To Go Unseen (A Natasha Romanoff Story)

15 [Nebraska, traveling up I-80]

Bucky was driving once the morning came. He felt terrible because while he was almost entirely healed, Natalia still winced when she moved and he was beginning to see dark circles under her eyes. It wasn’t fair. Neither of them felt particularly good, but Bucky insisted that Natalia rest. He would drive for the next few hours of their desperate race to avoid Belova.

After Bucky’s disruptive nightmares the previous night, they’d found a second hotel a few miles out from the one they’d been thrown out of and Natalia finally slept a good seven or eight hours. Bucky, however, was afraid of what he might see if he slept again and so while he spent the night in bed with her, her head on his chest and one of her legs locked around his, sound asleep, he never went back.

(he’d seen in his sleep metal plates warp and become unmade to the point where there was only a giant hole in the side of his chest and he looked inside and there was just metal more metal and sticky, thin blood coating everything and he began to scream, repulsed, scream and scream and scream)

He shook his head, swallowed, gripped the wheel. Tried to blink away the images glowing crimson and silver behind his eyes. Tried to settle his twisting stomach.

Now they were making their way up the highway and Natalia was staring at him as he drove and he was speeding. And he was thinking about running, which was what they were doing. He had thought he was done running. He’d done enough of it for a lifetime.

“You’re white as a sheet,” Natalia commented.

“Thought I was done, uhm, running,” he said and cleared his throat and shifted in his seat and stared at the highway in front of him. The heating under their seats suddenly seemed too hot.

Natalia was silent for a long time. He glanced over at her and admired the way her beautiful red hair fell around her face. Red, like the flush in her cheeks like crimson like hot blood on metal like splitting his skin and feeling the way red felt like pain and inhumanness and, oh. Bucky shuddered and tried to clear away his thoughts, those thoughts that raced from him and straight into the depths of the things that all he wanted to do with was avoid.

He looked away from her hair.

“We shouldn’t have left home,” Natalia said. Then, she was frowning and shaking her head. “Count on me to finally find a home just to leave it.” Bucky didn’t know what to say.

“We’ll go back,” he said. “We will.”

“Oh, no doubt about it, my darling,” Natalia replied and she was looking at him and her smile was angry. “No Red Room brat is going to stop us.”

“But until then, we’re running,” Bucky said quietly, darkly, and he reached up and ran his prosthetic hand through his hair nervously. “Like… uh, like before.”

“You have me,” Natalia said and she reached over and rested a hand gently on his knee. “You’re not alone this time. And we’ll be back in our apartment, right across from Steve, before you even know it.”

He wanted to believe her, but the thing was, he already knewit. He was already feeling the pain of it. Too late for that.

“Yeah,” he replied.

A few hours later, Bucky was battling himself in the silence. He was starting to shudder, staring ahead at the road, thinking too hard again about his unsettling nightmares, about everything that sickened him, and suddenly, the air in the car didn’t seem like enough.

Just barely staving off the panic, Bucky pulled over into some parking lot of a place he didn’t bother to catch the name of and flung the door open, throwing himself out of the car and gasping. Natalia was napping in the passengers seat and he didn’t want to wake her, but he knew he wasn’t feeling entirely functional and he needed some fresh air. He needed a rest, for at least a minute, or he wasn’t sure what would happen to him.