[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 murmurs something reassuring under his breath in answer and cradles her against him until she settles again. Only then does he move, carrying her out into the main cabin, where he lowers her gently to the makeshift bed.

Bucky sets the second pillow next to her so she has something to hold on to and tucks the blankets over her. He waits until he's sure she's still asleep and likely to stay that way before he goes back to the cockpit to watch over their flight, leaving the door open behind him so that he can hear her if she calls out.

[from_the_outside]

Her dreams are mostly formless, though she recognizes bits and pieces here and there. Bucky's there. Sam, too. Karli. Mateo. If anything takes real shape, she forgets it almost instantly as her sleeping mind skips from shape to shape.

What is clear is when she blinks suddenly awake and finds herself holding not Bucky, but a pillow, and she gasps as she sits up, cold panic washing through her. It was a dream, she never left, he never came –

All of it flashing into and out of her mind in a second as she realizes she's on the plane, not in her bed in Madripoor, and if it was a dream, she's still sleeping.

It doesn't do anything to slow her pulse or keep anxiety from spiking through her blood, though.

[nerves_of_ice]

The loud gasp and sudden flicker of movement gets his attention. Bucky slips from the pilot's seat and makes his way quickly to her side, going down on one knee next to her chair.

"Bad dream?" he asks.

[from_the_outside]

She shakes her head, rubbing at her eyes. "Dreams were okay. It's the waking up that sucked."

Blinking her eyes open again, she looks arounds, a little bleary. "How did I get back here?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"I carried you," he says, reaching to brush her hair back from her face, very gently.

"You fell asleep sitting up in the cockpit."

[from_the_outside]

She nods and leans her head into his touch, still blinking sleep out of her heavy eyes.

"How long was I out?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"About an hour." He curves his hand against her cheek. "I'd hoped you'd sleep more. It's a long flight, you know."

[from_the_outside]

"So I've heard."

She lets her eyes slide closed as she leans into his hand. One hour was just enough to make her feel even more tired, but she somehow doubts she's going to get any kind of quality sleep during their flight. "Too wound up, I guess."

[nerves_of_ice]

He sighs, very quietly.

"Do you want to bring the pillow and blanket so you can curl up more comfortably in the copilot's chair?"

[from_the_outside]

She huffs out a breath of a laugh at that sigh. "Sorry to disappoint."

Her eyes feel full of sand; she rubs at them and gives him a tired look. "Will you feel better if I stay out here and try to sleep more?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"I just want you to rest," he says. "I don't care so much where, as long as you do."

He brushes his thumb over her cheekbone.

"You're so tired, baby."

[from_the_outside]

"So are you," she tells him. "It's been a hell of a day. Week. Year?"

Six years? Her train of thought is still boarding at the station. "I'll get some sleep in Brooklyn."

For the time being, she pushes the blanket off her legs and swings them over the edge of the makeshift bed. "I'll come back up to the cockpit."

[nerves_of_ice]

"Okay."

He pulls her into his arms when she stands and just holds her for a few seconds, not moving yet.

[from_the_outside]

She sets her head against his shoulder and closes her eyes, arms slipping around his middle.

"How're you doing, baby?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"I'm good," he murmurs, and runs one hand in small circles on her back.

[from_the_outside]

"Just a little longer," she murmurs.

But she doesn't show any sign of wanting to move.

[nerves_of_ice]

"Okay," he says again, and slides his hand up to cradle the back of her neck.

[from_the_outside]

God, she is tired, down to her bones, the kind of tired that feels like she won't ever not be tired. She should stay out here and sleep, she knows –

But that grasping anxiety that corkscrews into her chest at the thought of being even that far away from him means she probably wouldn't get much rest, regardless

[nerves_of_ice]

He draws his thumb over the back of her neck, just beneath her hairline.

"Come on," he says, gently. "Let's get you settled."

[from_the_outside]

She nods against his shoulder. "Okay."

A deep breath, like she's bracing herself, and she pulls back enough to look up at him, her smile rueful. "Only, what. Fifteen hours to go? That's nothing."

[nerves_of_ice]

"That's the spirit," Bucky tells her, and leans in for a quick kiss. He snags the blanket and pillow, and leads the way back to the cockpit.

[from_the_outside]

She follows him, retrieving her bottle of water and draining it before going quickly to galley to get another – and, after a second's thought, another bottle for him, too.

The co-pilot's seat is small, but she can curl into it without too much trouble, taking the blanket from him and tugging it over her legs, propping the pillow behind her head. This way, even if she does fall asleep, he'll be the first thing she sees when she opens her eyes. It might not stop the nightmares, but it should help with the waking.

[nerves_of_ice]

He talks for a while after she curls up in the copilot's chair, keeping his voice low and steady, rambling on about things that don't require a response from her. Eventually, as she drifts off, he goes back to checking the instruments.

It looks like they're going to get lucky on weather, enough so that he can take the more northerly of the great circle routes and avoid the majority of Russian and European airspace. He can't say that he minds that in the slightest.

The trim little jet flies on through the night, chasing the sun on the far side of the world, and Bucky keeps watch while it does.

[from_the_outside]

She doesn't sleep well, exactly, but she does sleep, waking up every little while to have some more water, use the lavatory, or just watch him with dark, tired eyes as he flies them home.

Occasionally nightmares shake her awake, variations on the same one she's had all week: they arrive and she is arrested. Or worse.

But at one point she blinks awake to see the horizon limned in the shimmering watercolor lights of the Aurora Borealis. She reaches for his hand and watches it with him in silence for a long time, and for a little while manages not to think of anything at all aside from how lucky she is.

[nerves_of_ice]

By the time the coast of Greenland slides away beneath them he can feel his own weariness beginning to settle in his bones, but a careful self-assessment confirms that he'll be good to go for hours yet.

Which is fortunate, as they're starting to enter more populated airspace. Bucky turns the volume up on the radio and starts monitoring more closely as they begin the long arc over Canada that will eventually lead them down to New York.