Chapter 2
Bucky’s shoulder throbbed with every step. The pain grew sharper as the adrenaline faded away. The warmth of his blood seeping through his shirt and improvised dressing was a constant reminder of just how bad things had gotten. He glanced at Veronica, wondering if she could tell how badly he was hurt. His thoughts were echoing with the words 'I’d been through worse,' as if he could simply convince his brain to ignore the pain. He kept his face neutral, masking the discomfort, but he could feel the weight of the situation pressing down on him.
The situation was dire. Since fleeing Hydra in Washington, Bucky felt like he was living on borrowed time, each breath a countdown to capture, death, or worse.
A fucking countdown.
A coutdown he now started sharing with an innocent woman.
He didn’t want to get her involved. She was a stranger, someone he should’ve left behind the moment he could. He could outrun those men. He could fight them alone. He could flee and hide again.
But there she was.
She was a distraction. This wasn’t supposed to happen—none of this was. If only he could just stay in shadow. He needn’t have helped her.
He couldn’t trust her—she’d appeared out of nowhere, a ghost materializing in his life with motives he couldn’t decipher. What if she worked for Hydra or Shield? Or any other place that was trying to catch him? Why did she stay with him? Was this all a setup? It didn’t make sense. People don’t just fight for some stranger. People didn’t do that—surely not for him. What if this was all part of some bigger plan to take him down? He should’ve known better. He didn’t get to have allies and didn’t get to feel sorry for strangers. Every time he did, someone got hurt.
‘Wait’ He heard her voice pulling him out of his reverie. ‘I can’t… Let’s stop for a second.’
He looked at her and suddenly realized how wrong he was. Guilt crashed into him. She was hurt because of him—because he hadn’t stayed hidden, because he’d let himself get tangled in her life.
It was a death sentence for her. Every minute with him was dangerous. He was a weapon, a monster. Sooner or later, he’d get her killed.
But reality was pressing him like a ton of bricks. He was out in the open, bleeding, with nowhere safe to go. His instincts were being suppressed by pain, and his mind telling him to find somewhere he could patch himself up and figure out his next move. But where? He was a ghost in this city, with no allies, no safe places, and no way to get the bullet out of his shoulder on his own. He was strong, he knew that. But he also knew his limits, which were disturbingly close.
He glanced at Veronica again. Her place wasn’t ideal. It might have been a trap, he might get her in trouble. But as much as he hated to admit it, he couldn't resist the vision of staying there. Of sleeping somewhere with an actual roof and walls. Of nor shaking from cold every night. Of not having to stay alone and deal with a wound alone.
He walked to her and again placed his metal arm around her waist, supporting her walk.
'No, you can’t, your wound will get worse, I can walk on my own.’
‘Lead the way,’ he ignored and positioned her hand more firmly on his wounded shoulder, trying to hide the pain.
The silence between them was thick with unspoken tension—her breath coming in shallow gasps of pain, his eyes scanning the shadows for any sign of danger. They walked, and walked. Slowly. Consistently. Despite his injury, he kept a steady pace, his grip tightening whenever she stumbled. They both climbed old’s tenement staircase, grunting from pain with an awkward feeling of closeness.
Her hand trembled a little when she put the key into the lock. When the door clicked open, Bucky helped her inside, and they both paused just beyond the threshold. The apartment was small, cold, and empty. It consisted of one room and a bathroom. Furnished with only necessary furniture. Bed, table, three chairs, couch, and wardrobe. Old kitchen cabinets, rundown stove, and fridge. It seemed like she tried to make it as livable as she could. A few pictures stuck to the wall, some books lying around, a blanket on the couch. The temperature was barely a few degrees higher than outside.
‘I know its not much, but…’
He cut her off, his voice gruff, almost too quick. ‘It’s perfect.’
Bucky stepped into Veronica’s apartment, his movements precise and controlled. His trained eyes began a methodical sweep of the room. He assessed the potential threats with a soldier’s instinct: the sharp edge of a knife lying on the kitchen counter, the lamp that could be used as a weapon, and the sturdy wooden chair that could be a useful barricade. He mentally noted the exits—the main door, the kitchen window, and the fire escape outside—while positioning himself in a way that allowed him a clear line of sight to all possible points of entry.
Veronica noticed the subtle shifts in his posture, how he moved with practiced caution. When a distant siren wailed, Bucky’s entire body stiffened, and he instinctively pivoted towards the sound. His reaction was quick and automatic, revealing an underlying alertness that seemed incongruent with the quietness of her apartment. He carefully positioned himself so that his back was always against the wall, and his eyes continued to survey the room, a habit that betrayed a lifetime of training in combat and evasion.
She saw how his hands clenched into fists when he heard a faint creak from the old floorboards. The tension in his shoulders was palpable, and his eyes darted around, seeking out the source of the noise even before he fully processed it. The way he flinched at every small sound and how his movements were calculated and deliberate painted a picture of someone who had been conditioned to remain perpetually on edge.
An awkward silence fell between them. She broke it first. As she walked to the window and closed the curtains, she said.
‘Sit there, on the chair. I will grab things I need, and I will patch you up. And… undress yourself’
As she was looking for something in kitchen cabinets and placing needed things on the countertop, he had a first chance to take a closer look at her. Veronica had short brown hair, cut a little unevenly to her shoulders. She had brown eyes with dark circles visible under them.
She was quite tall, and despite her leg, her moves were quick, well balanced, and precise. He also noticed her whole body being tense. Her jaw clenched, her shoulders stiff. She leaned on one side to relieve a hurting limb.
He watched her as she walked to his side, sat on another worn-out chair, and placed things she carried on the table. Her brows rose a little when she noticed that he took only half of his clothes off, the wound was bare, but the other metal hand was still covered by tangled clothes. But she didn't ask.
‘It will hurt. Do you want morphine?’ She asked out of nowhere with a calm voice, nodding in a small bottle direction.
He refused. I wouldn’t work on him. As a result of Hydra's experiments, he was immune to any potentially toxic substances. Poison, drugs, alcohol, and, unfortunately, painkillers.
He looked at the table full of various surgical instruments. Quite an arsenal.
‘Why exactly do you have all of this?’ He broke tense silence.
‘Well… I’m kind of paranoid.' She tried to smile, but only a worried grin entered her face. ‘I will be starting. If it hurts too much, tell me to stop.’
Veronica's hand trembled slightly when it reached his wounded shoulder. She could feel the tension radiating from Bucky, his muscles taut under her fingers, but she tried to ignore it, channeling her energy into the task at hand. Her touch was gentle, almost hesitant at first, but focusing on cleansing the wound, her moves became more fluid and her touch more firm. As she worked, trying to focus only on him, she found herself hyper-aware of every detail—the texture of his skin was stained with blood, the shallow rise and fall of his chest, the heat of his skin under her fingertips. The room was silent except for their breaths. His, shallow but slow, as if he was trying to steady himself. Hers, deep and at a steady pace that helped her focus.
She could feel his eyes on her, watching her every move, and it made her self-conscious, as if he were scrutinizing not just her actions but her intentions. Yet, there was something else in his gaze too, something that hinted at the fear and vulnerability he tried so hard to hide. It stirred something beep inside her—an overwhelming need to take care of him, even though she barely knew him.
His eyes went cloudy. His mind was still in Syberia. With all the doctors, soldiers, and his masters. Every pang of pain and every jolt of discomfort seemed to draw him back to that frozen wasteland, where the shadows of past torment still lurked, just out of reach. He was all again at someone's mercy. He felt fright. He felt pain. He felt exposed. Bare, physically and mentally. The urge to scream roared inside him, a raw, primal need to release the pent-up agony. But the memory of past punishments for such outbursts silenced him, chaining his voice in a cage of fear and resignation.
‘I am cutting some of your skin to have better access to the bullet,’ her soft whisper, and a new sensation of pain snapped him back to reality.
With a steady hand, Veronica took a deep breath and grasped the small pair of forceps. She leaned in, her gaze fixed on the wound. As she began to work, her movements were meticulous, almost reverent. Each shift and pull caused him to flinch, a low groan escaping his lips despite his best efforts to remain quiet. The bullet was embedded deep, and as she maneuvered the forceps to grasp it, Bucky’s entire body tensed, his knuckles whitening where he gripped the chair.
Her muffled apologies and commands to breathe felt like coming from under water.
When a bullet finally exited his body, the gasp fell out of his month. The sting of the disinfectant was sharp. Like lightning going through his body. Each application of the substance made him grit his teeth, fighting against the urge to flinch or cry out.
‘I’m finishing… just a few more seconds… It will be done soon’ she was whispering more to assure herself than him.
Veronica was whispering to him. Abot nothing. Just some soft words, but he found her whispering comforting. They were holding him back in reality, not letting him slip away to Siberia.
‘Breathe in’ a needle pierced his body, and both of their chests raised.
‘Breathe out’ a sharp pain announced, a needle emerging back on his skin.
‘Breathe in’ when her sticky from his blood gloves with shaking hands inside started tying a knot.
‘Breathe out,’ she snipped a thread.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Finally, she tied off the last stitch, her hands trembling slightly as she snipped the thread. She placed a fresh bandage over the wound and secured it, her movements careful, lingering on his tense body. When she finally secured the last piece of tape over the bandage, Veronica sat back, her breath catching in her throat. She felt exhausted. Started shaking as the events of today invaded her brain. She took off the gloves and, with a hand sticky from sweat, brushed her hair.
She glanced up at Bucky, meeting his gaze. His eyes were dark, guarded, but there was a flicker of something else there—gratitude, maybe, or a quiet acceptance of her help.
‘It's over,’ Veronica said softly, her voice barely above a whisper. She reached out, brushing a stray lock of hair from his forehead. Her hand trembled as she reached out, her fingers hesitating mid-air before they brushed against his skin. The touch was both tentative and tender, as if she was afraid of breaking something fragile and precious. Her touch was gentle, but she couldn’t help but notice how he tensed at the touch. But there was a moment—a second—where he seemed to relax, if only slightly, as if he was allowing himself to trust her, even just a little.
***
The time was passing slowly when they sat completely exhausted in the middle of the room. After what seemed like an hour, she stood up and walked to the wardrobe.
‘If you want to, you can use my bathroom.' She broke the silence and looked at him again. ‘But you need different clothes; those are completely soaked with blood.’
He turned his head in her direction with suspicion in his eyes. She pulled out a large cardboard box. She hesitated when she opened it. For a few seconds, her shoulders shlanched as if tons of feelings fell upon her. She took out two neatly folded pieces of fabric and threw them in his direction.
‘Wait, I cannot take them.' He opposed looking at a shirt and a sweatshirt.
‘You can; those aren’t mine, and no one will be using them any time soon. You can make use of them’
He looked at them more thoroughly. Sweatshirt had a badge he didn't recognize. Both pieces of clothing had a name embroidered on them. Leo Martinez and Blake Waters.
‘Whose are those?’
‘Those were my friends’… I’m sure they won’t mind…They…’ she stopped. The words couldn’t come out of her mouth. ‘They are both dead,’ she thought, but she couldn’t say it.
Bucky stared at the clothes in his hands, his mind focused on the names stitched into the fabric. The names felt heavy, laden with a past that wasn't his but that he'd now somehow inherited. He didn’t ask. He didn’t need to. The sadness in her voice was enough to tell him that these were remnants of people who mattered to her. People who were gone.
Nodding his thanks, he stood up slowly, testing the strength of his patched-up shoulder. Veronica’s eyes carefully followed his every move. Neither of them spoke until he entered the bathroom.
The bathroom door creaked as he pushed it open. The small space was bare, just like the rest of the apartment, with chipped tiles and a mirror that had seen better days.
The reflection that stared back at him was a stranger. He never recognised his face. He felt like an absent phantom controlling a weirdly looking puppet. Hollow eyes, a face etched with exhaustion, and a body that carried too many scars to count. He turned away from the mirror, ignoring the scary-looking reflection.
The water from the shower was lukewarm, but it felt like a blessing. As it ran over him, washing away the blood and grime, Bucky let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. The heat soothed his aching muscles, but it couldn’t wash away the turmoil in his mind. Thoughts of Veronica, of her care, of the way she looked at him—half with concern, half with something else—swirled in his mind. What was he doing here? What was she doing, helping him? He felt the weight of his guilt pressing down again. She shouldn’t be involved in this mess, and yet she was. She was deeply in it, all because of him.
A small, suppressed part of his mind screamed that it wanted to stay with her. To feel the care, to care about her too.
He silenced it. He couldn’t stay. It was too dangerous for both of them.
When he emerged from the bathroom, his hair still damp, and dressed in the clothes she’d given him, Veronica was in the kitchen, cleaning up the aftermath of their impromptu surgery. She moved with an absentminded efficiency, her thoughts clearly elsewhere. He noticed how she avoided looking directly at him and how her hands trembled slightly as she wiped down the table.
‘Thank you,’ he said quietly, breaking the awkward silence.
She looked up, and their eyes met for a moment. But her jaw tensed when her gaze moved towards the clothes. She tried to smile and murmured with a distant voice, ‘You can rest there’ looking towards the couch.
Bucky hesitated, not wanting to intrude on her space more than he already had, but the exhaustion won over. He sat on the edge of the seat and sank in a little in the soft cushion when a spring inside creaked. It felt… weird. He wasn’t used to anything better than cold, hard ground. It felt wrong somehow to be given anything good… comfortable… nice.
He watched her as she was wiping surgical instruments she used with a cloth. She shouldn't be doing that. He really should’ve walked away and found some dark corner of the city to bleed out in, far from her. It wasn’t too late, he told himself. He could still leave. But even as the thought formed, he knew it was a lie. His body ached with exhaustion, and his mind was just as worn. He was too tired to keep running. Too tired of being Winter Soldier. To tired of being used, manipulated, and lied to. To tried of killing. Too tried of being tortured, wiped, chased, and hunted. To tried of all this shit. And yet, every time he closed his eyes, he saw the faces of the people he’d hurt, the people he’d failed to protect. How many more would be added to that list if he stayed here with her?
But she wasn’t just another nameless face in the crowd. Something about her had broken through his defenses, stirring emotions he’d long thought dead. The way she’d looked at him—determined, worried, but not afraid—had cut through the armor he’d built around himself. No one looked at him like that. Not since… He shook his head, trying to push the thought away. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t afford to let it matter.
She walked in his direction, and his heart skipped a bit. He wasn’t read to face her again.
But no.
She opened the creaking door and entered a bathroom desperately, trying to ignore his presence.
She squeezed her eyes shut, leaning against the door, taking a deep breath, but the tension in her chest refused to ease. Her hands were still shaking—she could feel the tremor as she reached for the sink, gripping its edge to steady herself.
What the hell was she doing?
The image of Bucky sitting there, injured and silent, flashed in her mind. She had invited a complete stranger into her home. A dangerous stranger. A chased stranger.
Veronica walked into the shower and let the cold water run over her spine. She splashed her face, hoping it would clear her mind, but the questions kept swirling. She’d seen something in him, something that pulled at her, even if she couldn’t name it. Pain, maybe. A kind of pain that mirrored her own, though she couldn’t understand how or why.
She caught her reflection in the mirror—pale, eyes wide with something she couldn’t quite place.
Desperation?
Guilt?
She wasn’t sure.
Maybe she was crazy?
An entire new realisation fell upon her with all its weight.
There was something utterly, deeply wrong with her. She was going through her memories of the day. Each worse than another. First, after Bucky walked away at the market, why did she bother to find him and thank him? She didn’t need to. Why did he want to talk to him so much? Loneliness never was a problem for her. Why did it change now?
Another problem happened right after. After all this training, after being on dozens of missions, after shooting and being shot, why the hell did she freeze when she saw a gun? After all the things that had happened in her life, she even slept with a gun under her pillow, so why did she freeze?
Next, she threw herself in a battle. Like a fucking maniac. She should have run. Or hide. Like a normal civilian would do. A civilian she was now. And yet, she simply fought because she noticed Bucky doing the same.
What comes to Bucky, this facet of the day wasn't normal either. She dragged a man with her. A man almost twice her size. That could hurt her without even caring. A man chased by some armed people. She led him into her apartment. Without even considering leaving him there. Maybe she was too far gone, so lonely that she was willing to help someone as broken as he seemed to be. Or maybe it was something deeper. Something she didn’t want to admit. A need to help, to save someone else, when she couldn’t even save herself. She knew he was dangerous, but that wasn’t what scared her the most. What scared her was that she wasn’t afraid of him at all. Not in the way she should be. She couldn't think of the fact that he could hurt her in any way.
Keeping him here—what did that say about her? What kind of person takes in a man like him without knowing anything about him?
She dried her body with a towel, staring blankly at the wall, lost in her thoughts. She knew what was the worst part of it. She will let him stay, give him food, and wash his clothes. That's why she was so fucked up. She should be thinking about how to get him out of her life, not about how to make him stay. And yet, when she thought about him leaving, about being alone again, the idea felt like a punch to the gut. She didn’t want to be alone. Not now.
But could she trust him? It was dangerous, reckless—everything she’d been trying to avoid. But something about him called to her, something that made her want to push aside all the reasons she should be afraid and just… help.
Veronica let out a slow breath and forced herself to move—to gather the courage to go back out there. She wasn’t sure what she’d find when she opened that door—whether he’d still be sitting there or if he’d already slipped away like a ghost. Part of her hoped he was still there. The other part wasn’t sure what she’d do if he was.
When she entered the room, she instantly looked at a couch. He was sitting with his head resting against the back of the couch, his eyes half-closed. The vulnerability etched into his features made her chest tighten. There was something achingly fragile about him in that moment, something that made her want to protect him, even though she knew she should be protecting herself.
She took a step closer, and then another, until she was standing right in front of him. For a moment, she just stood there, watching him breathe, the rise and fall of his chest steadying her own chaotic thoughts. She reached out, hesitating before her fingers brushed lightly against his forehead, checking for any sign of a fever.
His eyes few open with a flash of fear and disorientation in them. She quickly withdrew her hand.
‘Shhhh, it’s just me.' She said quietly, ‘You are safe. Sleep.’
His face relaxed a little, and his eyes looked at her with something so warm in them that it just broke something in her heart. His body relaxed further into the cushions, his exhaustion finally overpowering the adrenaline and pain. She covered him with a blanket lying next to him and took away his old clothes he was still holding.
Veronica took a step back, her gaze fixed on him. There was so much she didn’t understand about this man, so much that frightened her—but right now, all she could think about was making sure he was safe, at least for tonight.
She sat on the bed, keeping her eyes on Bucky, watching over him like a guardian. The situation was a mess that could resolve itself in many unpredictable ways. But whatever happened next, she knew one thing for sure: there was no turning back now. Not for her. Not for him.