Bit of Bucky angst and spice in this one ;) don't worry y'all, I promise this is paving the way for Roki/Loara (what should their ship name be?)...
ROARA
It was now day 6 of being in Bucky's apartment. I had never been more bored in my entire life.
"Uno reverse." I said. Bucky sighed and slapped down 4 cards.
"All I'm saying is, you should get out more, maybe we could go around Central Park?" He flicked through his cards and signed. "I fold."
"You can't fold in uno Bucky. It's not poker."
"Well do you want to play poker then?" He asked.
"UGH!" I slammed my fist on the table, sending the cards flying. "I don't want to be like THIS anymore!"
"Well stop bitching about it then!" He yelled, going on all fours to pick up the cards.
"You stop bitching about me bitching about it!"
He sat back against the couch and looked at me. "This isn't working Ro. You've got to give me something."
I sighed. I knew he was right. I'd been getting more irritable by the day. I listened to the slight crackle of the old recording on the record player as the black disk turned slowly on Bucky's turn table. It was a jazz song, a song we both liked, a song we both knew from long ago. "I'm sorry. I just don't know how long I can take this. I feel like I'm going crazy."
"You're telling me." He raised an eyebrow. "Have you tried reading another book?"
"That's all I do when you're out." I looked at the toppled pile of books by the sitting room door. "I've read so many books."
"Have you been doing your leg exercises?" He rested his arms on his knees.
I nodded. "Yep."
There was a ring on the doorbell.
Bucky stood up with a groan. "I'll get it."
I heard him walk down the hallway and undo the latch.
"WE BROUGHT CHINESE!" Alina's cheerful voice carried into the living room.
"You also brought him." I heard Bucky say in an annoyed voice. "Where's Steve."
"C'mon man, I brought you dumplings, be nice." Sam replied.
"Steve couldn't make it." Alina walked in front of me, arms ladened with plastic bags which smelled glorious. "I can see my presence was needed."
I gave her a glare. "I am going insane Ali."
She fell onto the sofa next to me and patted my knee. "I'm not going to ask Fury again for you honey, you've just gotta wait this out."
Sam came in. "Hey, it's my flirty girl!" He tackled me in a hug, careful to avoid my ribs and my leg.
"Hey, I thought I was your flirty girl." Alina pouted.
"You two are both my flirty girls." He pulled a prawn cracker from Alina's bag. "But Roro has been flirting hard recently."
"Will you cut it out?" Bucky groaned. "You're in my apartment, isn't that enough to annoy me?"
"Sam, tell me what you haven't told me already! I want all the gossip." Alina whined.
"Okay, okay." Sam grinned and sat down on the floor, pulling a box of noodles towards him and cracking apart a pair of chopsticks. "Along with her usual flirting with, you know, Steve and Bucky and Loki-"
"You flirt with Steve?!" Alina asked, leaning towards me.
"And he flirts back!" Sam chuckled.
"Hey," I muttered as I pulled over a box of chicken noodles, "it's nothing it's just like a little flirting, we're friends."
"Like we're friends?" Bucky asked, the pop of his beer bottle opening breaking the silence after his question.
"No. Not like we're friends."
"Anyway," Sam said to break the tension, "I also caught her winking at that Agent, Simon Bridges, the other day."
Alina stopped her grinning. "I don't like that guy." She stabbed a piece of broccoli and shoved it angrily in her mouth.
"Neither do I." Bucky muttered, taking a sip on his beer.
"At least you two agree on something then." I said, looking between them. Bucky only agreed to Alina coming round because apparently Steve would be here too. I guessed he was going to be in a particularly bad mood this evening.
"Anything else you haven't told me Sam?" Alina asked innocently.
Sam glanced at me. Please don't talk about what happened with Loki. Please. For the love of God Sam.
"Uh," he looked at me again, "no, no that's about it. But still that's four guys."
"I thought I was the only one Steve flirted with." Alina sighed. "I guess I'm not so special."
Bucky finally grabbed a takeaway box. "Don't worry, he flirts with Natasha too."
Ali's face fell. "Awh shit, I thought she only flirted with me as well!"
Sam and I burst out laughing.
"Ali," Sam said through his cackles, "Nat flirts with everyone."
"How haven't you noticed this?" I asked.
Alina shrugged. "I dunno. I was busy paying attention to other things."
"Like Steve's abs." I said under my breath.
Alina punched me lightly on the arm.
"Hey, it's true." Sam said, hands up with a chopstick in each hand.
"They're nice abs!" She argued. "You don't see abs like those everyday."
Sam looked at Bucky and then at me. "Roara might."
I looked away. Bucky and I had not been sleeping together like that. I don't know if it was to do with the strange tension between us, or my injuries, but we hadn't even kissed properly since I'd come back.
After the meal we said our goodbyes to Alina and Sam and Bucky shut the door angrily. He did not like Alina, not even a little bit. He had a grudging respect for her, but that was where he drew the line. I didn't even need to explain about Sam.
"So." He came back into the room, hands firmly shoved in his back pockets.
"So." I replied.
"Yep." He picked up the glasses and took them over to the sink. I watched his hands carefully wash them up, dry them, and put them away.
"Bucky." I said. He turned away from me, busying himself in the kitchen.
"Bucky." I said again, slightly louder this time. Still no response.
I rose shakily to my feet. "James, look at me."
He turned, anger across his face. "Is what he said true?"
I leant on the side of the sofa for some support. "What do you mean?"
"Have you been flirting with all these other guys?"
"James-"
"Don't James me, have you?"
I looked down at my feet. "Yes."
He threw the tea towel he'd been holding down onto the floor. "God damn it Roara, why?"
"It's because you keep treating me like I'm some fragile thing, that could break in your hands at any moment!" I shouted. "And I'm not! Those other guys don't, and just because of this stupid leg injury-"
"It wasn't just a leg injury!" He screamed. "You nearly died! I watched your breathing slow on that table, and I thought you were a goner! You got impaled, you got poisoned Ro, I don't know what you don't understand about that?"
"You lost a fucking arm, I'm not going around acting as though it means you can't do anything for yourself."
"It's not the same thing, and you know it." He growled. "But that doesn't explain why the hell you feel the need to flirt with absolutely everyone?"
"Because that's the person I am James! I am flirty and cheeky and that's why you fell in love with me in the first place!" I yelled. I hadn't meant to say it. I groaned and put my face in my hands.
"What did you say?" He asked quietly.
I lowered myself back onto the sofa, my left leg aching. "I said," I blew out a long breath, "that's why you fell in love with me."
"I..." He breathed in deeply. "I care about you Roara, and I find you attractive, God do I find you attractive but I'm not in love with you."
It hit me like a bullet to the chest. I felt the breath knock itself out of me. I didn't even know why, because I knew I wasn't in love with him. I cared about him, definitely, but love? Love was a big deal. Love was a very big deal.
"I'm not referring to now." I said quietly, looking at my hands in my lap. "I'm talking about back then."
He came to sit beside me on the sofa. "You're talking about 1942 aren't you?"
I nodded.
"There's something you've not been telling me, isn't there?"
I looked up at him, and I could feel my eyes begin to prickle. "We were a bit more than maybe what you remember."
"What I know is that we kissed, and we were good friends, and that I liked you. I don't remember anything else." He looked me dead in the eyes.
"Yeah..." I looked down. "It was more than that." I took in a deep breath. "Oooh. Okay. Uh. Remember when I said, back at the cells, that we were nothing? Well, that wasn't wrong. But it was more that we amounted to nothing. You, uh, you asked me to marry you."
"And what did you say?" He asked me quietly.
I wiped my eyes. "I said yes." My voice sounded completely defeated, empty, void of emotion.
"Why didn't you tell me?" His voice was soft, his words gentle, but I could tell he was angry.
"Because I wasn't ready to have that conversation. Because I'm not that girl anymore, I'm not Hazel. I liked what we were, I liked that there were no expectations. I didn't want to have to say that we'd been engaged for nearly a hundred years and that nothing was going to come of it, at least not in the foreseeable future." I wiped my eyes again, feeling completely pathetic.
"And if I asked you again today, what would you say?"
I groaned, still staring at my lap. "I'd probably say no."
I heard him suck in a breath. "Well that's good because I wouldn't ask you again. We had sex, we didn't promise each other anything. I care about you, a lot, but that doesn't mean I want to be with you like that."
I bit my lip, trying hard to not let the tears fall. I didn't know why the words hurt so much, but they really really did. First Loki, and now Bucky? I supposed that was a greedy way of thinking about things, but I couldn't help it. I was used to rejecting people, I'd done it all my life, turning away advances and offers to buy me drinks and hands at dances. And now the two men I'd really loved were telling me one after the other that they no longer felt the same. I knew it had been a long time since they'd first cared about me, and in that time it's easy to fall out of love, but that didn't stop the heartache that came with the sudden realisation that the people you loved didn't love you. Because I wasn't in love with Bucky, but I did love him I realised. Just not like that. Perhaps I'd assumed he was still in love with me, because that's how things had left off. It was a stupid thing to assume.
"I told you, the night of the party," he said more consoling now, "when you asked if I was the person you deserved to be with. I said no. I didn't just mean that because of the things I've done, although that was part of it. I meant that you deserve to be with someone who can be with you, who loves you completely. You won't find that here."
I nodded. I knew that. We were never together, so why did this feel so much like breaking up? But we weren't breaking up, we weren't doing that at all. We were just two friends, having a conversation with each other.
"I would go to the ends of the earth for you, you know that right? You're one of my closest friends." He lifted my chin very gently to look at me. "But you're right. We're not how we were."
"It feels like our entire relationship is built on our history." I whispered. "Not the present." I thought about what he'd said to me, on the rooftop. That I would always be Hazel from Italy to him.
"I know." His blue eyes were piercing when they looked at my own, his jawline chiseled like a sculpture, his lips a deep shade of red.
"And we're not anything more than close friends." I realised I no longer wanted to cry. This felt far more like relief, like a massive weight had been lifted. As though I'd finally understood why everything had felt a little forced since I'd returned. Because when I'd returned we'd been thrust into the present. Nothing like a near death experience to remind you of reality. But quickly I realised I felt a deep hunger inside of me. I thought of Loki's fingers wrapped around my wrist, of my hand on his jaw. I thought of Bucky, no James' hand in my hair, on my back.
"We're not. We're not more than close friends." He agreed. There was a word for this kind of look. It was called opia. It was the feeling you got when you made complete eye contact with someone, where it felt both vulnerable and invasive. And our eyes were not moving from each other's.
"So why do I really want to kiss you right now?" I murmured, never once breaking eye contact.
"I don't know, but I feel like I should ask you the same thing."
I didn't even have time to register his words or his hands on my face before his lips were on mine and we were kissing. He wasn't acting as though I was fragile anymore. Not in the slightest. And that was hot as fuck. His hands were gripped tightly on my waist, pulling me into him. My heartbeat was racing, my hands in his hair.
"This is a really bad idea." I muttered as the kiss broke.
"I know." He kissed me again, hands tugging at the bottom of my t-shirt.
I lifted my arms up above my head as he pulled my top off me. "We're just friends right, we've discussed this properly now."
"Yeah," he tossed my t-shirt to the side, "just friends." His hands were on my neck, lips pressed to my jaw.
"So you don't care if I flirt with other guys?" I wasn't sure if I was out of breath from kissing him, or from the adrenaline that was causing.
He paused and leant back a bit, eyes darkening. Was he... jealous?
"Roara..." He rasped.
"Yeah?"
"Just shut up and kiss me, okay?"
"Yeah, okay, I can do that." I grabbed his face and kissed him, his words ringing in my ears, tugging at a memory that I pushed away.
I spent too much time thinking about the past with James. I needed to think about the present, about right now, about my lips pressed to his neck and the groan that was escaping his mouth. I needed to think about how our clothes were all over his apartment, about the giggles we were sharing over trying to work with the cast on my leg, about how at one point he stopped to turn the record over so the song could keep playing. I needed to think about how our gasps and moans were mixing perfectly with the cadence of the soft jazz, about the taste of summer heat and the sweat on our skin, about the way everything felt exciting because we knew we shouldn't be doing this and it was so so wrong but at the same time it felt so very right because in this moment we needed this. We needed each other. Just one last time, I told myself, I need him like this just one last time. Because I was hungry, insatiably hungry, and nothing was filling that hunger but right now it was eating away at me just a little bit less.
I tried not to think about Loki's palm pressed onto mine, about his green eyes, about my 19th birthday when I was so close to pulling him to me and pressing my lips to his. I tried not to think about the way his arms held me so close to him as he carried me through the forest, about how he would talk to me about Asgard over the camp fire in the cave, about his shaking hands ripping my clothes off me in the clearing to look at my injury. I tried not to think about how I could feel his eyes on me as I took my clothes off before stepping into the river even though I'd told him to turn around, about the way he gave me butterflies in the pit of my stomach when he winked at me, about the the way he would throw both of his knives into the air and caught them again with such confidence. I tried not to think about him braiding my hair, all those years ago. I tried so hard. I really did.
We rested my head on Bucky's chest, feeling his heart thump under my cheek, out of breath and exhausted.
"What did I say?" His voice was quiet, slightly raspy from being breathless. "When I asked you to marry me?"
I paused halfway through drawing a pattern on his chest with my finger. "You said you wanted to take me back to Brooklyn, and take me to all the dance halls. That we'd get an apartment together, when the war was over." I looked up at him. "I don't believe in marriage though."
"You don't?" I winced at the question. We'd talked about it a lot before his memory had been wiped. "Another thing I don't remember talking about?"
"Yeah." I sighed. "It's partly because, well, I've lived a very long time and anyone I marry I'd have to live without some day. I didn't say that of course. I just don't think that you need to do that to be with someone permanently. But to me the till death do us part bit, it was very literal."
"I can see that. I say anything else?"
I chuckled. "You did mention getting a taste for English girls. You and Steve might have a similar type in that regard."
"Well the accent is pretty sexy." He muttered defensively.
"You don't need to tell me that." I closed my eyes. "I wish your AC would work."
"It's always been broken." He told me. "I gotta take a leak."
"Eww, you don't have to say it like that." I opened my eyes and sat up. "I might as well get into bed. I can take a shower tomorrow."
"You sure you don't want one now?" He raised an eyebrow.
I pointed to my leg. "Logistically it's pretty annoying."
He groaned. "I guess."
I leant down and gave him a small peck. "I'll see you later." I got up and stretched, taking the few laboured steps it took to get to the bedroom door. I glanced around my shoulder.
He had one arm over the back of the sofa, and he was watching me as I walked. Suddenly my confidence vanished, and I was incredibly self conscious of absolutely everything, from my scars to my leg.
"Why are you watching me?" I asked.
He shook his head and looked away, confirming my fears.
"Night." I said, opening the bedroom door.
"I'll see you in a few minutes Ro." He reminded me, getting off the sofa.
"Yeah, but I intend to be asleep by then." I chuckled. "Goodnight James."
"Goodnight." He replied.
I shut the door behind me and pulled on an oversized T-shirt, carefully lowering myself into bed and pulling the sheets over me. It was a hot night, even with the window open. I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. Damn. The windows had been open. The neighbours certainly heard something. Ah well, free entertainment I supposed.
I felt the weight of Bucky's body move into the bed beside me. He didn't hold me as he went to sleep, and I was somewhat glad of that. We shouldn't pretend to be a couple if we weren't one. In his sleep though Bucky shifted and turned, an arm lazily snaking around my middle and pulling me into him. I knew that I would wake up that morning, as I had every other morning, thinking I was back in the cave. Thinking his body was Loki's. And like every other morning I had to remind myself that Loki didn't have feelings for me anymore, and he had only held me for body heat. And now I had to remind myself that Bucky too didn't have feelings for me. That he was just a friend, a complicated friendship it was going to be, but a friend nevertheless.
It was going to be a long recovery.