reader was a highly skilled neuropsychologist who worked for what used to be SHIELD. a couple days after the bombing in vienna, her friend and coworker, sharon carter, asks a favor of her: to relocate to wakanda in order to help treat and rehabilita...
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Muted. She felt muted - but not necessarily in a bad way. Everything in her was dialed down and dulled. Over the last couple days, Y/N had toned down her emotions, feeling less. Call it a coping skill. Call it a stress response. Whatever. It wasn't like she was sad about it. In a way, in was comforting - not having some overwhelming internal angst.
It had been a week since that fight she and Bucky got into. The mature part of her was telling her to find him and talk it out like the adults they were. But here's the thing. Over time, before they even had the fight, the number of therapy sessions they were having was less frequent as his treatment was improving. The sessions were more intermittent now, and there wasn't one scheduled for a while. Until then, she felt no desire to talk to him.
Was she mad? Sad? She wasn't sure. She just avoided thinking of things that caused her a considerable amount of distress. At this particular moment in time, Bucky was one of those things. Ergo, she made a constant effort to ignore all thoughts of him.
Though, she somehow couldn't entirely ignore the ever present lack of... Bucky. She had gotten so used to having him close by, used to having someone to talk to, laugh with. His proximity had become a constant. A comfort. She refused to admit to herself that silence didn't feel like silence anymore; it just felt like the absence of his voice.
She found she needed to keep herself busy.
Bucky handled it a bit differently. He had lots of intense emotions but he didn't mute them, per say. He didn't ignore them. He felt them, he definitely felt them. He just kept them bottled up inside and talked about it to no one. It was a very strange change of routine. Whenever he had some sort of emotional turmoil, he would always go to her - therapy session or not - to vent, rant, ask for advice, or just talk through a stream of consciousness. Now he just had to sit with it.
He spent most of his time alone. He missed her.
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"Hey Shuri," Y/N greeted as she entered the princess' lab.
"Hello," Shuri smiled. "Come sit."
This wasn't a routine visit. Shuri mentioned wanting to talk about something else this time. Something important. She was reminded of this when she walked in to find two Doras sitting with Shuri at a lab table.
"So," Shuri started, "The trigger word experiment. We're here to discuss safety and security."
Shit. That awful thing. It had slipped her mind these past couple days.
