Chapter Text
There was never quiet time here even when night rolled in. The hum of the AC, the clanking of pipes in the midst of an upgrade, the distant shuffling of papers and footsteps from three floors below. It was all a background murmur that still wasn’t enough to silence the static that buzzed constantly in my head. The nightmares held off, and the team’s therapist said it was progress. But the ease terrified me. I can’t forget what happened. I won’t let my guard down.
I had mostly settled into the team dynamic. Nat was the easiet, the first to fully welcome me open armed. She knew the deal, what happened there and what still rang in my mind. She knew I hated the sterility of the white walls in the compound that mirrored where we’d grown up. On the first day she gave me a hideous painting of some flowers in a field - the kind you’d find in motels off highways - but it broke up the white in my room and I can never thank her enough for that.
Steve was apprehensive but kept that mostly to himself. He was like a mother hen with massive biceps, and he was only looking out for the good of the team. After a few months of me successfully not murdering anyone I think the tension in his huge shoulders finally relaxed. Now he just reminds me to drink water and that I shouldn’t eat gummy bears as a breakfast food.
Sam was the wild horse. He was so attached to Steve’s hip when I first got here that I thought he’d view me through the same hesitatnt distanced eyes; he did not. The second week I was here he threw a boxing glove at my head and told me my head should’ve been smaller if I didn’t want to get hit. It was the first time I smiled in years.
Tony was the quiet puppeteer in the background. I mostly saw him through the reports he sent to my emails and the new guns he had made for me. Steve had told him that maybe I wasn’t ready for it and Tony had told him my hands were very capable of ripping Steve apart without an extra help.
Everything would be gentle and simple and chugging along nicely if it wasn’t for Barnes. Bucky fucking Barnes. Standing in hallways are doorways like a brooding brick wall with an attitude problem. The guy barely said a word a week to me but somehow made his distaste of me known. I guess some people just rub against each other wrong and I’m a balloon to his bed of nails.
I don’t care. I swear I don’t. But my life now is one I want to keep and I won’t let the grey eyes that turned an entire nation to stone ruin that. He could hate me. He does - that much is obscenely obvious - but I wouldn’t let him get under my skin.
“I can see it.” He tells me as I turn the corner.
I still in the hallway and look at him, arms crossed across a massive foreboding body. Eyes not looking at me but burrowing through my soul nonetheless. “What?” I respond sharply.
His hair falls loose mostly, a gentle wave bordering on not being brushed since the cold war. Shirts cling against the metal arm that he tries to cover with sleeves and gloves when not needed for anything physical. His jaw was sharp and tense with the spite he held for me. I’d be scared if I hadn’t killed a dozen of his kind in my life. Maybe they didn’t have metal arms but they had the same vibe as him; arrogant with an asshole aftertaste.
“I can see it still in you. The room. The darkness.” He punctuates his words with venom, pausing to let each round seep into my skin and cycle poison throughout me. He pushes off the wall and walks past me. His eyes remain forward as if merely looking at me was beneath him. “I see through you.”
The words prickle against my skin and I stand in quiet hollowness hoping that some form of biting remark will come to me. Something sarcastic and hurtful to hurl back his way before he leaves the vicinity.
It doesn’t come.
I know he’s right.