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. 

*

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to scroll up and vote! See you on Saturday!

The field itself was a ruin of churned mud and discarded favor ribbons, the occasional lost boot. Someone's gauntlet, bended and forgotten near a fence post. The detritus of spectacle.

Sir James Buchanan Barnes walked through it like a man who wanted very much to be somewhere else.

He was limping. A gift from the third bout, when Sir Aldric Thornwall had gotten a lucky angle with his shield and introduced it firmly to Bucky's ribs.

The impact had knocked the air from his lungs with an audible crack that he'd felt more than heard. He'd finished the match anyway. He'd finished all of them. He'd placed second, which in any reasonable accounting of the day should have felt like something.

It didn't feel like much of anything.

Just the persistent throb beneath his ribs with every breath. Just the weight of mail he hadn't bothered to shed yet, still bearing the afternoon's sweat and dust.

The banquet, he thought, scowling.

Lord Castellan Morrow had made it clear, through three separate messengers, that his presence was expected at the celebration feast. That the competitors were guests of honor. That it would reflect poorly on a man of his standing to absent himself.

Bucky's standing, such as it was, had survived worse reflections.

So he just kept walking.

The city proper closed around him as he left the tournament grounds. Cobblestones replacing mud, the noise changing from open-air echo to the compressed warmth of torchlit streets.

Wintermouth at night had a specific smell: woodsmoke and river damp. He knew these streets well enough to navigate them half-asleep, which was approximately his current condition.

A pair of knights from the eastern circuit fell into step beside him for a while, their breath wine-sweet and celebratory, clapping him on the shoulder with the camaraderie of men who hadn't taken a shield to the ribs. He felt the impact reverberate down through the bruise, sharp enough that his vision whited at the edges.

"Hell of a final bout, Barnes."

"Could've taken him," the other offered generously. "Aldric fights dirty."

"Aldric fights to win," he said, which was the only response that was both true and didn't require him to have feelings about it. His voice came out rough, abraded by thirst and the dust he'd swallowed every time he'd hit the ground.

They took the hint, or something close enough to it, and peeled off toward the sound of music spilling from an open tavern door, lute strings and off-key singing and the particular roar of men determined to enjoy themselves.

The next interruption came two streets later, in the form of two scarcely clothed women leaning against the warm stone of a bakehouse wall, still radiating the day's stored heat.

Their exposed skin gleamed amber in the torchlight, deliberate and inviting. They tracked him with the experience of people who had learned to read a man's evening prospects at a glance.

"Sir Knight," one called, with a smile that had worked on better men than him. Her voice was honey-slow, practiced. "Shame to spend a victory night alone."

"First runner-up," he said, without stopping. The mail clinked with each step, a sound he'd long stopped hearing.

"Close enough."

It wasn't, but he didn't have the energy to explain the difference. He kept walking.

The maester caught him at the corner of Chandler's Row. Plump, earnest, clutching a satchel of medicines with both hands as it might escape. His robes were too clean, his face unlined. Fresh from the Citadel, probably. Still believed healing mattered more than politics.

"Sir Barnes." He was slightly out of breath, which suggested he'd been following for a while, trying to work up the nerve to address him. "Lord Castellan Morrow sends his regards and requests that you allow me to examine your injuries before the feast-"

"I'm not going to the feast."

A pause. The maester's throat worked. "He anticipated you might say that. He asked me to convey that your attendance is-"

"How's your handwriting?" Bucky interrupted.

The man blinked. "My- adequate, ser. Why?"

"Good." Bucky stopped walking, turned just enough to face him properly. Watched the maester straighten reflexively under the attention. "Here's what happened: you found me three streets back, examined me thoroughly despite my objections, and determined I've got at least two cracked ribs and a possible concussion. You ordered me to bed with strict instructions not to drink, feast, or make any sudden movements for the next three days."

He held the maester's wide-eyed stare. "Your professional opinion is that my attendance at tonight's festivities would be, and I'm quoting you here, 'medically inadvisable and potentially dangerous to Sir Barnes's recovery.'"

The maester's mouth opened. Closed. His gaze flickered down to Bucky's left side, where he'd been favoring it, where the mail sat wrong.

"You..." The man's voice was uncertain. "You do likely have cracked ribs, ser."

"There you go. Not even a lie." Bucky's smile was brief and sharp. "You write that up for your Lord, attach your seal to it, and you've done your duty. He gets his excuse in writing, you get to have actually helped someone today, and I get to go home. Everyone wins."

He could see the man working through it, the truth of the injury versus the falseness of the examination, the political cover versus the medical accuracy.

"I... suppose that would be acceptable," the maester said slowly. Then, with a hint of spine Bucky hadn't expected: "But you should let me examine you properly. Cracked ribs can shift, puncture-"

"I've had worse."

"That's not the reassurance you think it is, ser."

Despite everything -the ache and the exhaustion- Bucky felt something in his chest. Not quite a laugh, but close enough.

"Tomorrow," he offered, and meant it more than he'd meant most things today. "You can poke at me all you want tomorrow."

The maester nodded, satisfied or at least willing to accept the compromise. "I'll have the letter sent within the hour."

"Appreciated."

----

His lodgings were modest by deliberate choice. A single room above a cooper's workshop on the quieter end of the merchant quarter, rented by the week during tournament season. No servants' quarters. No one to report his comings and goings to anyone who might have opinions about them.

This had its advantages.

He catalogued the disadvantages the moment he stepped inside and faced the cold hearth, his breath still misting in the chill air.

Right.

He set the heavy tournament satchel down with a dull thump, rolled his left shoulder experimentally -the socket grinding in a way that spoke of old breaks poorly healed- and decided that feeling was overrated.

The fire wasn't going to light itself. The armor wasn't going to unlace itself. The evening was shaping up to be a prolonged exercise in doing everything the hard way, which was, at this point, so consistent as to be almost comforting.

Almost.

He got the fire started on the third attempt. The tinder was damp, -because of course it was- and then stood in its growing warmth and began the specific misery of removing plate armor without assistance.

The tabard first, then the gorget, useful as it was, he hated the damn thing; removing it felt like relief. Then the pauldrons, working the straps with fingers that were more cooperative on the right side than the left.

The scarring along his left forearm pulled when he reached a certain angle, the old tissue going taut. It always did. He'd stopped noticing it the way you stopped noticing a crack in a familiar wall; it was simply part of the room now.

The breastplate hit the floor with a sound like an argument ending, the impact reverberating through the floorboards.

There.

What remained was a man in a sweat-dampened gambeson with a bruised ribcage, a mild headache, and absolutely no interest in examining either. The padded underarmor clung to him, cold now that the mail was gone, the fabric stiff with salt and exertion.

He took off the gambeson and dragged the wooden chest from his satchel, the one the tournament steward had pressed into his hands with excessive ceremony, and set it beside the fire. The brass fittings caught the light, over-polished. Performative.

The lock was simple. Inside: coin, as expected. A satisfying weight of silver stacked in neat columns, some gold beneath. He'd need it. The estate his father had left him was four walls and a burned-out shell, courtesy of the same people who took him hostage and left their mark on his arm.

Rebuilding wasn't cheap. Timber, thatch, labor, it all required the kind of funds you didn't earn through valor or skill, just the slow accumulation of tournament prizes and some service contracts.

Glory didn't buy roofing.

He picked up a brooch set with garnets -gaudy, impractical, the kind of thing you pinned to a cloak if you wanted to be robbed- and looked at it for a moment. The stones were decent quality, at least. It would fetch a reasonable price from the right jeweler.

He set it aside with the others. A necklace of amber. A pair of silver clasps. All destined for the same fate: the jeweler's scale, melted down or pried out and reset for someone who actually wanted them.

He had no use for adornments. He wasn’t fond of them, as most of the nobility, and also, he had no one to give them to.

The war had seen to that.

He reached back into the chest, fingers brushing past velvet pouches, and found something else.

A ring. Silver, heavier than it looked. He drew it out into the firelight and turned it between his fingers. The stone was a ruby, deep red, cut into the shape of a star.

He stared at it.

Red stars on grey and black.

His colors.

He turned it slowly, watching firelight slide across the facets. The star was crude, the points uneven, the kind of work you got from a jeweler with more ambition than skill. It was, objectively, the ugliest ring he had ever seen. Garish. The sort of thing a merchant's son wore to his first banquet, desperate to prove he belonged.

Bucky, who wore his father's signet ring only on scarce occasions because selling it felt wrong, even if the man was never a paragon of paternal love, felt the particular pull of a terrible idea.

Just to see if it fits.

It was small for his right hand, so he tried the left, mostly out of stubbornness… and it slid on. The fit was perfect. Uncannily so, as though it had been sized for exactly this finger, accounting for the slight deviation where the bone had set wrong.

The ruby flared.

Not like firelight reflecting, but light from within, red and sharp and pointed, like something had woken up inside the stone and found him looking.

The ring burned. Seared against his skin, hot enough that he felt it in his teeth, a bright line of pain circling his finger.

What-

He grabbed for it with his right hand, trying to twist it off, but his fingers passed through something that wasn't air and wasn't quite resistance.

The room tilted.

No. The room disappeared.

The fire went first, snuffed like a candle, leaving no smoke, no ember-glow. Then the chest, the coins. The ceiling with its water-stained beams. The floor beneath his feet.

All of it went, between one breath and the next, and what replaced it was falling.

His stomach lurched, and the burning in his finger became the only solid thing in a world that had stopped being solid.

He tried to breathe and couldn't find air.

The darkness swallowed him whole and the last thing he registered, distant, wrong, was the smell of plants and humidity.

Then nothing.

----

She stood on the sidewalk in front of The Sweet Briar with her hand buried to the wrist in her purse, fingers closing around lipstick, a crumpled handkerchief, what felt like a receipt that she really ought to throw away, and absolutely nothing key-shaped.

The morning was grey and cool for early spring, the kind of damp that sank into your coat and stayed there. The street was quiet, too early yet for the lunch crowd, the shops on either side still dark. A truck rumbled past, leaving the smell of diesel and wet pavement in its wake.

Just when she thought she might have actually forgotten the keys -left them on the kitchen counter next to the bread box, maybe, or in yesterday's coat pocket- her fingers finally closed around the key ring at the very bottom of the purse, underneath everything else, because of course they were.

The lock stuck.

She jiggled it once, patiently, the same way she had jiggled this exact lock approximately four hundred times and had not yet called the locksmith, because she only ever remembered the lock was broken when she was standing directly in front of it, key in hand, and by the time she got inside she'd forgotten again.

The metal resisted, then gave with a sound like a small complaint. She pushed inside.

The front of the shop was an obstacle course.

Mr. Thomson from the supply house had delivered very late yesterday afternoon, because apparently a union picket line two blocks east had backed up half the city's delivery routes. By closing time, she didn’t have the energy to do anything about the results: buckets of early flowers stacked three deep against the counter, their blooms still tight-furled and smelling faintly of earth.

Two flats of fern she hadn't priced yet, the fronds already drooping from a day out of soil. A box of wire and ribbon spools that had no business being in the middle of the floor but was there anyway, and somewhere underneath all of it, allegedly, the new ceramic pots she'd ordered in February and assumed were lost.

She picked her way through it with careful steps, her heels clicking against the wood floor, and made it to the back without incident.

The stockroom was small and currently in a state that she chose to call organized chaos and not a problem she had to solve today.

More deliveries back here too: boxes stacked along the left wall, the worktable barely visible under brown paper wrapping and tissue. The air smelled like potting soil and the green, living scent of the spider plants hanging near the window, their runners brushing the top of a stack of terra cotta. She reached up and pulled the cord on the single overhead bulb.

The light swung once, twice, and settled.

She saw the legs first.

Long legs, stretched across the floor between a toppled flat of begonias and the base of the shelving unit, attached to a man who was very much present and very much not conscious, sprawled at an angle that suggested he had not chosen to be on the floor so much as arrived there.

Her breath stopped.

For one crystalline second, her brain refused to process what she was seeing -legs, boots, a body where no body should be- and then her heart kicked hard against her chest.

There was a man. In her stockroom. On the floor.

He'd taken out a good portion of the new stock on his way down. The begonias were scattered, soil spilled across the floorboards in dark trails. A ceramic pot in sage green -the one she'd specifically ordered and waited two months for- was in three neat pieces beside his left arm. The pothos she'd been propagating had been knocked from its perch; the vines lay crushed beneath his shoulder.

She stood very still for a moment, one hand still on the light cord, the other pressed flat against her chest where her heart was trying to break through.

He wasn't moving.

His chest was -she watched for a second, barely breathing herself- yes, his chest was moving. Shallow, but steady.

So. Not dead.

She still hadn't decided if that was good or bad.

Her gaze darted to the back door: still closed, the bolt still thrown from the inside. The window was latched. No broken glass. No signs of forced entry.

So how-?

Her hand moved without conscious thought, reaching back toward the worktable, fingers closing around the wooden handle of a trowel. Not much of a weapon, but the edge was solid steel, the point designed for breaking hard soil. It would do.

She took a step closer, the trowel held low at her side, ready to strike.

His clothing was strange. The shirt was wrong, off-white and loose, the kind of fabric that looked hand-woven, rough in a way she couldn’t describe. The collar was laced instead of buttoned, the ties loose and askew.

The trousers were the same, tucked into boots that had absolutely no business existing in 1955: tall, dark leather, worn in the way that took years and hard use, not a factory.

Over all of it, a belt of heavy leather, studded and wide. And attached to it, running down each thigh -she tilted her head slightly- what appeared to be straps, buckled and reinforced, holding padded cushioned sheaths flat against his legs.

Like something out of a medieval fair, except those fairs didn't come through this city, and even if they did, the participants didn't break into a flower shop in full costume and collapse on the begonias.

She took another step closer, careful to avoid the broken ceramic.

His face was-

Well.

A face that had seen better days was her first thought, and her second was that even roughed up as he was, it was a remarkable face to have stumbled into her stockroom.

Strong jaw, straight nose, the kind of bone structure you saw in magazine advertisements for razors or cologne, the ones that made you look twice even when you weren't in the market.

A bruise was already darkening along his left cheekbone, deep purple spreading toward his temple. There was a cut above his brow that had bled and dried, the blood a rust-brown line trailing toward his hairline.

The beard was a few days past deliberate.

And the hair -she paused on that- dark brown, long enough to brush his shoulders, pushed back from his face and thoroughly disordered, tangled with mud and sweat.

It was long for a man. Longer than any man she'd seen outside of a history book or painting.

She straightened up slowly, the trowel still in her hand.

Alright, she thought, forcing her breathing to steady. Think.

Option one: he was a vagrant who'd somehow gotten through a locked door -the damn lock, God help her- and passed out on her stock.

Possible. Unlikely, given the boots alone probably cost more than her monthly rent, but possible.

Option two: he was a veteran. There were men, she knew -the whole city knew, even if nobody said it plainly- who hadn't come back from the war quite right in the head.

Shell-shock, they'd called it in the first war. Combat fatigue now, as if giving it a softer name made it easier to carry.

Except that didn't explain the kind of clothes.

Option three: he'd gotten blind drunk somewhere in the vicinity, wandered in through a door she knew she'd locked, and the outfit was theatrical. A costume. There was a theatre district six blocks south. Strange things happened near the theatre districts. Actors were weird.

Except that the door had been locked. And bolted.

She looked down at him again.

At the slow rise and fall of his chest. At the ring on his left hand, silver with a red stone that caught the light strangely, still faintly warm-looking even in the dim stockroom.

At the begonias, crushed beyond saving.

The telephone was on the opposite wall. She edged past him, keeping the trowel between them out of some vague instinct that felt less vague with every step. Her heel caught on a scatter of soil, and she steadied herself against the doorframe, not taking her eyes off him.

He still wasn't moving.

She picked up the receiver with her free hand, the trowel still raised in the other, and dialed zero, the rotary clicking back into place.

The line hummed and returned a busy signal.

Dammit.

She clicked the hook and tried again, her gaze locked on the sprawled figure.

Busy. Again. It was a challenge to get to an operator these last few weeks. It was the third time this month she needed to make a call, and the lines were occupied.

She leaned her hip against the wall and tried a fourth time, watching him over her shoulder out of an abundance of caution that was starting to feel less abundant and more barely sufficient.

Okay. If she could just get through to the operator, get a squad car over here -or an ambulance, depending on what exactly was wrong with him- she could have this sorted before her first customer arrived at nine. It was a reasonable plan. It was perfectly reasonable-

The fifth attempt produced a busy signal and also, from somewhere behind her, a sound. The distinct scrape of ceramic against concrete, and then a longer drag, like weight shifting.

Her breath caught.

She turned around slowly, the receiver still pressed to her ear, the busy signal droning against her brain.

He was sitting up, propped on one hand with the other braced against the shelving unit, head bowed forward like it weighed too much to lift. The dark hair fell across his face in tangled strands. His shoulders rose and fell with breaths that looked like they hurt.

She didn't move. Her fingers tightened around the trowel handle until the wood bit into her palm.

For a moment he just sat there, motionless except for the breathing. Then his head lifted slowly, and he blinked at the stockroom with the heavy, confused expression of a man whose surroundings were not what he'd been expecting.

His gaze tracked left: shelves, boxes, the window with its spider plants. Right: more shelves, the worktable, the spilled soil.

Then his eyes found her.

A nice pair of steel blue eyes.

That was the completely irrelevant thing her brain produced, and she hated that it did, because those steel blue eyes were currently fixed on her with a frown that was more baffled than threatening, but he was large.

She could see that now, even sitting down he had the kind of shoulders that spoke of labor or violence or both- and he was between her and the back door, and she did not know him, and she was alone, and-

Her mind didn't finish the thought. She crossed the distance between them in three steps, raised the spade, and swung.

She didn't account for his reflexes.

One moment she was bringing the flat of the blade down toward his head, and the next, her wrist was caught mid-arc in a grip like iron, the world tilted sideways, and she was on her back on the stockroom floor with approximately two hundred twenty pounds of confused stranger pinning her there.

The impact knocked the air from her lungs. Her shoulders hit concrete, her head just barely missing the leg of the worktable. The trowel clattered away, skittering across the floor into the scattered soil.

He'd moved fast. Too fast for someone who'd been unconscious thirty seconds ago. Too fast for someone who'd struggled to sit up.

His hand was still locked around her wrist, holding it flat against the floor above her head. His other forearm was braced beside her shoulder. His knee was between hers, his weight distributed in a way that kept her pinned without crushing her, like this was something he'd done before. Many times before, in fact.

When she pulled at her wrist -once, testing, her breath coming in sharp gasps- he simply held it, not tightening, not letting go, like the question of her leaving hadn't seriously occurred to him as a variable.

Her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat, behind her eyes. She could smell him: leather and sweat and something else, something like smoke and metal and old wool.

She could count his eyelashes.

The blue eyes she'd noticed before were a lot more striking at this distance, and a lot less groggy. Whatever fog had been in them when he'd first sat up had burned off fast into something sharp and assessing.

He was looking at her the way she imagined soldiers looked at enemies in the dark. His chest rose and fell against hers with each breath. She could feel the heat of him through her blouse, through his strange linen shirt.

Get off get off get off-

She opened her mouth to scream, to say something, to demand he let her go-

And then he lowered his face toward hers by one deliberate inch, eyes narrowing and demanded, low and very even:

"State your intentions, witch."     

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