45 Gouge
This chapter is special! If you're interested, you can listen to me read this chapter aloud. I can't add links, but if you go to soundcloud . com and add /blithebells/45-gouge to the end of the url, it'll take you to the file. Or, you can find this chapter with an active link on Wattpad. :)
I thought it would be fun to try. :) Tell me what you think! -BB
Bucky woke up when the stinging in his face became too much. In confusion, he sat up and touched his cheek and when his hand came back, he could see red shining on the metal and he gasped.
"James?" Natalia said next to him, shifting, and Bucky looked over at her and used his hand to cover his face. "What is it?"
"Nothing," Bucky said and he reached out his free hand to touch her shoulder and reassure her, but as he held his hand out in front of him, he was horrified to find more blood caked under his fingernails. "It's noth-ooh!" He said in surprise and Natalia was already sitting up. She looked at him, confused, with his eyes wide and his prosthetic hand clapped over his right cheek, and she squinted.
"What's wrong?" She asked and when she reached up and took his hand gently away from his face, he let her. Her eyes widened, she pressed both hands over her mouth and Bucky could see more red spread across his left palm out of the corner of his eye. "James!" She cried. "Your face!"
Before Bucky knew it, Natalia was out of bed and the lights were on, yellow and unexpected, and Bucky blinked and turned around to see blood staining his pillowcase and down the front of his shirt.
"What have you done?" Natalia gasped.
"I-I don't…," Bucky said and he pulled himself out of bed and hurried to the bathroom and found in the mirror a James Buchanan Barnes with dark circles under his eyes and four long gouges, slow in healing, across his cheek. He looked down incredulously at his right hand with the drying red underneath his fingernails, and swallowed. Natalia appeared behind him, looking green.
The cuts weren't too deep, they finally found as Natalia patted a wet washcloth to Bucky's face. They had just bled profusely. Bucky looked in the mirror and estimated. Six minutes, maybe five, and counting. He told Natalia this and she frowned.
"Okay," she said. "Does it hurt?"
"No," Bucky lied. Natalia looked down and pressed her mouth together, then she leaned over the bathroom counter to dig around the medicine cabinet.
"We should get some neosporin on this before it closes," she said quietly and although Bucky thought it would be pointless, even redundant, he let her spread some on his face. He washed the blood off his hands while she did this, and let her help him out of his bloodstained undershirt.
"How did this happen," she asked when they had both stopped moving and she had stood up close to him, leaned in, and touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers, right underneath where he could feel the tingling of the wound sealing itself.
"I don't know," he replied quietly. "I must have done it in my sleep."
"What were you dreaming about?" Natalia asked and Bucky looked down tiredly and Natalia sighed and her hand slid down his bare chest and she leaned up to very gently kiss his mouth. "We have to change the sheets and your pillowcase," she said to him in a voice almost a whisper. "There are some clean ones in the hall closet. Would you get them? I'll clean up here."
"Alright," Bucky said and he stepped away from her reluctantly and walked out of the bathroom and out of the bedroom and into the dark hall where he found new sheets, clean and pressed and folded neatly, and he re-entered the bedroom silently to bring them back, but stopped at the door when he heard something from the bathroom. His heart sank and his shoulders slumped. Natalia was crying.
Bucky didn't know what to do. He could hear her taking deep breaths, trying to be quiet, and he waited a few moments for her to pull herself together before he walked back to the bathroom solemnly.
"Here," he whispered quietly and realized it was in Russian. "I'm sorry." There was an emptiness in the air about him, a certain defeatedness, and a heart so broken that the shards turned him up and cut him inside. He was deeply, deeply sad.
Natalia looked up at him and smiled sweetly, taking the new bedding from him.
"Thank you, darling," she replied, and brushed past him, back into the bedroom, and he followed her and helped her remake the bed.
Later, when the lights went back off and Natalia curled up next to Bucky, her head on his shoulder and her hand across his chest, they both lay there awake and it seemed to Bucky that she held him just a little tighter and pressed herself to him just a little closer. There was fear in her embrace. Bucky tried to swallow, tried to breath, and shakily, he kissed her head and wrapped his other arm around her shoulders.
Cut less than half an inch. Healing time, under five minutes. And he would have added, to the list in his head, no scarring, but when he looked back down to Natalia, hugging him so tight as though she thought he might drift away, he realized that wasn't quite true.