Chapter Text
"Whenever you’re all alone and you hear something randomly fall just pretend like I used to that it’s a clumsy ghost named Steve and yell at him to stop. For some reason this worked for me especially if you imagine how sorry Steve would be.”
Bucky paused his scrolling of Nat’s blog, or whatever she called it, and slowly nodded his head as he read the post.
Okay, maybe this would help him sleep at night.
“What are you doing?”
He shrugged then kept on scrolling. He didn’t need Nat to know that he felt like his apartment was haunted. One, because she would laugh at him for believing in such nonsense. Two, her laughter would bring attention to their outside table, and he definitely didn’t want that. Three, she would eventually tell everyone in their group, and he would never live it down.
“You told me to look through this.”
She gently grabbed her phone from his hand and said evenly, “No, I said look at this one post that made me laugh. You’re the one that kept going as I got my coffee and yours when, I’d like to remind you, I didn’t have to.”
Bucky scoffed and nodded as he went to grab his coffee. At the last second Nat pulled it out of his reach with a pout and a shake of her head.
“What do we say?”
Bucky glared at her before saying with as much sarcasm as he could, “Please?”
A little smirk formed on her dark red lips before she lowered his coffee onto the table. “I bet you were an angel growing up with that tone.”
Bucky smiled and took his coffee as he watched her sit across from him. “Oh, I was an absolute angel. The total opposite of you, I’d imagine.”
If he was being honest, he was actually a good kid. He was quiet and never really said anything to anyone. That didn’t mean he was shy, though. Actually, when he met someone he liked he turned into a chatterbox that no one could shut up. He just never got into trouble and kept to himself. He was incredibly boring now that he thought about it.
She laughed as she closed out of her blog app thing then put her phone face down on the table. “Oh yeah, your mother would have had a fit with me. All I ever wanted to do was run around and climb things nonstop and I never wanted to sit down.”
“Nothing has changed much I see.”
She shrugged as she moved the exercise bag, she’d unceremoniously thrown on the table thus taking up most of the table closer to her. “Oh, shut it. Just because I’ve actually found my calling as a trainer doesn’t mean you can make fun of me for it.”
Bucky took a sip of his still hot coffee only slightly burning his tongue. “I’m pretty sure it means exactly that.”
She rolled her eyes before taking a big swig of her black coffee.
Bucky wrinkled his nose as she kept drinking it. For whatever reason, she had gotten a deal with the coffee shop people. She got lukewarm untouched black coffee for fifty cents a regular size cup and like seventy-five cents for a bigger cup.
Nat always got a bigger cup from the shop and used a cup from home that she filled up as well.
Bucky didn’t get how she could drink that. He could never handle watching her drink without wrinkling his nose in disgust.
Of course, that’s why Nat always drank in front of him just to fill him up with disgust for the day.
“You are disgusting.”
She drank the rest of the cup before putting the cup down with huge cheeks. She took a breath before swallowing the large of amount that was in her cheeks. When she was done, she gave out a satisfied sigh before she smiled at him.
“You keep saying that I’m going to be tempted each time to switch your coffee to mine at some point.”
Bucky’s eyes widen. He looked down at his coffee as if it had magically changed into Nat’s disgusting coffee in the minute he looked away. He glared as she laughed uproariously at his reaction.
“I hate you.”
“You love me, and you can’t even deny it, bub.” She rubbed at her eyes before taking in a deep breath and slouching horribly back into her chair.
Yeah, his mom would’ve had a conniption if Nat was her child.
“How’s the whole moving into a new apartment thing going for yah?”
Bucky looked down at his coffee cup then drank it slowly, trying to buy some time to answer that question. Finally, after a moment he looked at her and shrugged, “Good.”
She squinted at him as if she were looking for a lie in his one-word sentence. “Why did it take you so long to answer?”
Bucky paused the edge of the cup on his lips as he thought about her question before shrugging, “I don’t know?”
She squinted at him for a moment longer before shrugging. She then straightened up in her usual good posture before going into a story about how ridiculous some of her client’s actions were today.
He nodded at the right spots and rolled his eyes at the most ridiculous antics of her clients, but he was still thinking about her question. If he were being truthful, he’d tell her that moving out of their apartment, which they had shared with their friend Sam, was turning out to be a bad idea on his part. He didn’t know why but about a month ago he had gotten this urge to set out on his own even though he had a pretty good set up as it was.
He rolled his eyes. Nat went on to tell him how some of her clients were so focused on her that when she lost her footing, they had fallen along with her.
“Why do they come to you again?”
“Because I’m the master at everything of course!” She threw out her arms and basked in the weak sunlight.
Bucky scoffed and laughed into his coffee before taking one last long drink of his coffee. “Right,” he said as he elongated the word to show his skepticism.
She looked at him with a small smile before intertwining her hands in front of her and shaking her head. “You know it’s true, Barnes.”
He did a light flourish with his hands in her direction before saying, “Oh, how could I ever forget.”
She threw a crumpled-up napkin at him and he caught it before sending it straight into the trash. He ignored her sarcastic OOOOOH before throwing his empty coffee cup up in an impressive arch. The cup hit the rim of the trash can and he thought for one awful second it wasn’t going to go in as it stopped moving for a second before it toppled into the trash.
He turned to Nat with a big smug smile and asked, “Who’s the master of all things again?”
She rolled her eyes before mockingly bowing at him. He laughed at her antics until she looked at her phone and sighed.
“Work beckoning you?”
She nodded her head before getting up and fixing her bag onto her shoulder. “Yep,” she pointed at him and as she grabbed her coffee cup, “I’ll be seeing you later, stranger. Just because you’re off on your own doesn’t mean you can’t come around, moron.”
Bucky waved her off with a, “Yeah, yeah you don’t have to grovel to get me back.”
She rolled her eyes and swatted him on the back of the head before she slowly walked backwards away. “You hear me punk come over for dinner sometime. I know Sam misses you to even if he doesn’t say it.” She rolled her eyes. “Sometimes I don’t understand how he can be so good with getting people to open up when he can’t do it himself.”
Bucky waved at her and said, “You know Sam. Always an enigma to us mere mortals.” As he got up off his sit he said before going the other direction, “I’ll take you up on that dinner, ok? Just not today.”
She nodded back and said before turning in a seamless about face, “Ok, just text or call and we’ll be there.”
Bucky nodded at her receding figure. He never said it but he was glad they never said goodbye. Just the sheer amount of belief that they’d see each other again reassured him on so many levels.
He kept walking and sighed when he realized that he had nowhere else to go but back to his creepy, small, possibly haunted apartment.
He sighed and wished he had somewhere to go or to work. Sadly, that wasn’t an option to him at the moment so he begrudgingly trudged all the way back to his apartment hoping the advice from that one post would help him.