@fracturesandfaultlines (Cont. from here.)
[ He could barely make out Natasha’s silhouette in the dark. A nightmare had jarred him awake, or maybe some fragment of memory. They felt like the same thing really since he’d fled Hydra. Bucky swallowed and sat up, forcing his finger to ease off the trigger he’d found his way to in slumber. The gun itself, he let rest in his lap. It was the closest thing to comfort he had.
“That your idea of empathy?” he asked, voice gravely with with sleep and general disuse. It was maybe the most he’d voluntarily said since they’d fallen in together. It bothered him more and more that he didn’t quite recall how he knew her. Reality was right there at his periphery, but every time he reached for it, it slipped away. He could ask, probably, but he was far too stubborn for that.
“Your bedside manner could use some work,” he murmured instead, moving closer in a silent offer to take over keeping an eye out so that she could sleep.]
Natasha smiled as he approached, comfortable with him and their situation in a way that she might have found difficult to explain to another.
Perhaps he reminded her of her days before the Avengers, when dangerous hours waiting in an abandoned building was far from unusual. This felt very normal--just as normal as a Avengers mission might have been.
No, more so. That had been part of her life for longer, after all. Stealth and being hunted, misdirection and murder.
Or maybe it was simply the number of times that she, herself, had woken from night memories, both real and imagined, with a gun in her hand. They were two of a kind, she and the Winter Soldier.
“No activity while you slept--unless you want to count a few rodents in the walls. No lights, no sounds of vehicles.”
Holstering her own weapon, Natasha sat down in the spot that he’d vacated and leaned against the wall, watching the shadow-like form that was all she could see of him from here. Had Bucky Barnes had always moved with a predator’s grace, or if that was something he’d acquired along the way?
