Her fingers clench on the rifle for a moment. Her teeth grind against each other tightly enough to be painful. Something inside her goes taut with tension immediately when he calls her by name. Tries to strike up a bond with her. Some of the others tried that - the difference is that her and this one have actual shared experience, however brief.
She was part of the invading army. She very nearly would have been part of Thanos' second victory in this timeline.
Perhaps that feeling in her chest is shame, not anger.
There's a stretch of silence. Then, almost too quiet in the space of the warehouse:
"Yes. I'm aware of your strength and your skill. As you are of mine. You must know you do not frighten me."
Not a question, that. The organisation of... SWORD dispatched him, so he must know what they know. Which she suspects isn't half of what the wider galaxy knows of her, but is admittedly more than she'd have assumed humans being able to gather together from what little exposure to her they had. Humans are known throughout the galaxy for being strange - and perhaps that tendency to underestimate them is why they, in the end, bested Thanos where the galaxy at large failed.
Bucky snorts; surprised, himself, by his flicker of amusement at her comment and the gentle implied insult in it. It’s true: he’d still been shaggy and unkempt and bedraggled on that battlefield, like some feral dog recently brought in from the cold. He doesn’t reach up to run a hand through his relatively newly-shorn hair — he’s reached for his rifle, and his hands are too steady on that trigger — but he is, suddenly, aware of it.
“Yeah, it was time for a haircut.” Somehow, the man still has a dry sense of humour even here, in the middle of the field. He has a bad habit of it, ever since he’d been woken up. He and Sam groused at each other often enough when they were on mission.
“I’m not trying to frighten you,” he adds, voice echoing through the room. He’s had enough of fear; hates the way people look at him when they first recognise him, when they mostly know him and his reputation as the Winter Soldier, when they’re still waiting to see if he’ll bite.
Still sitting there, his back against the metal, he’s weighing the angles and options here. He could jump into action and trying to outshoot her, but he’s feeling strangely reluctant; there’s already been enough death everywhere. If he can find some other way out of this situation without it…
“So. Hey. What’s the plan? You’re gonna keep killing agents? Run away again if you can slip past ’em at the exits? Try to steal a spaceship to get off-planet? There aren’t that many spaceships here.”
"I noticed. Terra is lacking for technological advancements."
Her options are more than slim. She did consider letting herself get captured to try and see if she can't take something off the agencies who seem to have alien tech falling out of their pockets at every turn, but she can't be sure they have what she needs. Gamora's biggest enemy on this backwater planet is, it seems, her lack of intel.
"What's the alternative - let me take you in to be examined and harvested for parts? Human curiosity is known throughout the galaxy. You take what you don't understand, and you dissect it in the name of learning."
Tech and aliens alike.
And Gamora has seen the people on the battlefield. Humans with extraordinary technology or powers that defy their natural limitations. She can hazard a guess as to the lengths humans will go to in order to get a leg up on the galactic playing field. Her skin is thicker than theirs, and her organs are different. She bleeds green. She's strong naturally wheras they have few who can match her. Her skeleton is more advanced than most tech on this planet, as are her other implants. And her sword can kill Asgardians.
"I will kill agents as long as you send them. Blame your SWORD for the lives lost, not me. I didn't seek this conflict. You can step away. If you try to take me, I will kill you, too, and strip that arm for parts."
Bucky’s response is quick, instinctive, ready to reassure her and say that that’s not what SWORD has planned — but even before all of the words are out of his mouth, he’s already trailing off and cutting himself short, the gears in his head turning.
Because. Would they?
Through Sam, they’ve had access to some of the operational files on Westview. They’d heard what had happened with Wanda. SWORD dissecting Vision’s corpse and picking over his body to see how he ticked, when he had once been their comrade, one of the heroes of the Battle for Earth. And Bucky’s been on the other end of that lab table, too: scientists had once hooked up sensors to him, a bit in his mouth, readings on the monitors, measuring his metabolism and stamina and strength. The effectiveness of their serum.
SWORD wasn’t HYDRA — but that’s what people had said about SHIELD once, too.
He’s quiet for too long. Contemplative. Starting to question his mission; he’s had so many years of blindly following orders and fulfilling his mission.
(So apparently I’m still a gun.)
“What do you want?” he asks, after a moment. “A phonecall to the Guardians of the Galaxy and to hitch a ride off-planet with them, or what?”
It's her turn to be quiet for just a little too long. Because that's what she should want, isn't it? Those people are, as they would tell it, her family. They've protected the galaxy with this world's original Gamora by their side for years now. Her sister is with them.
Except that's not her sister - her sister is the one who was shot unceremoniously. Her sister is dead. She never reconciled with this Nebula like her other self did. And she doesn't know these people. Knows they see the memory of someone she never was, instead of the person she is, who never slipped out from under Thanos' thumb on her own until the big battle came a lot sooner than planned and she had to make a stand.
A slow exhale.
"No."
It sounds more like 'I don't know' than she intended. She knows that she doesn't want the Guardians to pick her up. Doesn't want to be their replacement for a dead woman. Doesn't want to be taken by SWORD. Beyond that...
She tries to pivot back. Tries to press that hesitation in his voice from earlier.
"They didn't tell you, did they? What they could harvest from me. What promises they see in my blood and in my implants." Her voice goes quiet, but also sharper. "People talk before they die. I know what they want. So why don't you?"
Later on, they’ll have cause to notice those similarities between their unique situations: the way some friends could look at them and think they love them, but they’re still seeing someone long-dead, someone they aren’t.
Much later on.
But for now, it’s like Gamora’s jamming in a fulcrum and pressing down, finding that splinter and levering him open.
Bucky shifts in his position, cranes a head up and over the edge of the dented metal; he can’t get a good angle on it, can’t see where she’s holed up in her sniper nest, but she doesn’t take another warning shot either. He sinks back down again behind cover, thinking. Trying to think.
How much does he trust the people holding his leash? Not very. He pretty much trusts no one these days. It’s a grand list of one, lately.
“It wasn’t included in the mission brief,” he says, but there’s that rising questioning note in his voice, a kind of quiet bitterness. This ground is too familiar. He’s been aimed and pointed at too many situations like this before.
“People like to leave shit out when they think it’s need-to-know.”
She watches through her scope. Watches that slim chance of escape widen. Watches the doubt grow, like cancer.
"That's alright."
Quiet. Like a blade in the dark. Like a trap poised to be sprung.
"I was someone's pet assassin, too."
She can offer him that much.
"They sent you because they will take me dead, not just alive. They think you can kill me. What do you think they could want me for when it doesnt matter whether I breathe? You km now the answer. You know you're here to pull the trigger and bring them something useful. They didnt send you for your personality."
The brief had said dead or alive. Can he kill her? Maybe. Super-strength against augmented strength, his quick reflexes against her enhanced ones, vibranium arm against cybernetic implants. He stands the best chance out of anyone else they could’ve sent, but it would be a very close fight. He would not come out of it unscathed; he’d be hurt, injured, bleeding, maybe even close to death himself. The two assassins would be evenly-matched. He’d carved his way through human targets over the course of his gruesome career, but Gamora Zen Whoberi Ben Titan was not a human target. She’d give him a run for his money. He’s not even sure if he would walk away from it alive.
So why, after everything, should he lay down his life in service of this shit mission?
It turns out that once you’ve betrayed one cause, it’s easier to do it again, easier to claw your way out of that rut and finally, agonisingly, conceive of something outside of blind obedience. He’s walked away from worse masters with shorter tempers and deeper vindictiveness. All it had taken last time was splitting his knuckles open on Steve Rogers’ teeth. This time—
Bucky puts the safety on his rifle back on. (A distinctive click, audible to someone with enhanced hearing.) And he slings it back into the holster on his back, no longer immediately to hand, a weapon sheathed.
Outside the warehouse, SWORD has an eye on both of their blurry heat signatures (and the ones of agents now gone, their bodies slowly cooling), but they don’t have a clear view on the assets. They don’t have ears on the facility.
So Bucky raises his hands first, fingers reaching for the sky, as he slowly rises up behind that cover and puts his skull back into plain view. Open palms, unarmed, a white flag. A truce.
Gamora's eyes slide close for a moment at that sound, her small sigh of relief tucked away beneath it. Reprieve, at least for now. It almost burns, the thought of standing down from the fight she's been entrenched in for weeks now. The thought that maybe this could be truth instead of just another attempt at a trap. That she could slip the noose. Because her thoughts run similar to his. For all that Gamora easily tosses out assurances that she would kill him if he tried her, she has seen enough of him on that battlefield against Thanos and his forces not to actually think of a fight between them as anything short of brutal and potentially lethal even for her. And even if she did survive - the damage someone like him could inflict on her knows few measures.
When her eyes open again, she watches him raise a hand from his cover, then lift his head. Trains the sights on him and watches him through him for a moment. Lets the moment drag. He doesn't duck back down - either very foolish or very good at bluffing.
Or perhaps just... good. Perhaps just honest.
Gamora isn't sure she can believe that.
It's only after that long, drawn out pause that Bucky will hear her safety snap back on as well, almost loud to their kinds of ears in the silence of the warehouse. And then she moves, too. Leaves cover and lets him see her. With the rifle on her back, she's far from unarmed though, and lets him see that her hand is on something on her hip - Godslayer, should he get too close to comfort and make any moves she doesn't like seeing. From his perspective that might as well be a blaster. For now though, she makes eye contact with him.
Gamora is exhausted, and visibly so. Doesn't look like she's slept in far too long. Her sharp features are almost gaunt, and the green skin much less vibrant with the pallor of exhaustion. There's blood spattered on her - and clearly not all of it her own.
"Would you like me to strike you, so you can claim I bested you and slipped out of your grasp? Would that make them let you survive failure?"
It might not sound it at first glance, but she's trying to do him a favour here, is trying to show him honor and help ensure he doesn't suffer punishment for letting her go. It's a messed up way of saying thank you - but the thought counts, right?
This is a wild leap of optimism. He’s usually a cynic, but sometimes that old faith in something better shines through, some vestigial instinct which sounds an awful lot like Steve’s voice in the back of his head, the invisible Jiminy Cricket on his shoulder: you should try trusting people once in a while, Buck.
And he looks up and up across the warehouse, to meet Gamora’s eye. Catches the glint of metal at her hip. He wonders what it’d be like to fight someone with a sword; of all the things he’s done in his over-long life, that hadn’t been ticked off the bucket list. Yet.
He considers the offer she’s made, and continues doing that math.
“You can’t just walk out the front door, even if I turn back with a black eye,” Bucky says. The wheels are turning, waiting to catch on an idea. Because Gamora’s back is to the wall and there really isn’t an easy way out of this location — the authorities have the building surrounded.
Except.
Except that when he got the brief, he also got detailed blueprints of the building, which she wouldn’t have had access to. It mapped air ducts, basement passages, maintenance hallways.
A potential way out.
The pause goes on a bit too long, and then: “You’re not gonna be able to get out of here alone,” he says. “But I know a route.”
She wants to fight him on that, to protest. Of course she can walk out the front door just like that. Slaughter her way through their forces and...
Well. And die. Gamora knows the odds are not in her favour, no matter how it raises her hackles to have anything to that tune suggested to her.
"You know a route."
The words hang between them for a moment. To those outside it looks like they must be squaring off. Like perhaps Bucky is talking her down, into coming willingly so he doesn't need to kill her. The situation is tense and might yet come to blows. Of course, that is not the case.
Gamora presses her lips together, briefly.
"You would do this for me?"
A simple question about the things he is putting on the table, the sacrifice he's willing to make. It astonishes her - the implication of a kindness of that scope. He might yet betray her. Lead her to presumed safety only to avoid an outright fight.
But sometimes... sometimes hope is too sweet to ignore in favor of the distrust that was nurtured in her. She's seen him after all, fighting alongside so many who had rallied to save the lives of millions at their own peril, for no reward and little glory.
It’s a big jump; almost impossibly large, to imagine that he’d do this for someone who doesn’t even know him. Set aside everything he currently knows, burn up his current life and set it ablaze, sacrifice it in order to give Gamora a safe way out. It might seem saintly. Why would he do this for her?
But that’s the whole point.
The corner of Bucky’s mouth flickers; a little sad, a little rueful, a little set in his ways. “Someone else did the same thing for me, once,” he says. “I’m just paying it forward.”
Steve had offered him a way out. Steve had reached out a hand. The circumstances weren’t exactly the same, but he’s got this debt hanging around his throat and if there’s at all a chance he can save another assassin, another cornered animal who doesn’t have to die—
Bucky’s made up his mind. He reaches to the SWORD earpiece that he can activate at a touch, but instead he just takes it out, drops it to the floor. Stands ready with his heavy boot to smash it, as soon as she says yes. If she says yes.
“I was getting tired of the leash anyway,” he adds.
That... is something he will have to get used to with her. The way she will absolutely not understand the turns of phrases that are so common on Earth. And the way she will correct him almost gently - though something with a good dose of annoyance - on these things.
For now...
She moves fast. He drops the earpiece, waits for her response. Gamora gives it by way of stepping on the earpiece herself, crushing it underfoot.
"Do not make me regret this."
A warning, calm but fierce. She means that, very clearly. Is still poised to strike at the wrong move, but for now... nods, after a deep breath, to signal that she's in agreement with his plan. That she will follow him. And hope for her own sake that this man is worth his word.
“Likewise,” Bucky says, with a flash of teeth. They both know the risks and the score. They’re metaphorically holding hands and both walking off the edge of a cliff, with nothing else but the blind hope that there’ll be solid ground to catch you below.
The earpiece shatters underfoot, and he sets off through the warehouse. He doesn’t like having Gamora walking behind him — that sword could so easily slip between his shoulder-blades — but he does need to take the front and lead the way through what he’s memorised of the blueprints.
And this trust is a two-way street. He could be taking her out back to where a secondary team is waiting; he could be leading her into a trap.
But he doesn’t, is the thing.
It takes a few minutes before SWORD realises that they can’t raise Barnes on the comms. Even longer before they send in one anxious agent to check for him, expecting to find the Winter Soldier dead, only to see that he’s —
gone, just gone, the pair of assassins vanished into the maintenance tunnels as if they were never here.
In the end, the retrieval mission doesn’t go how his superiors envisioned it.
SWORD is likely going to be beyond pissed, but Bucky saw too much of himself in her — a haggard creature with no one else to turn to — and he’s spent years on the run himself, and so it’s somehow easy enough to back to that life. His pardon’s fucked, but it also means that leash around his throat being neatly severed, no longer accountable for monitoring and check-ins. It wasn’t so long ago that SHIELD itself was hunting him, the entire world watching him for for a crime he hadn’t committed—
So, like, sue him, he’s reluctant to let this woman die for something she isn’t responsible for, either. She’d fought in the Battle for Earth. She hadn’t sided with Thanos. Shouldn’t that mean her being counted alongside all the other heroes instead of being treated like she was radioactive, hauled back to Area 51 for questioning, as if she were still with the Mad Titan?
This was probably a bad idea — but then again, Bucky’s always been good at jumping facefirst into bad ideas. So here he is on the run again, with another stranger. They’re in yet another safehouse, yet another dark room. He’s leaning on the same network that he and Steve and Natasha had used over the years: spycraft and caches left behind, addresses jotted in his notebook, even though it feels like he’s picking over the ashes of his friend’s intelligence network. Nat’s not around to use it, after all.
(Sam’s the only one, these days, to still have Bucky’s unlisted phone number. Just enough contact that Bucky knows he can reach out if it gets really fucking dire; not so much that the other man will wind up in hot water with SWORD. They pretend they aren’t still in touch.)
And over the days, Bucky’s been slowly realising that there’s a hitch in Gamora’s shoulder. He’s trained to read body language and he can tell that there’s something paining her, just like how she can tilt her head and hear the quiet machinery whirring away in his vibranium arm. She’s just a hair-trigger slower on the draw, seems to favour one side.
“Did you catch a bullet?” he finally asks, one night, while he’s rummaging through the cabinets for some food. Gamora hasn’t been bleeding as far as he can tell, but there’s still something wrong. He’s pretty sure.
It's familiar in a very strange way, this life on the edge of nothing. Gamora is out of her depth with it. They hide in places that are almost as persistently cold as most of space is, in buildings that seem ramshackle to her, yet remind her so much of a life long gone on a planet far from advanced. The way he slips them through the cracks of territories feels like her own deep undercover missions to take out someone here or there.
There is a tentative... peace between them. Gamora isn't sure she'd go so far as to call it trust. Why Bucky did this, threw his life in service of SWORD away to do this for her and with her, she doesn't understand. Right now, she doesn't see the point in questioning it. They're here, they're surviving.
She's sitting at the rickety table, one leg drawn up on the equally rickety chair. There's the smooth 'thwing' of her unsheathing and unfolding Godslayer, her retractable sword. But while she's busying herself sharpening its horrific edges, Gamora's eyes keep tracking to Bucky. He's a puzzle, and she hasn't met many people who are that without vexing her. There are many things Gamora doesn't understand - but few she wants to.
"Yes." She never volunteered the information, but he's asking, now, and she sees even less point in lying than she does in sharing. "I'll get it fixed when I make it back up."
A distant future. They both know that. But she's not flippant or optimistic when she says that - her flesh has already sealed over the vexing piece of metal, and the worst she's dealing with is the pain of the way it lodged in between two parts of her skeleton. The metal of her joints grinding up against the lead of the bullet. She suspects if her organs weren't working harder than human ones do, she might have to contend with such archaic woes as sepsis. As it stands, she's just in pain. She's just slower - and that would be a death sentence against most things she faces usually. On earth, against humans, the odds are still stacked in her favor.
"You don't need to look for canned rations. I saw tracks out in the woods, of some beast or other. I can secure us food."
Read: She's offering to kill the likes of a bear or wolf for dinner. As you do.
Yes, she says, and Bucky casts a concerned look over his shoulder. But the alien woman looks impassive, still curt and businesslike as she tends to that sword, with the same kind of attention-to-detail and conscientiousness he used for cleaning blood and dirt out of the cracks in his arm.
Gamora doesn’t sound worried, so he probably shouldn’t be worried, but.
“Canned rations are meant to be eaten. They’ve been here a while, so they’d probably expire otherwise.” He’s still rooting around in the back of the cupboard, his right hand finally closing around some cold metal… and it turns out it’s just one can of soup, and there’s a disappointed twist at the corner of his mouth, an answering hungry rumble in the pit of his stomach. He sets the can on the kitchen table between them.
It’s a one-bedroom place: he’s been loath to infringe on her privacy, so Gamora has the bed and the private room, while Bucky sleeps on the sofa. He’s a little too tall for it, and the cushions are lumpy against his spine, but he’d quietly taken the couch anyway.
He’s staring at that can now, considering. Politeness means he doesn’t want to send her hunting for sustenance, but the hunger is sharper. He looks up, his blue eyes meeting hers.
“You’d go out hunting with… what, with that?” he asks, nodding to the sword.
It’s a very nice sword. It’s just, y’know, not a rifle; he’s accustomed to animals needing to be hunted long-distance, with a bullet between the eyes.
Gamora knows hunger. The protein bars were a resource hard fought for and won. On missions, she found herself trying one local thing or another constantly, concealing curiosity with the practicalities of blending in.
Food had always been a tool. She noticed that Bucky needed more to maintain himself. She can also tells he knows what it's like to go without. There's something in the sharpness of his eyes that feels familiar all too often.
"Don't be a fool. I also have a Dagger."
They had to ditch the rifles. No ammo left.
Gamora meets his eyes.
"Eat that before your stomachs consume themselves." A pause. "Or stomache. I don't know how many you have." You as in humans. Conceding food feels bad, like a battle lost before she even fought it. But she eats a lot less than he needs to. And reluctant as she is to admit it, Gamora needs Bucky to be well for both their sake.
The corner of his mouth quirks into a half-smile at her mention of the dagger; unsure if she meant it as a joke, but it lands as one anyway, dry as the desert.
“One. Stomach, singular.” Bucky rattles around until he finds the one pot, pries open the can and pours it in, lights the rickety gas stove from the box of matches they’ve been keeping on the counter. He still wants to split it in half, share the soup evenly between the two of them, because that’s how it’s supposed to work—
“We should share,” he says. “Fifty-fifty. And we can split whatever you manage to hunt. And whenever we manage to find ammunition again, I can shoot, too. Pull my weight.”
He’s hyper-sensitive to feeling like dead weight again; his best friend had carried him like the albatross around his neck for long enough.
Her eyes snap to the set of his shoulders like sniper sights. Just as piercing, too, even if they're not making eye contact right now. Gamora has gone still behind him anyway.
Everything in her screams that his need to share is weakness, that she should take the food if he is so foolish as to relinquish a dwindling resource that easily. That inner voice sounds like Proxima Midnight. Perhaps even like Ebony Maw, preaching over the children of Thanos as they fight for scraps.
There's another part of her. One that hungers for things that have nothing to do with food, but with softer edges she doesn't dare name. A starved and wide open chasm inside of her, gaping like a carcass.
Her movements are slow, deliberate as she comes up behind him. Quiet, her steps always so soft because of how she's been trained and raised, but with enough weight to make sure it doesn't seem like she's sneaking up on him.
"Say I have two ships," she says, slow and careful, "and they burn fuel at different speeds. Is it smart then to give them the same amount?"
It feels so foreign on her tongue - kindness.
Gamora reaches around him, still standing partially behind. Nudges the bowl on the counter in his direction.
"You know how Earth works. That keeps me alive. You pull my weight, too." A small pause. "We share. But even splits are not equal." Her jaw clenches, but she pushes through the need to look out for just herself - they need to look out for each other. And Gamora knows how to do that. "I don't need fifty of the soup. Enough for me means more for you. We pull the weight together."
Despite knowing that she’s approaching, it hammers on all of his instincts to have someone standing partially behind him — an annoying itch in his shoulderblades, an urge to sidle sideways to get her back in his full field of view and out of his blind spot. He presses it down.
And Gamora’s usually so reticent that this explanation almost sounds like a flood of words, so it makes him instantly pay attention: straightening, standing light on the balls of his feet, gaze dropping to the bowl as she slides it closer to him.
We pull the weight together, she says, and Bucky feels something sharp twist in his chest.
And he huffs a laugh. It’s like she’s having to explaining math or justice to a stubborn child, the fact that equality isn’t always equity — and yet when she phrases it this way, it finally sinks in. Even reluctant as he is.
“For decades,” he says, a sideways approach to an answer, “I was only deployed as a lone operative. One person, in the night. Sometimes I had armed backup, but they were more like pawns on the board to be sent and manipulated and to die. I’m not really used to working together. So if I’m shit at it, that’s why. But alright. You’ve got a point, and I get the soup.”
It's so familiar, the tension he holds himself with, but also the admission he makes. Gamora has been a blade in the dark throughout the galaxy for years, too. She doesn't understand much about him, but that... yes, that she understands. Where he was a blunt tool, she was a sharpened knife. Both so very deadly.
She knows that whenever they look at one another, they're both considering how they could kill each other.
"We were punished when we shared food," she says after a long stretch of silence. In her world, everything is transactional. He told her something of his, so she shares back. "The children of Thanos had to compete in everything."
So he knows now, that she doesn't share. That she's been taught to expect pain when sharing. That she's been taught to take for herself and not consider anyone's wellbeing but that of Thanos and his mission.
And yet she chooses this. If she held a bread in her hand she doesn't know if she could stomach tearing it in half and giving part to him. But this? This is something she can choose. To treat him like the person neither of them got to be.
To be kind in a small way, when she was never allowed to be that, either.
Gamora steps away from him to retrieve her weapons. "Do the beasts of your world have acid for blood, or similar trapping?"
That confession — that kindness — sinks in with a heavy realisation, an ache in his chest. She was brutally trained not to do this very thing, but she’s choosing to share nonetheless. Now. With him. That matters more than from someone who was accustomed to handing over what little they had.
Bucky doesn’t say anything, but he’s still looking, his gaze quiet and thoughtful and following her. Watching Gamora’s fluid and graceful movement as she crosses the room, reaching for her weapons, suiting up to leave their little cabin.
(Part of him wants to stay here forever, but he knows it’s not possible. It’s an interlude, a brief respite before they inevitably have to move on to the next safehouse. But for now? They can rest.)
To the question, he snorts, but then, “No. Watch out for sharp teeth, sharp claws, and thick fur for defense. And the smaller grey ones, they might be in a pack.”
As he rattles off those dangers, though, this is honestly starting to sound like a terrible idea. There’s some gravelly concern in his voice when he says, “You’re already injured. You sure you’ll be okay out there? I can come with—”
There's a distinctive, satisfying ssssnikt sound when Gamora picks up Godslayer, flicks her wrist and lets the blade extend to its full length before retracting it, just letting herself feel the weight. The look she throws Bucky is... not unimpressed, exactly. Perhaps slightly amused.
"Did you ever read the dossier the men of swords had on me? Incomplete as it was, they did get one thing right. I'm known as the deadliest woman in the galaxy."
She fastens both sword and dagger to her belt with a little shrug.
"My skin is thicker than yours, and Thanos made sure I would recover from damage fast, too. So teeth and claws are only of very temporary concern to me."
She's a super soldier in anything but the word. And extremely dismissive of any harm that could come to her. The notion here clearly isn't that she believes herself above being hurt - she simply accepts that it might happen and doesn't consider that a deterrent.
And Thanos made sure, she says, and something else kicks in Bucky’s chest at that particular parallel. He doesn’t know all the details of Gamora’s capabilities, but she’s dropped enough casual reference to her brutal training and enhancements by Thanos. They’ve both been forged into the things they are now. Metal grafted, mechanical replacements, augmentations, improvements. A sharpened weapon of a person trained by people who don’t care about them.
His mouth opens, closes, swallows the words sitting on his tongue. There’s something he almost wants to express, but they don’t know each other well enough and he’s just not good enough at putting the words together to manage it eloquently. Steve had been the one with the speeches. Sam was good with the speeches. Bucky, he tended to speak through action.
So all he says is, “Alright,” and then opens the door for her. Watches as Gamora slinks out into the forest, light on her feet, sword in hand. He watches her go and then returns to his errands.
He busies himself with what he can do to stay useful: wolfs down the soup, rinses out the bowl, then heads outside to chop more firewood for the evening. Whenever she eventually returns with her kill, she’ll hear that relentless, monotonous metal thwock guiding her back, as steady as a metronome.
It’s been several months of living on the run together. Surviving in a cabin in the woods waiting for the heat to die down, then eventually cobbling electronics together into a makeshift interstellar radio, Gamora tinkering with the innards of the machinery, modifying it for a long-range call, eventually flagging a ride to safely hitchhike her way off-planet.
E.T. phone home, he thought, remembering a movie night with Sam’s nephews —
And when that craft descended and the choice came to stay or to go and she extended that invite, he’d said, Yeah, sure, what the hell.
Which is how they find themselves here: dropped off at a dive bar at the other end of the galaxy, on the edge of Ravager space. Having to scrape by and make ends meet by by whatever means necessary; which for Bucky, sometimes means doing dishes, sometimes being a bouncer for the bar, sometimes picking up more unsavoury jobs like roughing people up. (Being a loanshark’s enforcer is tamer than being an assassin, at least.)
Best of all, Gamora doesn’t have to stay cooped up in hiding anymore; people don’t double-take at the sight of a green woman out here. Mostly, Bucky’s the one the bar patrons goggle at, doing about-turns, sometimes pointing and snapping a photo of him. Humans aren’t too common around these parts.
But it’s a living, and neither of them have to look over their shoulders anymore; SWORD’s jurisdiction ended far away, in Earth orbit. Bucky’s been relishing this chance at a real second start, without having to walk around in the rubble of his memories and his past self, living in a New York which looked both familiar and uncanny and strange at the same time. Life in space is, frankly, fucking cool, and he knows Gamora’s saving up for her own ship.
And there’s a common stardate in this particular quadrant, based on the nearest set of binary stars in some complicated calendrical math which he can’t follow, but tonight is apparently what counts as new year’s eve here. So they’ve both got the night off, and he’s enjoying it accordingly; refills in hand, Bucky slides into his seat next to Gamora at the bar. Pushes her drink over to her. He’s started to learn which ones she likes. The alien liquor usually fizzes and smokes in unnerving ways, but at least it punches through his amplified metabolism.
“Here’s to one more year alive,” he says, lightly.
It hadn’t seemed likely for her back when they’d first met, behind the scope of a gun in an abandoned warehouse.
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the road so far —
MEET CUTE
Her fingers clench on the rifle for a moment. Her teeth grind against each other tightly enough to be painful. Something inside her goes taut with tension immediately when he calls her by name. Tries to strike up a bond with her. Some of the others tried that - the difference is that her and this one have actual shared experience, however brief.
She was part of the invading army. She very nearly would have been part of Thanos' second victory in this timeline.
Perhaps that feeling in her chest is shame, not anger.
There's a stretch of silence. Then, almost too quiet in the space of the warehouse:
"Yes. I'm aware of your strength and your skill. As you are of mine. You must know you do not frighten me."
Not a question, that. The organisation of... SWORD dispatched him, so he must know what they know. Which she suspects isn't half of what the wider galaxy knows of her, but is admittedly more than she'd have assumed humans being able to gather together from what little exposure to her they had. Humans are known throughout the galaxy for being strange - and perhaps that tendency to underestimate them is why they, in the end, bested Thanos where the galaxy at large failed.
"You're not as unkempt anymore."
no subject
“Yeah, it was time for a haircut.” Somehow, the man still has a dry sense of humour even here, in the middle of the field. He has a bad habit of it, ever since he’d been woken up. He and Sam groused at each other often enough when they were on mission.
“I’m not trying to frighten you,” he adds, voice echoing through the room. He’s had enough of fear; hates the way people look at him when they first recognise him, when they mostly know him and his reputation as the Winter Soldier, when they’re still waiting to see if he’ll bite.
Still sitting there, his back against the metal, he’s weighing the angles and options here. He could jump into action and trying to outshoot her, but he’s feeling strangely reluctant; there’s already been enough death everywhere. If he can find some other way out of this situation without it…
“So. Hey. What’s the plan? You’re gonna keep killing agents? Run away again if you can slip past ’em at the exits? Try to steal a spaceship to get off-planet? There aren’t that many spaceships here.”
no subject
Her options are more than slim. She did consider letting herself get captured to try and see if she can't take something off the agencies who seem to have alien tech falling out of their pockets at every turn, but she can't be sure they have what she needs. Gamora's biggest enemy on this backwater planet is, it seems, her lack of intel.
"What's the alternative - let me take you in to be examined and harvested for parts? Human curiosity is known throughout the galaxy. You take what you don't understand, and you dissect it in the name of learning."
Tech and aliens alike.
And Gamora has seen the people on the battlefield. Humans with extraordinary technology or powers that defy their natural limitations. She can hazard a guess as to the lengths humans will go to in order to get a leg up on the galactic playing field. Her skin is thicker than theirs, and her organs are different. She bleeds green. She's strong naturally wheras they have few who can match her. Her skeleton is more advanced than most tech on this planet, as are her other implants. And her sword can kill Asgardians.
"I will kill agents as long as you send them. Blame your SWORD for the lives lost, not me. I didn't seek this conflict. You can step away. If you try to take me, I will kill you, too, and strip that arm for parts."
no subject
Bucky’s response is quick, instinctive, ready to reassure her and say that that’s not what SWORD has planned — but even before all of the words are out of his mouth, he’s already trailing off and cutting himself short, the gears in his head turning.
Because. Would they?
Through Sam, they’ve had access to some of the operational files on Westview. They’d heard what had happened with Wanda. SWORD dissecting Vision’s corpse and picking over his body to see how he ticked, when he had once been their comrade, one of the heroes of the Battle for Earth. And Bucky’s been on the other end of that lab table, too: scientists had once hooked up sensors to him, a bit in his mouth, readings on the monitors, measuring his metabolism and stamina and strength. The effectiveness of their serum.
SWORD wasn’t HYDRA — but that’s what people had said about SHIELD once, too.
He’s quiet for too long. Contemplative. Starting to question his mission; he’s had so many years of blindly following orders and fulfilling his mission.
(So apparently I’m still a gun.)
“What do you want?” he asks, after a moment. “A phonecall to the Guardians of the Galaxy and to hitch a ride off-planet with them, or what?”
no subject
Except that's not her sister - her sister is the one who was shot unceremoniously. Her sister is dead. She never reconciled with this Nebula like her other self did. And she doesn't know these people. Knows they see the memory of someone she never was, instead of the person she is, who never slipped out from under Thanos' thumb on her own until the big battle came a lot sooner than planned and she had to make a stand.
A slow exhale.
"No."
It sounds more like 'I don't know' than she intended. She knows that she doesn't want the Guardians to pick her up. Doesn't want to be their replacement for a dead woman. Doesn't want to be taken by SWORD. Beyond that...
She tries to pivot back. Tries to press that hesitation in his voice from earlier.
"They didn't tell you, did they? What they could harvest from me. What promises they see in my blood and in my implants." Her voice goes quiet, but also sharper. "People talk before they die. I know what they want. So why don't you?"
no subject
Much later on.
But for now, it’s like Gamora’s jamming in a fulcrum and pressing down, finding that splinter and levering him open.
Bucky shifts in his position, cranes a head up and over the edge of the dented metal; he can’t get a good angle on it, can’t see where she’s holed up in her sniper nest, but she doesn’t take another warning shot either. He sinks back down again behind cover, thinking. Trying to think.
How much does he trust the people holding his leash? Not very. He pretty much trusts no one these days. It’s a grand list of one, lately.
“It wasn’t included in the mission brief,” he says, but there’s that rising questioning note in his voice, a kind of quiet bitterness. This ground is too familiar. He’s been aimed and pointed at too many situations like this before.
“People like to leave shit out when they think it’s need-to-know.”
no subject
"That's alright."
Quiet. Like a blade in the dark. Like a trap poised to be sprung.
"I was someone's pet assassin, too."
She can offer him that much.
"They sent you because they will take me dead, not just alive. They think you can kill me. What do you think they could want me for when it doesnt matter whether I breathe? You km now the answer. You know you're here to pull the trigger and bring them something useful. They didnt send you for your personality."
no subject
The brief had said dead or alive. Can he kill her? Maybe. Super-strength against augmented strength, his quick reflexes against her enhanced ones, vibranium arm against cybernetic implants. He stands the best chance out of anyone else they could’ve sent, but it would be a very close fight. He would not come out of it unscathed; he’d be hurt, injured, bleeding, maybe even close to death himself. The two assassins would be evenly-matched. He’d carved his way through human targets over the course of his gruesome career, but Gamora Zen Whoberi Ben Titan was not a human target. She’d give him a run for his money. He’s not even sure if he would walk away from it alive.
So why, after everything, should he lay down his life in service of this shit mission?
It turns out that once you’ve betrayed one cause, it’s easier to do it again, easier to claw your way out of that rut and finally, agonisingly, conceive of something outside of blind obedience. He’s walked away from worse masters with shorter tempers and deeper vindictiveness. All it had taken last time was splitting his knuckles open on Steve Rogers’ teeth. This time—
Bucky puts the safety on his rifle back on. (A distinctive click, audible to someone with enhanced hearing.) And he slings it back into the holster on his back, no longer immediately to hand, a weapon sheathed.
Outside the warehouse, SWORD has an eye on both of their blurry heat signatures (and the ones of agents now gone, their bodies slowly cooling), but they don’t have a clear view on the assets. They don’t have ears on the facility.
So Bucky raises his hands first, fingers reaching for the sky, as he slowly rises up behind that cover and puts his skull back into plain view. Open palms, unarmed, a white flag. A truce.
no subject
When her eyes open again, she watches him raise a hand from his cover, then lift his head. Trains the sights on him and watches him through him for a moment. Lets the moment drag. He doesn't duck back down - either very foolish or very good at bluffing.
Or perhaps just... good. Perhaps just honest.
Gamora isn't sure she can believe that.
It's only after that long, drawn out pause that Bucky will hear her safety snap back on as well, almost loud to their kinds of ears in the silence of the warehouse. And then she moves, too. Leaves cover and lets him see her. With the rifle on her back, she's far from unarmed though, and lets him see that her hand is on something on her hip - Godslayer, should he get too close to comfort and make any moves she doesn't like seeing. From his perspective that might as well be a blaster. For now though, she makes eye contact with him.
Gamora is exhausted, and visibly so. Doesn't look like she's slept in far too long. Her sharp features are almost gaunt, and the green skin much less vibrant with the pallor of exhaustion. There's blood spattered on her - and clearly not all of it her own.
"Would you like me to strike you, so you can claim I bested you and slipped out of your grasp? Would that make them let you survive failure?"
It might not sound it at first glance, but she's trying to do him a favour here, is trying to show him honor and help ensure he doesn't suffer punishment for letting her go. It's a messed up way of saying thank you - but the thought counts, right?
no subject
And he looks up and up across the warehouse, to meet Gamora’s eye. Catches the glint of metal at her hip. He wonders what it’d be like to fight someone with a sword; of all the things he’s done in his over-long life, that hadn’t been ticked off the bucket list. Yet.
He considers the offer she’s made, and continues doing that math.
“You can’t just walk out the front door, even if I turn back with a black eye,” Bucky says. The wheels are turning, waiting to catch on an idea. Because Gamora’s back is to the wall and there really isn’t an easy way out of this location — the authorities have the building surrounded.
Except.
Except that when he got the brief, he also got detailed blueprints of the building, which she wouldn’t have had access to. It mapped air ducts, basement passages, maintenance hallways.
A potential way out.
The pause goes on a bit too long, and then: “You’re not gonna be able to get out of here alone,” he says. “But I know a route.”
no subject
Well. And die. Gamora knows the odds are not in her favour, no matter how it raises her hackles to have anything to that tune suggested to her.
"You know a route."
The words hang between them for a moment. To those outside it looks like they must be squaring off. Like perhaps Bucky is talking her down, into coming willingly so he doesn't need to kill her. The situation is tense and might yet come to blows. Of course, that is not the case.
Gamora presses her lips together, briefly.
"You would do this for me?"
A simple question about the things he is putting on the table, the sacrifice he's willing to make. It astonishes her - the implication of a kindness of that scope. He might yet betray her. Lead her to presumed safety only to avoid an outright fight.
But sometimes... sometimes hope is too sweet to ignore in favor of the distrust that was nurtured in her. She's seen him after all, fighting alongside so many who had rallied to save the lives of millions at their own peril, for no reward and little glory.
"You would save me?"
no subject
But that’s the whole point.
The corner of Bucky’s mouth flickers; a little sad, a little rueful, a little set in his ways. “Someone else did the same thing for me, once,” he says. “I’m just paying it forward.”
Steve had offered him a way out. Steve had reached out a hand. The circumstances weren’t exactly the same, but he’s got this debt hanging around his throat and if there’s at all a chance he can save another assassin, another cornered animal who doesn’t have to die—
Bucky’s made up his mind. He reaches to the SWORD earpiece that he can activate at a touch, but instead he just takes it out, drops it to the floor. Stands ready with his heavy boot to smash it, as soon as she says yes. If she says yes.
“I was getting tired of the leash anyway,” he adds.
no subject
That... is something he will have to get used to with her. The way she will absolutely not understand the turns of phrases that are so common on Earth. And the way she will correct him almost gently - though something with a good dose of annoyance - on these things.
For now...
She moves fast. He drops the earpiece, waits for her response. Gamora gives it by way of stepping on the earpiece herself, crushing it underfoot.
"Do not make me regret this."
A warning, calm but fierce. She means that, very clearly. Is still poised to strike at the wrong move, but for now... nods, after a deep breath, to signal that she's in agreement with his plan. That she will follow him. And hope for her own sake that this man is worth his word.
wrap!
The earpiece shatters underfoot, and he sets off through the warehouse. He doesn’t like having Gamora walking behind him — that sword could so easily slip between his shoulder-blades — but he does need to take the front and lead the way through what he’s memorised of the blueprints.
And this trust is a two-way street. He could be taking her out back to where a secondary team is waiting; he could be leading her into a trap.
But he doesn’t, is the thing.
It takes a few minutes before SWORD realises that they can’t raise Barnes on the comms. Even longer before they send in one anxious agent to check for him, expecting to find the Winter Soldier dead, only to see that he’s —
gone, just gone, the pair of assassins vanished into the maintenance tunnels as if they were never here.
can you see my scars, can you feel my heart —
SWORD is likely going to be beyond pissed, but Bucky saw too much of himself in her — a haggard creature with no one else to turn to — and he’s spent years on the run himself, and so it’s somehow easy enough to back to that life. His pardon’s fucked, but it also means that leash around his throat being neatly severed, no longer accountable for monitoring and check-ins. It wasn’t so long ago that SHIELD itself was hunting him, the entire world watching him for for a crime he hadn’t committed—
So, like, sue him, he’s reluctant to let this woman die for something she isn’t responsible for, either. She’d fought in the Battle for Earth. She hadn’t sided with Thanos. Shouldn’t that mean her being counted alongside all the other heroes instead of being treated like she was radioactive, hauled back to Area 51 for questioning, as if she were still with the Mad Titan?
This was probably a bad idea — but then again, Bucky’s always been good at jumping facefirst into bad ideas. So here he is on the run again, with another stranger. They’re in yet another safehouse, yet another dark room. He’s leaning on the same network that he and Steve and Natasha had used over the years: spycraft and caches left behind, addresses jotted in his notebook, even though it feels like he’s picking over the ashes of his friend’s intelligence network. Nat’s not around to use it, after all.
(Sam’s the only one, these days, to still have Bucky’s unlisted phone number. Just enough contact that Bucky knows he can reach out if it gets really fucking dire; not so much that the other man will wind up in hot water with SWORD. They pretend they aren’t still in touch.)
And over the days, Bucky’s been slowly realising that there’s a hitch in Gamora’s shoulder. He’s trained to read body language and he can tell that there’s something paining her, just like how she can tilt her head and hear the quiet machinery whirring away in his vibranium arm. She’s just a hair-trigger slower on the draw, seems to favour one side.
“Did you catch a bullet?” he finally asks, one night, while he’s rummaging through the cabinets for some food. Gamora hasn’t been bleeding as far as he can tell, but there’s still something wrong. He’s pretty sure.
no subject
There is a tentative... peace between them. Gamora isn't sure she'd go so far as to call it trust. Why Bucky did this, threw his life in service of SWORD away to do this for her and with her, she doesn't understand. Right now, she doesn't see the point in questioning it. They're here, they're surviving.
She's sitting at the rickety table, one leg drawn up on the equally rickety chair. There's the smooth 'thwing' of her unsheathing and unfolding Godslayer, her retractable sword. But while she's busying herself sharpening its horrific edges, Gamora's eyes keep tracking to Bucky. He's a puzzle, and she hasn't met many people who are that without vexing her. There are many things Gamora doesn't understand - but few she wants to.
"Yes." She never volunteered the information, but he's asking, now, and she sees even less point in lying than she does in sharing. "I'll get it fixed when I make it back up."
A distant future. They both know that. But she's not flippant or optimistic when she says that - her flesh has already sealed over the vexing piece of metal, and the worst she's dealing with is the pain of the way it lodged in between two parts of her skeleton. The metal of her joints grinding up against the lead of the bullet. She suspects if her organs weren't working harder than human ones do, she might have to contend with such archaic woes as sepsis. As it stands, she's just in pain. She's just slower - and that would be a death sentence against most things she faces usually. On earth, against humans, the odds are still stacked in her favor.
"You don't need to look for canned rations. I saw tracks out in the woods, of some beast or other. I can secure us food."
Read: She's offering to kill the likes of a bear or wolf for dinner. As you do.
no subject
Gamora doesn’t sound worried, so he probably shouldn’t be worried, but.
“Canned rations are meant to be eaten. They’ve been here a while, so they’d probably expire otherwise.” He’s still rooting around in the back of the cupboard, his right hand finally closing around some cold metal… and it turns out it’s just one can of soup, and there’s a disappointed twist at the corner of his mouth, an answering hungry rumble in the pit of his stomach. He sets the can on the kitchen table between them.
It’s a one-bedroom place: he’s been loath to infringe on her privacy, so Gamora has the bed and the private room, while Bucky sleeps on the sofa. He’s a little too tall for it, and the cushions are lumpy against his spine, but he’d quietly taken the couch anyway.
He’s staring at that can now, considering. Politeness means he doesn’t want to send her hunting for sustenance, but the hunger is sharper. He looks up, his blue eyes meeting hers.
“You’d go out hunting with… what, with that?” he asks, nodding to the sword.
It’s a very nice sword. It’s just, y’know, not a rifle; he’s accustomed to animals needing to be hunted long-distance, with a bullet between the eyes.
no subject
Food had always been a tool. She noticed that Bucky needed more to maintain himself. She can also tells he knows what it's like to go without. There's something in the sharpness of his eyes that feels familiar all too often.
"Don't be a fool. I also have a Dagger."
They had to ditch the rifles. No ammo left.
Gamora meets his eyes.
"Eat that before your stomachs consume themselves." A pause. "Or stomache. I don't know how many you have." You as in humans. Conceding food feels bad, like a battle lost before she even fought it. But she eats a lot less than he needs to. And reluctant as she is to admit it, Gamora needs Bucky to be well for both their sake.
no subject
“One. Stomach, singular.” Bucky rattles around until he finds the one pot, pries open the can and pours it in, lights the rickety gas stove from the box of matches they’ve been keeping on the counter. He still wants to split it in half, share the soup evenly between the two of them, because that’s how it’s supposed to work—
“We should share,” he says. “Fifty-fifty. And we can split whatever you manage to hunt. And whenever we manage to find ammunition again, I can shoot, too. Pull my weight.”
He’s hyper-sensitive to feeling like dead weight again; his best friend had carried him like the albatross around his neck for long enough.
no subject
Everything in her screams that his need to share is weakness, that she should take the food if he is so foolish as to relinquish a dwindling resource that easily. That inner voice sounds like Proxima Midnight. Perhaps even like Ebony Maw, preaching over the children of Thanos as they fight for scraps.
There's another part of her. One that hungers for things that have nothing to do with food, but with softer edges she doesn't dare name. A starved and wide open chasm inside of her, gaping like a carcass.
Her movements are slow, deliberate as she comes up behind him. Quiet, her steps always so soft because of how she's been trained and raised, but with enough weight to make sure it doesn't seem like she's sneaking up on him.
"Say I have two ships," she says, slow and careful, "and they burn fuel at different speeds. Is it smart then to give them the same amount?"
It feels so foreign on her tongue - kindness.
Gamora reaches around him, still standing partially behind. Nudges the bowl on the counter in his direction.
"You know how Earth works. That keeps me alive. You pull my weight, too." A small pause. "We share. But even splits are not equal." Her jaw clenches, but she pushes through the need to look out for just herself - they need to look out for each other. And Gamora knows how to do that. "I don't need fifty of the soup. Enough for me means more for you. We pull the weight together."
no subject
And Gamora’s usually so reticent that this explanation almost sounds like a flood of words, so it makes him instantly pay attention: straightening, standing light on the balls of his feet, gaze dropping to the bowl as she slides it closer to him.
We pull the weight together, she says, and Bucky feels something sharp twist in his chest.
And he huffs a laugh. It’s like she’s having to explaining math or justice to a stubborn child, the fact that equality isn’t always equity — and yet when she phrases it this way, it finally sinks in. Even reluctant as he is.
“For decades,” he says, a sideways approach to an answer, “I was only deployed as a lone operative. One person, in the night. Sometimes I had armed backup, but they were more like pawns on the board to be sent and manipulated and to die. I’m not really used to working together. So if I’m shit at it, that’s why. But alright. You’ve got a point, and I get the soup.”
no subject
She knows that whenever they look at one another, they're both considering how they could kill each other.
"We were punished when we shared food," she says after a long stretch of silence. In her world, everything is transactional. He told her something of his, so she shares back. "The children of Thanos had to compete in everything."
So he knows now, that she doesn't share. That she's been taught to expect pain when sharing. That she's been taught to take for herself and not consider anyone's wellbeing but that of Thanos and his mission.
And yet she chooses this. If she held a bread in her hand she doesn't know if she could stomach tearing it in half and giving part to him. But this? This is something she can choose. To treat him like the person neither of them got to be.
To be kind in a small way, when she was never allowed to be that, either.
Gamora steps away from him to retrieve her weapons. "Do the beasts of your world have acid for blood, or similar trapping?"
no subject
Bucky doesn’t say anything, but he’s still looking, his gaze quiet and thoughtful and following her. Watching Gamora’s fluid and graceful movement as she crosses the room, reaching for her weapons, suiting up to leave their little cabin.
(Part of him wants to stay here forever, but he knows it’s not possible. It’s an interlude, a brief respite before they inevitably have to move on to the next safehouse. But for now? They can rest.)
To the question, he snorts, but then, “No. Watch out for sharp teeth, sharp claws, and thick fur for defense. And the smaller grey ones, they might be in a pack.”
As he rattles off those dangers, though, this is honestly starting to sound like a terrible idea. There’s some gravelly concern in his voice when he says, “You’re already injured. You sure you’ll be okay out there? I can come with—”
no subject
"Did you ever read the dossier the men of swords had on me? Incomplete as it was, they did get one thing right. I'm known as the deadliest woman in the galaxy."
She fastens both sword and dagger to her belt with a little shrug.
"My skin is thicker than yours, and Thanos made sure I would recover from damage fast, too. So teeth and claws are only of very temporary concern to me."
She's a super soldier in anything but the word. And extremely dismissive of any harm that could come to her. The notion here clearly isn't that she believes herself above being hurt - she simply accepts that it might happen and doesn't consider that a deterrent.
"I'm capable."
no subject
His mouth opens, closes, swallows the words sitting on his tongue. There’s something he almost wants to express, but they don’t know each other well enough and he’s just not good enough at putting the words together to manage it eloquently. Steve had been the one with the speeches. Sam was good with the speeches. Bucky, he tended to speak through action.
So all he says is, “Alright,” and then opens the door for her. Watches as Gamora slinks out into the forest, light on her feet, sword in hand. He watches her go and then returns to his errands.
He busies himself with what he can do to stay useful: wolfs down the soup, rinses out the bowl, then heads outside to chop more firewood for the evening. Whenever she eventually returns with her kill, she’ll hear that relentless, monotonous metal thwock guiding her back, as steady as a metronome.
🌌 new year’s eve.
E.T. phone home, he thought, remembering a movie night with Sam’s nephews —
And when that craft descended and the choice came to stay or to go and she extended that invite, he’d said, Yeah, sure, what the hell.
Which is how they find themselves here: dropped off at a dive bar at the other end of the galaxy, on the edge of Ravager space. Having to scrape by and make ends meet by by whatever means necessary; which for Bucky, sometimes means doing dishes, sometimes being a bouncer for the bar, sometimes picking up more unsavoury jobs like roughing people up. (Being a loanshark’s enforcer is tamer than being an assassin, at least.)
Best of all, Gamora doesn’t have to stay cooped up in hiding anymore; people don’t double-take at the sight of a green woman out here. Mostly, Bucky’s the one the bar patrons goggle at, doing about-turns, sometimes pointing and snapping a photo of him. Humans aren’t too common around these parts.
But it’s a living, and neither of them have to look over their shoulders anymore; SWORD’s jurisdiction ended far away, in Earth orbit. Bucky’s been relishing this chance at a real second start, without having to walk around in the rubble of his memories and his past self, living in a New York which looked both familiar and uncanny and strange at the same time. Life in space is, frankly, fucking cool, and he knows Gamora’s saving up for her own ship.
And there’s a common stardate in this particular quadrant, based on the nearest set of binary stars in some complicated calendrical math which he can’t follow, but tonight is apparently what counts as new year’s eve here. So they’ve both got the night off, and he’s enjoying it accordingly; refills in hand, Bucky slides into his seat next to Gamora at the bar. Pushes her drink over to her. He’s started to learn which ones she likes. The alien liquor usually fizzes and smokes in unnerving ways, but at least it punches through his amplified metabolism.
“Here’s to one more year alive,” he says, lightly.
It hadn’t seemed likely for her back when they’d first met, behind the scope of a gun in an abandoned warehouse.