Stay Awake with Me Awhile

He wakes beside her suddenly. His jerked movements cause her eyes to fling open—she had been awake already, her mind so focused on work that she couldn't sleep. Darcy sits up, groggy and dazed; the lovely dual side effects of insomnia. She squints in the darkness. Slowly, her eyes take in the small particles of light in the room and she sees Bucky bent forward, back muscles jumping as his ribcage expands and deflates rapidly. In the blackened room, Darcy spots glittering splatters of sweat on his unclothed torso. His hands are in his long hair. His knuckles are white.

Another nightmare.

She knows it instantly, and the realisation makes her stomach twist into intricate knots.

The doctors at the now-defunct SHIELD said these nightmares were not simply subconscious fears trickling into his head, but rather they were memories. Flashes of his life as the Winter Soldier. Hydra spent so long trying to make him forget who he was, trying to force his humanity out of him, that when he finally broke free of their shackles, his brain did not know what to do with itself. It was too used to being tortured and zapped with alien tools, and as a result, he must suffer through these memory lapses.

They come to him in the night, when he isn't focused on trying to forget all of the horrible things he did while under Hydra's command. When she found him—when they found each other, months and months ago now—the nightmares were scattered. She remembers the first night she spent with him when one took over. His screams—Darcy hears them still.

I'm sorry he said. I'm so, so sorry.

To this day she is clueless as to whom he was speaking.

Darcy does not know what they look like to him. Are the figures in his nightmares the shadows of his victims? Are they faceless and hollow?

Or, do they retain their features? Their voices?

She prays it is the former. She doesn't want to think of the one she loves carrying such vivid images of his time as a mindless assassin.

This is the third time in a single week Bucky has experienced a lapse. They have never before occurred this close together. Typically, he will have one in as many months. If he is particularly stressed, there is a chance he will have two. But never have there been three in such proximity.

Is there danger ahead? Perhaps this is some form of a sixth sense. Bucky's mind . . . maybe it is trying to warn them against a coming force of evil.

Rationally, though, Darcy knows this is more of a purge. His body ridding itself of all of the built-up poison. One day, he won't be forced to sleep fearing another lapse. One day, he will rest peacefully through each night.

Darcy cannot wait for that day.

He is crying. She watches, heart breaking, as he chokes on harsh sobs. The noises close Darcy's throat, and she can't stay pressed against the headboard any longer. Sucking in a pathetic breath, Darcy glides towards Bucky and wraps her arms around his quivering shoulders. She holds him, her cheek resting on the dampness of his back. His skin is warm and smooth. Stroking her thumbs across the length of his collarbone, Darcy bites her tongue for fear of crying alongside him.

He is so strong. Each day, he proves to her just how much strength and power is within him. Nobody else could have fought against Hydra the way he did—the way he still does. Anybody else would have cracked long ago and entered a place from which they could never escape, no matter how hard they or anyone around them tried. Not Bucky, though. He battled his demons until the only ones remaining were those cowards who sneak out in the dark.

To see him weakened in this way is enough to make Darcy wish she could trade places with the man before her. She wishes she could snatch away his pain. Enter his mind and erase the memories Hydra forced upon him. The process would surely kill her—she is so unbelievably frail compared to him—but death is a price she would gladly pay to protect Bucky Barnes.

Eventually, the sobs transition into quiet moans of despair, and those too pass alongside the minutes.

Darcy refuses to let him go. He has wrapped his hands around hers now, though. He presses his soaked, cracked mouth against her knuckles. She feels tears, saliva, and mucus lave the back of her hand, but she hardly minds.

Sighing deeply, a noise that is hiccupped by a straggling sob, Bucky readjusts his grip on Darcy. His hold is tighter now. Turning his head sideways, Darcy now sees streaks of wetness painted on his cheeks. He looks to the wall on their right—the wall decorated with the motions releasing Bucky from having to pay for Hydra's crimes. There are many of them. Each country laying charges against the Winter Soldier held separate proceedings.

Each let him go free.

"Do you remember," he says, and Darcy can feel his voice rumble against her ear, "when we met at my first hearing in the US?"

She nods into his back. She kisses the sharp jut of his shoulder blade. "Of course I do."

It is one of those days. One of those days she, at the time, when she awoke that morning, had no idea of the impact it would have on her. She had no reason to believe it would be a day that would change the course of her entire existence.

The US was the last country to get its greed-ridden claws into Bucky. He had been waiting in a dungeon for nearly two years waiting for his case to be reached. When he appeared in court at 9:05 a.m. on the dot, he was practically unrecognisable. If it had not been for the metal arm, the chained-up individual could have been anybody.

Darcy was there by chance. Her boss at the time had placed all of the names of the top-tier journalists at the paper in a bag and pulled one out at random.

Looking back, maybe it wasn't chance. Darcy no longer believes in coincidences.

She sat with the rest of the press, her mouth dropping open slightly when they called the Winter Soldier into the courtroom—Calling the case of The United States of America versus James Buchanan Barnes. It was the day she, along with many of her fellow journalists, learned Bucky's given name.

Don't call me James he asked her when they found each other following his release. He looked more human then. The whiskers were gone from his face. His hair was no longer a scraggly mess that reached his shoulders. It's Bucky, not James.

"That's one of my favourite days," he says after a long silence.

"How come?" she presses, neither of their voices breaking through the darkness of the room.

Releasing Darcy, Bucky wipes at his face and tears himself free of her hold. He turns to face her, cross-legged. She joins him in his position and he quickly takes her hands, moving them up to his chest. His heart pulses out a steady rhythm.

His hazel eyes are black in the night, but she can still feel the intensity of his gaze on her. It is enough to send her blood rushing up to the surface of her skin. She is pink all over, even if neither of them can see.

"Because I knew when I saw you that you were going to change my life," he says, and before Darcy can interrupt his stream with her doubt, he goes on, "It sounds mad, I know, but I came into the courtroom having been deprived of human contact for months and months and months, and I saw you sitting near the front of the press section, your pen poised above your notebook, and I knew."

Darcy is quiet for a moment. All of the air has evaporated from within her lungs. "You knew I would change your life?"

His shadow nods. He releases Darcy's hands and gets to his knees. He towers over her, his face millimetres from her own. His breath comes out like sweet mint. Reaching out, he cups the back of her head. So much time has gone by, she doesn't even feel the mechanical hand anymore.

When he is this close, and when the sun is less than an hour away from rising, she can see the dots of stubble lining his jaw. Come proper morning, he will have to shave them away.

Their breaths mingle in the darkness. They exchange air—life—for seconds more until Bucky bends that one extra millimetre. Darcy gasps into the kiss, her arms coming up automatically. She arches her back, so much shorter than Bucky, and opens her lips for him.

"You make me better," he whispers into her mouth. "You make me unafraid."

Darcy kisses him all around as he lays her gently on the mattress. "But the nightmares," she says.

He shakes his head. His hair showers her cheeks. "They're almost gone. I can feel it."

This admission creeps inside of Darcy like some highly potent drug. It snakes its way through her veins, heating her up from the inside.

She smiles.

"I love you," he says, kissing her again.

Darcy holds Bucky's face in her hands, forcing him to look her in the eye. "I love you, too," she breathes.

Mirroring her, his lips spread wide, all traces of the memory lapse gone.