find me

36. bad day

There's good days, and bad days.

The good days are when everything goes exactly the way it's supposed to, aligning perfectly to your every single need.

And then there's the bad days, when even the tiniest thing goes awfully wrong, and the world seems to have secretly decided to be against you.

Once upon a time, Bucky had a lot of those. Those were the real bad days. The kind that can really fuck someone's brain up, or like his therapist used to say: "the kind that people end up in mental institutions for". Well, he didn't go to a mental institution. Hell, he didn't even finish up all the mandatory therapy sessions the government had set up for him after the last kidnapping and torturing. He sat in that tiny stuffy office for the first three sessions, while flirting shamelessly with the therapist, then asked her out on the fourth session. He slept with her after the fifth one, and after enough honeyed words and some persuasion, she agreed to write him off as "fit for duty". He stopped answering her calls the same week his office called him in for a mission. He wasn't proud of it. But he didn't have much to offer her anyway. That's what he'd told himself, at least.

Since he had moved back to New York fully, and had started combat training, the bad days had been less intense, but they were still the majority of his days. So much so that he started getting used to them, getting almost surprised when he didn't have a bad day.

They usually started with Bucky waking up drenched in sweat from yet another nightmare, he'd go to take a shower and the water would feel like knives on his skin, grating his every nerve. Guilt, and shame would permeate his every thought, making him irritable and closed-off. His neck and back would hurt from the tension provoked by the nightmares, so his training ended up being painful and straining the tensed muscles even more. Then maybe traffic would hit him on his way to work, or someone decided to shout at him for driving too fast or taking too much time at the light. That succession of events would set his mood for at least the rest of the morning, which could actually be decent after all, but when he finally thought the day had taken a turn for the better, the most annoying and unexpected inconvenience would once again put him back in that same shitty mood.

Since he met Natalie, his life had gotten progressively more good days, and he had noticed the difference because when he found himself having a bad day, it annoyed him more than it ever used to. It almost took him by surprise. She had a way of just making any day a good day, sometimes even turning what had started as a bad day into a good one. Considering they spent most of their days together, it was safe to say most of Bucky's once dreadful and painful days, had magically turned good.

That was true until she left. After that the bad days seemed to be never ending. Even worse since they escaped from New York. Somehow having bad days with Natalie felt much worse because he knew how good they could have been if things had gone differently, if they were different people, with different lives.

Then they spent that first night together again, and they kissed, and held each other, and it felt like heaven was one step away again. Like no day in front of him could ever be bad again. And it felt true for all the days that followed that first night... until today.

Today he woke up with his head pounding with a headache, and when he stood up and stretched his back he felt an intense pain in his torso and knew that his wound was to blame.

Apparently, all the liberties he had taken the past few days with Natalie and all the manual work he was doing weren't exactly appropriate for his healing journey.