pennysheets | For Sabetha

It's been five days since he missed their rendezvous, vanished from all their usual haunts. Even with her connections and skills, it took that long for her to find this little sliver of HYDRA and find its root. The building Sabetha traced them to looks abandoned from the outside, an old hospital in a rural part of Russia, now overgrown with weeds. But the lock on the gate is new, and she'll note subtle security cameras. Not beyond her skill, though, particularly if she takes the time to note when guards arrive-- out of a dirt track in the back, not the main road-- and takes out one with the right size to steal her uniform.

She can sneak inside to the modern lab below ground, and she can slit the throat of the guard outside the white-tiled cell, and she can put said guard's eye to the scanner to open the cell, but inside she'll find not her twitchy but implacable companion in murder and thievery, but a blank-faced weapon that lunges for her as soon as she pokes her head in the door.

It's been over twelve hours since they last refreshed his programming, but it still rattles around in his skull. They don't have a Chair here, but they do know the Words, and it's only a matter of time before they reassemble a Chair to complete he recalibration. To make him truly mission-ready.

Something inside, deep inside, where the Words can't touch, doesn't want that. But he can't help but feel his body grab for the intruder, knowing his duty here, knowing he can only go with his new handler. She'll have to be quick on her feet to avoid him, but it's not impossible: they also haven't fed him in those five days, in the hopes of keeping him easier to handle if the brainwashing fails, and he's not nearly as fast or as strong as he ought to be.

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"Sometimes," he says, sounding smug. "Still pulled it off, though. See if there's any music anywhere, will ya?" Though he's slowing down to saner speeds, now that he's beat the challenge, so he could technically handle scrolling through stations. He's still gonna let her do it.

Also, once she has, he's going to offer her his hand. Without the need for both hands on the wheel, he wouldn't mind holding hers again.

They're still close enough to the ass end of nowhere that it takes her a minute or so of fiddling with the radio to find a station that's playing music - synth-heavy indie stuff by the sound of it, and there's always the risk that the next turn will take them out of range.

"Think this is as good as we're getting for a while still," she says. It's still more than she'd really been expecting.

There's perhaps a heartbeat's hesitation when he offers his hand, before she slips hers into it, grip light enough to not be a hindrance to his reflexes if he suddenly needs both hands on the wheel. Unlikely, perhaps, now that their speed is calibrated more to a road than a racetrack - but the road they're on still isn't exactly straight, and the surroundings are still wooded enough to make large animals a possibility.

He keeps her hand on and off for most of the drive, occasionally needing both hands for a turn or to poke the radio again himself once they get closer to civilization.

When they stop for a meal, he does let her hand in public, but he sits close, too. They don't seem to have drive-through in this part of the world, but the little diner isn't terrible. It's just public.

And when they stop for the night at a dingy little hotel with decent sight lines and easily avoidable security cameras, he only gets them one bed.

For the moment, at least, it isn't cloying, this desire of his to keep close to her. Sabetha knows that she's one of his touchstones, that while he's functional, he's nowhere near healed from his latest ordeal, and that he's going to be on high alert for a while yet.

And it's...sweet, almost. Reassurning, almost.

She doesn't protest the singular bed. It's a while before they actually get to sleep that night, but fortunately, in addition to the sight lines and the laughable security, they don't have much in the way of neighbours to protest.

Eventually, she wakes, to the first beams of watery sunlight filtering around the edges of the blinds.

Bucky's already up, having slipped out of bed an hour or so before dawn, and spent a near-silent while carefully cleaning one of his guns and consulting maps on the internet and then falling down a rabbit hole of unexpected research into tourist traps on the way to their next destination. Not as many as in the USA, is what his brain tries to tell him.

He's currently sitting on the floor by the door, laptop next to him, watching her. He'd seen her starting to stir and put his research aside, and is now strongly considering getting up and going back to bed now that he won't wake her up by doing so.

She reaches out with one hand before consciously registering the empty space beside her, and blinks the bleariness from her eyes, searching the small room until she finds him by the door.

"Hey," she murmurs. "Don't tell me you've been there half the night, and I didn't notice?"

The little reach is what does it, he can't resist that. He levers himself up as her eyes find him and pads back over to the bed, settling down on his side facing her. He's not under the covers, but he's close enough to feel the warmth of her under them. "Not that long," he answers, equally softly. "An hour, maybe."

"Hmm." She reaches up to brush his hair back, fingers grazing gently over his scalp. The small smile tugging at the corners of her lips is still a little sleepy, still a little softer than she almost ever is when fully awake. "That's not so bad, then."

She pushes herself up enough that she can lean over to kiss him, light and almost teasing. "Do we have some time to spare before we get on the road?"

Since the only schedule they have to keep to this time is the demanding need in his head and chest and stomach to destroy as much of HYDRA as he can, and that's a little easier to ignore when Sabetha is right there smiling at him like that, kissing him, hand in his hair... "I think we got a little time," he says with a smile of his own, and rolls over towards her, kissing her more deeply.

It'll be late morning, after a shower and a stop in the diner next door for breakfast, before they're on the road again. By then he's itchy to move again, but it'd been a nice respite, to not think about killing for a couple hours again.

For Sabetha

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