#blackxwidxw

he normally had a routine: coffee, run, shower, start the day. when they first started sleeping together that routine sort of morphed into one they’d navigate together. whoever woke up first got the coffee, but this morning when he brought it to her, it went cold by the bedside while she slept. she wasn’t really one to get sick and he wasnt really one to get worried either, but when she still wasnt up at seven, he went into the room with some tea to check on her. 

six stones. three teams. one shot. he was trying not to let it keep him awake. yet, the anxiety and the what if’s were working against him. he knew he  needed the best rest he could to make sure things went smoothly tomorrow, that all the pieces of the plan fell perfectly into place rather than scattering like dominoes -- yet it evaded him. instead he lie there with his back pressed to the mattress and is eyes glued to the ceiling. he could play the scenarios a million times over, but at the end of the day, he was no dr strange. he couldn’t take a look at all the possibilities and discern which was the one that brought them to success. the disappointment he’d felt when they finally found thanos, just to discover he’d destroyed the gauntlet had been insurmountable. the little hope he clung to scattered in his hands like the dust of those they’d lost. 

What was he thinking? He wasn’t ready for dinner guests. Well, guest in this case. He still had a few boxes needing unpacking, the rat traps needed to be replacing, and he didn’t even have any pastries for guests, what would his mother say? “C’mon Steve.” He said to himself shaking his head. It’s just Nat. They’ve shared meals in much more unpleasant of places. Didn’t change the fact that she would be his first guest he’s had here since 1940.

He had his face in the fridge searching through what he had. “Eggs, fruit, condiments, steak, and a few potatoes... Breakfast for dinner it is.” He said as he set the radio to playing the oldies station, which only made him feel older. Half these songs were from after he was put on ice. 

Just as he got the stove turned on and everything on the counter he heard a knock at the door. “Just a moment.” He said as he wiped his hand on his red white and blue checkered apron before hanging it up on the hook in the kitchen. 

Steve was well acquainted with loss well before Wanda put a sea of it in his head. He lived a full year of it as a crash course when he lost Natasha to Vourmir. They’d lost their friends five years before that. He lost best friends, lovers — and all the collateral in between.

But it was different to live there. To exist somewhere between the dark spaces of someone else's grief and your own, while you masked a smile on your face and kissed a stranger to bed every night. It was like drowning with an audience, except no one helped you. They fed their applause and waited until your lungs filled up. And that played on a loop until wanda had cut them all free.

Steve stared at their ceiling, disoriented. The dull light coming from the street outside reminded him he was in their apartment in brooklyn, where the window was opposite of where it’d been in his room in Westview. Even so, he still had to consciously force the tension back out of his muscles, but it didn’t fully leave them.

The spent feeling that wore his bones hollow after a fight was a different breed of monster from the one that left him feeling mentally drained now. Sitting upright, he closed his sandpapery eyes and inhaled a slow steady breath. He could feel the warm weight of nat in the bed next to him, but it was the smell of her shampoo in the sheets that convinced him.

Though he knew some part of him would always have a love for Peggy, he found love in someone else too. And what he hated most, was that whatever Westview was meant to be, soured whatever had been left of peggy and steve. It turned it into something foregin and wrong, out of time and place. Wedging an idea of something that had never really gotten the chance to grow into a garden that already had flowers. He appreciated Peggy for what she meant to him, and for the time that he had her in his life, but he didn’t yearn to be with her. His heart had belonged to the black widow for some time now and he had no intentions of asking for a return.

So, really, while his marriage to a faux peggy in westview would never sit well with him, it was mostly that it left him feeling like he’d cheated on his wife that churned his gut something rancid.

What exactly did it mean to have ‘peace of mind’? There wasn’t a one size fits all definition— that’s the lesson Bucky was learning. With everything that he had been through, everything that he has fought against and broken through, there was some part of him that was striving for an ideal that in the end, meant nothing to him. There was no ideal, there was no one goal at the end of a long winding road. All this time, he had unknowingly set himself back because he believed it was near impossible to get there. But there wasn’t just one place to go. And there was no one specific road to follow.

The princess of Wakanda gave him the chance to start over. She gave him the freedom he deserved while allowing him to keep the fractured parts of himself that had survived the forced wear and tear of seven decades. However those pieces were to fit together again was up to him, and for the first time since the day SHIELD and HYDRA fell to pieces at his feet all those years ago, Bucky had the opportunity to do so. Without fear of being locked away in his own mind again. Without fear of being dragged away and down into the dark. And he wasn’t taking it for granted.

The area around the Facility was nice enough— not Wakanda nice, Bucky knew. But still nice, calmer than it was inside with its busy hallways and filled rooms. He missed the water ( even with the memories he had of how dark it was the deeper you went, how cold it could be, and how sharp the sting was when it met with your skin after falling for far too long ). But trees and a nice sunset would do the trick well enough.

Every moment he could, Bucky was outside. Often times it was with a notebook, a pen ( for the things he knew were certain ), and a pencil ( for the things he knew weren’t certain at all ). Sometimes a jogger would pass by, sometimes he would be all alone— either way, it was the best moments of the day, being out there.

On this particular day, Bucky was using his pen a lot more than his pencil, which sat with it’s almost perfectly sharpened tip in his pocket. He glanced down at the notebook in his hands, briefly reading through what he had just written down, and then closed the pages before standing up. As he turned around he lifted both hands up to pull back a portion of his hair and tie it in a bun, some loose waves escaping in the process and flipping back in front of his face. But before he made it very far he noticed an all too familiar face nearby— though now her features were framed by a silvery blond rather than a red. And he smiled, switching his path to head towards her as he fiddled with his hair some more.