#antibullies

Kelly Jelinek

               THE FIRST INDICATION that the day was going to be different than others was when a soldier had rushed into the tent and had breathlessly stated that American soldiers were carrying someone through the camp, but they didn’t belong to any of the assigned squadrons in the area. Becky, having gotten used to being prepared for just about anything, had peeked outside, her heart flying into her throat when she saw her brother — sweat-soaked and filthy, but it was him — marching through the camp with his hands still on his gun. Behind him, men she didn’t know pulled someone on a roughly-made kit behind them. Her brother’s eyes had grown wide when he’d seen Becky and they’d had their reunion, but when he’d turned to look at who was on the kit, her eyes had followed and she’d gone sick in confusion and horror. 

                                                         It was Steve. 

Steve was supposed to be in New York. Steve was safe in New York, away from the horrors Becky saw every day. But there he was. It had taken her half a second longer to recognize him under the sweat and the dirt and the blood and the fact that his entire body was different ( how was it different? what was happening? was she dreaming? was this a nightmare? ) but her heart knew him, knew everything about him, and it was Steve. When the doctors had pushed the men out of the hospital tent after they’d delivered Steve to them, Bucky had looked at Becky with a fierce look that clearly begged her to take care of him, but even without that plea, she wouldn’t have left his side. He was covered in lacerations, and she had some of the best sutures in the Army. She quickly fell into place by his side, putting him back together as a surgeon took a look at his injuries and deemed that he was suffering most immediately from blood loss.

After they patched him up, Becky sat by his side, his stalwart sentinel. She looked at the planes of hs face, seeing her Steve in the midst of these new features. And when his eyes opened, she was there. 

❛  steve?      urm...  this is not what it looks like. ❜   yes it was.    kate you’ve been busted.   she did have a few questions.     what was that get up?    that definitely wasn’t the suit she was used to seeing.      she looked around to see if they were now alone.    evil scientists were plotting.     this was way above kate’s level.       ❛ clint can’t know about this... i’ll be grounded for years..   but also let me catch you up...   they’re planning to blow up the city with that gas they’ve developed and ... it’s horrific... ❜ 

               “I DON’T HAVE spies: YOU have people who think that I’m the only person who can talk sense into you.” She couldn’t remember the first time someone had called her because Steve had been doing something unnecessarily stupid, but whenever he got his bell rung or did something needlessly reckless, she was everyone’s first call to grass on him. 

                                   Apparently, she was well connected. 

fairness doesn’t exist at five in the morning ------- especially when it’s only her comm jumping to life on the bedside table over and over until she finally admits defeat by untangling her hand under the bedcovers to see what all the fuss is about. ( and it’s always a fuss when it comes to fury; and it doesn’t help that even his typical lack of patience seems cut in half before the sun’s up. ) the groan that sneaks out as she’s scrolling through the messages with her thumb gets preempted by a yawn; her free hand rushing to stifle it before it wakes up the sleeping form beside her.

( but perhaps it’s for the best that @antibullies’s phone hasn’t lit up like the fourth of july along with hers ----------- fury doesn’t need to see both of their devices pinging from the same bed, even if she’s sure that he already knows they’ve gone and blurred the line between personal and professional. )

another yawn successfully smothered by the palm of her hand, she resigns herself to getting up and getting herself together; switching out his her tee shirt for the tact suit she’d left draped over the back of her desk chair. she likes to think she’s keeping that expectation of relative silence intact until she turns back around mid - zip to see steve watching with a sleep - filled grin from his side of the bed.

❛ don’t mind me. just enjoying the view. ❜

he  decides,  for  the  day  at  least,  he  won’t  pry.  steve  nods  once  in  courteous  understanding,  as  though  his  attempt  at  charming  small  talk  with  his  neighbor  wasn’t  shut  down.    “  no  hospital  talk,  got  it.  ”    his  words  come  in  a  breathy  chuckle,  half-agitated,  half-amused.  steve  knows  better  than  most,  some  topics  are  a  little  too  difficult  for  outsiders  to  understand.  he  cannot  pretend  to  understand  what  a  nurse  goes  though  on  the  daily.  the  mechanic  whirring  of  his  fridge  combines  with  the  mild  racket  of  her  laundry  in  his  machine  as  he  grabs  two  beer  bottles  from  the  door  of  his  fridge  —  his  visitors  are  usually  more  of  the  professional  capacity,  so  they’d  been  there  a  while.    “  i’m  glad  you’re  finally  taking  me  up  on  the  offer  though.  had  i  known  you  were  more  likely  to  say  yes  to  a  beer  than  a  coffee,  i  could  have  made  the  adjustment.  ”

it's days like these she's thankful she's at least got that degree in psychology to pull from when she needs to sound a little more legit ------------- but she's equally thankful that steve rarely seems like someone who goes out of his way to be overly nosy. ( maybe it's him being old - fashioned, or maybe it's just the type of people she's usually surrounded by. either way, it's a nice break from the norm. )

        "believe me, it's better if i don't. what kind of guest would i be putting my host to sleep five minutes into a story? ------ thanks." she accepts the offered bottle with a polite smile, knowing that in reality what's got her frustrated to the point of wanting to pull her own hair out is practically something out of the pages of a spy novel.

. "NOT RIGHT NOW, okay?" The selfsame smile had already slid off of her lips when he hadn't been fooled by it, but that didn't mean she was interested at all in actually digging into the sorrow that had chosen to grip her that night. She was well versed in this sorrow, after all; the neighborhood physician had once called it bouts of self-loathing or a kind of hysteria. He'd even suggested that she would do well in an asylum, perhaps. But they were too poor and too stubborn for that to happen, and Becky had remained with her family, and the sorrow came and went. The war and its terrors brought a more vicious edge to it, but even so, she'd pushed back against this for a too-long time. Steve had seen it before, she knew. And even if he hadn't experienced it himself — days in a row when she wouldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't even get out of the shared bed in the small Barnes family apartment — Jimmy had always been talented at language, and could have painted a vibrant picture with his words. But instead, she remembered him being there, being the one to try to pull her from bed on days when she couldn't do it herself. Even pulling out her well-worn but well-maintained dress and pushing it into her hands to get her human-looking enough to make a presence at her job and not lose the second source of income she and Jimmy desperately needed.

He'd been there through all of it; that didn't mean she wanted to talk about that darkness that had always crept back no matter how hard she fought them off. It was just another way of showing why she wasn't one of the heroes.

"We're not talking about this tonight," she said, though the tone sounded more like I'm not going to want to talk about this ever. They'd never really TALKED about it. Never talked about the way light sometimes slipped through their fingers without them even meaning for it to. Her smile came back, smaller and truer. "Please, okay?"