One Night Stand (A Bucky Barnes Fanfiction)

The Year After

A/N: This chapter is told in three month increments in Bucky and Jade's POV.

Three months later

I woke up in the Wakanda Medical Center without a familiar face at my side. It was like waking up from a bad dream to an unfamiliar nightmare. Everything was confusing and hazy and I wasn't sure of anything, not even who I was, for the first 24 hours. Bits and pieces came back, from my life before, back in the 1940's and most of all Steve. He showed up three days after I woke up, familiar and smiling, the only thing that I was sure of. He brought journals, mine apparently, ones that I had been writing in since I got my memory back the last time, in a box with my name 'Bucky' scribbled across the side in his hurried writing.

"It's good to have you back, Bucky," he said, touching my shoulder. "Again."

T'Challa and Shuri put me back in my old cabin, the one I was told that I had been in before. It felt like home immediately, though I had no recollection of living there. They gave me more goats, things to care for so I didn't get idle, so I didn't go crazy while being alone.

I took care of my goats by day and laid in bed reading my journals by night, trying to force a memory, pausing after each page that I read, closing my eyes and envisioning it and willing my brain to call up the memory. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, which only frustrated me to the point that I gave up and went to bed.

***

"How was therapy today, Jade?" Steve asked tentatively, eyeing me over his burger.

I shrugged. "It was good. Same as always."

Steve nodded. "Still having nightmares?"

"Yes, but it's only been three months and Dr. Lewis said that its normal when suffering from PTSD, even mild cases," I answered between bites of salad.

"Are they getting less frequent at least?"

"Yeah...down to about one to two times a week...I wake up and do my breathing exercises and stuff then I go back to sleep," I sighed. "I feel like its working."

"Good," Steve said, sipping his water. "That's good."

This had become a weekly thing for Steve and I over the course of the past three months. I would have my therapy appointment at the compound and then meet Steve in the cafeteria for lunch. It had started out innocently, with Steve catching me in the halls as I had left my first appointment, eyes puffy and teary, that encounter ending with him offering to buy me lunch. He had caught me again at my appointment the following week, that time I had cried less, and offered to buy me lunch again. And then it happened again the following week and the week after until I had grown used to finding him there, standing outside Dr. Lewis' office, waiting for me. And between the weekly lunches and the texts that we shared I felt like Captain America and I were becoming fast close friends.

I took a deep breath and asked the question that I always asked. "How is James?"

Steve's face always softened when I asked, his blue eyes holding sympathy and a weak smile on his lips. "He's doing well. We spoke on the phone yesterday... he uh...still doesn't remember much." And there's that weekly disappointment.

"Oh, I am glad he is doing well."

The last three months had passed by quickly, a little too quickly for me. They had been hard, harder than I expected; my experience as a captive under Dimitri having a lasting effect that erupted in the form of vicious nightmares of him assaulting me nearly every night before I had started therapy. It was the nightmares and Iris' insistence that had sent me to therapy two weeks after I had been rescued. I had felt the need to go to the Avengers compound first, to meet with Steve and Tony and make sure that it would even be okay for me to talk about what had happened, considering that my kidnapper had been part of a secret organization. It was then that Tony had recommended and introduced me to Dr. Lewis, the new in house therapist at the compound. He had even graciously offered the service free of charge, which I had refused and then accepted after Steve's urging.