[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

[from_the_outside]

"I absolutely cannot wait to go to a little hole-in-the-wall and resume my quest to find the world's greatest hamburger," she tells him, closing her eyes and smiling at his kiss.

"You will. Soon." She breathes out a sigh and blinks her eyes open to look around the bathroom. "Tomorrow's going to be a busy day. We should try to get some rest before it all."

[nerves_of_ice]

"You're right," he says, even as his arms tighten around her for a moment. Slowly, he relaxes his embrace.

"Come on."

[from_the_outside]

"Don't worry," she says, amused, and turns her head to kiss his cheek. "I'm not going anywhere without you. Not anymore."

She shifts forward and stands carefully, then slowly gets out of the tub and reaches for a towel to wrap herself in, testing her breathing carefully as she does.

It's much better. The steam and oxygen helped a great deal.

[nerves_of_ice]

He watches as she moves, listens as she breathes, and feels a thread of relief twist through him.

Bucky hits the drain and gets up, reaching for a towel of his own.

[from_the_outside]

She's brushing her teeth when another thought strikes her, and she pauses to give him a bemused look in the mirror.

"Did you say something about 'getting a plane ready' earlier?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"Yes?" He finishes drying off, adds the towel to the hamper, and goes back into the bedroom to find a t-shirt and sweatpants, leaving the door open to not cut off the conversation.

"We're going to need it."

[from_the_outside]

"...Babe?" she says, after spitting out her toothpaste and rinsing her mouth.

"Where did you get a plane?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"Borrowed it," Bucky calls back.

[from_the_outside]

She turns the water warmer and dampens a cloth to wash her face, frowning in the mirror as she does. "Borrowed it from who?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"Don't worry, he won't miss it."

He drags his pack out from under the bed and opens the drawer where he'd put the few things he'd brought with him.

[from_the_outside]

"Uh huh."

There's the sound of splashing water, and then Sharon emerges from the ensuite, applying moisturizer to her face and looking skeptical.

"You get why that's kind of a worrying answer, right?"

[nerves_of_ice]

He visibly reviews what he'd said and winces.

"Okay, yeah, I guess that's fair." Bucky shoves everything from the drawer into his pack and zips it shut, then clearly rethinks that and pulls out clothes for tomorrow.

"He won't miss it, though."

[from_the_outside]

She gives him a patient look. "Who won't miss it, Bucky?"

Packing. That's something she should do, probably, except she honestly has no idea what, if anything, she wants to bring with her.

[nerves_of_ice]

He sighs.

"Zemo."

[from_the_outside]

She stares at him, all thoughts of packing fleeing her mind. "Zemo?"

He – "You stole Zemo's plane?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"Borrowed," he says, firmly.

[from_the_outside]

She stares at him.

Until she has to sit on the edge of the bed and just laugh.

[nerves_of_ice]

He shoves the pack out of the way and sits beside her on the bed. Bucky puts his arm around her and flashes her a quick grin.

"Like I said. He won't miss it."

[from_the_outside]

"It's perfect," she tells him, after a brief coughing fit brought on by the laughter, and catches his face in her hands to kiss him soundly on the mouth, still grinning when she pulls back.

"God knows he deserves it."

[nerves_of_ice]

"I thought so too," he agrees. "And I figured you'd rather have a way home that wasn't likely to flag on any official systems."

[from_the_outside]

"No other people to worry about, either," she says, and gives him a kiss on the cheek as tension she hadn't even realized she'd been carrying unspools from her shoulders.

"You're pretty quick on the draw, aren't you?"

[nerves_of_ice]

He leans in and kisses her. Once it breaks:

"Who, me? I'm just a simple soldier boy."

[from_the_outside]

"Oh, okay," she laughs, putting her arms around his neck and giving him a winsome smile.

"Take me home, soldier boy."

[nerves_of_ice]

He laughs, pulls her close, and tumbles the two of them together back onto the bed, then kisses her.

[from_the_outside]

She yelps a laugh as they fall back and hauls him close to kiss him until she has to turn her head away to cough, grinning, into her arm.

There's no chance in hell she's letting him go. She cups his face and drinks in the brilliance in his eyes, the way he keeps smiling at her. "God, it's good to see you smile, baby."