Tear into my heart, make me do it again;

[grimvisaged]

The rose itself surprised him less than the name on the note. Not hers, but his own, the one he's coming to share with Barnes a begrudging inch at a time, nudging into a neutral ground. She's the one who pins it upon him—Rogers remains too skittish, too fiercely optimistic to insist upon a name at all—and he accepts the compromise because she bestows it with such surety. He has to have a name, to her, because it's an anchor when her memories fail her as readily as his own. It puts them on equal footing.

The flower he dropped dutifully into a cup filled with water, but the note he neatly folded and slipped into his right pants pocket. Days now he's been carrying it, reaching down to feel the outline of the paper through the fabric. There's so much written between those two lines, so much he is incapable of deciphering. It tugs on him like leash. He thinks, dimly, that perhaps it always was that way with her.

And so he's waiting again, perched dutifully in the far-flung shadows of her room, the note an ember in his pocket as he watches the door.

Comments

[regimes_fall]

Natasha had never particularly associated the color orange with anything. She saw the world in shades of grey and her past in shades of black and white with red all over, but orange had become the color of ghosts as far as she was concerned. She had not looked into the color meaning behind the anonymous rose she’d received as her imagination filling in the blanks with probabilities and hopes and fears was more than enough energy to waste on a flower. What she did know was that it was a gesture greater than she’d known to expect, and that each night since placing it in a vase on the nightstand beside her bed, she’d had shadowed dreams of a chest covered in scar tissue beneath her cheek and the steadiness of a heartbeat beneath. Dreams of a low, scratchy voice speaking Russian into her ear, and the trailing of metal fingertips along her spine that brought her to wakefulness with her heart in her throat and a feeling that had nothing at all to do with fear. It was ridiculous, she told herself. She wasn't even positive the flower was from him, and still she couldn't stop herself from filling in the blanks.

Her own flower had been a gesture that she’d perhaps been too honest in, and as always she wondered if she should regret it. She’d had no idea how to convey to James what she thought or what she felt, how she’d known she’d loved him so much once upon a time and how she thought it might be so easy to fall into that again. What she had known was that she cared very much whether he lived or died and that was a sentiment she both wanted to express, and thought he needed to hear.

The rose had also been an invitation, and when she walked into her room, turned on the light and found he’d accepted, she could not help the flutter of pleasure that took hold of her stomach as she toed off her shoes and dropped her bag on the floor beside the door. “Hey you,” she said, smiling a bit as she padded toward him on bare feet. “I was wondering when I might see you again.”