INDY

There was a nice, peaceful few minutes when I first woke up that I didn’t remember the night before. And then I had to deal with the overwhelming urge to fling myself from my bedroom window. I decided it would be a better idea to focus my energy on something a little more productive.

The one thing I was certain I’d gotten from my mother was the habit of distracting myself from difficult things by working. I peeked up and down the hallway (while defending my actions to myself so I didn’t feel as cowardly), then bolted out and into my office, closing the door and leaning my forehead against it with a sigh.

This was ridiculous. I lived here. This sneaking around stuff was just a band-aid solution, unpractical in the long term. I just wasn’t sure I was ready to see him yet. Wasn’t ready to see his reaction to me after last night. I was trying as hard as I could not to think about him at all. But the idea that Bucky might not feel comfortable around me anymore made my chest tighten.

So I kept myself sequestered away in my office with the door shut. My door was never shut. It felt wrong. But even thinking about opening it back up made me feel exposed. About halfway through my work day, I got a call.

“This is Agent Strathos.”

“Indy.” The voice on the other end was deep and rumbling. “It’s Bruce. Just wanted to let you know I’ve made it back safely. I’m sure you got my report, but there were no incidents while I was filling in for you.”

“Yes,” I said, rubbing my forehead tiredly. I had almost forgotten to check back in with him. Lucky he called me first, really. “Thank you again for keeping an eye on things for me. And I can get you the files you asked for by the end of the week.”

“Great, that will help me out a lot,” he said slowly, sounding a little hesitant. Not exactly out of character for the Bruce I’d known before the Blip. “I also wanted to say… I saw the work you’ve done there. Tony would have been proud of you.”

I sucked in a breath and thanked my foresight that my office door was shut and Bruce was on the other end of a voice call, because I was crying suddenly.

“Thanks, Bruce.” I don’t know if he noticed my voice wavering, couldn’t quite tell if I’d managed to cover it. But we exchanged quick goodbyes and disconnected the call.

I rolled away from my desk in my chair, wiped my hands across my wet cheeks, and blew out a sigh. Would Tony really have been proud of me? I wasn’t sure. Never had been. Maybe before I’d made a major move against him and pretended nothing happened. But I don’t think Tony was very proud of me, in the end.

And if he could see me now, trying to suck face with the guy who murdered his parents…

I found myself frowning through tears at the picture of Tony and me on my bookshelf.

I missed that sarcastic smile that only sometimes became something a little more sincere. I missed his stylishly messy hair and neat-trimmed beard that I used to tease him for. His voice rang in my head every time I rebooted any system — Try turning it off and on again. He had been like a second father to me.

Why had I done it? Why had I really interfered that day eight years ago? Was I always just… infatuated with Bucky? Had I fucked up my entire relationship with Tony — the first person who had made me feel wanted and cared for since my dad died — over a crush that I’d mistaken as actual good intentions?

I wrapped my arms around my stomach, feeling a little sick.

Maybe if Tony were still here, things would be different. If I could apologize… Like I should have done before it was too late.

I sat up a little straighter, hit with a sudden flare of motivation.

It wasn’t too late to fix things with Bucky. Even though the thought of standing before him and verbally addressing what had happened last night sounded as appealing as shaving my legs with a vegetable peeler. I wasn’t going to go through this posthumous guilt with anyone else.

BUCKY

Her office door was closed this morning. The sight of it made it feel like there was a black hole opening up in my stomach. She was never going to speak to me again. She was never going to look at me again.

And I didn’t have words for how badly I wanted her to look at me again — exactly the way she had last night. I could feel her intentions in every inch that had disappeared between us. She wanted me. Maybe the same way I wanted her. Maybe not. I had a lot of questions about it that I couldn’t think about too long without beginning to grimace.

How long had she wanted to do what we’d almost done last night?

If I hadn’t stopped her, what would have happened?

Did she hate me now that I’d drawn that line I didn’t really want there?

Her door stayed firmly shut until noon, when I left the compound to try to get my mind off things. Unfortunately, that just gave me more mental clarity to devote to thinking myself in circles. I walked through the city, up and down sidewalks, occasionally through a park. And I thought, Fuck it.

I was already in pain. Now that she had displayed whatever level of attraction she’d been influenced by last night, I was inevitably going to end up hurting her as well.

I’d rather hurt her feelings than be the reason she winds up dead.

If I was just going to hurt us both, I might as well finally let myself imagine it.

The way I’d wanted to slide my fingers into her hair and press my mouth to hers last night. I would have let her run her hands along my body, not afraid or self-conscious the way I might have been with anyone else. I would have told her how amazing I thought she was, whispered between frantic kisses that I’d waited much too long for.

I might have carried her back to my room and let her make fun of me for sleeping in the floor. I probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to go too far just yet, but I would have asked her to stay, to lay beside me and let me hold on to her. Her body would fit like a miracle against mine. And everything would feel like a dream for a while.

I wanted it. I could admit to myself, sitting alone on a park bench staring at my hands — one gloved — I wanted it probably more than I’d wanted anything since defrosting. She was everything to me. I wanted to be everything to her, too. I wanted it with a bone-deep throb that felt less like happiness and more like suffering. Sometimes it felt like I was Life’s least favorite person.

I didn’t know how to continue on from here. If she didn’t realize how close I had been to yanking her against me and taking up every minute of the rest of her morning, she had to think I was upset with her. She probably thought the logical thing: that I’d asked her not to kiss me because I didn’t want her to.

Every part of this situation hurt. I didn’t want her to wonder when it came to me. I didn’t want her to think that I saw her as undesirable. Didn’t want her wondering if she’d done something wrong last night. Unfortunately, she probably had. She didn’t realize what she had done to me, looking at me like that, talking to me that way. I could still almost feel her lips just an inch or two away.

My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket and I pulled it out slowly, forcing myself to remember where I was. It was a text from Sam.

Sam: Indy’s looking for you. Did something happen I don’t know about?

My pulse thundered out of control for a minute. I ignored Sam’s message and made my way back to the compound, mostly in a daze. What did she want? Typically, we skulked around each other for a while when we had issues between us. Breaking the silence hours after the incident was unprecedented.

Although, she had been finishing up the decryption of those task force reports. There could have been a development with Project Safeguard. That possibility wasn’t hugely comforting.

When I got to the fourth floor, Indy’s office door was open again. I tried to walk at a normal pace to it. She was standing in front of her desk with her back to the door. I let myself just look for a minute. I shouldn’t have. She was just as short and slight, her white blouse tucked into a pair of high-waisted tan slacks. Her hair was put back up in a claw clip, but her reading glasses were laying upside down on the desktop.

I let thoughts about her soft skin and the curve of her hips evaporate and cleared my throat.

She spun around, and I thought I was going to buckle. Her eyes were wide and shined a hypnotizing amber color, her cheeks pink and growing pinker.

“Hey.” My voice came out low. “Sam said you were looking for me.”

She immediately looked uncomfortable. Not a professional meeting, then.

“Yeah, um, could you shut the door?”

I nodded and took another step inside, shutting the door behind me.

“I, um…” she shook her head and looked down at her shoes. “I know I don’t have any egg rolls this time, but I just wanted to say I was sorry.”

I hated the disquiet in her face. Hated that she couldn’t meet my eye. Hated that I had to leave it that way.

“Don’t worry about it,” I blurted. I was surprised at how unaffected I managed to sound. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

I’d thought I was doing something gracious, letting her leave the conversation that was obviously the cause of her tense posture. But she looked like I’d slapped her. Her chest rose and fell sharply. Once. Twice. Then she nodded and turned away.

“Yeah. That’s fine. I’ll let you know when I have an update on Project Safeguard for you.”

That was the second time she’d spoken like that to me. In that mechanical, hollow voice that made me want to shudder. The first time had been right before the pressure cooker bomb in Romania had gone off.

Shit, what did I do this time?

“Alright,” I said quietly, turning back toward the door. Every step I took away from her felt like pressing lit matches into my skin. I wanted to turn around, hug away whatever uncertainty had taken over. Instead, I opened her office door and stepped back out, sighing and staring down at the doorknob before gently closing it behind myself again.

INDY

“I’m not angry with Bucky,” I said in exasperation, three days after my attempt at apologizing to him.

“Well, something’s going on between you two that’s got you both seeming pretty slap-happy, and he won’t tell me what it is.” Sam reclined in the chair on the other side of my desk, one ankle propped up on his knee while he toyed with the spiffy little plastic bird that bobbed on the edge of my desk.

I frowned, my fingers faltering almost unnoticeably in typing up the cohesive report of the full task force’s findings. “Nothing is going on. We just… are going through things right now. I’m busy with this task force. Bucky is probably feeling stir-crazy again since the team hasn’t gone out on a mission in a while and the man couldn’t sit still if we nailed him to a chair.”

Sam’s amusement only deepened at the edge of irritation that slowly grew in my voice.

“So you’re trying to tell me the way you two can’t look straight at each other for more than half a second is because you’re both… stressed?”

I blew out a sigh and leaned back in my chair, staring levelly at Sam. “Yeah. That’s what I’m telling you.”

I didn’t need his disbelieving expression to know how thin my excuse was. We had been acting strangely around each other. Every time I walked into a room he was already in, my feet marched me right back in the other direction. I couldn’t look him in the eye without remembering the way he’d felt, his heart beating on the other side of my chest. So, I didn’t look him in the eye. During the rare instances I was forced to interact directly with him, I chose a point directly above his left eyebrow and kept my eyes locked there to avoid the desire to burst into flames on the spot.

He was no better, always storming around with resting murder face. I’d been reading in the living room the other day, sitting on the couch while Kate watched some reality show about a lady who recreationally eats nail polish or something. I saw him out of the corner of my eye. He exited the hallway, stood on the edge of the room for a moment, then shook his head and left again. I could feel his eyes on me for hours after that. What had he been thinking? What was it he was seeing when he looked at me?

That was the thought that was beginning to haunt me. Had he asked me not to kiss him because he saw me as a child? For some, it made sense. People like Sam, Bruce, and Clint had known me as a teenager, and the teenage phase of life leaves a strong impression on everyone. Bucky had seen me one time when I was 20, didn’t even remember it. I was in my late twenties now.

It’s not like it could be seen as him taking advantage of a younger woman. He was, what, a million and a half? Everyone was young to him. If he was waiting around for someone “age appropriate”, he was traversing time in the wrong direction.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve put more hope in Bucky’s opinion of me than I should.

He’d had a pattern of undermining my authority and underestimating my competency before… did that extend to everything? He didn’t see me as a grown woman with considerable skill and good ideas. If I based my judgment on his actions and not his words… He saw me as an unqualified kid, playing pretend behind a computer and trying to kiss grown ups.

The thought was as belittling as it was infuriating. I slammed my finger down on the space bar, earning a raised eyebrow from Sam.

“It’s nothing, Sam,” I sighed, fighting a yawn. “You know how we get. We’ll be back to normal in no time, and then we’ll find something else to argue over.”

“So you are fighting!” He stood from the chair excitedly.

“Sure, Sam,” I relented as he made his way to the door. “We’re fighting.”

He threw me a smirk over his shoulder as he left, like he knew I was just placating him.

Maybe the most disturbing part of this recent mishap with Bucky was that it had forced me to realize how lonely I was. Since I’d come back from the Blip, I’d only been close with my team. I’d gone on one date, had one kiss, and that was with a guy we now knew to be a vacuous pawn for evil. I hadn’t realized until I'd looked up into Bucky’s shadowed eyes that night how empty I felt when he wasn’t around. How alone.

I folded my arms across my desk and rested my head on them, letting the steady tick of my desk toy fill the silence.

BUCKY

If I’d thought longing for Indy in silence was hard, I had no idea what to do with the way I felt at the end of every night now that I knew my feelings were — on some level — reciprocated.

We kept space between us, neither of us having the guts to stay for long where the other was. During the times when we couldn’t avoid it, like meetings or dinner, we kept our eyes to ourselves. Mostly.

I never had been able to help stealing glances at her. And once or twice, I caught her eye before she looked away. She was angry. I could tell that much by the short tone she used whenever she was forced to speak directly to me. But when I did manage to get a glimpse of her eyes, I saw a similar pain to mine.

I’d effectively rejected her. That knowledge made a strange band of thick tension grow around my chest. I didn’t know how to walk us back from that. Didn’t know if I should. This was what I had wanted. To have a firm barrier between us that I couldn’t sabotage with a too-friendly smile or a slip of the tongue.

Well, I had done it. And probably wrecked everything we had between us in the process. I missed talking to her. I missed the way she would become absorbed in something and her eyes would grow unfocused before I had to nudge her back to reality. I missed the light arguments we had over our tastes in food, music, books. She was right there, but I missed her like she’d left me.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell Sam what had happened between us that night. I knew he would just use it as fuel in his crusade to get me to fold beneath my feelings. Regardless, he knew something was going on. He had displayed a surprising amount of restraint so far by not inserting himself into the situation.

Little everyday things became agonizing. The moment in the afternoon — after her workday and before she helped Sam with dinner — when she got out of the shower, leaving every room she walked smelling like coconuts. The coffee pot I found mostly full every morning with only one cup poured out of it, already sitting half-drunk in Indy’s mug. Even watching TV in my room alone felt like slicing further into my heart. Maybe because I had the self-destructive tendency to put on musicals and then stare blankly at them, wondering over which point Indy would finally be overcome with emotion and start sniffling at, were she here.

She continued meeting with her task force, making decent progress with Project Safeguard from what details I was reluctantly given. I saw that guy, Ben Grant, giving Indy just as many flirty grins and warm-eyed looks as I wished I was able to. And Indy, I was grimly pleased to observe, seemed too irritated with me to notice him. I shouldn’t have been so satisfied with that. It would be better for her if she found someone else. Maybe it would give me a reason to really let her go.

Because I was terrible at this. At not loving her. I didn’t know how to stay near her and not wish for more. And I didn’t know how to leave and stay gone, not when she was here, still working day and night to keep me out of the hands of people who wouldn’t hesitate to use me to commit truly atrocious crimes. Because no matter how upset she was with me, this was her job, and because she cared about me. I knew she did. She wouldn’t have been so appalled at that near-kiss, or so shut down and defensive at my brushing off her apology otherwise.

There were a lot of nights that I struggled with my decision. When I came extremely close to knocking on her door and telling her everything, showing her everything. Every scar and every story. Every apology I had yet to make and every reassurance I had to offer. I danced on the line between pretending to be stoic and unfeeling, and taking her in my arms again because I knew that’s where she belonged.

Tonight was one of those nights that I really struggled. Another late night for Indy. Another nightmare for me. This time, she had fallen asleep.

Thick hair splayed across her desk while she snored on top of her crossed arms. Her full lips were parted, cheek smushed against her arm. She looked remarkably innocent and so tired. She worked so hard and didn’t let anyone see how much it affected her. She’d started to show me… before I’d probably made her feel like opening up to me that way had been a mistake.

I lifted my right hand and grabbed a stray lock of her hair, letting the strands slide through my fingers. Soft. I brushed it back with the rest of her hair and kissed the top of her head, feeling horribly like it was the last time.

I didn’t know what I expected. For her to wake up and forgive me with no need for words that I couldn’t push together the right way? For time to right itself so I could keep my mouth shut and let her kiss me? Whatever I hoped to achieve by watching her sleep, it didn’t happen.

Eventually, I made myself move. I sighed deeply, grabbed a blanket from the living room, and draped it around her shoulders before I left the office. It was getting harder to breathe again.