[ 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."

Comments

[from_the_outside]

"Having it back is definitely good."

She leans her head back again, against his shoulder, so she can look at the sky. "I'm glad Aunt Peggy kept it for me, all those years."

[nerves_of_ice]

"She said she gave you my letter," he murmurs. "I guess she gave you other things too."

[from_the_outside]

"Well, she kept them aside for me," Sharon tells him. "Here, actually. In a piece of her old furniture, up in the attic. Steve and I came down to find them after, after I came back."

[nerves_of_ice]

"Oh." He considers that for several seconds. "What else did she keep?"

[from_the_outside]

"The lamp," she tells him, thinking back.

"Howard's files. Letters. My old clothes." She smiles, a little. "The hairclips you got me for Christmas."

[nerves_of_ice]

He flinches violently at the mention of Howard Stark, and hastily attempts to distract from what he knows, despairing, is an all-too-obvious reaction.

"Hairclips," he says. "Do you - do you still wear them?"

[from_the_outside]

She shifts and frowns as he flinches away from her. "Yes," she says. "Bucky, are you okay?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"I'm fine," he says, instantly. "I'm fine. Sorry."

[from_the_outside]

He doesn't seem fine. Something she'd said spooked him, and she isn't sure which part it was.

"It's okay if you aren't, you know," she murmurs. "We can talk about it."

[nerves_of_ice]

He shakes his head. The last thing - well, almost the last thing - that he wants to do is to tell her how he murdered their friend and his wife, and why.

[from_the_outside]

"Okay," she murmurs. "Okay, Bucky. I'll leave it alone."

It goes against every professional instinct, but she can do it. She wishes, for a moment, that she'd ever been someone who was good with delicate things, but she hasn't been. She can only hope her desperate need to keep from fucking this up will be enough.

[nerves_of_ice]

A tension he hadn't been aware of holding seeps out of him. "Thank you," he murmurs, soft.

They'll have to talk about it at some point. He knows that. He can't keep this secret forever.

But not now.

[from_the_outside]

"No problem."

She settles back against his side, breathing him in, feeling the tension ease out of him. "She'd also kept that drawing Steve did of us," she murmurs, after a moment. "Do you remember that?"

[nerves_of_ice]

He's silent for a few moments, thinking hard, trying to coax a fragment of memory into view, then startles a little as an image flits across his mind's eye.

"Not the portrait," he says, slowly. "The other one. At - we were, we were together in it?"

[from_the_outside]

"Right. The one of both of us, at the pub."

The portrait, he'd sent to his sisters... but she can't bear to bring them up right now, for him to live their loss all over again. "It's here."

[nerves_of_ice]

He looks toward the house, as if it might suddenly appear out of thin air, then back down at her.

"I thought everything was gone."

[from_the_outside]

"Some things are," she admits, softly. "But not everything. Aunt Peggy kept what she could. And now I keep them."

[nerves_of_ice]

"What you have is probably all that's left. Except for whatever of Steve's stuff is in the museum."

He draws her a little more closely against his side without even thinking about it.

[from_the_outside]

"Right."

He'd mentioned that, but it had gotten lost in the confusion shortly thereafter. "You went and saw the exhibit."

[nerves_of_ice]

He nods, the small movement sending a couple of locks of his hair drifting over hers. "Before I went to see Peggy. Yes."

[from_the_outside]

"That must have been pretty weird," she murmurs, and tips her head to look up at him, puffs of her breath warm against his throat and jaw. "Steve's gone a couple of times, too."

[nerves_of_ice]

A faint shiver runs through him as he nods again before looking back down at her.

"There was so much I didn't know. Didn't remember." He swallows. "It was like - it was like reading about someone else."

[from_the_outside]

"Even Steve kind of feels that way, and he remembers it all," she tells him.

The museum really isn't happy that he'd taken back the uniform, but considering it was his fight with the Winter Soldier that wrecked it, she decides against bringing that up here and now. "Maybe some if it will jog some memories."

[nerves_of_ice]

“It’s why I went to see Peggy.” He sighs, slow and deep.

“I don’t know how to explain. My memory, I mean.”

[from_the_outside]

She watches him, her head on his shoulder, and runs her hand over his back and side in an attempt to soothe.

"It seems like you're getting bits and pieces."