She'd fallen asleep curled up against him.

Almost afraid to move, he just held her, fingers tracing idly along her arm, his thoughts too full and too jumbled and his nerves still too on edge for sleep.

He'd said too much. He knew he had. It was a blur, what he'd said, his mind jumbling and falling over itself in his agitation. He hadn't intended to say any of it, either what he remembered saying or what he feared he'd said. But her quiet, tentative little why had shattered his resolve, his muddled thoughts surging up as though in answer to her question, the mix of fear, adrenaline and tension snapping the fragile leash he'd been holding the memories in check with. He knew he'd admitted his memory was in shreds, and he knew he'd let far too much slip out about the mindless monster he'd been, about the evil things he'd done.

But it had felt good to let it out. He hated himself for that too. The weight of his past and the pressure from the way his thoughts staggered and clashed with the chaotic, fragmented memories still battling inside his head had been too much, leaving him unable to stem the flow of words that had poured from him as he struggled to bring his mind back under control.

Yet, in that moment when she'd taken his head in her hands, his thoughts had stilled, allowing him a measure of calm, of peace as her acceptance had startled him out of the spiralling storm of memory, self-loathing and shame, letting him regain a small measure of control over himself again. It was still there, the dark, disjointed memories fighting and clawing through his mind, threatening a return to the near mindless confusion and agitation that had gripped him as the alarm and rage left over from the attack on Iris weakened what little mastery over his own head he'd been able to regain.

Then she sighed sleepily against him.

At the soft, contented sound his mind finally went blank, save for the woman in his arms too foolish to fear him and too stubbornly kindhearted for him to leave. He couldn't help but smile at the thought.

And eventually sleep found him too.

But then with a start he was awake, his skin prickling as his heart raced. The images that had woken him just as they did every night were just as disjointed and garish before his waking eyes as they had been in his dreams. Just as horrible too.

...Excruciating pain as blinding electric currents arced and seared through his brain, leaving him just as uncomprehending and blank about why as he had been before they'd even activated the machine...

...The pounding, aching pressure in his head, his body; the need to complete his mission, each and every one, no matter that he felt empty regardless. He felt nothing; emotionless, blank...

...A frozen river bed, his body broken and shattered; white-hot agony blending with icy, frozen burning, his own steaming blood melting the snow...

...Dead faces, dozens upon dozens of them; burned, bloodied, crushed, empty...as empty as he felt; blood, bullets, fists and blades; the crunch of bone and snapping of tendons beneath his cybernetic hand...

...A young woman, barely more than a girl but still just as deadly as he, looking up to him as horror began to bloom across her features, realization and revulsion blooming in her pale eyes...

...A face that was somehow—impossibly—more familiar to him than his own; swollen, bruised and bleeding, looking up at him with sad, knowing eyes as he promised that he'd be there 'til the end of the line...

...The abrupt vibration of a bullet's discharge shuddering through his shoulder as the reverberation echoed in his ears, while in the distance a target fell with a silent spray of blood...

...A face he'd known, calling him by a name a little part of him thought he should know, before—before—and his hand, squeezing around a woman's neck...

And then something had happened that hadn't before.

The memories had turned to nightmares.

The woman's face had become Iris'.

And he hadn't been able to stop even as he screamed, trapped inside his own head.

Suddenly struggling to breathe, Bucky—James for her, only for her—tried to sit, only for a soft, sleepy sound of protest to stop him.

She was still curled into his side. Sometime, in a moment of drowsy near-consciousness, he'd shifted so that he was stretched out along the couch rather than sitting, pulling her with him. By some miracle Iris hadn't been woken by either that...or by his nightmares.

Involuntarily his fingers brushed across her cheek before he flinched back at the sight of the gleaming metal of the cybernetic digits against her skin. There was too much blood on that hand... Either hand. It was the flesh one that had tightened around that woman's throat—her name on the tip of his tongue even as her face was seared into his memory—and the flesh one that almost always pulled the trigger... He was drenched in blood. He suppressed a shudder, wanting desperately to keep her from waking to see the remnants of the memories he was sure were written in his eyes, on his face, on his very skin. How could he even let himself touch her... There was no way she'd want him to if she knew the truth...if she knew even a fraction of what he'd done...

He also knew he should move her. He knew he should return her to her own bed. But she looked comfortable enough, burrowed as she was between him and the couch-back, his arm wrapped securely around her waist as she lay pillowed against his chest. There was barely enough room for the two of them, and he worried for a moment about the risk of sliding off the edge of the couch to the floor. He really should move her.

But he didn't want to. He wanted to keep her right here, safe, in his arms.

Wasn't that a cruel irony...

He knew what was going to happen. As sure as if he could see the future, he knew. One day they would show up. And if they didn't, someone else would. Whoever it ended up being would try to take him. And it would be a fight. It would always end in a fight. His life was one of violence whether he liked it or not. There was no escaping that fact. He might manage to get away, to beat them back, or he might not. They might take him alive, though a dark, bitter part of him hoped they wouldn't if it came to that. It really didn't matter either way. Only one inescapable fact did.

She'd get caught in the crossfire.

If they didn't do worse to her first.

He scrubbed his hand over his face, the cool metal not as bracing as cold water but it sufficed.

What he should be doing was leaving before this went any further. Because it would. He could feel that too. No matter that he tried to convince himself it wasn't happening, he knew he was beginning to fall in love with this stubborn, quirky woman who loved sunflowers but was named Iris. The woman who, for some unfathomable reason had let him into her home all those weeks ago and sheltered him, fed him, befriended him. Who, despite knowing nothing about his demons, somehow seemed to provide precisely what he desperately needed; time and a sense of normalcy, of stability...of safety. A haven. She'd become a haven against the violent, cruel storm that was his life. The woman who, somehow, made him feel, if not whole, at least like a person again even at his most broken, instead of an empty shell, a husk of a man.

The woman who, for some unfathomable reason, despite the fearful bewilderment he'd seen in her hazel eyes, wanted him to stay.

He should leave before it was too late.

But it was already too late, a little fractured corner of his mind whispered. Who was he kidding? He'd been falling in love with her since she first brought him a take-out container of chicken parm; her own dinner. And every dinner and every moment of time they spent together over the ensuing weeks—months now, he realized with surprise—were only entangling him further. She was quickly becoming part of him, essential to him. She was nestling her way further into his heart where he wanted to keep her, safe and protected.

The way she made him feel with her presence alone.

But the only way to protect her was to disappear.

That hurt to think about.

It would have to happen. It was as inevitable as the fact that they would come for him.

So he would leave.

Iris shifted in his arms, settling herself more securely against his side, her cloud of dark curls tickling his throat and jaw. He sighed heavily.

And his lips brushed against her forehead.

But not tonight. Tonight he was staying right where he was.

She'd asked him to.

A/N: Thanks for reading!

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