[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]

She's pressed back into her seat as the plane picks up speed, as gravity ceases to have any pull on them and the jet lifts nose-first into the air while Madripoor drops away behind them, and she can't stop blinking away the tears that gloss over her eyes. She stares out the window, her hood finally falling back, and watches as the city lights recede and nothing, nothing, nothing stops them.

By the time the jet finishes its climb and levels off, she's stopped fighting it, just lets the tears stream down her face as all the stress and pain and fear and loneliness of six long years finally begins to loosen.

They did it. He did it. Just like he promised.

[nerves_of_ice]

He sets the autopilot, double- and triple-checks it, checks the sky around them to be sure, then turns both radio and alarms up to full gain before he dogs the cockpit door open and goes back into the cabin.

"Sharon?"

Bucky crouches down on his heels in front of her, reaching for her hands.

"Baby?"

[from_the_outside]

She hiccups a breath and lurches into motion, undoing her safety belt buckle with alacrity so she can strip out of her leather jacket and hood and push them to the side along with the coat she'd been wearing before.

(She wants to feel free, free, free.)

As soon as she can, she puts her arms around his neck and hugs him tight, her whole body shaking the way his had when she first told him okay, you win. Let's go home.

"You did it," she tells him, voice thick. "You did it. You got me out."

She didn't think it was possible. Knows there's still more to do, still the Power Broker to reckon with, but...

She laughs and pulls back to cradle his face, her own tear-stained and lit from within. "Bucky, you did it. You did great. You did so good, baby."

[nerves_of_ice]

He wraps both arms around her and pulls her tightly to him, swinging her around in a circle in the middle of the cabin before he lowers her feet to the floor again and kisses her, again and again.

"It nearly killed me to leave you there the first time," he swears between kisses, low and fervent. "I could never have done it again."

[from_the_outside]

She clings to his shoulders and laughs like a kid as he swings her around, kisses him back over and over again, tasting salt on his lips. "You saved me," she tells him, and kisses him again. It's like a miniature sun is blooming in her chest; she feels light for the first time in years.

"You came back for me and you saved me. My hero. God, I love you so much, Bucky."

[nerves_of_ice]

"My angel," he tells her, and kisses her back. "I love you."

[from_the_outside]

She kisses him again, and once more for good measure, and pulls away to dry her face with her sleeve. She feels champagne-drunk, giddy with relief and happiness even as she knows they'll have a hell of a reality to face when they land. Maybe even beforehand.

But they'll face it together, and right now that's all she cares about.

Now that they're safe, she can finally take stock of the jet's interior, looks around with curiosity. "I have to say," she tells him, "as far as stealing jets goes, you picked a good one." It's comfortable, luxurious – the kind of thing she'd have had for herself, if she'd ever left Madripoor.

She wonders if there's any food on board. Or champagne. They really should celebrate.

[nerves_of_ice]

"Borrowed," he reminds her. "Technically."

Bucky smooths a hand over her hair, then rests it against her back. "Look around, if you want. We've definitely got time for you to poke into all the corners."

[from_the_outside]

"A lot of time," she agrees. Some, what. Almost eighteen hours? God, she might actually get some sleep. Hopefully the autopilot will let him rest a little, too. "In a bit."

For now she slips her arms around his waist and pulls herself flush against him, tucking her head into his shoulder. She can't stop smiling. "Oh my god, I'm giddy."

[nerves_of_ice]

He smiles back and holds her close. "Well, you've had a hell of a day."

[from_the_outside]

"Me?" she laughs. "Yeah, I guess so. Not just me, though."

She can't get over the fact that they pulled it off. Of course he did everything perfectly – she never expected anything less – but it was the two of them against everything that could have gone wrong and didn't.

She leans up to kiss his neck, his cheek. "We make a pretty good team, partner."

[nerves_of_ice]

"Yes, we do," he agrees, and pulls her into another, deeper kiss.

When it breaks, he runs his other hand through her hair, smiling down at her.

[from_the_outside]

This has to take the cake for one of the wildest twenty-four hour rides she's been on in a long time. She tips her head into his touch and smiles back up at him, feeling like right now? She can believe absolutely everything he ever told her about what might be possible.

A pardon. A life free of Madripoor and the Power Broker. A little place in Brooklyn. And him, right there with her. She leans up to kiss him again, then disentangles herself, laughing.

"I'm going to see if Zemo has any food we can 'borrow'," she tells him. "It's a long flight on an empty stomach."

[nerves_of_ice]

"The galley should be fully stocked," he says. "Food and drink both. I'll go check on things in the cockpit."

He flashes her a quick grin, then goes back forward and settles into the pilot's seat, casting a glance over the instruments.

This time he leaves the door latched open.

[from_the_outside]

She goes forward enough to start poking around the galley, beautifully paneled in what looks like cherry, looking in the little fridge and opening each of the latched cupboards. He's right: there's plenty of food, and she chooses a couple of the likeliest looking dinners, sticks them into the little oven to heat, and then –

"Bingo," she says, and grins before she pops the cork on one of the bottles of champagne she'd found. There are a handful of flutes in a cupboard: she selects two and fills them up, then leans against the cockpit door and offers one to Bucky.

"I'd say you shouldn't have this while flying a plane, but we both know it's not going to do anything to you," she tells him. Her smile is pure and sweet. "I think this calls for a celebration."

[nerves_of_ice]

He turns around in the seat and accepts the flute with a warm answering smile. "Under the circumstances, I'd have to agree."

Bucky taps his glass against hers, very lightly. "Cheers, angel."

[from_the_outside]

"Right back atcha, hot stuff."

She takes a sip of her champagne and makes an appreciative face: Zemo really does get the good stuff. Careful not to bump anything or spill her drink, she comes to sit in the copilot's seat, looking out the cockpit windows with interest.

Not that there's much to see. Clouds. Stars. The moon. It's just that she hasn't been in the air for so long, hasn't been anywhere but Madripoor for so long. "How's she flying?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"Pretty well," he reassures her. "Handles easily, nothing weird about the controls, no dead-stick feel."

Bucky glances at her. "And I promise my skills aren't that rusty," he adds, deadpan.

[from_the_outside]

"Well, that's a relief, now that we're multiple thousands of feet in the air," she quips back, grinning as she settles into the copilot's seat. The food's warming up: her stomach gives a loud growl as the smell wafts into the cockpit.

"The autopilot on this thing good enough to let you rest a little? Eighteen hours is a long time to go."

[nerves_of_ice]

"Should be. A catnap or two at least."

He slants an amused look at her, but there's a flicker of relief in his eyes as he teases, "Hungry?"

[from_the_outside]

"Starving," she says, with zero self-consciousness. "I didn't eat anything all day, did you?"

Right on time, the oven beeps, and she gets up, sipping at her champagne. She pauses to rake her spread fingers through his hair, tip his head back, and kiss him warm and sweet before heading back into the galley. "Come on. I warmed one up for you, too."

[nerves_of_ice]

He shakes his head, then turns back and checks all the instruments and the autopilot settings before carefully getting up and following her out into the cabin.

"Thanks," he says, leaning against the wall, champagne flute dangling loosely in his fingers. "Because you're right, I didn't eat anything either."

[from_the_outside]

He's hardly eaten at all this week, and with that super soldier metabolism of his he's lost weight. She has the inexplicable urge to make him sit down and eat a sandwich. "Not sure what it is," she says, opening the little oven door and taking out the food. "Some kind of chicken? And potatoes? Some veggies? It looks good, anyhow."

Smells pretty good, too, and she digs out some silverware – on this plane, it's actual silverware – and tips her head towards the cabin and the folded-out table between two of the seats. "Let's eat."

[nerves_of_ice]

"Looks great," he agrees, and goes to sit where she'd indicated. "The company's nice, too."

He waits until she's settled across from him and starting on her own plate before he takes the first bite.

[from_the_outside]

"My favorite company," she tells him, smiling before washing down the first few bites with sips of champagne.

God, she feels – not relaxed, exactly, she's still too wound up for that – relieved. She's giddy with it, even as she knows it can't last. She needs to check her phone, the news, see what Madripoor is saying...

But not yet. Let them try to suss out the mystery a while longer. She has a little more of her dinner – are these plates real bone china? Zemo. – and smiles at him.