The rest of Tuesday passed uneventful.

Bucky was still fidgety and restless. He slept very little, catching a nap every two hours or so, but all in all his mind was lost spent thinking about the previous night.

Natalia, arriving like a dream, her blood signaling that it's a nightmare.

Lionel, entrusting to him a bank of information and secrets that could be accessible to anyone who can control him.

Natalia, leaving him once again without a trace of why and how she ended up there.

The vague threads were irreconcilable in his head. He held to three truths.

1.) The attic's responsibility rests in his unstable shoulders for the next 36 hours.

2.) Natalia ran to the store in hopes of safety and comfort.

3.) She wants him to find her again, and the answers lie on this stupid round disk that held a symbol, a number, a letter, as if she was –

"Playing chess with me..."

Quickly he looked for a chessboard and cleared Lionel's table. He walked twice around the entire store - Tuesday, 4:18 PM - and concluded that not a soul breathed in it.

Hastily he opened the chess board and laid it out on the beautiful stained table.

As he expected, letters and numbers were etched on the side, and it was only so easy for him to locate

"E1,"

The tile had a small unevenness to it that when he pushed, indicated it could be opened.

But it won't.

He turned the board over and realised the bottom was misguiding. Tapping into it, the inside rang hollow. It was only when he shook it that he heard the slight sliding of a small, probably flat, object in the hollow case.

He could've just cracked the case open, sure. But that would've compromised Lionel's trust in him. He looked for another clue. He was so close.

Rummaging through the dusty printed manual that spilled with the contents of the board, he realised the writing was in Cyrillic, and an angry thrum rang through his brain.

Natalia and him being given orders by a man who hid in the shadows.

Written messages from assassin to assassin in the language only they knew how to speak in their target country.

Natalia passing him chess pieces with letters -

"Pressed on the bottom..."

He looked at each piece carefully, looking for the something, anything.

The queen had the two opposing triangles, like on her flattened bottlecap.

Did Natalia carry the disk with her whenever she went, as if she might meet him anytime, anywhere? Or is the secret he's about to uncover something that any agent passes to a fellow agent, in times of trouble?

What if it's a signal for his capture?

Bucky twisted his neck at the clang of the door, a child entering the bookstore and flashing him an over enthusiastic grin.

Not now, perhaps.

He smiled back at him, and asked if he could help him with anything.

24 hours then passed since Natalia came. Bucky slept the early evening and felt more... Assured. It was Wednesday, three AM. He thought there would be no better time than then to uncover the secrets - after all, Lionel would be back in nine hours.

He threw the newspapers littered over Lionel's desk on the floor. The chess board sat in the middle. He opened it again and examined the manual, then carefully he examined the pieces.

Just as he thought, one of them had the two opposing triangles etched on the bottom. It was the Black Queen. Bucky smirked. Of course.

As if intuition took place in his hands, he placed all the pieces on the board, played a sequence that was etched into his mind like the way sentences come naturally to most, and to his surprise, his hand naturally moved queen to E1. Bucky took a deep breath. My last breath of air, he thought.

The piece descended with the tile.

He removed all the pieces aside and pushed on the tile that sank. It popped up and revealed an aged piece of paper, with what seems like -

"Coordinates..."

His heart beat stronger than when he anticipated death.

"She wants me to find..."

Her, whispered his mind.

"Something," he convinced his lips.

Whatever it was he had to find, it'll only come in the afternoon.

When Lionel comes back. And explains whatever the goddamn fuck was hiding in that attic.

And everything else Bucky doesn't know, perhaps.

Hastily he made sure nobody was loitering along the window, along the alley. He listened for footsteps, breathing, whispers, anything.

The night was quiet, dark, protecting. Bucky took out a map from his bag.

Tracing the numbers he realised he came up empty. Or, empty from what it looks like. It was a farmers market it lead to.

He looked at the chessboard and read the year of its make. "1942," he whispered. Uncanny.

He scavenged the drawers, the maps aisle, the cupboards for a map from those times.

It took him an hour to find one, underneath piles of record books. It was just as yellow as the paper in the board.

To his surprise, the map bore a mostly similar layout.

"A farmers market..." He said.

"What the fuck."

He walked to Marcus' blocky old computer and searched the coordinates in the browser.

"A farmers market?!"

The market sat square in the middle of the city. Apparently, it's also seasonal, closing up shop during the colder months and only opening during festivals and summer months.

His luck.

Lunch is only so far, though.