INDY

When I woke up around four in the afternoon, Bucky was passed out behind me on the thin motel mattress, his metal arm wrapped around his eyes, the other slung over my waist, fingers rested against my stomach. His mouth was open, warm breath tickling the back of my neck. The smooth feeling of his skin told me he was shirtless and the soapy smell enveloping us definitely wasn’t coming from the sheets beneath us, so I assumed he took a shower before getting into bed. I wished I’d had the energy to shower before I’d fallen asleep, but the motel’s 300-count poly blend sheets weren’t exactly luxurious enough to worry over. Besides, I’d had some stuff on my mind.

I closed my eyes again and let myself enjoy the security for a moment. Before that “stuff” set back in.

I’m pregnant. We’re on the run. We have a handful of hours until sundown when we’ll have to try to discretely get into Mexico during a border crisis.

If ICE didn’t mistakenly shoot us, Hydra could catch back up with us. We’d left no clues behind us, thanks to Bucky’s elimination of our vehicle. But I was paranoid now. I’d thought we were safe back at the cabin.

I slid slowly out from beneath Bucky’s arm, rolling off the edge of the bed and straightening up to look at him. He’d left a large space open behind him, forcing me to my edge of the mattress. I sighed and rolled my eyes, but smiled, fiddling with the dog tags I wore. I vaguely remembered — through a haze of sleep — him returning after destroying the SUV. Sliding into bed with me, burying his face in my hair, and squeezing me to him with shaky movements. He’d been similarly clingy and almost frantic after the last time I’d been attacked. The first time he kissed me.

I rummaged through my bag, sliding aside the leather-bound book Bucky had given me so long ago to get to my clothes. My pictures with my dad and Tony stuck out from between the copyright pages. I swallowed and reached for a clean set of dark clothes and the coconut shampoo Bucky had somehow found the time to snag from the cabin bathroom before we’d left.

Stripping my clothes off in the bathroom was a bit of a process. Most of it stuck to me with a mixture of sweat and blood. McKay had had a ball toying with me before Bucky had shown up. I had no intention of letting Bucky know just how long that had been; he’d tear himself apart over it. But how would I explain away the flower-like blossoms of dark purple and blue over most of my body? They’d been careful not to direct their “payback” at my stomach, but everywhere else was fair game.

Of course, I was still worried. Surely this much physical trauma (not to mention the other forms I’d been subjected to last night) was enough to at least cause complications if not complete miscarriage. There was just so much I didn’t know.

I shoved all of my musings to the back of my mind and stared myself down numbly in the mirror. I barely recognized myself. Pale with stress, splotched with abuse, and running on mental fumes.

The hot water rolled off of me with an alarming opacity of red for a few moments before it cleared up and I was left to attempt gently scrubbing around the slices McKay had left on my leg and my left shoulder. He’d thought it was clever, leaving a cut on me over the place where Bucky had an entire prosthetic. I wasn’t looking forward to him seeing it.

With the blood and dirt washed off of me, my hair hanging in wet, coconut-scented strands around my shoulders, I looked a little more familiar. The miracle effect of a half-way decent shower. The water had had next to no pressure, but it had gotten the job done.

Bucky was sitting up against the wall behind him on the bed when I exited the bathroom. His eyes were a little wary as they met mine, but the corners of his mouth tilted upward.

“Hey, Doll.”

There was sadness on my face, in my eyes. I could feel it. It had been there since last night and I didn’t entirely know why. We’d made it out alive, against the odds. Bucky hadn’t run screaming in the other direction when I’d told him I loved him. Hadn’t abandoned me immediately when I affirmed the pregnancy to him. But there was still so much I didn’t know….

I crawled back onto the bed with him, curling into his side when he lifted his arm for me. His eyes warmed, and I felt his chest rise and fall a little more steadily beneath me.

“We’ve got about four hours until sunset,” I murmured.

“Maybe now is a good time to talk, then,” he suggested quietly.

Panic made my heart beat quicker. There were things I didn’t know, but was I ready to have them cleared up right now? I’d counted on being tucked away at another safe house, with no extraneous worries to add to my fatigue. But this was as big a deal for him as it was for me, and Bucky was impatient at the best of times. So I blew out a sigh and nodded.

“Yeah. Okay.”

He sat up straighter, keeping his arm around me, but angling himself toward me to look me in the eye.

“I need to know how you feel about-” he broke off, frowning. “About what’s happening here.”

“The pregnancy, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, how do you feel about it?” I hedged.

He closed his eyes and sighed, opening them again slowly. “Indy, let’s not do this right now. I’m in love with you. And I have been from the beginning. But I’m an old man. I was always worried that what I’d want out of a relationship was… probably going to be a little more intense than what you would be expecting.”

I was barely breathing, drowning in his blue eyes again. “What do you mean?”

His delicate lips quirked up as he leaned toward me. “I won’t pretend that I got as far as imagining us having kids, but I’ve been laying awake at night back at the compound for months before we left… tormenting myself with the idea of you loving me. I’m an old-fashioned guy, Doll. I think I’ve been subconsciously planning our lives together since the minute you shook my hand.”

He leaned in closer, his forehead tilted gently against mine, angled so that his words danced across my lips.

“I want this,” he breathed vehemently, eyes filled with emotion as they stared into mine. “You’ve always made me feel normal again, when I thought I’d lost every chance at ever living a normal life. I thought the whole wife-and-kids future I’d been idolizing since I was a kid was just a dream for me after what I’d been through. What I’d done.”

His face became somber. “But I can’t make this decision by myself, either. I need to know that this is what you want. I know it’s dangerous and probably awfully stupid and selfish, but… It’s been so long since I had something just for me.”

I held my hand up to his lips, stopping his agonized muttering. I hated the undeserved guilt behind the furrow of his eyebrows, the slight frown he was trying to hold back.

“Bucky,” I sighed, relief spinning like a whirlpool through me. “I want to keep the baby.”

His eyes widened, first in disbelief, then in excitement. Tears glistened in the crinkled corners of his eyes as he laughed and pulled me against him.

“I love you,” he whispered.

I pulled back to kiss him, but missed and was poked in the lips by the stubble on his chin. He laughed harder, so I frowned at him and grabbed him by the face to kiss him forcefully on the lips, tackling him backward into the big open space on the bed behind him. I kissed him a few more times, just to drive the point home, loudly smacking my lips against his cheek, forehead, neck, temple, wherever I could reach. He took his punishment well, eventually pulling me down against his chest to look seriously into my eyes again, brushing my wet hair away from my face. We didn’t speak for a while, but he kept his eyes on mine, trailing his thumb across my cheeks like he was taking note of every minuscule curve of my face.

I don’t think either of us had ever felt so loved.

O o 0 o O

Making our way into Mexico was easy — surprisingly so. Which is why I spent the entire time wound all the way up. To the point that Bucky had to calm me down multiple times over the regular civilian vehicles passing us. We traveled all night on foot. Bucky piggy-backed me partway, but I felt bad forcing him to carry me, no matter how strong and enduring he was. Of course, that meant that I slowed our progress considerably. There was a reason I wasn’t a field agent.

Since my Spanish was pretty much limited to my usual order at most Taquerias and asking for the bathroom, Bucky handled communicating with the few locals we chanced interacting with. He managed to secure us a space in the damp corner of what seemed to be an overcrowded hostel. He slept with his back against the wall, and I slept sitting in his lap, my head pillowed between his neck and shoulder with his jacket for a blanket. My feet throbbed throughout our stay, and my bruises felt fresh after the full night of traveling on the roadside, ducking into ditches at Bucky’s command. But I managed to get a handful of hours of sleep.

We kept baseball caps on and hoods up when we traveled, our bags slung mostly over Bucky’s shoulder, but I carried what I could manage. Bucky kept a hand either around mine or on my lower back or side, guiding me, but the hold felt protective as well.

Finally, after three full nights of walking, we made it to the coast, where our luck continued. Hopefully, it was nature’s way of balancing out the sudden and unexpected appearance of Dennis McKay. Bucky displayed his hidden talent as a travel guide and booked us a thoroughly illegal boat out to the coordinates we’d given the single elderly driver.

The boat’s constant rocking and bumping on the waves made me feel nauseous, but I held down what little I’d eaten in the last day.

Bucky gave the old man the few pesos we still had and we watched him speed away into the distance, back in the direction of the mainland. “So,” Bucky said as we turned to examine the night-darkened island. “This is where Banner’s been hiding out?”

“Well, less hiding and more…” I paused, thinking my words through, as Bucky’s hand slipped into mine. How quick these habits formed. “Focusing?” It was as close a single-word explanation as I could give, not being Bruce myself.

The sand seemed to imitate the ocean water nearby, splashing softly around our footsteps. The starlight reflected off rhythmically crashing waves that made me even sleepier than I already was.

“And you’re sure he’s qualified to handle this?” Bucky asked, glancing worriedly down at my abdomen, even though it was way too early to see anything.

“He worked for the government on super serum research and he has a lot of experience with different forms of radiation. Plus, he has an M.D. Hopefully that’ll be close enough.”

“What does radiation have to do with it?”

As we made our way toward the hut front tucked away into the densely-packed tropical foliage, I shot a glance at him. “It’s an important part of how super serum is made. Bruce was turned all Hulk-y by gamma radiation. Steve was inflated with Vita Radiation. But honestly, there are still a lot of gaps in our knowledge about the serum they used on you. There’s no telling what it could mean for…” I stumbled over the words a little. “The baby.”

His mouth fell open just a bit, then he looked pensively at his feet, keeping quiet the whole way to Bruce’s front door.

“All the old guard’s getting a midnight visit from us, huh?” I muttered distractedly, knocking on the door.

A few deep, booming footsteps rattled the wind chimes and blown glass pieces hanging nearby. Then a huge, green man with a half-familiar face was staring blankly down at us.

“Hey, Bruce,” I greeted apologetically. “Feel like harboring some fugitives?”

BUCKY

The mostly wall-less layout of Bruce’s place stressed me out. I figured we were probably alone on this island, but my instincts were to keep scanning entry and exit points for potential assailants. That was hard to do when so many panels of walls were rolled up, warm air blowing through unobstructed.

Indy put a hand against my arm, which I only barely registered since it was the metal one, but I looked down at her. There was a tiny bit of worry creasing her eyebrows, but she smiled up at me in a way that made my heart slow its fretful pounding.

“We’re okay,” she murmured quietly, running her hand down my arm to link our fingers. She did it so easily, like she wasn’t holding a set of small vibranium rods instead of a real man’s hand.

“I know, Doll,” I whispered, stepping closer to the short stool she was seated on at Bruce’s oddly tiny kitchen counter.

I wanted to lean down and kiss her forehead, but Bruce could have walked back in at any moment; he’d only left the room to get a space ready for us. I wasn’t sure what he’d thought earlier when he looked from Indy to me, her hand still clasped in mine. Probably most people would be confused by the unexplainable romance between us. The White Wolf and the computer mouse.

But I’d imagine it was jarring, seeing me with her. He’d worked as an Avenger, had known Steve. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell he didn’t know what I’d done. And he knew her when she was just a teenager. Somehow, this was different than Pepper. Indy had once told me — back before the Teregova mission — that if Tony was like a father to her, Bruce was like an uncle. And I felt a weight in his overly green gaze, like he was sizing me up.

I didn’t like it. It made every muscle in my body wind tight. But I knew he cared about Indy. He was helping us. For now. I wondered whether his generosity would continue when he learned what I’d done to her… We hadn’t told him about Indy’s condition. We hadn’t told him much of anything, to be fair. Luckily for us, he actually seemed pretty laid-back. He was at least willing to wait for an explanation for our sudden arrival on his private island until the morning.

I still felt like I was shoring up my internal defenses against eventual disapproval from him. Not that it should have mattered much to me. But it probably mattered to Indy. So it did matter to me.

Bruce and I had both fought in the battle against Thanos. Twice. I vividly remembered his hulking, green form (no pun intended) racing past me as we rushed the enemy during the final battle. Hopefully that would be enough for him to give me the benefit of the doubt when we told him exactly what we really needed from him tomorrow morning.

“Well, I’ve only got one extra room, but there’s always the couch,” Bruce announced as he reentered the room through the wide doorway.

“It’s fine,” Indy spoke up, tightening her hold on my hand. “We’re used to sharing a room, now, anyway.”

If I expected a reaction out of Bruce at that, I didn’t get one. He simply nodded and waved over his shoulder for us to follow him. I lifted all of our bags before Indy could grab them and hauled them with us as we followed Bruce through his beachside place. It seemed like it’d been carved out of rock rather than assembled as separate pieces. Most of the furnishings were covered with thick, coarse woven fiber.

The room he led us to was small, but it was practically a Hilton suite compared to how we’d been sleeping for the past few days. The bed was barely over twin-sized, but that didn’t matter much to me. As long as Indy was taken care of, I’d be fine. A hard floor was something I could handle.

“Well,” Bruce said, a bit of awkwardness leaking into his voice for the first time. “There’s extra blankets in the drawers over there, and, uh-”

He turned around and looked over the two of us, his eyes lingering curiously on me for only a few seconds. On what he probably saw as a piece of weaponry that I held to her back — my hand.

“Let me know if you need anything,” he said, making his way back toward the door. “It’s good to see you guys again.”

I gave him a tight smile and a grateful nod, and Indy called out her thanks behind him. Then we were alone.

I turned slowly to face her, dropping our bags near the foot of the bed. She took a step toward me and nearly collapsed against my chest. She looked so tired. There were deep circles beneath her eyes, and her face was pale. She had to be starving considering the sporadic eating habits we’d had to adhere to on the road. But when I’d asked her earlier, she said she’d rather sleep than eat.

She pressed her face into my chest, rubbing against me like a cat.

I chuckled, running my hands up and down her back. “What are you doing?”

“Snuggling,” she mumbled into my shirt, nearly muffled to silence. “This week has been the worst.”

“Come here.” I pulled her with me toward the bed and made her sit, kneeling in front of her to help her get her shoes off.

“Jesus,” she whined quietly. “I really should have been more open to the piggy back rides.”

“Told ya,” I muttered, slipping her socks off and squeezing her foot gently in my hand.

She exhaled sharply and laid back against the bed immediately. “What are you doing?”

“Rubbing your feet,” I answered. “You’ve been walking constantly for almost four days.”

“So have you.”

“I think we both know how much more durable I am than you.”

She was quiet for a minute, just staring up at the ceiling and letting out small whimpers when my fingers dug into a particularly sensitive spot. “Fine.”

I looked down so she wouldn’t see me smile. Stubborn girl.

“Buck?” she asked quietly a few minutes later.

I hummed in response, thumbing a circle into the ball of her foot.

“Do you think… would you still have-” She broke off and huffed out a sigh, apparently annoyed with herself. “Us. Would this still have happened if we’d never left New York?”

I ran my hand from her foot up her leg, to her knee, over her thigh, where I gripped her gently, massaging. “Why do you ask?”

She sat up on her elbows to look at me. “Curiosity, I guess. Would you and I still be this if I’d never been attacked?”

I stood and started taking my jacket off, my belt. Indy’s eyes tracked every movement, her throat bobbing.

“Indy, whatever we are, we’ve been from the beginning,” I said in a low voice, leaning down on one knee over her on the bed. I pulled my shirt off in one quick motion, tossing it onto the dresser with my jacket, and leaned down to press my forehead to hers. “I might have been scared and… admittedly a little stupid.”

She laughed, winding her arms around my neck and pulling me closer.

“But,” I continued. “I was losing the fight a long time before any of this. I couldn’t have kept myself away from you for much longer. I probably would have come to your office and made some big embarrassing speech about how much of a goner you made me into.”

Her eyes softened, breath hitching. “Think you can fit on this bed with me?”

I eyed the space next to her, the short length of the bed. “No chance. But I’ll be right here beside you all night. Promise.”

She held up one pinky finger between us. I grinned and hooked my pinky around hers. She kissed me and asked me to hold her for a while before I tried to make myself comfortable on the floor next to the bed. So I sat against the headboard and traced circles against her stomach, under her shirt, wondering as she drifted to sleep just what was growing beneath my fingers.