Meadow

You both make it to his chambers, your small bodies quietly sneaking through his door as to not wake the guard posted outside his room. Bucky shuts it softly with a sigh of relief, he takes your hand again and you both move for his bed.

This isn’t the first time during a storm the young prince has come to find you. You’ve grown up together, granted you were both born into different lives but that didn’t stop the bond you two had. Your father was a knight, But was killed for treason. To spare you and your mother the Queen allowed you both to stay in the castle and work as servants for the crown.

When you first came here you were only three, Bucky was five. The princess, Rebecca being the same age as you, the Queen allowed you to attend some of her courses with her while your mother worked around the castle. Becca was sweet and always made sure you were right by her. Especially during dance lessons which were your favorite.

Bucky, even at the age of five. Was attending lessons on how to rule a kingdom. It wasn’t until almost two years later, during the night you had snuck out of your small room you shared with your mother, feeling restless and craving a snack. You were planning on making a quick trip to the kitchens to snag a biscuit the chef always left out for the guards who worked during the night.

But on your way, in the dark hall you heard sniffling. Your brows furrowed together, your small face scrunching with curiosity. You followed the sound to find the young prince hidden behind a pillar, one of many that decorate the hall.

“Are you alright your ma-majesty?” Your small voice asks, concentrating hard on the last word so that it is pronounced correctly. He snaps his head up, quickly wiping his eyes with the back of his hands “yes. Go away.” He snaps turning away from you more.

“But you are crying” you point out “my momma says if you see someone crying sometimes they just need a hug. To get the sad out” you extend your small arms, smiling softly. He turns his head slowly, looking at you over his shoulder. “I don’t hug servants” he mumbles. “It’s not proper” he adds as he moves to stand.

You drop your arms back to your sides “What’s proper?” You ask head tilted in confusion. He looks at you, head pointed down slightly. “I’m not really sure. But father says I’m not supposed to be kind to servants” he admits, picking at his sleep shirt sleeve.

“Oh” you mutter, “but can you talk to them?” You ask. He shrugs “yeah, to ask for something” you smile then “then why don’t you just ask for a hug? Then it’d be pro-proper” you say matter of factly struggling with the last word slightly. Bucky smiles then. It’s small but there. he glances around the pillar making sure no one is passing before he whispers “may-may I have a hug?” He asks.

You nod quickly and wrap your small arms around his torso. He’s not much taller than you, but he’s tall enough that his chin can rest on top of your head. “Is the sad gone now?” You ask quietly. He slowly wraps his arms around you and nods “I think so” he says and steps back after a few seconds.

Lightening strikes outside the castle walls, causing Bucky to jump slightly. You look from him to the stain glass window where rain is hitting against it. “Do you not like the rain?” You ask and he shakes his head “no… it’s loud and I can’t sleep when it rains..” he mumbles looking down. “I don’t like it either, when I can’t sleep my momma plays with my hair or rubs my back, OH! or sometimes she’ll sing a song! I could do that for you!” You say getting a little excited.

Bucky’s eyes widen a little, “you would?” He asks softly and you nod, “mhmm”. That was the first night you had ever shared a bed with someone other than your mother. A scared seven year old Prince, who let a five year old servant girl rub he’s back until you both fell asleep. That morning you had woken up back in your bed though. You never knew how you got back there but your five year old mind brushed it off. It wasn’t the last time though. You spent many nights running around the castle or sneaking into his chambers with the young prince, comforting each other during the rainy nights and others just spending time together to be kids. Kids without roles that were placed on them at birth.

Now, at the ages ten and thirteen here you are again. Bucky sneaking you into his chambers on a stormy night. You both sit on his bed facing each other, “did you hear?” He asks, fiddling with his thumbs. “Hear what?” You question. “My father’s sending me away.. to a school in the east.. says I’ll become a proper prince there and that they’ll teach me how to be a king..” you frown “in the east? Where in the east? For how long?” You ask quickly, your breath becoming uneven. Bucky shrugs “somewhere called.. Mo-Moldova? I don’t know when I’ll be back…” he sniffles slightly, head pointed down to his lap.

You shake your head, taking in a shaky breath as your eyes fill with tears “but.. but you can’t go..”. He looks up at you as a tear slides down your cheek “I have too, my father ordered it.” He states “but it’s not fair!” You exclaim “you’re my best friend..” you add sadly. Something changes in him then. Something you’ve seen a little of before in recent months but it’s never been directed towards you. Not until now.

“I am not your friend.. I am your prince and soon to be king..” he mumbles. Voice sounding bitter now. “W-what? Bucky-“ he cuts you off standing from his bed now. “My name is not Bucky it is James! Prince James! And you will address me as such!” He snaps, your eyes widen at his out burst. “Get out! Get out! You-you nasty servant! Get out before I call my guard!” He shouts pointing towards his door.

Your breath quickens, and you scramble to stand hopping down off of his bed, running to his door. You pull it open and step out, but glance back once. His back is still towards you and his shoulders are heaving. You shut the door then and with tears streaming down your cheeks you run all the way back down to the servants quarters. All the way back to the small room you shared with your mother. That night, as your mother lay quietly next to you in the small bed you wept quietly. That was the first time a boy has ever made you cry.

——

Now, thirteen years later. You have grown into a young woman. You now assist with chores around the castle and sometimes, you assist the princess. Becca has always been a constant, besides your mother she is a warm comfort during your long days. She’s someone you are able to confide in without worry of repercussions.

Currently you are helping her with her hair. Working on a beautiful updo. “Did you hear?” Becca asks softly, fiddling with a bracelet on her wrist as she glances at you through the mirror in front of her. You smile shaking your head softly “hear what?” You ask “dear James is coming back, should be here in a day or so is what mother says” she explains smiling. Your hands slow on her hair slightly “oh?” You say softly and she nods “yes! Can’t wait to see him, he’s been gone for so long” Becca adds and you hum in response, choosing to stay quiet.

She senses the change in you. Squinting at you through the mirror before turning around to face you. “Aren’t you excited?” She asks. You remove your hands from her hair looking down at her from where she sits. “Of course… it’s just, you know how our last talk was” you explain. The day after it happened you had confided in her about it during a dance lesson you were allowed to go to. Rebecca’s face softens then and she gently grabs your hand in hers “I know, and I know it hurt him just as much. But he does care” she says softly.

You shake your head, offering a small smile as you place your hands on her shoulders and gently turn her to face the mirror again. “I doubt he feels that way now..” you say as your hands begin fixing her hair again. Becca laughs lightly “then you truly don’t know my brother”

——

Two days passed by quickly, and the castle was buzzing with the excitement of the princes return. Some wondering how he’d react being back after being away for so long and others, mostly the younger servants and ladies maids gossiping about how he must look and if he’s as handsome as some say he is now. You were just wondering if hopefully… he’d remember you.

A small part of you always dreamed of this day, when he’d return and things between you would be as they were before that night so long ago. But you knew, deep down. It was a foolish thought. A dream.

“My dear hurry with those linens, we haven’t got much time before he arrives and we are all to be in the entrance hall for his arrival” your mother rushes, shoving a basket of clean linens into your hands and effectively snapping you out of your thoughts. “Yes mother” you nod. Adjusting your grip on the basket you make the all too familiar walk to his room. His chambers. The one for years now has been empty.

Stepping in felt like stepping into a memory. Everything relatively the same besides a few things missing that he had taken with him before he left. You hadn’t stepped back in here since that night. Letting out a heavy sigh you begin undressing the bed, replacing the old linens with the new. Making sure there was no wrinkles or creases. Taking your time to straighten and fluff the pillows. As you finish you slowly leave the room. On your way out taking one last look.

As you make your way back down the hall your mother calls for you, her dress shirts gathered slightly in her hand as she approaches you in a rushed jog “my dear hurry! The carriage has just arrived!” She exclaims, and you both rush to the servants quarters, quickly setting down the baskets you both carry before turning and rushing to the entrance hall where other servants and maids lineup on each side of the grand double doors. Guards stand in a stiff line in front of you. Heads stuck looking straight ahead while you and the other servants behind them stand heads pointed down with your hands clasped in front of you. You were never to make direct eye contact with a royal.

Trumpets blared and cheers roared outside the castle, signaling the prince’s arrival. After what felt like hours but was only minutes the grand doors opened. Revealing the royal family as they walk in together. You glance your eyes up, trying to get a glimpse of them. From what you can see, the prince.. James, and his father were in front. The Queen and Rebecca walking not too far behind them.

They stop in the middle, the king announces his son’s return “the prince has returned!” He exclaims proudly, all the guards and servants bow. In unison we all welcome him back “welcome home our prince” before standing straight again. You glance up once again, careful to not move your head. You spot him through the bodies of guards in front of you. He has grown. He’s taller, a lot taller. Broader too and his hair now hangs softly at his shoulders. He looks strong. He looks like someone who would be king.

He’s looking around, staring at the rows of guards and servants before him. His eyes pass over you without a thought, before.. for a spilt second they come back to you and your eyes lock onto each other. And for that small moment your heart picked up its pace. Does he remember me? But the thought was quickly stopped. Your mother’s elbow poking at your side snapping you back into your proper place.

“Come my son! We are throwing a grand ball in your honor tonight!” The king exclaims, he claps his hands and like clock work the servants and guards disperse. All quickly going back to work to prepare for tonight. Your mother grabs your elbow and drags you with her. But not before you take a chance on one more glance at the prince. But you find he was already looking at you.

One passed close enough that the wind of it tugged at his tunic.

He started walking.

His gaze roamed over everything: the glass fronts of the shops, the painted signs, the wires strung between buildings like black veins against the grey sky. And the people.

Lord, the people.

Men in strange short coats and narrow hats. Women with bare legs, bare arms, painted mouths, walking alone as though the world had not lost its mind.

Another contraption rolled past him.

A man balanced on a device with two impossibly thin wheels, propelling himself forward with his own legs pumping at metal arms near the ground. No horse. No visible engine or magic. Just the man and the skeletal black frame beneath him, moving at a speed no human should manage on foot.

Bucky stopped dead.

The thing came at him with no reins, no visible means of being controlled beyond the rider's boots working those narrow metal arms. Its wheels were impossibly thin, its bell giving a sharp little trill that cut through the street noise like a thrown knife.

The rider leaned around him at the last possible moment, coat flapping, one hand lifted from the handlebar in furious accusation.

"Watch it, pal!"

Bucky turned with him, tracking the motion, the insult, the impossible narrow-wheeled thing as it shot past his shoulder close enough that he felt the brush of air against his sleeve. His boots moved half a step off the curb before his mind had decided anything useful.

A horn blared. A flat, mechanical scream that didn't belong to any animal he'd ever heard.

He turned back just as one of those horseless carriages -wide and green and shining like a beetle's carapace- bore down on him with two round eyes burning pale through the grey morning. For a heartbeat, he stood rooted to the ground, unable to make his legs obey.

Then, a hand closed around his left wrist.

The contact went through him like a struck bell, and his whole body answered before thought could intervene, muscles jerking in the direction of the grip, boots scraping over wet pavement as he stumbled backward.

Pain lit up his ribs, white and vicious. The green beast roared past close enough that its wind slapped cold against his face, horn still bellowing as the driver shouted something filthy through an open window and did not stop.

Bucky hit the edge of the sidewalk hard enough to jar his teeth.

The woman struck him in the arm a second later with her free hand. Not hard, exactly, but sharp enough to snap him back to his senses.

"What is wrong with you?"

He stared at the place where the carriage had been, watching it disappear down the street.

The traffic kept moving as if nothing had happened.

Another one followed behind it. Dark blue this time. Smaller. More of them farther down the road, parked along the curb like sleeping beasts, their windows reflecting pieces of the sky in impossibly clear glass.

His wrist was still held.

He looked down at it.

Her fingers were wrapped tight enough to blanch the skin beneath her own knuckles. She seemed to realize it at the same moment he did and let go at once, as if his skin had burned her.

Her mouth moved. Red. That impossible red, angry now.

"Do you have a special wish to die this morning?"

He heard the words. Understood them individually. Could not make them gather into meaning.

His hands were empty. He had no sword. No shield. No idea what kingdom this was, what laws governed it, what god had built machines to transport people without horses as though it were the most natural thing in the world, people walking past in their strange attire as if nothing remarkable had happened.

His chest worked once.

Then again.

The breath would not settle.

He tried to force it down into the place where his discipline lived. The old place. The trained place. The place that had carried him through broken ribs, frozen marches, cells too dark to measure time in, men asking questions with tools because words had failed to satisfy them.

It was there.

He could feel its shape, familiar as the weight of a sword, but he simply could not reach it.

The street stretched wide before him, slick and grey, full of motion. The wires overhead trembled in the wind. Somewhere nearby, unseen machinery thudded and clanged. A woman laughed. A dog barked. Another horn sounded in the distance, and his shoulders flinched before he could stop them.

----

She saw the flinch.

It was small, almost nothing, just the quick betrayal of his shoulders at the distant horn, but it made whatever else she had been about to say die behind her lips.

Her question was still there between them, and he had not answered it.

Not that he was ignoring her. Not exactly. Men ignored women in a variety of ways, and she had developed, over the course of owning a business and being alive in general, a fairly extensive catalogue.

This wasn't that.

This man was not ignoring her.

He was… not there. Not properly.

He stood six inches from her on the sidewalk outside her own shop, broad and filthy and absurd in those boots, and looked past her with eyes that had gone distant in a way that made the back of her neck prickle.

The color had drained from his face.

The bruise along his cheekbone looked darker for it, purple-black against the sudden pallor. The cut above his brow, which she had almost forgotten in the general catastrophe of him, had opened again somehow; a thin line of red slipped down toward his temple.

His body was trembling.

Not dramatically. Nothing anyone passing by would notice unless they were close enough to see the tiny, involuntary shiver running through his hands. Through his jaw. Through the tendons in his neck, standing out like rope under skin.

She saw it because she was standing too close.

Because she had grabbed his wrist and felt the shock.

Because for one terrible second, when the car had come at him, and he had simply stood there, she had known with absolute certainty that he was about to die in front of The Sweet Briar before the shop had even opened for the day.

Her own heart was still beating in her throat.

"You could have been killed," she said, quieter this time.

He did not answer.

His gaze flicked once to the street, then to the cars, then upward to the wires, then back to the place where the green car had disappeared around the corner. Too much. That was what his face said now, beneath the stubbornness, beneath the absurd severity of all that knight-of-the-realm nonsense.

Her anger lost its footing.

Damn him.

Damn him for being frightening, and rude, and possibly insane, and then standing there looking like a lost thing that had wandered too far from wherever it belonged.

"Mr. Barnes," she said carefully.

His eyes moved to her face. Not focused, at first.

She lifted both hands a little, palms angled toward him in what she hoped was a calming gesture.

"Listen to me," she said. "You need to come back inside."

His jaw shifted.

"No."

Of course.

Of course the man who had nearly been flattened by a sedan five seconds ago still had room in him to be obstinate.

She took a breath and counted to three.

"Fine. Stay out here. Get yourself killed. But do it after lunch hour, so at least my customers don't have to step over you to buy lilies."

Something passed across his face. A flicker. Not amusement, exactly, but something close to it. Then his attention cut past her shoulder.

She followed it automatically.

A patrolman was coming down the opposite side of Camden Street from the corner near Levinson's pharmacy, where the sidewalk opened into a clear view of the street in front of her shop.

He must have seen the bicycle swerve. Must have seen the car skim by close enough to make two women outside the bakery gasp into their gloves.

And now he was looking directly at her companion.

At the strange clothes. The long hair. The bruising on his face. The blood at his brow. The size of him. The way he stood there, pale and shaking and not quite oriented toward the world around him.

The patrolman adjusted his cap and crossed the street at an angle, long strides eating up the wet pavement with purpose.

Oh, wonderful.

Perfect.

Exactly what the morning needed.

She turned back to Mr. Barnes.

Something in him changed. The trembling did not stop, but it went underground, forced beneath a sudden hardening of posture. His shoulders squared. His chin lifted. The lost look vanished so quickly that if she had not been watching, she might have thought she'd imagined it.

A mask, she realized.

No. Not a mask.

An armor.

He didn’t have one, so his face became it.

"Don't," she said under her breath.

His eyes did not leave the approaching patrolman. "Don't what."

"Whatever it is you're about to do."

"I am doing nothing."

"You're standing like you're about to challenge the entire police department to single combat."

His gaze cut briefly to her, offended despite everything. "I don't know what that is."

"That," she said, pointing with one discrete motion of her head toward the uniform, "is a policeman. He keeps order. He asks questions. He carries a gun. And if you call him a knave or try to throw him to the floor, this morning is going to get much worse for both of us."

The word gun did something. His eyes narrowed slightly.

"A guardsman."

"Close enough."

"Yours?"

"What?"

"Is he yours?"

She stared at him. "No, he is not mine. I don't keep policemen."

The patrolman was halfway across the street now. She had perhaps eight seconds before he reached them.

Eight seconds to decide whether to tell the truth -which would sound insane- or lie.

This strange, injured man appeared in my locked stockroom. He says he's a medieval knight and believes I'm a witch. Oh, and he almost died because he doesn't understand automobiles.

Yes, officer, please take him somewhere kind.

But there was nowhere kind, and that was the problem.

She knew enough about the state institutions to know that. A man like him was not gently escorted to a warm bed and a sensible doctor. A man like this would get handcuffed if he startled the wrong person. A cell if he argued. A hospital ward, if someone felt charitable. An institution, if someone with authority decided his mind was more inconvenient than treatable.

The officer stepped up onto the curb.

"Morning, ma'am," he said, though his eyes stayed mostly on Barnes. "Everything all right here?"

She smiled.

It was not a good smile. It arrived quickly and had too many teeth, the kind of smile that fooled absolutely no one but was required by the social contract.

"Good morning, officer."

Barnes looked at her.

She felt it rather than saw it, the sudden sharp turn of his attention. Suspicious. Assessing. Probably wondering if she was about to have him arrested, detained, executed, or whatever else knights expected from guardsmen in impossible cities.

She kept smiling.

"Had a little scare, that's all."

The patrolman's gaze moved over the man beside her again, slow and professional, cataloguing details. "Looked like your friend here nearly stepped in front of a car."

Friend.

The word hung there, wrong and convenient.

Barnes's expression did not change, but she could feel his objection forming between his brows like a gathering storm.

She stepped on it before it could speak.

"My cousin," she said.

The patrolman blinked. So did the man beside her.

She did not look at him.

"My cousin," she repeated, silently kicking herself for the flimsy excuse even as she committed to it. "From up north."

The patrolman's brows lifted slightly.

"Up north."

"A little town near Mount Katahdin. Very remote, really. Hardly any roads to speak of."

Behind her, he drew a slow breath through his nose. She could feel judgment radiating from him like heat from a stove. She ignored it.

"He came in early this morning, he’s looking for a job, you see," she continued with a bright tone. "He's had a long trip and hardly slept. He’s a stubborn backwoodsman with no sense around traffic. He was bewildered by the view, and then that bicycle startled him, and- well. You saw what happened.”

"I saw him walk into traffic."

"Yes. He does that."

The patrolman squinted at her, and she immediately regretted having a mouth.

"I mean," she amended quickly, "he doesn't usually do that. Obviously. That would be very troubling as a habit. He's just tired. Disoriented. And he took a fall yesterday, so he's not entirely himself."

The officer's gaze went to the bruise on Barnes's cheek, then the cut above his brow, lingering there with professional interest.

"A fall."

"From a horse," she said.

That, at least, felt thematically appropriate.

Barnes's head turned very, very slowly toward her.

She gave him a look that she hoped communicated several things at once, including but not limited to: be quiet, I am saving you, and if you ruin this, I will personally murder you with a pair of pruning shears.

Miraculously, he said nothing.

The patrolman studied him for a long moment.

"That true, sir?"

His eyes moved from her to the officer.

A pause. Too long. Much too long.

Then, with grave reluctance, "I was unseated."

Her eyes nearly closed with relief.

The patrolman seemed to accept this, or at least failed to find the obvious hole in it quickly enough to press. Maybe it was too early in the morning for him, too.

"Looks like you ought to have a doctor look at that."

"He will," she said firmly.

"I do not require-"

"He will," she repeated, louder, and smiled harder at the patrolman. "As soon as I get him inside and settled. He also needs a change of clothing, as you can see. Can't have him walking around looking like he lost a fight with a hay wagon."

The officer looked between them, considering.

The moment stretched.

Someone across the street had stopped pretending not to watch. Mrs. Kaplan from the bakery stood with one hand on her door, eyes bright with the terrible appetite of neighborhood gossip that would fuel conversations for a week.

No.

Absolutely not.

She could not have this become a story before mid-morning.

The patrolman finally nodded once, seeming to decide the situation was odd but not dangerous.

"Best keep him out of the road, then."

"That is very much my plan."

The man's gaze flicked to Barnes one more time. "You take care, sir. City streets aren't forgiving."

He looked at the road, then back at the officer, and when he spoke, his voice was quiet and oddly sincere.

"No," he said. "They are not."

Something in his tone made the patrolman pause, a flicker of concern crossing his features. But then he simply tipped his cap to her.

"Ma'am."

"Officer."

He moved on, though not quickly. She watched him walk back down the block toward the pharmacy, glancing back once before he reached the corner.

Only when he had turned out of sight did she let the smile fall off her face like an abandoned coat.

He was staring at her.

"What," she said flatly.

His expression was unreadable again, which she was beginning to suspect meant he was feeling several things at once and had decided none of them were fit for public display.

"Your cousin," he said.

"It was the first thing that came to mind."

"From up north."

"It seemed plausible."

"It did not."

"Well, he bought it, didn't he?"

"Did he?"

She looked toward the corner where the patrolman had disappeared. Then at Mrs. Kaplan, who was still watching from the bakery window like a hawk spotting a rabbit. Then at the two women whispering near the bus stop. Then at him, standing there like a brawl in human form, bleeding gently onto the collar of his impossible shirt.

"Maybe," she admitted.

A horn blared somewhere down the street, and he flinched.

Small, contained and brutally fast.

But she saw it.

His jaw clenched afterward, as if he could trap the reaction between his teeth and kill it there.

She sighed, feeling what was left of her anger drain away and leave behind something uncomfortably close to pity. And the very reasonable desire to shove him back into the street herself and let nature finish what the sedan had started.

But beneath all of it was the fact of him: pale, shaking, hurt, completely unmoored, and looking at Camden Street as if it were a battlefield he'd stumbled onto without armor or weapons or any idea which side he was meant to be fighting for.

"Inside," she said.

His eyes narrowed.

She pointed at the shop door behind them.

"Now."

"I told you-"

"I lied to a policeman for you, Mr. Barnes, so unless you'd like me to call him back and explain that you are not, in fact, my cousin from up north, you are going to walk through that door, sit down somewhere that is not my begonias, and let me clean the blood off your face before Mrs. Kaplan decides to come over here and ask questions I cannot answer."

He stared at her.

For one second, she could almost see the refusal rise in him, proud and immediate and utterly stupid.

Then another car passed, and he did not look at it; that was how she knew it had frightened him. Then, he turned toward the flower shop without another word.

The bell above the door gave its bright chime as he stepped back inside.

She followed, locked the door behind them, and flipped the sign to CLOSED with more force than strictly necessary.

----

Bucky heard the bolt slide into place with a soft, final click.

A small sound. Ordinary, probably, to her. To him, it landed with considerably more weight. The sound of a cell door, a gate closing, an exit sealed.

He turned his head to her.

She reached up and drew down a strange fabric stretched between narrow wooden slats that clattered softly as it descended, stopping halfway down the window. Not a curtain, exactly. Something that rolled and caught on a mechanism he couldn't see.

He noticed everything, apparently, except the things that might keep him from nearly being killed by horseless carriages.

"Come on," she said and walked past him toward the rear of the shop.

There were, at present, too many questions in his head. They had gathered in his head like crows on a battlefield fence, black and loud and waiting for something to die.

So he followed.

The shop looked different from behind her.

That was not a thought he should have had.

It arrived anyway, unbidden and unhelpful.

Her skirt moved when she walked, a soft, hypnotic sway that drew the eye and then punished the man attached to it for having one. The fabric brushed the backs of her knees with each step, and below that -God help him- her calves were bare, the skin catching the morning light filtering through the half-drawn shade.

The sight shouldn't have affected him the way it did.

He'd seen far worse immodesty in camp followers, tavern girls who unlaced their bodices for coin, even a countess once who'd been shameless enough to receive him in his own chambers in nothing but a loose shift that left very little to imagination.

But this felt different somehow.

Deliberate in its casualness. Ordinary in its brazenness.

As if every woman in this godforsaken century simply walked around like this, and he was the fool for noticing.

He wrenched his gaze toward the nearest bucket of flowers with such determination that he might as well have been preparing to duel it.

Roses.

White ones, their petals just beginning to unfurl, with the faintest blush of pink at the heart of each bloom. Innocent. Chaste. Entirely safe to look at.

Unlike certain other things in this room.

She reached the back room and stepped aside, pointing toward a chair beside the worktable.

"Sit."

He looked at it with immediate suspicion.

The chair was made of metal. Thin silver legs bent in a precise curve, holding up a seat covered in some smooth green material that was neither leather nor cloth. It shone faintly under the light overhead, reflecting the ceiling in a way that seemed unnatural.

Bucky stared at it for a second too long.

"It's a chair," she seemed fit to clarify.

"I can see that."

"Wonderful. Then use it."

He should not have.

There were several reasons he should not have.

For one, it was unwise to place himself at a disadvantage in a room he did not understand, with a woman he did not know, in a century that seemed very committed to making a fool of him at every opportunity.

For another, it was utterly inappropriate.

There was no servant. No matron tucked into the corner with her embroidery and her sharp little coughs to remind them of propriety. No chaperone at all to lend respectability to the fact that this woman was about to put her hands near his face, possibly his body, while the two of them were alone behind a locked door.

A decent man would object.

A prudent man would leave.

He sat.

The metal chair gave a faint protesting creak beneath his weight but did not collapse, which was more than he had expected from something built with legs that narrow. The act of lowering himself was unpleasant. His ribs had apparently chosen this moment to remind him -in exhaustive detail- that they had been cracked before the universe had lost its mind and had not improved during the intervening catastrophe.

His breath caught despite his best efforts.

She noticed. Her gaze flicked down to his side, then back up, too quick to be called staring and too sharp to be accidental.

"You hurt your ribs?"

"No."

She gave him a look that suggested she had heard better lies from children.

He met it stubbornly.

A pause.

"Yes," he admitted.

"Thought so."

She turned toward a small wooden cabinet mounted low on the wall and crouched down. From inside, she pulled out a metal case. Small, rectangular, with a hinged lid and a painted red cross on the top.

A coffer, his mind supplied automatically, though it was made of metal rather than wood, and far too uniform in its construction to have been hammered by any smith he knew.

She set it on the worktable and flipped the latch.

The cross should have been reassuring.

It was not.

Inside were bottles, tins, folded cloths, strange implements he had no names for. She began sorting through them, and he watched her hands move.

Competent hands. Not delicate, though they looked as if they could be when they wanted to. She knew where things were, even in the disorder. She found a clean cloth, a small brown bottle, and a roll of white bandaging and set them on the table.

He cleared his throat and she glanced over her shoulder.

The words should have come easily. Courtesy did, when one was raised with enough of it beaten in by tutors and lords and the general expectation of civilized behavior.

He had thanked lords he despised, maesters who'd prodded at wounds, servants who'd brought water, boys who'd held horses, women who had done far less for him than lie to an armed city guardsman.

Still, it took him a moment.

"For what you said to the guardsman," he began carefully. "Outside."

Her hands stilled completely. She turned to face him, the cloth still held loosely in her fingers.

"The policeman," she corrected gently.

"The policeman," he repeated, the word still feeling foreign on his tongue. He met her eyes. "For that. You have my thanks."

Something in her expression softened. The wariness didn't disappear entirely, but it eased.

"You're welcome," she said simply.

She set the cloth down on the worktable and leaned back against it, her hands bracing on the edge behind her. The posture was less guarded than before.

"Though for the record," she added, and there was the faintest hint of amusement in her voice now, "you made that more difficult than it needed to be."

He shifted in the metal chair, wincing slightly as his ribs protested. "I said very little."

"You said it with the face of a man about to fight." She tilted her head, studying him.

“I was inquired by a law enforcement."

"You were asked whether you fell off a horse." She crossed her ankles, settling more comfortably against the table. The motion drew his eye briefly to those impossible shoes before he forced his gaze back to her face.

"I was unseated," he corrected with careful dignity.

She blinked at him for a moment.

Then her lips curved into something that was almost a smile, warm in a way that made something in his chest tug unexpectedly.

"Fallen, unseated…" she said softly, waving her hand.

The strange thing was, he almost wanted to explain. Wanted to tell her that it was not the same thing at all.

That falling could be clumsy, careless, the result of poor seat or a man who didn't know his business. Being unseated meant impact, skill, another man's force meeting yours at the exact angle required to take you from the saddle despite everything you did to prevent it.

There was dignity in the distinction.

But she was looking at him with something gentler than he'd seen from her yet. So he did not explain. He was, as she had said, trying not to make things more difficult than they needed to be.

Also, and more pressing, he was hungry.

The realization came with embarrassing force now that he was seated and no longer fighting for his life against bicycles and automobiles. He had not eaten since before the tournament.

Had meant to, after. Had meant to remove his armor, find bread and stew at the tavern down the street, and perhaps sleep for half a day if his luck could be persuaded toward mercy for once.

Instead, he had put on a cursed ring and been thrown into a florist's back room nearly six centuries from where he belonged.

His stomach gave a low, traitorous growl that echoed in the stockroom with all the subtlety of a church bell at matins.

The woman paused mid-motion.

He closed his eyes briefly.

Lord.

When he opened them, she was looking at him with something that might have been concern or exasperation or both.

"When did you last eat?"

He considered lying.

His stomach, apparently tired of his pride, made the answer unnecessary by growling again, louder this time.

She set the cloth down with a soft sigh.

"Right," she said. "Blood first. Food after."

"That’s not-"

"Mr. Barnes."

He stopped.

Her tone had changed. It was the voice of a woman who had discovered the exact amount of patience she possessed and found him standing at the far edge of it with his boots on.

"You are bleeding, you nearly got killed by a car, and I have already lied to a policeman before midday.” She gestured at the chair, less sharp than simply direct. "Sit still and let me clean that before you pass out and make this morning worse than it already is. Then, we'll figure out food."

He was opening his mouth to object-

"Please," she added, and something about her tone reached him. So he leaned back in the metal chair and said nothing.

She seemed to take that as victory.

Perhaps it was.

She stepped closer, and the air between them shifted. He caught her scent more clearly now: flowers, yes, but also something faintly powdery and sweet that he couldn't name. Soap, perhaps. Or some cosmetic concoction women of this time favored.

The cloth in her hand was damp; he could see the darkness of moisture against the white fabric.

He kept perfectly still.

She bent toward him, close enough that her breath would have touched his face if she'd spoken, and then her fingers touched his jaw.

The contact was brief, impersonal, the gesture of someone accustomed to arranging things precisely.

It went through him like a strike of flint.

His breath caught with the sudden, with the unwelcome awareness of how close she was. How warm. How the neckline of her dress sat just low enough that if he dropped his gaze even slightly-

He locked his eyes on the ceiling and kept them there.

"Hold still," she said quietly.

He was already still. Rigid as a man in armor, every muscle tense by the maddening fact that her thumb was resting just below his jaw, her fingertips cool against the edge of his beard.

The damp cloth touched his brow.

Cool. Clean. It stung where the cut was, a sharp little bite that he barely felt through everything else.

What he felt was her.

The bend of her body as she leaned in. The brush of her skirt against his knee. Brief, accidental, gone before he could react. The small crease of concentration between her brows as she worked, utterly focused, utterly unaware of what the simple act of touching him was doing.

She tilted his face slightly toward the light.

His jaw shifted under her hand, and the movement made her fingers slide -just barely- along the line of bone and muscle beneath his ear.

Heat crawled up the back of his neck.

This was absurd.

She was cleaning a wound. Nothing more. She had shown him no interest beyond the bare minimum of human decency, and even that had been grudging. She thought him mad, or damaged, or some combination of both. She had called him cousin to a lawman to avoid further inconvenience.

And here he sat, breathing too carefully, thinking about what it would feel like if those hands moved with intent instead of practicality. If they slid into his hair. If her thumb pressed just a little harder against his throat. If she leaned closer and-

Fuck.

He was acting like some green boy again.

Worse. He was acting like a man who hadn't been touched by anyone in far too long, and whose body had decided now -of all the godsforsaken moments- was the time to remind him of it.

The cloth moved to his cheekbone, gentler now, following the edge of the bruise.

"It's not deep," she said after a moment. "Won't need stitches. Just needs to be clean."

"I've had worse." He managed.

"I don't doubt it."

She stepped back, and the absence of her touch was immediate and disorienting. She studied her work, then reached for the brown bottle, uncorking it with a soft pop.

The smell hit him immediately. Sharp. Medicinal. Something that burned the inside of his nose and made his eyes water.

"This is going to sting," she warned.

"I can-"

She dabbed it on before he could finish.

It did not sting.

It burned like the fires of hell had been distilled into liquid form and applied directly to his face.

He did not move. Did not make a sound.

His hand, however, gripped the edge of the metal chair hard enough that he heard the frame creak.

"Sorry," she said, and she actually sounded it. "It's awful, but it'll keep it from getting infected."

He managed a nod, not trusting his voice.

She corked the bottle and set it aside, examining the cut again, and then stepped back fully, putting a respectable distance between them, and he could breathe again.

Then his stomach growled. Again. Loud and shameless.

She paused.

He watched something shift in her expression, watched her think. Her gaze went to the little corner table where the tin of those dried herbs sat, and her mouth pressed into a thoughtful line.

"I don't have much here," she said slowly. "It's a stockroom, not a kitchen. Tea and stale biscuits in some corner, mostly."

He opened his mouth to tell her it didn't matter, that he required nothing-

"Wait here," she said abruptly.

Before he could object, she was already moving toward the front of the shop, pulling a key from somewhere in her skirt and unlocking the door.

"Don't touch anything," she added over her shoulder. "And for God's sake, don't go outside again."

The bell chimed.

The door closed.

He sat alone in the stockroom, surrounded by buckets of flowers and incomprehensible objects, with no earthly idea where she had gone or whether she would return.

For a brief, ungenerous moment, he considered the possibility that she had simply gone to fetch the authorities after all. Left him here to be collected like a stray dog.

He could not have blamed her if she had.

But he stayed.

Partly because his ribs ached and his legs felt unsteady, and the metal chair, absurd as it was, held his weight. Partly because the door to the street terrified him in a way he was not prepared to examine.

And partly -mostly- because some quiet, exhausted part of him had decided to trust her, and he was too tired to argue with it.

Time passed. He did not know how much. Somewhere beyond the walls, the muffled sounds of the impossible city continued: horns, voices, the rumble of those horseless carriages.

Then the bell chimed again, and he heard the click of her heels through the shop. She reappeared through the storage door with a brown paper sack clutched in one hand.

"Here," she said, crossing to him and holding it out. "Eat this before you fall over."

He took it cautiously.

The sack was warm. And the smell…

God, the smell.

Something rich and savory drifted up from inside, meat and bread and something he couldn't identify, and his mouth flooded with saliva before he'd even looked inside.

He opened it.

Within was a strange construction: two thick slices of bread pressed together, and between them, slices of roasted meat layered with melted cheese, what appeared to be a cooked egg, and some green leaves he didn't recognize.

He turned it over, examining the oddity from several angles.

"It's a sandwich," she said, watching his confusion with poorly concealed amusement. "Roast beef. From the diner on the corner. You eat it. With your hands."

A sandwich.

He had never heard the term. Never seen meat and bread arranged in such a deliberate, portable fashion. In his world, meat was served on a trencher, or in a pie, or skewered over a fire. Not... stacked.

The smell did not care about his confusion, and his stomach growled a third time, traitorous and insistent, and he abandoned his examination in favor of simply eating.

The first bite was a revelation.

Warm bread. Tender meat, properly seasoned. The richness of the cheese, the unexpected softness of the egg, the crunch of whatever green leaves she'd called them.

It was, without exaggeration, one of the finest things he had ever tasted.

He ate with more control than he felt, forcing himself to chew, to pace himself, to not devour the entire thing in three bites like a starving animal.

She watched him for a moment, then turned away to give him privacy.

He was grateful for it.

When he'd finished -every crumb, every scrap, the paper sack reduced to a crumpled ball in his fist- he set it down carefully and cleared his throat.

She turned.

"Better?"

"Yes." His voice came out rough. "Thank you. That was..."

He didn't have words for what it was.

A sandwich, apparently.

"...generous of you," he finished.

She nodded, accepting it, and for a moment neither of them said anything.

The silence stretched, not quite comfortable but not hostile either. Finally, she crossed her arms over her chest in a way that was becoming familiar.

"So," she said. "What are we going to do with you, Mr. Barnes?"

He looked at her standing there in her scandalously short skirt and her impossible shoes.

"I don't know," he said honestly.

Next Chapter

You had not eaten in two days, and the scraps you scavenged from the bottoms of Brooklyn’s dumpsters did little to fill the hunger gnawing at your gut—less painful, somehow, than the gaping, oozing wound hidden beneath your t-shirt. You did not know how much longer you would have to fight rats over food, how much longer you would have to swallow your retching just to bite into a slice of expired pizza.

Ahead of you, an old woman—her basket brimming with fresh produce, enough to make you salivate—grimaced when the greengrocer handed her an apple unlucky enough to be bruised.

With a wave of one hand, he dismissed her concern, tossed the forsaken fruit aside with the other, and offered her another one instead—redder, shinier, smoother.

You watched the damaged apple roll along the sidewalk with dull eyes, then scanned your surroundings before tugging the stolen cap lower over your head.

You did not think. Hunger drowned out reason and morality alike. You slipped a trembling hand from your pocket and closed it around the fruit without hesitation. Your dirty nails bit into the still-crisp flesh, and you savoured the sensation, already imagining your teeth doing the same.

The pocket of your jacket sagged under the apple’s weight, but you bore it gladly, thrilled at the thought of a proper meal after what felt like an eternity.

You walked away as your heart pounded in your ears, hot with embarrassment.

“Hey—you! I saw that! Get back here!” a voice suddenly barked behind you.

You quickened your pace. Soon you were running through the crowd, weaving past muttering pedestrians. You dared a glance over your shoulder and your eyes widened at the sight of the greengrocer’s furious face as he charged after you.

You cursed under your breath and darted down the first alley you found.

“Where are you, brat? Get back here! I’ll teach you some respect!”

You retreated deeper into the narrow passage until you collided with a stack of rotting crates. Rats scattered between your legs, nearly tripping you before rushing at the man, who swore loudly.

The apple clearly was not worth the trouble, for the man stopped.

Your heart hammered in your chest. You pressed a palm against it, trying to quieten it. All he would have to do was listen—hear it pounding—and your hiding place would be revealed.

“Whatever. I don’t have time for this shit.”

Crouched in the shadows, you watched him grumble for a while before turning back, still muttering to himself.

For a full minute, you remained frozen, afraid he might return. With help, this time. Then, when you finally understood that he was not coming back, you straightened and frowned.

His easy surrender triggered a familiar anger in your chest—one that had settled into your bones since your arrival here. If it had come to it, you would have fought tooth and nail for that apple. You did not have the luxury of giving up; your survival depended on it. That man could throw apples, oranges, and pears onto the pavement without a second thought, while you were left digging through trash because you had had the misfortune of finding yourself in the wrong universe.

Tears welled at the corners of your eyes, but you swallowed them down. Instead, you pulled the apple from your pocket and bit into.

Sweet juice burst across your tongue, a blissful distraction from your panic. You lapped greedily at the rivulets running down your chin, catching with your fingertips the drops your tongue had missed, and bringing them straight to your mouth.

You devoured the apple in five bites—core and seeds included, for hunger did not forge picky eaters—and almost immediately regretted your initial excitement when the last bite came too soon.

You nearly broke down when you realized you were not full. Worse still, eating had awakened sensations that hunger had numbed.

Your gaze drifted to the dumpster.

You wiped your mouth with the back of your hand, then rubbed your palms against your grimy pants.

Already regretting the decision, you hauled yourself onto the edge of the dumpster and swung a leg over, dropping into the heap of reeking bags. Burying your nose in the collar of your shirt, you ripped open the first one and started digging.

You spent several minutes hunched over, hands filthy, searching for something else to eat—anything, please—but found only mouldy leftovers, soggy cardboard, and empty wine bottles. For a moment, you considered returning to the market to steal something else, but the memory of the greengrocer had left a bitter taste in your mouth.

The last thing you needed was to more raise attention.

Frustrated, you almost tossed aside an empty cereal box when your eyes finally caught on the cardboard. There, beneath the grime, was a face you now recognized. A spark of interest lit your gaze. Without hesitation, you tore the box apart, keeping only two pieces: the photo of the man in a blue uniform and the text underneath.

You let the rest fall to the bottom of the dumpster, climbed out, and hurried home.

Home was now an abandoned basement in a crumbling Brooklyn building. The few teenagers loitering in the stairwell, dealing in all kinds of illegal goods, left you alone as long as you did the same—a deal that suited you just fine. You nodded to them and descended the steps swallowed by darkness. There was no electricity in the common areas.

Once inside the cellar, you went through a now-familiar choreography: two shoulder blows to force the door open, three blind sweeps along the wall to find the switch, then four precise steps to reach the shredded armchair facing the fresco.

A single bulb, nearly burnt out, dangled from the ceiling, casting such a weak orange glow that you had to squint to make out what lay before you—the work you laboured over day after day.

Everything you had managed to gather about the Fantastic Four—you had learnt their name on the fourth day here—during your wanderings was assembled there. Newspaper clippings, battered magazine covers, fragments of stolen reports. All held together with yellowed tape, bent pins, and scraps of glue scavenged from the trash.

You immediately added the two pieces of cardboard to the rest. The drawn portrait of Reed Richards joined the other cut-out photos. Just beneath it, you taped the small block of text, still legible despite its creases:

Start your day the Fantastic way! Eat Fantastic Four Cereals and grow up smart like Reed Richards, the world’s greatest mind!

You rolled your eyes—burying memories of a certain captain and his equally ridiculous slogans—before collapsing into the chair.

Most of your nights were spent sitting like this and letting your gaze drift over the mural of clues again and again until every detail was etched into your mind. Over time, you had formed an idea of who these Fantastic Four were: heroes of a world that seemed far less shattered than your own.

Aside from one or two articles mentioning trouble around an underground city named Subterranea, this New York lived quietly. A few isolated crimes threatened the peace now and then, but nothing resembled the endless catastrophes you and the rest of the Avengers had grown used to.

A sob shook your chest, catching you off guard.

Without realizing it, your eyes had settled on a photo of the four superheroes—proud, smiling, united. Something cracked inside you. The image summoned other faces. Sam. Yelena. Wong. Bucky. Thor. Natasha. Steve. Tony.

The dam broke, and your loneliness poured out.

You curled in on yourself in the chair, one hand clamped over your mouth to stifle your sobs, the other pressed against your wound.

You wanted to go home. You wanted it more than anything in the world.

You had never thought of yourself as unlucky. Not even when you nearly died in the battle against Ultron. Not even when you lost five years of your life to Thanos. Not even when he tore away, one by one, the people you loved.

How easy it was for men to revise their worldview, to betray their own philosophies.

Your gaze slid back to the photo one last time.

Yes, misfortune was real. All that talk of destiny and karma was nothing but naïve invention. How else could it be explained that those who held the power to grant your dearest wish were also the very ones who wanted to see you captured?

The wound on your abdomen reopened during the night.

When you brought your hand to it, your trembling fingers came back sticky, and you were carried five days earlier, to your awakening on Liberty Island’s dock. As on the first day, the pads of your fingers played with the fluid, but this time, you did not recognize the viscosity of blood.

You straightened up with difficulty in the chair—each movement tearing a short breath from your lungs—to examine the wound. As soon as you bent forward, the world reeled, and you had to clutch the armrests to keep from toppling forward.

Under the nearly burnt-out bulb, blood mingled with a thick, yellowish pus. The instant its acidic stench invaded your nostrils, you pitched forward and vomited a bitter bile that burned your throat. Your body found itself trapped in a cruel dilemma you could not resolve: your stomach contracted with each retch, and each convulsion unleashed a fresh wave of pain that spilled from your wound through the rest of your body.

The agony surged into your back, your shoulders, your thighs. You groaned. Your heart raced. Your head rang. You let yourself collapse back into the chair, unable to remain upright any longer. The moth-eaten fabric was cold and clammy against your skin—a brief relief for your feverish body.

You eventually fell asleep, exhausted by a battle you already knew you would lose. The reprieve, unfortunately, did not last. Barely an hour later, the fever wrenched you awake. Violent shivers seized you, immediately followed by crushing heat.

“No. Don’t leave me. Steve,” you whimpered, half-delirious.

A vicious cycle began. You would fall asleep, then jolt awake, brutally torn from the arms of Morpheus by the fever, only to fall back into their embrace seconds later.

When you woke up for the third time, you dragged yourself—or rather, almost crawled—to a water tap fixed to the wall of the basement and lifted your shirt. What you saw nearly made you throw up again. The flesh around the wound was swollen, burning to the touch, and streaked with purplish lines that vanished beneath mounds of yellow pus.

You tried to clean it with water, but the gesture tore a cry of pain from you and nearly made you faint.

When you woke for the eighth time, your face pressed against the damp basement floor and your body wracked with uncontrollable shivers, you understood that you could no longer bury your head in the sand. The infection was spreading. If you did not treat the wound, you would die.

So, in the morning—while still weak and nauseous—you dragged yourself to the nearest pharmacy. Pain had finally outweighed fear.

You moved forward with your hood pulled low, teeth clenched, aware of the many eyes lingering on you. You could not find the strength to care. Did they not have anything better to do than stare at a staggering woman? This New York was clearly not accustomed to crackheads.

Inside the pharmacy, you wandered the aisles for a while, feigning the hesitation of an ordinary customer while you took stock of what you could steal: an antiseptic and an ointment, perhaps. Bandages would be harder to hide, but did you have another choice?

“Do you need any help, miss?”

Without lifting your head, you answered: “No, thank you.”

When the pharmacist’s footsteps faded, you slipped the items beneath your clothes, your hand hesitating over the large box of bandages before you finally took them as well.

Your gaze met that of a man. You immediately turned on your heel and fled, heart pounding, praying the stranger would take pity on you and not report you to the pharmacist. You did not have the strength to run.

It took you longer than usual to reach your building and, at last, the basement. In the stairwell, through blurred vision, you vaguely noticed that the boys who usually loitered there were gone, but the thought withered as soon as it bloomed. Your wound burned too fiercely for you to care about anything else.

The basement door gave way under your weight on the fourth shove of your shoulder, but the impact tore a groan from you and set your entire body ablaze, with—at the eye of the cyclone—your abdomen. It took no less than nine fumbling attempts to find the switch. As for the four steps to the chair, they became a staggering progression.

When you reached it, at last, you pulled your treasure from your pockets and started to remove your shirt, but a strange sensation stopped you short. Tilting your head, you gently let the fabric fall back over the raw wound.

As casually as possible, you crossed the basement to the tap. Water burst forth. Its splashing smothered the silence. You bent to wash your hands, letting the water pool on the floor and soak your shoes.

A blue reflection appeared in the puddle.

With a flick of your hand, you diverted the stream and hurled it at the mass lunging toward you.

Reed Richards recovered quickly from the surprise and stretched out an arm to grab you, but you jumped aside and raised a shield of water around yourself.

The superhero’s hand struck the wall.

“How did you find me?”

He clenched his jaw, as though speaking to you pained him greatly.

“There was a report,” he admitted. “Half an hour ago.”

The man from the pharmacy.

“Of course,” you muttered.

“We do not want to hurt you. We hope to resolve this issue peacefully.”

“Bullshit,” you growled immediately.

A bead of sweat trickled down your forehead.

You did not know how much longer you would be able to keep the water in a solid state. Already, cracks were appearing in your shield. In places, the water turned clear again and dripped to the floor. A voice in your head—one that sounded like Steve’s—reprimanded you for the opening you were giving to the enemy, but Reed, fortunately, seemed none the wiser.

Had you been healthier, you would have laughed at the irony.

“Aren’t there supposed to be four of you?” you blurted out, desperate to distract him. “’m almost offended. You paint me as a terrorist, yet I’m not even worthy of the whole package?”

“This is no laughing matter. Twenty-three people are dead because of you.”

Reed’s words snapped through the air.

Twenty-three.

You had not known. The number made you sway, and your shield liquefied a little more.

“I didn’t mean to,” you said weakly. “I didn’t want to—Let me go,” you finally pleaded. “This has never happened before. I promise it won’t again. I am not a murderer.”

I do not kill innocents, is what you wanted to say. Many Hydra agents had died beneath your waves, but you carefully kept that to yourself.

“I am afraid you give us no other choice.”

Reed’s fist struck the shield. The water shattered, pulverized into thousands of droplets that immediately rained down over you both. You turned to flee, but pain speared through your abdomen. You collapsed with all your weight, your jaw slamming violently against the floor with a dull crack.

You screamed in agony.

Reed did not hesitate. His arms stretched and closed around you, binding you in living chains. You struggled, but your body no longer obeyed. Every movement awakened the wound in your stomach; every breath burned your lungs.

You were spent. Your body responded only in jerks of consciousness. Your head was heavy. Each breath scraped your chest raw. Your vision darkened, and the floor seemed to vanish beneath your feet despite the hold that kept you upright.

Don’t tell me you’re giving up, Tideborn, Bucky Barnes’s flat voice echoed in your head. I’ve trained you better.

Reed’s arms continued to tighten around you. He was going to squeeze you to death, you realized.

You closed your eyes and focused on this warm body, so close to yours. You strained to hear the familiar sound of the ocean. People mistakenly believed it existed only on the shoreline or in the hollow of a seashell, but one did not need to go far to find waves.

Beneath flesh, beneath muscle, in the blood, everywhere, water moved. You clung to that current, to that great canal and its tributaries, and drew from the groundwater of the human body.

Suddenly, Reed’s grip loosened around you. The superhero brought his hands to his throat as an unprecedented flood poured into his lungs.

The moment he released you, you let go as well—you did not want to kill the man, only weaken him—and staggered toward the door.

That's what made it odd, you were hesitating long enough that she had begun to notice.

"It's routine." She said calmly, "I'd just like another set of eyes. Someone new."

Your gaze fell briefly towards the tank. From your desk, the water looked calm and still. He was nowhere in sight, not above, just at his usual spot at the bottom.

You swallowed, "Yeah, okay." You nodded, trying to sound optimistic. Naomi looked satisifed with your answer.

"Meet me in fifteen minutes, yeah?"

By the time the two of you reached the upper platform, the west wing was mostly empty. Only a few stayed; some lingered to chat, or were organizing their desks. The stairs to reach the top were somewhat hidden, the metal steps echoing as you both climbed up. And the loud clank the cooler made as you brought it up with you.

At the top, the platform turned into a narrow walkway that circled a part of the tank's rim. It was heavily monitored; the tank did not have a hatch to close it completely. There was concern that he would eventually jump out of it, but this place was packed tightly with sensors and locked doors that would keep him inside.

You set the cooler by the railing that was circled around the tank to prevent falls from staff. For a moment, neither of you spoke. She stepped forward first, resting her hands on the metal rail as she looked down into the water. You followed a second later, looking down into that deep, dark water. It really creeped you out, and you weren't the type to get scared of a little ocean water.

He could easily pull you into the water if he wanted to right now. You felt yourself gripping onto the rail tightly more than you should. It was faint, but you could see his shadow at the bottom. A shape darker than the rest of the water, not moving a muscle.

You gulped.

Naomi looked at you, gesturing towards the cooler.

"Go ahead."

You turned towards the cooler, fidgeting in your pocket for some gloves in your coat; you did not want your hands to smell like fish all night. You noticed your hands were a little shaky as you put on the gloves.

What were you so afraid of?

You lifted the lid of the cooler and grabbed a handful of fish before tossing them over the edge of the rail. They hit the water with a soft splash before disappearing almost immediately.

A mixture of different types of fish was tossed, vanishing into the dark abyss. Neither of you spoke as you tossed them in. Naomi kept a watchful eye on you and the tank as you did so, calculating. Anxious that something may happen, that could put two and two together, and why he only paid attention to you.

The shadow at the bottom of the tank never moved.

Naomi exhaled quietly through her nose.

"Hm."

It wasn't frustration, it was more like mild disappointment. You wondered what was going on in her head. You wondered if she believed your incident, which is why she brought you here. Did she suspect the siren to jump out and drag you in by the ankle? You slightly backed away from the railing just a bit, in case that hutch was true.

Naomi straightened from the railing and glanced at the cooler. "Hold on a moment." She said, "I'll go grab another batch from storage." Grabbing the handle of the cooler.

You looked over at her, "More?"

"Yup." She replied, "With the stunt he pulled today, if he's finally willing to swim up a bit higher, it's worth rewarding this behavior with more fish."

That sounded reasonable enough for you.

She started to drag the cooler with her as she walked towards the stairs.

"Just stay here, yeah? She said, "I'll be right back."

The metal steps echoed softly as she descended back downstairs. The sound faded as she reached the end of the stairs. Then she shut the door behind her.

It was a little too quiet for comfort now. It wasn't like it was completely quiet; the sounds of the tank's filtration filled the space. You kept your hands where they were, against the railing. Making sure to not lean in too much as you look down on the water.

The water was still.

You were just looking down at the water because there was nothing else to do here. You could scroll on your phone, but you didn't want to take the risk of it accidentally falling in the tank because of how sweaty your hands felt right now.

Naomi would come back any minute now; you hoped she wouldn't take long.

A faint ripple broke across the surface, the motion snapping you out of your thoughts as you frowned slightly.

It hadn't come from the fish you've thrown in; they were dead as hell.

The water shifted again, but it wasn't a violent shift. Just enough for small rings of movement across the tank.

You took a deep breath as your fingers tightened slightly around the metal rail. Not once did you think that at this age you would be scared of fucking water.

And then? Nothing happened.

The small rings you noticed smoothed out quickly, the surface settling back into stillness. You stayed where you were waiting, waiting for something, anything. Maybe being here alone with your thoughts was making you tweak out.

You exhale slowly, trying to loosen the tension in your shoulders.

You were fully expecting something out of a horror movie to happen. The siren jumping out with his sharp ass teeth and claws, dragging you into the tank and killing you right there.

You shook your head, "Keep it reasonable.." You mumbled to yourself, trying to think of something else.

But of course, your mind kept going back to the possible scenarios that filled your mind.

What if he did come up right now?

What's the possibility you've ticked him off more than the last time?

You were deep in your thoughts, completely unaware of your surroundings for that split moment.

A sharp metallic clang rang out behind you. You flinched hard, the sound tearing through the silence. The echo of footsteps followed afterwards.

It was just Naomi.

You knew that, but still your head snapped towards the noise. Your pulse was still a little too fast as she reached the top of the platform. Hauling the cooler filled with fish. She paused for a second, studying your movements, taking in the way your hands were still gripping the railing hard.

"...Did something happen?" She asked.

You shook your head a little bit too quickly.

"No, it was nothing. Just too quiet here." You let out an awkward laugh..

She gave you a look and nodded, setting the cooler beside you with a thud. "Okay, good."

Naomi stepped next to you, "Let's try that again, yeah?"

You nodded, stepping back just enough to give her space.

She put on some gloves, and opened the cooler. This time, it was more fillies to the brim, the smell was more noticeable than the last batch.

She didn't throw the fish immediately. Instead, she looked down into the tank for a moment, as if she was calculating on what the right call was next.

Waiting.

Then, without looking at you, she said, "Stand there for a second?” She pointed a little beyond the metal railing.

You looked at her, confused, but you did so anyway. Shuffling a bit towards where she pointed. “…Here?”

“Mm.” She nodded.

There was no explanation. No elaboration. Just a quiet instruction. You had to do what she said, right? She was the big boss in this whole project.

You stayed where you were, your hands wanting to grip the railing that wasn’t there behind you. One of your hands, the closest to it, reached out to it.

Oh my god, she’s going to push you in the tank. That’s all you were thinking, even if it was ridiculous. Logic has been out the door for a long time.

Naomi's gaze flicked between the water and your reflection in the surface. Not obvious enough to call attention to, but deliberate. But you still felt her gaze, calculating. Something brewing in that mind of hers, and it was kinda creeping you out.

Like she was lining something up.

Testing.

Was she hoping the Siren would come up and grab you? Gears started to turn in your head, 'What the hell did she gain by this?'

The seconds stretched, yet those seconds felt like an eternity. There was no movement anywhere in the water. No shift from below. No ripple breaking the surface. The shadow in the corner remained exactly where it always had been.

Still and unresponsive.

Naomi exhaled softly. Clearly frustrated with whatever she wanted to see.

"Alright," she said, more to herself than to you.

She reached into the cooler and began tossing the fish one by one. They hit the surface with soft, hollow splashes before disappearing beneath the water.

It wasn't like you were going to stand there and not help her with the fish. It was a big batch, and you wondered if the Siren would even eat all of this fish; obviously, their organs were different from those of the average human. How much could he actually handle?

The last fish slipped from her hand and vanished into the dark.

Naomi watched for another moment. When nothing happened, she straightened. "Guess earlier was situational," she said, brushing her hands together lightly. Her smile was back again as she turned to you, "We'll try again tomorrow, yeah? Hopefully, we can figure out what can bring him up again."

You didn't respond.

Naomi stepped back from the railing, grabbing the empty cooler.

"Let's head down."

When you reached the bottom level, the west wing had emptied out. Feeding the siren took more time than you would've thought. Or maybe that was your mind messing with you. You really needed to go see a doctor with the weird shit that has been happening to you. Every electronic was turned off.

Naomi paused near the exit, glancing toward the windows briefly. Beyond the glass, the sky had darkened, heavy clouds rolling in. Her eyes widened in surprise, "Oh, right! Storm's supposed to hit tonight," she said.

You nodded faintly. You'd heard. You weren't quite used to them just yet; you did more closely here for your line of work. But storms? And typically harsh ones at best? You don't think you get used to them for quite a bit.

She set the cooler in the corner; she'll properly store it the following day. "Do you have a ride? It's too windy right now to walk." Seems like she's very observant. You occasionally mentioned in passing conversation that you did walk from home to the facility. Seems like Nomi is an eavesdropper.

"Yeah," you said automatically, but then you hesitated.

You went quiet, "I can call an Uber." Naomi watched you for a second. Then she shook her head lightly.

"Don't worry about it," she said. "I'm heading that way anyway. I can give you a ride." You glanced back once, towards the tank; you didn't know why you did. You just felt a pair of eyes on you; it gave you goosebumps.

'Uhm- Okay," you said. Naomi smiled as she nodded.

"Good! Let's go." She grabbed you by the wrist as you dragged you out of the West Wing. Guess she really didn't set boundaries with people, or ask people to drag them by the wrist.

By the time you got home, the storm had already started. Droplets becoming heavier as minutes started to pass. The sky had been a little dull all day, but now it changed into a murky color, the clouds filled to the brim with water.

You threw your bag at your cozy couch, you didn’t bother turning any of the lights on yet. It wasn’t like you had a hard time seeing where you were going. You had one goal right now, wash away today’s stress. As you headed towards your bathroom.

You lived with no one.

That was obvious, you moved for this job leaving your life behind. You turned the shower on without thinking.

Hot water came quickly, steam already beginning to fog the mirror as you stepped out of your clothes and into the water. The heat from it immediately calming down your senses and nerves.

You exhaled. The tension in your shoulders eased faster than it should have. It always did, since this whole project landed on you, since the ringing in your ears that never really fell quiet. You leaned forward slightly, resting a hand against the tile as the water ran over the back of your neck, down your spine. The ringing was dull now, not fully gone but it wasn’t taking over your thoughts.

You stayed there longer than you meant to.

Minutes passing without notice, the outside world fading into the steady rhythm of the shower. Rain against the windows. Water against tile. The low hum of plumbing behind the walls.

Your home was your safe place, away from all the stress of your work. Away from the siren that haunted you, even if you spent most of your free time researching them. It was better than having your anxiety spike in the West Wing.

Eventually, you reached out blindly, turning the temperature down just slightly before stepping back.

You should get out….maybe just a couple more minutes.

You stood there in the gently spray of the shower head. Letting it run over your face, your eyes closed, grounding you.

Letting your mind drift back to that day. Two weeks into the project, desperate for some answers, or to even see him.

The tank. The way you walked to it, pressing your palm to the glass, how hopeful you were. And how terrified you felt yourself be when he came charging into the glass.

You opened your eyes.

That was enough thinking. You shut the water off, trying to push your mind into thinking of something else.

You felt refreshed after stepping out of the shower. Today’s events..were a lot, and whatever Naomi was doing up there? Was..fucking weird. You put on comfortable clothes as you stepped into your room.

A bit messy from things being shattered everywhere with your..research. You laid on your bed, pushing yourself up. Almost immediately you went to go on your phone. Search tabs filled the screen almost immediately.

Sirens biology.

Deep sea vocalization myths.

Marine predator behavioral patterns.

Nothing useful, it was just fiction for those niche groups. Nothing that could actually help you, nothing concrete.

Most of the tabs always circled back to the same ideas. Mythology, could it be myths though? The siren was very much real. You shook your head, not wanting to drive into mythology any deeper. Along with speculation what was addressed as a fact for sirens.

You groaned, knowing you wouldn’t find anything tonight once again. Then clicked on the familiar tab.

Some videos explaining sirens, you just watched. Knowing most of the material people would cram into videos for views.

Movement. Posture. The way the body displaced water. How they were deemed so beautiful, which they were. But male sirens were never mentioned, or rarely mentioned.

You leaned forward slightly, looking at your screen closely. Studying the fucking video like it might finally give you something real.

Outside? Out of the comfort of your home? Thunder roared across the sky. The screen buffered.

You frowned as you tapped the refresh button a couple of times, but it failed to load. Your wifi was shit right now, so you huffed, turning it off; your data would do for now. It was a bit slower, but you could get by it.

At the same time, the overhead light flickered.

Once, twice, and then?

Everything that used electricity in your space shut off completely. Darkness filled your home, the only light source being your phone, whose service barely worked. Silence poured into the space, not entirely, though.

The rain was still there. Way more noticeable now, louder now.

You sat there for a moment, staring at the blank screen, the screen shutting off your reflection faintly visible in it.

The ringing in your ears crept back in. You frowned before lying back into your bed, groaning in frustration.

You left your home a little later than usual.

Maybe because it was the morning after the storm. It wasn't like you'd overslept; it was quite the opposite.

The second you stepped into the facility, you knew something had happened here.

It looked like a hot mess.

Employees were walking like they had places to be, holding soggy papers in their arms. Maintenance workers were pushing carts with tools to mop up the muddy footprints left by everyone. A ceiling tile sat in a trash can. You see about 3 buckets collecting water from holes in the ceiling.

"What the hell?"

You said mostly to yourself; nobody answered you anyway. Mostly because everyone was busy complaining.

"The south wing's computers are fried."

"At least your wing didn't flood."

"The company that finances here is so fucking negligent. Why is it so bad????"

A woman carrying a semi-soggy box nearly bumps into you before mumbling an apology and continuing to walk down the hall. The storm hit the facility too hard, even though it should have been able to handle it. You started to walk down the hall, a routine you knew well, to get to the West Wing. The further you walked, the more the damage became visible. Some ceiling panels were wrapped, looking like they'd fall any second now.

You also saw a couple more buckets underneath another leak. Two researchers passed you, annoyed that their overnight research was wiped clean. The power was out here as well, and it seemed like there was no backup.

You continued to walk; someone farther down was arguing about a printer not being functional anymore. The West Wing was a good distance away; those employees who lingered in the hall were talking about what happened here, and their stories were getting more dramatic as you walked.

You couldn't tell what was true anymore. You found yourself smiling at conversations you heard. By the time you reached the doors of the West Wing, your mind wandered.

You hadn't heard anything about this section of the facility; it wasn't strange. The whole wing was under an NDA, but still. You wondered what damage you were going to walk into right now.

You felt it as you stepped in; everything felt wrong when you stepped in.

The usual background noise that you've grown used to, the steady hum of equipment of the tank that would fill the room, was gone. Instead, it was replaced by movement too much of it. Panicked voices mixed with fast footsteps; you heard doors slamming and people arguing about what to do.

You hadn't even gotten to your desk when you said. "What the fuck??" No one answers you here, too, at least not at first.

You placed your things on your desk; it looked like the computers still worked here. The West Wing didn't look that...bad. A couple of buckets to collect leaking water, but there weren't any ceiling tiles in a trash can.

The last couple of co-workers you had were frantic, panicking, and not knowing what to do. This would've been easier if the rest of the team were still here.

You spotted Naomi in the middle; it was like seeing a completely different person. Finally seeing a crack in her persona. Naomi was usually so cheerful; of course, at times it looked and felt fake as hell. And right now?

She's barking orders to everyone surrounding her.

Her voice cut sharper than it should've. She was always so... friendly, very condescending. Everyone moved faster because of her tone, maybe even recklessly, not calmly. Naomi pushed through the small crowd of people, her steps heavy as she went to look at something else. When she spotted you, she changed her direction towards you.

Her eyes were studying you as she grumbled, "You're late."

"I- sorry, what's going on?" You asked.

She didn't answer immediately, instead shes in her head, trying to think if she had the time to sit and chat with you. In that small amount of time, you looked around the room to get a bigger picture without her saying. You felt your stomach tighten a little, the tank.

The familiar shadow that you're used to seeing and acknowleging everyday wasnt here.

"Naomi?" You try to get her out of her head. "What happened?" She blinked once before she exhaled, putting it straight to you. "Our specimen, the mermaid, isn't in his tank anymore." You fell silent.

"What?"

She shrugged, "Power went out at our facility, obviously. With such a harsh storm, it was bound to happen." She frowned, "Though I didn't realize how greedy our company actually is. There was only one backup battery for our wing. It failed after an hour; a couple of other departments had the same issue." She started to look like she was about to burst any second.

"...He escaped?" You said quietly, as if saying something wrong would throw her into a rage.

"Apparently yes." She nodded as she typed something on her tablet.

You hear your colleague shout, "East wing is clear from signs of our mermaid!" Naomi turns to the voice before looking back at you for a second.

"Rest assured, though, I'm just-" She cracks a small smile, probably fake; who knew? "Very stressed; he couldn't have gotten far with that tail of his."

Being stressed was a valid emotion in this setting. Her job, well everyones job on the line. The one assignment: research the mermaid, but with him being gone, there was no reason to fund this project. Naomi didn't bother to wait for you to respond, just went back to commanding orders.

You gulped. You had so many questions and concerns.

The tank is empty. And he's on the loose in the facility.

"Let's hope he doesn't jump on someone." You mumbled as you tried getting your thoughts together before joining everyone else.

A few hours passed, and there was no progress.

No one could focus on doing anything today. Every conversation obviously would circle back to the missing mermaid. It was like playing hide-and-seek, but the hider had been hiding since probably before morning.

Some colleagues did go look around the entirety of the facility. Any place that they were able to access- hell, even Naomi in places only some were authorized to go into.

You tried to work, looking to see if there was any footage of him leaving the tank. Every few minutes, someone would rush into the room to give an update on where he wasn't.

"Maintenance tunnels!"

There was nothing.

"Lower access corridors!"

Nothing again.

Everyone in the wing was on edge.

By lunchtime, a couple thought he had somehow escaped the facility. It wasn't like it was impossible, granted the power was out. Which, granted, motion sensors were trash in that situation. But he wouldn't know that.

Or he was probably dead in a corner of the facility somewhere. He was aquatic; he needed water to survive. If that was it? You could research his dead body at least.

You were trying to organize some documents that had to be reprinted after the storm got to them. Suddenly, you hear someone kick the door open.

Sean stumbles into the room, his face pale.

Like, actually fucking pale, like if dude had seen a ghost.

In one hand, that was gloved it was carrying a big clear bag of something. You took a look; fish scales? What the fuck?

"Sean? You okay?" Someone asked.

Sean proceeded to ignore them as he shouted. "Dr. Naomi!"

The room went silent, confused about what the shouting was about, as some turned. Naomi looked up from her tablet. "What?!" She sounded a bit annoyed. Sean sped-walked towards her, his eyes wide, the bag shaking in his hand.

"I found this-" He held it out to her.

Naomi grabs it as she takes a look inside. The bag was clear, obviously, but looking at it more closely? Her expression changes, not by much, but it was enough.

You stand up from your chair, and you didn't mean to blurt out, "What is it?" There was a deafening silence for a moment, but Sean did respond to you.

"It's skin."

The others turned to him, looking uncomfortable. Or if he's making a joke.

"What?"

Sean pointed to the bag, you did walk closer for a better look. Inside the bag? Were several pale, translucent fragments. Fish scales? Some were larger, some were barely any bigger than a fingernail clipping. They looked dry, brittle, like flakes?

Naomi decided to get a better feel for things, grabbing one of the flakes. Feeling the texture of it. "Doesn't feel right.." She mumbled. It looked strange.

Sean drags a hand down his face, blurting it out. "I think he dried out." The room erupts.

"What? You're saying that's what's left of him?!?"

"Nah man, you bugging!"

"Ew- ew ew!!"

"I mean- he wouldn't survive outside the tank!" Sean countered.

A knot formed in your stomach, and you felt like you were going to be sick. You wouldn't call it nasty, but that was supposedly mermaid remains.

Sean continued to speak, saying his theory. "Look- he was probably already stressed by the storm- then, then- everything failed here- he left the tank and spent hours outside the tank-"

"He's dead." Someone blurts out.

Those two words? Everyone seems to agree, even Naomi, who was still examining that flake in her fingers. This explanation was easy to latch onto; it was simple and understandable.

The mermaid escaped, and he wouldn't survive, and he kicked the bucket. Case fucking closed. But it wasn't the closing everyone wanted. Sean hadn't collected everything where he found the skin. The job right now was to collect the entirety of the supposed body.

And then figure out things from there. This project was going to come to an end; this assignment was just a short part of your career. But it just felt wrong- the skin? Felt wrong, but it wasn't like you were a mermaid expert.

Your knowledge of covering the entire internet wouldn't cover this.

Around you, the room had already begun to mourn the creature that gave them a headache every shift.

By late afternoon, the theory already became the fact. It became the official story. The mermaid is gone; the tank is no longer needed.

The rest of the skin was collected and sealed in containers to analyze further the next day. Everyone was just trying to get shit down now, still processing it.

The West Wing would eventually close again, whenever an analysis was done on the skin. People didn't want to talk about the mermaid anymore; if he was mentioned, he was called an 'Asset.'

Around that time, Naomi gathered everyone to announce an early dismissal today. Everyone was tired; there was no way everyone would be at peak productivity. You grabbed your bag as you walked out. Everyone just looked off, not really mourning that much, just tired and unsure of what was next after a project that never really came to a clean conclusion.

Naomi passes you near the entrance of the facility; her expression is tired. Probably has her hands full with what is the next step after this. "I thought you were going to be the solution to crack the code on the mermaid." She mumbled as she shrugged. "Oh well, it'll still be interesting to test its skin, right?" She gave a tired smile.

You blinked. You were the solution? Honestly, you probably were, but that didn't matter now. "Right- yeah, it will." Naomi nodded as she gave you a pat on the shoulder before leaving like the rest.

The streets are still fucking wet, obviously. The smell of rain is still there but faint. It feels too tame compared to what just went down in the west wing. What happened there? Felt like a novela, or it was from a different universe or something.

You didn't want to take the bus back home. You did take it earlier this morning, not wanting to deal with the puddles around. You walked to work, but right now? Ugh, you didn't wanna sit on a bus with your thoughts, nor wanted to accidentally step on puddles of water. This place did have those electric scooters scattered around; one would probably work. You found one near the corner where the start of town was. The facility was a bit distant from the actual town.

You pulled out your phone. Scan and pay. You were ready to ride this thing; you stepped on and pushed off. Not too fast nor too slow, the wind was light on your face. It was comforting somehow. You passed by stores, empty crosswalks. The silence was still there in your mind, but right now? It was easy to ignore.

You kept on riding faster than needed. But even so, you didn't want to be back home just yet; the feelings would just come crashing down on you again. You decided to take a different route back home. Taking the longer route on purpose.

The scooter hums under you, and you feel the light vibration on the handles as you continue. You avoid the puddles on the ground without even thinking.

Your grip loosens a bit as you turn down a side street. It had some older buildings, but not many stores here anymore. You weren't a local, but what you'd been told is just that: barely anyone comes here to shop. Slowly but surely, owners have been closing things up. It'll only be a matter of time before this street lies abandoned.

You slow a little, just to take a look at the architecture. That's when you see him; your brain only registered it as a shadow at first, till evenutally it did catch up; you swerved instantly.

"SHIT-" The scooter jerks as you try to stabilize, barely missing the guy. Barely having the time to think, you catch yourself before eating shit. Dropping your foot to come to a complete stop. You turned your head to the guy. He's standing in the middle of the street like he was there the whole time.

The guy had no urgency, no reaction to almost being hit by a fucking scooter. Just there, damp fabric clinging to his clothes, his hair went at the ends. The guy looked creepy; he was very still.

You're annoyed as you speak, "Are you insane?" Your voice sounded snappy, "You cannot stand in the middle of the fucking street-" You cut off, because right now you're taking a real good look at him.

The posture? It's very..off. Like someone trying to understand how to stand for the first time.

And then? The tied sleeve, the lack of an arm on his left side.

Okay...

Who else had a missing left arm?

Now thinking about it, the mermaid had long hair too. Okay, this has to be a coincidence.

Right.

"What the hell-" You said quietly.

He tilts his head slightly to the sound of your voice. He's listening and deciding what you are. Not like a human would. Though he didn't look lost, he looked like he had stopped there on purpose. Like he was waiting for something, or someone.

You're seeing things.

Next Chapter

You’ve been walking the length of your new room, arms out to the sides trying to get comfortable with the extra weight on your head. Hoping if you keep practicing you’ll look more natural with it on. But as minutes turned into hours you don’t feel any better about it. You feel if anything more unnatural. How are you going to be a princess? Better yet how are you going to be queen one day? You’ve only ever known how to serve others, how are you going to let the people you grew up with serve you now? Everything felt so… different.

You sigh yanking the tiara off your head and look at it. God you feel like a imposter. You feel like you’re playing dress up. You shuffle your bare feet across the room and sit on the edge of the ridiculously cloud like bed. You wish you could see James. Just talk to him. But tradition has it the bride and groom aren’t to see each other before the wedding. You wondered if he was feeling as anxious and stressed as you were. Was he pacing his room? Was he missing you as much as you missed him? Gosh you just wanted to hold him. You just wanted him to tell you he loved you and everything is ok.

But no, the cruel joke of this whole situation is that he’s right across the hall and you’re supposed to stay here. Alone. With your thoughts. You’re supposed to be getting “beauty sleep for your big day tomorrow!” As Becca and Miriam so excitedly put it before leaving you for the night. You sigh heavily flopping down back on your bed.

You lay there staring up at the ceiling, fingers twisting into the night gown you wear. Thinking of everything that’ll happen tomorrow. But most of all, you’re going to marry your best friend. Someone you’ve loved since you could pronounce the word properly, And he loves you and is marrying you. You’re going to be husband and wife.

So screw it. Sitting up with a huff you mutter “screw tradition, he’s going to be my husband anyways” you all but stomp over to your door. Grabbing the handle and taking a deep breath before swinging it open. But to your surprise, said soon to be husband is already there. And looks quite as shocked as you are. “Oh” you gasp out. He’s in nothing but his under shirt and trousers, hair looking slightly tousled. He was mid pace before you had swung open the door, now he stands there with his mouth half open.

“I um.. I couldn’t sleep” he says quietly, straighten his stance. You nod slightly, hand still on the door handle “I couldn’t either” you say softly. He nods and offers a small smile. Silence soon fills the hall as you both stand there unsure of where to go from here. You swallow before stepping aside slightly “w-would you like to come in?” You ask softly. He huffs out a laugh and scratches the back of his neck “I don’t believe that would be the proper thing to do”. You smile at him tilting your head “when has any we’ve ever done been proper?” You ask and he rubs his hands together, his tongue darting out quickly to wet his bottom lip before nodding and stepping towards you “I suppose you are right”.

He steps into your room and you shut the door behind you and turn to watch him as he looks around the space. His eyes fall to the tiara that lays on your bed, he walks over and picks it up “trying it on?” He asks turning it over in his hand before facing you. You give a slight nod taking a few steps towards him “thought I’d uh practice, but it turns out gravity is not on my side with it” you say with a small smile. He chuckles “yes it does take some getting use to” he says softly before placing it back on the edge of the bed.

“Do uh, do you like the room?” He asks shifting on his feet as his hands clasp behind his back. “Oh um yes.. it is rather big though for one person” you admit, he nods and sucks on his teeth glancing around again “I suppose you have a point”. You hum in response and look down at your feet. “I um I did want to give you something. It was left behind in your.. in your old room” he says as he reaches into his pocket pulling out a small chain.

“Miriam brought it to me, though I don’t know why she wouldn’t have just given it to you herself” he holds out the necklace to you and you gently take it from him. “Oh.. thank you I guess with everything I forgot it” you say quietly looking down at the small sapphire. “Was it your mother’s?” He asks, his eyes locked on you as you gaze at it. You nod and look up at him with a sad smile “yes, yes it was”, he nods towards you and points at the necklace “may i?” He asks and you furrow your brows at him before realizing “oh um sure” you say handing him the necklace and turning around.

Gently he unclasps it and brings it around your neck, with delicate hands he puts it around your neck. Once it’s clasped again he gently fixes the chain before his hands rub down your neck and to your shoulders, resting there. You bring a hand to the small stone and look down at it before turning your head to look at him. He’s closer than you’d thought he’d be “thank you” you say, voice coming out as a whisper. He bites his lower lip and nods, his eyes looking over your face. Slowly his face comes closer to yours his breath fanning over your lips.

You close your eyes slightly as his lips softly graze yours. You smile before whispering “I don’t think this is proper before the wedding”. He smirks and brings one of his hands to your face turning you more towards him. “When has anything we’ve ever done been proper?” He whispers back, his lips ghosting yours as he speaks. Your smile grows as you turn more so you are chest to chest with him. Grabbing his other hand that still rests on your shoulder you take it in yours and hold it “I suppose you are right” you whisper back and he sucks in a breath before pressing his lips onto yours.

It’s slow, and filled with want and longing but it quickly turns into something more heated. He lets go of your hand and brings it up to cup the other side of your face, pulling you more flush against him. Your arms move to wrap around his neck, stretching onto your toes to deepen the kiss. Quickly and without breaking the kiss he removes one of his hands from your face and bends hooking it around your waist “hold on” he mutters against your lips as his lifts you. With a gasp you grip him as you are hoisted up, on instinct your legs wrap around his waist. Your night gown bunching up slightly.

He moves to kiss your neck as he turns and backs up until he is sitting on the edge of your bed, you straddling his lap. Your hands move to his hair combing through it as a soft moan leaves your lips as he places hurried kisses on your pulse point below your ear. He nips at the skin there, the action causing you to gasp and grip his hair tightly drawing a low moan from his chest. He pulls away from your neck and looks into your eyes, you bring your hands to his face resting your forehead on his as you both breathe each other in.

“We should probably stop” he pants, voice now rough. You close your eyes and gently kiss his cheek before pulling back slightly to look at him “ but what if I do not wish to?” You whisper a smile pulling at your lips. “What if I want to know all of you now?” You ask quietly slowly placing a kiss to his lips. He shudders his arms tightening around you, gripping the fabric of your night gown “you don’t know what you do to me… I am trying to be a gentleman” he mumbles against your lips. You move so your mouth is next to his ear “I do not want you to be” you whisper. And that breaks him.

His hands move to grip the back of your head and around your waist before quickly flipping the both of you. You land on your back and he wastes no time in capturing your lips once again. His hand at your waist moves to grip your leg and hooks it around his hip as he scoots you both further up the bed, the tiara clatters to the ground but neither of you care enough to make sure it didn’t break. His hand on your leg travels up higher until it rests on your now exposed thigh. He grips the flesh there and you gasp as your hands move down to the hem of his under shirt, sliding them underneath it and up his abdomen feeling his warm skin under your fingertips.

He shudders as your hands move higher and he pulls away from you to help you remove his shirt, he is beautiful. You trail your hands down his now exposed chest, both of you breathing heavy. He rests his forehead on yours closing his eyes “are you sure?” He asks voice breathless. You nod running one of your hands down his cheek and onto his neck “I want all of you” you whisper pulling him into a kiss. His hand on your thigh moves higher pushing your night gown up around your waist exposing your lower half, he shifts so he can reach down and untie his trousers.

You help him push them off and he looks at you “tell me to stop if it’s too much” he pants lining himself up at your entrance. You nod and suck in a breath at the blunt head pushing slowly into you. It burns, the stretch unfamiliar and invading. Your hands grip his shoulders nails digging into the skin there. He pushes in further and you wince causing him to still “are you alright?” He asks nuzzling his face into your neck. “Y-yes.. don’t stop” you stutter placing a light peck on his shoulder.

He pushes until his hips are flush with yours groaning into your neck holding you tightly. You both stay like that for a few moments, wrapped in each other. Eventually James slowly starts to pull back before pushing in again. You shudder at the friction and he places a kiss to the corner of your mouth. You bring your other leg to hook around his other hip, the angle opening you up more making it so he can go deeper. Slowly his pace picks up and the pain you feel dulls slightly, it starts to become more enjoyable.

One particularly deep thrust draws a surprising moan from your lips, your head titling back at the sudden pleasure you found in it. James brings his lips to your neck peppering kisses there and down to your collar bone, his chin drags down the neckline of your nightgown as he kisses lower. With new confidence that would’ve shocked you in any other situation you manage to shift your weight and roll you both over. You straddle his hips, hands rested on his bare chest as you settle into the new position.

Moaning at the feeling of him seemingly feeling deeper within you now, he sits up with you grabbing the hem of your nightgown and pulling it up and over your body “so beautiful” he moans cupping one of your breasts bringing his face closer to it and placing opened mouth kisses. You gasp and rock your hips moving your hands to his shoulders for more support. He bites gently on the soft flesh near your nipple before taking it into his mouth and sucking, you moan rather loudly at the action and pick up your pace rocking into him harder.

His free hand wraps around your naked waist and pulls you flush against his chest. Lifting his head he captures your lips in a sloppy kiss moaning into your mouth as his own hips buck up to meet your movements. You move a hand to his hair tangling it in there and pulling “fuck” he groans thrusting up into you roughly. He pulls his face back slightly moving his hand from your breast to your cheek placing his forehead against yours, you breathes mingling between you both. “I love you” he pants look into your eyes, you place a kiss to his lips and pull back again looking into his eyes “I love you more”

——

3 years later

“Ian come back! You’ll get your trousers all muddy!” You shout watching the small three year old run off towards one of the fountains in the gardens. You shake your head smiling as he slows slightly, now trying to take careful steps to avoid any stray puddles. James chuckles beside you “at least he’s mindful?” He questions and you roll your eyes at him as you walk slowly along the path. “I just don’t want to have to change him again before dinner” you state softly linking your arm in his “you know Miriam has said she doesn’t mind changing his clothes” James states lightly, you nod “I know, but I like doing it. I am his mother” you say and James places a kiss to your temple “you are an amazing mother but help is always nice, especially with how our son loves to adventure and have dirty trousers” he says.

You stop at the fountain your son is currently trying to get into, his small body hanging on the side splashing the water with his finger tips. James gently pulls away from you and goes over to him, he picks him up and dangles him over his shoulder causing the small child to squeal in excitement laughing as his father tickles his sides “stop dada!” He squeals trying to wiggle out of his grasp “stop? Why would I stop?” He questions jokingly. You laugh and walk over to them poking at James’s side “give me my son you monster” you joke grabbing Ian from his father.

You hold him to you tightly and he wraps his arms around your neck nuzzling his face into your shoulder. You gently rub a hand through his brown hair, James gapes at the two of you “my heart” he says dramatically, bringing a hand to his heart “you call me a monster?” He asks jokingly. You smile leaning your head onto your sons “he is just a poor little boy” you say softly, laughing lightly as Ian mutters a “yeah” turning his head and sticking his tongue out towards his father. James shakes his head lightly bitting back a smile.

The three of you continue your walk, eventually you place Ian back down and both you and James grab each of his hands picking him up gently and swinging him as you go, he giggles and squeals kicking his feet as he gets picked up. “Momma what’s that?” He asks as you both place him down again, he takes his small hand out of yours and points. You squint looking towards where he points “Oh, I completely forgot that was there” you say softly and look to James, he looks towards it and smiles “it’s a gazebo” he says looking down at Ian. The small boys face scrunches up as he looks at it more “grazedo?” He says tilting his head looking up at you. You laugh light shaking your head “gazebo sweetheart” you correct softly.

“May I go see it?” He asks softly and you nod “yes but be careful please!” You call after him as he’s already taking off towards it leaving you and James a few feet behind. You both smile and follow the small boy towards the old wooden structure. “You know, we should really ask for someone to fix this up” you say softly, reaching out to touch the old wood of one of the pillars that holds it up, your eyes following Ian as he moves around inside of it. “Should probably just tear it down.. build a new one maybe?” James questions, you nod softly stepping into it and brushing some dirt and leaves off of the bench before sitting. “Perhaps, but then we’d be tearing down memories… and it’d be a nice place for Ian to be able to bring his siblings to.” You say softly looking at James as he leans on the pillar “siblings?” He asks cocking an eyebrow.

You hum softly “yes, I believe in a year or so this one will be running rampant with him” you say smiling placing a hand on your abdomen. It takes him a moment, he just stands there looking at you confused before realization crosses over his features and then shock “y-you mean.. your?” He asks taking a step towards you “about two months along now says the healer” you say nonchalantly and James quickly rushes over to you picking you up and spinning you. You laugh and he sets you down placing a kiss to your lips “yucky dada” the three year old now standing on one of the benches states, James pulls away from you and turns towards him “it’s not yucky, it’s love Ian” he says picking up the small boy and bring him over towards you.

“Love?” He asks looking at his father “yes, love. I love your mother and you very deeply. And now you’ll have a little bother or sister to add to the love” he explains and the boys face scrunches “brother or sister?” He asks look towards you “yes my heart, there’s a baby in my belly. Right here” you point and he smiles “momma ate a baby?” He asks with a laugh and you shake your head as James joins him “no silly, I’ll explain it better when you are older” you say lightly reaching out and brushing some of his hair out of his face. “Can it be a sister?” He asks as you move your hand back to your side. “I hope” James mutters and you eye him before shaking your head “we won’t know what it is until it is born my dear” you explain and Ian nods before wiggling out of James’s grasp again and wondering out of the gazebo.

You call for him not to go far as James pulls you close to him, one of his hands gently coming to your face “I love you, all of you” he says softly rubbing his thumb along your cheek, you smile “we love you more”.

His eyes searched her face, flicking from her eyes to her mouth, then back up. The frown deepened.

"The ring," he said, and there was something in his voice now that hadn't been there before, something that sounded almost like fear, buried under the controlled features. "You put the ring in the chest, did something. You brought me here."

She stared at him.

Right. So. Not a drunk actor. That left her with someone eloped from an asylum, or a veteran with some kind of shock.

She forced herself to take a breath, to level her voice to a stay, calm tone, the way you'd talk to a spooked horse or a confused child.

"Listen, sir," she said. "I don't know what you've got going on in that head of yours, but I am not a witch, I don't know anything about any ring, and I would greatly appreciate it if you got off me. Now."

----

He studied her properly now.

Really examined, now that the immediate threat of the -whatever that thing was she'd tried to brain him with- had been neutralized.

The clothing was wrong. Scandalously wrong. She wore a blouse with short sleeves that ended above the elbow, leaving her forearms bare. And the neckline! God. The neckline was cut in a V that plunged toward her chest with no chemise beneath, no modest linen to preserve decency, with buttons made of something that caught the light, like shell or bone, beaconing the eyes toward the tantalizing curve of her-

His eyes snapped back to her face, jaw tight.

No respectable woman dressed like this. No lady certainly, but even common women knew better than to display themselves so openly unless they were advertising a service. Also, the carmine on her lips. He had never seen such a brazen display.

So. A whore, then? Or a service in whatever establishment he'd been dragged to after being drugged and robbed? The building smelled strange. Earth and growing things, yes, but also that underlying wrongness he couldn't place. And the light overhead wasn't firelight, wasn't candlelight, but something steady that didn't flicker, didn't smoke, just existed like it had been summoned there and told to stay.

Magic. Had to be.

His head was pounding. His ribs ached with every breath. And this woman was staring up at him like he was the confusing element in this situation.

"If not a witch," he said, keeping his voice level with effort, "then what are you, wench?"

Her eyes went wide.

Then they narrowed, and something in her expression shifted from fear into outrage so quickly he almost missed the transition.

"Wench?" she repeated, her voice climbing half an octave. "Did you just call me a wench?"

He frowned. "You object to the term?"

"Get off me, you brute!"

She shoved at his chest with her free hand. Not hard enough to move him, but hard enough to make her intention clear. The outrage was burning off the fear now, replacing it with something that looked a lot like indignation.

He didn't move. Didn't understand her sudden fury.

"I asked you a simple question-"

"A simple-" She made a sound that was half-laugh, half-disbelief. "You pinned me to the floor, accused me of being a witch, called me a wench, and-"

"You tried to strike me-"

"Because you're a stranger in my stockroom!"

"after summoning me here with dark magic-"

"I didn't summon anybody!"

They were talking over each other now, voices rising, and he could feel his own temper fraying. He was tired. His whole body hurt. He'd woken up in a hovel filled with plants and dirt, and that gods-damned light hanging from the ceiling like something out of a fever dream.

Wasn’t a candle, nor a lantern, just a spark that had no business existing without flame inside an unbelievably thin glass.

And now this woman, this… temptress with her bare arms and her plunging neckline and luring lips, was acting as though he was the unreasonable one.

As though she hadn't put that cursed ring in the tournament chest.

As though she hadn't brought him here, wherever here was.

He leaned in slightly, dropping his voice to something harder, more controlled.

"Listen to me very carefully," he said. "I don't know what game you're playing, but I woke up in this place with your plants scattered around me and that-" he jerked his head toward the overhead bulb without taking his eyes off her, "thing burning without oil or wick. The ring on my hand is still warm from whatever spell you cast. So you can tell me what you want from me, and where I am, and we can handle this civilly-"

His grip on her wrist tightened slightly.

"-or you can keep pretending you don't know what I'm talking about, and I'll get the information another way."

She stared up at him, breathing hard. For a moment, he thought she might bite at him, she looked angry enough for it.

Instead, with a kind of forced, brittle calm:

"You are insane."

He blinked.

"I'm- what?"

“In-sane.” She pronounced it carefully, as though he might not know the word. “Crazy. Not right in the head. You need a doctor.”

Not right in the head.

The words landed somewhere specific, which was the problem.

There had been men along the country who said it without ever saying it outright, in the way conversations faltered when he stepped into a room, in the way former companions clapped him on the shoulder a shade too carefully, as if he were something that might splinter or lash out depending on the day. 

Barnes came back wrong, was the version that traveled fastest, passed between cups of ale and lowered voices in corners they assumed he wouldn't overhear. Too quiet. Too watchful. Sleeps alone, drinks alone, doesn't speak of the time he was missing.

Not right in the head.

As though he hadn’t entertained the possibility himself.

In the particular hours between midnight and dawn, when sleep refused him and the walls of whatever rented room he happened to be in seemed to inch steadily closer, he had considered it more than once.

And now here he was.

Sir James Buchanan Barnes.

Pinning a strange woman to the floor of a room full of crushed plants, in a place he didn’t recognize, beneath a light hanging from the ceiling like a captured star, after being brought here by a ring he had put on for no better reason than to see if it fit.

Not right in the head.

Maybe he was.

The breath left him before he could stop it. Short, sharp, entirely without humor, and yet somehow adjacent to it. The nearest thing to a laugh he’d produced in longer than he cared to reckon, wrung out of him by the worst possible circumstances imaginable, which felt fitting enough to almost be funny.

Then he looked back at her, and his expression settled into something harder, flatter. Guarded.

The joke, such as it was, was over.

“Where is this place,” he said.

Not a question.

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Then tried again.

"You're in my stockroom," she said carefully. "The Sweet Briar. It's a flower shop on Camden Street."

"What city."

"New Wintermouth."

He stared at her.

New.

"What county."

"Hancock."

The name meant nothing. He watched her read that in his face.

"Maine," she added, as if that clarified anything.

It didn't. That meant nothing either, and somehow that was worse than if she'd said a name he could place and dispute.

"New Wintermouth," he repeated, very quietly.

She nodded.

He looked at the wall, at nothing, at the impossible reality that someone had taken the name of Lord Morrow's seat -the city he'd ridden into a hundred times through the eastern gate, where he knew which taverns watered their ale and which armorers charged fair prices- and transplanted it somewhere else entirely.

Hancock.

Maine.

The place was wrong.

Everything was wrong.

He looked past her, toward the strange window set high in the wall. Pale grey light filtered through, early morning by the look of it, and beyond the clear glass…

He couldn't see much from this angle. A wall, maybe. Brickwork. Something metal, dark and angular, running up the outside of the building like a ladder but too narrow, too precise. Too uniform.

"Hancock County," he said again, quieter this time.

She nodded, still pinned beneath him, still watching him with those wide eyes that were starting to look less afraid or mad and more worried, which was somehow more unsettling.

He stood slowly.

She was already moving before he'd fully straightened, scrambling to her feet and putting the width of the stockroom between them. Her back hit the shelving on the far wall with a soft thud, and she stayed there, breathing hard, watching him.

From standing, the room rearranged itself into something even stranger.

Every surface was occupied with objects that made no sense. He turned his head slowly, cataloguing against his will, his mind trying and failing to organize the wrongness into categories he understood.

The black device mounted on the wall, the thing with the coiled cord she'd been holding before she'd tried to brain him with the trowel. It hung there like some kind of sleek, modern artifact, its purpose utterly opaque.

Beside it, a small table.

And on that table: a cup, and some little storage boxes, made from metal.

He stared at it.

Ceramic, pale pink, a color so uniform and so perfect it could not have come from any potter's wheel he'd ever seen. Too smooth. Too flawless. Not a single variation in the glaze, not a fingerprint or settling mark or any of the small human inconsistencies that came from an object being made by hand.

It looked as though it had been conjured into existence fully formed, which -given present circumstances- he could not entirely rule out.

His attention drifted back to her, because she was the only thing in this room that made any sense, except she didn't.

She didn't make sense at all.

The short sleeves. The scandalous neckline. The hair, uncovered and unpinned like no modest woman would wear it.

And her mouth. A deep red like crushed berries or wine, and he had never seen a woman paint her mouth like that outside an itinerant play.

But she'd said she sold flowers.

Then his gaze dropped lower, following the line of her blouse, and that was when he saw them.

Her legs.

He hadn't noticed from the floor. He'd been too focused on neutralizing the threat, on controlling the situation, on trying to make sense of where he was and how he'd gotten there.

But now, standing, with the full measure of her visible from across the room, it was impossible not to notice her skirts ended below the knee.

Not down the ankle, where they belonged.

Below the knee.

The hemline sat several inches beneath that joint, casual and deliberate, as though this were perfectly normal. As though she had simply decided that the entire lower half of her legs were public information and dressed accordingly.

The shoes buckled neatly at the ankle with thin straps, propped up on heels that were barely wider than his thumb.

Heat crawled up the back of his neck.

He averted his eyes. Glanced back, because he was trying to assess the situation, and that required looking at all of it, required understanding what kind of place allowed -expected- women to dress like this.

But God's wounds, her legs.

He jerked his gaze back to the room, sensing the flush spread from his neck to his cheeks, feeling like an untried boy who'd never seen a woman's ankle and was now being confronted with several square feet of information he had no idea what to do with.

Focus.

There were more objects. Incomprehensible things demanding his attention.

A flat rectangular object on the worktable, smooth and dark. A row of metal implements along the wall, too identical to each other, like they'd been cast from the same mold a dozen times over.

And then, on the wall beside the door, what it seemed to be a calendar. It had Arabic numerals, instead of Roman, but the month across the top was in clean, uniform letters.

Still, he didn't recognize the paper; it was too white, too perfectly flat, without the texture of vellum or the slight yellowing of parchment. Or the image above: flowers rendered in such flawless, vivid detail that they looked real. Not painted or illustrated with some improved technique. Something else entirely. Something that made a cold shiver run down his spine.

He took a step toward it and looked at the numbers. The month. The year in the corner, small and plain.

1955.

He stared at it for a long moment.

Then he heard himself say, from a very great distance:

"What year is this."

A pause from behind him.

"1955," she said. Carefully. The voice of someone delivering bad news to a person they weren't sure could handle it, which under other circumstances might have offended him.

His stomach dropped.

He turned away from the calendar, one hand reaching blindly for the shelving unit beside him, gripping the edge hard enough that the wood bit into his palm.

The room tilted.

He bent forward, bracing himself, trying to breathe through the sudden lurch of his body trying to reject this information the only way it knew how.

Nothing came up. He hadn't eaten since before the tournament, which was perhaps the only mercy available, so his body produced only a long, miserable contraction that did absolutely nothing except inform his bruised ribs -in exhaustive detail- exactly how much they resented this recent turn of events.

He straightened slowly and breathed through his nose.

Across the room, she was watching him with her arms crossed over her chest -covering that scandalous neckline, finally- still concerned.

"Are you-"

"Fine," he said.

His voice came out steady. He was distantly proud of that.

She pressed her lips together, clearly unconvinced. The red paint held, he noticed with the detached part of his brain that was still cataloguing details. Whatever she'd used, it didn't smear or fade. Just stayed there, perfect and crimson, even when she pressed her mouth into a skeptical line.

Focus.

"1955," he said aloud, because saying it a second time didn't make it better, didn't make it more believable, but at least made it real. A thing that had been spoken and could not be unspoken. "That is the year."

"That's the year," she confirmed quietly.

She was still watching him like he might collapse. Or bolt. Or do something else unpredictable and damaging.

Fair enough. He felt like he might do all three.

----

She watched him stare at the wall.

The anger had gone somewhere quieter while she wasn't paying attention, replaced by something she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to be feeling toward a man who had, not ten minutes ago, pinned her to the floor and called her a witch.

But he looked… lost. That was the word that kept circling back. Not dangerous-lost, not the wild-eyed unpredictability of someone you needed to run from. Just lost.

His eyes were staring, but whatever they were seeing, wasn't in the room. It was something considerably worse than whatever floral calendar and shelf of terra cotta pots were actually in front of him.

She'd seen that look before.

On men who'd come back from overseas and sat in the pews at St. Benedict's on Sunday mornings, staring at the stained glass with that same hollow, distant focus. Present but not present. Seeing Normandy or the Pacific or some foxhole outside Bastogne instead of the story of Pentecost rendered in jewel-toned light.

Poor thing, she thought, against her better judgment and every reasonable instinct of self-preservation.

The real question now was where he'd come from, and whether anyone was looking for him.

The state institutions weren't, by any account she'd ever heard -and she'd heard plenty- places that took particularly good care of anyone. Overcrowded, underfunded, and more concerned with keeping people contained than actually helping them get better.

Some families made their own arrangements instead. An attic room, a trusted relative, a situation that worked well enough until it didn't.

She looked at his clothes again, cataloging details she'd been too frightened to notice before.

The quality of the leather in that belt, in those boots. The weight of the fabric in his shirt, even dirty and sweat-stained as it was. The craftsmanship in the stitching, the buckles, the strange straps running down his thick thighs.

Not cheap. None of it was cheap.

Wealthy family, then. Wealthy enough to commission custom theatrical costumes, or whatever this was. Wealthy enough to keep their troubled son at home rather than surrender him to the state system. Wealthy enough to preserve the family name by keeping the problem private.

And then he'd gotten out somehow -wandered off, slipped away during a moment of inattention- and ended up here.

In her stockroom.

On her begonias.

She uncrossed her arms slowly, a deliberate gesture of peace, or at least of temporary ceasefire.

Alright.

"I have an immersion heater," she said, keeping her voice gentle, unthreatening. "Do you want some chamomile tea?"

He turned from the wall and looked at her with that steady, unreadable gaze.

"Chamomile," he repeated. “What is… tea?”

She blinked at him. He couldn't be serious.

"It's… like a herbal broth, I suppose." She gestured vaguely toward the little table, where she had a tin of teabags and the mug. "You put hot water and the dried flowers that come into a little bag. It's calming. Helps with..."

She trailed off, unsure how to finish that sentence. Helps with shock? Helps with whatever is going on in that head of yours?

"It's nice," she settled on. "Soothing."

Something moved across his face. A flicker of recognition, maybe, or consideration. His gaze went to the tin, then back to her, assessing.

A pause. He seemed to be weighing this information against some internal metric she couldn't guess at. Deciding something.

Then: "No."

Simple. Firm. Final.

Not exactly hostile, but borderline rude.

She blinked. "No?"

"No," he repeated. His hand was still braced against the shelving unit, white-knuckled, like he needed it to stay upright. "I don't need some herb-water. I need to think.”

Fair enough, she supposed. Though he looked like he could use something warm and settling, standing there pale and swaying slightly like a man who'd taken a harder hit than he was willing to admit.

But she wasn't about to force tea on someone who'd already demonstrated he had very effective reflexes, and a concerning assumption she was a practitioner of dark arts.

"Alright," she said. "No tea."

She shifted her weight, smoothed her skirt once more with both hands, and decided that if they were going to be standing in her stockroom together so early in the morning, the least they could do was know each other's names.

So she gave him hers.

He held her gaze for a moment, eyes narrowing with suspicion. But then, his shoulders dropped into a stiff, old-school posture, seeming to accept the exchange.

"Sir James Buchanan Barnes," he said. Each word precisely articulated, formal. "Knight of the Realm."

She blinked.

Knight. Sir.

They were committing fully to the delusion, then.

Hospice or relative's attic, definitely. Or perhaps a family arrangement gone wrong, some relative's responsibility until he'd slipped away when their back was turned. Poor man, probably thought he was Richard the Lionheart half the time.

"Right," she said, very carefully. "It's nice to meet you, Mr. Barnes."

----

He frowned.

No curtsy. No change in her posture, no dip of the chin, no clasping of hands or murmured sir or any of the thousand small genuflections that should have followed an introduction like that.

She'd just looked at him, the way one might acknowledge a tradesman. A merchant. A peasant.

Either she didn't recognize what a knight was, which would mean she was poorly educated -but that made no sense, because even the lowest-born knew what a knight was, even children knew- or she knew perfectly well and was choosing to ignore it discourteously.

An insult delivered with that same gentle, careful voice she'd used to offer him a herbal infusion.

The third option, that the title meant nothing here, that it carried no weight at all in this place, he set aside. Pushed it into the same corner of his mind where he was keeping 1955 and New Wintermouth and the impossible light hanging from the ceiling.

He wasn't ready to look at any of those directly yet. Wasn't ready to line them up and see what picture they made together.

It didn't matter. Not right now.

What mattered was the door behind her, and what lay beyond that door. What this place was, and whether the wrongness ended at the stockroom walls or continued out into the streets beyond.

He needed to move. Needed to get outside and find a street corner, a landmark, a church spire, something. Anything he could use to orient himself. Because right now the walls of this small room were doing something to his breathing that he was going to attribute entirely to the bruised ribs and not examine any further.

He pushed off the shelving unit, steadying himself.

"I'm leaving," he said.

It wasn’t a request. Just a statement of fact.

"Wait-" she started, taking half a step toward him, one hand lifting in a gesture that might have been placating or restraining or both. "You don't look so good. Maybe you should sit down for-"

"I'm aware," he said.

The words came out hard, but God's wounds, he didn't need her to tell him he looked like hell. He could feel it in every breath, every movement. Could taste it in the back of his throat, all dust and bile.

He probably looked exactly like he felt.

Which was, to put it charitably, like shit.

He ignored her and made for the door, the one that presumably led out of this cramped back room and into the rest of whatever establishment she was running.

"Is there someone I should call?" she asked behind him.

He paused, with hand on the doorframe.

Call?

The word hung there, strange and contextless. Call as in... summon? Send for?

"Give notice to, you mean?" he said, not turning around.

A beat of silence. Then: "I- yes. Someone who'd be worried. Family members, or..."

"No," he said. "That won't be necessary."

He pulled the door open and stepped through.

----

The proper shop opened up before him, and he stopped.

Well.

She hadn't lied, at least. She did, apparently, sell flowers.

The room was larger than the stockroom, lined with tables and shelving at different heights. Buckets and vases everywhere, stuffed full of blooms in various states of opening, roses, lilies, things he didn't have names for in colors that looked almost too vivid to be real.

Along the walls: more displays. Wreaths hung on hooks. Arrangements in ceramic containers. A small table near the window held potted plants, their leaves dark and waxy.

He walked further in, boots heavy on the wooden floor, his gaze moving over the inventory. The flowers were fine. Good quality, even, from what he could see. Fresh, well-tended, the kind of stock that spoke to either a reliable supplier or exceptional luck.

But flowers.

Flowers.

He tried to reconcile the economics of it and came up blank.

They were... what? A luxury for feast days and weddings. A merchant's wife might buy a small bouquet for her table if she had coin to spare and wanted to show it. A nobleman might send flowers as a token to a lady he was courting, but even then, it was usually a single perfect one, not an entire shop's worth.

How could this possibly sustain a business? Not a shabby street stall where overhead was low and expectations lower, but an entire building. With a dedicated stockroom.

Who was buying this many flowers?

His gaze drifted back toward the stockroom door, where she was still standing there, one hand braced against the doorframe, watching him as though he were the source of confusion here.

He broke eye contact first.

Because looking at her for too long made his thoughts arrange themselves in directions he did not care for. The scandalous skirt and the colored lips. The shop full of flowers that could not possibly keep a roof over anyone’s head unless the flowers were not, in fact, the point.

A front, then.

A respectable veneer for a less respectable trade.

He felt his face go hot.

Whatever this establishment was, whatever this city was, whatever madness had brought him here, he would not find answers standing in the middle of a flower shop while a half-dressed woman studied him like a puzzle she was trying to solve.

He needed air.

He needed sky.

He needed to see the street.

So he turned toward the front door.

“Mr. Barnes-”

The name stopped him for half a breath. Not Sir Barnes. Not Sir James. Mr. Barnes, again, as if she had decided the rest of him was decoration.

He did not turn around.

“I said I’m leaving.”

“I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”

"Your concern," he said, reaching for the door, "is noted. And dismissed."

There was a chime above it. He noticed it only when the door opened and the thing gave a bright, ridiculous little bell, cheerful as a jester's cap.

He made it three steps past the door before the world stopped making sense.

Next Chapter

The field itself was a ruin of churned mud and discarded favor ribbons, the occasional lost boot. Someone's gauntlet, bended and forgotten near a fence post. The detritus of spectacle.

Sir James Buchanan Barnes walked through it like a man who wanted very much to be somewhere else.

He was limping. A gift from the third bout, when Sir Aldric Thornwall had gotten a lucky angle with his shield and introduced it firmly to Bucky's ribs.

The impact had knocked the air from his lungs with an audible crack that he'd felt more than heard. He'd finished the match anyway. He'd finished all of them. He'd placed second, which in any reasonable accounting of the day should have felt like something.

It didn't feel like much of anything.

Just the persistent throb beneath his ribs with every breath. Just the weight of mail he hadn't bothered to shed yet, still bearing the afternoon's sweat and dust.

The banquet, he thought, scowling.

Lord Castellan Morrow had made it clear, through three separate messengers, that his presence was expected at the celebration feast. That the competitors were guests of honor. That it would reflect poorly on a man of his standing to absent himself.

Bucky's standing, such as it was, had survived worse reflections.

So he just kept walking.

The city proper closed around him as he left the tournament grounds. Cobblestones replacing mud, the noise changing from open-air echo to the compressed warmth of torchlit streets.

Wintermouth at night had a specific smell: woodsmoke and river damp. He knew these streets well enough to navigate them half-asleep, which was approximately his current condition.

A pair of knights from the eastern circuit fell into step beside him for a while, their breath wine-sweet and celebratory, clapping him on the shoulder with the camaraderie of men who hadn't taken a shield to the ribs. He felt the impact reverberate down through the bruise, sharp enough that his vision whited at the edges.

"Hell of a final bout, Barnes."

"Could've taken him," the other offered generously. "Aldric fights dirty."

"Aldric fights to win," he said, which was the only response that was both true and didn't require him to have feelings about it. His voice came out rough, abraded by thirst and the dust he'd swallowed every time he'd hit the ground.

They took the hint, or something close enough to it, and peeled off toward the sound of music spilling from an open tavern door, lute strings and off-key singing and the particular roar of men determined to enjoy themselves.

The next interruption came two streets later, in the form of two scarcely clothed women leaning against the warm stone of a bakehouse wall, still radiating the day's stored heat.

Their exposed skin gleamed amber in the torchlight, deliberate and inviting. They tracked him with the experience of people who had learned to read a man's evening prospects at a glance.

"Sir Knight," one called, with a smile that had worked on better men than him. Her voice was honey-slow, practiced. "Shame to spend a victory night alone."

"First runner-up," he said, without stopping. The mail clinked with each step, a sound he'd long stopped hearing.

"Close enough."

It wasn't, but he didn't have the energy to explain the difference. He kept walking.

The maester caught him at the corner of Chandler's Row. Plump, earnest, clutching a satchel of medicines with both hands as it might escape. His robes were too clean, his face unlined. Fresh from the Citadel, probably. Still believed healing mattered more than politics.

"Sir Barnes." He was slightly out of breath, which suggested he'd been following for a while, trying to work up the nerve to address him. "Lord Castellan Morrow sends his regards and requests that you allow me to examine your injuries before the feast-"

"I'm not going to the feast."

A pause. The maester's throat worked. "He anticipated you might say that. He asked me to convey that your attendance is-"

"How's your handwriting?" Bucky interrupted.

The man blinked. "My- adequate, ser. Why?"

"Good." Bucky stopped walking, turned just enough to face him properly. Watched the maester straighten reflexively under the attention. "Here's what happened: you found me three streets back, examined me thoroughly despite my objections, and determined I've got at least two cracked ribs and a possible concussion. You ordered me to bed with strict instructions not to drink, feast, or make any sudden movements for the next three days."

He held the maester's wide-eyed stare. "Your professional opinion is that my attendance at tonight's festivities would be, and I'm quoting you here, 'medically inadvisable and potentially dangerous to Sir Barnes's recovery.'"

The maester's mouth opened. Closed. His gaze flickered down to Bucky's left side, where he'd been favoring it, where the mail sat wrong.

"You..." The man's voice was uncertain. "You do likely have cracked ribs, ser."

"There you go. Not even a lie." Bucky's smile was brief and sharp. "You write that up for your Lord, attach your seal to it, and you've done your duty. He gets his excuse in writing, you get to have actually helped someone today, and I get to go home. Everyone wins."

He could see the man working through it, the truth of the injury versus the falseness of the examination, the political cover versus the medical accuracy.

"I... suppose that would be acceptable," the maester said slowly. Then, with a hint of spine Bucky hadn't expected: "But you should let me examine you properly. Cracked ribs can shift, puncture-"

"I've had worse."

"That's not the reassurance you think it is, ser."

Despite everything -the ache and the exhaustion- Bucky felt something in his chest. Not quite a laugh, but close enough.

"Tomorrow," he offered, and meant it more than he'd meant most things today. "You can poke at me all you want tomorrow."

The maester nodded, satisfied or at least willing to accept the compromise. "I'll have the letter sent within the hour."

"Appreciated."

----

His lodgings were modest by deliberate choice. A single room above a cooper's workshop on the quieter end of the merchant quarter, rented by the week during tournament season. No servants' quarters. No one to report his comings and goings to anyone who might have opinions about them.

This had its advantages.

He catalogued the disadvantages the moment he stepped inside and faced the cold hearth, his breath still misting in the chill air.

Right.

He set the heavy tournament satchel down with a dull thump, rolled his left shoulder experimentally -the socket grinding in a way that spoke of old breaks poorly healed- and decided that feeling was overrated.

The fire wasn't going to light itself. The armor wasn't going to unlace itself. The evening was shaping up to be a prolonged exercise in doing everything the hard way, which was, at this point, so consistent as to be almost comforting.

Almost.

He got the fire started on the third attempt. The tinder was damp, -because of course it was- and then stood in its growing warmth and began the specific misery of removing plate armor without assistance.

The tabard first, then the gorget, useful as it was, he hated the damn thing; removing it felt like relief. Then the pauldrons, working the straps with fingers that were more cooperative on the right side than the left.

The scarring along his left forearm pulled when he reached a certain angle, the old tissue going taut. It always did. He'd stopped noticing it the way you stopped noticing a crack in a familiar wall; it was simply part of the room now.

The breastplate hit the floor with a sound like an argument ending, the impact reverberating through the floorboards.

There.

What remained was a man in a sweat-dampened gambeson with a bruised ribcage, a mild headache, and absolutely no interest in examining either. The padded underarmor clung to him, cold now that the mail was gone, the fabric stiff with salt and exertion.

He took off the gambeson and dragged the wooden chest from his satchel, the one the tournament steward had pressed into his hands with excessive ceremony, and set it beside the fire. The brass fittings caught the light, over-polished. Performative.

The lock was simple. Inside: coin, as expected. A satisfying weight of silver stacked in neat columns, some gold beneath. He'd need it. The estate his father had left him was four walls and a burned-out shell, courtesy of the same people who took him hostage and left their mark on his arm.

Rebuilding wasn't cheap. Timber, thatch, labor, it all required the kind of funds you didn't earn through valor or skill, just the slow accumulation of tournament prizes and some service contracts.

Glory didn't buy roofing.

He picked up a brooch set with garnets -gaudy, impractical, the kind of thing you pinned to a cloak if you wanted to be robbed- and looked at it for a moment. The stones were decent quality, at least. It would fetch a reasonable price from the right jeweler.

He set it aside with the others. A necklace of amber. A pair of silver clasps. All destined for the same fate: the jeweler's scale, melted down or pried out and reset for someone who actually wanted them.

He had no use for adornments. He wasn’t fond of them, as most of the nobility, and also, he had no one to give them to.

The war had seen to that.

He reached back into the chest, fingers brushing past velvet pouches, and found something else.

A ring. Silver, heavier than it looked. He drew it out into the firelight and turned it between his fingers. The stone was a ruby, deep red, cut into the shape of a star.

He stared at it.

Red stars on grey and black.

His colors.

He turned it slowly, watching firelight slide across the facets. The star was crude, the points uneven, the kind of work you got from a jeweler with more ambition than skill. It was, objectively, the ugliest ring he had ever seen. Garish. The sort of thing a merchant's son wore to his first banquet, desperate to prove he belonged.

Bucky, who wore his father's signet ring only on scarce occasions because selling it felt wrong, even if the man was never a paragon of paternal love, felt the particular pull of a terrible idea.

Just to see if it fits.

It was small for his right hand, so he tried the left, mostly out of stubbornness… and it slid on. The fit was perfect. Uncannily so, as though it had been sized for exactly this finger, accounting for the slight deviation where the bone had set wrong.

The ruby flared.

Not like firelight reflecting, but light from within, red and sharp and pointed, like something had woken up inside the stone and found him looking.

The ring burned. Seared against his skin, hot enough that he felt it in his teeth, a bright line of pain circling his finger.

What-

He grabbed for it with his right hand, trying to twist it off, but his fingers passed through something that wasn't air and wasn't quite resistance.

The room tilted.

No. The room disappeared.

The fire went first, snuffed like a candle, leaving no smoke, no ember-glow. Then the chest, the coins. The ceiling with its water-stained beams. The floor beneath his feet.

All of it went, between one breath and the next, and what replaced it was falling.

His stomach lurched, and the burning in his finger became the only solid thing in a world that had stopped being solid.

He tried to breathe and couldn't find air.

The darkness swallowed him whole and the last thing he registered, distant, wrong, was the smell of plants and humidity.

Then nothing.

----

She stood on the sidewalk in front of The Sweet Briar with her hand buried to the wrist in her purse, fingers closing around lipstick, a crumpled handkerchief, what felt like a receipt that she really ought to throw away, and absolutely nothing key-shaped.

The morning was grey and cool for early spring, the kind of damp that sank into your coat and stayed there. The street was quiet, too early yet for the lunch crowd, the shops on either side still dark. A truck rumbled past, leaving the smell of diesel and wet pavement in its wake.

Just when she thought she might have actually forgotten the keys -left them on the kitchen counter next to the bread box, maybe, or in yesterday's coat pocket- her fingers finally closed around the key ring at the very bottom of the purse, underneath everything else, because of course they were.

The lock stuck.

She jiggled it once, patiently, the same way she had jiggled this exact lock approximately four hundred times and had not yet called the locksmith, because she only ever remembered the lock was broken when she was standing directly in front of it, key in hand, and by the time she got inside she'd forgotten again.

The metal resisted, then gave with a sound like a small complaint. She pushed inside.

The front of the shop was an obstacle course.

Mr. Thomson from the supply house had delivered very late yesterday afternoon, because apparently a union picket line two blocks east had backed up half the city's delivery routes. By closing time, she didn’t have the energy to do anything about the results: buckets of early flowers stacked three deep against the counter, their blooms still tight-furled and smelling faintly of earth.

Two flats of fern she hadn't priced yet, the fronds already drooping from a day out of soil. A box of wire and ribbon spools that had no business being in the middle of the floor but was there anyway, and somewhere underneath all of it, allegedly, the new ceramic pots she'd ordered in February and assumed were lost.

She picked her way through it with careful steps, her heels clicking against the wood floor, and made it to the back without incident.

The stockroom was small and currently in a state that she chose to call organized chaos and not a problem she had to solve today.

More deliveries back here too: boxes stacked along the left wall, the worktable barely visible under brown paper wrapping and tissue. The air smelled like potting soil and the green, living scent of the spider plants hanging near the window, their runners brushing the top of a stack of terra cotta. She reached up and pulled the cord on the single overhead bulb.

The light swung once, twice, and settled.

She saw the legs first.

Long legs, stretched across the floor between a toppled flat of begonias and the base of the shelving unit, attached to a man who was very much present and very much not conscious, sprawled at an angle that suggested he had not chosen to be on the floor so much as arrived there.

Her breath stopped.

For one crystalline second, her brain refused to process what she was seeing -legs, boots, a body where no body should be- and then her heart kicked hard against her chest.

There was a man. In her stockroom. On the floor.

He'd taken out a good portion of the new stock on his way down. The begonias were scattered, soil spilled across the floorboards in dark trails. A ceramic pot in sage green -the one she'd specifically ordered and waited two months for- was in three neat pieces beside his left arm. The pothos she'd been propagating had been knocked from its perch; the vines lay crushed beneath his shoulder.

She stood very still for a moment, one hand still on the light cord, the other pressed flat against her chest where her heart was trying to break through.

He wasn't moving.

His chest was -she watched for a second, barely breathing herself- yes, his chest was moving. Shallow, but steady.

So. Not dead.

She still hadn't decided if that was good or bad.

Her gaze darted to the back door: still closed, the bolt still thrown from the inside. The window was latched. No broken glass. No signs of forced entry.

So how-?

Her hand moved without conscious thought, reaching back toward the worktable, fingers closing around the wooden handle of a trowel. Not much of a weapon, but the edge was solid steel, the point designed for breaking hard soil. It would do.

She took a step closer, the trowel held low at her side, ready to strike.

His clothing was strange. The shirt was wrong, off-white and loose, the kind of fabric that looked hand-woven, rough in a way she couldn’t describe. The collar was laced instead of buttoned, the ties loose and askew.

The trousers were the same, tucked into boots that had absolutely no business existing in 1955: tall, dark leather, worn in the way that took years and hard use, not a factory.

Over all of it, a belt of heavy leather, studded and wide. And attached to it, running down each thigh -she tilted her head slightly- what appeared to be straps, buckled and reinforced, holding padded cushioned sheaths flat against his legs.

Like something out of a medieval fair, except those fairs didn't come through this city, and even if they did, the participants didn't break into a flower shop in full costume and collapse on the begonias.

She took another step closer, careful to avoid the broken ceramic.

His face was-

Well.

A face that had seen better days was her first thought, and her second was that even roughed up as he was, it was a remarkable face to have stumbled into her stockroom.

Strong jaw, straight nose, the kind of bone structure you saw in magazine advertisements for razors or cologne, the ones that made you look twice even when you weren't in the market.

A bruise was already darkening along his left cheekbone, deep purple spreading toward his temple. There was a cut above his brow that had bled and dried, the blood a rust-brown line trailing toward his hairline.

The beard was a few days past deliberate.

And the hair -she paused on that- dark brown, long enough to brush his shoulders, pushed back from his face and thoroughly disordered, tangled with mud and sweat.

It was long for a man. Longer than any man she'd seen outside of a history book or painting.

She straightened up slowly, the trowel still in her hand.

Alright, she thought, forcing her breathing to steady. Think.

Option one: he was a vagrant who'd somehow gotten through a locked door -the damn lock, God help her- and passed out on her stock.

Possible. Unlikely, given the boots alone probably cost more than her monthly rent, but possible.

Option two: he was a veteran. There were men, she knew -the whole city knew, even if nobody said it plainly- who hadn't come back from the war quite right in the head.

Shell-shock, they'd called it in the first war. Combat fatigue now, as if giving it a softer name made it easier to carry.

Except that didn't explain the kind of clothes.

Option three: he'd gotten blind drunk somewhere in the vicinity, wandered in through a door she knew she'd locked, and the outfit was theatrical. A costume. There was a theatre district six blocks south. Strange things happened near the theatre districts. Actors were weird.

Except that the door had been locked. And bolted.

She looked down at him again.

At the slow rise and fall of his chest. At the ring on his left hand, silver with a red stone that caught the light strangely, still faintly warm-looking even in the dim stockroom.

At the begonias, crushed beyond saving.

The telephone was on the opposite wall. She edged past him, keeping the trowel between them out of some vague instinct that felt less vague with every step. Her heel caught on a scatter of soil, and she steadied herself against the doorframe, not taking her eyes off him.

He still wasn't moving.

She picked up the receiver with her free hand, the trowel still raised in the other, and dialed zero, the rotary clicking back into place.

The line hummed and returned a busy signal.

Dammit.

She clicked the hook and tried again, her gaze locked on the sprawled figure.

Busy. Again. It was a challenge to get to an operator these last few weeks. It was the third time this month she needed to make a call, and the lines were occupied.

She leaned her hip against the wall and tried a fourth time, watching him over her shoulder out of an abundance of caution that was starting to feel less abundant and more barely sufficient.

Okay. If she could just get through to the operator, get a squad car over here -or an ambulance, depending on what exactly was wrong with him- she could have this sorted before her first customer arrived at nine. It was a reasonable plan. It was perfectly reasonable-

The fifth attempt produced a busy signal and also, from somewhere behind her, a sound. The distinct scrape of ceramic against concrete, and then a longer drag, like weight shifting.

Her breath caught.

She turned around slowly, the receiver still pressed to her ear, the busy signal droning against her brain.

He was sitting up, propped on one hand with the other braced against the shelving unit, head bowed forward like it weighed too much to lift. The dark hair fell across his face in tangled strands. His shoulders rose and fell with breaths that looked like they hurt.

She didn't move. Her fingers tightened around the trowel handle until the wood bit into her palm.

For a moment he just sat there, motionless except for the breathing. Then his head lifted slowly, and he blinked at the stockroom with the heavy, confused expression of a man whose surroundings were not what he'd been expecting.

His gaze tracked left: shelves, boxes, the window with its spider plants. Right: more shelves, the worktable, the spilled soil.

Then his eyes found her.

A nice pair of steel blue eyes.

That was the completely irrelevant thing her brain produced, and she hated that it did, because those steel blue eyes were currently fixed on her with a frown that was more baffled than threatening, but he was large.

She could see that now, even sitting down he had the kind of shoulders that spoke of labor or violence or both- and he was between her and the back door, and she did not know him, and she was alone, and-

Her mind didn't finish the thought. She crossed the distance between them in three steps, raised the spade, and swung.

She didn't account for his reflexes.

One moment she was bringing the flat of the blade down toward his head, and the next, her wrist was caught mid-arc in a grip like iron, the world tilted sideways, and she was on her back on the stockroom floor with approximately two hundred twenty pounds of confused stranger pinning her there.

The impact knocked the air from her lungs. Her shoulders hit concrete, her head just barely missing the leg of the worktable. The trowel clattered away, skittering across the floor into the scattered soil.

He'd moved fast. Too fast for someone who'd been unconscious thirty seconds ago. Too fast for someone who'd struggled to sit up.

His hand was still locked around her wrist, holding it flat against the floor above her head. His other forearm was braced beside her shoulder. His knee was between hers, his weight distributed in a way that kept her pinned without crushing her, like this was something he'd done before. Many times before, in fact.

When she pulled at her wrist -once, testing, her breath coming in sharp gasps- he simply held it, not tightening, not letting go, like the question of her leaving hadn't seriously occurred to him as a variable.

Her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat, behind her eyes. She could smell him: leather and sweat and something else, something like smoke and metal and old wool.

She could count his eyelashes.

The blue eyes she'd noticed before were a lot more striking at this distance, and a lot less groggy. Whatever fog had been in them when he'd first sat up had burned off fast into something sharp and assessing.

He was looking at her the way she imagined soldiers looked at enemies in the dark. His chest rose and fell against hers with each breath. She could feel the heat of him through her blouse, through his strange linen shirt.

Get off get off get off-

She opened her mouth to scream, to say something, to demand he let her go-

And then he lowered his face toward hers by one deliberate inch, eyes narrowing and demanded, low and very even:

"State your intentions, witch."     

Next Chapter

You both make it to his chambers, your small bodies quietly sneaking through his door as to not wake the guard posted outside his room. Bucky shuts it softly with a sigh of relief, he takes your hand again and you both move for his bed.

This isn’t the first time during a storm the young prince has come to find you. You’ve grown up together, granted you were both born into different lives but that didn’t stop the bond you two had. Your father was a knight, But was killed for treason. To spare you and your mother the Queen allowed you both to stay in the castle and work as servants for the crown.

When you first came here you were only three, Bucky was five. The princess, Rebecca being the same age as you, the Queen allowed you to attend some of her courses with her while your mother worked around the castle. Becca was sweet and always made sure you were right by her. Especially during dance lessons which were your favorite.

Bucky, even at the age of five. Was attending lessons on how to rule a kingdom. It wasn’t until almost two years later, during the night you had snuck out of your small room you shared with your mother, feeling restless and craving a snack. You were planning on making a quick trip to the kitchens to snag a biscuit the chef always left out for the guards who worked during the night.

But on your way, in the dark hall you heard sniffling. Your brows furrowed together, your small face scrunching with curiosity. You followed the sound to find the young prince hidden behind a pillar, one of many that decorate the hall.

“Are you alright your ma-majesty?” Your small voice asks, concentrating hard on the last word so that it is pronounced correctly. He snaps his head up, quickly wiping his eyes with the back of his hands “yes. Go away.” He snaps turning away from you more.

“But you are crying” you point out “my momma says if you see someone crying sometimes they just need a hug. To get the sad out” you extend your small arms, smiling softly. He turns his head slowly, looking at you over his shoulder. “I don’t hug servants” he mumbles. “It’s not proper” he adds as he moves to stand.

You drop your arms back to your sides “What’s proper?” You ask head tilted in confusion. He looks at you, head pointed down slightly. “I’m not really sure. But father says I’m not supposed to be kind to servants” he admits, picking at his sleep shirt sleeve.

“Oh” you mutter, “but can you talk to them?” You ask. He shrugs “yeah, to ask for something” you smile then “then why don’t you just ask for a hug? Then it’d be pro-proper” you say matter of factly struggling with the last word slightly. Bucky smiles then. It’s small but there. he glances around the pillar making sure no one is passing before he whispers “may-may I have a hug?” He asks.

You nod quickly and wrap your small arms around his torso. He’s not much taller than you, but he’s tall enough that his chin can rest on top of your head. “Is the sad gone now?” You ask quietly. He slowly wraps his arms around you and nods “I think so” he says and steps back after a few seconds.

Lightening strikes outside the castle walls, causing Bucky to jump slightly. You look from him to the stain glass window where rain is hitting against it. “Do you not like the rain?” You ask and he shakes his head “no… it’s loud and I can’t sleep when it rains..” he mumbles looking down. “I don’t like it either, when I can’t sleep my momma plays with my hair or rubs my back, OH! or sometimes she’ll sing a song! I could do that for you!” You say getting a little excited.

Bucky’s eyes widen a little, “you would?” He asks softly and you nod, “mhmm”. That was the first night you had ever shared a bed with someone other than your mother. A scared seven year old Prince, who let a five year old servant girl rub he’s back until you both fell asleep. That morning you had woken up back in your bed though. You never knew how you got back there but your five year old mind brushed it off. It wasn’t the last time though. You spent many nights running around the castle or sneaking into his chambers with the young prince, comforting each other during the rainy nights and others just spending time together to be kids. Kids without roles that were placed on them at birth.

Now, at the ages ten and thirteen here you are again. Bucky sneaking you into his chambers on a stormy night. You both sit on his bed facing each other, “did you hear?” He asks, fiddling with his thumbs. “Hear what?” You question. “My father’s sending me away.. to a school in the east.. says I’ll become a proper prince there and that they’ll teach me how to be a king..” you frown “in the east? Where in the east? For how long?” You ask quickly, your breath becoming uneven. Bucky shrugs “somewhere called.. Mo-Moldova? I don’t know when I’ll be back…” he sniffles slightly, head pointed down to his lap.

You shake your head, taking in a shaky breath as your eyes fill with tears “but.. but you can’t go..”. He looks up at you as a tear slides down your cheek “I have too, my father ordered it.” He states “but it’s not fair!” You exclaim “you’re my best friend..” you add sadly. Something changes in him then. Something you’ve seen a little of before in recent months but it’s never been directed towards you. Not until now.

“I am not your friend.. I am your prince and soon to be king..” he mumbles. Voice sounding bitter now. “W-what? Bucky-“ he cuts you off standing from his bed now. “My name is not Bucky it is James! Prince James! And you will address me as such!” He snaps, your eyes widen at his out burst. “Get out! Get out! You-you nasty servant! Get out before I call my guard!” He shouts pointing towards his door.

Your breath quickens, and you scramble to stand hopping down off of his bed, running to his door. You pull it open and step out, but glance back once. His back is still towards you and his shoulders are heaving. You shut the door then and with tears streaming down your cheeks you run all the way back down to the servants quarters. All the way back to the small room you shared with your mother. That night, as your mother lay quietly next to you in the small bed you wept quietly. That was the first time a boy has ever made you cry.

——

Now, thirteen years later. You have grown into a young woman. You now assist with chores around the castle and sometimes, you assist the princess. Becca has always been a constant, besides your mother she is a warm comfort during your long days. She’s someone you are able to confide in without worry of repercussions.

Currently you are helping her with her hair. Working on a beautiful updo. “Did you hear?” Becca asks softly, fiddling with a bracelet on her wrist as she glances at you through the mirror in front of her. You smile shaking your head softly “hear what?” You ask “dear James is coming back, should be here in a day or so is what mother says” she explains smiling. Your hands slow on her hair slightly “oh?” You say softly and she nods “yes! Can’t wait to see him, he’s been gone for so long” Becca adds and you hum in response, choosing to stay quiet.

She senses the change in you. Squinting at you through the mirror before turning around to face you. “Aren’t you excited?” She asks. You remove your hands from her hair looking down at her from where she sits. “Of course… it’s just, you know how our last talk was” you explain. The day after it happened you had confided in her about it during a dance lesson you were allowed to go to. Rebecca’s face softens then and she gently grabs your hand in hers “I know, and I know it hurt him just as much. But he does care” she says softly.

You shake your head, offering a small smile as you place your hands on her shoulders and gently turn her to face the mirror again. “I doubt he feels that way now..” you say as your hands begin fixing her hair again. Becca laughs lightly “then you truly don’t know my brother”

——

Two days passed by quickly, and the castle was buzzing with the excitement of the princes return. Some wondering how he’d react being back after being away for so long and others, mostly the younger servants and ladies maids gossiping about how he must look and if he’s as handsome as some say he is now. You were just wondering if hopefully… he’d remember you.

A small part of you always dreamed of this day, when he’d return and things between you would be as they were before that night so long ago. But you knew, deep down. It was a foolish thought. A dream.

“My dear hurry with those linens, we haven’t got much time before he arrives and we are all to be in the entrance hall for his arrival” your mother rushes, shoving a basket of clean linens into your hands and effectively snapping you out of your thoughts. “Yes mother” you nod. Adjusting your grip on the basket you make the all too familiar walk to his room. His chambers. The one for years now has been empty.

Stepping in felt like stepping into a memory. Everything relatively the same besides a few things missing that he had taken with him before he left. You hadn’t stepped back in here since that night. Letting out a heavy sigh you begin undressing the bed, replacing the old linens with the new. Making sure there was no wrinkles or creases. Taking your time to straighten and fluff the pillows. As you finish you slowly leave the room. On your way out taking one last look.

As you make your way back down the hall your mother calls for you, her dress shirts gathered slightly in her hand as she approaches you in a rushed jog “my dear hurry! The carriage has just arrived!” She exclaims, and you both rush to the servants quarters, quickly setting down the baskets you both carry before turning and rushing to the entrance hall where other servants and maids lineup on each side of the grand double doors. Guards stand in a stiff line in front of you. Heads stuck looking straight ahead while you and the other servants behind them stand heads pointed down with your hands clasped in front of you. You were never to make direct eye contact with a royal.

Trumpets blared and cheers roared outside the castle, signaling the prince’s arrival. After what felt like hours but was only minutes the grand doors opened. Revealing the royal family as they walk in together. You glance your eyes up, trying to get a glimpse of them. From what you can see, the prince.. James, and his father were in front. The Queen and Rebecca walking not too far behind them.

They stop in the middle, the king announces his son’s return “the prince has returned!” He exclaims proudly, all the guards and servants bow. In unison we all welcome him back “welcome home our prince” before standing straight again. You glance up once again, careful to not move your head. You spot him through the bodies of guards in front of you. He has grown. He’s taller, a lot taller. Broader too and his hair now hangs softly at his shoulders. He looks strong. He looks like someone who would be king.

He’s looking around, staring at the rows of guards and servants before him. His eyes pass over you without a thought, before.. for a spilt second they come back to you and your eyes lock onto each other. And for that small moment your heart picked up its pace. Does he remember me? But the thought was quickly stopped. Your mother’s elbow poking at your side snapping you back into your proper place.