#fuckyeahbuckynat

BuckyNat Week: Battle Couple Sunday

BuckyNat Week: 616 Monday 

I’m sorry! I can’t find anything in my initial search. I vaguely remember this happening but I’m not sure which panel it was.

His hands used to fall like bricks. Now they fall like soft pillows and they have lost all cruelty. He makes me feel like a naive girl so I hit harder than even I have been made for. Sharper. Deeper. I could dig into his flesh and he wouldn’t stop me. These bones have never known this kind of fear. They’ve never known fear at all before him.

Natalia... 

Bedtime whispers like alarm bells in my head. And yet we press on playing games like blood and bone soldiers. Fingertips pressed into the crooks of muscles, bending each other to crookedly kind intentions meant for bedrooms, not red rooms.

Just once he begs me to run away. His little spider. Bound up in arms, one of metal, one of flesh, I listen to his heart beat against bone. Aching for release from a cage built for it by handlers and God, himself. I will not grant him this. Monsters are meant to be caged.

Freedom would burn the world to the ground. Our love would be little more than kindling to an inferno.

He sneaks out with the care built into our programs, safe back in his own bed before morning. Only to find his mind taken from him once more. A shell. A repeat. He begins anew - the process from bricks to pillows that tears fear into me over and over again. 

For him, he’s asked me to run only once- for me, he’s asked a million times. 

——— (

Also posted on Ao3! for #buckynat week

) ——-

It was Steve that was the man clothed in red, white, and blue during the war. Captain America, the shining example of patriotism and freedom; he was the shining star while Sergeant James Barnes worked on the edges and in the shadows to keep both this national symbol alive and his best friend’s hands and conscious clean.

It was those Howling Commando missions that came back to James first, the faces and names and the comfort of having a half-dozen highly trained and competent Allied companions at his and Steve’s back. With the English Falsworth and the French Dernier as his brothers, national loyalties dimmed even further in importance to Buck. Good people were good people; and no amount of rhetoric or propaganda from the mouths of gray-haired men could be swallowed for long by Bucky Barnes. That sentiment held even when everything else was stripped from him.

Lines in the sand had always been thin for James, borders and rules and dictates to be challenged; authority be damned.

When Barnes first practiced his rudimentary Russian somewhere in the wilderness of Belarus with Agent Peggy Carter in ‘44, the word for ‘red’, krazniy and the word for ‘beautiful’, krazsiviy, confused themselves in his head. Months later, the men that recovered him and the men that enslaved him never corrected that little cognitive foible.

So when a crimson-haired Soviet agent is paired with the Winter Soldier on her first mission, her color is thrice as brilliant as anything else, sparking something akin to memory. He remembers he never battled for nations, not truly, but for the very souls that fought shoulder-to-shoulder with him to survive. And now that is only Natalia Romanova. She is Red. She is Beauty.

 They call him ‘the American’. She is born Russian. In the hot tangle of their tongues and limbs as they take their clandestine comfort and assert their souls, the Soldier and the Spy can not tell one another apart. Conquest? Surrender?  They leave such things to presidents and dictators. Yet a Cold War melts and makes accords in the melding of flesh-on-flesh. An Iron Curtain mean nothing to the organic heat of hearts.

He encouraged Natalia to defect, again and again, to take something of them both with her before they are caught. Before he is wiped. But she refuses.

“How can leave you?” she breathes in the hollow of his ear. “That would be desertion.”