Kingo stepped up to the wall of the chamber and reached out, brushing his fingers against the green marble. A tiny strand of cosmic energy let him interface with the Domo’s controls as he spoke. “Arre main phir keh raha hoon, bhai, tujhe ghar hi jaana chahiye. Maze kar! Family ke saath time bitao, ghoom-phir lo, apni filmein bana, kya pata?” Hey, I’m telling you again, brother, you should just go home. Have fun! Spend time with your family, travel around, make your own movies, who knows?

  The golden Celestial filigree that threaded through the stone wall shimmered for a moment before the whole thing seemingly vanished, turning perfectly invisible, to reveal the beautiful blue world laid out below them. They were in low Earth orbit, close enough to the planet that only about half of it was visible. Karun gasped at the view—as expected—but somehow his friend’s reaction to the dramatic reveal wasn’t as satisfying as Kingo had hoped.

  Looking down at the planet, he pushed away a twinge of melancholy, gesturing with his hand. “Phastos tujhe duniya ke kisi bhi kone mein chhod sakta hai. Paris, Mumbai, Hollywood—jo chahe chun le.” Phastos can drop you anywhere in the world. Paris, Mumbai, Hollywood—pick whatever you like.

  Karun managed to tear his eyes away from the view to look at Kingo, the glimmering blue sphere reflected in his eyes. He shook his head. “Aur main aapko yahan akela chhod duun? Nahi ji, main kabhi nahi kar sakta.” And leave you here alone? No, sir, I could never do that. His voice was steady, full of the sort of firm determination that Kingo wished he himself could feel about their presence here. “Yeh log aapka parivaar hain, haan. Lekin jo zaroorat aapko hai, woh ye nahi de rahe. Yeh apne missions mein, apne aap mein hi uljhe hue hain. Aapke liye kaun hai, agar main nahi?” These people are your family, yes. But they are not giving you what you need. They are too entangled in their missions. In themselves. Who would be there for you, if not me?

  Karun’s words hit Kingo a bit too hard for comfort. He tried to laugh it off, but the sound caught halfway out of his throat. He switched to English. “Come on, Karun. The world’s going to be ending in a few years. You should be out there doing what you want to do, while there’s still time to do it. Not cooped up here while my family shouts at each other.” Kingo glanced back at the chamber they were standing in, cluttered with piles of Makkari’s pilfered possessions. “As far as space hotels go, this place? Two stars. The room service sucks,” he joked, more trying to lift his own mood than Karun’s.

  His valet smiled. “I chose this forty years ago, sir. And I’m not leaving you now. You have stood by me, through good times and bad. Let me do the same.”

  Kingo swallowed the lump rising in his throat, turning back to look out at the Earth again. What had he done to deserve a friend like this? “You’re too good for me, Karun.”

  Karun turned as well, and they stood quietly for a moment. “It’s beautiful, sir.”

  “It sure is,” Kingo said with a small, gloomy sigh.

  The quiet didn’t last for long. Soft footsteps approached, echoing hollowly down the corridor ahead of Sersi as she entered the chamber, moving purposefully toward the two men. She folded her arms as she reached them, looking troubled. “Kingo,” she asked quietly, “are you really okay with all of this?”

  He straightened, forcing the certainty into his tone. “Ikaris and Ajak are right. The Emergence isn’t some disaster to be stopped—it’s the birth of a Celestial. It’s why we’re here in the first place, and it’s bigger than us.” Kingo glanced back toward the view through the wall. “Bigger than Earth.”

  Sersi exhaled sharply through her nose. “And Druig?”

  “We need to talk to Thena and Gilgamesh—you said so yourself. How else can we do that while they’re with the Avengers, without a fight breaking out?” Kingo said helplessly. The absolute last thing he wanted was for there to be more fighting. “Ikaris killed Iron Man and they’re the Avengers, Sersi. They avenge. It’s kind of in the name. They’re not the Negotiators.”

  “So Ajak wipes Druig’s memories and we’re just supposed to act like that’s okay? That everything’s fine?”

  “No. No, I know. Everything’s not fine. I know. But what else are we supposed to do?” He shifted uncomfortably, his gaze flicking toward the floor, then back up. “We’ve still got hours before he’ll be ready to wake up again. When he does, we’ll talk to him. Who knows? Maybe he’ll be less of a jerk this time around.” He tried for levity, shrugging. “Less. He’ll still be Druig.” Her sceptical look cut through him, but he pushed through it, defensiveness creeping into his voice. “What else could Ajak do? He overreacted, threatened the Emergence. Druig always pushed too hard—I really thought Ikaris might kill him. He brought this on himself.”

  Sersi’s eyes searched his features, looking disappointed. “Do you really think he was overreacting? Knowing what we know—that we’re supposed to just stand back and let humanity die?” Her eyes flicked toward Karun, who’d been watching quietly. “What about you? Do you think Druig was wrong? That he overreacted?”

  Kingo stifled his initial reaction to interject. This entire situation was messed up, but it had to be even harder for Karun. He was the only human on the Domo. Kingo was all he had up here.

  Karun glanced at him, his eyes flickering between the two Eternals, then offered a faint, almost apologetic smile. “I’m human. I might be a little biased.”

  That drew a strained laugh out of Kingo, though it faded quickly. “I don’t like it, alright? I don’t like that Earth has to be destroyed. But there is no alternative, Sersi. Tiamut is a Celestial. We’re following the orders of Arishem himself. There’s nothing we can do except try to make sure it happens as smoothly as possible.”

  Sersi’s voice dropped, almost pleading. “What if there was an alternative? What if we could save both? Earth and the Celestial. We have years to work something out. What if we tried to find humanity another home?”

  “Are we building a big ship, too?” Sprite’s sarcasm-laced voice came out of nowhere and Kingo jerked backward with a start. The air flickered, the illusion concealing the small Eternal fading to reveal her leaning casually against the invisible wall of the Domo. “Taking a pair of each animal? Space colonisation would take decades. You don’t just snap your fingers and move eight billion people.”

  How long had she even been there? Ugh. “We need to put a bell on you,” Kingo muttered.

  “It could happen quickly, with our help,” Sersi said insistently.

  “How, Sersi?” Sprite countered. “If you want to save everyone, you’d need to get them all to cooperate first. Every country in the world agreeing to evacuate. How are you gonna do that? If we reveal ourselves publicly, tell everyone about us, about the Emergence—even setting aside the, you know, mass panic and rioting that would cause—do you really think anyone would trust us?”

  “Everyone would think they had a better idea of how to deal with things,” Kingo said, nodding. “No one’s just going to go along with whatever plan we try to put in front of them. You think everyone in the world is going to leave their home willingly, instead of fighting to work out some way of stopping the Emergence? There’s just no way it’d work.”

  Sersi looked away from them. “That’s it, then? It’s too hard, so we shouldn’t even try?” she asked softly, her voice verging on breaking. “We can’t just… give up on everyone. Can we?”

  “Hey, if you come up with a brilliant plan that will definitely somehow work, I’ll be all ears.” Kingo could hear the tiredness in his own voice. He shot the view of Earth one last look. “Come on, Karun. We’ll get some rest while we wait. Hopefully Makkari stole something comfortable we can use.”

  Karun lingered a moment before following, turning instead to Sersi and giving her a shallow bow. “Insaaniyat ke liye jo kuchh bhi aap karti hain, uske liye dhanyavaad, Sersi ji. Kripya hum par se umeed mat chhodiye,” he said quietly. Thank you for everything you do for humanity, Miss Sersi. Please do not give up on us.

  Kingo tried to ignore the tightness in his chest at his friend’s words.

  --

  Despite the coffee in her system, Natasha slept like the dead. My own rest was more fitful, dozing off for short stints only to suddenly jerk awake and just lie there, staring at the ceiling, listening to her steady breathing, feeling the reassuring weight and presence of her body pressed up against mine.

  Weirdly, it felt like I was too comfortable to sleep properly. I hadn’t been driven to the utter edge of exhaustion. The bed was too soft. The return of my usual nightmares didn’t help, either… fragments of memories and fears that dissolved into a nonspecific blur soon after waking. Very briefly, I considered seeing if I had more success on the hard wooden floor, but decided against it. I’d needled Bucky for doing literally that exact thing once before, and besides, even if I wasn’t sleeping, that was fine. I was happy enough just being here with her.

  At one point, Nat shifted in her sleep and her arm rubbed against me in a way that sent a startling jolt through certain parts of my body, unhelpfully reminding me once again that I had yet to seek any sort of relief. Could I rub one out in bed without waking her? Would it be weird if I did? Probably a little.

  Hang on, if Thena and I could sense each other’s emotions and stuff through the link, did that mean that she knew I’d been feeling pent up this whole time? Did that mean she’d be able to feel it when I actually followed through? Usually, I didn’t care much about that sort of thing. Hell, I might go so far as to say I had a little bit of an exhibitionist streak. But somehow, the thought of Thena feeling some of what I was feeling during sexytimes was weirdly invasive. Ugh. I should probably have an awkward conversation with Natasha and Carol about it before we did anything, wasn’t I? Not looking forward to that. I don’t think Nat would really care, but it might bother Carol.

  I decided to try to ignore the feeling. Eventually, it went away, and I managed to doze off again for a while.

  It was dark outside when I found myself starting to feel really restless. I’d managed to get little bits and pieces of sleep, but my body was refusing to cooperate anymore, and I was just lying there, wide awake.

  In the back of my mind, I could feel that Thena was in a bit of a contemplative, reflective mood. I frowned a little, trying to place her location—she was on the opposite side of the compound to the guest quarters, maybe sixty or seventy metres or so from me, which put her near the river? I knew there was a little wooden dock over in that direction, which brought up a vaguely unpleasant memory. I wasn’t sure I’d ever even physically been there myself, but my strongest association with it was the scene in Endgame when the Avengers had gathered to mourn Nat’s sacrifice. God, why did I keep thinking about that?

  Natasha was currently snuggled into the crook of my shoulder, and I gave her a gentle, reassuring squeeze. It was probably just guilt. I’d made her worry about me, thinking that I might be dead, and my brain was reminding me how shitty that sort of thing felt. I guess? I wasn’t sure, I just wished it would stop.

  A pulse came through my connection to Thena—a query. I thought for a moment, then sent an acknowledgement back. Any sort of distraction would be better than lying here, stuck thinking thoughts.

  I called a little bit of magic to my hands, tendrils of red energy creeping up to slip between Natasha and me. Very carefully, very slowly, and very deliberately, I lifted her body just enough for me to extricate myself from her, then placed her back down. Nat was a fairly light sleeper, and I was pretty sure I would normally have woken her no matter what. She really was out like a light. Hopefully, she wouldn’t stress too much if she woke up and I wasn’t there.

  I was still wearing my sports bra, so I just switched out my underwear for some bike shorts before easing open the door and slipping out of the room. The lights in the common area were still on. I headed down the corridor toward them. Through my connection, I sensed Thena starting to move as well, heading this way.

  As I stepped out into the lounge, I saw Bucky sitting by himself on the couch, dressed in plain clothes under a black bomber jacket, and reading a book. He looked up as I entered, quickly setting his book aside and rising to his feet. “Wanda! Hey,” he greeted me.

  “Hey, yourself,” I said with a small smile. “What are you still doing up?”

  A slight crease to his brow. “It’s not that late.”

  I glanced toward the clock hanging on the kitchenette wall, just above the microwave. “Oh, it’s not even ten. I thought it was later than that.” That made sense. Nat and I had gone to bed super early, after all.

  “Everyone’s been sleeping irregular hours for the last few days, anyway. The Eternals might show at any time. Better some of us are awake when it happens.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, nodding. “Whatcha reading?”

  “Oh, just…” Bucky looked at the book he’d dropped on the coffee table, a little bit of an awkward expression on his face. His hand twitched, almost like he was resisting the urge to pick it up again and hide it. “Something Sam recommended.”

  I leaned over to get a better look at the cover. I didn’t recognise it, but I gave him a small, encouraging smile when I realised what sort of book it was. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk MD. “Cool. Is it… good?”

  “It’s interesting,” he hedged. “Sam thought it’d be helpful, but told me to take some of it with a grain of salt. It is giving me a lot to think about.”

  “I really hope it isn’t condescending or anything for me to say this, but I’m really proud of you. I’m glad that you’re moving forward and working through stuff.”

  He smiled and let out a small snort of amusement. “Thanks. I really don’t think I… I wouldn’t be where I am now without you. Everything you did.”

  There was a moment of quiet—I just wasn’t really sure what to say. Getting that sort of compliment always felt really good, but I never quite knew what to do with it. After a second or two, I dipped my head. “Well, I just—”

  “Actually, I was hope—” Bucky started to talk at the exact same time, and we both stopped and chuckled. He gestured for me to speak first.

  I jerked a thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the stairs. “I was just going to head over to the hangar and do a bit of a workout. Feeling a little restless.”

  Bucky nodded. “I could… come with? If that’s okay?”

  “Uh, sure! That’d be nice.”

  He left his book on the coffee table, and we headed downstairs together in a comfortable, yet somehow a little tense, silence. As we exited the building, Thena approached us, coming down the path that led toward the engineering labs and river.

  “Mr Barnes.”

  “Bucky’s fine.”

  “Bucky, then.” The Eternal turned to look at me, a query running down our connection.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I hesitated, then shook my head. “Sorry, Thena. I might just run through a few exercises with Buck instead, if that's okay?”

  Thena stared at me, and I could feel her thinking. She wasn’t upset or annoyed that I’d called her over here for nothing; there was just… I wasn’t sure what it was, exactly. After a moment, her eyes flicked briefly back to Bucky, the corners of her mouth quirking up in a small smile, and she nodded. “Very well. I was enjoying the river, in any case. There was a heron.”

  With that, she turned and left back the way she came. Bucky and I lingered in front of the main building for a few seconds before we started toward the hangar. Once we were about halfway there, he glanced sideways at me. “Sorry if I interrupted your plans.”

  I shook my head. “Honestly? This is better. Sometimes I feel like I can’t get away from her.”

  As we entered the facility, the lights thunked on. It always made me feel a little self-conscious, knowing that FRIDAY was essentially always keeping tabs on people moving around the compound. She was discreet, but still. I’d had bad experiences dealing with JARVIS back when the Avengers were located in the now-demolished Tower. I hadn’t had another HAL-9000 style ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Ms Maximoff’ moment since the Avengers had relocated, but still, the anticipation of it bothered me.

  We turned left as we stepped inside, our path demarcated by a yellow strip on the bare concrete floor that led us through the Quinjet section of the hangar. As we stepped past the partition separating the two halves of the building, Bucky glanced at me again. “So what did you want to do?”

  I thought for a moment. “Are there actual guns in the training armoury? Can we do a live fire exercise?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Bucky said with a slight frown. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m trying to do something that has a conceptual element, and I don’t think it’ll work properly if there’s not a real element of danger.”

  He hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Got it. Give me a minute.”

  While Bucky stepped away, heading over toward the door that led to the training facility’s armoury, I walked out into the middle of the large, mostly open space. The steel barriers had been moved into a different arrangement than the last time I’d been here, laid out in rows that left a long, relatively narrow path through the middle.

  Briefly, I wondered what sort of training exercise they’d been doing with Peter over the weekend. It’d been Saturday morning when I’d gone to the Eternals’ homestead. Had he missed out on his Sunday session because the Avengers were scrambling a response to my disappearance? Did he even know that I’d been missing? Once everything was sorted with the Eternals, I’d need to touch base and apologise if he’d missed out on training because of me.

  I turned back toward Bucky as he approached, his footsteps echoing faintly off the concrete and metal walls. He’d taken off his jacket and was carrying an AR-15 style rifle of some kind in both hands, a pistol sitting in a body holster he’d strapped over his shirt. The way the straps sat pulled his shirt tight against him, outlining his body rather distractingly.

  “Alright, so what’s the plan?” he asked.

  A pair of noise-cancelling earmuffs edged in wisps of chaos magic—pulled from one of the equipment racks that sat against the side of the room—landed in my waiting hand. I put them on my head lopsided, leaving one ear free for now. “I’m going to cast a new protection spell on myself that I want to test out, so I’ll go over there and turn around. I don’t want to be able to hear or see you. And I want you to shoot like…” I gestured narrowly past my midsection with one hand, the edge of my palm grazing my ribcage. “Just past me. Like, as tight and close as you can.”

  Bucky gave me a sceptical look. “That seems dangerous. Are you sure?”

  “Like I said—that’s the point, more or less. You’re a good shot. I trust you.”

  “…Alright.”

  We set up between the long rows of barricades, Bucky at one end with a bullet trap set up at the other, me standing between them. Standing there, I drew deeply on my well of power, wisps of red chaos magic dripping from my fingers as I twitched them, weaving together an altered version of my armouring protection spell.

  I should really come up with a fun name for it. Everyone else’s spells and magical items had cool-sounding names, and if I was inventing my own spellwork, I should get to call it what I want. It was hard to pick something that felt right, though. Wanda’s Warding Weave? The Maximoff Mantle?

  The problem with the original version of the Shroud of the Scarlet Witch was that it was a huge drain on my reserves to maintain. It provided what was honestly a ridiculous level of protection—I was pretty sure I could facetank a literal artillery cannon with the Crimson Curtain of Chaos up—but I couldn’t keep it up forever. Once again, it felt like something that I would have a hell of an easier time with if I knew some witch runes or something I could use as a basic structure to build the Hexaegis around, so that it had more integrity and didn’t need to continuously draw on my power so much. I could keep it running for significantly longer if I put it into a power-saving, stand-by state—leaving Wanda’s Wondrous Wall intact but ‘off’. It was easy enough to turn back on, but it meant I was unprotected if caught by surprise, which had always been my biggest weakness.

  Man, I didn’t really like any of these names. Oh well. Another time.

  Anyway, I had a sneaky workaround plan. It felt like it was a much more complicated way of going about things, but I didn’t really have much choice unless I wanted to spend my time inventing a whole new system of witch runes from the ground up. I’d had an idea for a trigger I could weave into it so it’d turn itself on and off based on whether I was ‘in danger’. I wouldn’t need to be aware of the danger for it to work, either—that was the great thing about tapping into something at a conceptual level. If this worked, I might even be able to make a more complex version that could selectively shield whatever parts of me were actually in danger, but I needed to get the basic form right first.

  I focused on the feelings of danger from the last fight: Ikaris’s fingers wrapped around my throat, the swing of his fist almost taking my head off, the dread settling in my stomach when I’d thought he was about to cut me in half. Impending danger. I isolated that feeling and looped it into the activation of the magic.

  The altered protection spell settled onto me and went dormant, waiting for the trigger to be activated.

  I raised a hand toward Bucky, then fixed the earmuffs so they covered my ears properly and turned away from him, looking toward the far end of the hangar. The excess magic in my hands dissipated and I relaxed my body, holding my arms out to the sides. “Whenever you’re ready,” I called out. “Let’s try three shots, spaced out however you like.”

  There was a pregnant pause, seconds crawling by in tense silence, then a muffled thump. I felt the passage of the bullet as it whipped past, goosebumps raising on my skin, and saw a small hole appear in the bullet trap’s catcher. I wasn’t sure how close it had been, but it was pretty close. Annoyingly, the spell hadn’t activated. I waited patiently.

  Two more thumps, in rapid succession this time. Two more holes. Still nothing from my spell.

  I raised my arms above my head for a second, then turned back to face Bucky, adjusting my earmuffs again so I could hear him when he responded. “Okay, this isn’t working,” I said, trying not to sound too annoyed with myself. I wasn’t willing to give up just yet, though. “I think I might need you to actually shoot me.”

  Bucky had lowered the rifle, but at that, he let go of the barrel completely, letting it droop down toward the floor as he gave me an even more dubious look than before. “What?”

  “Just, like, a little bit. Wing me.”

  “I’m not going to wing you.”

  “Please? I think the fact that I’m not actually in any danger is messing up the trigger. I need to actually be about to get hurt.”

  “Wanda…”

  I suppressed a spike of annoyance. If Thena were here, she would have shot me in the shoulder or something by now. I paused, examining that thought for a moment. God, was I actually turning into Thena here, a little bit? I felt a little like I was starting to lose track of what was reasonable to do in training situations. Was it crazy to be asking Bucky to shoot me?

  I shook my head to clear it a little and started toward Bucky, taking the earmuffs off and sending them floating back over to where I’d gotten them from. “Okay, yeah, you’re right. Sorry.” Coming to a stop in front of him, I spread my arms out, tilting my head slightly to present the side of my face. “Hit me instead. Punch me in the face as hard as you can. Metal arm, to be safe.”

  He gave a little bit of a disbelieving laugh. “I’m not going to hit you, either.”

  “Why not?” I asked crossly. “We’ve sparred before!”

  “Yeah, when I knew you were going to react and block and dodge. I’m not just going to haul off and punch you in the face.” Bucky shrugged. “We can spar, if that’s what you want?”

  I bit my lip, then nodded. “Okay, yeah. A spar. That might be enough.”

  Bucky’s eyes searched my expression for a moment, then he nodded. “Alright.” Stepping off to one side for a moment, he leaned his rifle against one of the barricades, took off the holstered pistol and laid it down next to the longarm, then came back to stand in front of me. We both settled into loose, ready stances.

  “If you hold back, I’ll stick you to the ceiling and leave you there,” I told him.

  He grinned. “Fair enough.”

  A half-second later, his metal fist came flying. I ducked low, sweeping my arm up to deflect, and felt the shock of vibranium meeting my forearm. The impact rattled me all the way up to my shoulder, but I’d taken harder hits from Thena and Gilgamesh. I slid inside his guard, surprising him as I snapped off a quick jab to the ribs. He twisted, blocking with his elbow, and retaliated with a low kick. I barely hopped back in time, his boot grazing my shin hard enough to sting.

  My spell still hadn’t activated. Irritating, but now I was curious to see how well I measured up to someone like Bucky in pure hand-to-hand.

  For the next frantic minute, the two of us traded blows in quick succession—me weaving in close, slipping under his swings, driving my fists at his midsection, while he hammered back with brutally efficient strikes. He was more experienced than I was, but the skill gap felt a hell of a lot smaller than it had been the last time we’d fought, and I was faster. Every time I thought I had him, though, he managed to shift and push back, forcing me to adjust.

  I saw his instincts kick in—a subtle, subconscious shift in how serious he was taking the spar—a moment before I ate a metal backhand that caught me off-balance and flung me sideways into one of the metal barriers with a bone-jarring thud. Still no dice from my protection spell, but I was finding myself caring less and less about it as I lost myself in the fight. Bucky faltered slightly, a look of concern flickering across his face as I clambered back to my feet.

  “That all you’ve got, old man?” I taunted him breathlessly, flexing my bruised arm.

  He grinned back. “Don’t make me spank you again.”

  “Don’t make promises you aren’t intending to keep!”

  He came at me again, but I darted forward recklessly, throwing myself against him and causing his punch to go wide. I caught his arm, twisted, and drove my knee into his gut. He staggered, wheezing, but came right back, metal hand latching onto my shoulder. We locked together in a rough grapple, shoving, twisting, each trying to topple the other. He was nowhere near as physically strong as the Eternals I’d been training with, but I hadn’t used any magic so far and still wasn’t that used to this sort of fight. I was panting, my pulse hammering in my veins.

  I dipped low and heaved, a flicker of red energy flashing in my palm as I cheated, using a telekinetic shove to push him off-balance just enough that I was able to wrestle him the rest of the way to the ground. I followed him down, landing on top, straddling his waist, as I managed to grab his arms and pin them.

  I froze. We were both breathing heavily, our faces a bare inch apart, eyes locked together. After a brief instant, I drew back fractionally, but didn’t let go or look away. My body was, uh, responding to the position we were in, and I was pretty sure that was not another gun I was feeling in his pants, pressing hard up against me. My lips parted slightly. This was a kiss scene, right? This felt like a cliché bit right out of the movies. We were about to kiss. I really, really wanted us to kiss… but…

  With some difficulty, I held myself back. “Okay, so, I know we have this whole teasing, flirty ‘will they, won’t they’ thing we do, but I’m not really…” My voice was low and felt a little shaky, and I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts, licking my lips nervously. “Can we be completely real for a minute? Because I would very much like to kiss you on the mouth, now. And, uh. And, so, what do you—how do you feel—uh, what do you think about that? How do you feel about that statement?”

  He didn’t respond right away, a conflicted expression ghosting across his features. “That’s… actually something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  I recoiled a bit, immediately letting go of his arms and sitting up. “Oh, god, have I been…? If I’ve been making you uncomfortable, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean to, I just—”

  “No, that’s not—no,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “You’re right. There’s definitely been… tension.”

  I sagged a little, letting out a sigh of relief. “Okay, good. Had me worried for a second, there.” I hesitated, not really sure what to say next. The way I was sitting on him was making me acutely aware of the very specific parts of our anatomy that were currently pressing together, and it was incredibly distracting.

  Bucky sighed. “This is… hard.”

  “Oh?” I asked, a hint of mischief entering my tone. I shifted my weight, rubbing myself against him in a way that almost derailed what I was going to say by making me gasp. “I make you hard, huh?”

  “You’re making this pretty difficult for me, yes.” There was a slight strain in his tone, but he couldn’t help a small smile.

  “Sorry. In my defence, I’ve been pent up for days.” I looked down. “I’m going to apologise in advance in case I leave a wet spot when I get up. I’m so turned on right now I think I might actually be getting dehydrated.”

  “I thought you wanted to be ‘completely real’ for a minute?”

  “Bucky, have you met me? I am being completely real right now.”

  That got a small chuckle out of him. “Oh, man,” he murmured. He heaved a heavy sigh, letting the back of his head thunk gently against the concrete beneath us. “What am I getting myself into?”

  That didn’t sound like a rejection. “Getting yourself into?” I asked, trying to sound like I was nonchalantly asking for clarification.

  “Can we talk… not like this?” Bucky asked, gesturing toward the lower halves of our bodies. “It’s a little distracting.”

  I immediately removed myself, rising to my feet before offering a hand to help him up, which he took. There was an awkward moment where I wasn’t even sure how to stand or what to do with my arms, crossing them and trying to casually lean against the nearby metal barrier before not feeling comfortable with that and straightening up again. I rubbed at my forearm with my other hand, feeling self-conscious.

  “Thanks,” Bucky said, then hesitated. I stayed quiet. After a little while, he spoke again. “I’ve been thinking a lot about you, these last few days. About how I feel about you.”

  “How do you feel about me?”

  He snorted. “That’s such a complicated question.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” I offered.

  “I care about you.” He said it straightforwardly. Matter-of-factly.

  My heart was pounding. I wanted to immediately jump in and tell him I cared about him, too, but I could see that he wasn’t done talking, so I restrained myself.

  “I just… I’m not sure how I feel about what sort of relationship we would have. The way you are. With… others.”

  “Ah.” My stomach dropped a little bit. “You’re not comfortable with polyamory?”

  “It’s not something I really ever considered.”

  I looked away for a moment, staring out across the empty training facility, then glanced back at him. “I get it. It’s not something everyone can do. But I’m not really willing to hold back or restrain how I feel about people, and… well. I like sex. A lot. And I have varied tastes. You may have noticed.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, I kind of got that.”

  “I would never want to try to force you into something you’re not completely comfortable with,” I told him, then let out a small snort of amusement. “I mean, I get it: An amazing, powerful, sexy woman swept into your life and saved you. But even if it might fit the narrative convention, this… isn’t a story. You don't have to fall for her if you don’t want to.”

  “What if I already have?” Bucky asked softly.

  My breath caught in my throat. I had no idea what to even say to that. There was another long, tense moment of silence.

  “Actually getting involved with someone feels like a big step,” he said slowly. “And if I do, I think it’d be better—safer—to have something… stable. Grounding.”

  I latched onto the words, feigning a look of mock outrage to distract myself from what I was feeling. “I’m not stable?”

  Bucky grinned again. “I mean, you did try and get me to shoot you just before,” he said, then turned to the side, resting his forearms on top of the metal barricade and leaning lightly against it. He looked a little uncomfortable opening up, but powered through it anyway. “That’s not what I meant. I know I can trust you. Rely on you when I need to. I just… Don’t want to be unimportant.”

  That knocked me off balance. “What? Of course you’re important, Bucky. When have I ever made you feel like you aren’t?”

  “That’s not— You haven’t. I’m sorry. I’m saying this all wrong.” He paused, trying to collect his thoughts. “If I’m just one of your partners, I just…”

  He’d trailed off, not quite sure how to put his thoughts into words, but I bristled a little at the implication. “Do you think Nat isn’t important to me?”

  He had the decency to look a little chastened by that. “Well, no, but… It’s not like you and Carol have the same sort of relationship.”

  “There are different levels to these things,” I told him. “Carol wasn’t interested in something more, at least to start with. We have actually been getting a bit closer, despite that. But anyway, that’s beside the point: We’re adults. We can talk things through. Decide what we want out of this, set expectations accordingly. It’s just about communication. Keeping things open and honest.”

  Bucky looked at me sidelong, a slightly surprised expression on his face. “I know,” he said after a moment. “It’s just… a lot.”

  “Are you maybe putting too much pressure on yourself? It kind of sounds like you’ve built this up to be this massive, huge thing in your head.”

  “Isn’t it?” he asked quietly.

  “Like I said, we’re adults. We get to decide what our relationship looks like. What do you want?”

  “You,” he said immediately, which felt intensely gratifying. “I want to spend more time with you, and look after you when you’re hurt, and,” a brief smile flitted across his face, “other things. Maybe more. I just don’t know what that could look like… in the future, you know?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know what that looks like, either. But do we need to? I don’t want to hold myself back just because maybe things might not work out in some theoretical future.” I let out a small snort. “I feel like I nearly die frequently enough that it’s silly not to live in the moment.”

  “And what do you want, ‘in the moment’?”

  “Right now? In this moment?”

  He nodded.

  I laughed and flicked my fingers demonstratively, motioning as though I was using my telekinesis. “What I want right now is to magically rip off our clothes, have you wreck me like I’m a background actress on Game of Thrones, and deal with all the rest later, when we’re not mid-crisis.”

  Bucky stopped leaning on the barricade, turning and giving me a deliberate look before inclining his head. “I think I might be able to manage that,” he said with a small smile.

  “You think?” I asked teasingly. “I assume it’s been a little while. Afraid you’ve forgotten how to take care of a woman, old man?” He laughed and reached for my waist. I let him pull our hips together, but leaned back, avoiding being drawn into a kiss so I could keep talking. “I don’t mind showing you what you need to do. I just need a peach. A ripe one. Cuz if you do it right… ripe. Down there.”

  “I don’t need a peach,” he said with a chuckle, leaning in to try to catch me with his lips.

  I continued to evade him, keeping my mouth just out of reach, eyes flashing with mischief as I lowered my voice slightly. “I could teach you bananas, instead?”

  He shifted his grip on me. “Do you have an off button?”

  “I do, if you think you can find—” I let out a sudden gasp.

  He found it.