Little Wing - Bucky Barnes x OC

The Courage to Fly

A/N: Here we go. Last chapter. Put on some sad music, babes.

I'll leave more notes at the end♥️

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Dove was on hour who-fucking-knows of driving across the country, in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Wanda was curled up in the passenger seat, trying to get some rest after taking the early morning shift for their drive. To allow her to sleep undisturbed, Dove kept the radio off so all she had to listen to was the puttering of the moving truck's engine.

Driving through the wide-open fields of The Great Plains, all she could see was grass. For miles and miles, that's all there was. Just fucking grass. Without any kind of trees and the only mountains far off in the distance, the sun was beating directly into the window, blinding her while she tried to hold the moving truck steady despite the janky alignment.

It had been over a day of driving nonstop. The two of them had made a few stops at gas stations along the way to fill up the tank, go to the bathroom, or grab some food. At the first stop, somewhere in southern Idaho, Dove had planned to call Bucky. She wrote his number down on her palm from the Maximoff's address book before leaving town and planned to call, then chickened out last minute. Every stop since, she hoped she'd be able to call, but bravery continued to evade her.

Keeping a hand on the wheel, Dove looked down to her palm, finding the phone number slightly smeared. It sat there on her skin, barely legible as the ink was disappearing slowly with each time she had washed her hands.

It was just another painful reminder of how she had left without saying goodbye. So painful in fact, that she had ignored the scribbled numbers as much as she could despite them being held right in her palm.

She kept replaying her summer spent with Bucky over and over again in her head. Everything from those major moments they shared, to the smallest of things. The first time he first took her to swim at his house or the camping trip or her birthday.

It all played like a movie in her head. And she realized that's what it had felt like to her. Like the kind of love she saw in films or read about in books. The kind that is so perfect it didn't even feel real. The kind most people spend their entire lives looking for.

Dove knew she was young and first love always felt like the be-all and end-all of life. Secretly, part of her hoped that it was real. She had fallen madly and irrationally head over heels in love.

All that said, they had to put themselves first. They both had dreams and needed to chase after them, even if it pulled them apart. They had to be their own priorities.

Perhaps it was selfish, she thought, to move away and leave Bucky like that. But she couldn't live in regret. She couldn't stay in Roseworth, waiting for him and resenting him for it one day. That was no way to live, even if it was for the love of her life.

Tears pooled in her waterline as Dove looked back up to the long stretch of road ahead of her. She tried to blink them away, sending a couple of drops down her cheeks. She was thankful that Wanda was asleep and wouldn't catch her moment of vulnerability. She wiped her eyes with her wrist and shook her head, slapping the wheel a few times as she let out a huff of breath. "Come on, come on, Rogers. Keep it together," she muttered to herself.

She drove for a while longer while trying to keep her thoughts at bay until her entire body was aching. Her arms from having to fight the truck to stay on the road, her legs from holding the gas just-so, her back from the terribly uncomfortable faux-leather seat. Sweat was dripping from under her hair, due to the broken air conditioning and the mid-west heat.