The Pen is Mightier! (penismightier) wrote in chaotic_library, @ 2014-11-12 23:38:00 |
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Current music: | Rise Against - Tragedy + Time |
Entry tags: | bucky barnes, maria hill, marvel, multi-parter, natasha romanov, novel, r-rated, sharon carter, steve rogers, tony stark, yuuo, yuuo: marvel |
[Bucky Barnes, Cast; R] In Derelict Sidings The Poppies Entwine
Character/Series: Bucky Barnes, Cast; Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: R
Notes: God, I seem to like making Bucky bleed from stupid shit. Sorry, Bucky.
Title: In Derelict Sidings The Poppies Entwine: Chapter 7
Author: yuuo
Word Count: 3765
Summary: It'd been dark already when they'd left, chasing the sunset into the west.
It'd been dark already when they'd left, chasing the sunset into the west. Steve hadn't asked Natasha where they were going, so Bucky didn't either, not yet. He had no idea how long they'd be on the road, or what they might have to do once they stopped, so he dozed, letting the sound of the road under the tires lull him to sleep.
He jolted into artificial awakeness when he felt the car stop and lurch a bit as it was put into park. He had no idea where they were, and no concept of how long they'd been traveling. The landscape around him told him nothing, not with how dark it was. That was the first thing he noticed, actually, the lack of lights beyond the building in front of them, and a flickering and dying neon sign naming the building as a hotel with vacancy.
"Where are we?" Steve asked, sounding like he'd been taking advantage of the quiet of travel to sleep a bit too.
"We're in Indiana," she said as they got out. "We're just off I-80 right now."
Bucky stretched once he was out of the car, then looked up at the motel sign, listening to the hum of electricity as the 'O' blinked in and out of apparent existence. "I take it this isn't where we're staying."
"No," she said, sounding tired as she unlocked the trunk. "We've been driving about nine hours, I need sleep before I run us off the side of the road."
Neither Steve nor Bucky protested, although Bucky wished they knew where she was taking them, he could volunteer Steve to take over and get them to wherever they were going faster. But Natasha was in charge of their extraction, he knew what it was like to be a mission head. You didn't just delegate things, you took that responsibility yourself. So he didn't say anything as they grabbed their bags, including the weapons and uniforms, and headed into the lobby.
It was sixty a night for a two-bed standard room, which was cheaper than Bucky was expecting, even for as off-brand as the place was. He'd only ever operated in hotels that had a much higher rate. But, they were in a shoddy building, getting what was probably not a glamorous room, somewhere in the Midwest, away from most commercial tourist traps.
Either way, he didn't care, it was a place to sleep in a real bed. His neck hurt from the angle it'd been in for the past few hours, his head resting against the car window, and sleeping in a car never really rested anyone, it just took the edge off of drowsiness.
The room they dragged themselves into was, as Bucky expected, tiny. It had two doubles, neither of which looked terribly comfortable, and an even tinier bathroom attached. There was an old TV on an equally old stand. Between the two beds were two bare-basic nightstands and a small, wall-mounted lamp over each, that probably put out a lot less light than the overhead that they flicked on upon entering.
Natasha dropped her bag on one bed, leaving the other for Steve and Bucky. Unlike when they stayed with Tony and Pepper, Bucky didn't feel any onset of awkwardness at the prospect of sharing a bed overnight; they were on a mission, and in a mission, you don't worry about things like personal comfort when it might be detrimental. With no idea how long it'd be before they could sleep again, they both needed to get proper rest whenever they could.
"Dibs on the bathroom," Natasha said, pulling out her night clothes, a pair of old sweat pants and a tank top that fit her a little too snugly for Bucky's comfort, and disappeared into the bathroom.
Bucky stowed the bag with the weapons over by the TV, getting them out of the way, before sitting down on the edge of his and Steve's bed, rubbing his hands over his face. The left hand was uncomfortable against his skin, cold and rigid, but he was used to that. He was tired, his brain felt stuffed with cotton, and he would've almost given anything for the days in the military, when coffee actually did something for him. But he didn't really need it anymore, he just was stuck halfway between body shut down and a second wind to keep going.
But neither he nor Steve knew where they were going, and Natasha seemed intent on not telling them, which was really starting to annoy Bucky. He understood need-to-know information, but that didn't change the desire to have that information. Natasha was a spy evacuating two targets. Keep the destination secret, even from the targets, until you're already there. Keeps things safer for everyone involved.
It still annoyed him.
"Hey," Steve said quietly, and Bucky looked up just as Steve sat down next to him. "How're you doing?"
Bucky shrugged. "Better than I did at home. Doing something is better than doing nothing."
Steve made a noise that might've been agreement, might've been the sound of his brain trying to turn a corner. "Look, Bucky, I'm sorry, I've been getting short with you."
Bucky shook his head. "Don't. It's my fault. I was the one acting like an ass." He glanced the closed bathroom door. "Any idea where she's taking us?"
"No," Steve said. "She hasn't told me anything."
The dryer lint in his brain floated around to another train of thought. "You know, all I can think right now is that it's a good thing we didn't keep that cat."
The bathroom door opened, and Natasha stepped out with her day's clothes in her arms. "What's this about a cat?"
Instead of answering, Bucky grabbed his bag and started digging in it for his own sleep clothes. Steve took Bucky's silent claim on the bathroom as his hint to answer Natasha for him. "Bucky found a cat that a neighbor dumped on the roof. We gave her to Tony."
Natasha's head whipped around to stare at Bucky, who paused at the foot of her bed, halfway to the bathroom. "You managed to get Tony to take in a pet?"
"I convinced Pepper," Bucky said.
Natasha's shock quickly disappeared. "That makes more sense."
Taking that as the end of the conversation, Bucky walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. He changed quickly, wanting to just crawl into bed and hit the snooze button on his brain for awhile.
By the time he left the bathroom, Natasha was already under her covers, propped up on a couple of pillows and looking sleepy. She glanced at him, then looked over at Steve. "Looks like it's your turn, Rogers."
Steve made a noise of agreement, stepping around Bucky with his night clothes in hand. The bathroom door shut behind him.
Bucky sat back down on the edge of his bed, stuffing his dirty clothes into his overnight bag. He glanced up at Natasha. Her eyes were closed, but her breathing didn't sound like the relaxed and even breaths of a person asleep. "You look tired."
Her lips quirked a bit, and she opened her eyes, turning her head to look at him. "I've been up longer than you have, Mister Gets To Sleep In The Car."
"You know, if you'd tell us where we're going, you could've had a chance to sleep in the car while we took a turn driving," he pointed out, turning on the lamp next to his bed.
"I'll tell you tomorrow," she said, watching him walk over to the door and flip off the overhead light. "I've had to go longer."
Bucky sat back down on his bed, glancing at the bathroom door before looking back at Natasha. "So have we."
"I know." She pushed herself up a bit, rolling her head back. "God, my neck." She turned her head to look at him, which made her look vaguely like a cat trying to twist its head upside down. "I'm not trying to make you dependent," she assured him. "This is my part of the mission, that's all."
He found that acceptable. He glanced up at the sound of the bathroom door opening, interrupting whatever thought he might've been about to give voice to, as Steve walked out. "You're on that side," Bucky said, jerking his thumb towards the other side of the bed, closest to the door.
"You're putting me near the door?" Steve asked in surprise as he tucked away his clothes from the day. "I'm surprised you're not trying to make Natasha take this bed to put me as far away from danger as possible."
Bucky scowled at him. "Bite your tongue, jackass. I'm not that bad." Then he held up his left hand. "I can't sleep on this side, remember? And as much as I like you, I don't want to be snuggled up against your back just so I can lay comfortably."
Steve glanced over at Natasha as she made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a giggle that she'd tried to strangle with mixed results. She put her weight back off her arms, settling down on her pillows and trying to look far more innocent than she'd probably ever been. Bucky glanced up at Steve, raising an eyebrow, wondering if Steve had ever heard her make that noise.
Steve shook his head and walked around to his side of the bed. "Go to sleep, both of you, before I'm forced to smother you in your sleep."
Bucky turned to glare at him even as he pulled back the covers. "What the hell did I do?"
Steve crawled into bed, watching Bucky as he joined him. "You kick in your sleep, consider it preemptive."
While Natasha made that noise again, Bucky got settled and made a point of kicking back at Steve's leg. "I do not. Not unless you deserve it."
Steve kicked back. "Just turn off the light and go to sleep, Bucky."
Bucky reached up and turned the switch, the light disappearing and leaving behind an eerie level of blackness. The only light was the dim flickering of the motel sign through the closed curtains. No sounds of people, or of traffic. Even nature seemed quiet, the louder creatures already migrated or bedded down for the winter. And the room was cold. Bucky curled up tightly, feeling grateful for the body heat of Steve's back pressed against him in the entirely too small bed.
It wasn't anything like being in cryo, he had no memories of his time in the chamber, but he remembered the thawing process, how dark and silent everything seemed until his brain was able to jumpstart the ability to process sensory feedback, how cold it was before he got hosed down with temperate water to slowly bring his body temperature back to normal.
If it weren't for the relative softness of the bed and covers, and that one source of heat behind him, his brain might've gone down that unpleasant trip even further. The attacks had been more infrequent as time went by, but he might just have to leave and walk back to DC if he had one in front of Natasha.
Slowly, light filtered into his awareness behind his closed eyes. It was cold. He felt himself begin to shake as muscles began to respond. Something tugged on his left shoulder, and he automatically yanked himself forward, away from whatever was pulling on him. He was jarred into full wakefulness as his head struck something hard and sharp before he landed on the ground with a hard thump.
"Bucky?" Steve sounded worried, not quite panicked, but definitely worried.
A lamp switched on, filling the room with more than the faint light of the sun through the curtains. Bucky blinked, his eyes adjusting. He didn't even know when he'd fallen asleep, but he must've, and fallen out of bed again. His head hurt. "Ow." He put his flesh hand against his temple, where he'd gotten hit, glancing over at the nightstand. He'd hit the corner on his way off the bed.
Steve crouched down next to him, leaving Bucky to wonder when he's gotten around the bed. "You okay?"
Bucky made a grouchy sound, grateful that his back was mostly to Natasha so she couldn't see the burn of humiliation on his face. He could still see her out of the corner of his eye, sitting on the edge of the bed and watching quietly. "I'm fine. Just hit the nightstand." He looked at Steve. "You woke me up," he said, somewhat accusingly. If he hadn't been grabbed, he might've just been able to ride out the disquieting nightmare instead of falling off the bed and hitting his head, and all in front of someone who was barely more than a stranger.
Steve glanced at Natasha, and Bucky could see his brain trying to figure out how to answer without lying outright. He looked back at Bucky. "You were kicking me," he finally said. "I told you that you still kick in your sleep."
"Kiss off," Bucky said, pulling his hand away from the injured spot. "Damnit." He was bleeding, not much, but enough to annoy him.
Natasha moved, getting up, and Bucky finally looked at her as she headed into the bathroom. He wasn't sure if he was insulted or not that she'd made no inquiry into his well-being. On one hand, he didn't want the fussing. On the other, that was a bit rude. He got to his feet, careful not to knock Steve over as he did, and sat down on the edge of the bed, putting his hand back over the wound, as if that might make it throb less.
Steve got off the floor and sat next to him. "Let me see," he said, grabbing Bucky's hand and pulling it away. Bucky silently put up with Steve's examination, feeling too tired and a bit too strung out to protest. "It doesn't look bad," Steve finally said.
"Any dizziness?" Natasha asked, returning from the bathroom to stand in front of them. She held out a damp washcloth. "Here, put this against it, stop the bleeding."
Bucky almost argued that he knew how to put pressure on a wound, but his nerves were just too frayed to give a damn as he took the washcloth and did as instructed. "No, no dizziness. It'll be a bump at best. Probably gone in a few hours."
Natasha sat down on her bed. "So you actually do kick in your sleep. Don't feel bad, I'm not a good bedmate, either."
Bucky didn't answer, staring blankly at the ground at her feet, trying to just keep the washcloth in place and not shiver. It was cold. Why was it so damn cold? He should probably shower once his wound was done bleeding to wash the blood out of his hair, but the thought of water spraying on him didn't sound terribly appealing just then. The idea of curling up in a tub of hot water and not being cold for awhile sounded nice, though. Not something he'd do, not out here, not away from the privacy and comfort of his own home.
He glanced at the clock. It said ten past ten in the morning. "What time is check out?" he asked.
Natasha turned the clock to face her, then frowned. "In forty-nine minutes," she said, then picked it up, fiddling with the back. "I set it to wake us up at ten, why didn't it go off?"
Steve stood, grabbing his bag off the floor. "While you figure that out, I'm going to get changed."
Natasha didn't say anything, just kept frowning at the clock. Bucky watched her with very little interest, more to focus his eyes on something while he tried to force down the building headache. Finally, she tossed the faulty alarm clock onto the nightstand with a disgusted sound. "These dumb things never work in places like this."
He raised the eyebrow that wasn't currently partly covered by a washcloth. "Are you sure you set it right?"
She looked insulted. "I set it fine. The alarm's broken." She glanced back over her shoulder when the tap turned on in the bathroom, then turned back around, holding her face in her hands. "I thought he had a ladies first policy."
"Not when said ladies are bitching about something dumb," Bucky said, pulling the washcloth away from his head and testing the wound site gingerly to see if it'd stoped bleeding. He couldn't see any signs of fresh bleeding on his fingers, so he set about washing the blood already on his hand off.
"What a gentleman you are," Natasha said, sounding somewhere between amused and concerned. "Stopped bleeding?"
"Yeah," Bucky said. "You going to be okay to drive? You've had all of four and a half hours of sleep."
She gave him that enigmatic smile that he still wasn't sure if he liked or not. "I've gone on less." She ran her hands through her hair, the faint curls sticking up slightly when she did, and looked over her shoulder again at the bathroom door. "He doesn't take long in the bathroom, does he?"
"No."
"So if I bat my pretty eyes at you, will you be more of a gentleman than Steve was and let me go before you?"
He stared at her a moment. "I'll let you go first if you promise not to bat your eyes at me."
Natasha got a look that Bucky knew to fear, the look of a woman about to bait a man and if he didn't say just the right thing, he was toast. "What, you don't think my eyes are pretty?"
"Is there any way I can get out of this?" He didn't feel like engaging in gender relations with her, especially not when his head hurt.
She smiled, a genuine one this time, not that obnoxious little secretive smile that was already driving him nuts. If he weren't currently trying to run for his life, and he didn't have a currently love-hate relationship already established with her, he might have to find that smile attractive. "You know, Steve said you used to be good with women."
Bucky sighed. "That was also before I killed about half the world's population."
"Now you're just exaggerating," Natasha said, once again glancing over her shoulder at the closed bathroom door. She looked like she wanted to go pound on it and demand Steve open up and let her in.
"Are we counting the people who died in wars I started?"
She looked back at him. "Still not half the world's population. Besides, that was Hydra, not you."
Bucky was silent for a few seconds. "So you've finally decided that? Good. You can stop pushing at me about it."
"That was never in question," she said. "What was in question was how much you'd recovered. Just because you could work and play well with Steve, didn't mean you could with anyone else, including me."
Bucky didn't get a chance to answer before the bathroom door opened, and Steve stepped out. "Told you he didn't take long," he told Natasha.
Natasha grabbed her bag. "Thank god," she said. "Steve, you're terrible with women."
Steve paused, looking at her in confusion, before realization dawned on his face. "Sorry. You were doing something else."
"You didn't offer," she said, then went into the bathroom and shut the door.
Steve studied the closed door. "She's a confusing woman sometimes."
"You're the one that's friends with her," Bucky said.
"You two didn't try to kill each other while I was in there, did you?" Steve asked, digging around in the weapons bag and pulling out sixty bucks. Natasha had no idea how much they had, didn't even know they kept their savings in cash, rather than trusting the banks. Bucky figured Steve had pulled the money out to help with gas.
"The room's intact, and the only injury so far is the brain damage I'm going to have from that nightstand."
Steve shook his head, zipping the weapons bag back up. "And Peggy used to call me dramatic."
"You are," Bucky said.
There was no more talking after that, not until Bucky had had his turn in the bathroom and the three repacked and were back at the car. Natasha made them wait long enough for her to check them out at the lobby, then returned. She didn't let them load the bags right away, dug under the thin carpeting on the floor of the trunk and produced two Illinois plates and a screwdriver.
"What're you doing?" Steve asked, stepping back to watch as she unscrewed the DC back plate.
"We'll be passing by Chicago," she said, removing the old plate and starting to replace it with the new one. "Best way to stay out of law enforcement's eye is to not stand out. Which means until we're in Iowa, we're from Illinois."
Steve and Bucky exchanged a look, and followed towards the front of the car. Bucky leaned against the front passenger door, claiming shotgun before Steve could banish him to the backseat again, while Steve walked around to watch Natasha remove and replace the front plate. "So we're going to Iowa."
"We're going through Iowa," Natasha corrected. "I'll tell you where we're going once we're past Chicago." She paused, dropping the DC plate on the ground. "No offense, but you're a terrible liar. If we get pulled over, I'd rather you not know anything."
"Are we expecting to get pulled over?" Bucky asked.
Natasha grabbed the old plates off the ground and got up. "No." Bucky watched over his shoulder as she dug around in the trunk again, presumably putting the old plates into the hiding spot she'd pulled the new ones from. "But I don't like to get caught off-guard."
Steve started to help Natasha stow their gear, then gave Bucky a mildly dirty look when he realized that Bucky was taking the front seat. He gave Steve an innocent smile, or tried to, anyway, but with his headache, it probably looked more like a twisted parody of that clown from that Stephen King book that Bucky had read and promptly decided that he never wanted to see a clown again upon finishing.
Once they were secured in the car, Natasha pulled away from the dingy hotel and headed for the interstate again.