Apr. 30th, 2021 at 7:25 PM
OPEN POST ▪ PIC PROMPTS ✔ ▪ BODY HEAT/SNOWED IN ✔ ▪
HURT/COMFORT ✔ ▪ WORD ASSOCIATION ✔ ▪ SMUT ✔ ▪
TEXTING ✔ ▪
RANDOM STARTERS ✔ ▪
BLUE SHIRT APPRECIATION ✔
BUCKETHEAD.
March 2023
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( YOU HAD TO LEAVE TO START YOUR LIFE OVER )
Despite believing that both Black Widows would know how to manoeuvre around a spider's web, he knew that the purpose of a web was to not only look pretty but to be sticky enough to capture insects. In this case, the Widow network would try and catch its spiders, too. Dreykov was a figure Bucky easily understood—he wanted power, and he would have done anything to ensure that he maintained that power. The Widow network would have been intricately mapped out and programmed just like his own brainwashing.
With his duffle bag sitting prettily in the centre of the kitchen table, Bucky closed his eyes and sighed, and did his best to ignore Alexei's big booming voice as he spun a tale of how he had gone undercover in a similar situation and had easily beaten out Captain America as Russia's best spy. Bucky knew it was bullshit. The timestamps didn't ever add up. After Natasha had gently told him to simply let it go and let the old man reminisce in a way that made him feel big and important and useful, he did. Or, at least, he did his best.
It made him feel a little more comfortable with the task that they were undertaking. If Bucky was annoyed, he wasn't nervous. He hadn't pretended to be anyone else in a… long, long time. He could barely remember when he had been anyone but the Winter Soldier, and now he was here, ready to play husband to Natasha in order to brush shoulders with incredibly stuck up rich people positioned in too powerful positions. If they could integrate themselves within that elite, they could get closer to the heart of the Widow network in the United States. One branch of spider webs down.
Once he heard Alexei pick himself up from the couch and wander after a disgruntled Yelena to the backyard to tend to the pigs, Bucky stepped out of the kitchen and into the living room. And there sat his wife… or fake wife. For someone who was so straight-laced, it was difficult for him to wrap his head around the fact he needed to tap into his more subtle side. He liked being sharp and brash. It made him feel as though he truly did own himself.
Leaning against the wall close to where Natasha sat, he crossed his arms and shook his head incredulously. "You're really going to need to tell the big guy to stop talking shit about Steve before I punch him with my left hand." It would've sounded more like an exasperated threat if the corners of his lips weren't turned upward.
Of course that had all fallen apart because of Red Room and the machinations of their political espionage as they always would. She and Yelena were doomed to fall into the hands of the monsters who'd haunted her dreams as far back as she could remember. The monsters she'd vowed to destroy one day and thought she had. She'd thought wrong.
As bad as Hydra, the slippery cells just popped up again from one cover agency to another and using more and more vile methods of control and domination to make people, girls, their unwilling servants. It didn't seem to matter how many she took down there was always going to be more, the spider laid millions of eggs and it was going to take time to eradicate them all.
So she was grateful for the help she was being offered by others; Alexi, Yelena, Melina and surprisingly by the man she'd thought once might kill her as a rival. His vitriol now though seemed reserved for Shostakov and she had to chuckle. Natasha tipped back a shot of vodka and poured a second before she turned to face him, looking quite oddly demure in her 'casual attire' of jeans and a white t-shirt, hair back in a pony tail as though she was just some ordinary house wife. The part she'd be playing along side him. "Oh he'd love that way too much."
She smirked and downed her second shot, gesturing with the empty glass while she swallowed. "You know hell specifically tells those stories to get a rise out of you right? He's spoiling for a good fight and he thinks your the only one who can give it to him."
He sighed, shaking his head. While he thought of sharing another quip about Alexei—and loudly, too, just in case he was listening in—he didn't particularly want to talk too much about him.
"You really think this is going to work?"
Bucky couldn't help but have a glass half empty kind of view these days. Natasha looked so calm and unmoved. A part of him was jealous of how easily she made things look.
Was Barnes a friend now? It was hard to tell with him, he'd tried to kill her at one point but so had every other person in the house so she couldn't very well hold that against him. So she had to assume they were something. They weren't enemies and they surely had aligned purposes. They both knew how it felt to be used against their will as a puppet for someone else and she wanted to spare others that pain.
Natasha turned and poured herself another shot, she poured a twin and when she turned back she stood and handed the other to him. She took up a lean on the wall next to him. She raised her glass and looked at it. "I think it can, but you really need to loosen up. Do you come from the planet that fun forgot?"
She clinked her shot to his and raised it to her lips ready to toss it back when he did his own.
Although, it was surely very, very easy to be fun with alcohol when he wasn't affected by it.
Bucky remained standing, looking to a clear space against the wall. Despite Natasha's confidence, he didn't quite feel it. This was out of his element. Even if Bucky was far from who the Soldier was, that was all he knew. It was all his muscles could recall from memory.
"I'm not wearing pants that end at the ankle," he said before looking at her, the corner of his lip curving upward. "I don't want to be the fashion disaster that you usually are." See? He could be fun…
"Good thing someone else perfected it, because..." She looked him over and winced. "Yeow."
She was trying to develop playful banter, the sort that long time partners had, a report that made them comfortable enough with each other to make jokes and pick on each other. Little details like that could make or brake cover identities.
And he volleyed back with some cutting remark about her being a fashion disaster and she laughed, honestly laughed loud without even stopping. She gave herself a minute before she collected herself. "Yeah, hmm which one of us had a modeling career cover at one point? Oh right that was me and which one of us lived in a hut in a sarong in Wakanda with homeless guy hair? Right, that was you."
She ended with a gesture to him, prodding him in the chest with her index finger.
Even though he knew he looked incredibly unwashed and very unlike himself, he had to believe that he had what it took to be on the cover of a magazine. Back in the day, when he had a nice healthy ego and self-esteem, he would've been someone who would want to be on a cover. Now… it wasn't something he ever wanted.
He rubbed his chest, feigning that she'd poked him too hard.
"Which magazine? I was on the cover of Old Man Lost in Time. Very niche yet respected magazine."
She'd been exploited for all of the attributes that made her physically appealing as a woman and those had made her sometimes more high profiles than she wished to be. Thankfully there were more ways to subtly disguise oneself than even she could count. So her covergirl and centerfold history at least would not be coming back to bite her in the ass.
What a choice of words.
"Have you done undercover relationship status before? I've done it a few times. When I was a kid actually was my first."
Bucky would much prefer to continue talking about being on a cover of a magazine. Although he had no experience whatsoever, it was easier to joke around. Less relied upon him being a top model.
Inhaling heavily, he released it and felt his shoulders sag. "Not really." It wasn't useful to lie, even if he wished to save face—make himself look useful. The last thing he wanted was for Natasha to call this off because he wasn't experienced enough.
"Never needed to do that spy work for the army and the Soldier wasn't inconspicuous enough."
She'd been on long term insertion assignments so she had to get used to becoming someone else, which brought the next question. "So, who would you want to be. If you could be anyone? What's something that would be ideal for you?"
She tipped back her drink and wondered what a man like him would want. Would he want to be a thinker or a man of action or perhaps someone funny? Just who was he under it all?
Bucky smiled, although it was out of amusement at his own expense. He used to have an answer for that. He wanted to be someone who survived the war and provided for his family. But that wasn't the answer that Natasha was looking for.
She was looking for some fantasy that he could live up to, something that he wanted that he'd be happy to pretend to be for a little while.
Biting his bottom lip, he shrugged. "I guess someone who was good with his hands and who was happy." Not damaged, not a killing machine, not lost and misplaced. "I think I'd be a good mechanic. Maybe even a renovator."
Looking down at his left hand, he flicked his wrist. "Bit hard to sell with this."
"I think that would suit you, and prosthesis are more and more common all the time. Especially in fields that work with power tools. But your saving grace will be photostatic veil tech. Same stuff I've used for masking, it'll make your arm look completely normal. It won't change how it feels but it'll look like the real thing."
She was still a little shaken she would have to find a way to bring it up with Yelena later and make sure she hadn't mentioned it to Bucky. But it was so uncanny, it really did seem like a perfectly suited thing for him. Enough that she half jokingly tossed out the other portion of the story. "I guess I should be a teacher or something low profile like that."
Looking down at his arm, he turned his hand over to face his palm upward. While he wore long sleeves, he acted as though he could see through the fabric. "You think you'd have enough of that stuff for my arm?"
He'd need to mask from fingertip to his shoulder. Bucky knew she had better use for that veil technology and it wasn't his arm.
She doubted he'd be too inclined to let that happen, at least not easily. "So no strip poker nights, that's gonna be off the table." She decided to slip the joke out there to take any of the weight off him that the mention of the topic might have triggered.
At the stripping or the poker, he chose to leave that completely to the imagination.
He knew what she was doing. Pretending to be someone else was her forte, not his. Killing people, being switched on and off… that was more his. But he appreciated it all the same. This was just another thing on his plate that was very fresh and new to him.
Bucky regarded her with a smile. "You want to be married to a worker like that?"
Nat smiled, it was perfectly convincing. But behind it was something else, she never thought about marriage because she'd never thought about long-term plans. Agents don't make those because long-term wasn't an expectation. You had a finite usefulness expectation. Eventually, you get hurt or fail, or even if you are good you get old enough that you slip up. You can't expect to retire gracefully from what she was, that wasn't how it worked. No children, no split allegiance, no complications.
Well, she'd fucked all that right up, hadn't she?
"Yeah, I think that would be just about right."
"How many of these fake marriage covers have you done?"
Someone of Natasha's skillset must've been a fake wife a handful of times. Either that, or she finds it all too easy to slip into the skin she needs. It's something he's envious of. Sometimes, he wishes he could be someone else.
"So you're working with a pro here. It's really all about the familiarity people have with each other when they've been together. Which is why it's almost always easier to pull it off as a newer relationship." She nodded and gestured to the way that Alexi had gone. "Mom and dad," she said it in the tone of it was just easier to call them that. "Had to work on their cover, they did it a lot. Played games of it so we would too. I got used to being Natalie, she became as much me as my real self."
"I do have one friend, we could pull it off. We could pretty convincingly be married. We have that great ability to be best friends and still annoy the shit out of each other. When you get someone who knows you that well, someone you can actually be vulnerable with that's why you have a good partnership." And those were, in her mind, very rare indeed.
"But kissing him was like kissing a brother, so that kept us both very well aware of what we were being tapped to do." She looked at Bucky, canted her head to the side somewhat thoughtfully. "You don't look like a brother."