cradle | darcy/bucky, love
He’d woken to the feeling of her fingers, tucking a lock of hair behind his ear. Snuffling softly into the pillow, he leaned into her touch, half-asleep and warm and content. She was the only one who could chase away the nightmares, and he could honestly say it was the best part of their entire arrangement.
… maybe not the best part. Something in his stomach stirred when she stroked down the skin of his neck and down his flesh shoulder. He thought back to their previous activities, and let the corner of his mouth curl up in the tiniest smirk.
He felt the warmth of her hands at the center of his back, the random patterns becoming more purposeful as the curlicues and swirls turned into shapes and letters. Mentally tracing the paths of her fingers, he drew the images into his head on instinct as he let himself be lulled back to sleep.
He felt a constellation of stars, an octopus, four-leaf clovers and five-petal flowers. She drew an arc reactor, Steve’s shield, and then started tracing out letters. He felt her write out his name in broad strokes, J-A-M-E-S, but his brow furrowed when she stopped.
He felt his throat tighten when she carefully traced out – slowly and in two tiny gestures, like she was afraid – the two sides of a heart.
Her hands pulled away. “I think I’m in love with you,” she whispered, letting the words fill the silence.
He felt her rise from the bed, shuffling as she collected her clothes and redressed. When she slipped out of his bedroom and the door clicked shut behind her, he opened his eyes and reached around his back to touch where she’d drawn that tiny little heart.
Love is for children, the innocent and the weak, a dark voice in his heart whispered. He was none of those things, old and jaded and broken – there was no place for love in his life, especially not with a girl like Darcy Lewis.
He withdrew his hand, rolling onto his back to stare up at the ceiling contemplatively. He considered his past history; Steve had told stories of his ladykiller days back before HYDRA, and as the Winter Soldier he had carried out his fair share of seduction missions.
In comparison, breaking the heart of a soft, civilian girl was going to be easy.
And it was – or at least he thought it would be.
When she knocked on his door a few days later, the first thing he said as he opened the door was, “This isn’t working any more.”
She had gone still, eyes wide as she looked up at him. “What?”
“Love is for children, Lewis,” he said simply, and when he looked at her she flinched.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied. He fixed her with a stare, before reaching out and using a metal finger to draw a heart on the inside of her forearm, before slashing across the middle of it. The harsh gesture made her breath catch.
“Oh,” she breathed, staring emptily down at her arm as he drew his hand away. “Oh.”
“We agreed in the beginning,” he reminded her, and he watched as she closed in on herself, the initial flickers of hurt burrowing under a veneer of cool blankness that had him impressed. “No strings, no commitment, no love.”
“No love,” she echoed, and gave him an empty smile that had his heart flipping oddly. “So that’s it?”
He shrugged. “That’s it.”
"Okay.” She inhaled slowly, closing her eyes, and when she breathed out her expression had shifted back into a casual cheerfulness that had him blinking in surprise. “I guess I should grab my stuff before you throw it out, huh?”
She pushed past him, and he watched mutedly as she scurried around his apartment collecting odds and ends, pieces that he hadn’t realized were hers and ones that she’d left over the course of their six-month arrangement. He let her talk as she moved, the stream of chatter washing over him as he watched her slowly strip his apartment of all signs of life.
She left with two boxes less than twenty minutes later. He had looked around, caught unaware and off-guard by how cold the living room seemed without her plants on the coffee table or her favorite red afghan tossed over the back of his couch.
He went to sleep that night, and woke up drenched in sweat less than two hours later. He went to the kitchen, intent on making himself a cup of chamomile tea, only to find that his favorite mug was gone, as were the tealeaves – Darcy had taken them with her.
The weight of what he had done hadn’t fully settled in yet, but he ignored the twinge in his chest as he dug out a chipped green cup and a sad mint teabag from the back of his cupboard. He told himself it was just adrenaline, and willed the feeling to go away.
It didn’t.
When the mild feeling of discomfort first settled in his chest, he’d ignored it with a long-practiced ease. He believed that whatever it was, it would heal on its own in due time.
When it persisted in the same spot after weeks, the discomfort evolving into an ache and then into something that was becoming dangerously distracting, he'd gone to Doctor Cho and requested a full diagnostic.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” the woman declared, and he frowned because there was something wrong – and he could feel it. “Perhaps it is a phantom pain, from a past injury?”
“No.” It didn’t feel like anything he’d ever felt before – not at all like the sharp, brittle cold of cryofreeze settling into his bones, nor the choked off feeling of drowning, nor the piercing burn of a bullet or a knife. It was something else, something that felt like a combination of things – as if his lungs didn’t have enough air, as if his skin was too tight for his body, as if his ribcage on the verge of cracking itself open from the pressure of his muscles pushing against the bone. It was all those things, and most often, it felt like his heart was being clamped in a vice, suffocating him slowly from the inside out.
When he told her those things, he hadn’t realized he had placed a hand over his chest. The doctor’s face was gentle when she asked, “Does it happen when you think of someone in particular?”
He stiffened. He couldn't stop himself as he let out a soft huff, feeling like his tongue was too heavy to speak.
Love is for children, his heart whispered. But even as he reminded himself, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking of her.
"I think I'm in love with you." She had said it so quietly, so gently, and remembering it made his chest do all those odd things again.
The doctor's gentle voice pulled him back to the present. "... Mr. Barnes?"
He looked up at her, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. It didn't matter that she probably wouldn't notice the trembling, so minute that only someone enhanced could see it. "Does it matter?"
Doctor Cho made a small noise, a hum that spoke of revelation and understanding, and he asked, “So you know what’s wrong with me?”
“Yes, but there isn’t anything I can do.”
He bristled, when he caught the flash of pity in her eyes. “That machine of yours is supposed to be able to fix people,” he snarled. “Are you saying that you can’t, or you won’t?”
She gave him a look – not one that was angry or stern, but instead, one that was so kind and patient that he felt ashamed.
"The cradle can do many things, Sergeant Barnes," Doctor Cho said softly. "Unfortunately, mending a broken heart isn't one of them."