ｊａｎｕａｒｙ ７ｔｈ， ２０１４
３０°
ℒℯ𝒶
She doesn't see the bullet coming, because her eyes are also trained worriedly on Steve. Always concerned about everyone else, never about herself. A downfall that costs her.
When it hits, time seems to come to a screeching halt. She feels nothing but a slight pressure, a dull ache, shock. A sudden thought. No. Her already weak knees get weaker, collapse.
She hits the grass; the earth underneath is hard. She rolls to her back. The sky above her is a solid blue, cloudless, punctuated by Bucky's form in the corner of her vision. The sky is beautiful, but all of her focus is on him.
She watches him in the short few seconds before he notices. Admires his eyes before they are sad, enraged, full of grief. She has memorized every detail of his face by now, but each time she looks at it, the breath still leaves her lungs. He is heartbreakingly real, shockingly beautiful, a man torn between wrong and right and rarely given a chance to choose between them for himself. He has been shaped by brutality and loss, tragedy and suffering; but for all of this, he has remained kind. She doesn't want to see his eyes swallowed by the black emptiness of pain. She wishes she hadn't been shot, just so he wouldn't need to feel that again.
But her wishes are futile. A shiver goes down his back as it suddenly hits him what the sound of something hitting the grass was, and his bones go still.
He turns. He sees.