Winter Child.

🏵Spasibo Oneshot

Warnings: Somnophilia/non-con masturbation. Stalking.

Summary: She offered kindness where there should’ve been fear. Now it haunts her in silence, starved for warmth it can’t forget.

🏵Muzh Oneshot

Warnings: Non-con undertones. Dub-con. Stockholm Syndrome. Basement Wife.

Summary: It made a choice in the space between orders and instinct. Safety wore the face of captivity. Kindness wore gloves. And when she asked its name, it gave her the only word that felt true.

🏵Kukla Ended

Warnings: Dub-con. Stockholm Syndrome/Unhealthy Relationship Dynamics. Captivity. Memory loss. Bittersweet/Open Ending.

Summary: The puppet traced coordinates to a dollhouse where apparently, it had cut its strings before. The doll called it husband, and its body remembered what its mind couldn't. Its previous self had been playing house behind its handler's back, but this one knew that strings don't stay cut forever. Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

🏵Amends -Epilogue- Oneshot

Summary: Bucky has been making amends for months now, apologizing to those affected by the Winter Soldier deeds. But there's one name on his list he can't bring himself to cross off until now. Not because he can't find her, but because what he did to her had nothing to do with commands.

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

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

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

Drabble #1 - Unsolicited Advice Rating: General Audiences

“Does all that stuff not bother you, man?”

Bucky glanced at the excitable Mexican in the front seat, and pretended he hadn’t heard him. Unfortunately, that did not deter Luis.

“HYDRA, Thanos, the five year blip thing,” he continued. “The way Congress just chucked you out after you saved the whole of New York.”

Bucky closed his eyes briefly, and wondered how he always seemed to draw the mission short straw.

“That’s not really-"

“You know,” Luis carried on blithely. “My Abuela always said bad days are like dead rats. There’s always gonna be a couple in the garage.”

“What?”

*

Drabble #2 - Tie Your Shoes Rating: General Audiences

“Okay, Jamie. Take both shoelaces and cross them together.”

Jamie did so carefully. 

“Good. Now wrap this lace around and under the other and pull them together.”

Bucky’s son nodded. 

“Now we make a loop. Like a bunny ear.”

Jamie giggled. “Bunnies are soft.”

Bucky chuckled. “Yeah, they are,” he agreed. “Wrap this around the bunny ear.”

“Am I doing good?” his son asked. 

“You’re going great,” he replied sincerely. “Now pull this lace through the hole there and pull them together.”

Jamie gasped. “I did it!”

“Proud of you, son.”

You smiled softly at Bucky.  

First of many lessons. 

*

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