Chapter 1

Chapter Text

Nobody else notices how naked
my hands look. Nobody else thinks the space between

my chin and shoulder seems oddly empty. But I know
what this should feel like. I know what is missing.

- An excerpt from 'Paws' by Sarah Kay

It started the way her favourite story did - the way she did. And, perhaps, she should have seen it coming. It started from a speeding car; it started from a man who was not quite supposed to be there; it started from a woman who just so happened to be.

The streets were known to her. Her hands in her pockets, Clara Oswald walked along aimlessly - which is, you could say, how she does most of everything these days. You will not think it to look at her. Her dark, chestnut brown hair looked clean, soft, and fell dead straight past her shoulders; she hasn't washed it in two days. What's the point, she might say if she were asked; she hasn't been. Nobody would dare. The hallways of her employment were littered still like pews in an empty church, whispers like prayers of confession in the dark. How they point, how they stare at the forlorn widow; they know not the extent of everything she has lost, the burden of Atlas' grief on these only all too human shoulders. Still, she stands tall; as if breaking were a relief she hasn't earned. This is her atonement, her penance. There is no saving a woman who saved – that's not how it worked.

She favoured wearing a dark, hooded, forest-green coat. Her steps were lazy along the tarmac of East London as people walked around her with lives of their own. There was the hustle and bustle of life buzzing about; it was a symphony composed of voices of strangers all meshing into the song of busy almost-silence; it might as well have been silence to a woman who couldn't be bothered to listen. No one noticed her; there is nothing of her to notice. She was but an ordinary girl. Very clever. Very pretty, if one were to look; but never the kind of pretty that makes you stop.

She hardly paid attention to anything. It was only when you looked at her - really looked at her - that, perhaps, you will see that there could be the possibility that something was very wrong. And even if you did notice, she will hardly say the story. Tongue used to spouting excuse after excuse, she will find a way to excuse herself from explaining the truth. Who will believe her now? Though she did not have to worry about that - there was no left around her left to look. Were you still a lost girl if you knew that no one was looking?

Hers were a young woman's eyes that aged with lifetimes' worth of grief. Wide and rich as earth, there was once a time when they sparkled as if sprayed with the kiss of early morning dew. It has been five months since she lost everything; it has been five months and two weeks since the final goodbye with her last beloved. Around her wrist was still the burnt out device that was her last hope at something normal, something hers. Alas, as selfish as it was to hope otherwise, Danny Pink would not have returned to her; he had his own debts to pay and, perhaps, this was fate collecting for her.

"I'm always losing things," a much younger Clara once said, and it has remained true of her for as long as she has lived. Her mother. Her friend, Mrs Maitland. Herself, in the time winds. Then went her clever boy. As did her modern former-soldier, thrice – in one day, and a fourth time in two weeks' time. In another two weeks, as did her best friend; she will never see him again, she knows. He's home – a place she will never know nor have again.

Better me than him, she thought. Go to hell, he'd said to her once – and he should've stopped there; God knows this must be worse, God knows she'd deserved it then. And isn't this what sinners deserve? Though he was alive and well (probably; he always seemed to be, eventually), she knew better than to hope that her best friend would ever come back.

It has been five months.

When she was younger, she was told that all she had to do to find something that she had lost was to go to a quiet place and think on where she might find it again. And then she could remember. The problem with this living nightmare was that she knew exactly where everything was, she remembered everything - no reflection at a quiet place could ever bring them back.

Pity the man who almost made it to the stars but couldn't, yes. But pity ever more then woman who had it all - who had starlight woven in her fingertips - only to have it all slip away.

Days and days have gone by where she'd wish for peaceful sleep. She'd sleep safe tonight, Danny had promised her, and she did. Safely did she sleep that night and every night since, she knew; but he said nothing of her ever sleeping soundly. Dreams of him, of happier days that will never be (days that will never come, passing on and on and on), offered no such relief as she still wakes alone every day to the embrace of cold, unwashed sheets. And on this day, the prayer should have been answered – her final sleep, met without warning nor intention, by the collision of a car she hadn't seen before a mechanized hand came to meet her arm to pull her away.

"Oh my stars!" came her mother's cry that were uttered from an impossible girl's lips, a hand against her racing heart. The car whizzed on without remorse, horn blaring as it did. Impossibly wide eyes, she stared on and remained stock still, if for but a moment. Her breathing went from near stagnant to a rapid rise and fall within a millisecond. It took a moment before she returned the stare to the man still holding her arm. Clara, though gentle, shrugged out of his grasp. He let her go.

"Thank you," she said, licking her lips and swallowing what had gathered from parted lips as her mind whirred, trying to process what had just happened. Her heart felt like it was beating again for the first time; the sudden spike of adrenaline in her veins making her feel more alert, more awake, more alive than she has ever felt in months. To the kindly stranger-made-saviour did she then turn her attention, familiar amber stare up into deep blue that she knew in another life – that knew her right back.

James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes blinked, blank stare and parted lips mirroring her own, and looked at her, not knowing what to say but spoke before he could think.

"Do I know you?"