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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It was quiet here. Slow, gentle, soft.
The life Kat had become accustomed to over the last year melted away in those first few days spent by the riverside. All of those months of scrambling between safehouses and raids, leaping from country to country, the need to always keep moving to appease the constant presence of adrenaline in her bloodstream... It was given time to fade here.
Nobomi and her sons kept her busy when she needed it. Chores and meals kept her hands and thoughts occupied when they itched for distraction, but it was never expected. If she needed to simply sit and stare at the river, she could. She knew she wouldn't be disturbed, even if the tip of her nose glowed with a rosy, sunburnt hue most evenings when she returned to the shade of her hut after she forgot about sitting in the sun too long. She was sure Shuri would scold her when she saw it, but it didn't really matter right now.
If she needed to spend a few minutes pacing the other, empty hut on the farm, she could. Telling herself she was readying the space for him, for Bucky, when he at last arrived, but in truth there was little she could do. Almost a carbon copy of her own living space, from the colourful woven curtain over the doorway down to the comfortable collection of blankets piled upon a sleeping mat on one side of the single room, there was little she could see that needed changed. Even the tiny glimpses of modernisation that were scattered around the room were presented so subtly that she couldn't imagine they would distress him. The few charging ports, the underfloor heating controls that made life outside the city just as comfortable as within it, little enough of them needed hidden further than they already were. Little enough, except for the cloth she had draped over the small mirror hanging on the curved wall, remembering the shattered expanse of glass he had left in his room in the palace. She knew his temperament well enough to guess that it hadn't been blind rage that had driven his fist through the surface, but rather his feelings towards his own reflection.
That was where she had been, when he arrived. Absently folding and refolding the blankets on the bed set aside for him, trying to figure out how many he'd prefer when the low light of the early evening had spilled into the hut as the curtain lifted.
Looking up, she had expected to see Nobomi or one of the boys – or even Ayo – summoning her for a meal, but instead she froze under the wide-eyed gaze of a pair of startlingly blue eyes.
For a fleeting second, she stood locked in place, her breath thickening in her throat to form a lump at his unexpected appearance, every cell of her body seeming to react to his presence as the hairs on her arms prickled in the warm air.
Before he looked away, as if that brief second of locking eyes with her had physically burned him, and she was able to blink again. To take in the fact that he was really here.
Involuntarily, her eyes dropped to his left shoulder. Expectantly, as if the removal of the metal plating would be apparent even through the thick fabric draped over the place where that limb had once been. It wasn't, of course. If she hadn't known, she would have never guessed that anything was different beneath those folds of red and blue woven cloth, but the dark, bruise-like shadows that she had glimpsed beneath his eyes betrayed enough.
