After a little longer at the museum, we started heading back home.
I ducked into a small corner store, unsure if he'd follow. Glancing over my shoulder, I spotted him leaning against the glass window outside, his head down, posture still. I couldn't see his face, but his focus was somewhere deep inside that little notebook of his.
Inside, I grabbed two ice pops from the freezer and slipped them under my sweater. I grabbed a newspaper and paid 7 lei—much cheaper than the two ice pops I took.
Stepping out into the muggy air, I found him in the exact same position, scribbling intently.
"Writing it all down?" I asked, tucking the newspaper under my arm.
He nodded without looking up, finishing his thought before gently closing the notebook and slipping it into his coat's inner pocket. Then his eyes met mine.
I pulled the two pops from under my sweater—orange and lemon. "Which one? It's way too hot not to have something cold."
His face seemed nervous, like this choice had the fate of the world on his shoulders, not sure what to choose his hands didn't move an inch from his sides.
"Actually, I really like lemon. I'm a bit of a sour person, you okay with orange?" I pull back the lemon flavor
He takes the orange flavor "Yeh, thank you."
We started walking down the alley behind the store, side by side this time, slowly eating the ice pops. He took a small bite and nodded, apparently approving. I flushed a little, watching him. I blame it on the heat.
"You ever notice how there are way too many choices now?" I said, licking at my lemon pop. "A few years ago it was like, chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Now you've got weird ones like lavender-pistachio-honey or something."
His brow wrinkled. "That sounds horrible. People eat that?"
I laughed. "Yeah, apparently. I haven't tried it, but it sounds like regret in a cone."
He smirked. Just barely. But I caught it.
We wandered like that—talking, walking, occasionally falling into silence—until we reached the front of our building.
I pulled out the newspaper and held it out to him. "Want more window covering? I only get these for the crosswords."
He took the extra pages from me. "Thanks."
As I opened my door, I noticed the lights were on. "Power's back. Want to stay for that beer while I work on my crossword? You can do your, you know, scrapbooking."
He looked at me like I'd just offered him something strange and foreign. An invitation. A small, normal thing.
But then—without a word—he stepped in.
Bucky settled into a corner on the hardwood floor, legs crossed, notebook resting on one knee. He flipped through pages like they were relics. Occasionally writing, occasionally just staring.
I grabbed us a couple beers placing his on the ground in front of him, I sat on the bed, pen in hand, focusing on the crossword. We stayed like that for the next hour—no conversation, just the quiet scratch of pen on paper, the occasional clink of glass, and the sound of two people not quite alone anymore.
For the first time in a long while, this crappy little apartment felt… homey.
Safe.
After taking a final look at my completed crossword puzzle, I glanced over. His beer was empty, and he was still memorizing that Captain America pamphlet like it held the last pieces of who he used to be.
I popped open the fridge — now humming and cold again — and grabbed one of our remaining beers. Tossing my sweater on the bed, I slid down the wall to sit beside him, the bottle cold in my palm. He didn't look up. I placed it quietly on the floor next to him.
I stretched out my arm and twisted slightly to show him the old scar on my upper bicep.
"You know how I got this?"
He finally shifted his gaze — first to the scar, then to my face — like he was asking for the story.
"One of those crazy bastards got a few shots off while I was running. This one got me. Hurt like hell — I'd never been shot before."
"It hurts, getting shot" he said, with the hint of a smirk and a shadow of something heavier behind it. "I don't recommend it."
"So you've been shot too?"
"Yeah," he nodded, taking a sip of the fresh beer. "Don't remember all of them. But the scars and pain are still there."
"What do you remember?"
He leaned his head back against the wall with a soft thud.
"It's fuzzy. Everything's overlapped — layered wrong. Hard to make sense of."
"So it's like a jigsaw puzzle where you don't know what the picture's supposed to be?"
He let out a soft chuckle, a flicker of amusement crossing his face. "Something like that."
"Well," I said, "if you want, I'll help you figure it out. I've got a lot of free time and nowhere to be."
He turned to me slowly. His eyes looked weighed down — not just by grief, but by the certainty of what he'd done. "I don't think you want that. I've done a lot of bad things."
I faced him fully, my voice steady. "How do you know I haven't?"
"You don't seem the type."
"Neither do you, Bucky."
I extended a hand and placed it gently on his knee. I felt a small flinch — instinctual, defensive — but he didn't pull away.
"It's just me" I whispered
A kind hand, no ill intent. I wonder how long it had been for him since he had that, from the look on his face I would say a while.
My fingers lightly stroked over his jeans — soft and slow, like coaxing a feral cat to trust me.
"I don't want to remember some parts," he said, his voice distant, almost fragile. "But I have to remember everything."
He was staring up at the single bulb swinging slightly above us. His hands, still gloved, were tightly clasped in his lap. I could see the tension in his knuckles even through the leather. His words weren't dramatic. They were just… honest. Raw.
He turned to look at me again. And for a moment, I forgot how to breathe.
His eyes — a lake-blue kind of clear — Only disturbed by the cracks of red in the white, he doesn't sleep well. But this was no secret to me.
I didn't know what he was thinking. My cheeks flushed, heartbeat fluttering into my ears. Could he hear that? Could he feel the tremble in my hand pressed against the floor? The heat radiating off me?
At some point, while I sat there panicking in my own head, he had removed his right glove.
His bare hand reached up and gently stroked the hair from my face. My instincts always were to move away but, in this moment, I was planted firm in my place like a century old tree. I felt his warm fingers gently stroke across my face, guiding back my stray hairs tucking them behind my ear. His fingers traced down the back of my ear to find my small hoop earring at the bottom, teasing it between his fingers before his palm cupped my cheek . I could feel the years etched into that hand — the calluses, the quiet strength. And still, he was so gentle.
"Push me away," he said, his voice low, rasping — like the weight of the moment was pressing against his chest too.
I didn't speak. I just moved my hand from his knee up to his thigh — solid and warm under my palm.
"Tell me to stop."
I looked into his eyes and whispered, "No."
I closed mine, and his breath met mine — warm and shallow, like we were sharing the only air left in the world. When his lips touched mine, it was uncertain. Careful. Like a man who wasn't sure he deserved softness anymore.
He shifted slowly, his body pressing closer with intention.
His hand slid to the small of my back, guiding me gently until I felt the floor beneath me. I hadn't even realized he was laying me down until I was already there, the cool of the hardwood against my spine.
But I wasn't afraid. There was no panic — only trust.
His body hovered above mine, heat and weight pressing down in the safest way imaginable. His presence didn't trap me. It grounded me. For once, closeness wasn't something to escape. It was something to reach for.
He searched my eyes again, just to be sure. And then he kissed me again.
This time, I kissed him back without hesitation — giving in to the quiet pull between us. The kiss was soft but deep, like he was trying to memorize the shape of comfort.
And I let myself be seen.
When our lips finally parted, we both drew in breath like we'd been underwater too long — flushed and unsteady. He rested his forehead against mine, our eyes locking, as if we were both trying to ground ourselves.
Crack.
I flinched, startled by the sharp sound. His left arm had crushed the corner of my wall — crumbled concrete now sifted through his gloved fingers like dry sand.
"Sorry," he murmured, guilt etched into every word, like he'd broken something irreplaceable.
He let the remaining pieces fall, then slowly pulled both hands back toward himself and sat up on his knees. His eyes stayed fixed on his hand — the one that had broken the wall like paper. His face twisted in dread, his skin pale and drawn tight.
"It's okay," I said quickly, my voice uneven.
His gaze lifted to mine, then dropped again — to the still-visible bruise on my neck.
"I'm so sorry," he said, barely audible, his voice thick and cracking at the edges. He looked moments from breaking apart entirely.
I didn't think — I just sat up and wrapped my arms around him, guiding his head gently to my chest.
"It's okay," I whispered near his ear. "You didn't break anything I care about. It's just a wall."
He trembled in my hold. His arms stayed rigid at his sides, maybe afraid of what would happen if he returned the embrace. Maybe afraid of himself.
We stayed like that for a long time. Silence wrapped around us, only broken by the faint echo of distant sirens through the window.
Eventually, the shaking subsided.
"Why aren't you afraid of me?" he asked, voice muffled against me.
"Should I be?" I replied, gently — like it was the most obvious thing in the world that I wasn't.
"Yes," he said, lifting his head to look at me directly.
That's when I realized, in my rush to comfort him, I had climbed fully into his lap and basically buried his head in my chest. My face flushed instantly, burning red. Baboon-level red.
"I'm sorry," I blurted, flustered, unsure what to do with my limbs or my dignity.
He blinked at me, confused. "Why are you sorry?"
"You know… just… because I… and you…" My words fell apart like the corner of that wall. I was spiraling. This kind of thing wasn't exactly in my comfort zone. I hadn't exactly… done much of this. And what little I had done definitely didn't compare to what I'd just let him do.
"I'm just gonna—go sit over there. On the bed. No reason." I scrambled awkwardly off him and perched myself stiffly on the edge of the mattress.
He leaned back against the wall again, picking up the beer I'd handed him earlier and downing it in one gulp.
"I don't think I can get drunk," he said, exhaling.
"What?" The sudden shift in topic was jarring — but honestly, a relief. It helped ease the fever in my cheeks and the… other sparks that had started igniting.
"They injected me with something. A drug. Changed me. I'm… stronger. Faster."
He was peeling the label off the bottle now, eyes glued to it like it might give him answers he hadn't already tortured himself with.
"THEY, the same ones who… did that to your arm?"
"Yeah." He said it flatly. "I wasn't always like this."
"What were you like before? Do you remember?"
His fingers stilled. His eyes clouded, distant.
"I was a soldier. In the war."
"What war?"
He looked up at me, face unreadable. "The war with Germany."
I blinked. "You mean, World War Two?"
He nodded once.
I stared at him, eyebrows raised. "That was, like… 70 years ago. That makes you like—what, 100?"
"Something like that."
"How?"
"They kept me on ice," he said, casually, like that was a normal sentence. "Only woke me when they needed me to clean something up."
I stared at the now-empty bottle in his hand.
"I'm gonna need more beer for this," I muttered, getting up and grabbing the remaining bottles from the fridge before plopping back down beside him on the floor.
"Shit, forgot the bottle opener."
Clunk.
Before I could stand, the cap popped off and hit the floor with a metallic clatter.
He had used his metal arm.
"Well," I said, accepting the opened bottle, "so it's just a glorified bottle opener."
He cracked a grin as he opened another for himself. "Something like that."