Better Love || A Bucky Barnes Fanfiction

- The Time Traveler's Wife -

Flew to the UK today. Hiding out in Wales. There's a beach here. It's the middle of winter but that doesn't stop Elena from walking down to the beach. The wind is crippingly cold and the grey sky echoes the ocean in colour and mood, but goddamn... she's the sun in my life.

Remembered when Steve and I first met as kids. So excited, I feel like I'm about to break the pen writing the memory down. We were at school and he was so small...

Nightmare about Howard and Maria Stark. I remember it all. Sometimes I think I deserve to die for everything I've ever done, that maybe Steve should have just let Tony kill me. But then Elena wraps her arms around me and her kisses are everywhere and I think that maybe... maybe we deserve second chances at happiness. 

She had been reading his journals every night since she had woken up. She had done this before when he had been under so the entries were once she had already memorized, but it was the only thing she had left of him, his mind, his spirit. She loved the ones he wrote about Corrie. Always so bright and optimistic, bringing forth memories of his own sisters who were now dead and gone. Sometimes she would spend hours reading through them and tracing the letters with one finger, silently speaking the words and wondering where he had been when he had written them, or where had she been, or had it been from a time before they had met. She imagined him sitting in a room or at a park bench writing down the memories, the feelings, the emotions, and would have to close her eyes after a moment to stop herself from becoming overwhelmed by the feeling of him.

Then, when waves of sleepiness would wash against the borders of her mind, she would put the journals away in her bedside draw and fall asleep, dreaming of him or her daughter or both of them, together once more in the grassy fields of Wakanda.

For Steve, though, all he saw was his friend pulling further and further away from the living, softly reaching towards the dead.

After the incidents with the serum, Tony, and Thanos, it seemed that life had come to a crossroad. Now people were beginning to try to push forward and make a new life for themselves in what was left. Others, though, were still holding on to the past. Elena was one of them. Despite her newfound strength that matched Steve's, she wasn't making the most of it. Her training had slipped away and instead she spent her days floating about the complex, a ghost haunting the area. 

Weeks passed, then months, and while the others began to leave the complex and start again, Elena remained. She wasn't the only one, Steve noticed. Natasha had decided to stay as well, keeping in contact with the remaining team and taking notes on whatever suspicious activity was occurring. Apparently Barton was still alive, however he was living a darker life than any of them would have ever expected from him. Steve wasn't going to interfer with that, though. He was trying, slowly, to move on too. But he couldn't, not until Elena could as well. At least Natasha's got some kind of plan, he thought one day, watching as Elena sat outside and let the new season's wind blow softly against her face. Elena's just letting the days slip past her like water through one's hands.

Then there was the book. 

It wasn't the journals. Those were private, for moments she desperately needed the memory of Bucky by her side. No, it was something else. Another novel she had dug up from many years ago. In the beginning nobody had noticed. They had all thought that it was always a different novel in her bag, her hands, beside her bedside draw whenever they had caught glimpses of it. Eventually they realized it was just the one novel, the same novel, that never left her side. The spine was cracked from the amount of times she had opened the book, the cover faded, the corners bent, the pages warped. Despite this, though, she never let it out of her sight, and when she was feeling particularly tense or upset, she would clasp it like a bible.