In the week that followed Tambasi Market, Elsa's personal visits to the farm far outstripped her professional ones. Almost every day, in fact; bar one when a call kept her past nightfall.

Maybe, just maybe, Bucky contemplated offering her his bed for the night, to save her travelling the full way home but, upon reflection, the gesture could have easily been taken out of context. And why damage progress with a potential misunderstanding?

Unfortunately, Bucky reverted to internal suffering that evening, where his brain snidely suggested that she didn't want to see him; that her absence was nothing to do with a complicated birth twenty miles south of the farm. However, that doubt evaporated when, to her credit, she turned up the next morning with breakfast as an apology.

Would it have inspired murmurs among the neighbours for the little vet to be seen leaving his plot early in the morning? With a long, parting kiss before she took to the driver's seat? And another before she took off? Perhaps. Did Bucky care? When it was truly innocent? Not particularly. It was just breakfast. But it got Bucky thinking. When the inevitable happened (and he didn't know when that would be, his mother raised a gentleman, after all), what would he do? As it turned out, he would have to scrape together an answer sooner than expected.

"Will I see you tomorrow?"

"I have every intention of it. If the animals cooperate."

It wasn't unusual for Bucky to laugh anymore. Or smile. In his own, restrained way, perhaps, but all the same, it was a massive improvement on his habitually stark self. He did both just then; tittering softly at the idea of the animals deciding if he could see his friend or not and allowing the pull of a grin at the thought of reunion; even if half of it was hidden in her hair.

"God, I wish you didn't have to go…"

When Elsa's arms slid from his middle and her stance changed against his, Bucky guessed he had crossed the line he had feared crossing.

That's it. I've gone and done it now…

However, when the White Wolf heaved his sigh and folded his lips into a pained grimace to face the inevitable berating for ungentlemanly conduct (and he could only assume "gentlemanly conduct" was high on her list of priorities in a partner), he found something else instead. The contemplative tilt of a dark head and the mulling gaze that would not be easily separated from his.

Still, Bucky waited to be told that she didn't want to see him anymore, that his insinuation was despicable, that she expected more from him. But instead…

"What if I didn't?"

James Buchanan Barnes did not remember much about passion.

His exhausted mind could tell you all about pain, torment, struggle and fear. But passion… Passion had taken a back seat to survival, slaughter (through no fault or choice of his own) and a desperate search for the self that had been taken from him. To even think about a woman would be nothing but a distraction.

Now… He had nothing but that glorious distraction. Nothing and no one to distract him from the distraction. Only her.

Bucky's consciousness did not stretch to if his bed was clean or tidy. If his day of farm work left an awful lot to be desired in hygiene or odour. If his arm (or lack thereof) would put her off. If she really wanted this as much as he did. But by the way clothes hit the floor (even in their flurry, she still helped him with his) and how one set of lips could not be parted from the other for long, it appeared those reservations were not on Elsa's radar either.

He revelled in her enthusiasm, enraptured by the flirtatious giggle when he lifted her to reclaim her lips (not unlike the ten-kilo bag of oats he had lifted without much effort). Her responses and eagerness, like her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck, were spurring and driving… So it made little sense for Bucky to be the one to stop; much to Elsa's puzzled and concerned curiosity.

"Are you alright?"

"Yeah…" He answered weakly, tipping his head back against the wall, her weight having no bearing on his torso. "It's just uhh… It's been a long time." Not a lie but one hell of an understatement.

"Me too." She offered, with a sweet, encouraging grimace; the extent clearly unfathomed. "If you'd rather we waited, we can-"

Elsa was not cut off by anything Bucky said, but rather, the wordless (and gentle) action of setting her down, skirting meekly around her and assuming a pace in the limited floorspace. A pace that, dare she think it, screamed anxiety.

"Would you prefer if I left?" Fearing regression and rejection (despite the initiation being something of a joint effort), how could she not feel a tad vulnerable, standing in her underwear in the open-plan hut? Bucky had stopped pacing and opted for the more relaxed position of sitting on the bed, elbow supported by his thigh and forehead cradled in his only hand; arguably, that stance held as much stress as the pacing.

"No..." Fingers knotting into his hair, the White Wolf could feel the radiation of incomprehension from the little vet; the one he wanted to spare all of … If he wanted her, like she apparently wanted him, there had to be openness. There had to be transparency. There had to be honesty. "No. But maybe you should get dressed anyway. You're gonna wanna leave after you hear this."

"My name is James Buchanan Barnes." As good an opening as any? The pair had swapped; Elsa (having disregarded the warning of getting dressed) replacing Bucky on the bed, while the niggling temptation to resume his near-frantic pacing almost won out. Wetting his lips, it seemed like the most obvious and basic thing. She already knew it, of course, but for Bucky's own sake, if he started small, upping the ante might come that bit easier. "I was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 10th…" After a bite of hesitation, Bucky reluctantly added: "1917."

It took a moment of processing; of utterly baffled silence, a crease of her forehead and a sinking in those perfect features, before Elsa managed to choke out a stupefied response.

"Bucky." The vet kept her tone as level as she could possibly keep it, perhaps swirled with perplexed, uneasy laughter. "That would make you nearly a hundred years old, that's not even possible…" When her incredulity faded into dejectedness, Bucky felt the familiar lurch in his stomach; this was only part of what he had been afraid of. "You know… If you didn't want to take things any further… All you had to do was say so. You don't have to make things up, I'm not a child."

"But I do." He didn't fight the urgency, she needed to hear it; the equal state of undress had no bearing on his seriousness. "I do wanna take things further. That's why I'm tellin' you, Els. You deserve to know. I mean… If we do take a stab at this, this us thing, there's a lot you're gonna have to understand and the only place that's gonna come from is knowing why." That's it. He thought again, crestfallen. I've lost her, and I've barely opened my mouth. "Even if you didn't understand… I'd wanna be open with you. Honest with you. And some of this stuff… They're not secrets you keep from someone you wanna build something with." Maybe it was a bold assumption, but she didn't challenge it.

Swallowing the build-up of saliva from his mini spew, Bucky waited under the dissecting gaze from the bed. Unreadable, Elsa searched every sun-kissed line and freckle in the White Wolf's face; scrutinizing for some bare sign of a lie or exaggeration, but all she found was genuine anguish, distress and a desperation to be believed.

"Let me guess." Again, her tone betrayed nothing, but Bucky allowed himself a relieved breath; at least she was still there. "When you said you were in the army, you meant World War II."

"I was deployed to Europe in 1943, yeah." Careful. He urged himself. Easy… "The 107th Infantry Regiment. Then, the Howling Commandos."

"But… How?"

This… This was the hard part. Again, start small. Build. To do that, Bucky took a deep breath and smothered the trauma bubbling in his stomach and brain alike.

"You ever heard of Hydra?" How he didn't retch on the poison of the name, Bucky didn't know but he was thankful for the small mercy all the same. The hush that engulfed the room suggested she hadn't heard the question or didn't understand it, but the intensity that hung in the air argued otherwise. At last, she sat forward, head cocked, and eyes narrowed with hateful recognition.

"Nazis?"

Bucky cracked a sad smile at the vehemence she had laced into each letter; he'd felt the same, hence his self-appointed duty to stop them and everything they stood for. He (and Steve) ended up getting a hell of a lot more than they bargained for but… he knew that when he stood in line to be assessed for suitability, he knew it when he left Brooklyn for the last time, and he certainly knew it when he scaled the train in the Alps: the ultimate sacrifice could be demanded of him. As it happened, it had been but, in blessing and curse, it was not as permanent as it might have been for someone else.

"Nazis." The White Wolf confirmed, nodding through his sigh. "It's a Nazi science division. Or was." Her eyes had found his stump and all of a sudden, for the first time since he met her, Bucky was self-conscious of it.

"Did they-?"

"No. Not really, no. They gave me a replacement, actually. But I paid for it." You're doing okay. It's working. She's still here. She's listening. Keep going. The truth. Only the truth.

"My unit was ambushed and overpowered at Azzano." He went on, keeping to memory to prevent getting side-tracked. Despite being in the safety of his humble home, Bucky could not help but feel the resonation of fear and vulnerability from all those years ago; from the weapon's facility, from the holding cell, from the laboratory. Many did not make it out, particularly those subjected to his same plight, but ever the survivor, Bucky gently ushered himself back to the present.

"We were taken to a weapon's facility in the Swiss Alps where we were forced to work as POWs. They beat us, they tortured us, worked us to the bone… When we, me included, got too weak to work, they experimented on us."

Elsa paled in horrified solidarity, the very thought of it revolting. It seemed a world away, an entire lifetime; things like that didn't happen anymore. And yet… Here he was. In front of her. Recounting his direct, first-hand experience. And how could she not believe it? When every word was uttered with hollowed trauma? Grave, solemn and sedate.

"I can't imagine…"

"It killed them. What they did to me, it killed others." Perhaps he hadn't meant it to come out so dispassionately, but the fact remained: He had lived through what others had not. Half afraid to ask and even more afraid of the answer, the vet hesitated before asking:

"What did they do to you?"

Re-living the war, his capture and imprisonment was one thing and outlandish enough. But… the birth of the Winter Soldier and his fifty-year reign of terror was very much another. How did he even begin? How did he tell this girl, this splash of colour on his blank canvas, about brain washing? Assassination? Cryostasis?

"Bucky?" Crash-landing to reality, woken by her tender rousing, the White Wolf had spaced, but for a different reason than usual in her presence. "Are you alright? Why don't you sit down?"

"They wanted a Super Soldier." He went on soberly, stirred by her prompting and ignoring the invitation to sit. "I was the first the serum worked on, that it didn't kill. It was experimental, uncompleted, but with so many test subjects, why not keep trying?"

"Sweetheart-"

"Enhanced durability... Enhanced speed… Enhanced refelexes…" Bucky listed the terrible gifts in a sedated drone, having had them drilled into his brain all those years ago, never to be scrubbed. "Enhanced stamina… Enhanced agility… Regenerative healing abilities…" They had been repeated in a loop to him, at him and over him while in Hydra's clutches; going into cryostasis after a mission or coming out of it before one. Sometimes, just while Zola marvelled at him, awestruck by the achievement. "And I didn't have a say in any of it."

It had become apparent that to let him vent was the easiest and kindest thing to do; to be able to talk about it, pick it apart aloud and understand it might be invaluable to him. She had never seen him so sunken or withdrawn as she did now but attentive and patient, she let him go on, uninterrupted.

"I was rescued with the rest of my squad and others by… Captain America-" Leave Steve out of it for now. "And returned to our base camp. There, we formed the Howling Commandos with Captain America to go after a Nazi called Johann Schmidt and Arnim Zola, the scientist behind the Super Soldier project."

Bucky paused, his mouth dry and his mind still a jumble when it came to the next part. Even then, some seventy-odd years later, the very idea of it sent a shiver down his spine. He remembered the train, he remembered falling, screaming but… his next clear memory was the sterility of a lab. They said he had been pulled from the icy Danube; it was probably the only truth Hydra had ever told him.

"I… became compromised and couldn't complete the mission." Before she could ask what happened, the White Wolf lost the restraint he had been holding on the details. "Our intel had been skewed and they were waiting for us. I fell from the train heading back to the Alps, mid-fight, and down into the river below."

"That should have killed you." Elsa broke her worried but fascinated silence, looking upon the ex-Winter Soldier with renewed astonishment. "If not the fall, the water-"

"The temperature and the water itself, yeah. Hypothermia. Drowning." Tugging his (only) hand through his days' worth of tangle, Bucky considered his next plot point. "I didn't know what they'd done to me or how I survived till I woke up in another cell for… God, I dunno how many years. All I know is, I'd rather've been dead than faced with Arnim Zola again."

"But you were." Came the guess that Bucky did not dismiss.

"Yeah." He murmured, knowing crunch-time was coming, when she would make up her mind to stay or go and, with Bucky's renewed all time low, he could almost safely assume she would do the latter. "I think I could've lived with the enhanced speed, agility and everything else but… that's not even the worst of it."

Could his resolve have crumbled further? It seemed so when he chanced another look at the bed to spy the head, abundant in its loose, dark waves, tilted in a way that always crippled him.

"The Super Soldier serum was only part of the program, what became known as the Winter Soldier program…" Swallowing hard, Bucky grit his teeth and flared his nostrils in some vain attempt at grappling control of his emotions. "Mind control was the rest."

"Fifty years." He went on, voice cracking and purpose slipping. "Fifty years of assassinations, mindless killing and slaughter. They kept me like a dog on a leash, letting me loose when it was time for me to do what I was kept to do… Wiping out anyone that was a threat to them… People I knew… People I cared about… Innocent bystanders…" Howard Stark, his wife Maria (her crime simply amounted to being in the wrong place at the wrong time), and Steve Rogers who, thankfully, had been an unsuccessful target.

Elsa had straightened on the bed, spine steeled, and chin jutted parallel to her chest; as if it had just occurred to her that the man she was alone in a hut with could potentially be dangerous. And she would be hopelessly out muscled should he decide to attack her.

But that's not him… She told herself, watching as the self-confessed murderer deteriorated into little more than a frightened child. He's not like that. Not anymore, at least… He's no beast. He's no monster.

"The mind control is gone." Bucky rasped, lifting his despondent gaze from the floor, only for his stomach to replace it when he realized her body language had changed. "That's why I'm here. You said Shuri can do anything, you were right. I'm cured, but I've so much healing left to do."

Elsa was no longer on the bed, and with agility to match Bucky's, one hand had taken hold of his, while the other planted itself flat on the White Wolf's chest to guide him back towards the vacant bed. Bewildered, he complied, at a loss for anything else. Doleful, he watched through bloodshot eyes as she began to dress.

"Where're you going?"

"To the jeep." Was her somewhat distracted reply, seating herself at the kitchen table as a grounding to pull on her boots. Despite being crushed, what else could he do other than nod that utterly heartbroken nod?

"I don't blame you."

With stealth to match a Winter Soldier, Elsa was upon him again. Could he recall the last time his chin was cupped like that? Sitting perfectly in her palms, like they had been moulded to slot together? Or kissed so tenderly on the forehead?

"I'm going to the jeep to get tea." She soothed, lining the bridge of her nose with his. "Where I come from, tea makes everything better. I promise, I will be no more than thirty seconds; you can come with me if you wish."

As per her gentle, benevolent declaration, Elsa was gone no more than thirty seconds; Bucky had fretfully counted them from where she'd left him on the bed. Her return was marked by filling the cast iron kettle and setting it aside to boil while Bucky looked on.

As if there was no implication, simply getting comfortable, the little vet began to disrobe once more; stripping down to the bare essentials that she had donned for her brief excursion to the jeep.

The reuniting peck was mutual, instinctive; learning to read each other over the past week had apparently slipped their notice. It felt only natural for Elsa to seat herself in Bucky's lap, to be close when that peck evolved; one strong arm securing her waist, while a smaller one crossed from behind his left shoulder to his right.

From there, no one noticed the kettle boil.