Intertwine

98 - Stupid, Stupid Alina

YALL I AM SO SORRY BUT THIS CHAPTER IS SUPER SUPER LONG SO IF YOU END UP SPENDING 30+ MINUTES READING THIS ONE BUT AT LEAST IT'S INTERESTING!

ALINA

"You know what I think?" Bucky and I were lying awake as the morning light began to stream through the window of the bedroom.

Bucky groaned and put his hands over his face. "What?"

"I don't think that's Roara. I think it's a clone. With like some of her memories implanted or something."

"A clone? Are you kidding?"

"What?"

Bucky took his hands off his head and fixed me with a death stare. "She's not a clone." He said it as though I was truly dim.

I looked up at the wooden ceiling. "How else do you explain everything?" Neither of us had actually been able to sleep, so we'd talked through the events of the past few months, putting together what we remembered, trying to find a pattern.

"Maybe she just got sick of us?" Bucky suggested. "Or maybe she went insane, she has been through 400 years of shit. She was depressed, becoming addict, maybe a wire just came loose in her head."

"So you're saying she's mentally unstable? Like you?"

"Uh, I didn't say that." I could practically hear him rolling his eyes.

"You didn't say she was mentally unstable or that you were mentally unstable?"

He hit me with a pillow. "Shut up."

I grabbed the pillow from under my head and rolled over to whack him in the face. "No."

He pushed his hand at my face, squishing my cheek. "You're being annoying, this is your fourth annoying warning."

"You're being grumpy." I responded, shoving my pillow underneath my head again and turned to look up. There was a pattern on the wood like the strings I saw attached to people when I threw pain at them in medical vision, expect brown rather than yellow. I tracked it with my eyes, moving from one side of the wooden beams to the other.

Bucky put his hands on his chest and looked up at the ceiling as well. "What would you normally be doing right now?" He murmured quietly.

"What time is it?" I whispered back.

"5am."

"I'd probably be training with Steve. How about you?'

"Reading. If I was taking care of Ro I'd be organizing her pills, getting her breakfast ready."

I paused. "You really loved her didn't you?"

"Once." He sighed. "Perhaps. I don't know anymore."

"It's okay to not know. I didn't know about Steve until, well, yesterday. But it's always been there. Since he gave me his jacket I suppose." I smiled. "That was a long time ago."

"I remember the first time I saw you two together." Bucky shifted his weight in the bed. "You barged into that Ascendency cell in England like two bulldozers."

"What are you saying about my weight?"

"That you're built like a super soldier who weight lifts." He chuckled. "I mean look at you, your biceps are the size of watermelons."

I lifted an arm from under the covers and tensed my bicep. "Wouldn't say that big, but thank you, I do try."

Without looking he lazily gave my bicep a poke.

"Oi!" I slapped his hand away and shuffled under the covers a bit more.

"What do you use steroids with that? How do you do that?"