In the midst of dreaming that she was auditioning for a television singing competition while simultaneously realizing with horror that she could not actually sing, Summer was pulled from slumber by an indistinct sound coming from somewhere nearby. Opening her eyes and blinking away the odd images, she looked around and found herself sprawled on her back, far away from where she had first fallen asleep. A look to her right found Bucky still asleep nearly face-down but clearly on the verge of distress, eyes clamped shut and hands in fists near his pillow, his breaths coming increasingly erratically.
She slowly sat up, instantly fully awake as she watched him carefully and quickly considered her options. Steve had gotten inadvertently punched in the face more than once after trying to wake Bucky from his nightmares, she'd heard, and Summer wasn't sure she'd have much of a face left if she faced the same fate. But, leaving the bed and leaving him to suffer didn't seem like much of a viable option either, though leaving him to his dreams had been exactly what she had done during the month he had spent living with her.
She spent a moment stuck in indecision before a soft, almost imperceptible whimper left his lips and made her decision for her. Reminded of the dreams that she'd comforted David in the wake of since he was a little baby, she cautiously moved closer and watched him for a few more seconds before slowly reaching out her hand.
Poised to leap away any minute if she had to - hopefully quickly enough, though that was unlikely - she ran her fingers soothingly through his hair, softly like she would with David, all while watching his face and breathing for any sign of calming or worsening. When the touches didn't seem to be making it any worse, she let herself move in closer while she spoke as comfortingly as she could manage, hoping her words of him being okay and safe got through to him somehow, and to her relief, after a moments, his breathing slowed down a bit.
She wasn't sure how long she stayed like that, putting her mothering skills to the test on a much more difficult subject than her son, but by some miracle, in time, his fists uncurled and his jaw relaxed along with his breaths, and he seemed to fall back into a semi-restful sleep. She smiled, not having expected success, and settled down near him to try to sleep some more herself, her hand moving from his hair to twine with his fingers as she closed her eyes.
But, the peace was short-lived. She was startled awake nearly an hour later to him shooting up in bed with a ragged gasp, breathing hard and looking around in confusion as she quickly scrambled up to a sitting position behind him.
"It's okay," she said, voice tinged with sleep. "You're okay." Then she reached out to reassuringly touch his arm, and he flinched away, looking back at her with wide eyes that frightened her a bit with how confused they were.
"Bucky," she said quietly, cautiously, her hands down in surrender, "calm down. You're all right. You were dreaming."
He blinked, still breathing like he'd just done laps around a city, recognition dawning in his eyes as he muttered, "Summer?"
She nodded in relief, taking that as a signal that touching him would be okay now. She placed her hand on his right forearm and replied, "You fell asleep with me, remember?"
He stared at her for a moment before looking down at her hand on him, then dropping his head and running his metal hand over his face. She sighed and laid her head on his shoulder, almost able to feel his misery rolling off of him. There had been times in her life where sleep had not come easy, but to experience his level of sleep deprivation on such a prolonged basis was nearly unthinkable.
"Is it still like this every night?" she asked softly, listening to his breathing slowly return to something more normal but still labored. He nodded, and she pressed a kiss to his shoulder, hoping that her presence was at least a little comforting. "Maybe an hour ago I woke up and I could tell you were having a nightmare. I tried to help, and you seemed okay after a few minutes."
It was quiet for a few moments before he replied, "I wasn't. I think I heard you, but..."
"Didn't really help?" she surmised, a little disappointed, but that was just life, she supposed.
His tone was blank and miserable when he eventually muttered, "I shot you." Another pause, a swallow of his dry throat, and then, "I thought you were... I thought... but then I saw your face and..."
"Hey," she gently interrupted, trying to pull his face towards hers, but he resisted and she didn't push it. "It was just a dream. Dreams suck, I know."
"They won't go away," he said miserably, with all the exhaustion of someone who had slept the better part of seventy years but couldn't catch more than a few hours at a time now.
She could feel tension returning to his muscles as he worked himself back up, so she made him look at her and wouldn't let him stop her this time. "I know. And the dread's probably worse than the actual dreams, right?" He just looked at her, and she had a feeling that she was right. "I know because mine suck too. Nothing like yours, I'm sure, but still."
His eyes turned mildly questioning but no less exhausted and dejected. She pursed her lips and cringed at the thought of having to talk about it, but he had never breathed a word of his dreams to her until now. She couldn't really ask him to open up if she wouldn't do the same.
"HYDRA?" he asked quietly. "The agents that found me here?"
"Sometimes," she replied. "Maybe once a week I have that one. But it's usually Mark and what he did. I guess almost suffocating to death is kind of perfect for nightmares because you can't breathe and then..."
She trailed off when his eyes widened and suddenly became slightly murderous. Then she remembered that she'd never told him that part of the story. She straightened a little, clearing her throat and gesturing unnecessarily with her hand towards her mouth as she explained, "Uh... he tried to keep me quiet and... yeah. I passed out and when I woke up he was passed out drunk next to me and..." She glanced up at him and fell silent, knowing the hardness of his glare wasn't directed at her but still feeling like she might wither under it anyway.
"You could have died."
She nodded. "Yep. But I didn't." One more look at him found his expression full of questions, but she blurted out her next words before he could ask her anything. "One time I dreamed it was you hurting me. Exact same dream I always have, except it was you instead of him."
All at once, his eyes grew large, his face paled, and he looked like he might throw up, but before he could take the new bit of info the complete wrong way, Summer clarified her point by holding up her hands and saying, "I'm telling you that because that's how stupid brains are. I know you'd never hurt me, and dreaming that made absolutely no sense. Dreams are just... dreams. They don't mean anything. And they don't need to have power over you. Or at least that's what my old therapist used to tell me." Then she paused and added, "All your dreams can't be bad. Don't you have good ones every once in awhile?"
He reluctantly looked away then, thinking as he looked at his hands in his lap. "I think I've had three. One of Steve, two of you."
"Really? Do tell," she smiled, desperate to lighten the mood. She scooted back on the bed and pulled on his hand to follow her, and after a moment they were settled against the headboard, her facing him while he stared out in front of them.
"First one was when I left here," he said, still speaking in a hushed, sleepy tone. "I fell asleep in the car. Second was last night."
"Last night?" she repeated. "... And?"
He gave her a look that told her he wasn't going to tell her, and after a moment she rolled her eyes. "Tell me and I'll tell you one I had about you. A good one, not a stupid one." His expression changed to mildly intrigued, and she grinned and said, "I'll go first, if that helps. So, one time like a month ago, I dreamed that I took you to this big library because you said you wanted to read Charlotte's Web, which is this kid's book about a pig and a spider, but we couldn't find it anywhere, so you got really pissed off and punched a hole into a bookshelf. Then the librarian started coming towards us all mad, so you took us into the computer lab and dragged me under a desk. And then you started kissing me and stuff, but I woke up before the, you know, good stuff could happen. Always happens to me. Then I wake up and I'm like..." she forced herself to shut up before she made a bigger idiot of herself. She looked up to find his eyes a little less tortured and a little more amused, which was definitely a good thing. "Anyway. Your turn."
She waited impatiently while he looked down, appearing thoughtful for a bit, and her attention was briefly drawn to the early morning light starting to break through her curtains before his voice snapped her eyes back to him. "You know how we walked in on Steve and Natasha... in the kitchen?"
She held her breath. Yes, it was difficult to forget walking in on America's oldest no-longer-virgin getting a favor from his terrifying spy girlfriend. "... Yeah."
He glanced at her, then almost let a grin cross his face as he added, "You shouldn't send me pictures of you... licking things."
She stared at him for a moment, letting those two hints sink in. Then her eyes widened and she broke into a smile, coupled with a stupid blush she could just never avoid. "So that picture wasn't a complete failure? That's awesome! I thought it just went over your head from the way you answered me."
"... I didn't really think I was supposed to say what I thought."
She chuckled and leaned her head back. "Well, that's kind of the idea of texting. But since you're from the stone age, I'll let it pass. This time. Next time, share your thoughts."
He started to return her grin, but it quickly faded as his face grew somber once more. "How can you laugh and joke after... after talking about what happened to you?"
He looked genuinely perplexed, and she drew a breath before replying, "Well, it happened six years ago. I've had my time to fall apart over it and let it destroy me, and trust me, it was a crapfest. My grandma was dying and my brother was away at college, and when I found out I was pregnant..." she shook her head, eyes closing briefly. "I thought it was the worst possible thing that could happen. I was terrified, heartbroken, in denial, everything you can imagine. I tried to go and have an abortion. I was early enough that they gave me pills for it, so I came home and took them, then freaked out and made myself throw them up. I still feel guilty about that."
She glanced at Bucky to find him listening intently, his face the picture of seriousness. "So, even though I decided to keep him after that, I was angry and resentful and bitter about it. I let what happened pretty much consume me and was a complete wretch and wouldn't even eat until my grandma literally smacked me straight. I don't know what I would have done without her. I did the therapy thing because of her nagging me, found a support group. I didn't think it would help but it did. It was great. That was how I learned to 'take my power back', as they called it. Then I had my baby. And my grandma died a few months later." She took a breath and then added, "She's the one who came up with his name. I was stumped, but she said that for me, going through with having him after what I went through was like facing my own personal giant. So she suggested David. You remember David and Goliath?"
He nodded. She took another breath and said, "Anyway. My point is, it all is what it is. And Mark doesn't have any power over me anymore. It'll always hurt and I don't think you ever quite 'get over it', but... it doesn't define me, you know? So I guess that's why I can talk about it and not freak out. I've accepted it."
He looked caught somewhere between flabbergasted and completely confused, but in his defense, she knew that she'd just dropped a whole lot of emotional baggage on top of his head. That baggage was one of several reasons why she used to think that she'd never find a man willing to even attempt a relationship with her, but maybe the key was finding one with their own baggage and thus the capacity to understand. And boy, had she hit the motherload of mutual baggage. Reagan National Airport had nothing on them.
In time, she found herself curled up at his side, her head on his chest, and she listened to the steady thump of his heartbeat and subtle mechanical sounds from his arm. He was in deep thought above her, or at least that's what his expression had told her the last time she'd peeked up to check on him.
She was nearly on the verge of falling back to sleep when his voice rumbled in her ear, pulling her back from the edge. "I can accept some things, but some I just... can't."
Realizing that he was picking up where they'd left off nearly ten full minutes of silence ago, she blinked a few times and asked, "Like what?"
A full minute or two passed before he gave an answer. "I don't want to tell you."
She kept her head down, thinking maybe he'd have an easier time telling her whatever it was if he didn't have to look directly at her. "If you could scare me off, I would have run for the hills already. Probably when I read that you killed a president."
Another few minutes, and then he said somewhat brokenly, "But kids are different."
Her stomach instantly twisted with dread. She didn't say a word, waiting to see what he'd say next, praying he wouldn't leave it there and leave her imagination to run wild with the potential horrors behind those words.
"I shot a little girl in the head, in the middle of her birthday party, right in front of her parents. And I have no idea why."
She closed her eyes, her belief that nothing he could say could shock her proven false. She had never imagined his targets being anything other than adults, important people like Howard Stark and JFK and Steve. Those, she could at least understand why HYDRA would want gone, but a kid? Why?
And to think that the same man who had played Angry Birds with her son, let the boy use his arm like a big toy and had humored his every whim, had once been so utterly stripped of his soul that he could kill another child just like that...
No wonder he couldn't sleep at night.
"It wasn't you," she eventually managed to say. "It wasn't your fault."
"But I remembered Steve. If I could remember him, how I could I not... how could I just not even question..."
She finally lifted her head and let her eyes meet his, the pit in her stomach growing deeper at the sight of the pain etched in his features. "Please don't do that. You have to know that blaming yourself is... it's no different from if I blamed myself for what happened to me."
"You didn't hurt anyone," he pointed out.
"Doesn't make you any less of a victim," she replied.
And that was the truth of it, if he could look past his guilt long enough to see it. But she couldn't sit there and lecture him about it, or pretend to have any idea what it was like to have that kind of blood permanently stained on one's hands. Maybe the best thing that she could do was continue to show him how she accepted him, despite her still-uneasy stomach, and remind him during these difficult nights that he really was, in every sense of the word, innocent. And maybe, someday, he would start to believe her.
As the sun rose outside, she watched the rest of early morning pass by in a lazy, somewhat heavy, silent crawl. Her head ended up back on his chest and his fingers found their familiar place in her hair as she dozed off and on through the questions and thoughts swirling through her head that she wouldn't give voice to. Occasionally she would feel his heart rate pick up beneath her ear, signaling that he was spiraling too far into his own mind, and she would either take his hand or mumble comforting words between kisses to wherever she could reach until he calmed down and his heart returned to normal.
This continued until her door creaked open and a half-asleep little boy came scampering inside the room in his Captain America pajamas. She separated herself from Bucky and smiled at her son as he crawled into the bed and curled up in her lap, cuddling with her as he turned suspicious, untrusting eyes on the man sitting on the other side of his mother'a bed.
"This is how he wakes up every day now," she explained, while Bucky and David took part in a staredown that she thought was more cute than anything, since it consisted of David's dirty looks and Bucky's innocent stare back. "I don't think he likes the idea of sharing me much."
Bucky looked up from David to her, slightly nodding his understanding while David tightened his little arms around her in a "she's mine" gesture. Bucky almost smiled. Summer did and then asked, "Have you figured out how to work coffee machines?" When he nodded, she added, "If you go start some I'll make pancakes."
And that was the official start to the new day, Bucky nodding and rising out of her bed looking more tired than when he had first laid down in it the night before, and her not faring much better. She would live, though, and so would he. At least there was always coffee. And maybe getting a hideously early start wasn't so bad, since Bucky would be gone next morning, and as cheesy as it may have sounded, she didn't want to miss a moment.
It was halfway through watching her pancakes get put away silently but quickly by the two men in her life that Summer remembered she needed to drive into town to pick up a prescription for David. It couldn't be put off, unfortunately, so she invited Bucky on the world's most boring errand-run before taking a shower and then facing the task of figuring out what to wear.
Standing in front of her closet in a towel, she eyed the contents of it warily, saving her most contemptuous glare for the pair of boots that sat innocently near the front. To her slight shame, she had been wearing them a couple times a week in an attempt to break them in and make them at least somewhat wearable, but they still hurt if she wore them too long, and she wondered how other women could wear such things all day and not have their feet fall off. Nevertheless, her reason for having bought and worn them in the first place was sitting in her kitchen with his effortless, mildly disheveled, natural allure, so she figured it was a good time to break out the torture boots again.
After tossing them on the floor behind her, she started rummaging through her clothes and frowning at them all, all of them seeming either too dressy or too casual or too something or another. But then something caught her eye at the very back of the clothes rod, a black leather jacket that was a relic from her pre-baby days but still in fine condition. She pulled it out and looked it over, quickly deciding why the heck not before grabbing a dark purple dress she'd bought for New York but never got to wear, ignoring the fact that she was probably overdressing for a trip to the pharmacy. But that was irrelevant when she had more important reasons to dress above her usual standards.
The dress ended just above her knees, cinched at the waist with a thin black belt, and the neckline was low enough that she would probably need to steal Bucky's lady-scarf to stay warm. Black tights went under the dress, and when it came to makeup, she went easy on it to keep from looking like she was trying too hard. Same went for her hair, which was towel-dried in waves that would be trying to reach past the middle of her back if she didn't get it cut soon. When she was done, she looked over her reflection in the mirror above her dresser, trying not to feel completely ridiculous and rolling her eyes as she headed out to the hall.
Heels clicking against the floor, helping give off a false air of confidence, she walked into the kitchen to fetch David and get him dressed, glancing at Bucky as he sat at the table with his back to her, doing something on his phone. The sound of her footsteps caught up with his ears as she was telling David to head to his room, and she looked at Bucky just in time to see him turn and glance at her before doing a slight double take. His eyes narrowed and began their sweep of her at her boots, slowly working their way up, and just when their eyes met, she mustered up what she prayed was a flirtatious grin and then headed off to follow David to his room.
When she came back, both of them ready at last, Bucky had shifted the chair so that he'd be able to see her the moment she reappeared. She could feel his stare as much as see it, and as satisfying as it was, she wasn't sure if she would ever get used to the intensity of it. It didn't help that over time, his stare had evolved from from much more innocent origins to something that was now so overtly lustful that she finally knew what people meant when they threw around terms like "eye-sex".
She heard him stand from the table when she grabbed her purse and started throwing her keys and other essentials into it, and she sensed him lurking inches behind her when David ran off to grab some toys from the living room.
"Hurry up, kiddo, we should have left like ten minutes a-"
Her words died at the sensation of her hair being gripped and her head being pulled back, gently but swiftly, and suddenly she was being kissed so ferociously that she almost fell over from the shock of it and had to be steadied by an arm that helpfully wrapped around her waist and held her upright.
It was over before David could walk back in and be subjected to them kissing a second time, and when her mouth was free again and his arms were gone, Summer straightened up and stared in a daze at her unrepentant assailant as he slowly walked backwards towards her front door. Then he had the audacity to run his eyes back down over her body and bite his lip, a habit he seemed blissfully unaware of, before opening the door and slipping outside.
She was still staring at the door with her mouth half-open when David reemerged, waving a hand near her face to make her snap out of it. She shook her head and decided that it was unreasonable to be so utterly frustrated after a single kiss, regardless of how ridiculous it had been, and she marched out to her truck while actively fighting the urge to throw something hard at Bucky's head.
It was nearly two full hours before the errands were done and they were back home, which were two hours full of combatting Bucky's hand crossing the border of his passenger seat to try to play with (and slip under) the hem of her dress and giving in to David's silent but effective pleas for junk food which made the excursion last longer than it needed to. By the time she'd gotten them back into the woods and safely inside the house, her frustration levels had not dropped and she was debating how exactly to get a minute or maybe fifteen alone with the source of her angst with her son awake, but then the jerk dropped his jacket on a chair and said something about taking a shower before disappearing down the hall.
Of course. She plopped down on her couch and flipped on cartoons before letting her head fall back and eyes close, considering walking outside and face-planting in the snow to get her brain to cool down.
Then her eyes opened and stared at the ceiling just before her doorbell rang.
She shot up with immediate alarm, all warm and mushy thoughts gone in a flash as her reflexive fear set in. David, the poor boy, looked scared as well, and Summer quickly assured him that it was probably just the mailman as she got up to her feet, wobbling slightly in her heels, grabbing her taser from her purse as she made her way to the door.
She glanced down the hall, where she could hear the shower running. Then she moved to a window and peered out the side of it, but she couldn't see much of anything at the angle. Then whoever it was at the door knocked a few times, and she swallowed her fear before biting the bullet and stepping around to unlock the door.
Taser still firmly in hand, she cracked open the door, hoping it really was the mailman. But it wasn't, and as soon as she got a glimpse of who was on the other side, every drop of blood in her veins ran cold and her face paled.
"What the hell are you doing here?" she choked out, her tone equally shocked and venomous as she came face to face with the man from her nightmares for the first time in over four years.
Mark looked the same as she remembered, five feet and nine inches of averageness, short light brown hair and brown eyes, pleasant enough to look at if one didn't know any better. He held up his hands in surrender and said quietly, "Please don't freak out. I just - I was in town and -"
She stared at him with wide eyes until she noticed him looking over her shoulder. She followed his gaze to David, peeking around the corner of the living room, and she instantly snapped, "David, go to your room. Right now. I mean it. Go."
The boy obeyed, and Summer turned back to her unwelcome visitor, who looked a bit dumbfounded at having seen his son for the first time since he was an infant. "What do you want?" she asked harshly. "And why didn't you call?"
"Well, I knew you wouldn't answer if I did," he replied, his tone blank rather than accusatory. "I just wanted to... see him."
"Really?" she asked, eyebrows raised and old anger sparking to life. "Are you kidding me? Almost five years later?"
He winced a little and nodded, closing his eyes. "I know, I know. Can I just... I know I have no right, but can I at least come inside?"
"Uh, no," she replied.
He paused and said, "Technically I'm still allowed a few visits a year."
"Technically, you can go to hell," she shot back. "He doesn't even know you. He doesn't do that great with people he doesn't know. You'd know that if you gave a crap about him."
He sighed, putting his hands on his hips and looking down, something she knew he did when he was getting frustrated. "Can I please just come in for a minute?"
She stared at him for a moment, long and hard, and then she changed her mind. Fine. Let him have a glimpse of what she had built for the last five years with nothing but the barest of financial support from him. Let him see how little she ever needed him in the first place. She swung the door open and raised an eyebrow. "Fine. One minute."
He looked shocked at her change of heart, but he quickly recovered and stepped inside, awkwardly. He noticed the taser in her hand that she was making zero effort of hiding, and his eyes widened briefly, which almost made her grin.
Once he was inside, she closed the door and crossed her arms, staring at him as he looked around silently.
"You've... uh... you've kept the place up pretty well," he said dumbly, glancing at her before looking at the taser again and then quickly looking away.
"Were you expecting filth and everything in shambles?"
Mark sighed and waved his hand before muttering, "Can you please not do this?"
"Do what? I think I've earned the right to act like a bitch to you, don't you think?"
"I know I've been an idiot," he replied, "and I know you hate me. But I've been thinking about him, and... I don't know. I don't like how all of this turned out."
"Which is entirely your fault," she pointed out.
He sighed again, shoving his hands in jean pockets and leaning back against her kitchen table. Silence fell for a moment, and she was about to declare his time up and shoo him out when he glanced up at her and muttered, "For what it's worth, you look great."
She drew in a deep, calming breath to keep from exploding and answered, "All right. Get out."
"Summer -"
"Nope," she shook her head, "no. Out. I'm not doing this."
"Can I please just talk to him? Just for a minute?"
"If you don't get out," she replied, "I swear I will tase you right in the face."
His eyes widened a little at the threat, but he persisted. "Summer, please."
"You still have no clue what 'no' means," she laughed bitterly. "Have you changed at all in the last five years? Or are you still the same idiot you've always been?"
Somewhere in the middle of her last sentence, Mark seemed to suddenly notice a pair of men's shoes near the front door, and after that, a man's leather jacket in the chair sitting next to him. His expression was a bit incredulous when he looked up and asked, "Is... is there a guy here with you?"
In her fury and outrage, she had almost forgotten about Bucky entirely. Now that she remembered him, she realized that she couldn't hear the shower running anymore, and that meant that she should probably make Mark leave within the next sixty seconds. She quickly schooled her features into blankness, however, and shrugged. "What if I did? How is that your business?"
He opened and closed his mouth a few times like a fish. "Just... just curious, I guess."
"Well, you lost your right to be curious a long time ago," she replied. "Now for the last time, get out."
"Let me talk to him first."
She gritted her teeth. "No."
"Legally, you can't deny me this."
"Like hell I can't."
They stood at an impasse, her fingers itching to tase him into the next century. She watched him carefully, vowing to do it if he took so much as one step towards the hallway.
She never got to find out what his next course of action would have been, however, because a deceptively soft-spoken voice from the edge of the hallway made them both look up in slight shock, albeit for very different reasons.
There stood Bucky, still wet and shirtless after his shower, staring at the stranger in the dining room with seemingly zero thought as to the metal arm very much on display, looking poised and ready for battle as he asked, "Who the hell are you?"
Summer picked her jaw off the floor and glanced at Mark, who had gone deathly pale and wide-eyed as he stared openly at the man demanding his identity. Judging by the way that he stared at Bucky's arm, he knew what it meant and who he was. He would have had to have been living under a rock for the last six months to not know.
She held her breath. This wasn't going to end well.
From the moment the sound of distant but clear arguing reached his ears, Bucky's reaction had been instinctual and rapid. The last time somebody had knocked on her door while he was there, he had ended up killing two HYDRA agents and narrowly saving her son from certain death. He had no interest in taking the chance of a repeat performance of that night, so with his arm as nothing more than an afterthought, he all but stormed out of the bathroom in jeans and came to a stop at the edge of the hallway.
His question of the man's identity was pointless, because once he took a good look at him, it was obvious who he was. The eyes gave him away, because they were the same eyes that belonged to Summer's son.
He looked at Summer, and the anger that she wasn't trying to hide was all the confirmation he needed. She also looked a bit terrified, looking back and forth between him and the man she'd called Mark, like she expected something horrible to happen any minute.
The sound of a chair falling over stole Bucky's attention, and he shifted his gaze to find Mark scrambling after nearly tripping over his own feet trying to scuttle backwards towards the door. His eyes were wide with sudden terror and he reached out a slightly shaky finger, muttering, "You're... you..." Then he looked at Summer and half-exclaimed, "Why is he in your house? Wh - he - he's..."
"Yeah. He is," Summer replied, glancing at Bucky nervously after she spoke the words.
Mark gaped at her before backing up closer to the door. "You're insane, Summer."
It was when he grabbed the doorknob and tried to make a run for it that Bucky sprung into action, and the poor fool simply never had a chance.
Bucky crossed the room as the door opened and grabbed him by the neck of his jacket, effortlessly yanking him back and turning him before clamping his metal hand over his throat and making a pathetic half-scream come squeaking out of his mouth. Bucky looked at him through narrowed eyes, his grip tight enough to make Mark panic but not completely deprive him of oxygen as he took his time looking the man over.
"So you're Mark," Bucky stated, tone low and clearly threatening by the way Mark choked a little harder and widened his eyes. "I've heard about you."
Then Bucky looked to his left, to Summer, who stood by still clutching her taser, watching with alarm but not with fear. Their eyes met, and words were not necessary for him to communicate his silent question. He left what happened next up to her, and the slightest inclination of her head gave him all the answer he needed.
He turned back to the very red, sputtering face of the man in his grip, and then tightened his grip as he walked him forward, through the door, before throwing him down to the ground hard enough to make him cry out in pain despite the cushion of snow beneath. He coughed and wheezed and tried to scramble up to get away, but Bucky kept him down with a kick to his ribs, then one to his stomach, each making him cry out miserably and curl in on himself in a vain attempt to fend off more blows, but a metal hand curled around his upper arm and flung him on his back. A distinct cracking sound told Bucky that he'd either broken the arm or at least pulled it out of socket, and the scream that resulted sounded like one of a man dying. Clearly, pain was a new concept to the man
Moving with a precise and terrifying fluidity, Bucky pressed a knee to Mark's chest and pinned him to the ground, grabbing his throat again, this time with his right hand, while his other reared back and then smashed into his face. His nose shattered on impact, but if Bucky had not been holding back, his entire face would have met the same fate. His movements were careful and strategic, however, and this, for better or worse, was what he knew he was best at, designed for, and knowing that the target of his assault was deserving and entirely not the least bit innocent made it feel damn good for once to throw a punch.
"Stop! Please," Mark moaned pathetically, face bloodied and bruised from the single punch and breathing labored under Bucky's grip on his neck. "I won't - I won't tell anyone, I swear!"
"No, you won't," Bucky said, tone lower than before and dripping with a fearsome confidence. "Because if you do," he went on, taking his hand leave Mark's throat and using it to cover his mouth and nose, "I will find you wherever you go, and I will enjoy listening to you scream while I cut you apart."
The combined effect of his threat and the very intentional suffocation by his hand made Mark's eyes nearly tumble from their sockets and body thrash with panic as much as it could while still being pinned to the earth.
"Don't come back. Don't make me regret letting you live."
He waited until the last possible moment to remove his hand and let the man take a painful, frantic gasp of air as he finally let him free, standing up and watching as he laid there struggling for breath, unable to move yet despite how desperately he wanted to. Bucky stood there, glancing behind him to find Summer watching from the doorway with an unreadable expression. Then he turned back to the man laying in front of him, and as a parting gift, sent a brutal kick flying directly between his legs. By that point, Mark was nearly unable to scream anymore, and wept through the blinding pain instead.
Bucky didn't move an inch until the man had crawled through the snow and managed to collapse into the driver's seat of his car, eventually peeling out of the driveway and nearly hitting a tree in his haste to get away. Once the car was out of sight, Bucky turned around and walked back towards the door, where Summer was still standing and wearing an expression he still couldn't wholly decipher. She didn't seem displeased, however.
He stood a few feet in front of her as she closed the front door and locked it, cold after having beaten the man to an inch of his life while wearing only jeans in nearly-freezing temperatures, but also warm from leftover adrenaline and the rush of how satisfying it had been to repay a bit of what Mark had inflicted on the woman who was still currently gripping her taser for no reason.
Trying to ignore the almost audible humming in his veins, he focused on her as she turned around to face him and immediately started babbling. "I'm really sorry about that. I had no idea he was coming, and I shouldn't have let him in, but I just..."
He shook his head. "You have nothing to be sorry for."
"No, I do, because if he tells someone -"
"He won't."
"But what if he does?"
Bucky refrained from replying, instead looking down at her hands before stepping forward and taking the taser from her grip and tossing it on the kitchen counter. Then, operating on something more instinctual than thought, he put his hands on her hips and backed her up gently against the door.
As she looked up at him with widening eyes and parted lips, he let his actions express what his words couldn't, because words failed and deserted him in moments like these. Cradling her head with two hands that only moments ago had been exacting revenge on her once-tormentor, he brought his lips down to cover hers in a kiss that was neither soft nor hard, neither demanding nor pliant, but simply, wholly, consuming. He wanted to seal her, set her apart from her own past, pull her in until she couldn't get any closer, and assert a claim that the instincts guiding his actions understood far better than his brain did.
The leftover tension and anxiety in her body drained as it all but slumped against his, her slightly shaky hands moving up his arms until they met in his hair. The soft skin of her cheek and her hair were mere subtle tickles under his left hand, far from the warm and sensuous things they were to his right, but he savored what little he could feel before the moment came to an end that lingered between their shared, heavy breaths.
It seemed that she had been left as speechless as he, which was significant for a girl who never seemed to be without something to ramble about at any given moment. He hoped that it meant that she understood what he couldn't say, what he wasn't sure he even fully comprehended.
He almost jumped in surprise when she finally did speak, so wrapped up he was in the silence. "David. I have to go get David."
He nodded, reluctantly letting her go and stepping aside so that she could walk past him towards the hallway. He instantly felt colder without her, but he was used to that. What he wasn't used to was the odd sense of heaviness in his chest, not painful or unpleasant, but impossible to ignore.
Whatever it was, it was a thousand times better than feeling nothing at all.
One thing that he could say for her was that Summer was nothing if not resilient. If she was disturbed or troubled at all by Mark's unexpected visit and Bucky's pummeling of him into the ground, the most that she showed of it was acting slightly more hyper than usual as she made dinner. She was slightly on edge, that much he could tell, and she had a bit of a dazed look in her eyes from time to time, but he genuinely could not tell if it was a good thing or a bad thing.
The routine stayed the same, and he thought that it had become as much of a comfort for Summer as it was for David. He would know - routine was one of the first things his therapist had advised him to construct and stick to, and it really was a wonder how simply sticking to a predictable routine could be a calming thing.
But, as comfortable as he knew she was in her routine, her home, he kept thinking of what may have occurred had he not been there when Mark paid his visit. The most likely scenario was probably Summer tasering him until he voluntarily left, but her ability to fight an intruder off was beside the point. He didn't want her to have to fight anybody, and especially not someone who had hurt her so badly in the past.
He didn't want to leave her home the next day and then return to New York without her a few days after that. He wanted her where he could see her, close to him and never as far as she had been for the last month and a half.
He planned on talking to her about moving after she put David to bed, and he waited patiently when that hour came. She disappeared in the bathroom with her son to give him a bath - still wearing the boots that had been torturing him all day, which he thought was a sign of how distracted she really was by the day's events - and he was left to wander around the house, trying to get his thoughts together and figure out how to present them in a way that would convince her to agree with what he thought was blindingly obvious - that she needed to stay close to him, all the time.
He ended up in her bedroom, sitting down on the side of her bed and ruffling his hair with his right hand, still lost in thought when a glow from over his shoulder stole his attention. He glanced behind him and saw her open laptop, having just lit up due to the slight jostling his sitting must have caused it, and for a moment he wondered what it was doing there, since he hadn't seen her use it all day. Then he decided to ignore it and go back to staring at the floor.
But then the thing started beeping, and he turned around and peered at the screen to try to figure out what it was doing. Upon inspection, he figured out that someone was trying to "call" her computer, as if it were a phone - which was bizarre - and he watched the little notifications from something called "Skype" until the call ended and the images went away. Once the screen was clear, it displayed her background photo, which was different from the one he remembered from his early days here. This picture was of a younger version of herself, a little bit rounder in her cheeks and slightly paler, sitting on the same couch that was in her living room today, holding a tiny little blue bundle of a baby and sitting next to an elderly lady that he assumed was her grandmother.
As he stared at the picture, suddenly he was intrigued. She must have had more pictures on there somewhere, and he suddenly wanted to see them all.
It never crossed his mind that she might object to him digging around on her computer, or that there might be things on there that she didn't necessarily want him to see. Instead, driven by his curiosity, he pulled the computer on his lap and started clumsily trying to navigate it. He was better with his phone than computers, not having had much time to practice with the latter.
He never found the elusive photos. Instead, what he first found was a folder filled with her college assignments, which he skimmed over with only moderate interest. After that, he found where she apparently stored her music, which resulted in a song playing that he couldn't figure out how to turn off. He ended up muting the speaker and continuing with his search, clicking on a folder that was titled innocuously enough but ended up completely distracting him and making him forget what he was looking for.
It was a folder of her writings. He knew, somewhat vaguely, that she was a writer. She didn't talk about it much and she always downplayed her talent, so he was curious to see if she was better than she claimed and what exactly she actually wrote about.
The first file was relatively small and he read through it quickly. It was some sort of story, or a part of one, about an injured man who ended up at the home of a girl whose perspective the story was written from. Immediately, he recognized the familiarity of such a storyline, and he started plowing through the other files in the folders in a sudden need to know what else she had written.
The files were like snippets of a bigger story, not yet fully interconnected the way that a novel would be, but all involving the same two characters and describing scenes that were incredibly familiar and also not. Changes to how they had actually occurred in real life were subtle and enough to make what he was reading fiction, but the similarities were what stirred him. Even more than that, the male character was, he realized, a perfect description of himself in all but name. The man even had a prosthetic arm that he couldn't remember getting due to memory loss from brain trauma he sustained in a war.
At first, he was confused. It didn't seem like she was trying to write an actual book, since nothing was in a particularly specific order, but he was stumped to figure out any other reason why she'd write such things. He abandoned trying to figure it out when he reached the final file, however, because it was a bit longer than the others and, as he could immediately tell, quite different from what he had read previously.
It described a hotel bathroom, a much nicer one than the one he had once had her half-naked and beneath him on the floor of in New York, and that was his first clue of the nature of what he was about to read. Heat started creeping up his neck once he reached the second paragraph, which described the two characters stumbling inside said bathroom and undressing each other. From there, reading the document became what was essentially taking a trip inside the more secretive places of Summer's mind and getting a firsthand description of how she saw him, what she wanted from him, and what she wanted to do to him.
None of it was particularly explicit, but it was detailed enough to make him read the words with a slightly open mouth and quickening pulse. The previous files had focused on emotional, subtle themes, making the physical and sexual ones of this one a shock, and while he knew that she was attracted to him and liked his appearance, he couldn't have quite known exactly how enthusiastic she evidently was about the prospect of intimacy. If "intimacy" adequately described what her character was doing to his while kneeling from a shower floor.
He wasn't typically one to blush, but it was impossible to not feel like his head was on fire by the time he finished the document. Unable to stop himself, he started reading it again, and he was so befuddled by it all that he didn't hear Summer walk inside the room or unsuspectingly and casually ask what was so intriguing for him on her computer.
He only realized her proximity when she walked to his side and glanced down over his shoulder to see for herself what had captured his attention so wholly. He tried to clear the screen but, being technologically challenged in addition to being in no state to properly function thanks to what he had just read, there was no stopping what happened next.
She screeched out a curse he'd never heard her say before and then all but tackled the laptop, closing it with a loud crack and accidentally knocking it off of her bed and down to the floor. Then she covered her face with her hands and started pacing, mumbling incoherently into her hands, and it took him a minute for his brain to catch up with exactly what had just happened.
Then she turned around and dropped her hands, revealing a face so red and embarrassed that it was even worse than Steve's when they'd caught him and Natasha together. "You must think I'm a freak, oh my God. It's not what it looks like, I swear. I'm not a... whatever it looks like I am, I'm not."
He stared at her, still sitting on the bed, face blank despite the fact that underneath he was one step away from grabbing her and bringing her fiction to life.
"I just - I write random things, to get them out of my system, and, uh, I usually delete it afterwards and I meant to delete that one too because I swear that's not the kind of thing I normally write. I don't do the fifty shades of whatever thing. And you probably have no idea what that is. Oh my God. This is horrible. I just - I've been super frustrated and..."
At first, he was amused by her rambling and embarrassment - he couldn't help it. She was adorable when she was flustered. But then he realized that she was on the verge of crying.
"... I can't stand it when people read what I write half the time anyway, so this is basically my worst nightmare, and if you just keep sitting there staring at me I'm going to jump straight out my window."
Now she was actually crying. And Bucky suddenly felt like a jerk.
She turned around again, covering her face with her hands, and he finally got up from the bed, horrified at how terribly this was going and how utterly wrong she had it all. He cautiously reached out his hand to her shoulder and said quietly, "Summer, stop. Please, stop crying."
She shook her head and tried to also shake him off. "Nope. Can't. You don't understand how awful this is for me."
Undeterred, he moved his hand to her waist instead of her shoulder and replied, "You haven't asked me what I thought of it."
"I don't need to. I can tell by the look on your face how weird you think I am now."
He rolled his eyes slightly and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. Then he drew a breath and replied, "Then maybe my face isn't what you should be looking at."
Before she could ask what he meant by that, his arm slid around her waist and pulled her against him, making sure her hips were pressed directly into his, and he hoped that would be enough to put an end to her ridiculous self-doubt.
Sniffling a little, she slowly turned her head to look at him from over her shoulder. She wiped at her eyes with her hand as her more normal blush colored her cheeks. "Oh."
He then took her wrist and turned her around, making her face him, and he said quietly, "I'm sorry. I didn't think you'd cry."
She shook her head and muttered, "I do that sometimes when I'm so embarrassed I want to die."
He moved her hair behind her ear and replied, "You shouldn't be." When she scoffed, he added, "You're good. I didn't know you were that good."
She eyed him warily. "I hope you aren't making fun of me."
He narrowed his eyes as if offended that she'd think such a thing. "I'm not."
Then she paused, looking down and cringing a little before peeking back up at him and asking, "Did you... read the whole thing?"
He nodded. She winced. "Twice."
She winced again, her painful flush returning to her face. "Oh, God..."
He tipped her chin up with his hand and leaned down, brushing his lips against hers before murmuring, "I like your imagination."
She groaned a little as his lips pressed against hers, breaking away a moment later to mutter, "This is still the most embarrassing thing ever."
Then, to his slight disappointment, she slipped out of his arms and turned away, walking towards her bedroom door in the boots that had to be killing her feet by now. He followed her silently, and to his relief, she was only walking to the door to close it. He waited until it was shut and she had turned back around to invade her space once more, pressing her back to the door and earning a surprised gasp from her lips in the process. She looked up at him a bit questioningly just before his hand diverted her gaze, moving to the doorknob and twisting the lock. He watched her eyes widen slightly and throat move as she swallowed before looking back up at him. "Uh..."
He wanted to ask her if her mouth really watered whenever he took his shirt off, like the story had said. He wanted to ask her about all the other details from it and ask if they were literary embellishments or the truth, but asking her anything like that now would only add to her embarrassment and be counter-productive. So he kept his questions to himself and kissed her instead, with all the hunger she hadn't meant to stoke by writing something that hadn't been meant for his eyes but had reached them anyway. She didn't resist, eagerly kissing him back, and within moments, he was walking her back to her bed.
They separated only to fall back on the bed, Summer first and then him next, one of her hands guiding him back to her lips while the other went to her own leg, towards the zipper of her boot. His hand covered hers and made her stop as he murmured against her lips, "Not yet."
She huffed a little and he trailed his kisses down to her neck as she asked, "What is it with you and these boots? Not that I'm complaining, but..."
She moaned a little as he nipped at the places he'd learned were the most sensitive of her neck, and then he raised his head, looking first at her lips and then her eyes as something occurred to him. At this point, after reading what he'd read and taking such an intimate look inside of her head in the process, he sort of owed her something.
While she looked at him in slight puzzlement, he leaned in and brushed his lips over her ear, softly speaking the same French sentence that he'd said on their first date and tormented her with ever since. He felt her shiver as he spoke, and after, when he drew back, she blinked a few times and asked shakily, "Did you just say something new or was that the same thing you said before?"
"Same," he said, kissing her jaw. "And it means," his hand slid from her hip down her leg, "that you look beautiful," his lips brushed hers and she trembled, "but that I'd rather see you in these," his hand curled around her leather-clad calf as he looked into her eyes, "and nothing else."
The sound that she made was something between a whimper, a whine, and a moan, and it made him grin with satisfaction. He pulled back slightly to watch her gape at him and struggle for words before finally asking, "You... that's what you said? On our date?"
He nodded, relishing her reaction and quite happy with his decision to withhold the translation until now.
She smiled. "Really?"
He almost laughed at her. "Yes."
The brief catch of her lip between her teeth was his only warning before she all but pounced on him, her embarrassment from earlier now an afterthought as she pushed him down on the bed and crawled over him, and from there, it was a half-mad and fully perfect spiral into chaos. Her boots stayed on but her dress came half off, his shirt was an early casualty, and they wreaked havoc on her sheets with the constant push and pull, for once blissfully free of any interruptions.
He had been on a mission to get her dress all the way off despite the belt making it slightly difficult to do so, but he gave up in favor of letting her push him so that he was half-sitting against the headboard and in perfect position to set her mouth to his chest. His eyes closed and his hand was at home in her hair, while her kisses turned into more courageous swipes of her tongue and nips of her teeth, moving lower, slowly, teasing the fire within and building it beyond his control. His eyes opened when he felt hands pulling at his jeans and lips dragging down his stomach, and his hand tightening slightly in her hair prompted her to look up him.
He opened his mouth but she swiftly shot back up and kissed him before he could say a word, holding him down when he tried to regain control by flipping them over. Of course, he could have overpowered her and flipped them with next to no effort, but he let her have her way, looking up at her with slightly wide eyes as her hands finished undoing and pushing down his jeans. He saw a tinge of anxiety in her gaze but the heat behind it overpowered it, and one more kiss to his lips sent another spark of heat racing down his spine.
One last thought materialized in his brain and came out in a disjointed rush of words. "You... we're supposed to... slow..."
"We've waited long enough, at least for this. Relax," she whispered against his mouth before slipping down, kissing down his jaw to his neck as he watched her go, suddenly feeling young for the first time, as far as he could remember, due to his sudden cluelessness as far as what the hell to do with himself, and specifically, his left arm.
Summer worked her way back down him like she fully knew what she was doing - maybe she did, or maybe she was faking, he didn't know - and his anticipation was on the verge of combustion as he jerked his arm up, then down, nearly panicking for a moment before throwing it back behind his head and gripping the back of his own hair with his metal hand, keeping it safely away from the woman currently trailing her tongue so close to where he wanted it that he had to close his eyes and tense his jaw to keep from groaning aloud with need.
But then, only a few seconds later, a warmth engulfed him. His eyes sprung wide and his mouth fell open, a sound foreign to his ears flying from his lips as his head fell back helplessly against the wood behind it.
The rest was a blur of heat and pure, desperate pleasure that made him feel genuinely happy to be alive again.
For the rest of her years, Summer knew, she would never forget the look on his face or the sounds he made, and she would never forget the way they made her feel.
It may not have been his first intimate encounter with a woman, but due to the circumstances, it may as well have been, and she was sure that was the reason why he was so wide-eyed, so seemingly shocked at what he was capable of feeling under the right touch. It brought an extra depth to a moment that would have been special still without it, and helped her push through her lack of confidence in her abilities and very limited experience. She let herself be impressed with her own bravery just long enough to finally get somewhere with him without a ringing phone or a knock on the door, and watching and feeling and hearing him fall apart under her touch was its own reward.
It hadn't taken long - understandably - but there was already an ache taking root in her jaw when she sat back, ignoring the mild pain in favor of looking over the panting and delirious pile of loose and happy super soldier in her bed. He'd slid down the headboard at some point, his metal hand never leaving its place in his own hair, and as she moved to lay down next to him, she decided to go ahead and take a moment to be proud of her herself. Maybe she was finally growing up after all.
"So," she said, curling up at his side and looking up at his for-once relaxed face a bit shyly, "did girls do that in the 40's?"
Her voice made his eyes flutter open, blinking a few times before taking a deep breath and raking his hand through his messy hair. "I don't remember." Then he shifted so that he could look at her, and when he did, her stomach fluttered at the satisfied, slightly sleepy look in his eye.
"Good, then you can't compare me to anyone yet," she smiled. He almost rolled his eyes at that, just before turning on his side to face her fully. She closed her eyes as he pulled her against him and kissed her, more softly than before, but still full of heat that reminded her painfully of her own unmet needs.
The kiss grew deeper as his hands wandered once more, his right one slipping down her legs towards her boots - she owed her sister in law a great debt for making her buy those things, and she was still in shock over the translation she had gotten at long last - then moving back up to run over her thighs, under the dress still trying to cling to her despite most of the top of it being yanked down. Her heart started pounding anew when his fingers easily pulled and slid her panties down, tossing the fabric somewhere out of sight as she opened her eyes and let him place her on her back. Though they were still more relaxed than she'd ever seen them, his eyes burned as they gazed down upon her. Then his hand was at her breast, teasing her as he brought his lips to her ear and said something indecipherable. She couldn't even tell what language it was, though it sounded like a smoother version of Russian, and after he started trailing kisses down her neck, she asked breathlessly, "Do I get to know what that meant?"
"Your turn," he mumbled against her skin, steadily working his way down.
She gulped and decided that Bucky stumbling across her personal literary ramblings hadn't been such a bad thing after all.
A/N: ... So yeah, this is a far cry from what I used to write, but hopefully it's enough to still have some impact. And if not, then, well, at least this chapter has Mark facing a bit of justice, which was kind of fun to write. Anywho, my thanks and love to all of you who read, faved, followed, and/or reviewed this story, you're all the best and I adore you. My updates are getting kind of weird, I think for awhile I stuck to Mondays but then I got impatient and now it's always on different days but it's still once a week, so I have no idea. I'll probably update next Wednesday or Thursday lol. Til then, have an e-hug :D Oh, and my usual thanks to midnightwings96 for being amazing as always :D