The Hurt And The Healing: Bucky X OC

Chapter Forty Nine: Translation Please

"Come on!" Mara encouraged as she held onto Bucky's calf. "Just one more. Just one more, Bucky!"

He groaned in pain as he worked with her to lift his leg and keep his knee bent at a ninety degree angle. When he pulled his leg back so that his thigh was against his chest he couldn't help but exclaim "fuckin' hell!" Mara had taught him many things in the past two weeks, but these days it felt like the things he used the most were her curses.

"Great job," she praised, lowering his leg back down onto the bed. "Ten lifts! You're getting stronger every day."

"Still hurts like a sonnafa," Bucky muttered, accepting her outstretched hand to pull him up into a sitting position. His torso was mostly healed except for the fractured ribs. It was his legs and arm that were proving to be difficult.

"Yes, but the pain means that the nerves are healing," she reminded him. Bucky scowled but accepted the glass of water she offered him and drank it greedily.

"Okay, let's do something else," Mara suggested. "Ask me anything." She sat down beside him on the bed and waited for him to collect his thoughts. They had already covered her, Sam, Wakanda, Nonna, and Steve. The whole "you are one hundred and six years old" thing threw Bucky through a loop for two full days, but he seemed to have accepted it.

The memories were coming back slowly, and mostly in chronological order. He remembered parts of life before the war, flashes of his time with the Howling Commandos, and a few key moments with Steve. But his time with Hydra was a blur, and he had yet to recall anything that happened after that fateful day on the bridge.

Including Mara.

She had done her best to not take it personally. Of course he would remember Steve first. They had known each other their whole lives. And it made sense that memories not even Hydra had been able to destroy were the first ones he recovered. But when she looked at him she could recall every late night patch-up, every lingering hug, every time he let her hold his hand when she was anxious. It felt especially cruel that she remembered him so clearly when he had almost no memories of her.

"Was I-" he paused, trying to think of the right phrasing. "Was I good to you?"

Mara couldn't help but smile. "You were," she answered firmly. "Even when I was horrible to you."

He looked at her, eyebrows low over his eyes. "You were horrible to me?" he asked skeptically. "Mara, you're definitely being too hard on yourself."

"No, I was objectively a very brusque, cold, unkind person to you for like the first six weeks we knew each other," Mara replied with a small laugh. "Nonna chided me for it all the time. Although in my defense I knew that you were keeping a secret from me and that pissed me off."

"That I was the Winter Soldier?" he asked.

"Yep," she said, popping the last letter. "Nonna calls me 'the walking bullshit detector,' and when we first met I could tell that you were... altering some details."

"Such as?"

"You said you freelanced for a private security firm."

Bucky laughed and shook his head. "From what you've told me that wasn't too much of a lie."

"The Avengers aren't fuckin' home alarm salespeople!" Mara protested, lightly smacking his metal bicep. He chuckled and wrapped his arm around her, stopping her from hitting him again.

"Violence and cursing, hmm?" he teased. She groaned and looked down in hopes of him missing embarrassment on her face.

"I was really hard on you," Mara continued once Bucky had stopped laughing and she stopped wishing the earth would swallow her whole. "I called you a serial killer way too many times." He glanced at her and she was reminded of how many cultural references he had forgotten. "People who kill a lot of other people for pleasure," she explained meekly.