[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]

"I didn't mean it like that," he protests, reading her expression. "I just meant - I guess we can arrange for it to be discovered, or something, and donated to a museum. Once we're home."

[from_the_outside]

"Mm-hm," Sharon says, in a way that suggests she will consider donating it or leaving it somewhere to be discovered but it wouldn't be her first choice.

"And your Cézanne," she reminds him, before he can question her about it. "That's coming, too."

[nerves_of_ice]

He eyes her, then sighs and tucks one arm behind his head.

"I guess I better figure out how to get to the plane and back tonight, then. That's not going to fit in the pack."

[from_the_outside]

She frowns at him.

"What's to figure out?" she asks. "Just go over the rooftops like you usually do."

[nerves_of_ice]

He turns his head sideways and gives her a level stare.

"That would mean leaving you here alone."

From the tone of his voice, that's not acceptable and non-negotiable.

[from_the_outside]

She reaches to cup his face with her hand, looking at him for a long few seconds before she nods. "Okay," she agrees. "So that's out." She thinks for a moment, then meets his eyes again.

"We'll just take my car. Or, you will. I'll hide in the trunk or the backseat. We'll set the bomb on a timer or a remote switch, take the car, and be long gone before the place goes up."

[nerves_of_ice]

"Remote detonation," Bucky decides. "Timers have a high failure rate. I'll park and double-back to activate it so that if something goes wrong I can deal with it."

[from_the_outside]

"'If something goes wrong'?" she echoes, lifting her eyebrows at him.

[nerves_of_ice]

"If it fails to go off," he explains.

[from_the_outside]

She looks at him and sighs a little, shaking her head against the pillow.

"Just please don't blow yourself up," she tells him. "I don't know how to fly a plane."

[nerves_of_ice]

He chuckles, very softly, and leans in to kiss her.

"I won't. I promise. You ... probably don't want to know how many times I've done this, actually."

[from_the_outside]

"You're probably right," she tells him, a little wry, and kisses him back gently.

"Give me ten minutes to pack some stuff and then let's try to get some sleep, okay?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"Need any help?"

[from_the_outside]

"I think I can manage," she says, amused, and disentangles herself from him so she can get up and go to her closet and dresser, opening drawers and beginning to take out some clothes, all of which look essentially the same: black long-sleeved shirts, black or dark pants, her leather jacket.

She puts them on the bed and goes into the bathroom to collect her toothbrush and toiletries. She works fast: her legs still feel a little wobbly.

[nerves_of_ice]

He pushes himself up against he head of the bed and watches as she collects a few things. After a moment or two, his glance goes to the cracked glass art.

"We should probably leave that for last. So that Inga doesn't wonder," he murmurs.

[from_the_outside]

She follows his glance as she comes back into the bedroom, zipping up a small toiletry bag. "Yes."

Her glance stays on the art for a few seconds too long before she shakes her head and starts adding her things to his pack, keeping aside a change of clothes for the morning.

[nerves_of_ice]

He watches the way her glance lingers, and a slight frown appears on his own face.

"Sharon?"

[from_the_outside]

She glances up at him from where she's rolling up a shirt.

"Yeah, baby?"

[nerves_of_ice]

He shakes his head, thinking better of it. Whatever the reason for that glance, she doesn't seem upset now, and it's been a long, long day for her.

"Never mind," he says, instead. "Jumping at shadows, I guess."

[from_the_outside]

"You and me both."

That's Madripoor for you. Six years of this hellhole, of plots and machinations, and she's forgotten what it even feels like to not be suspicious of everyone and everything.

She stuffs the last of her items into his pack and slips it back under the bed, then crawls back over the duvet to kiss him and settle down by his side. She's exhausted to her core, but her nerves are all still jangling. Whether she'll actually sleep tonight is anyone's guess.

[nerves_of_ice]

"Try to sleep if you can," he murmurs. Bucky shifts so that he can run one hand over her back in slow, soothing strokes.

"You're alive. I'm alive. We're together. We're going home."

[from_the_outside]

"All good things," she says, and rolls over to click off the bedside lamp before coming back to him.

It doesn't feel real. Won't, she imagines, for a long while, even if they're successful. This has been her world for too long.

She takes a deep breath and only coughs a little, presses a kiss to his shoulder. "Rest," she tells him. "Tomorrow's going to be a hell of a day."

[nerves_of_ice]

"Mm-hm," he agrees, and makes no promises. She's right, though; he's going to need to rest some, if he's going to fly them out of here.

Bucky makes sure she's settled comfortably, keeps his arm around her, and wills himself to fall into a light doze - one that'll let him react to any change in her breathing, and one that'll let him rest without going deep enough for nightmares. He hopes.

[from_the_outside]

Unsurprisingly, she sleeps like shit.

Part of it is that she just doesn't feel all that well still. Her chest still hurts a bit and so does her throat, which she supposes isn't unusual after being poisoned.

Part of it is that she always sleeps like shit now. She's slept better since he's been here, but she still dreams almost every night, still wakes up throughout the night, still sleeps shallow and restless.

But most of it is that nervous sensation she remembers from being a kid on Christmas Eve: nerves and anticipation and fear and hope all tangling up in her chest and head until sleep seems impossible.

It isn't. Eventually, she drifts off, as she usually does, but strange dreams and images flit through her sleeping mind and the deep, drowning slumber she so desperately needs seems utterly out of her grasp.

She'll sleep on the plane, she tells herself, when she flits back to consciousness for the latest time. She'll sleep in Brooklyn.

[nerves_of_ice]

It could be worse, he decides, when his eyes open in the darkness of the curtain-shrouded room. He slept some, at least; light, hazy, sleep washing in and out like waves at the edge of the surf, but it was still enough rest for him to be fully operational, well within mission parameters--

He shakes his head, a single tiny movement back and forth, and lets his breath out in a quiet sigh.