Certainty (A Bucky Barnes Fanfic)

━◦○◦5.4: Slow Dancing◦○◦━

Sam whacked his leg with his shoe, then tossed it at the door. Bucky, Sarah, and Shamara laughed.

"Of course," Sarah gestured to the kitchen. "Hope you don't mind Cajun food."

"Love it," Bucky took off his boots.

"I don't know what that is," Shamara smiled sheepishly.

"Soul food, but make it very Louisana. African, French, and Hispanic styles altogether," Sarah grabbed shrimp out of the fridge. "If you like seafood and spice, you'll like it."

"Sounds good to me."

They were silent for a moment as Sam and Bucky went to get cleaned up. Sarah gathered vegetables and passed them to Shamara to chop up.

"So," Sarah filled a pitcher of water. "I think I guess the tragic backstory."

"Probably," Shamara chuckled, pausing to wipe her hands off and fix her hair.

"But how about now? You start thinkin' about what you want?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know. Do you have an idea of what job you want? Where you want to live?" Sarah stood beside her again, lifting her eyebrows. "Family?"

Shamara's stomach flopped, and she looked down. The kitchen was silent for a moment as they kept working. The sunset grew in color, filling the kitchen with pink and purple light.

"I haven't had much chance to think about it," Shamara slowly admitted. "But . . . I know I don't want to keep living in New York. I grew up in a village, and small towns like this hold my heart. I have thought about doing something with Arabic, maybe some basic self-defense training courses for other women, but if it is a small town -."

"Small towns can be as dangerous as cities. I'm sure you'd find a market," Sarah took the onions Shamara had finished cutting. "And what about family?"

Shamara hesitated again, wiping her eyes from the onion acid, "I would love having a family again. But I don't know how reasonable it is for me to expect it."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, in terms of marriage, I . . . I don't know. It is hard for me to trust that something won't go wrong in the beginning stages of a relationship. I don't trust mere feelings, and that makes it very frustrating to have feelings for me."

Sarah laughed, "First, some guys like that. Second, ones who care about you deeply prove it with time."

Bucky had proved it. Over and over, so why was she still so scared of admitting her feelings? Part of it was she was dying, of course. But shouldn't that have made her more reckless? Want to tell him everything and hold onto him while she could?

"Do you want kids?" Sarah stirred in a whole bunch of spices.

" . . . I think so. But I might be too . . . broken to care for kids well," Shamara scraped the rest of the vegetables into the stew.

Sarah rubbed her shoulder, "If you had told me I would have to live through the deaths of all my other family and have two little boys to bring up despite it all . . . I would've thought the same thing. Motherhood ain't about us, Shamara. It's about loving selflessly, much like marriage is."

Shamara bit her lip, her heart racing. She leaned against the counter as Sarah kept working.

She kept thinking she needed certainty to tell Bucky how she felt but was that inauthentic? She knew better than most how uncertain the world was. So if uncertainty wasn't the core of her fear, what was?"