Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Wednesday night finds her in a dimly lit, smoky bar, drinking Southern Comfort and lime, on the rocks, of course, and… thinking.

Thinking.  Always thinking.  Ever since they pulled her from the rubble of that defunct Hydra facility - she still doesn't know where,  can point it out on a map, pronounce its name with perfect accent and intonation, but her recollections of it are dark, full of holes and underscored with the feeling of fire burning through her veins.  

Thinking...

She actually misses the days when her thoughts were not her own.  There were missions.  Orders.  Commands.  Demands.  Gunfire and blood.  Smoke and…

Fuck...

How twisted.

At least back then she knew what to do.  How to behave.  Didn’t feel much more beyond the pain of battle, or the punishments whenever she stepped out of line.  

This , this longing and regret, these are new.  Uncomfortable.  Not so easy to manage.  

So she settles for a bar not too far from Avengers Tower and drinks because, eventually, the thoughts will grow hazy, heavy still, though much more easy to manage.  And when she sleeps, there will be neither thoughts nor dreams.  Just silence and comforting darkness. She won't care that he brought a girl home.  

He appears to have moved on.  

Clara.  The girl’s name is Clara.  And Clara is soft in a way she will never be.  Doesn't remember how to be.  Clara is safe.  Probably sweet and kind.  There are probably no scars marring her pale flesh.   Clara has her memories and they're probably good ones.  Warm and filled with light from a life well-lived, instead of dictated and controlled.  

Clara probably doesn't keep a knife under her pillows, just in case.  

She’d laughed when Bucky had introduced them, partly because of the look on his face - wide-eyed and obviously uncomfortable - and partly because laughing seemed so very appropriate, given the situation.   Oddly enough, laughing is one thing that comes easy to her these days. Laughing and fighting.  And drinking.  Drinking is the easiest of all.

Steve had looked like he was going to have an aneurysm, so she excused herself.  Didn't even bother to stop off at her apartment to grab a jacket.  Headed out of the building and into the night, her thoughts on Southern Comfort and Bucky’s flesh arm curled around Clara’s waist.  

The significance of this isn't lost on her.  

Clara probably doesn't even know how to hold a gun.

She signals the bartender for another round.  Curls her fingers over the suspiciously sticky bar top.  Feels the air shift when someone, someone big and warm and smelling faintly like electricity, takes the stool next to her.

“We can't get drunk - me and Steve.”

She doesn’t move. Doesn't respond.  Watches the bartender’s hands, thin and slightly shaking, as he refills her drink.

“It's the serum.  Metabolizes the alcohol too fast.”

She smirks around the edge of her glass.  “Sorry for your loss.”  

And she is sorry, because this feels great.  Liquid happiness.  Joy in a bottle.  Welcoming darkness waiting at the bottom.  

Bucky doesn't say anything else for a long moment, which is fine.  

She likes the music here; the garish, neon lights that work sometimes; the smell of smoke and old cooking grease.  Even the barstools, ratty and worn in spots, are nice.  No one feels sorry for her here.  No one apologizes.  

No one knows she’s in love.  

No one bothers to care.

“That wasn't supposed to happen,” he says finally.  

She grunts.  The liquor sloshes in her stomach.  “Doesn't matter.”

“She's a friend.”

Anger rises like a tide in her and she turns blazing eyes on him.  “I said it doesn't matter. ”

He takes it in stride.  Stares at her a long moment.  “It wasn't planned.  I'm not trying to hurt you.”

Hurt me.

She doesn't know if he means now or then.  She doesn't care.  She reaches into her pocket.  Tosses a couple bills on the bar and walks away.  Shoves out into the night and nearly collides with a man and woman who are walking by.  

She thinks to apologize.  Stops and stares after them with the words on her tongue.  

… It doesn't matter …

                                ***

She gets careless.  No, careless is not the word.  Careless implies a lack of intent.  There had been intent when she'd stepped between Clint and the angry, knife-wielding Hydra agent.  Intent to save him and intent to feel something other than the roiling sickness which seemed ever-present. She could have easily deflected the blade.  She probably would have.  Before.

The knife piercing her flesh had granted her a strange moment of peace, of feeling something other than broken and weighed down by unreciprocated emotions.   

In those brief seconds she’d felt something other than the ghost of Bucky Barnes’ fingers slipping up her spine.

He was pissed, though he didn't say anything.  He stayed by her bed for three nights while she recovered in the infirmary, all scowls and clenching jaw.  

When she was released, he tried to help her back to her apartment, but she'd waved him away.   Didn't want his hands on her.  Wanted them on her so badly.  

He’d continued to scowled.

She’d merely glared.  

That night, she slept alone for the first time in three days and hated every minute of it.  She'd grown accustomed to his presence again, even if the time had been spent staring angry daggers through her.  He had been there, which was more than he’d been since they’d broken things off seven months prior.

Chapter Text

He doesn’t bring anyone else back to the Tower.

She’s grateful.

She feels guilty.

He deserves someone normal.  Soft.  Without baggage or nightmares or a general disregard for her own safety.  Someone who actually gets squeamish at the sight of blood.  Someone who doesn’t know 17 ways to kill a man with her bare hands.

She’d loved him.  Had told him as much inside the silence and stillness of his bedroom, sweaty from sex and high on the feeling of his body curled around hers.  

More silence followed.  Uncomfortable.  She could hear her heart thudding in her ears.  

“You shouldn’t,” he’d said softly, sadness coloring the edges of his words and his breath tickling the back of her neck.

She is unaccustomed to this feeling, however she is sure his response isn’t the right one.  

She’d pulled away.  Disentangled herself from his big, strong body and, somehow, managed to find her clothes, scattered as they were across the bedroom floor.

He’d called her name.  Tried to stop her as she left, but she was built to fight and he didn’t try again when she’d shoved him into the wall.  

***

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

Every now and again, he’ll seek her out.  Find her at the bar and she thinks she should find a new hideout, but she doesn’t have the energy and, truth be told, she likes this little game.   It’s more than what she’s had.  

And… she misses him.  

“Doesn’t matter, Bucky.”

He gets the same response every time.  It’s her mantra now, something to keep the anger and resentment at bay.

“Are you ever gonna gimme a chance to explain?”

She shrugs.  Passes her half empty glass between her hands over the bar top.  

“I didn’t mean that I don’t love you back.”

She takes a slow breath.  Stares into the amber liquid.  

“It’s just…”  He huffs out air.  Runs his metal hand through his hair.  “I'm…”

She doesn’t want to hear it. Doesn’t want an excuse that will make him feel better about turning her away.  Breaking what was already broken.  

“Not built for it,” she finishes for him.  

Finishes her drink.

Pays.

Leaves.

***

“It scares me.”

This is new.  He’s waiting at her apartment door one night, looking lost and forlorn and, dear God, does he have any other expression?

She stops.  Stares up into his clear blue eyes with their impossibly long lashes.  Watches his jaw working beneath the dark scruff of his beard.  

He folds his arms across his broad chest.  

“I’m sorry?”

“It scares me,” he repeats. “Loving you.”

“That’s very romantic, Bucky.”

She places her palm on the sensor next to her apartment door.  It unlocks with an almost imperceptible click and she shoves past him.  

The heavy sound of his boots on the hardwood floor is too familiar.  Too close.  She can smell him and she hasn’t even touched him.  He smells like the earth, the air after a lightning strike.  

It’s fitting.

She doesn’t tell him to go.   She should.  This could get ugly and she just wants to sleep.

He follows her as far as her bedroom door.  She begins to undress. Wonders, idly, as she peels out of each garment, if he’s clocking the differences in her and Clara’s bodies - her dark, battle-scarred figure against his girlfriend’s flawless, bright one.

When she finally turns to look at him, his gaze is fixed on her.  There’s sadness in his eyes, pain now where once there had been the flames of lust and desire.

“I did that to you,” he said.

She doesn’t understand.  When she fails to respond, he moves into the room.  Comes to stand in front of her and she hates that her body still reacts to him, nipples pebbling and heat flaring in her core.

She lifts her chin and glares at him in defiance, if only to show him otherwise.

He doesn’t balk or shy away.  He lifts his hand and trails a cool metal digit along a scar at the base of her ribcage.  She starts at his touch. Vividly remembers what those fingers were capable of doing to her.  

“Nine years ago, I was brought in to train you and a handful of others.  A new batch of soldiers.”  He sneers at the last word but she catches the hitch in his voice.  The regret underscoring it.  His finger moves featherlight over the scar, his face set in thoughtful lines, before his hand closes into a fist.  He takes a small step back.

She doesn’t remember him; she isn’t really surprised by that.  She’s more surprised, concerned, that he never mentioned it.  

She thinks she should put some clothes on.  She feels raw and exposed suddenly.   Open and slightly unsteady.

“You were brilliant.  A natural, I could tell, even before all the enhancements.” His pale eyes flick up to hers.  

Enhancements.  

Her blood burns at the word.  Simmers just below the surface of her skin, her body remembering the pain, though very little else.

“You were headstrong.  Stubborn.  They tried their damnedest to burn that outta you.”  

Bucky glances away.  Shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans and takes a few more steps away, trying to distance himself from the memory, from the storm of emotions rising in his eyes.  

“When that didn’t work, they used… me.”

Chapter Text

There’s blood on her hands.  It’s not hers.  Not all of it anyway.   

She curls her fingers in her lap, legs dangling over the edge of the examination table, swinging slowly forward and back.  She's tired and there’s a bottle of Southern Comfort with her name on it, waiting for her at a bar a block away.

When the heavy sound of Bucky’s boots - she thinks she'd be able to pick that sound out of a crowd - passes in front of the closed examination room door, she stops.  Cocks her head to the side.  Listens as those steps pause, shifting uncertainly and, finally, thankfully, move away.  

She sighs and there's a bit of relief in that sound.  Relief and a slithering sense of resignation because she's not ready to talk to him just yet, but she likes the concern she’s seen in his eyes these past few days.  

She watches the doctor as she prepares to stitch up the nasty gash running the length of her bicep, though her mind is somewhere else, focused on the memory of her apartment and the story of how Bucky had marked her.

Bucky, normally a man of few words, had painted a haunting picture for her.  Startlingly clear and bright as it blossomed in her mind's eye, though his memory, like hers, is spotty at best.  

She doesn't remember any of it.  She remembers the base.  Her handlers, of course.   Some of her missions stand out - the blood and the violence have never been easy to forget - but her actual training and Bucky, the Soldier, well, there's a hazy, gray spot where she assumes he should be.

According to him, she had been prone to bouts of rage, when she wasn't being quiet or melancholy.  She would lash out at her handlers.  The techs.  The other Soldiers.  

Bucky believes, then and now, there remained a part of her which was naturally driven to rebel.  Hated what she'd become.

When the ‘treatments’ failed to fix this, they used him.  Training sessions that lasted until she could hardly stand, until her body could take no more and she collapsed under the weight of exhaustion.  

She fought him, hard and often.   He has his own battle scars from those moments, what look like claw marks scoring his ribcage, just below where metal gives way to flesh.  

He’d cut her in order to stop her from killing her Handlers. That's how she’d gotten the scar.  She’d begged him to kill her.  

He couldn't.  In her way, she’d grown on him and he’d protected her.

Until the day he couldn't. Until the day they'd taken her away.

When they'd found her in that crumbling Hydra facility, filthy and lost, and more than just a little broken, Bucky actually began to believe in second chances.  

***

When he comes to her at the bar, she doesn't say anything.  Not at first, at least.  She   doesn't push him away, or hurry to leave.  She sits in the wake of his warmth.  Flexes her fingers to feel the skin pulling around her stitches.  

She's not healing the way she should. The way she used to.  She feels a measure of concern regarding this, but it's faint, soaked in the sickly-sweet taste of Southern Comfort.  

Finally, she says, soft and low, “What did you mean?  When you said that loving me terrifies you.”

She watches him from the corner of her eyes. Dips her finger into her glass and paints her lips with it.  

He stares straight ahead.  Watches their reflection in the mirror behind the bar.  Looks thoughtful and troubled, and she fights the urge to reach out to him, to rake her fingers through his hair and press in close the way she'd always done before.  

“I'm always afraid you'll remember,” he eventually replies. She can see the ghosts drifting in his eyes, bright now beneath the glow of the neon lights.  “Remember what a monster I was to you.”

She knows he means it and she doesn't know how she feels about it, about remembering him that way.  Remembering them both that way.  

“Do I mean anything to you, Bucky,” she says, her eyes meeting his in the reflection of the glass.  “Or am I … a regret  A… vessel for your guilt?”

Her heart thumps solidly inside her chest when his hand closes over hers.  

“At first, I just wanted to do right by you,” he admits, fingers tightening when she moves to pull away.  He won't allow it.  He gives her a look, determined and steady, and she stills, though she refuses to meet his gaze.  

“Now, you're all I think about.  Wanna protect you the way I wasn't able to before.  Wanna make you happy the way I didn't know how.  Wanna… keep lovin’ on you.  If you'll let me.  Wanna show you me, instead of the beast I was.”

She tries to breathe deeply.  Pulls in air through loosely parted lips and finally looks at him.  He's hopeful.  Sincere.   

She doesn't stop him when he pulls her close and slants his lips over hers.  Kisses her softly, gently, and she can feel that cold thing inside her beginning to melt away under the sweet, insistent press of his lips.

“Your girlfriend.”

He shakes his head.  His metal hand rests heavily on her thigh.  

“Over,” he says simply.  

“When?”

“The night you met her.”

She thinks she should probably feel just a little guilty about that.