Coming Home | Bucky Barnes

After

Lillian wondered if shell shock was exclusive to soldiers. She knew she wasn't an extreme case, wasn't even close. But there were days where she felt morose. The melancholy hit her hard like a tidal wave. It hurt to smile and all she wanted to do was lie in her bed with the covers over her head. Maybe it had to do with her job, like her mother said. Despite the joy of the war being over, she knew it wasn't unlike the words of her mother as well. Sure the economy was booming. Things weren't being rationed extensively. Lillian found herself going to a lot of weddings and baby showers. Yet all that didn't matter when she would clock into work. She still treated soldiers for their broken souls. The war would never be over for them. Their minds were still on a battlefield chasing the ghost of their former selves.

Her mother was insistent that she should find a different job or better yet marry so she wouldn't work, but she couldn't abandon a job she loved even if most days were harder than before.

On the extremely hard days, she found herself drifting to thoughts about Bucky. She hadn't seen the Sergeant since Steve liberated him from the camp he was held prisoner. Almost immediately they abandoned their camp in Italy. She was sent to France along with other nurses. He had told her he was being sent back to England with most of the soldiers. She tried not to think about that night or his warm lips pressed against her lips and cheeks promising to win the war – to them going back home to Brooklyn where he could take her on a proper date. Sure, they wrote, but it was far and between considering he had decided to join Steve in working with the SSR. And the letters lost meaning with all the black tape.

In the following year during a harsh winter, she was devastated when she heard about his accident during a mission with Steve and his team. Even more so when it became news he had been found taken in by good Samaritans, but by then Steve had lost his life taking down some organization called Hydra.

She wondered how he was. She didn't dare venture back over to her childhood neighborhood where she heard he was back at home living - recovering. She just knew she probably wouldn't be able to handle the broken look in his eyes like so many other soldiers. She didn't want to see the result of the war in Bucky making him no longer the boy she knew from Brooklyn.

Lillian wrapped her scarf tighter around as the snow hit the pavement harder.

She really hated winter.

...

Brooklyn was hit with a heat wave in the following spring. As soon as you stepped outside it felt as if you took a dip in a heated pool. There was no reprieve from the sticky heat. Ladies were on lawn chairs in their swimming gear with their flattering fans trying to cool their heated skin. Men were shirtless with sweating bottles clutched in their hands on their foreheads. Kids had pried opened a fire hydrant on the corner and fought for the body of water.

Lillian Kinney's tight curls were now sweated out into loose frizzy waves. Her floral light blue sundress no doubt had sweat marks under her arms, near her breasts, and at the swell of her back which the heat didn't help with either as she wanted to succumb to itching it. She couldn't wait to get back to the home she shared with her sister and nephew after another exhausting visit with her parents.

It had become a ritual of Lillian taking her free Saturdays to the Upper East Side where her parents lived. Only Lillian made the visits as her parents had disowned Alma when she became pregnant with Thomas, who was going to be 3 in the summer. Her parents had overlooked her sister's loose behavior for so long and Lillian knew that the only reason Alma was cut off was because the father of Thomas refused to take claim of him. Her parents couldn't afford to have Alma stain their building reputation among the elite residences of their new neighborhood.