ic contact ★ i'm just a shot away from you

[lostsoldier]

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"JACK DAVIS"
"FRED MONROE"
"SHIRTLESS MAN ON 005"
"MISS C4 2015"



James Buchanan Barnes

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[alsohawkeye]

[ Her next exhale comes out her nose as a snort but it takes a few more before she manages to huff even a simple reply. ] Fuck off. [ Tone is hard - it's hard enough just to get the inflection right so the words mean what they're supposed to - but if it's possible to pick anything out of that hoarse and breathless Chinese curse it's dry and fond and grateful.

She almost puts her head on his shoulder. She comes close, she even lets her neck tilt that way a little for a moment. He's the right height for it and she can see herself pivoting in to press her face into his chest, catching the last of her breath through his shirt, dark and warm and his arm around her until she feels a little less like she's going to die in the next ten minutes. It's not thought so much as urge, a craving in the pit of her chest as the panic recedes but its fluttery edges linger in her lungs. She tries to remember the last time somebody held her and it wasn't that long ago it was Peter and she was almost dead and this is already a stretch for them, isn't it? Hands on backs and careful teasing and this brief, unplanned glimpse beneath her competence. He didn't ask for this. He didn't sign up to be her keeper the way she agreed to be his, didn't come into this (friendship or whatever) with eyes open to the mess and volunteering to take it on, asking to be trusted with who and what she is. That's not really fair to him or the team(??) they've become but it still feels like an imposition. He's got his own shit to deal with and she's shown him too much already; probably they'd both end up uncomfortable with more. ]

And if you tell anyone about this I'll cut your nipples off while you sleep. [ The twitch at the corner of her mouth makes clear that threat's only sort of real, as she takes a deep and settling breath and steps away like ripping off a bandaid. She moves towards the table, with the knife and the comm and the tape and the gloves and sets her forearms on it. English this time. ] Scissorhands me.

[lostsoldier]

[ It's not the imposition that bothers him, but the trust it implies — the vulnerability she'd expose as a result. The day he'd met her, he'd come a few heartbeats and fortuitously timed passersby from trying to snap her neck and put her out an airlock, and some days all that's changed between them is that's not immediately necessary. (Some days, he wonders if he'd hesitate, if it was — but they don't test it, and he's not sorry for that.)

But her head tilts that slight degree, and his chest aches in a way it hasn't for weeks now, like the tightening of the string that tethers him to his own ribcage, and for a second her weight against his arm feels like his arm instead of somebody else's. She doesn't close the distance, though, and neither does he. It's better if he doesn't. ]

Yes ma'am, [ is his answer, with a cheeky lift of his chin when she pulls away. (That quite the threat, ok, he's not taking any chances.)

He doesn't tell her to say goodbye to her gloves, that this is going to hurt like hell now and twice as bad when they cut them off again, because he imagines he doesn't need to. He just opens a glove between metal fingers and teeth and gets started. ]