#and also genuinely very tired + ive had a migraine all afternoon. they know i usually cancel fridays anyway so.

[toastsnaffler]

love cancelling plans with ppl who don't want me there. we r both relieved but won't admit it

[philtstone]

For the touches meme: MCU ship of your choice with#8 :)

#8 -- shielding someone with their body

u can also read this on ao3 <3 to say "this prompt got away from me" would be an understatement and yet i still have the temerity to follow it up with "and there might be a part two!" lord. anyway, apologies to kaadhu because she doesn't go here at all but also she did give me the green light to be self-indulgent with this one, so.

the "Jonah Day" was inspired by a scene from Abraxas's phenomenal fic series "Just Two Guys" which was in turn quoting Anne of Green Gables. naturally i had to give it my own little spin. the fic concept itself was inspired by "Jazz Standards Vol 3" by sixes_and_sevens and "In the Woods Somewhere" by @rebellconquerer, both of whom are brilliant authors whose versions of these characters are inspiring in how much they are rich and full of feeling and complexity. i wanted to try my hand at the idea without there being an associated plot arc. hopefully i did it justice bc ive been working on this for a week and i have other Responsibilities so if i dont post it now and be at peace with its imperfections ill never get anything else done. this fic is part of this series and while technically a stand alone i guess the emotional beats of it are very much tied into their previous growing. i wanted to show that they have a process for working through things but that it's inevitably still evolving.

anyway. with that out of the way -- enjoy! (or if you're kaadhu, hopefully i can make it up to u with the star wars prompts im gonna work on next)

It’s one of those days. 

It’s like everyone woke on the wrong side of some bed, and the world has not thought to slow down and accommodate them, and the headaches Sarah has started getting every few weeks, which she refuses to call pre-migraines, have settled at the back of her skull. 

Also, it is raining. Badly.

Cassius used to call ‘em Jonah Days. Only person had it worse in the world, he’d say, was probably Jonah and his whale.

Sarah does not have a whale, but she does have that headache, and has spent all day tracking down a mistake on a license she ordered three weeks ago and trying to make up for the work she missed last week when AJ had the stomach flu and had to spend an afternoon at the hospital. It had just been her at home; Rhodes had called on Sam’s behalf, and Bucky had had to fly out on short notice, something half classified with a tension undercutting it that left Sarah’s tongue feeling dry. He got back in yesterday. Yesterday was not as much of a misery as today but still dragged itself out, and was prolonged enough that they only had time for a brief kiss hello and the curt acknowledgement that Sam was alright. Whatever had happened, Bucky was not happy about it. She’d noticed, of course. His face was drawn, and everything he said came out like the second half was being held as a careful package at the back of his throat. Sarah, distracted by life, had not thought about it too hard. On the rare occasion the rarer mission (getting rarer still) is genuinely awful, she has realized he’ll always find a way to call her. Sometimes, as a reassurance for her. Other times, for his own sanity. Once he called barely three hours after he left, like by some prescient intuition he knew she’d be sitting at the kitchen table on the verge of a panic (another one of those Days). Another time, in the middle of the dairy aisle at Wal-Mart, she picked up the phone to him crying. 

Nothing like that happened this time. He’d said I’m fine, quietly, into her temple, and Sarah had been too tired to try to coax anything else out of him, so she let it be. 

When she gets home, today – The Jonah Day – stomping into the kitchen with as much purpose as she can muster, Bucky is sitting at the kitchen table, something pale and unkempt about his face, and nursing an empty mug of tea. 

She knows it’s tea because of the glittery little tag that’s hanging from the edge of the mug. In truth this should be her first red flag: there’s only one kind of tea he drinks, and a rare handful of occasions he drinks it on. She’s never had a great love for honeybush, but the stuff Ayo’s wife Aneka sends is nice-smelling and strong enough to be medicinal. Sarah’s not in any mood to be catching flags today, red or otherwise. She shuffles in and wonders where they’ve put the ibuprofen and nearly steps on the cat, who scratches her foot in her yowly attempt to get away from Sarah’s sandal.

“Shit –” Her elbow slams into the cabinet as she startles – “Argh! Out of the kitchen, Alpine – Cass! What’d I tell you about getting these dishes done after school? Do I look like a dishwashing service to you?”

That had been the deal. There is an abstract part of her that knows Cass is working on a science project and an even more abstract part of her that knows that, in the regular routine that’s emerged, Bucky would have reminded him. 

Clearly he has not. Sarah is too tired to process why that might be. Maybe he forgot. She doesn’t think he got much sleep last night, which isn’t exactly uncommon. She remembers waking up to an empty bed and a rumpled sleeping bag on the bedroom floor. She’d nearly tripped over that, too.

Could be that’s what got the whole day going.

“Can you get Cass?” Sarah asks, only half-looking at Bucky. She walks through the remainder of the kitchen and peers into the coffee pot to see if there are any dregs left from the morning. The rainstorm outside seems to have turned into a thunderstorm; Sarah can hear its low rumblings. Are there leftovers in the fridge? No. And no one has bothered to think of dinner, either. She swallows back the urge to curse on her next prolonged inhale, the delay in reply rubbing her already edgy nerves wrong for no reason. “Bucky.”

“Hm? Oh.” In a side glance, she can see him shift his elbows on the table, rub at his eyes and nod. “Yeah, um. Yeah, I’ll get him. Let me put this in the sink.”

Another rumble. If the power goes out she thinks she might scream.

Speaking of the sink: she tosses the thermoses the boys left on the kitchen counter into it with a dull clang and wonders if she has time to take a shower. It doesn’t occur to her that maybe she will feel better if she takes a moment to breathe and perhaps ask Bucky for a hug – Sarah’s habits of self-reliance started well before her first marriage, even – but anyway, she feels disgusting. She smells like sweat and fish and she wants to sleep for ten years and cry at once. She’s worried if he gets too close she’ll cringe, or snap, or something foolish. Still. He has to enter her space to rinse the mug out. She tries not to look at him lest the crying overtake her and attempts to source a granola bar to maybe take the edge off her headache. 

Overloud footsteps thunder abruptly down the stairs. Suddenly, Cass is barreling in, an overdue apology loud on his tongue. This happens a half second before his hip knocks into one of the kitchen chairs, which drags, scrapes loudly, and pinches an unassuming Alpine’s tail between its leg and the table’s. 

Alpine shrieks.

“CASS!” Sarah yells, forgetting herself. 

“I’m sorry!” yelps Cass immediately, wide-eyed and penitent. 

“It was an accident,” Bucky says quickly. He’s straightened beside her, and his voice has something strained under the placating instinct, “it’ll be fine –” 

One free hand comes up in front of him in a gesture she knows very well. “For the love of God!” Sarah yells. “No, it was not! I have told you a million times, Cassius Wilson –” Bucky’s hand is too close to her. She grabs it, to bat it away, shove it back towards him. Alpine is still yowling holy vengeance. Cass is apologizing more loudly now, and she does not notice Bucky’s shoulders tensing, and her hand connects with his a split second before the rumbling beginnings of thunder turn into a full blown clap outside.

With the piercing pop of breaking ceramic the mug in his hand explodes, spraying its pieces all over the floor. Sarah’s mouth lets out a startled little cry and she does not realize why that is until she looks down, heart in her throat, and realizes his other hand has shot out and grabbed her wrist.

A reflex, probably. Her tendons are pinching but Sarah knows this kind of thing can spook anyone on a good day. And she’d been yelling so loudly, right in his ear.

“Sorry!” says Cass again, reedy with the fright he gave himself, the suddenness, the mundane violence of a cup breaking and the spring storm. His voice is thinned out with the upshooting squeak of pre-teen concern and in a moment Sarah’s anger fizzles. She can hear the rain lashing at the windows. 

“It’s alright,” she says, parroting Bucky’s earlier words, “it’s just a mug.” 

Bucky is still holding her wrist. The angle is awkward – Sarah is too close to him and too far away from him at once and her forearm is bent low, towards the kitchen counter. The metal pads of his fingers dig into her bones, pushing them together, and when she comes to gently tug away, she can’t move it an inch. “Ow,” comes out of her mouth, muttered and mostly surprised, before she can stop it.

“Alpine!” she hears Cass say. “No, you have to get on the table or your feet’ll get hurt –”

Poor Alpine has not had a moment of peace since Sarah entered the kitchen. She’s never loved thunderstorms and beyond her own pinched tail and trodden foot the tiny cat is tense and staring at Bucky and Sarah with wide, alert, too-knowing eyes. Sarah cannot process this. She is looking at Bucky’s face. Every line of his body is iron hewn, pupils large and dilated, lips too red and parted where he is breathing heavily. He’s staring at the floor, and the broken ceramic, but there suddenly isn’t a doubt in Sarah’s mind that he isn’t seeing jack shit.

“B,” she tries. “You okay?”

Nothing. His grip on her arm is so tight that she’s started to feel it in her elbow. She can see blood trickling down his right hand thumb where she realizes the broken ceramic cut into his palm; he didn’t startle and drop it, then.

“Mom?” Cass has noticed them. “Uncle Bucky?”

“James,” Sarah says, as steadily as she can. “Let go, please.” 

She bites her tongue just before the rest of the sentence comes out; she would not, in a million years, in any lifetime, say You’re hurting me when Cass is still in the room. 

“What’s wrong with him?” 

“We all just had a fright,” Sarah says, trying to subtly shift her shoulder. “Cass, put your running shoes on. Then go to the supply closet upstairs and grab the hand vacuum and dustpan.”

“But –” 

“Tell AJ not to come down ‘til we’ve cleaned the broke mug. We don’t get it clean soon Alpine might hurt herself.”

This is motivation enough to manage him. She thinks for Cass this must still be one of those momentary incursions of chaos into routine that are sprinkled throughout her own childhood. She watches her son nod rapidly out of the corner of her eye, and then he scrambles away and back up the stairs.

“James,” Sarah says, once he is out of earshot. “I need you to hear me. We’re in the kitchen. You broke a mug by accident. There’s a rainstorm outside. Please let go, you’re hurting my arm.”

He is not entirely frozen because she can see the minute trembles in his chest and chin and bloodied right hand. It’s not a lot, but it’s started dripping onto the floor. 

“James. Bucky!” 

The pressure on her wrist is starting to edge past uncomfortable and into a territory Sarah doesn’t want to think about. She doesn’t think he’s squeezing any harder, only the shock has started to fade, and she is really feeling it now. It might even bruise. Not badly – Sarah knows her own body well enough to guess – but enough that the idea makes her sick to her stomach. She can see the dull brown of the last drops of tea from the mug, splattered onto the pale grey of his indoor t-shirt. Those will stain for sure, she thinks. Her head pounds. Her brain feels like scrambled eggs. A tiny shard of ceramic bites into her pinky toe, between her sandal straps, and she can hear AJ’s inquiring voice from upstairs, asking loudly what happened. Knowing her children he will be down in a moment and heedless of any possible danger, broken mug related or otherwise. 

“Baby,” she says, “forgive me.”

She reaches forward with her free hand and fits her thumb and forefinger into the groove beneath where his rotator cuff should be. Sarah presses as hard as she can. Like a flipped switch the grip on her hand releases and Sarah has to bite back another curse when the frozen deadweight of the vibranium prosthetic freefalls and crashes directly onto the ground, just barely missing her shin. 

She is not in any place to understand what the effect must be outside of a shock, but immediately Bucky makes a strangled noise of surprise and slumps back against her cluttered kitchen counter with the imbalanced movements of some leggy baby animal. 

Only, for perhaps the first time, Sarah is acutely aware of how large he is, how ungainly and imposing all that muscle can be. 

“Be careful, the mug –!” she hears herself yell anyway, entirely instinct. 

“The mug,” Bucky repeats, slurred, blinking. His right hand reaches up to scrabble at the thin air to his left. She can see the fumbling movement of his wrist, the way his body leans. His eyes meet hers, wide and startled and questioning. He’s seeing her. She didn’t think it would make such a difference, but she nearly cries. The sound crawls up her esophagus but does not quite make it out.

“Sarah?” he asks, voice small.

Jesus Lord, Sarah thinks. The whole thing happened so fast – nothing long or drawn out about it. Hell, she could pretend it didn’t happen at all. He stares at her, and then the shattered mug on the floor, and then his arm, deadened and inert. Finally his eyes land on her wrist, which she has cradled instinctively in her other hand, and is rubbing. Dread floods into his expression. 

“It’s alright,” Sarah says, “It’s fine, you got spooked, we’ll just –”

She tries to reach for him, working both with and against her own instincts.  

“No,” he chokes. 

She can see him beginning to tremble.

“James –”

“No!” The sheer panic in his voice does not help her own at all, “Stay – wait, don’t, please –” He pulls away from her and his foot nudges one of the larger mug pieces with a loud scraping clink. Between this and his sudden movement Sarah flinches. 

For a long moment, Bucky gapes at her.

Then, slowly, he sinks down to the floor. The tremble in his body becomes more visible. His remaining arm comes up to wrap around the crown of his head, half-covering his face. His knees are pulled up to his chest, like he is trying to make himself as small as possible in front of her. You’re gonna get ceramic in your jeans, Sarah wants to say. The wreckage of the mug spreads out around him.

“Mom?” calls Cass’s voice from the stairs, followed by footsteps. “We got the vacuum! Should I –”

“Stay outside the kitchen, Cass.” It’s immediate – hoarse-voiced but louder and firmer than Sarah thought him capable of right now. His face is still covered. “Too many small pieces on the floor, I’ll clean it up myself. You too, AJ.”

Their footsteps stall. “Okay!” she hears. Sarah sways in place. 

“Sarah,” he says, into his single arm. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Oh, God.”

It’s alright, Sarah wants to say. She managed it earlier, didn’t she? Her wrist is more or less fine now. Maybe a bit tender, but nothing that couldn’t have happened a million other ways.

The words don’t come out. Instead, to her horror, a small sound like a sob does. 

It’s alright, she urges herself. Just say it.

“I love you,” is what she says instead. She leaves the kitchen to fetch the dustpan. It’s only once she’s hit the laundry room and locked the door behind her that she lets herself begin to cry.

**

By bedtime, Sarah’s wrist is properly tender. The kitchen has long since been cleaned. In between her stint in the laundry and AJ’s innocent declaration that she needed a shower, Bucky went ahead and ordered them pizza for dinner, so that was one more thing she didn’t have to think about too. No one put the boys to bed properly but when she checked in they had managed alright themselves. When she enters the bedroom the storm outside has dulled to a simple drizzle and her chest floods with relief. He’s there. And not in the sleeping bag, either. He’s on their bed, curled up to face the wall, and his face is pale. 

Sarah ignores her bathroom routine and crawls onto the bed beside him. He hasn’t re-attached his arm. She saw it in the den, earlier, tucked away behind the cushions on the daybed he used to use.

She takes a deep breath. She’s spent most of the evening trying to detangle between her residual emotions from the Jonah Day and the very real thing that happened downstairs. She sat in the tub for twenty minutes thinking about what words she wanted to use. 

Bucky beats her to it.

“Has it,” he starts, sounding miserable. “Your -- your arm.”

Sarah doesn’t want to lie. “It’s ...”

“Jesus,” he whispers, this awful undertone of disgust weighing it down into the bed.

“I was going to say it probably won’t even bruise.”

Bucky doesn’t reply. She wonders if he hasn’t reached out to check the wrist himself because he’s scared of himself, or if he’s scared she will be.

“I’m sorry for not being more careful earlier,” Sarah says after a long moment, looking at her toes. They’re in desperate need of a pedicure. “For – yelling. Being rough. I should have been more aware of my surroundings.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she hears, delivered into the bedspread. 

They have two spreads on this bed. One Sarah has had for always – it’s quilted, with small squares of yellow and blue, and small stitched flowers that Sarah’s grandmother said were meant to bring a sense of safety into a bedroom. The other is red – burgundy pattern bursts, even a bit of purple. The material is thicker-woven and heavier and very new, and bought after much careful consideration (and her own encouragement that he get something he liked) from one of Bucky’s favourite vendors a few months ago. She knows it is called a kitenge and loves that it is on her bed.

“B,” Sarah says finally. “If I’m an adult I’m responsible for how I behave when I know certain things about others. You have to –” she fists her hands into the sheets, searches for the right thing beneath the tension in her throat, “respect that. Respect me by acknowledging that.”

There’s a long moment of quiet. 

“Thank you for apologizing,” Bucky says softly. Then, after another long pause, “I’m sorry for not telling you how – how bad I was feeling. And for scaring you after. And for ... fuck. Sarah. I’m so sorry.”

Sarah swallows around her dry tongue.

“I know. You still feeling rough?”

“A little. My head got really loud and I couldn’t stop it.”

“Because of last week’s thing.”

Sarah doesn’t like calling them missions. Sam says she doesn’t want to give ‘em the dignity of a proper name lest they end up having power over her life.

“It wasn’t anyone’s fault.” 

“Did you call –”

She can’t see his face but she can perfectly imagine the way his eyes scrunch shut on a frown. “Didn’t realize it was bad until it was … bad. Thought I could work through it yesterday. With – routines.”

“The tea,” Sarah realizes. Simultaneously she feels heartbreak and a keen sense of frustration. She should have noticed, she thinks. Then again, the plain reality is that she will have her own bad days, and she is only human. Also, she very much knows the desire to prove you haven’t mistaken your newfound ability to control. Still, still, still – 

“Just, since then,” she starts.

“I called Dr. Naimi while you were in the shower,” he says quietly. 

It’s been about a month with her, so Sarah would have been ready to understand if he didn’t at all. Just barely, but ready. Sarah likes Dr. Naimi and Dr. Naimi likes Sarah. Trauma specialist is an added perk of her proximity to them, and Sarah’s cheerful memories of LSU.

Sarah lets out a long exhale through her mouth. She can see his right hand where it’s curled up by his stomach. He’s put bandaids over the cuts from the ceramic. She knows he doesn’t need them – those cuts would’ve self-sealed within fifteen minutes – so she is left wondering if the decision was made for the boys’ sake, or maybe hers, or even his own. Easy not to think about something if the evidence is covered up and away. Sarah rubs at her eyes, which are dry and gritty from her earlier cry.

In a sense she’s stalling the instinct to reach out to him because the back of her brain is still working through the newer, more temporary instinct that’s appeared. But she does need to change. Bucky is already in his sleep clothes, faded grey sweatpants that he’s wearing holes into and that garishly orange t-shirt memorializing Cass’s first grade Lion King play. Sarah leaves the bed. She brushes her teeth, wraps up her hair, wipes her face. She comes back into the bedroom and shimmies out of her jeans, then bypasses her usual tank top for the navy blue t-shirt folded neatly at the top of his drawer. The shoulders hit halfway down her biceps. She crawls back onto the bed, in front of him this time.

Bucky’s still wide awake.

“You gonna stay awake all night?” she asks.

“No.”

“Promise?”

She watches him touch his tongue to his bottom lip, which is looking raw, like he’s been doing that all night. He trembles on the inhale. “I’m better,” he repeats. “I’ll do some – um, those exercises before bed. Forgot to do ‘em last night, I was real tired I guess.”

This bedroom’s good for those – it’s got so much stuff in it, and sentimental stuff too, he can go through picking out things he can see and what they’re made of and how they feel to touch and lull himself to sleep like that. Sometimes he does it teasingly and lists what she is wearing while he takes it off. 

His eyes have cast down, a very deliberate avoidance of hers. Swallowing against her own mind she scootches forward and lies down in front of him. Then she pulls at his shoulder – firm, but with gentle hands. 

“Sarah,” muffled, into the pillow.

“Need you to hold me.”

“You don’t have to –”

“For me. For me, James.”

He relents, balancing on the ball of his empty shoulder, and smoothes his free hand over her arm and around her back to pull her towards him. His fingers, which are so familiar to her by now, splay open between her shoulder blades. They don't tremble, but they’re very careful. Sarah has to work hard not to notice. Still, he ends up half covering her. She lets her tender wrist lay gingerly against her collarbone in the hollow between their chests and breathes in and out in long steadying breaths. Where their bodies touch (at her hip, her cheek, where his shoulder digs into her breast) the pressure is just minutely too much but enough for Sarah’s purposes. She winds one arm around him, tangles their legs together, closes her eyes, and wills herself through her pounding heart to re-memorize the feeling: the deep-seated thing within herself that’s come to associate his body touching hers with safety and security. 

Sarah doesn’t newly believe herself a fool. Reality coexists with her convictions and they’ll just have to work their way through it. The blankets beneath them are contrasting in their fabrics and soft against the bare skin of Sarah’s neck. 

“I love you,” Bucky whispers. It’s said in the same way she said it earlier. Sarah nods, and holds him tighter.