The Hurt And The Healing: Bucky X OC

Chapter Sixty: The Stars Are Watching

Bucky loved Steve. They had had some great times together, and he would always cherish those memories. But right now Steve was being an annoying little shit and Bucky was starting to lose patience.

"He's so cute," Mara cooed, too distracted to even look up at Bucky. He glared down at the object of her affection and had a sudden craving for goat stew.

"Aaahng!" the bug-eyed little bastard screamed. Bucky rolled his eyes.

"He's alright," Bucky allowed, looking at the runt with something between a scowl and a smirk. "Loud as hell though."

"But such a sweetheart," she teased as the goat tried to charge at Bucky's calf again. Grunting, he picked up the squirming animal and set it back down in the pen they had let it out of for a few minutes of play.

"Steve was like my emotional support pet for a while," he explained, smacking the animal on its boney hips to get it to trot back to the rest of the herd. "It's mother wouldn't nurse him so I literally had to bottle feed him every few hours."

"When was this?" she asked, glancing up at him. The sun had set hours ago, but neither of them had felt like going back to the palace, let alone sleeping. So now they were looking at goats.

"In the first month after they woke me up," he answered. "Ayo was in charge of my mental recovery. She was a war dog in Eastern Europe for years before being promoted to the Dora Milaje. Saw some fucked up shit. T'Challa thought she could understand me better than the others."

"I'd love to get to know her," Mara offered but Bucky shook his head.

"Ayo doesn't really 'get to know people,'" he said with a dry chuckle. "She made an exception for me because the Royal Family personally asked her to. And one of the first things she did was drop a two day old goat in my lap and tell me to feed it. Said it was time I got to do something good." He grinned at the memory. "God, Steve was a loud kid. Always screaming, kicking, trying to run head-first into anything and everything. I once saw him charge at a rhino."

"Sounds like he lived up to his name's sake," she laughed, watching as Steve bleated to a much larger nanny goat who seemed used to his shenanigans.

"Oh, absolutely," he agreed. "I wish they could have met. Human Steve would have loved him."

"What happened to Human Steve?" Mara asked, still looking at the goats. Bucky, on the other hand, was staring at her in utter confusion. What happened to Steve? An excellent question that had several possible meanings. What happened to Steve physically? What happened to Steve being Captain America? What happened to Steve's friendship with Bucky? What happened to Steve's relationship with Bucky?

"Ah- um," he waffled, running through possible options. "What do you mean?"

"I mean where is he? There were press conferences about what happened to Tony Stark and Vision and even Dr. Banner's whole Jekyll/Hyde accident, but one day Steve Rogers is Captain America and the next they bring out Diet Cap," she explained. "Is he okay?" she continued, looking up at Bucky worriedly.

"The press conference that Stark Industries did after the Blip explained the whole 'time travel' thing, right?" he asked, watching Steve the Goat charge at a fence post and sighing heavily when his hard head bounced off of the wood.

"I understood absolutely none of the quantum science stuff, but yeah. The Avengers used time travel to collect what they needed to fix what Thanos did, but then another Thanos came back and Stark had to sacrifice himself," she recounted.

"Yeah. I don't get any of that science stuff either, but apparently someone had to go and put the parts back, otherwise, I don't know, the fabric of the multiverse would come undone," he said, glancing down as Mara closed the two inch distance between them and leaned against him, her arm around his and her head on his shoulder.