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13: hello, maisie jo

     I stayed up late every night since, if I even slept at all. Bucky was off with Clint for a week at that point, with no communication. The SHIELD agent side of me knew he couldn't just pick up a phone and dial my StarkCell, but the side of me longing for a hug from my husband didn't care, and hoped on all hope that he wouldn't care either.

I spent those late nights cleaning up for Laura, watching TV, playing with Lila's Legos, or just spilling over those Russian files again. It occurred to me at one point that police officers train K9's using strictly Russian commands, so a criminal couldn't sway them with English commands. It made me mad to think about that book then. I knew Bucky spoke fluent Russian because of that, I knew most of the men in control of him only spoke Russian, but the novelty of a man trained like a dog disgusted me. So I paced the floor and looked out the window and tried to breathe a little deeper.

Bucky would've wanted me to sleep. I knew that. It wasn't like I wasn't tired - I was exhausted to a point of collapsing and waking up on the floor - but I didn't want to miss any communication. From Bucky or Clint or anyone else. My mission was complete, that doesn't mean everything else was.

I reveled in how pathetic I was: How I missed out on high school relationships (aside from kissing every boy I could) over being emotionally incapable of holding meaningful conversation, and how I supposed I'd been making up for it now. But then I couldn't be mad at myself. I deserved to feel emotionally attached to someone. My closest friends in SHIELD were Natasha and Maria, and even then I did my best not to make conversation. Now I loved someone.

I loved him more than I'd ever loved anyone before. Every physical part of him sent my heart soaring, every bit of his personality made my stomach do somersaults. I was completely infatuated with this man, my Bucky, that I knew I shouldn't care about the extent of my obsession.

Laying on the couch one week and six days into his mission, as my stomach lit up with acidic pain from not eating and my head pounded from not hydrating, I realized that maybe my infatuation with him was okay, but I really needed sleep and nourishment. I stood up slowly and made my way to the kitchen, grabbing leftovers from dinner and a glass of water. I quietly marched upstairs, thinking of how my soldier ability to be so quiet would come in handy with our purple baby. I sat on Bucky and I's bed, for a minute leaning over and resting my head on his pillow. Because I was a lovesick wimp.

I grabbed the laptop designed and created by Tony that Clint had taken a few months back, opening it and going through the files from the Cleveland house I had transferred to a flash drive. I knew there were things I was missing, and in my mind I knew I was not in a mental state to figure it out, but I wanted to keep looking. Some of the files were created decades ago, some were from the past month. The fall of a public Hydra must have meant this dead man was given all these files. You'd think they'd work a little harder to keep things less obvious. Less on-paper and more coded. I wondered if they really meant anything. But they were Hydra files, and they were recent, and I knew there was some fancy Russian word I must have been reading wrong.

I held a piece of pizza between my teeth as I tried to re-translate a few words from a recent document.

"Hive spaceward . . . "

Hive spaceward? I had to have been reading that wrong.

". . . may the next among our fallen gods rest in peace . . . "

Okay, that made a little more sense. I studied Hive in SHIELD training years ago, but not since. I had completely forgotten about it.

". . . our foes will see the end of their world, may a new leader rise to take Hive's throne."