ALINA
"Stop moving." Bucky's voice was gruff and impatient.
"I'm trying but it really," I bit down on my lip and closed my eyes, "it really stings."
He was dealing with the burn Wheel had dealt me on the top of my arm, which had gone through my jacket and shirt. It was enflamed now, massive blisters running across the top of my shoulder, going near my neck. The skin was raw and angry.
"It would be easier if you took this off." He pointed to my sports bra.
I leant away from him. "Not in your wildest dreams Barnes."
"It's not because I want to see you naked, it's because the skin is going to stick to it, and it'll be a lot less painful if you took it off now rather than when your body's begun to merge-"
"Fine." I spat. I got up and walked to the kitchen, pulling a knife out of a drawer and making a careful cut at the top of my bra, peeling away the material from just the top of my shoulder so I could keep most of the bra on. "This is not ideal." I muttered, sitting back down.
"You're telling me?" He shook his head as he continued to carefully dab anti-septic onto my shoulder. "Only person I'd like to be stuck with less is that ass Wilson."
"Hey don't hate on my buddy." I tried not to wince. "He's a decent guy."
Bucky shook his head. "I'm going to have to take the skin off the blisters."
"I thought you weren't supposed to pop them?"
He sighed. "You're not, but we can't go to a hospital or they'll find us. You're lucky this is only bad second degree, if that blast was any hotter and you'd need skin grafts."
"Great." I muttered. "You're not going to mutilate me right?"
"I wish." He grunted, beginning to sterilise a needle. "You've got some burns on your face too."
"Oh." I hadn't realised. "Must have been from the explosion."
"Anything on your legs?" He asked.
I had been so concentrated on my broken ankle and the massive cut on my leg, as well as everything that had happened to my top half, that I hadn't even thought about surface wounds on my legs. I'd never been wounded worse. This was agony. I was definitely going to be left with some war scars.
"I haven't checked." I admitted. "Probably. My ankle's been smashed and I've got a massive cut on my leg."
"Jesus Alina, you really went hard today." He shook his head again. "You could have been killed."
"I know." I said quietly. "I was there."
He sat back and looked at me. "You've got to be more careful. I'm going to need to stitch up your arm wound from earlier too."
"And my leg." I sighed. "And my chest." The cut on my chest was just above where my sports bra ended, and the one Aditi had fixed was just below. "Wheel stabbed me with his staff twice. The second time it went all the way through me. I thought I was really done for then. Somehow Aditi was able to..."
"Able to?" He asked, beginning to remove the burnt skin from my shoulder. "Keep talking."
I grimaced. "This really fucking hurts." I whispered.
"Keep talking Stark." He ordered.
"She," I took a sharp intake of breath as he removed another blister, "she somehow was able to tap into my healing power. Neither of us understand it."
Bucky swiped some more anti-septic onto my shoulder, making me grip the side of the couch for support. It burnt like hell.
"Try swearing." He told me. "It helps with pain."
"Mother fucking, piece of bullshit, Jesus on a bike sucking off your, AHH, sucking off your mom." I panted, resting my head on the back of the sofa. I bit my lip as tears of pain began trickling down my cheek. "Sorry." I muttered.
"It's fine." He replied casually. "Normally you'd have gas and air with this, it's painful."
"You can say that again." I laughed dryly. "You're more talkative today."
He snorted. "Only because if I stop talking you stop talking and then you'd be screaming and I don't want to deal with that."
"So you're taking my mind off it?" I asked.
He nodded mutely.
"Great." I muttered. "That's just, mmmm, just great." I groaned as he took off another blister. "How many left?"
"Just one, and then I'm going to stitch up your arm." He shrugged.
"Fuck's sake." I pressed my forehead harder into the soft padding of the couch.
"You know who you sound like?"
"Who."
"Roara." He said bitterly. I'd nearly forgotten how close they had been. "She used to swear like a sailor."
"Used to?" I pushed.
He pulled the last of the blisters off. "Haven't you noticed the way she speaks is different? I thought you guys were best friends?"
"I wasn't really focusing on that." I shrugged slightly. "But I suppose. She's a lot more formal now." I thought about it. He was right. The way she held herself was different, the way she spoke was different. "The thing I really don't understand," I said as he applied the burn dressing to my shoulder, "is why she would burn the forest?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well," I glanced at my patched up shoulder and the medical needle and thread in Bucky's hands, "she loves nature. Absolutely adores it. Probably from her mom. But she would never ever harm it, she was fuming when she saw that they'd cut trees down to make the prison. According to the others she found adjusting to life in NYC difficult because it was all concrete and didn't have enough greenery."
"Her favourite place in the city was Central Park." He added.
"Yeah, exactly." I nodded slowly, gripping onto the sofa harder as he began to stitch. "She doesn't seem...herself."
"And then Bruce attacked us." Bucky agreed.
"Huh?"
"They dropped the Hulk from their helicopter and he started attacking us. Aditi and Wanda together had to get him to be himself. Aditi turned him back into Banner and then Wanda had to do something with his mind but I wasn't close enough to know what it was. Before that he began strangling Aditi." He informed me, his voice practically monotone.
"Wow." I blew out a breath. "Pent up anger over Fiona's death, or something else?"
"I don't think he'd ever do that if he were in his right mind. I don't know the guy well but..."
"He's not like that." I finished.
Bucky nodded in agreement. He pushed the needle back into my arm.
"Ow!"
"Keep still." He hissed. "I'm trying to help." He roughly grabbed my chin and turned me to look at him. "Do you want this to get infected?" I shook my head. "Do you want it to keep bleeding?" I shook my head again. "Are you a pussy?" I shook my head once more. "Then do. Not. Move." He went back to my arm, tying the knot in the stitch and making going back in once more with the needle.
"Where did you learn this?" I asked quietly.
"When I worked with Hydra as the Winter Soldier." He replied in a brash tone. "If you're going to stay with the avengers after this you'll probably need to learn at some point too."
"I actually think I want to go back and finish my degree."
He looked up at me. "You do?"
I nodded. "Uh huh."
"What's your degree?" He asked, looking back at my arm.
I swallowed. "I major in electrical engineering and physics. Might go on to do a doctorate. I missed a lot when I was imprisoned though."
"I know what that feels like." He finished off the stitching. "Nearly 80 years of missing things."
"I suppose you know what it's like to get your memory wiped too." I look a lot at the neat stitching in my arm. "But you had a lot more taken from you."
"It doesn't take away what you went through." He inspected my chest wound. "I think we can get away with butterfly stitches on this, it's not too deep." He got out a small packet and began to pull my skin together, placing the small adhesive strips in neat little lines across my front.
As he finished I leant across him to medical box and pulled out some cotton wool pads and the anti-septic liquid. I unscrewed the top and pressed the cotton ball to the bottle, turning it upside down for a moment, before putting the bottle back on the small table beside us.
"Come here." I said, steadying his face in my slender fingers. "You need looking after too." I whispered, pressing the soaked cotton ball to the cut on his cheekbone. It felt weird to be this close to him, to be speaking so quietly even when there was no one else about. He made no movement. I glanced into his eyes, which were concentrated on my face. I couldn't help but look at those sky blue eyes. They drew you in. I could understand why Roara had liked him so much. He was harsh and abrasive, but underneath it all he had a caring heart. I cleared my throat and looked away. I took another pad and pressed it to the bridge of his nose. He took a hold of my hand.
"I can do this." He reminded me.
"I know." I shrugged. "But you don't have to. Let me take a look at you." I sat back on the sofa. I took a small cloth and soaked it in warm water, pressing it to the grazes across his stomach. "I didn't realised you'd got beaten up so bad."
"Yeah well the Ascendency don't play nice." He muttered. "Roara nearly went in for the kill at one point."
"Why didn't she?" I breathed, moving the cloth across his front.
He let out a small, harsh laugh. "I don't know. She could have. But there was a look that went across her face when I said something and she stopped for just long enough for me to get back on my feet."
"What did you say?" I asked, my voice now a whisper to match his volume.
He sighed, running a hand through his hair. "I called her Hazel. I said you'll always be my beautiful girl, in Russian. You'll always be my beautiful girl Hazel even if you kill me." He shrugged. "And her face changed just for a second, and she lowered her sword."
I squinted at him, taking my hand away. "Did she look like she was really confused? Like she was scared and in pain and confused all at the same time?"
He frowned. "How did you know?"
I lowered the cloth and wrung it out in my hands. "The same thing happened when Locke called her 'my love'. It's as though certain words of affection trigger... something. I'm not sure what. Turn around, I have to do your back."
"You don't have to-"
"Turn around Barnes before I make you." I snapped. He groaned and turned around. "Jesus Bucky, what the fuck happened to your back?" There was a massive thick line across it, the skin raw and red. I shook my head and picked the cloth up again, swirling it around in the warm water, and pressing it on his back. "This'll take one big bandaid."
"Don't worry about it."
"If you tell me what to do one more time I will slap you."
He laughed then, properly, so much that I could see his back shaking. "You really have an attitude problem, you know that?"
"And you have a staring problem, looks like we're evenly matched."
"I don't have a-"
"Half the time I see you, you're staring at me as though you want to kill me. I'd say that's a staring problem." I threw the cloth down. "All done."
He pulled on a sleeveless undershirt and turned back around to face me, his eyes raking over my face. "Let's fix your leg now."
I got to lie down on the sofa, eating some warmed up but very old tinned soup, while Bucky sanitised and then stitched up my leg. He took off the splint Tony had put on my ankle. He'd given me only a small glance as the bandages had come off. It was hard to look at my right foot. It was swollen to the point that it no longer looked remotely how an ankle or foot should look. Luckily there was some old numbing cream which helped take the edge off it. This was the longest I'd ever spent alone with the man, and I was coming to realise Bucky spoke far more through his eyes than he did through his words. His facial expressions and small body movements were the key to understanding what he was thinking. He rarely seemed to actually vocalise his thoughts, which was the opposite to the people I tended to spend time around. Tony had practically no filter, Steve liked to be straightforward, Nat let you know what you needed to know. Roara didn't hold anything back. I realised I surrounded myself with people who spoke their minds. Now Nat and I didn't really speak anymore after that stupid kiss. Tony had been captured. Roara was insane. And Steve, lovely, kind, thoughtful Steve was god knows where in God knows what condition.
The only thing that kept my from crying out as Bucky assessed the damage to my ankle was the thought of his soft lips on mine, and how safe I felt in his arms as he had carried me through the dusty wreckage of the prison. How tightly he had held onto me. How I'd never wanted to leave his arms. It was a gentle love, a love that had crept up on me, but now I had kissed him it was undeniable. I really liked him. He was dependable, and I needed dependable. I realised that when I'd been screaming at Bucky about needing to be there for Roara in her darkest times, I was also screaming for myself. Nobody was there for me in my darkest times, unless you counted Loki and for some reason I rarely did. Perhaps because once I was out of that shit hole he'd backed into the shadows, understanding he was no longer vital for my survival, that he had served his purpose in my life. But Tony hadn't even realised I was missing. My parents were gone. I needed someone who could ground me, and for me that was Steve.
"You must have put some real strength into this." Bucky jerked me out of my thoughts of Steve.
"Huh?"
"I said you must have really put some strength behind these blows. You've shattered your ankle. It'll need reconstructing, probably need an artificial joint in here if you ever want to walk properly again." He shook his head and began dressing my foot and ankle. "You must have been desperate."
"I was." I admitted. "I was trapped and the thing stopping me from pulling my foot out was that bone and the direction of my foot. I was stuck under a wall and a pipe had burst. Everything was filling with water. If I stayed a few minutes longer I'd have been drowning."
"You took a risk."
"A calculated one." I corrected. "I always think things through."
"Did you think through kissing my best friend?" He didn't look at me as he spoke.
"Bucky," I sighed and rubbed my face. "Yes. I did. In a way. We don't have to like each other for us to be on at least amiable terms. You're his best friend and I'll never take that away from you, I don't want to." I thought of Roara, and how I barely recognised her now, and it wasn't anything to do with the way she looked. When I looked at her face I no longer saw my best friend. "But Steve means a lot to me. He makes me feel safe and loved and he never expects anything in return."
In response Bucky shot me one of his favourite glares.
I let out a long groan. "Yes, okay, I did return it. And I'm not sorry, so don't expect me to apologise. But he didn't expect me to. I did it of my own accord because of my feelings towards him. I shouldn't have to apologise for that. You were fuck buddies with my best friend, which is far worse than an emotional connection really-"
"We do-" He stopped himself. "We did have an emotional connection. But a romantic relationship wasn't the right way to go. I don't expect you to understand that."
"The difference is Bucky, is that I never tried to understand. All I needed to know is that you made her happy, and if she was happy then I didn't mind. Did I worry you'd hurt her in the end? Of course. Was I right? Absolutely. But I never told her not to be with you. You never needed to ask my permission and I don't expect to have to ask you for yours. Steve is his own man and you need to respect his decisions."
"His decision to kiss you?"
"His decision to kiss me." And God had he kissed me.
Bucky finished on my ankle. "You take the bed tonight, you need to rest your foot properly. I'll take the sofa."
"Don't be an idiot." I grumbled, hoisting myself from the couch and hobbling to the bedroom door. "Have something to eat and then come and sleep."
He stared at me.
"I'm not going to bite, I promise." I gave him a wink. "Nothing, seriously? Look, it's really cold in here, the fire is only going to do so much for you and the bed will fit us both. You'll be cold and uncomfortable in here."
"Are you sure Steve won't mind?" He mocked.
"You are so lucky I don't have a loaded gun on me right now, no, Steve would not mind." If he's still alive, I thought. "It should matter far more if I mind and I do not mind, in fact I'll be far more pissed off if you sleep in here. So what'll it be? Sleep in here, get neck cramp, not rest properly, be cold, and have me pissed off at you for however long we're here, and I really will make your life insufferable-"
"You do that already-"
"OR you can sleep in the bed like a normal human being keeping three inches away from me at all times, have a decent night's sleep, and I will promise to not be even more annoying than I already am." I shrugged. "It's your choice."
I hopped into the bedroom, carefully pulled on my new T-shirt, and got into the bed. I could practically hear Bucky going through the two choices in the other room, with grunts of frustration wafting through the space beneath the doorframe. After about five minutes the door opened.
"I'm only doing this so you'll shut up." He informed me.
"I know." I replied, turning over. "And I'm always right."
"Three inches?"
"At all times."
"Deal."