verb.
To come or go back to a place or person.
noun.
The firing of a weapon to counter a shooter's shot.
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They recoiled from their pasts, and in doing so found each other.
But the universe isn't kind enough to let a moment of peace last.
It took se...
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Bucky had forgotten how magnetic Kat was when she worked. Somewhere between those early days in Siberia, when his listless eyes had followed her like a single spark in the darkness around workshops and cold labs, and the years that had followed with growing warmth, he had forgotten. How he had watched skilled fingers dance over unforgiving metal and coax it to bend to her will, soft expressions of curiosity furrowing to frustration and easing again as she overcame a problem, smiles and pursed lips and teeth dragged thoughtfully over flushed skin. He hadn't realised at the time, but he knew it now. He loved watching her work.
She had come a long way from those freezing Soviet workshops buried beneath the earth in Siberia though. There were similarities, of course. Once again, they found themselves below miles of rock, this time nestled within the heart of a mountain in Wakanda. The crackling, intermittent radio that had once provided the backing track to her thoughtful hums and the clatter of tools on workbenches was replaced by Shuri's more sophisticated sound system, the seamless vibrations of thumping electric guitar uninterrupted by her hands drumming upon the sleek worksurface before her. Her head bobbed rhythmically with the sound, her lips silently forming lyrics he had perhaps heard before, maybe in a cosy apartment in Amsterdam, but she knew them better than he did. Her eyes remained focused on the object before her though, despite the distraction of the auditory input.
He had only seen it in projections up until this point. It had been something abstract, it hadn't quite been real. Just something that lingered in the fog of the future, something Kat was idly working on without the pressure of a deadline. Something they would approach in time when they were ready. When he was ready. Unhurried, unmotivated by everything that had driven the previous incarnation of that object.
Limb. He shouldn't be thinking of it as an object, it was a limb. A left arm. His left arm.
Its sudden unveiling had been jarring. Perhaps it had needed to be, to shock them out of that gentle rhythm they had slipped into. It was surprising how quickly his mind had shifted. There had been the briefest moment of grief, a backwards glance at the months of calm he was stepping away from, but that melancholy was sobered by the knowledge that it was necessary. If he lingered in that peace they had found, it would be destroyed. That was what T'Challa had made clear. The threat was on its way. It wasn't out there, something abstract occurring elsewhere in the world. It was coming to them, to Wakanda. Something that would shatter this peace, this sanctuary they had found. That was something worth protecting, something worth fighting for, perhaps in the hope they could return to it when the danger had passed, but that meant facing the fight first.
This fight that was so, so much bigger than them. Cosmically bigger. But he couldn't quite wrap his head around those sparse details yet. The full briefing would come, before they were lined up to face this, but right now all that they had to focus on was preparing themselves.
For now, they had to set aside any thoughts of fear and trepidation, and simply focus on the task at hand. That in itself was a relief, the permission to shove aside anything that didn't exist in this moment. Everything else could wait.
