The Viper || BUCKY BARNES [2]

Prologue

2014 ― Washington D.C.

FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS, HOLLAND STARK has been living in Washington D.C. with Steve Rogers in a two-bedroom apartment in a quiet neighborhood. She's been helping him adjust to the world, but he's only been back for three years, and it was going to take a lot more than that for him to adjust. But the two also developed a closer friendship in the last two years. It got to the point where Holland was always trying to set him up on dates.

She did take him to see Peggy. She and Peggy were never really friends, but she respected her as an agent and a fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. founder, and for the longest time, Peggy was the only person from her old life who was still alive. So she let Steve have his time with her because she knew what Peggy meant to him.

The two of them also did missions for S.H.I.E.L.D. from time to time. A lot of the missions that Holland did were paired with Natasha, which she didn't mind. Natasha has always been one of her favorite recruits, and the girls have gotten close since Natasha has been at S.H.I.E.L.D.

Holland considered Natasha to be her closest female friend.

Steve also did missions with them sometimes, and sometimes he went by himself. Holland figured that Steve wanted to be useful; she thought he didn't know how to live without a battle to fight, which wasn't his fault. He 'died' in the middle of the war. He never had the 'come home and learn how to live without a war' experience.

Bucky still haunted Holland's dreams. She knew it was reaching a point of being unhealthy since it had been about 7 decades since Bucky died, but she couldn't shake him. She knew their souls were tied together, and soul-ties are something that isn't as easy to get rid of. Sometimes Steve heard her wake up from nightmares; other times, Steve would hear her wake up, and she'd be crying. He'd always go in and check on her. He would reassure her that she's safe. And then he would sit with her.

Sometimes she would tell him what she dreamt about; other times, they would sit in silence, and she would take solace in the fact that Steve was there for her. Because for years, she had to handle her nightmares about Bucky on her own, but now she had a friend with her. Well, she knew at this point, Steve was more than her friend; he was like her brother. She lost one brother and then got the other brother back.

But one thing Steve and Holland did do together whenever she had a nightmare was going to run. The serums in their bloodstreams gave them endless stamina and super speed, not to the point of The Flash's super-speed, but they were faster than the average human. Steve suggested it when he heard her crying in the middle of the night, but she didn't want to talk about it. He suggested they go to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and just run laps.

For Holland, that helped. Running out her frustrations helped. And running was another time besides showering and sleeping that she took off Bucky's dog tags. They were special to her since he gave them to her when he proposed. He hadn't bought a ring, so he gave her his dog tags instead, and when she had asked him why, he said that he wanted her to keep the tags until he was able to replace them with an actual ring, and she knew the moment of replacing the tags for a ring wasn't going to happen.

But she still couldn't let go of the tags.

Holland had a nightmare, so she and Steve were preparing to go on a run right now. She was standing in the bathroom and fixing her hair, and when she looked at herself in the mirror, she sighed. She was trying to figure out what she was doing to herself. She looked at the dog tags around her neck and sighed again. She removed the tags from her neck and walked back to her room and put them on her nightstand, and Steve walked into the doorway and knocked. 

"You ready?" He asked. Holland turned around and nodded her head.

"Yeah, just... finishing touches, you know," Holland said. Steve peeked at her nightstand and nodded his head.