Stranger Who Knows All My Secrets [A Marvel FanFic]

Chapter 36: Absolutely Wrecked

★ VERY NSFW!! 18+ ONLY ★

Chapter Playlist:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnH4FJJZZddW7d7icdwYE100gZvF7CScc&feature=share

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Elena stared at Bucky strangely from her notebook as she sat across from him on her fire escape while trying to stay cool during the prolonged heat wave and blackout that had been plaguing the city. She'd had her head buried in the journal for three days now, scribbling away though occasionally she glanced at him from over the top of the pages. She must have been sick of him and was plotting all the ways she could get rid of him and he couldn't blame her.

Bucky had been hovering for three days straight but only because the heat had finally gotten to Elena and one morning, she fainted while giving Gurgen his breakfast. She just bent over to put the food dish down only to end up falling flat on her face! It scared the hell out of Bucky who'd been asleep on the couch when the crashing sound came from the kitchen, the dope then tried to insist that she was fine even as he tended to her bloody nose for almost an hour.

It had officially been over a whole fucking week of heat and no electricity, eleven days to be exact and it was easily turning into the longest July of Bucky's life, one that he desperately wanted to end. He was convinced Elena was either going to die from heat exhaustion or that she was going to end up stabbing Bucky while he slept and that was all due to what they chose to occupy their time.

Elena loved board games, she had a whole collection of them stashed in the cabinets of the media center in her living room; Chess, Checkers, Mancala, Backgammon, Pachisi, Go, Chinese Checkers, Pick Up Sticks, Playing Cards, Dominoes, Candyland, Jenga, Trouble, Operation, Monopoly, Catan, Jenga, Scattergories, Jumanji, Clue, Battleship, Rock'em Sock'em Robots, Risk, Dungeons & Dragons and of course, Scrabble.

Unfortunately, Bucky learned rather quickly that Elena was far more competitive than he had ever expected and a terrible loser. She did not want help to win, convinced that she was capable of defeating him at any game all on her own, then getting huffy and fussy whenever she actually lost but refusing to let that be the end of it. They must have played six games of chess in a single day, all of them which Bucky won not that Elena seemed to care because she would just demand a rematch. She demanded so many rematches that by the end of the eighth day, Bucky was ready to toss all the games into the dumpster on the side of her building.

He was over it, he never wanted to play another board game as long as he lived, and all because she had made him play so many of them. When Elena woke him up on the ninth day by rattling the Catan box next to his ear, he actually smacked it out of her hand and growled a firm no before rolling over and going back to sleep. They both settled on reading and thankfully she had way more books than games.

Bucky picked them off Elena's shelves at random and if he didn't like the story by the end of the first chapter, he put it back. He ended up reading The Martian, Three Apples Fell From the Sky, and The Stranger In the Woods. Honestly, that last one had him wanting to go wandering off into the Maine wilderness and living like a hermit himself but thirty years alone with no one else seemed like exactly the opposite of what he should be doing.

The other two books were good as well and he could tell by the worn-out spine and all the underlining that Three Apples was a book Elena liked to read again and again. It was entirely in Romanian of course, as were all her books, but the setting of that one in particular was in Armenia and it read more like a folktale than a novel. It was a cute story though, one about community, empathy, and resilience but Bucky mostly enjoyed reading the notes Elena had made, seeing what grabbed her attention.