[ WWII AU ] a ghost story

[from_the_outside]

It's been almost two years since she's been home, and little by little, the grief has gotten easier to live with.

It hasn't gone away. But she's able to focus on her job, watch movies, chat with friends, sleep most nights. She still dreams about him, but the dreams are tinged with wistful longing and only sometimes does she wake up with tears on her cheeks. She can't have his picture out in this apartment, Kate's apartment, but it's safe in the mountain house, along with his last letter to her, and she has a scan on her phone to look at when the long day is over and she's in bed, the stars from the lamp he'd given her filling her dark room.

Steve has helped, more than she could ever explain, and she hopes she's helped him in return. Aside from a few deeply classified missions here and there, they haven't worked together all that much, but she still sees him almost every day. In the halls, she's undercover as his mild-mannered neighbor, Kate, but in her secure apartment they can talk over anything, everything.

And it works. Every day is a little easier. They lean on each other when they need to, and they spend hours remembering and reminiscing about Bucky, talking shop, chatting about how Steve's fitting into the future. It's nice. She still misses Bucky, an ache that never really goes away, but they can both breathe through it, work through it, live through it.

She's on her way up from the basement laundry machines when she hears a familiar step in the hall, and has to smile to herself – first her own, then Kate's sweeter, more open one. "Hey, neighbor."

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[from_the_outside]

"Neither was I," she admits. "I hadn't heard of him before. Steve must have only just met him."

He'd have told her about Sam otherwise, she thinks. He knows she wants to know whenever he's made a friend. She squeezes his hand, trying to get his attention. "But the result was the same. You didn't almost kill me."

[nerves_of_ice]

His glance flicks up at that, uncertain and wary as he searches her face before he shakes his head again and goes back to staring stubbornly at the floor.

[from_the_outside]

He looks back up at her, then away, and she feels like she's about to shatter into a million pieces. "I don't know what to do."

She wants to throw herself into his arms, to hug him and hold him. She wants to back the hell away from him and keep her gun between them. She wants to go back, all those years ago, and tell him the truth the first moment she arrived.

She wants some damn Advil; her head is killing her. "I thought I'd never see you again."

[nerves_of_ice]

Maybe it would have been better if she never had, he thinks. For her; for everyone.

“What do you want?” It’s a mere whisper, barely audible.

[from_the_outside]

Her fingers tighten on his, a moment of desperation, before she forces herself to let go.

"Does it matter?"

[nerves_of_ice]

This time, his nod is immediate and certain. He might not be able to give it to her, whatever it is, but it matters.

"Yes."

[from_the_outside]

She shakes her head at him, unconvinced. All this is bigger than her, now. It always has been.

But it's Bucky, and Bucky's asked her what she wants so many times that she doesn't know how not to answer him. "I want to be happy to see you," she says, low. "I want you to look at me and call me 'angel.' I want for you to stop putting yourself as far away from me as I can get. I want Steve to be better, and I want the three of us to hold onto each other and never let go again."

She shakes her head again, minutely, and looks at him. "Can you give me any of that, Bucky?"

[nerves_of_ice]

Every word cuts him to the bone, sharper than any blade. Slowly, his gaze lifts from the floor to lock with hers, bleak and nearly black with an intensity to it that's drowning deep.

"But you aren't." A shudder runs through him as he hears his own voice, as the truth of his words strikes home. "Happy, I mean. If I move, you flinch. Steve's in the hospital because of me; I put him there."

He draws a ragged breath, but doesn't look away. "The man who called you angel, who made you laugh and smile, the man who... " He trails off there as something splinters in his throat and swallows, hard. "I don't know who that man is, any more. I haven't for years. I can't give him back to you. I don't know how."

He takes another breath. "I shouldn't have come. I'm sorry."

[from_the_outside]

He's not wrong. She isn't happy to see him, exactly. Certainly not the way she always imagined she'd be, if the impossible happened. "It isn't that you shouldn't have come," she tells him, quiet but firm. "It's that you're asking the wrong question."

What she wants has been irrelevant from the beginning. She wanted him to live, she wanted to stay with him, she wanted everything he ever promised her.

She wants for him to still love her, the way she still loves him. But there's nothing either of them can do about any of that, it seems. "What I want, instead of what I need."

[nerves_of_ice]

He searches her face as if he could find answers to all their questions written there, somehow.

"Then what do you need?"

[from_the_outside]

You.

But even if he looks and sounds and walks like the man she loved and lost, it's slowly becoming clear to her that whatever HYDRA did to him has left him broken.

Which means her mission parameters have changed. Which means she has a new goal. "I need for you to stay," she says, very slowly. "And let me help you, the way you helped me once."

Every breath hurts, the way it had for weeks when she first arrived home. He's right in front of her, but all she can feel is the grief of knowing he died all over again. "I need to be able to tell Steve we have you back, when he wakes up."

Her throat works. "And I need to make HYDRA pay. For all of it."

[nerves_of_ice]

He can't stay. Not to mention the fact that he's going to be named one of the world's most wanted terrorists any moment if he hasn't been already, every second that passes makes it more obvious that his very presence the way he is now is tearing her apart. He can only imagine what it'll do to Steve, a Steve who remembers a man named Bucky and not the Winter Soldier, a Steve who would have died before hurting him, even to protect himself.

He pushes himself off the wall with determination and takes a single step forward, toward her.

[from_the_outside]

Her throat works, but she holds herself still with an effort, determined not to flinch away from him again, even as her stomach clenches.

She won't. She can control it. She won't be afraid of him.

[nerves_of_ice]

He sees her swallow, sees the way she's carrying herself, and knows, he knows that she's fighting every self-preservation instinct to not react.

Pride at her courage and sorrow for her pain threaten to tear apart what's left of his heart. Slowly, gently, he raises his right hand to cup her cheek, and strokes his thumb feather-light over the delicate arch of bone.

"It's okay, angel," he whispers. "You don't have to protect me any more. It's my turn now. Tell Steve I'll be in touch."

In the next instant he's moving, dashing for the window across the room.

[from_the_outside]

Her heart stops as he reaches up and touches her face, and her eyes almost close at the way his thumb tracks, light as a feather, over her cheek.

Angel, he says, and so the sob is already rising in her chest when he rips himself away from her and flees to the window and he's fast, he's so fast, he's so much faster than her even on her best day and this is far from that. "Bucky, NO – "

The words shred her throat as she cries out, throwing herself after him even though she knows, she knows it's too late. She has to watch him go out the window and disappear, again, and there's no flash of blue light this time but it still feels as though she's been dragged and unceremoniously dumped here and now all over again.

There isn't a single sign of him anywhere outside the window, not even when she leans perilously far out of it, her eyes blurring with tears and her voice choking in her chest. "Come back."

It's too plaintive and too quiet for anyone but her to hear it, and there isn't anyone around anyway. So at least there also isn't anyone around to see her slump to the floor with her back against the wall and her face in her hands as her heart breaks all over again.

[nerves_of_ice]

He hears her call after him as he dives out the window, and the agony in her voice is almost enough to wrench him back around.

Almost. He's doing the right thing - the right thing for her - and that gives him the strength he needs to keep going.

He vanishes along the same path he'd used to get out of sight of Steve right after shooting the Director, and eels up to a nearby rooftop to wait. She shouldn't be alone. It's not safe. He'll keep watch.

Someone has to.

[marvel_npc]

* * * * *

From what Sam had said, it's about an hour, maybe an hour and a half since Sharon had been discharged from the hospital, but when Nat swings by his house to check in, she's not there.

Stifling her concern for the moment, Nat backtracks to Sharon's apartment. They really have to get her a new phone, she decides, as she climbs the stairs and knocks on her door.

[from_the_outside]

She doesn't know how long she sits there and sobs, broken down past even what she can take. There's no Steve here to hold her and make sure she drinks water, and no Bucky to wipe away her tears and make her laugh, a thought that only makes her cry harder, until all that's left is her thudding headache and sore eyes and a chest that feels like something's been digging in it with dull claws.

This time, when a knock sounds on her door, she staggers upright and almost runs over to yank it open, hoping –

But it isn't him. It's Nat, looking clean and put-together despite the chaos of the day and night, and Sharon wipes furtively at her eyes, holds the door open. "Hey."

[marvel_npc]

Oh. That explains it, then.

"Hey," Nat says, as she steps into the apartment. She waits for Sharon to shut the door behind her, then pulls her friend into a fiercely comforting embrace.

[from_the_outside]

She hiccups a laugh and puts her arms around Nat in return, even as she says: "Ow. I'm still bruised, you know."

Not that she lets go. She doesn't want to.

[marvel_npc]

"I know. I'll try not to break anything." She doesn't loosen her hold even a little for several seconds, though, and when she pulls back to search Sharon's face she gives her as comforting a smile as she can.

"Come on. Curl up on the couch. I'll put some coffee on, unless you'd rather something stronger."

[from_the_outside]

"I have to get to Sam's."

It's the only goal she's got. She needs to keep moving forward. Sharon wipes at her eyes again and takes a deep breath. "Or maybe I'd take you up on that something stronger."

Scotch had helped, when she'd been in the first throes of her despair, with Steve down in Virginia. Does she even have any, here?

[marvel_npc]

"If you'd rather, we can go over there first. He's not planning on leaving the hospital tonight," Nat tells her.

She hopes she doesn't have to point out that she doesn't have any intention of leaving Sharon alone right now.

[from_the_outside]

Her first instinct is to dig in her heels. She glances at the open window, and forces herself to let go of the thought that he might come back. If he were going to, he would have while she sobbed. "Coffee first," she says, tearing her glance away from the window and looking at Nat.

"Let's not have to try and figure out Sam's coffeemaker in the middle of the night."

[marvel_npc]

"Coffee it is." She doesn't miss the way Sharon's gaze tracks to the window and back, and files that away for later. "Curl up, get comfy. I'll be right back."

Sharon might feel better with a second or two to compose herself further, after all.