Bucky and Nat
He gravitates toward color, out of uniform. In that way, he’s Steve’s inverse. Today it’s a bold green t-shirt, no logo, just something defiantly comfortable.
“Snappy,” Natasha says as she drops into the seat beside him.
“I aim to impress,” says Bucky. He’s got both hands around his coffee cup. She’s sitting on his right side; he could be anybody, from here.
She nudges his knee with hers.
His mouth thins. “Stop that.”
She doesn’t.
“You’re a troll.”
“Where did you learn that word?”
Bucky rolls his eyes and takes a pointed slurp.
She leans back in her seat. “I need help with something.”
“That’s the kind of ask that used to get me in a lot of trouble.”
“I run this place. You can’t get in any trouble if I’m asking.”
“Not sure I trust that logic.”
“Aw, you’re breaking my heart, Bucky.”
“Don’t you start.”
She likes that about him, that patter calms him. He knows, better than Steve ever did, how to be someone for an occasion, for a need. Bucky used to have a flickering quality to him, static from a cathode tube, a flame, always himself but losing track of his own wholeness. When Steve remembers things, he once told her, he relives them, not like a flashback but all the same processing centers firing in his brain. Bucky walks a gauntlet every minute, eyes straight ahead.
“You bored?”
“No ma'am. I’m never bored.” He pulls his coffee closer, into his lap. She sees the line emerge, from his neck down through his shoulders, a purpose, a solidness.
“I want you to help me with something.”
He smiles. “Now that is a different question.”
*
She’d pause to watch him if she were anyone else. This is what she won’t change about herself, though. There’s a mission. There is this moment, and the one on either side of your next heartbeat, none of it a promise.
Here they all are: two, three dozen once-were Hydra; the Black Widow; Bucky Barnes. They flatten the cell in 10 minutes, a ruthless equation, all body. They waste nothing, not words, not movement, not opportunity. When she is finished, and he is too, she demands his attention, simply with her eyes.
They face each other from across the room. Natasha breathes out, loosens her hips, lets her spine go easy. Bucky stays still, too still. He still wears black into a fight, though now he’s wearing his own face too. She feels him in the room, the soldier, the weight on the world that raises the hair on her neck.
He shifts, from one solidness to another. The line in his back changes. “In a just world, there’d be pie and coffee now.”
“Right now?” She does it naturally, that half-smile; she has to. “What am I, an automat?”
He strolls, away from the wreckage they’re leaving. “Stark’s computer wears a cape now. I’ve seen weirder.” He smiles too. “How do you know that word?”
She does watch this, how he walks toward her, how he doesn’t waver at all.