[oom] you don't need to save me, but would you run away with me? // Part 2

[from_the_outside]

It's a long, long week. 

All the weeks here are long. She's been exhausted since she first arrived, and it hasn't gotten any easier – she's just gotten used to it.

What she isn't used to is watching what it does to Bucky.

He keeps busy, vanishing shortly after breakfast and not reappearing until well after dark, sometimes not until close to midnight. That doesn't mean she doesn't have eyes on him – she has eyes everywhere in this city. Some of what he gets up to he tells her about. Some of it she sees or hears about.

Some she only pieces together after the fact.

For example:

Four days into his stay she sees a flurry of alerts and messages about a gang of thugs that had decided to tangle with him in a Lowtown market. The videos of him throwing them into plate glass windows and walls and storefront doors travel through Madripoor like wildfire.

And then there are the rumors. It's public knowledge he killed Cade and that he's been seen with the art dealer: what no one knows is why, and the whispers grow steadily more frenetic as the week rolls on. The general consensus seems to be that the art dealer had Cade disposed of in order to help her own climb to power. More than one person attempts to contract him for help with an unsolvable problem. No one manages to hire him. No one seems to know what he wants.

Worse is that as the power dynamic between those on the lower rung vying for Selby's position fluctuates, he deliberately allows himself to be seen more often, delves more deeply into Madripoor's seedy shadows. She doesn't understand until her security catches a would-be assassin she saw coming a mile away, and then she realizes: his involvement with her, with Cade, has painted a target on her back.

So he's decided to paint a larger one on his own.

He loses weight. She pushes breakfast and dinner at him, but he eats mechanically, hardly seems to notice. The lines drawn on his face seem carved into rock. He stops smiling except occasionally when they're alone in the middle of the night, or when his phone pings with a text from Sam.

On the fifth night, he stops sleeping. 

He wakes up from a nightmare he refuses to talk about, and for the next few days she doesn't see him sleep at all. He's catching catnaps like he used to back in the Winter Soldier days, she thinks, but she's not sure. Every day he's a little quieter, a little more grim.

Which is why it's so strange that her apartment is completely filled with flowers.

Everywhere she looks now, there they are: large, expensive bouquets in fancy vases on nearly every available surface. He's had one delivered every single day, and every day she hates herself a little more for bringing him here. Every day he tells her come home with me.

Every day she tells him I can't. And he looks at her with those determined, weary eyes, and her heart breaks a little more.

It's a little over a week after he'd first arrived that she's hosting clients again. The party hasn't even started, and she already wishes she had a drink.

(There weren't any flowers today. She wonders if that's a sign.)

Comments

[nerves_of_ice]

He can read her expression plain as print, and is pretty sure he knows what she's thinking. Bucky sets the coffee in the holder and reaches for her hand.

"Not just because you were gone," he says, quietly. "Although I won't lie... it wasn't easy. I figure you know why."

"But after -- I guess you probably heard about how it went down. In the first attack. How bad it was, with Thanos's army trying to get to Vision. And when everyone..."

He squeezes her fingers, whether to steady her or himself is hard to say.

"T'Challa and Shuri were both taken, like I was. Like Sam. Like so many. Wakanda was reeling. Five years later - the last thing they needed while trying to put everything back together with the return was a semi-stable super soldier causing problems, either in general or due to State Department pressure. I'd have been more trouble than help if I stayed. So I went."

[from_the_outside]

Her hand is warm in his as she presses his fingers. "You know if they hadn't given you that pardon, T'Challa would never have let them bring you back, right?"

Personally, she thinks T'Challa and Shuri and Nakia and the others would have preferred Bucky stay in Wakanda, no matter how much trouble he might have been, but that's hardly helpful to say.

[nerves_of_ice]

"I know. We knew - I knew that from the beginning." He grimaces. "Of course, that was before all this with Zemo."

Bucky sighs. "I need to apologize. I had to do it, but still."

[from_the_outside]

She's not at all sure he had to do it, but isn't that her fault, too? If he'd known about her, where she was, what she was doing, he wouldn't have had to let Zemo loose at all.

It's just another brick of guilt to add to the bunch; she feels it settle in her stomach and cement itself there. "They'll forgive you," she says, instead of anything else. "Just maybe give T'Challa a little time to cool off, first."

[nerves_of_ice]

"I know they will. Ayo said 'for now,'" he observes. "And she called me 'White Wolf' again. And..."

A slow grin brightens his features.

"They built Sam's present."

[from_the_outside]

"Oh, really?"

She can't help but grin back at that smile on his face; she doesn't even try not to.

"And what's his present, exactly?"

[nerves_of_ice]

His grin broadens.

"A new suit."

[from_the_outside]

She stares at him for a moment before her own grin brightens and she can't help but laugh.

"Good. His old one didn't go with the shield at all."

[nerves_of_ice]

There's no missing it: as Sharon starts laughing, Bucky looks smug.

[from_the_outside]

"Look at you, doing nice things for Sam Wilson," she says, grinning at that smug look on his face.

"I guess miracles really do happen."

[nerves_of_ice]

"Looks like," he says, a little wryly. "He's a good guy. Still annoying as hell sometimes, but a good guy."

[from_the_outside]

"He is," she agrees. "Really good. Optimistic, too, which he's gonna need."

The thing that she hasn't been able to admit to Bucky yet is that she wasn't really lying, that night they showed up in Madripoor. All she'd done was let her bitterness and sorrow bleed through.

Heroes might exist. She won't argue that, not sitting here with him, her own personal savior, but –

Well. When it comes to America? To giving your all for a country that will drop you behind enemy lines and forget you ever existed?

There's still a big part of her that thinks only an idiot would choose that life.

[nerves_of_ice]

"Realistic and optimistic both," Bucky counters. "There's a lot he's been dealing with that neither Steve or I ever really understood. But he's not the kind of guy who gives up."

[from_the_outside]

"No," she agrees, looking at her fingers curling around her mug. "He'll need that too."

Because Karli won't give up. And neither will the John Walkers of the world.

[nerves_of_ice]

"Uh-huh." He picks up the coffee cup and drains it, then sets it aside.

"But he's got that kind of grit. And he won't be alone."

[from_the_outside]

"No, he won't."

She watches him as he finishes his coffee, as his face sets into that neutral expression she knows all too well. She nods to his empty cup. "Do you want a refill?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"I'd love one." Bucky looks up at her and smiles, small but real. "Thanks."

[from_the_outside]

She pushes out of the seat and reaches for his empty cup, then heads back to the galley to pour him another.

She leaves her cup in the galley. One's enough for her right now.

Slipping back into the cockpit, she hands him the refilled cup and leans down to press a kiss into his hair. "Here you go."

[nerves_of_ice]

"Thanks," he says again, and tips his head back to smile up at her before he straightens again and takes a swallow.

"You know, I wanted to ask about something you mentioned earlier," he starts, in a mild tone. "Reporting in to Fury." Bucky slants a sideways look at her. "Mind if I sit in?"

[from_the_outside]

That mild tone always means trouble. She looks over at him, narrowing her eyes.

"Why?"

[nerves_of_ice]

Just as mildly as before:

"I'd like to hear what he has to say."

[from_the_outside]

"I'm not sure you would like it," she tells him, skeptical. "And I am sure he'll want to know why you're sitting in on a report for a mission you weren't part of."

[nerves_of_ice]

"I didn't say I'd like what he's gonna say. But I would like to hear him try to explain himself." Mild is shading into very, very level, and he makes himself look away from her, out at the sky.

"I was part of it, Sharon. I just didn't know I was. Fury brought me into it to bribe you. He can deal with the consequences."

[from_the_outside]

He's looking away from her, but she keeps her eyes on him, feeling suddenly very, very tired. "What consequences?"

He knows as well as she does that Fury had already weighed all possible outcomes and come out on the side of this is fine. Hell, she doesn't even know if she's angry with him about it anymore. He didn't get snapped by Thanos on purpose.

"What could he possibly say that would justify any of it to you? There's nothing."

[nerves_of_ice]

Very, very evenly:

"Maybe I just don't want you to have to deal with him on your own."