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.
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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.