Gold Rush | Bucky Barnes x OC

Part One: Adrenaline

"I love it and I need it, I bleed it. Yeah, it's a wild hurricane.
Alright hold tight, I'm a highway star."
Highway Star - Deep Purple
____________

Malibu, California
December 1974

Adeline Gold loves speed. There's nothing more liberating than the feel of the wind through her blonde hair as she races along the Pacific Coast Highway. She presses her foot on the gas pedal of her cherry-red Chevrolet Corvette and accelerates to 80mph. Top down, radio loud, screaming the lyrics to Tiny Dancer at the top of her lungs. The tingle of adrenaline pumps through her limbs as the winter sun bounces off the aquamarine ocean blurring past her and she's tempted to throw her hands in the air like she's on a rollercoaster.

She feels free.

Until she gets pulled over by a cop.

She sighs and watches the cop in question, Officer Tommy Valance, approach her car with a certain swagger that oozes a seniority complex. She sees right through it and has done since the first time he pulled her over, yet he always makes sure it's turned on before he leaves his car.

"Addie, Addie, Addie." He mutters her name with a sigh and an exasperated tone of voice. His thin pink lips parting to reveal a row of uneven, yet unnaturally white teeth under his porn-stache.

"Officer." Adeline smiles sweetly, resting her Ray-ban sunglasses on the top of her head. She's already leaning across the car and digging into her glove compartment for her license and registration.

She knows the drill.

"I can't keep letting you off the hook, Adeline. This is it, next time I'm gonna have to write you up." He warns, looking over her documents briefly. If he's seen them once, he's seen them a hundred times.

Adeline bats her eyelashes. He's soft on her because of who her dad is. And she plays into it because who wouldn't?

"It won't happen again, Tommy. It's just that I'm running late to meet my dad."

"It's like fuckin' deja vu, Goldilocks." He peers down at her incredulously but then a sad smile sweeps across his face. "Too many accidents happen on this road, Addie. I don't wanna be pulling up to your car in a wreck."

"I promise, it will not happen again." She reiterates, looking him in the eye as she speaks.

Tommy gives a satisfied nod and taps the shiny red door between them to which she frowns. She wishes people would stop pressing their grimy mitts all over her car as and when they please.

"On your way then, princess." Tommy says before pointing a chubby finger at her. "No more speeding. And tell your old man I said hi."

Adeline waits for him to climb back into his cruiser before she revs her engine, wheels spinning as she tears off down the road muttering to herself.

"In your dreams, Tommy boy."

The less her dad knows of her driving offences the better.

Being an adrenaline junkie is almost a condition of Adeline's upbringing. Her mother left when she was three years old and so her father, a champion NASCAR driver, took her everywhere with him. Travelling across the country from speedway to speedway. She would sit in the stands with her father's best friend Tony Stark, a pair of ear defenders engulfing her tiny head as she cheered her hero on. Her young brain never comprehended the danger of the sport. She always hoped that one day she would follow in her dad's footsteps, but he had seen too many tragedies over the years and the last thing he wanted was his little girl behind the wheel of a souped-up race car.