𝔹𝕒𝕔𝕜 𝕋𝕠 𝔹𝕣𝕠𝕠𝕜𝕝𝕪𝕟 | Bucky Barnes⁽¹⁾

22 | You Are Home

One Year Later

February 22nd, 1946 – Washington: SHIELD Base

The words on the page had blurred into a bunch of meaningless dots in her vision after staring at them for way too long. Her hand was numb, barely gripping the pen she'd been writing with. It were as if she was frozen, trapped in that seat as she looked at the stacks of files in front of her, resisting the urge to stand up and shove them all onto the floor.

The day had been long; the sky outside her window was pitch black. Hardly a star shone, bar one. One star that caught her eye every night. It was always so bright, so perfect in its twinkling shine. She liked to imagine it was Bucky, that wherever he was, he was watching over her in the form of that one star. Guiding her through the darkest days of her life.

A whole year it had been since he fell. A whole year, and yet, there was no moving on. Everyone told her it would get easier, that over time, she'd learn to be happy again. All those sweet words of reassurance did was piss her off. When an old lady loses their husband, nobody tells her she'll move on, find someone else. Nobody reminds her that she still has her whole life ahead of her, with plenty of time to find love again, to grow a family. No, they except that the old lady had experienced her share of love. But not Ella – no, she heard the same lines so much in the past year, she'd grown numb to the sympathies.

I'm so sorry for your loss.

Gosh, you're still so young.

You're only 27, you have plenty of time to find love again.

I'm sure, with time, you'll learn how to cope.

She'd tried – God knows, she tried. Throwing herself into her work, assisting in the set-up of SHEILD, determining that HYDRA was truly banished from the face of the Earth. And she had done it all, successfully and proudly. Her picture hung up on a wall along a line of three frames; hers, Howard Stark's, and Peggy Carter's portraits were displayed for the rest of the staff to see, their names etched into small plaques beneath the frames.

They showed their achievements proudly, unhiding from what they'd done to fix the damage caused by the Red Skull.

But now what? None of that work brought back Bucky or Steve. The two good things she had in her life were taken away, and she was being forced to move on. At this point, she was beyond caring. More than once had she caught herself staring at the gun in her desk drawer for just a few seconds too long. Thinking... it would be so easy. She could be with him again.

A knock on her office door cut through her thoughts like a knife, startling her, the pen falling from her hand and rolling onto the floor with a small clack against the wood.

The hinges on the door creaked, Howard Stark popping his head around, a faint smile on his lips as he stepped inside. "You're still here then."

"Yup. Nose to the grindstone," Ella mused, picking her pen up off the floor, tossing it onto the desk. "What are you doing here this late?"

"Had some stuff to finish up in the lab. I was gonna go grab a drink, wanna join?"

"Nah, I'm good. Got some stuff to do."

Tucking his hands into his pockets, Howard sighed softly, his head subtly tilting as he watched the woman fiddle with papers on her desk. Not even reading them, just shuffling and piling up.

"Ella, you've barely left this office all week," he mumbled.

Ella looked over to him, lifting her shoulders as she forced a smile. "There's a lot to do. Not all of us enjoy slacking off early," she added lightly, pointing over to him and twirling her finger in the air.