The Winter Soldier is Still Here (Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier x reader)

A Lasting Glow

BUCKY POV
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Steve had planned to stay the entire next week, but got a call from Tony about a mission on Wednesday and headed out early.

Part of me was ready to see him go, mainly because I was tired of him bugging me and making small, sly comments, or insinuations, to me about (y/n). Part of me didn't want him to go because he was about all I had in the world and I'd be back to sitting in my apartment alone.

On Friday I decided to get out. I got in my Jeep and just decided to drive, anywhere, until I was tired of it. This fancy phone Steve was teaching me how to use could get me back to where I wanted if I got lost. I headed out of downtown and drove. I found myself soon on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The trees had changed but hadn't yet become bare. I couldn't help but admire the colors. It made me wonder what my favorite season had been. I tried to think back and recall. I thought back to the Spring. I seem to recall Steve and I working on a beat up Crosby I had bought second hand after my first paycheck from the military.

"Buck, you know I know nothing about cars," Steve had said to me as I had tricked him into stopping by.

"Well then, you can learn! One day some doll is going to sweep you off of your feet. You don't want to be having a great night when your vehicle breaks down and you don't know how to fix it, do you?"

He rolled his eyes at me but took off the button down so he wouldn't get grease on it. We worked on the car all day before heading out on another double.

When thinking back on this, I remembered how it hadn't been warm enough for the beach, but one could walk around comfortably in a tee.

This thought led me to summer. I went to the beach often, I think, as well as Coney Island. Steve and I were together for most of the trips. Sometimes it'd just be a female friend and myself, but that was mostly at the beach. It seems like I enjoyed the beach, or at least people watching, females specifically, on the beach. It seems like....yeh, Steve didn't care for the beach that much. He didn't like or care for being shirtless. I tried to convince him that it wasn't a big deal, that it didn't matter, but that never seemed to work. Ever since he became a super soldier, that doesn't seem to be much of an issue anymore.

I remember...not liking winter...maybe that was a foreshadowing in my life. I've always disliked winter, but now I loathe it entirely.

Fall....Fall, I must have liked. If I didn't like it then, I at least enjoy it now.

I had been driving a while and realized how long it was going to take me to get back to Lynchburg so at the next pull off I turned around and went back the way I had come.

As I came back into the Lynchburg city limits, I recognized that I was near the coffee shop Steve and I had visited after taking in the film last week. I'm not a big coffee drinker, but something warm in my system felt like the right thing right about now. I pulled off the road, parked, and headed for The Muse.

READER POV
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The week had somehow gone by slow and quick all at the same time. It seemed like I hadn't had a ton of time to just breathe. I had worked every day, with doubles on Tuesday, Wednesday, and now Friday. I was exhausted. I had three papers this week which had required quite a bit of research. Typically papers didn't give me much of an issue with my background being in English, but normally I didn't have Steve Rogers' words hanging in my mind, me milking them over and over.