p>A light whisking sound came from the bedroom. He smiled.
There were things that he was still afraid to actually say out loud.
Sheets being spread out gently.
Afraid because then, like lucid dreamers will tell you, one thought of 'is this is a dream' & it ceases to exist.
He walked over to the entrance of their room.
And he was having it now.
This month technically had been a long one. Too many plots, misses, close calls... All cultivated with sleepless nights in between, where she had to speak to him for a while before he snapped out of it.
& now, they're here, a whole day off & what he wants to say remains in his throat as, if this is all a dream, he doesn't want it to end now. ...Or ever.
Natalia was smoothing out the creases of the bedsheets, with all the gentleness she always had. The calm she showed to him whenever he tipped into the darker edges of his mind.
"[What?]" Natalia said, looking straight thru him.
"Nothing."
She walked over to him, laying him down gently onto the bed. The smell of the laundry bringing him back.
"It sounds ridiculous." He replied.
She looked at him in kidding disbelief. "We fought bears with guns. I don't think ridiculous is a word that can exist to us anymore, James."
He looked into her eyes. Being up in the depths of space, he'd seen things telescopes only scraped at; events that were meant to only be seen by God's, & painted by imagination.
His hand reached her for hair, running through it gently.
& yet, if he had to choose between seeing every major galactic event, in every multiverse, at any time he could choose, he'd still choose being here, lying on fresh linens with her, & silently praying it isn't a dream.
"Hey." She said, breaking through the wall. Her eyes speaking again. "What's wrong?"
Every sentence he had held in; say it too loud & the ocean might hear you, taking everything in one wave.
But after so long, keeping the words with skies he would trade for, every prayer just to feel her one more time...He promised he wouldn't waste a second. ...Not again.
Bucky shook his head. "Nothing. ....& that's why I'm scared."
"Hey." Natalia put her palm to his face, the warmth making him shiver. "Look at me."
He returned to her eyeline slowly. ...And it was like nothing had happened. Months hadn't passed. He had never lost her, and the whole of the mission with Daisy, his reasoning for leaving...Even Nobokov.
It was all a dream and she had been waiting here, on new sheets for him to come back to Earth, the way only she could ever do, in a way that gravity envied.
"You're here. No one can take that away again." Smoothed her finger over his cheek as she continued. "This is real."
They kissed, Natalia grounding him even further, her lips saying everything he couldn't accept from anyone but her.
"I love you." He breathed into her ear, taking the risk of toppling reality.
She kissed him again. "I love you too, James Barnes." Natalia entwined his hands in her own, & staring into the stars of his eyes, guiding her as much as him. Laid on fresh sheets, in the middle of Brooklyn.
Simple pleasures.