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repaying.
the red room
pre-graduation: sparring | mess hall
post-graduation: hurt/comfort | a week at the dacha
present-day
post-civil war: domesticity
【 au 】 the americans
pre-graduation: sparring | mess hall
post-graduation: hurt/comfort | a week at the dacha
present-day
post-civil war: domesticity
【 au 】 the americans
no name / margaret atwood
This is the nightmare you now have frequently:
that a man will come to your house at evening
with a hole in him — you place it
in the chest, on the left side — and blood leaking out
onto the wooden door as he leans against it.
He is a man in the act of vanishing
one way or another.
He wants you to let him in.
He is like the soul of a dead
lover, come back to the surface of the earth
because he did not have enough of it and is still hungry
but he is far from dead. Though the hair
lifts on your arms and cold
air flows over your threshold
from him, you have never
seen anyone so alive
as he touches, just touches your hand
with his left hand, the clean
one, and whispers Please
in any language.
This is the nightmare you now have frequently:
that a man will come to your house at evening
with a hole in him — you place it
in the chest, on the left side — and blood leaking out
onto the wooden door as he leans against it.
He is a man in the act of vanishing
one way or another.
He wants you to let him in.
He is like the soul of a dead
lover, come back to the surface of the earth
because he did not have enough of it and is still hungry
but he is far from dead. Though the hair
lifts on your arms and cold
air flows over your threshold
from him, you have never
seen anyone so alive
as he touches, just touches your hand
with his left hand, the clean
one, and whispers Please
in any language.
no subject
"Hey, don't get me wrong, I'm excited." Bucky's voice is still even, though, flat and level. He's more emotive than the version of him she once knew, and yet still more statue-like and stoic than most regular people — as if, after so many decades, he's simply forgotten what to do with his face, and the muscles for those micro-expressions have atrophied. The easiest shortcut these days to make him emote is amiable irritation, which might explain some things about his still-growing dynamic with Wilson.
"I just haven't played house with anyone in—" He stops, doesn't even try to calculate the incalculable number. "Just trying to make sure I'm an okay houseguest. Steve told me I don't snore, but I don't trust him not to lie out of politeness. Do I snore?"
no subject
The man she loved hadn't been real, in the end, had he?
"Hmm, do you want me to answer that honestly?" Natasha strolls ahead of him a couple paces and stretches one arm over her head with a soft sigh, not unlike a dancer preparing for a performance, what for the way her fingers delicately fan in the motion. "You don't snore in the winter."
It falls out without thinking, as if they've experienced anything other than the bite of cold now, as if there are springs and summers they've shared once upon a time ago. Natasha drinks from her coffee, the comment slipping by the careful confines of the walls she's built, of the defenses made just for James-shaped thoughts and memories that don't fit around the man known as Bucky Barnes.
"So you can rest assured, you're not roaring the house awake. I'd smother you with a pillow if you did. I'm sure it's a nice way to go."
no subject
The man in front of her now has been been a cobbled-together jigsaw puzzle over the course of his life. He's not the same as the carefree man he'd been before his capture by HYDRA. But he's not the stiff soldier she'd known, either, nor the one who had been slowly thawing. He's something new, a composite of the whole, a blurry picture coming carefully into view.
Bucky's still sauntering along behind her now, mid-sip of his coffee, when the remark tumbles loose. It's easy enough to miss— except that he's too attentive, too watchful, trained for decades to observe. It's a small skip in the record, a blip which doesn't line up with the rest of the picture. His head tilts.
"He tell you that? I told you already, he's an unreliable witness." He finishes his sip of the coffee, and then thoughtfully considers his own death by pillow asphyxiation.
"It's only nice if I don't wake up and start struggling and fight back. So you'd probably have to trank me beforehand. Quadruple the dose. Maybe spike my coffee." This is closer to what she knew: the old brutality, the callous awareness of the best ways to kill someone, but with a sense of humour slathered on top of it. The kind of morbid joke he couldn't really make around Steve — Romanoff, though, knows exactly how peaceful suffocation is or isn't as a method of murder.
no subject
Natasha's thankful Bucky can't see her face, that she's tactfully placed her back to him. (She'd look at him for hours and hours if given the chance, study where the man she new ended and where this one began). She huffs a laugh. "Didn't you know Steve Rogers is the biggest gossip this side of the Atlantic?"
No, of course Steve hadn't told her. Not with that kind of familiarity, and she bites the inside of her own cheek in retaliation for her slip. But there he goes, speaking in the tongue of humorous violence that only they can understand. It makes her pause, toss her head over a shoulder to look at him, expression put back together save for the faintest flicker in her eyes. She's seen him come to life from the ice, waking and struggling and fighting. It's an image she will never forget.
"Trying to trank you would be like trying to herd cats. You're lucky Rogers likes you so well, or else we'd have a problem. Just means you'll have to be careful when I buy you coffee. If there's creamer in it, well, you'll at least know what's coming right?" A grin, wild and sly, much like the fox in winter waiting for its prey, or the spider, curled up against the cold, but welcoming a friend to the webby hearth.
no subject
He likes the sight of that smile; keeps wanting to crack another joke whenever he can, to draw it out again.
"Good thing I prefer my coffee black, anyway," Bucky says breezily. (A rusty kettle whistling on the stove; a mugful of shitty instant coffee, old Soviet brand.) "So, hey, you won't catch me off-guard, Romanoff."
He glances around as they keep walking. The streets are all jumbled together like someone spilled them haphazardly down the side of a hillside; the cramped, narrow roads are winding steadily upwards, where they can see over the rooftops and have an even better view of the town. He hadn't even noticed the elevation until the view started changing. "You ever spent much time in Romania?" he asks, and there's something vague and thoughtful in his voice, curiosity taking the place of the teasing.
Natasha is slippery. He's been trying — and mostly failing — to pin her down, learn things about this new erstwhile teammate, but it doesn't come easily.
no subject
"Don't be so sure, Barnes."
The coffee in her cup has gone lukewarm, half emptied, and she already misses the piping warmth against her palms. Sucking in a deep breath, she tilts her head toward him, brows raised. "Not much. Not long enough to sightsee."
Could they be a tourist couple, wandering the quiet, romantic streets and not fugitives trying their best to discover what being human really feels like? What might it feel like to curl up together in the plush bed of their hideaway? Would it be warmer, less threadbare than the little dacha bed they made their own all those years ago? Could something good come out of all the horrible shit they've been dealt from D.C. to now?
She lets out the breath, slow and steady, the wisps of condensation dancing around her face. She sounds far away when she speaks again, the carefully constructed walls slipping.
"Why?"
The Widow shouldn't have to ask why. She should already know.
no subject
Finally, he settles on: "When I was on the run the first time, after leaving HYDRA."
They're in a smaller and older Romanian town now, located further from the capital city, further off the beaten path. There's disappearing into bustling crowds and there's disappearing into quiet streets; he's already done the former and it had blown up in his face when a shopkeeper recognised him, and so for this particular safehouse, they're trying the latter on for size.
"Guess our kind of travel never really left time for sightseeing, though."
Our, he says, and he just means that common thread — as far as he knows, they were both assassins in separate programmes and that's as far as it went — but it brushes too close, again, to the truth. Two weathered red passport books, fake names printed carefully beside stern and dead-eyed ID photos, the Winter Soldier paying for their tickets while escorting his asset through train stations on their way to the Widow's next mission, her next kill.
They've traveled together before.
no subject
The air leaves Natasha's lungs at the simplest utterance of our, like the word itself burns white hot. Suddenly grateful for the lukewarm coffee, she raises it to her lips and drinks deeply, if only to give her a moment for her mind and body to stop reeling.
They spoke of travel in the dim light of early mornings in the dacha, in the cool of twilight where they hid behind walls, on every mission where he rode passenger to her. She dreamed they could travel away from it all, once upon a time - that there might be a way out if they waited and wanted long enough.
"We're sightseeing right now," she says finally on the huff of something that falls short of a laugh. Her stomach flips, sick and unsettled. The coffee must be to blame.
Slowing her pace and settling in stride beside him, she dares nudge him with an elbow where once upon a time she might have leaned into the strength of his metal shoulder. Gesturing with her coffee cup, she points out a small fountain, smothered in wintry frost, then her hand sweeps to the steeple of a quaint church ahead.
"There are sights, we're seeing them. We just participate in a different kind of tourism." Where all exits are, where cabs wait, how many alleys come to dead ends, what houses are abandoned...
"What would you want to see? If you could see anything."
If she closes her eyes she can see the little dacha hearth, the light flickering over her fingers as they trace the bare skin of his side, his hip, skin warm and sticky from exertion. She whispered the same question to him years ago, her body settled against his chest, between his thighs, where she felt safe to dream and dream and dream.
no subject
There's a long pause while he considers the question. It should be an easy one, but Bucky's been wrestling with it for a while.
"Brooklyn," he finally says. The simplicity of it. (The last time she'd asked this particular question, they hadn't even known that was where he came from, that long tangled thread winding its way back to his origin.) "I know there's too much heat in the States to go home just yet — I mean, hell, SHIELD's got a headquarters there, so that's the last place we'd want to be. But I still want to see how it's changed over the years. The last time I was there was in the 70s."
He had only gone back home one single time in all his years as the Winter Soldier. A senator successfully assassinated, and then he'd— lapsed. Missed his rendezvous. Instead wound up on a train to Chicago, a bus to New York City. Two weeks off-grid before HYDRA agents, dressed as the NYPD, had found him and hauled him back in. He had been confused and addled at the time, unable to explain why his wandering steps had carried him to that exact city, but he still remembered it now.
That was the last time he'd been allowed on US soil, until he was sent after Fury.
"How about you?"