Erotylos: love stones prompt list

Marble

A/N: Bucky and the reader are sent on a mission together, stationed at a lighthouse by the sea. She has a little accident but he takes care of her, as they try to avoid admitting what they feel for each other.

— PAIRING: soft!Bucky Barnes x female!Reader
— PROMPT: Marble - having to stay strong, and maintain self-control
— WORDCOUNT: 2k

💎💎💎

They were assigned to keep watch over that spot of coastline for about two weeks. They were at the tail-end of it now, and still had nothing to report. SHIELD said there were sightings of Hydra activity, but the area had been uninhabited for so long that reports were barely worth trusting. There was nothing consistent, or detailed, or even convincing, just weird rumours of lights on the water. Bucky and his partner kept watch day and night, but hadn't seen a soul around those barren rocks. The waves splashed against the shore, the night winds howled, and the resident seagulls — the rats of the sky — screeched all day.

"Bucky, come look at this," his partner said, interrupting him from thinking his grumpy thoughts and chopping the firewood. She sat on a stair at the base of the lighthouse, a rotten old place abandoned for decades that served as their base through the virtue of being the only construction for miles.

He huffed and wiped his brown on the way to her, but had no illusions about what it was. There wasn't any urgency in her voice, just gross curiosity.

"What is it?" asked Bucky, trying to spot what she was looking at.

"There, you see him?" She pointed to a crop of black rocks up ahead, on which only two of those nasty seagulls stood perched, and one of them seemed to be choking on something. "He's swallowing a whole rabbit."

"No way."

"Yeah, he caught him by the foot, knocked him against the rocks, and then started chugging him down head-first."

"That's disgusting..." he winced, joining her in staring dumbly at the bird. By now it was tilting its head down and swallowing slowly, before it stopped to take a breath, then swallowed a bit more until the whole rabbit was gone and the only hint of it was a swelling, going down, in the seagull's long neck.

"He's gonna be too fat to fly," she gasped with horror and amazement.

Bucky leaned across the railing and, in a whisper, asked, "You think it's the seagulls that got our Hydra agents?"

"Could be..."

They both watched on a little longer as the seagull waddled off with his friend, shaking its tail as if it did a little dance. Bucky smiled in spite of himself and looked off to the left, toward the sea. The sun was close to setting, and the water looked inky laced with grey. Tiny waves lapped at the shore, and in the distance, clouds rolled in. He had gotten used to the relentless sound of water and the wind that never ceased, so that by now he almost didn't notice them anymore, but there was still something bothering him, like something he knew he'd forgotten but couldn't figure out what.

"Come on inside, it's getting dark," he said after a while, looking back down at his partner.

The girl sighed and shrugged her shoulders, the movement barely noticeable through her stuffy jacket. Still, she didn't seem as bothered by that mission as he was, although she had just as much reason to be; her time was being wasted too, after all. She raised her hand and Bucky took it, helping her to get up slowly. Then hop-by-hop he led her in. She'd had a little accident a few days prior, when they were fixing a generator in the basement. She stepped through a piece of wood that was too rotten, and her ankle got a little sprained.