[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 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.

[nerves_of_ice]

He smiles back at her and reaches across the table to briefly catch hold of her hand.

"Once we're back in New York and everything's cleared up," Bucky tells her, "I'm going to take you out to a nice restaurant. A real date."

[from_the_outside]

She squeezes his hand in hers, her eyes alight and amused and very warm. "That sounds amazing," she says, and frowns for a second as she thinks back.

"...We've never really had one, have we?"

[nerves_of_ice]

"Not like that," he agrees. "I don't think we can count that time in Greece, not for this."

[from_the_outside]

"I don't know," she says, her smile softening as she remembers. The food, the wine, how easy it was to talk with him. How easy all of it was.

"All things considered, that was a pretty good date. Dinner and a movie: classic."

[nerves_of_ice]

He looks amused and fond, both, at the memory.

"Well, that much is true."

[from_the_outside]

"It'll be better when it's not a cover, though," she admits, and squeezes his hand once more before letting go so she can take another bite.

"You'll have to show me around Brooklyn. I don't know it very well."

[nerves_of_ice]

"A lot of it's changed," he admits, "but it's still the Brooklyn I know at its heart. We can learn the new places together. If you want."

[from_the_outside]

She leans her chin on her hand and gazes at him, taking in his smiles, the way his shoulders have relaxed, the bright hope in his face. They've lost so much time, but what does it change?

Not this. She knows that now. "I want that more than anything," she tells him, then smiles, bright and pleased. "Right after that hamburger."

[nerves_of_ice]

Bucky laughs.

"You got it."

[from_the_outside]

It'll be a while before any of this can happen, she knows. She can't be out in public until the pardon comes through – if it comes through – and she probably has reams of paperwork to do to reinstate herself as among the living...

"Is there a pen and some paper somewhere on this thing?"

She needs to start making a list.

[nerves_of_ice]

"Probably, somewhere, but --"

He gets up and goes to his pack, digging around a little in a front pocket that on closer inspection turns out to be a flat hidden pocket behind the more obvious main one, unobtrusive and usually unobserved. Bucky pulls out a small notebook and a pen, comes back to the table, and offers it to her.

"There're still some blank pages toward the back," he tells her.

[from_the_outside]

She accepts the book, frowning slightly at it. "Isn't this..."

A soft shock lances through her chest as she flips through the first pages and recognizes the handwriting and the lists there, as memory carries her unceremoniously back to a hallway in DC, Steve's earnest blue eyes and the smile on his face as he'd written down thai food.

She smiles slightly as she looks at his list, then flips through the rest of the pages, glancing as she does at the new lists, the different handwriting. The names. She flicks a look up at Bucky, but says nothing about it for the moment.

He's right: there are blank pages towards the back. She carefully flattens the book and begins making a list of her own. "Okay," she says, numbering a few lines. "Pardon. 'I'm still alive' paperwork."

She taps the tip of the pen on the paper for a second, then adds,

"Find Fury and make my report."

[nerves_of_ice]

He nods confirmation as her question breaks off mid-word, but says nothing else about it. Steve's notebook. Steve's lists. His own.

"I've got a folder full of 'I'm still alive' paperwork," he tells her. "There was a lot of that. Some of it'll be different for you, I figure, since turns out I was listed MIA, not KIA. Anyway, if any of it helps..."

Bucky breaks off there with a shrug.

[from_the_outside]

"I'm sure it will," she says. "That'll probably have to be its own list, just to keep from getting stuck in red tape."

She makes a new line. "Shift my accounts."

She's already planned to empty her cover accounts into several of the ones she holds for the Power Broker, but she'll have to have at least one or two under her own name, and that means finding some inventive ways to move money so 'Sharon Carter' doesn't come under suspicion.

[nerves_of_ice]

"There are probably a lot of those, huh." He seems amused by that for some reason.