Taming The Ghost

Chapter 22

Life in Romania, for the most part, was easy. For the first month, we laid pretty low. I was out of action for a few weeks because of my ankle, so I sat on the beat up, red sofa we had in the middle of the room facing away from the kitchen, and read while Bucky occasionally went to the market to get us food. He tried to avoid going into stores as much as possible to avoid the CCTV, but sometimes we just craved candy, so he risked it. A lot of what we ate, though, was fresh vegetables and meat, and it turns out that Bucky was a pretty good cook, although he could definitely have been a bit more heavy handed with the seasoning.

As soon as I could stand for longer than five minutes without being in agony, I taught him the joys of paprika. We'd go out to the market together and pick what we wanted to eat, but I let him hand the money over. I never took that part away from him, cooking was his thing as well. This was the first time that he was truly free to make his own decisions and be in complete control of what he was doing, I always let him have those small victories. I was always on my guard, better safe than sorry, but for the most part I trusted him completely.

When we had nothing better to do, he enjoyed sitting next to me, or on the double mattress we had laying on top of some wooden pallets in front of the sofa and listening to me read aloud. He didn't necessarily enjoy the story, it was more the soothing tone of my voice he was interested in. Sometimes, I'd make up some character voices to make him laugh, and it worked. Most of the time he'd chuckle or, if I really nailed the voice, I'd get a hearty laugh-out-loud from him.

If we weren't reading, we were having therapy sessions; gaining trust and trading tales of hardships. He spent a lot of time writing in various notebooks that he had. Most of what he wrote was memories that would come to him, sometimes in the middle of the night, of his life before Hydra. He used colourful sticky tabs to mark the best ones. I'd often wake up to him sat on the sofa writing furiously, or pacing back and forth in the kitchen reading what he'd written before he either finished or realised he'd woken me up and came back to sleep next to me. Every so often, he'd remember a bad memory, something he'd done under Hydra's control that he wasn't proud of. Sometimes he'd tell me, other times he would say it was too much to put on someone else's conscience, but he always wrote it down. The notebook of bad memories was kept in a getaway bag we had hidden under the floor boards. It was full of other notebooks that Bucky had already filled with memories, some good, some bad, and ready to go if anyone ever came looking. He kept it there so that he couldn't read the awful things he was made to do, he only ever read the good. It also meant that no-one else could use those memories against him if someone decided to come searching while we were out one day.

At one point, I made him do trust falls with me. He, of course, caught me like I weighed nothing, but when it came to me catching him, he was sceptical.

"Are you sure you can hold my weight?" he'd ask

"Don't be so harsh on yourself. You may be out of action but you haven't put on that much weight." I joked with a grin

"Ha ha. Very funny, Laura." he replied sarcastically, he was getting very good at sarcasm, "I'm serious though. Can you? I don't want to hurt you."

"Yeah, I can take it. My Dad may not have succeeded in turning me into a super soldier but I do have something to show for all that crap he put me through." Dubiously, Bucky gave me a look that said 'ok, but don't hold me accountable if you can't take it' and turned. He let all of his weight roll back on his heels and grimaced, waiting to feel the impact of his body hitting the wooden floor. Instead, he felt my hands, holding him up by his shoulders. Opening his eyes, he stared up and grinned at me.