Poetic Justice (Soft Robotics 2.0)

0.20(paradigm)

Bucky is wearing a leather jacket again. It's different than the one from yesterday. That one had a simple zipper. This one has several zippers and some buckles, and some straps that fold and overlap. I don't understand how he gets it off and on.

"Are you gonna take your jacket off?" I ask, because I want to watch him do it.

"No," he says.

We're standing just inside my back door. His eyes are scanning over my kitchen, into my living room, all the way over to the armoire barricading the front door.

"I'm sorry I scared you," he says, directing the eye-scan to my face. "You didn't hear me call out?"

I shake my head.

"Before I jumped down," he explains. He ducks his head down at me, just the way he did in the alley. "I was trying not to scare you. I told you it was me."

I shrug. I already figured he must have called out to me; it'd be insane not to. But I'm deducing that whatever had made me think his image on the feed was Rumlow also made me think his voice was Rumlow, and I hear Rumlow's voice in the back of my head pretty frequently anyway when I'm stressed, and I've been getting better at shoving it down and not letting it travel far enough through my mind to become a thought, so—Bucky went unheard.

Then he settles on nodding down at the shattered wine glass at his feet, at the white wine puddled on the linoleum. "You got a rag or something?"

If I was polite, I'd protest his help and do it myself. But if he was polite, he would have given me some warning before staking out all night inside the roof of the gazebo outside my apartment. So, I move toward the pantry to find him something to clean with.

"No, stay there," he says, watching my bare feet near the glass. "I'll get it. In here?"

He's nodding to the pantry, but he doesn't wait for me to say yes before he opens it and sticks his head in.

"What the hell is this?" he mutters to my modified swiffer. The question seems rhetorical, so I don't explain. He turns around and holds it up. "Was this a mop at one point?"

"Mhm," I say. I want coffee.

"Does it have a fucking engine?" He holds it up toward my kitchen light, squinting at the bulky apparatus duct taped mid-pole.

"Yeah," I say. "Don't turn it on. I don't remember what I fueled it with, and I think I took the batteries out of some of my noxious fume detectors."

He props the swiffer back in its place. There's a pause while he keeps looking, and then he's rifling through my shelves. I feel like this is my cue to disclose the location of the roll of paper towels that I think is around here somewhere, but I don't actually know that information myself.

"All that's in here is—tech." He clunks a computer monitor out of the way. "I don't think there's cleaning supplies in here."

I take a big step over the mess, toward the coffee maker on the counter opposite me, tip toeing carefully. The glass scattered pretty far, so I'm still in the middle of the scene of destruction. I take another, carefuller step. Bucky turns around.

"Watch the—Grace. Stop," he says. "It's in a thousand pieces."

"I wanna make coffee," I say.

"Wait. Sit up on the counter."

I do what he says, because he says it with a lot of authority. He closes the pantry and commences opening and shutting all of my other drawers and cupboards. He's slamming them pretty loudly, but I don't think he's mad; I think he's just kind of an aggressive person. I think.