The Hurt And The Healing: Bucky X OC

Chapter Seventy Five: Communication, Consummation, and Colloquialisms

If you had asked Mara during spring of the previous year where she thought she would be in twelve months, the answer probably would have been "exactly where I am now." She would have said that nothing in her life would be different, and that was for the best because her life was fine. She had Nonna, her job, and a place to lay her head every night. And she would have been determined to believe that that was more than enough.

But it wasn't more than enough. In fact, it wasn't even close to enough. Ten years ago, before everything went wrong, she had been alive. She had been bursting at the seams with thoughts and feelings and love. So much love. Each year had held the promise of change for the better, and she had looked to the future with hope. And then change had come. And it had taken Alex and her mother and her father. And suddenly change wasn't a good thing anymore. So she made her life stagnant. She worked the same job at the same hospitals. She watched the same shows in the same living room with the same person. And if change ever threatened to come and upend her routine life, she chased it off with a baseball bat. Because when there was nothing going on in her life she could get away with feeling nothing.

And then James Barnes came crashing in with his constantly changing world, and she couldn't get away from him fast enough. Her perfectly controlled environment was upended by his chaotic life, and before she knew it she was feeling everything all over again. The adrenalin, the excitement, the fear, the pain- all of it at once. He made her feel again. And when he was gone and she had the chance to go back to the cold nothing she couldn't do it. When she was with him, she was alive. And she couldn't pretend that she had been alive before him.

So now here they were, her life nothing like what it had been or what she had predicted. She committed her heart to a man she had known for less than half a year simply because she couldn't bear the thought of not loving him. She moved out of her apartment and in with Bucky after spending a single afternoon furniture shopping. She adopted a cat who had leapt through their window without even taking the creature to the vet for a check up. She laughed and tried new things and flirted and went to therapy- all because of him.

And if he was her chaos, she was his stability. They made a life for themselves, a life with little routines that grew without prompting. Like the way they talked about their days as she made dinner and he set the table. Or how he brewed her coffee in the morning when she was getting ready to leave for work and he was still winding down from his patrols. And Alpine always slept between them, her little snores and purrs their compensation for accepting that their bed was now her's and they were just lying in it.

It wasn't the life Mara had ever envisioned for herself. But it was a life. And as she sat at her kitchen table and looked around while Nonna asked her about everything and nothing, Mara realized that she was happy.

"You really should invest in a good china set," Nonna advised her, not noticing that her granddaughter hadn't said a word in the past five minutes. "I know your generation doesn't believe in that sort of thing, but if you maintain it then it gains value. And besides, it's a lovely thing to leave your children when the time comes."

Mara sighed and swirled her cup of coffee.

"I think we still have some time to go before we're worrying about what to leave our children," she reminded the old woman with a smile. "We've only been together for four months."

"Has it really been that little?" Nonna exclaimed.

"It's four months this Friday if we're counting from when we became a couple back in the cabin," she replied with a nod. "If we're counting from when we met it's more, but that doesn't seem right."

"No, no I don't think you can count from when you two first met. You couldn't stand him back then!" Nonna teased. Mara laughed but couldn't argue.