James Bucky Barnes, the former soldier, doesn't think he's got any gentleness left in him. But Grace Juniper Cunningham, the former child prodigy, strongly disagrees.
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"𝘐 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘐 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘬𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯."
"𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴�...
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I felt safe with Bucky. More than safe, actually. Comfortable. As in, not only did I know no one would hurt me when I was sitting with him in his living room, but I also knew that if my feet got cold, he'd let me stretch them out onto to his lap and he'd tuck a blanket over them.
That was exactly how we were sitting the next evening, the day after the body and the elevator. I was crocheting, with the too-long sleeves of his blue Henley pushed up to my elbows, my legs bare across the couch. He had a book propped on my feet. He was reading someone's memoirs from the Great Depression, with a notebook laying on the coffee table in front of him, just in case he needed to jot something down. When I'd asked about it, he told me he did that a lot. He tried to trigger his own memories with other people's recollections. A familiar coffee brand or an obscure song lyric was enough to do it sometimes.
"Did you remember anything?" I asked, just wanting to talk to him, prodding the book slightly with my toe.
"Hm? Nah. Was just thinking how people now make the early thirties look so fuckin' bleak. With the pictures they use and shit," he said, flipping through.
"It wasn't bleak?" I asked, seeing a thread, grasping onto it. He almost never told me what he was thinking this willingly.
"It wasn't all bad," he said. "You can't be miserable for however many years straight without ever being happy. That kills a person. Anybody that lived through it must've been happy at some points. Same with the war."
"That's a nice thought."
"Yeah," he agreed, tossing the book on the coffee table and turning toward me. He grabbed onto my blanket covered feet and gave me a serious look, like he wanted my full attention. "But it makes me think how it's easier to say that traumatic shit happened in hindsight than to acknowledge it while it's really happening."
"Yeah, I think so t—wait are you trying to segway into getting me to go to therapy?" I asked, plopping back against the arm of the couch, interest depleted.
"You're living through traumatic shit right now, Grace."
"My situation is way different from the collapse of the global economy."
"Not for you."
I groaned in frustration, then settled on glaring at him.
"Don't pout at me," he said. "You know what it does to me."
"I'm not pouting, I'm glaring."
"Oh, got it, sorry," he said, not taking me seriously.
I glanced at his book again, laying on the coffee table. "Do you ever read for pleasure?"
"I don't know," he said, like I was the weird one for asking the question.
"How do you not know that?"
"I don't know how I don't know, Grace," he groaned.
"Well, when was the last time you did something that didn't have a reason? Except that you liked it?"
