find me

49. cottage

When Bucky and Natalie emerged out of the hotel room, there was a cold rainy day waiting for them. They had about fifteen to twenty minutes to walk, and of course they had no umbrellas. Natalie watched Bucky as he stepped out without hesitancy. He looked back at her with a smile and she wondered if he even felt the rain on his face; if he did, he didn't seem to mind it one bit. It made her smile. She waited a moment, then she stepped out after him and followed him as they started their journey to the bus stop through the pretty, dreamy French countryside. 

She hadn't said much after their quite intense talk that morning. She was still processing how crazy it was to hear Bucky say any of the things he said. 

You are the right person, doll.

She believed him, and yet couldn't really make sense of it at the same time. It was too surreal. Her mind kept drifting to it and she had to drag herself back to the present. 

Finally they reached the bus stop, checked the timetable and realised they had about twenty minutes before the next coach would get there. Of course, there was nothing around the stop, not a bench or a small roof next to the pole with the 'bust stop' sign. 

After twenty minutes of uninterrupted heavy rain, they finally got on the coach, which travelled through more beautiful French countryside and finally stopped in a small village called Saint Martin de Boubaux. Natalie struggled to pronounce it, and after a few attempts and some help from Bucky, she decided to leave it. By then her hair had almost dried, their clothes were however still very much wet. Natalie hoped it wouldn't make either one of them sick, she hated autumn colds. She hated any cold, but especially the nasty ones she got whenever the weather started to shift at the end of summer. 

Not that she would have minded too much, being nursed to health by Bucky, having to spend days on end in bed with him. 

We could do it a million different ways.

She had tried multiple times not to think about how many ways there were, otherwise she knew she would have ended up being soaked in every way. It had proved challenging but she thanked all of the practice she had in New York. Pretending to act normal when she felt anything but.

From the small town, Bucky and Natalie had to walk over to a small cottage nestled inside the woods that surrounded the town, almost an hour by foot from the centre of the village. Luckily by then it had stopped raining, so they weren't going to get soaked again. Their shoes however would have probably ended up completely ruined, covered in mud. The path they used was barely visible, it strayed from a hike that was used to get to the highest point of a nearby hill. Natalie noticed how if she hadn't been looking for it, she would have missed it entirely. She wondered if that was on purpose, or if it was just that maybe it had been there for a long time or not many people walked it. 

She thought of that one collection of poems she had read ages ago. She couldn't remember the name of the poet, but she remembered the feeling she had when she read this one piece about two roads in the woods. It seemed to imply that a single decision could transform an entire life, and she had felt very touched by it. It spoke of death, of war and of the men who went, knowing they might never come back. It was about how in the future we'd rewrite history, change narratives to make sense of the decisions we made in the past. Even when some, if not most, of the decisions people make are surely not taken with such foresight. It was a beautiful poem. Natalie turned to Bucky and asked if he knew it.