Soft Robotics ✧ Bucky Barnes

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In the morning, Nat watched me from the couch with raised eyebrows as I trudged back and forth between the drawer she'd given me and her bathroom, each time in different combinations of the same three skirts and two blouses.

"Do you want an opinion?" she asked on my third trip. "Or is this more of a routine crisis?"

I stopped in the middle of the room, shoulders slumped, a bundle of clothes in my arms. "Are you asking me if I do this every morning?"

She blinked. "Do you?"

"No!" I groaned.

"Is this about Barnes, then?"

"What if I just looked really good yesterday?" I asked, sighing. "Like, I'm afraid if he'd met me any other day except yesterday, he wouldn't have talked to me. So now I'm trying to figure out which outfit looks most like what I was wearing yesterday, without being so similar that he might think I'm still wearing the same clothes."

I started across the living room again, dragging my feet, without waiting for her reply.

"You know that doesn't make any sense, right?" she called after me.

"Yep!" I called back, closing the bathroom door.

"Just making sure!"

I settled on a pleated skirt, because I'd worn one yesterday (actually, now that I thought about it, I wore one almost every day). This one was beige plaid. Then, I was barely out the door when I decided my favorite blouse was uncomfortably low-cut, and I rushed back inside to put a sweater over it. The Tower could be chilly anyway, and it was still rainy outside.

I stopped in the kitchen and made coffee from Tony's machine, which I hadn't had time to fix yet. It seemed to like me, though, and it didn't take much prodding. Then, with my coffee and laptop, I went to the lounge.

My first instinct was to glance around for Bucky. I was hoping to see him, but when I found the room empty, I did a little sigh of relief. I curled up in an armchair next to the rainy window, away from the rest of the seating. It was the Sunday before finals week, and I needed to focus.

I'd received a ton of emails overnight with questions about my students' finals, most of them from my upper level Autonomous Robotics class. Because I was close to my students in age, and I liked to think I had an approachable, warm demeanor, they seemed to feel comfortable with me. It was also well known that I considered mental health to be as valid a reason as physical health to miss class or need an extension.

I was through with the emails in twenty minutes, so I moved on to one of the articles I'd been sent to read and review for a robotics journal. Then, I got distracted halfway through the abstract and remembered I had my own paper to draft. But that got boring too, because the research was already done. I leaned my head back onto the chair in pure misery, wallowing for a moment before sitting up and pressing onward.