Stranger Who Knows All My Secrets [A Marvel FanFic]

Chapter 31: Infatuation

Losing someone you love is never something a person can prepare for and Bucky Barnes was admittedly not ready to lose his sister, though most people aren't. He lay in Elena's bed and cried for hours until he fell asleep and the next morning, he couldn't even bring himself to move. Despite a serum that guaranteed he was at peak physical condition 24/7, he suddenly found himself unable to find an iota of strength to peel himself off of the mattress and return to his own apartment. 

Thankfully Elena let him stay, removing his shoes which he had slept in, along with pulling off his suit jacket, unbuttoning his dress shirt, and ensuring the belt on his pants wasn't cutting off his circulation. He was useless, defeated by the world, and suffering from unfathomable grief that he wasn't sure he would ever get over.

Elena was good to him though and that was something at least. The second morning at her place, Bucky woke up to clothes on the pillow next to him, his own clothes, clean ones that had gotten mixed in with her own laundry seemingly just as many times as hers had ended up in his. There were even pajamas just in case Bucky wasn't ready to go home yet and he wasn't. He showered in her apartment, cried on the toilet, and then ate everything he could find in her kitchen after pulling on sweatpants and a sweater. 

When he ran out of things to eat, she took him to the diner but Bucky barely spoke as he devoured several stacks of pancakes he was so out of it, he poured salt into his coffee instead of sugar. Elena grabbed the mug from him before he drank from it, handing over her coffee after making sure to add the exact amount of milk and sugar he typically enjoyed.

He was a zombie, an absolute shell of his former self. In fact, Bucky fell face-first into her bed when they made it back to her apartment, burying himself in the blankets while she stared at him from the doorway with both curiosity and concern. In retrospect, he was an absolute jerk for taking over her home, eating her kitchen clean, hijacking her bed, using all her hot water and not saying more than three to four words at a time so on the third morning he woke before she did, tiptoed past her sleeping form on the couch and finally went home. It probably wasn't a good idea for Bucky to ignore her text messages in the following days because when he finally saw Elena again in one of the conference rooms at the compound, she beat him violently with her shoe while cursing him out in Romanian.

"What the hell!" Bucky shouted at her.

"What the hell? What the hell!? I've been worried sick about your dumbass, that's what the hell!!" Elena seethed, chucking her shoe at him when he moved a chair between them.

"You come to my house in the middle of the night, break out into tears and then spend two days moping in my bed while refusing to talk and then you just leave!" She exasperated.

"I text you, twenty times James! Twenty! You couldn't even tell me if you got home okay?! I was ready to call Steve, ready to call your therapist!" Elena fumed, ripping off her other shoe and aiming for his head.

"I'm sorry! I was just in a bad place and I... I didn't know where else to go." Bucky spat out.

"Bad place? Love, I've seen you when you're in a bad place and that was not a bad place. That was a thousand miles past a bad place." Elena noted with actual anguish in her voice and it tugged at his heart in an unexpected way.

"Can we talk about this later?" Bucky quickly mumbled when he spotted Rhodey through the glass door to the conference heading their way with mission dossiers in hand.

"Pariezi că vorbim mai târziu sau îți împing testiculele în gât." She hissed at him, lowering her shoe as Rhodey came in.

"Uh, do I need to remind you two that physical violence against your teammate is highly frowned upon?" Rhodey questioned noting both of their frazzled looks.