Resilience | S. Rogers [3]

12 | EVERCHANGING FUTURE

Or Interrupted Plans

May 2018
Kraków, Poland

It had been the calmest two years Rose had ever had.

Truth be told, the first months were tough, too many things she had to get over and used to...  people she wanted by her side and weren't, and people she was expecting to storm in and burst her bubble.

But it stayed the same, for the most part. Just her and the cottage. Just her and the scenery. Just her and the trees. Just her and her garden.

In the beginning, it had been just her and Alpine as well, but once Bucky was awake, six months later after he was cryo frozen, she went back with her owner. Every once in a while, she'd go to visit Bucky, stay for a few days then return.

Neither of them ever suggested staying in the same place, not even the same country. They were both undergoing a similar private journey, and they had to do it by themselves.

Steve and the others checked in continuously, and once in a while, they'd come, by themselves, as a group... Rose took care of them during that time and then they'd part ways. Beth and she spoke too, and when it was possible, the former took a plane to visit, but that had only happened a handful of times in the past two years, it was too dangerous for Rose otherwise.

It was safe to say she was mostly alone.

But once the shock of everything that happened started to leave her and her paranoid state dimmed—enough not to be tense all the time, she felt content.

She was living in the outskirts of the city, so she mostly lived off the crops she had in her small garden, read, took care of her plants, listened to some music, read again, and went to sleep, making sure she ate of course.

It was the most twentieth-century life she'd lived in a while, sometimes it felt like she was back in time and was brought back to the present whenever she talked to her friends on the smartphone or watched very high-quality TV. 

She had to give it to T'Challa, the man knew how to read people, he'd picked the place well.

Some day during the week she'd go to the centre of the city, enjoy it. Memories hidden deeply in her mind would surface from time to time, some notion of her mother describing things from her hometown when she was young and she would need to stop and evaluate whether it was a fidget of her imagination or it had actually happened.

She'd decided that some were real for she could relate what she was seeing with her mother's narration in memory. Of course, a lot had changed since the 1900s (when her mother was born Poland wasn't even a country yet) but some things hadn't.

It made her feel closer to her mother, being in the place she grew up in until the first World War.

Rose remembered her parents had met fleeing the war with theirs and other families; her maternal grandfather was from England, so they were heading there. They came back and got married in the newly-formed country and lived about a year here before returning to England.