Battlefield ★ Bucky Barnes

XIV. Accessing Archive

Steve drove down the road, feeling slight relief as he entered into New Jersey. Natasha sat beside him in the passenger's seat, her feet propped up on the dash and her gaze out the window. Connie was fast asleep in the backseat of the truck Steve had stolen; not only was her physical exhaustion weighing down heavily on her, but her emotional exhaustion was as well, and Steve knew this. She had experienced so much emotional pain the previous day and it had just left her in a state of fatigue, which was very uncommon for a super-soldier.

Natasha looked at Steve as the events from earlier flood into her thoughts. The three of them had managed to make quite the escape from the S.T.R.I.K.E. team at the mall, though the things they had to do to achieve that escape were quite strange, for Steve and Natasha at least.

"So, where did Captain America learn how to steal a car?" Natasha asked.

Steve glanced over at her for the briefest of seconds. "Nazi, Germany. And we're borrowing. Take your feet off the dash."

Natasha did as he said, and as she looked at him a smirk pulled on her lips. "Alright, I have a question for you, which you do not have to answer. I feel like if you don't answer it, though, you're kind of answering it, you know?"

"What?"

"Was that your first kiss since 1945?"

Steve sighed and sat back in his seat. "That bad, huh?"

"No," Natasha quickly reassured him. "I didn't say that."

"Well, it kinda sounds like that's what you're saying."

"No, I didn't. I just wondered how much practice you've had."

Steve shot her a look. "You don't need practice."

"Everybody needs practice," Natasha retorted.

"It was not my first kiss since 1945," Steve told Natasha. "I'm 95, not dead."

Natasha let out a soft chuckle. "Nobody special though?"

"Believe it or not, it's kind of hard to find somebody with shared life experience."

Natasha glanced at Connie's sleeping figure in the backseat and raised a brow. Sometimes it never occurred to Natasha that Steve and Connie were, in fact, from the same period of time. Not only that, but they had quite a bit of shared life experience. The thought had never crossed Natasha's mind until now, but she wondered exactly why the two of them weren't together, and she wondered if Steve was the man she had been referring to in her dream.

"What about Connie?"

Steve shook his head quickly. "Connie's my sister, believe it or not."

"Sister?" Natasha chuckled in disbelief.

"Yes, my mom adopted her after her first set of adoptive parents decided they didn't want to take care of her anymore," Steve told her, a frown on his face as he remembered the day he first met Connie.

"What happened to her birth mother?"

Steve shrugged. "No one knows; all we were told was that her birth mother was too young at the time to take proper care of her so she gave her away."