Honesty ♧ Bucky Barnes

Collateral Damage

As it was the final of GBBO today, I gave Mary Berry a cheeky mention in this chappy. 

Erin was woken by the sound of singing. Not very tuneful singing, granted, but singing nonetheless. She rolled her eyes and looked at the alarm clock on her dressing table. It was only half six in the morning, she didn't need to be out of bed for another half an hour.

The low voice travelled through the closed door of her bedroom and with it the unmistakable clanking sound of pots and pans.

'Sun in the sky, you know how I feel,

Birds flying high, you know how I feel,

Breeze drifting on by, you know how I feel...'

Well, Bucky may never make a professional singer, his baritone voice warbled up and down in completely the wrong places, but Erin had to admit that it was a much nicer way to be woken up than by the incessant ringing of her alarm clock. She hopped out of bed and grabbed a hair tie from her dresser, throwing her hair up into a messy bun on top of her head. She stuck her feet into a pair of slippers and padded to the door, which she opened easily. She couldn't remember the last time that she had locked it.

Erin stood stock still and raised an eyebrow in disbelief at the scene in front of her. Bucky was stood in the small kitchenette, wearing a pair of low-hanging black cargo pants, a pink frilly apron and nothing else. He was focusing intently on the frying pan in front of him, in which Erin assumed a pancake was supposed to be cooking. It didn't look an awful lot like a pancake, and she was 98% sure she could smell burning, but she was too in shock to say anything. Bucky's shoulder-length hair, like Erin's, was messily tied up above his head with a black hair-tie, a few strands having fallen loose to frame his face.

Erin snorted out a laugh, and Bucky turned his head, surprised at the interruption. He smiled when he saw her.

"I didn't realise that 70 years under ice caused you to channel Mary Berry." Erin joked as she jumped up on the kitchen counter, letting her bare legs swing. Her scars were on show, raised lines of sensitive flesh protruding from her smooth skin like train tracks, but she couldn't find it in herself to care. She felt...

Happy.

"I have no idea what you just said," Bucky responded with a laugh, as he attempted to flip the pancake in the pan and succeeded only in accidentally folding it in half.

Erin jumped down from the counter and nudged him out of the way, using a spatula to unstick the quickly burning pancake from the pan and place it precariously on a plate on the side.

"Mary Berry is a famous cook, Buck," Erin explained, pouring another round of pancake batter into the pan and taking a step back, allowing Bucky to take over once again, "She specialised in cakes and stuff."

"I've never heard of her," Bucky responded as he started intently at the slowly cooking pancake on the stove.

"Yeah, you might not have, she's very English," Erin replied, taking her perch on the counter once more, "Have you ever heard of the Great British Bake Off? It's a television programme."

"Nope."

"Add it to your list."

Bucky let out a snort and continued to cook his pancakes in silence, humming quietly to himself. Erin poured herself a glass of water and sipped on it pensively, looking at him studiously. He seemed so different now than he had a few months ago. The tenseness from his shoulders hand gone, and she could see that the dark circles that had lined his eyelids for so long had almost disappeared. He seemed like a new man. If it wasn't for the shining metal arm which was connected to his tanned torso by a multitude of painful looking scars, she almost wouldn't have recognised him.