|1| Promise Me ✦ {Bucky Barnes}

Chapter 3: Home

BUCKY:

I don't know why I agreed to stay with her. The agent sitting on her motorbike in front of me was definitely not the first person I had in mind to help me. Not four days ago, she was pointing a gun at my head, defeating me in my mission to bring her to my commander. Other than her exceptional fighting skills and marksmanship and her being one of few agents with supersoldier serum, she wasn't all that special. She was just another agent of SHIELD. But I wasn't going to lie, she was a very pretty girl. Long red hair, around average height, beautiful yet cold green eyes. However, behind the coldness in her eyes, there was a certain kindness I didn't understand. It was the same kindness I saw when she hesitated to pull the trigger on the battlefield. A kindness I recognized from somewhere that I couldn't exactly pinpoint.

Now, I was silently sitting behind the agent on the back of her motorcycle, having no choice but to lean up against her back and shift uncomfortably when I felt too close to her. She only drove like it was the most normal thing to have my hands on her waist and my weight on her back, and I didn't understand how she could remain so calm. Like she had done something like this before. Like she had helped someone like me before.

The drive was short, because not moments after we got on the bike, we were parked in a garage below an apartment building next to a black sporty-looking car. She informed me that this was the car she was talking about and that we would be taking it from now on instead of her motorcycle. That was a relief. As pretty as she was, I wasn't overly fond of sitting so close to someone I barely knew. I followed her in silence towards the elevator, where she pushed the button for the fourteenth floor and let the door shut. Although the area was silent, I couldn't help but feel like you could cut the tension with a knife in the room. It was probably one of the longest elevator rides I had ever been on. Finally, the doors opened on the fourteenth floor, and she brisked out of it quickly. I followed closely behind her until she stopped at a door labelled 1408 and put the keys in the lock. When the door opened, the first thing I noticed was how clean the place was. Almost like she had cleaned up after a gruesome murder. I didn't take her to be so tidy.

"Home sweet home," she said as she shut the door and locked it behind me. I stood at the entrance, just taking in my surroundings. She took off her boots and put them on the shoe rack below the hall table beside the front door. Then, she hung her jacket up in the closet that was perfectly colour coded. She placed her keys in the dish at the front table and looked over at me, "take your boots off and put them on the shoe rack, and your coat in the closet in between the green and grey coloured coats," she told me. Wow, this girl was really organized. I did as she pleased since I didn't want to upset her, and hung my coat where she had said to. I didn't want her to dread having a roommate more than she already did. "You can sit down if you'd like," she offered, "I'm gonna go have a smoke, and we'll talk about you living here after that, okay?" I nodded, and she left the room through the large glass doors to her balcony to go have her cigarette.

Didn't people still smoke in their houses? I remembered that from the forties, I remembered the smell of cigarette smoke in the houses like nothing else. Thank god that ended. I remembered when I was younger, my parents smoking in the house so much that it would create a thick, black fog. I hated waking up to the grey, dry, foul-smelling fog when I was little. Maybe that was why I wasn't ever really compelled to smoke like almost everyone else I knew back then.

Other than Steve and my parents and siblings, I couldn't really remember anyone else from my past. I remembered where I lived in Brooklyn, but I didn't remember anything in my childhood that would've happened. Well, other than just now, when I remembered that little detail about cigarette smoke. But hating smoking didn't have any importance in my life, so why was I remembering that instead of the thing that had been on my mind since we left the museum earlier today; who was the girl that I knew all those years ago?