Return | Bucky Barnes | Book Two | Marvel Cinematic Universe

Chapter 12

"I miss you."

The small, vulnerable whisper passed her lips before she could stop it. She hadn't even thought those three words before they were out, but now they were. The silence broke, for just a second, but the cold hand clasping her heart didn't release its grip.

His fingers flexed slightly in his hair as her words unsettled the tomblike atmosphere of the room, a low, shuddering breath escaping him – the only sign Kat could detect that he had heard her – before he stilled again. That stony composure creeping over his skin once more, locking her out.

"You shouldn't be here."

The fist clutching her heart tightened its grip at his strained, painful words. His voice was tired, as if he had screamed himself hoarse and then kept going. But he had spoken. He had spoken to her.

"You didn't ask me to leave."

"I know."

Kat could almost hear the full stop at the end of each statement. The finality, the unmoving nature of their words – and how wrong they felt. How far removed they were from the tender, heartfelt whispers they had shared when he had woken. She didn't know how to fix it, but his head lifted slightly in the pause that followed his last words. "If... If you knew..." He sighed, his hand untangling from his hair and falling limply between his knees, the passive lighting of the cityscape outside catching briefly on the faint, healing cuts on his knuckles, confirming how the mirror had been broken. "If you knew what they made me forget... If you know what I know now... You'd run. You'd get as far from me as you could."

"It's nothing we didn't already suspect." Kat tried to reason softly, her hands curling into fists in her pockets, her nails digging into her palms. "We always knew Karpov might have given that order." The name left a bitter taste in her mouth, but she wouldn't let herself avoid saying it. She wouldn't give a dead man that power over her.

"You don't..." Bucky trailed off, sucking in a sharp breath of air, as if that would give him the nerve to continue; "You don't know... It didn't even come back until I'd gotten you out of the room, but... Kat if he'd... If you'd been pulled out of stasis- if I'd even laid eyes on you... What I had been ordered to do to make Stage Two happen..." His words stung like an open wound, and the words he left unsaid ached even more sharply. The details he couldn't bring himself to tell her, details she hardly dared to imagine, clearly had shaken him to the very core of his being. Enough to make him afraid to even look at her.

"You didn't." She reminded him softly, trying to fight past the tremor in her voice. "You would never hurt me, Bucky."

"But the Soldier would." He hissed out through clenched teeth. "The Soldier would – and until every last thread of programming is unravelled from my head..." His hand returned to his brow, as if he could physically pull the orders from his mind; "I can't... I can't risk it, Kat. I can't..."

"Bucky, all that time we spent together- we were careful, you never once-"

"You don't understand." He cut her off sharply, in a way he hadn't done before. At least, not in the time she had truly known him. Not since she had found him in Poland, when he had seen her as a threat. As his enemy. "Kat I- my head- I feel like I'm walking on ice, and every goddamn step I take towards you..." He gritted his teeth audibly, the muscles of his back flexing beneath his shirt as he warred with his words, trying to make her see through the fog of confusion and heartache that was clouding her vision. "It feels like if I take one wrong step, we're both dead. Or worse."

Inhaling a shaking breath as his words slammed into her, Kat tipped her head back against the wall, blinking aggressively in an attempt to will the tears in her eyes to vanish. He wouldn't see them anyway, but she couldn't bear to let them fall. He was already so afraid of hurting her, she couldn't bring herself to allow him to feel the guilt of hurting her in this way too. She knew, she knew in the depths of her soul, she would do anything to prevent him feeling that fear, that guilt any more than he already did, which was possibly how she found the will to utter her next words.