#not me spotting the compass and globe shop across the walking path and going

[damnprecious]

going to events is dangerous

not me coming home from a medieval market with another old time'y compass and a little handheld telescope

[imhereforbvcky]

Watch Me Run - Part 13

Masterlist  -  Series Masterpage  -  Part 14

Summary: You inherit a family relic that gives you the gift of foresight but there are others who are interested for more nefarious reasons. You turn to the Avengers for help. (Bucky x reader) Chapter: You and Bucky get a little closer. Meanwhile Loki moves closer to his goals and Natasha follows a new lead.

Word Count: 2183

A/N: Slowest of burns on this fic apparently. It’s building though! We’re going somewhere!

“Romanoff’s got a lead,” Tony explained. The old payphone thinned his voice, made it sound sharp and scratchy and so very far away.

Bucky held the heavy plastic to his ear with his left hand, so he would leave no trace of who had been there. Metal left no fingerprints. “What kind of a lead? Someone finally spot this guy? Where?”

Your eyes darted up to him, wide with a potent mix of fear and hope. Bucky worked hard at projecting passivity. Even if Tony did deliver alarming news, he needed you calm, here in this public location.

“No, no. I’m working on tracking Loki from here but it’s gotten a bit tangled with the Podunk Police force out at the hotel. Hell of a crime scene. They’re rattled. Understandable. But they want to call in Feds; we just want the reports. It’s—“

“What’s Natasha after then?” Bucky interrupted.

Eyes sharp and cool as steel scanned the room for the fifth time. It was a big room, lots of activity, no one would notice or care about two passersby using a payphone. Not in an ER. He’d scoped out this particular phone long ago. It was in the breezeway before the lobby, so as long as he kept his back to the room, the cameras wouldn’t pick him up.

“Some rumors about that necklace thing. It’s a little frightening how easily she finds information. I couldn’t dig up a damn thing about a green glowing rock in a big ugly eye-shaped necklace. But she makes two phone calls an--”

“Tony,” Bucky urged, watching you shift on the hard plastic stool, anxious and bored. When you leaned forward, gaze following the path of an incoming patient with a frown, Bucky’s hand was on your shoulder. He made a loose fist in the fabric of your t-shirt before pulling you back into the shadows and away from the waiting room with its cameras and its witnesses.

“Right. Payphone, limited time. If you’d let me send a Stark phone…,” Tony complained, gears always turning, even over old arguments. “Anyway. She’s headed to Nepal. Some temple or healer. I’m not sure how it’s connected, but you know how she is. Once she decides on something, there’s no persuading her.”

“She’s usually right.”

Natasha stood before the great wooden door, ornately carved, paint dull and chipping. The entry to such power appeared entirely ordinary. Not unlike the Black Widow herself, here, in simple denim and pale linen. This hall of reputed knowledge and force could just as easily have been the entry to a modest home or a forgotten shop.

The man who answered the door when she knocked stood on the step above her, looking down with a resolute calm. He barred her entry. Blunt force would be of little use here, but that was not a concern for her. She had been trained in many forms of persuasion, but in this case, she thought the truth might serve her best.

“I believe you have information I need,” she answered his questions with trademark composure.

“We are healers,” he frowned, equally cool. “We have nothing to offer a warrior.”

“About the Eye of Agamotto.”

She watched him carefully. The man standing before the door to the Kamar-Taj had broad shoulders and a stern eye. His spine, already straight as an arrow, seemed to stiffen like a drawn bow at the mention of the ancient relic.

“Indeed,” he finally conceded. A quick glance down the street and his hard gaze fell upon her again. “But you do not come alone. Deception will not serve you within.”

Natasha glanced across her shoulder, watching the faces in the bustling street. A merchant she had seen earlier, stared at her, bold as brass, determined as steel.

She hummed her agreement. “I’m not the one deceiving you. Bar him, if you like.” A one-shouldered shrug.  “He follows with the same purpose, but he is not with us.”

The man at the door narrowed his eyes at the merchant, watching for the length of two slow meditative breaths before turning back to Natasha.

“This is a place of knowledge, not war.”

“I just need information,” Natasha urged. “You keep him out long enough for me to get what I need and the war will follow me home. I’ll make sure of it.”

He nodded and stepped aside. The heavy wooden doors creaked open before her. With a quick sigh of relief and one last glance over her shoulder at the merchant who now openly scowled, Natasha stepped inside.

Weeks of dead-ends and Loki was frustrated. Out of leads and growing more agitated by the second, he’d followed when one of the Avengers slipped quietly halfway across the globe.

He was seeing rather more of this planet than he had ever intended. This should have ended with the death of one old man on a frozen spit of land. It should have ended with Loki unwinding the clock right there. He should be holding three infinity stones, not chasing Midguardians through crowded streets in New York and Nepal and Hel only knows where else.

What a mess. But what a challenge.

This avenger, the one who’d tricked him once before, stood outside a door like any other with a glance to him like a challenge. Fortunate, then, that Loki had spent hours poring over books in the Palace library at Asguard, learning magic from his mother, and strategy from his father. Those doors were guarded by more than man and Loki knew this.

Now that they were here, at this hall of Mystic Arts, it didn’t much matter that both she and the guard at the door had discovered him. Shape-shifting wouldn’t get him into that sanctum, but he didn’t need in; she did. He could wait.

For soon enough, she would tell him all he needed to know. And he would master time for himself.

The clatter of the plastic receiver landing in its cradle brought your attention back to Bucky. He sighed and shook his head at your raised brow. The question always on your mind, and on his, remained unspoken: Is it over yet?

Somehow if you didn’t ask, it seemed less disappointing, less frightening when the answer, inevitably rang a painful no. The answer was always no.

“Am I ever going to get to make a phone call?”

“No.”

He stood and held a hand out to help you up.

You rolled your eyes, but took it anyway. One swift tug and you were on your feet, marching back out to the rusty old truck.

“Wh-hey!” you complained, eyes darting back to the hospital. “I was gonna grab some snacks from the gift shop!”

“We can stop at a gas station on the way,” Bucky grumbled.

“More gas station food?” If you had to eat one more ham and cheese hot pocket you thought your insides might actually turn into molten cheese substitute. “Couldn’t we at least go to a restaurant? Hell, I’d take fast food at this point if it had something green on it.”

A smile curved at the corner of his mouth as he glanced down at you. “Drive-thru windows have CCTV,” he explained. “And there are too many people in there, too many variables.”

“Fine,” you sighed. “I hate hospitals anyway.”

“Everybody hates hospitals.”

“They do, don’t they?” you pondered. “Why is that? Good things happen at hospitals too. Babies are born, they make people better, save lives…”

“It’s the closest most people ever come to really seeing death. You walk in and mortality is suddenly more than someone else’s horror story.” Bucky’s eyes were set forward as he spoke. It was a simple matter of fact to him.

“The worst abstractions become concrete,” you surmised. “That was… very philosophical and also very morbid of you.”

He shrugged. “It’s true.”

“Do they still bother you? Hospitals, I mean.”

He paused. Even stopped walking. Something dark and angry flashed across his face. When he turned to you, it was gone, passive again, calm.

“Not anymore.”

You chewed on your lip for a moment, kicking yourself for even asking. What a stupid question. Of course hospitals were hardly a blip on the radar for him. A soldier, an assassin, a man who’d lived a hundred years. What had he to fear? Death paraded his loved ones away while he slept while he bent it to his will and the demand of war. All the while it left him cruelly untouched.

Death held no fear for a man like that. It was his to command.

“Once. A long time ago they did bother me,” he volunteered into the growing silence. It caught you by surprise. There was something of a smile warming his eyes, but of sadness rounding the edges.  “Steve was my best friend; he was always sick. Real sick. If I was in a hospital back then… meant it might be the end of the line for him.”

You looked up at him, compassion in your small frown and nodded. The rest didn’t need saying. You knew who he was. Bucky Barnes had fought in wars, been taken, torn down, and rebuilt. He’d become so intimately acquainted with mortality that for a time he’d embodied death itself. He’d done half those things chasing a scrawny kid from Brooklyn who couldn’t say no to a fight. Loyalty. Love. Determination. The defining qualities of James Buchanan Barnes, as you’d come to learn.

“Doesn’t help that the food’s gross.” Your shoulder nudged into his, a big loose grin staring up at him.

He laughed and you enjoyed the sound, but more, you liked the way a smile looked on Bucky. Laughter had a way of softening his angular features, plumping on his usually sharp cheeks and brightening his quick, wary eyes. When he laughed, you could see something gentle, something kind.

He slowed to a stop, but you couldn’t take your eyes off of him. It wasn’t until he glanced down that you realized you were standing beside the old rusty truck. You followed his gaze, down to his hand, still holding yours. It’s funny how comfort can creep up on you like that. You couldn’t even recall the moment you’d taken hold.

Within the darkened halls of the Kamar-Taj, Natasha pored over the pages of the book, but it held little meaning to her. She couldn’t understand it. Mystic Arts, spells, chakras, it all sounded like a children’s story. And yet Loki had come from another planet to collect on this knowledge.

“So, whoever has the Eye can…?” She nodded toward the book, unsure how to finish that sentence. The drawings and instructions seemed… farcical.

“If the wearer is sufficiently skilled in the Mystic Arts, yes.” The woman was small and thin. She looked ancient and young all at once. Thin skin stretched taught over sharp cheek bones and a perfectly round head. Delicate but not weak by any interpretation. She was not at all what Natasha had expected with a title like Sorcerer Supreme.

“But manipulating time this way is difficult, and dangerous,” she continued to explain. “Time loops, paradoxes, one could easily spawn divergent realities. These spell books are guarded vigilantly, and kept far from the stone itself for a reason.”

“And the stone-keepers?”

The woman paused, eyeing Natasha carefully. The Ancient One knew of The Black Widow, her many roles throughout history, the many sides of history, and she was wary.

“Please,” Natasha begged, “A few years ago two of these stones were here. In Ne –“

“The Battle of New York,” she acknowledged, slowly nodding.

“Yes. Loki, he’s practically a god from another world and he’s back. He’s after this Eye of Agamemnon,” Natasha pointed sharply to the drawing on the page.

“Amagotto,” the Ancient One corrected.

“If he gets his hands on it…”

“You think he’ll go back to 2012 and try to take the other two stones.”

Natasha nodded, wide eyes imploring. “The Eye, the stone-keeper… we’re trying to keep her and this relic safe.”

“Her?” The woman tilted her smooth head only a fraction, but her brows dropped in worried astonishment.

Natasha’s gaze shot up, surprise superseding her own worry. The Sorcerer Supreme didn’t know. “Loki murdered the last stone-keeper. The old man.”

When the other woman stepped forward, speechless, deep wrinkles growing deeper in her forehead by the moment, Natasha quickly reached for her phone. A few quick swipes and she’d called up the crime scene photos. The images that had started it all.

Blood cast across the screen, pooling deep red in strange crystalline patterns through the snow. The Ancient One drew in a sharp breath when she beheld the Seer’s eyes, cloudy and pale with cataracts, frozen wide but unseeing.

When she turned her face back to Natasha’s it was pale and grim. Suddenly, Natasha could see the years etched there, the soft wrinkles at her eyes and mouth, hollow cheeks and narrow lips. Most noticeable, though, was the fear that flickered dark in her eyes.

“But we have not trained a new stone-keeper.”

Part 14 >>