Slow Dancing & Apple Pie

Ten

"You know, a pretty little omega like yourself really shouldn't be walking alone at night."

"Wake up."

You jerked out of the nightmare with a strangled cry, staring blindly around as it felt like you were being smothered. Lungs burning, pulse thundering in your ears you barely heard the voice speaking to you.

Hands gripped your shoulders, one hot one cool. "Hey. Omega, breathe."

Finally, you let out a wavering breath and started coughing. A hand pushed hair away from your face and you heard the voice instructing, "Take it easy. Breathe in now."

Automatically, you sucked in a breath. "There you go. Now back out for me."

Three more times you were directed to breathe in and out before you blinked and could focus on the shadowy form in front of you.

"Steve?"

"No." The voice finally registered in your muddled thoughts, even as your lungs continued to burn and your heart thundered. Gasping a little you said, "Bucky?"

"Yes."

"Huh?"

"Gotta keep breathing." Fingers tapped gently against your cheek. "Come on, doll, in and out."

With every breath Bucky instructed you to take the pain in your chest lessened. He murmured quiet instructions to you, hands staying on your shoulders. When your breathing finally seemed to have returned to normal, you caught the focused look he was giving you. Then one of his hands touched the side of your head, thumb brushing along your cheek. "You back with me now?"

"Why are you—" you trailed off, confused as your body started to tremble.

Bucky made some kind of noise before he yanked a blanket out of the side of the nest you'd made for yourself and wrapping it tight around you. It smelled like Steve. Then his hand was back touching lightly at your hair. "You had a nightmare."

"Nightmare?" You hated how small your voice sounded and hated how violently you were shaking.

"Yes, pretty bad one by my estimation."

"I don't understand." Despite being wrapped in the blanket, your body continued to tremble so badly that your teeth started to chatter. You heard a tired sigh, a muttered string of what might have been Russian and then you found yourself scooped up and pressed against Bucky's chest as he laid down.

You made a soft distressed squeaking sound, and Bucky rolled his eyes in the dark, but managed to keep his voice steady. "Relax, I don't need you going into shock on me. Just focus on your breathing okay."

Bucky was no stranger to nightmares, no stranger to what they used to call shell shock and now called post-traumatic stress disorder. He hadn't even considered that what had happened to you, or rather what he had prevented from happening to you would have left you with nasty nightmares. And judging by the sounds you were making that roused him from sleep in the first place, whatever was happening in them was really bad. Sounds that nearly broke his heart if he was honest with himself.

It took him entirely too long to bring you out of it, and you'd come out in absolute panic mode. He focused on getting you to breathe, to calm down enough that he could return to bed. But when you started to shiver, he realized you'd need more. So, he did what Steve used to do after rescuing him from HYDRA the first time. When the nightmares would wake him in the dead of the night in the tent they shared. He held you.

Your face was pressed against his chest, hands curled against him and he could feel the deliberate way you were breathing. Which was good, you needed to relax, needed to keep breathing. Steve's clean, fresh scent was wrapped with your apple pie smell so strongly in the bed that it was pulling at him. When you finally stopped trembling, and your breathing started to slow and deepen, Bucky figured it was best for him to leave you. But when he started to pull away, your hands gripped tight in his shirt, fingers wrapping around his dog tags as you whined.