October, 2014.

Oslo, Norway. 

The apartment required an adjustment period. Admittedly, Bucky and I had been spoiled by the house in Aberdeen, with its working appliances and seclusion. Our little kitchen had no oven, stovetop, or refrigerator, just gaps in the cabinetry for each one. The water was reliable for the most part, but the electricity needed to heat the water was often lacking. That meant no heat, period. We compensated for it all with a trip to an outdoor supply store and came home with a propane camp stove, sleeping bags, and all manner of odds and ends. 

Our new city itself proved to be a challenge. It was cold, and it was hard to find a paycheck. Bucky hated it. He was old school; he needed to be working to feel useful. Neither of us could do much about the situation. Bucky just kept job hunting, and I turned to petty theft. I didn't want to worry about blowing through our cash, so I supplemented it by pick-pocketing in all the touristy areas. Bucky ignored it. 

He just couldn't ignore the fact he had no job prospects. 

"Why does Oslo hate us?" he mumbled. He was sitting with his back to the wall where a headboard would normally be, looking out the window and snacking on reindeer jerky he had found somewhere. 

"It could be karma," I supposed, earning a funny look from Bucky. "We entered the country illegally. We did a bad thing, so we get bad things in return."

Bucky resealed his package of jerky and tossed it over to his backpack. I could tell by the look on his face he wasn't sure what he thought about karma, especially with my lacking description. I left the kitchen area and grabbed Bucky's jerky on my way to sit with him. I ended up cross-legged in the floor across from him, close enough that our knees were almost touching. 

"The Catholic schoolboy in me that got swatted by nuns with rulers wants to say I don't believe that," he told me. "But it's hard not to agree with that sometimes."

He was too busy staring out the window to notice me staring at him. Our curtains, which had been included in our luxurious accommodations, were pulled back to let in a little sunlight and warmth. When we timed it right, it warmed up the room just a little. 

"I know the feeling," I agreed. I tried to follow his line of sight and see whatever it was he saw, but all I saw was the rooftop of the short building next door and some birds perching on power lines. After a few moments of silent starting, Bucky cleared his throat and faced me again. He snatched the bag of jerky out of my hands and sealed it back up after giving me a dirty look. 

"I'm still getting used to you as a blonde," he said, glancing at the top of my head. When we had first met, my hair had been nearly as dark as his and had a few natural strands of red spread throughout. After only a few days in Oslo I realized how noticeable brunette was amongst a sea of mostly blondes. So I had bleached my hair. It had hurt, emotionally and physically, since I had no idea what I was doing and went overboard. In the end, it came out nearly white. 

"So am I," I laughed. "I keep having to remind myself every time I look in the mirror. My roots are showing though."

Bucky made some sort of grunting noise before he stood up and went to his backpack. A majority of our clothes were folded and stacked against the wall at the foot of our makeshift bed, but everything important was always returned to our packs, just in case. He squatted in front of his bag, and I took his seat on top of our sleeping bags. The view out the window was only a little different from this vantage point, but it was enough to distract me from the yarn missile Buck tossed squarely at my face. 

"What the hell?" I muttered. Bucky chuckled, presumably at my startled face. I unrumpled whatever he had thrown at me and discovered it to be a hat. It was thick, olive green yarn knitted or crocheted into a simple beanie with a pompom on the top. 

"You're right about your roots showing. In case you want to cover them up, there you go," he explained. Buck stepped across his sleeping bag in socked feet, finally kneeling in front of me. He took the toboggan out of my hands and tugged it down over my head. "That's better. Keep your ears covered. It's warmer that way."

The words were familiar to me. I had read them before, when working at the Smithsonian. They flashed in front of my eyes in the same type face I remembered, a few words at a time. American Armed Services' Guide to Cold Weather Survival...foxholes conserve heat...use snowpack to your advantage...importance of thermal wear...keep your head and neck covered, including your ears. I carefully refolded the pamphlet and filed it away again. The American History Museum was considering a special winter exhibit, which meant digging through the archives for anything interesting enough to include. I marked the pamphlet down as a maybe and moved on. 

"Gail?" Buck asked, snapping me out of the memory. Once again, I was on the receiving end of one of his funny looks. "Is that what I look like when I start remembering something?"

"You tend to stick your tongue out," I joked. I pushed myself out of the floor and made it past Bucky, into our tiny kitchen. Besides the camp stove and a single pot, there was half a loaf of bread and some produce in one of the lower cabinets. Stig kept a cooler in the building's basement for anyone's cold foodstuffs, but we kept very little in the community chest. Easier to grab and go if everything was close at hand. 

"I what?" he questioned, cracking a small smile. 

"You stick your tongue out. Just a little, right from the corner," I explained. I poked the tip of my tongue out at the corner of my mouth and pointed to it. "Just like that. Now, what do you want for dinner?"

"Do we have anything good? I thought all we had was bread and cheese, and that is not dinner," Buck told me, starting a discussion we'd had at least a dozen times. 

"We also have a few apples, some potatoes, and I bought these cherries today," I listed off. 

"Where the hell did you find cherries?" Bucky asked. "It's October."

"It's a global market, Buck," I answered. I handed him the plastic container of cherries, and he dangled one into his mouth by the stem. 

"There wasn't this much plastic in the forties. Lots of glass and metal. This stuff is everywhere nowadays," he noted. 

"Yeah, that's for sure. There's a recycling bin down the street, so I'll drop it off there once we're done with it," I said. "If I boil a couple potatoes, you want one?"

"Gail, that's all I ate during the thirties," he reminded me. 

"So you have no problem sucking it up and helping me get rid of some of these potatoes," I teased, grabbing two of them and the closest knife. Bucky put down the carton of cherries and took up his own knife. He began peeling one of the potatoes, and I fetched our pot and filled it with water from the kitchen sink. I set it to boil and went back to peeling and dicing potatoes. 

"We did this in Italy and Germany too," Bucky told me. "Peel potatoes. So many damn potatoes. The camp cooks would get crates full of them wherever we went. Whoever had screwed up most recently got put on peeling duty."

"How many times did you have peeling duty?" I asked. I dumped our potatoes into the pot and sat down, cross-legged, against the wall to wait. 

"Once or twice," he admitted, sitting next to me with the carton of cherries in one hand and an empty coffee cup in the other. He pulled a cherry from its stem by his teeth and dropped the stem into the cup. "After Steve showed up and got us out of that Hydra prison, the cooks let most of us get away with murder."

"I can proudly say I never had peeling duty," I bragged, taking a handful of cherries for myself. I didn't bother telling him that the modern military had industrial-sized machines specifically for peeling potatoes.

"How long were you in?" Buck asked after spitting a cherry pit into the coffee cup. 

"Six years, give or take," I answered. "Joining SHIELD nullified the rest of my contract, but I was planning to retire anyway."

"That bad?"

I inhaled a deep breath and took a minute to eat a few more cherries. Buck gazed at me, waiting. Finally, I swallowed the last bit of a cherry and dropped the pit into the cup. 

"Being a medic means you get to see some rough things, and they stick. They stick really well, and they're hard to shake."

Bucky lowered his head, and his hands stilled. Slowly, he moved his metal hand onto my knee. It was almost startling, if it wasn't for the fact that he was being so gentle. He was never the one to initiate physical contact. 

"They get easier," he said quietly. "Not better. Not really, but easier to handle."

I thought about that as we sat there together, in the floor of a half-finished apartment building while potatoes boiled on a camp stove.