Notes: TW, Nightmares and alcohol use.
"Where do you think you are going?"
Steve, sounding disappointed. Bucky sighed.
"Out."
"Third time this week, Buck."
"Just need some fresh air. Don't look at me like that Rogers. I'm still allowed that, aren't I?"
Steve ran a hand through his stupidly perfect hair, exhaling one long breath. "No one is trying to imprison you Bucky, but you're still on parole, and any… shifty behaviour could compromise that. You deserve freedom, but there are still rules we have to play by."
"You really think I'm doing something that would get me locked up again? Do I look like an idiot to you?" Bucky fired back, with a little more heat than he intended. Still, the unspoken accusation hurt. If even Steve struggled to trust him, what hope did he have that the rest of the world would ever see past the winter soldier.
"No, I don't Bucky, but the parole board wasn't exactly understanding about the Germany-Siberia situation, they're looking for any reason not to sign off on you." Steve's head dropped further, hiding his eyes in shadow. "You know I trust you Bucky, but I can't protect you when I don't even know where you're going."
"I'm perfectly safe, Steve. I promise." Bucky answered, softening as he recognized the waning signs of adrenaline in the microtremors of Steve's finger tips. He had caused that fear. "The nightmares… you know how it is, a little fresh air and tarmac under the tires helps."
"You swear on my mothers name that no one gets hurt wherever you're going?" Steve pressed, offering his palm to seal the deal. "Swear it and I won't ask Harold to try and tail you again."
"The grey Lincoln? Yesterday? That was you? Really Steve?" Bucky felt his eyebrows contract in anger and forced himself to school his expression into general disapproval. "Fine, for Sarah." He shook Steve's hand, squeezing a little harder than necessary, but still grateful for the hug he got at the end.
It was stupid that that fragment of healthy contact made Bucky tear up. Stupid that there wasn't anyone else who could approach him without setting off every alarm in his body. Stupid that a hundred-year-old super soldier would be paranoid within the Avengers compound. Surrounded by people who were not his enemies, in the safest complex he could imagine. And still, he triple-checked the deadbolts and doorstops on his bedroom door before lowering himself to the floor to sleep every night.
Bucky walked through the trailer park, and stood before a half open door. A door he knew would reveal the terrible scene of the crime. The cloying smell of blood mixed with sagebrush that reminded him of the desert. Copper tang on his tongue.
How did he know this was the fourth in a line of similar murder scenes? He didn't question it, he just knew and it was his job to investigate, to reveal the murderer.
Evidence in little paper bags, a rusty truck he drove back to the precinct. Another black capped man waved hello, "find anything Sheriff?" the voice was nasally, high and accented.
"Not yet Rogers, think you can pull up the finger print records?"
"Sure thing boss." The man was walking away with the evidence, to a computer the size of a bus.
Bucky was at another trailer park, walking up the neglected path to a door, waving the flies away. A fifth scene.
Rogers, a short man with dark hair and spectacles ran up with a stack of papers.
"Got a match Barnes, would you like to see?"
Bucky gestured impatiently for the file. Flipped it open.
100% match, Sargent James Bucky guilty.
"Gonna have to take you in Buck." Rogers's voice had dropped low, and his shadow fell across Bucky's face as his shoulders and legs stretched grotesquely.
"I- NO- Steve! It wasn't me!" Bucky shouted as arms clamped over his, something wrapped across his mouth blinding him. He fought blindly, one handed and wrestling against something silky soft and smooth.
Bucky threw the sheet off himself, chest heaving as the shadows of his room rematerialized before his bewildered eyes.
He was ten minutes into a punishing routine when the back door chimed. He pressed his back to the wall nearest the hall.
Soft sneakered steps approached.
He reached for the shadowy figure just before they could turn the corner.
One arm twisted behind their back, and his vibranium forearm locking the head in an uncompromising trap against his chest. The lack of immediate resistance made him hesitate.
Until an elbow jabbed sharply into his gut. A quick kick to inside of his knee made him stumble, but he didn't release his target.
"Let me go Sarge, or we are going to have a real problem." The low voice was steady despite the pressure on her throat, cold and familiar. As was the cold muzzle of the gun against his left thigh.
He dropped her like a reflex, then lunged forward to catch her as she stumbled away. But she turned on a dime, bringing the gun up level with his chest.
"Sarge? Or is it the other guy I'm talking to?" she asked steadily.
"You- I didn't expect, I thought…" Bucky's rambles trailed off as the redness around her neck caught the dim emergency exit light and he slumped back against the wall. "I'm sorry. Gosh, I'm so, so, sorry."
"We've got to stop meeting like this Sarge." She lowered the gun, flicked the safety back on and holstered the weapon on her hip. "Next time, kill me before I put a bullet in that pretty face. Alternatively, maybe turn on a light so I know its you and not someone setting an actual ambush."
She stepped closer, reaching for the switch on the wall next to him. He saw the recognition in her face as he flinched at her raised hand and the light. She stepped back quickly, hands raised in a passive position.
"I didn't know it was you. Why are you here?" Bucky said, defensively, and hating how his voice sounded like it had in his nightmare, pathetic and defensive. Her eyes were red, swollen. They stood 5 feet apart, backs to opposite walls. And he could see the tremble of her hands, hear the quiver in her voice as she answered him.
"The building does have my name on it, I should be asking you why you're here at 2 in the morning." She answered sharply.
"You're Stone?"
"Nickname, rookie was giving them out like cookies. Stone stuck." She shrugged, pulled a key from her pocket and unlocked the office door, her back was turned for 3 seconds before she slumped onto the couch, head in her hands, eyes on the floor. Again carefully, painfully casual and unthreatening in her posture.
He stayed in the doorway, aware that even now she was watching his feet, that the gun on her thigh was less than a second from firing if she felt threatened again.
But she hadn't reacted immediately. She had let him get her in a chokehold, let him capture her dominant arm. She hadn't even had the gun out until after the elbow jab.
"Why?"
She looked up into his face, "why what?"
"Why didn't you shoot? Why when I was a clear source of danger, did you let me get the upper hand instead of putting a hole in my chest?"
"Same reason you didn't choke me out probably."
He shook his head slowly, raised a questioning brow and maintained eye contact.
She looked back at him for a long moment, unblinking. Then she sighed and reached over the armrest to a small safe he'd spotted in his first inspection of the room weeks ago. He cleared his throat loudly and looked away as she spun the dial.
A gentle clunk and the sound of the handle turning. The clink of glass on steel. He looked back to find her taking a slow sip from a bottle of amber alcohol.
"I'd offer you a glass, but I'm afraid I don't have any here." She said, her voice rough and strangely mellow. "And there's not enough left in this bottle for me to answer that question, so story time's out. Besides, you came here to be alone. Give me a minute and I'll leave you to it."
"I don't want to run you out of your own establishment Miss Stone, I can go." Bucky answered, taking a step forward as her hands began to tremble again. "Are you, okay?"
"That's Miss Stone-cold, to you. And I'm fine."
"Bucky. Call me Bucky. Just take a deep breath for me, in through your nose?"
She squinted at him as he knelt in front of her, his hand on his chest and demonstrating. But she followed his movements, though her exhale collapsed from her much sooner than his did.
"Again, breath out slow this time, through your mouth."
Several more coached breaths later she was looking less pale, and the wary watching and twitching of her hand to her thigh had decreased. "You rescue damsels in distress often, Bucky?"
He smiled at her use of the name, "don't think its much of a rescue when I caused the distress, Ma'am."
She shook her head at him slightly, teasing in her tone: "don't think you can just waltz in here and steal credit for my panic. I have only myself to thank for that."
"Wouldn't dream of it, Ma'am." He said, crossing his legs under him and using the desk as a back rest.
"Name's not Ma'am, Bucky, or have you already forgotten? Lost your recall sometime in the sixties?" She quipped, growing more genuinely relaxed as the conversation devolved into banter, as though testing the boundaries of her recovery and his reactivity.
"Stone Cold. Why'd they call you that?" Bucky asked.
She hesitated, licking her lower lip and staring beyond the floor somewhere to her right. "That's another story, and another bottle's worth to tell it."
The distance in her expression bothered Bucky, tugging at his own memory of disassociating.
"Another time then," He suggested, rising slowly. "Sorry for the interruption. I'll leave a light on next time." He was halfway out the door when she finally looked up again.
"What? Oh, yeah, yeah, good. That's fine. G'night."
Bucky made his way back to the compound, nodding at the gate security and locking himself once again into his bedroom. The adrenaline had flushed rapidly from his system and he was somehow more drained, though he'd barely made it past his warm ups in the gym before their encounter.
It was the memories of coaching Steve to breath when the asthma attacks had gotten bad. That, he decided had taxed his mind.
She must have been crying before they'd met, with the way her eyes were bloodshot, he'd been careful with the headlock, he was sure it wasn't hemorrhaging from asphyxia.
Two things. He'd learned two things. He wasn't the only one awake in the night battling demons they didn't want to talk about. And the enigmatic woman who hadn't wanted to kill him was anything but Stone-cold.
No matter what other pretty lies she might tell, there was a wounded soul buried beneath the competence and confidence of a battle-hardened soldier.