Chapter Text
Steve pulled up to the shop, glancing over at Bucky beside him.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Buck?” Steve asked him for the hundredth time. Bucky gave him a tight smile.
“Steve. I’ve been back for over a year… I’m alright, I promise. I… I want to do this.” Bucky took a deep breath, laughing slightly as he looked into the eyes of Steve, his best friend, his saviour. “Besides. How much trouble could I possibly get in in a flower shop?”
Steve barked out a laugh, but the nervous look hadn’t left his eyes yet.
“You’re probably right. Though, knowing you, you’d find a way,” he added.
Bucky smirked.
“Punk.”
Bucky looked down at himself. The email had said to dress ‘smart-casual’, and he hoped his outfit qualified as such: he was wearing a (borrowed) pale plaid shirt under a blue sweater, paired with dark fitted jeans and brown boots. He had to admit that for all his integrating back to the regular world, he couldn’t shake feeling like his feet were naked when he wore anything but boots. Steve had told him several (possibly too many) times that he looked great, but Bucky was still nervous: this new uniform, of the everyday, regular guy, was still a foreign concept.
“Okay, okay. I’m going. I’ll, uh, see you later?” Bucky asked slightly uncertainly.
Steve smiled at him, genuinely this time.
"You'll be done at four, right? I'll see you at home. And hey,” he called back as Bucky got out the car. “We’re getting out, Buck.”
Bucky smiled back at his long lost friend.
“Yeah, Stevie. We’re getting out.”
--
Bucky wandered through the door, immediately met by the scent of hundreds, if not thousands, of different kinds of flowers. He could pick them all out easily – roses, lilies, hydrangeas, bluebottles, daffodils – with his heightened sense of smell. Although Bucky would have thought it would have been overpowering, it was actually just bare of that: there was a light, aired out feel to the shop, the ventilation carefully planned out to stop customers being overwhelmed. Bucky certainly appreciated it.
He approached the counter, and was faced with a young woman with long strawberry blond hair and a pastel blue polo with a matching cardigan. She looked up at him expectantly, face open and kind, but with an edge to it.
“Can I help you?” she asked cordially.
“Uh, yeah, hi, I’m uh, my name is James? I’m here for the-” thankfully she cut off his stuttering. Bucky was kicking himself on the inside for sounding like such a bumbling idiot.
But the woman didn’t seem too fazed by his nervous disposition.
“Oh, right! Hi, James, it’s nice to meet you – my name is Lydia – I’m the manager of this place.” She said, smiling now. Bucky exhaled, trying to return her smile without looking intimidating. Or creepy. Either one.
“So, do you want to follow me to the back, and we’ll have a little chat?” she asked, getting straight to business. Bucky nodded, smiling slightly more easily now.
“Yeah – Yeah, sure,” he replied. She gave him another soft smile, and then looked over his shoulder.
“Tanesha? Can you keep an eye on things for a while?”
Bucky turned round, surprised he hadn’t noticed the teenage girl putting out flower pots at the side of the room. The fact that he hadn’t clocked her both freaked him out and comforted him: it meant his deprogramming was working, that he was no longer thinking as a soldier and had begun thinking as a man.
But this also made him vulnerable again.
Shaking this thought off, he followed Lydia to a room at the back of the building, with a small kitchen, some couches and a table – he assumed the staff room. The informal feel to the whole place appealed to Bucky.
“Okay, so your ‘interview’” – she said this with actual air quotes, almost rolling her eyes – “won’t start until Asher, the owner, gets here? But I thought I could just find out a little more about you in the mean time?” she asked, smiling conspiratorially at him. Bucky decided he liked this girl. She put him at ease.
“Yeah sure, uh, ask away,” he replied easily.
“How did you find out about the job?” she asked, clearly starting him out easy. Something about the friendly but cautious way she talked to him told Bucky that Lydia knew more about him than she let on.
“Uh, I saw it online? Was looking through some job listings, you know, and it seemed like it’d be a good fit for me, ma’am,” he replied. She grinned at him.
“Please, please, call me Lydia. This place is pretty casual,” she told him, laughing slightly.
“So, you’re ex-military, right?” she asked casually, but Bucky could see something stirring behind her eyes. He nodded.
“Yeah, Special Forces. Basically served my whole life,” he said, thinking of the extremely simplified version of his life story SHIELD had told him to adopt as his own. “What gave me away?” He joked, although he knew she’d seen it on his (extremely fabricated) resume.
Lydia smiled at him, sympathetically. Bucky didn’t miss the slight glance to his hands, clasped on the table – one flesh, one black metal. Since coming back, Tony had equipped Bucky with a brand new arm: this one black, and removable, with fake pads for his fingers and a softer, more matte look than his previous steel arm. For all intents and purposes it was a human arm, save the look. Tony had offered to make it look even more human, but Bucky didn’t see the point: he was different, and wasn’t ashamed of it.
“Yeah, I got sent back on injury. Luckily I have some very smart friends in high places,” he added, flexing his synthetic fingers. Lydia raised her eyebrows, impressed.
“Pretty cool,” she murmured.
“Yeah. Don’t worry, it basically works the same as my regular arm – if not better, so it won’t affect how I work or anything.” This was Bucky’s only reservation about having such an obvious prosthetic – he was sick of people being scared of him.
“Even if it did it would be fine, James,” Lydia said, smiling at him. For the first time Bucky noticed the silver chain around her neck, dropping into her top; but he could see the square outline. Lydia palmed her dog tags.
“You served?” he asked, surprised. Not because she was a woman – he understood how the world worked now, how it had evolved – but she didn’t seem like the type: too intellectual, too relaxed.
She shook her head, slightly sadly.
“No, uh, my – someone I knew.” She said shortly. Bucky understood immediately.
“I’m sorry,” he offered. She rolled her eyes, smiling at him.
“Thanks. But I understand, you know? If things get tough for you, I can help you. Your terms, James.”
He nodded, struck by Lydia’s empathy.
“Thanks. I, I appreciate it. To uh,” he rubbed the back of his neck, feeling slightly better about opening up to this woman, “To tell you the truth, this is my first gig in the real world. I’m not joking when I say I’ve been away my whole life.” His new story was much like Natasha’s real one: trained as a kid in Russia, recruited as a spy for the USA, fighting on both sides of any war, never sure who’s orders he was working on, but doing what he did best: point, and shoot. That part was true, at least.
Of course, this was all ‘classified’. But if Bucky ever let anything slip, it was this version of his life he was to spill out.
Never a real event. Ever.
--
He and Lydia chatted about the job for a while, about what it entailed – basically, Bucky had to learn a bit about flower arranging, about what different flowers mean, what scents work together. About 20 minutes into Lydia giving him a slightly intense lecture about roses, the owner Asher showed up. He was a tall guy in his thirties with brown eyes and floppy brown hair, and he vaguely reminded Bucky of a Labrador. Bucky’s hopeful boss to be had an overwhelming sense of joy and enthusiasm about him, as if he couldn’t imagine anything more important to the world than making sure people got the right flowers for the right occasion.
When he took of his bright pink cardigan (which clashed with the pastel blue polo shirt in such an overwhelming way that Bucky was getting a headache just looking at it) Bucky noticed the top half of the man’s right arm was covered in bright realistic floral tattoos, but when he reached for a bouquet of snapdragons on a high shelf, a long jagged scar was revealed on the inside of the man’s bicep, which Bucky immediately assessed was a stab wound.
He didn’t know what to make of this.
This was what Bucky still had trouble processing – the complexity of people. He had been trained to read people in a specific way, to make snap judgements about what their actions would be. Bucky could look at someone, at how they hold themselves, their facial expressions – and he could make a pretty accurate guess on how much they notice of their surroundings, the speed of their reflexes… how easy they were to kill.
But what really got him, was how much people really seemed to contradict themselves. It bothered him that Asher could have such a gentle nature, yet adapt to an authoritative role with such ease. That Lydia, with her somewhat cold and academic exterior, could be so empathetic.
In his head, Bucky knew this boiled down to the fact that for so long he’d seen people only as targets. Because if he began to think of them as people, confusing, interesting, individuals, he might just start to think twice about putting a bullet through their head.
And weapons don’t think.
--
“So, James. Tell me a bit about why you think you’d be a good addition to our little shop here,” said Asher with his easy smile after a couple of hours of induction to the shop.
After doing a bit of research on job interviews, Bucky had prepared a vague, stock answer about how he liked to work in a team, was organised and punctual, etcetera; but for once, he decided to go with something close to the truth.
Nervously, Bucky looked somewhere above Asher’s eyes.
“Well, uh, I’ve spent most of my life in the armed forces, where you can’t think about people much – who they are? I guess what I like about being a florist is that you need to, to interact with people? Find out something about them. I know I don’t have much experience in this, this area,”
He rubbed the back of his neck, laughing out a breath. What the fuck was he saying? But Asher was looking at him encouragingly. Something about the man’s open expression made him want to continue.
(He wouldn’t admit that it reminded him of Steve.)
“But I- I’d like to be able to help make people happy, I guess. I really think getting the right kinds of flowers to people can do that… even in a small way? I do have a lot to learn, but yeah. I think that’s important.” He trailed off. Bucky probably sounded like an idiot.
But Asher grinned, holding out his hand.
“Honestly, James, that’s why I got into this business. You get it, dude. Congratulations! The job’s yours.”
Bucky raised his eyebrows, a surprised ghost of a smile coming to his face as he shook the man’s hand. His boss’ hand.
He had a job. A job that was not killing people. The furthest job you could get from killing people, really (unless they were fatally allergic to pollen, Bucky thought morbidly).
He had to admit he was pretty excited about it.
“…so this week will be a trial period, but it’s really just a formality- oh shit! Lydia, take it from here. Terrence just texted me- massive code orange!” Asher said as he ran out the door, pulling his pink cardigan back on.
Bucky looked at the manager, slightly alarmed. Lydia rolled her eyes fondly.
“Spend too much time with Ash, you almost begin to believe flower deliveries are life and death. In case you were wondering, ‘code orange’ is when a delivery got damaged on its way. End of the world stuff here,” she deadpanned.
A laugh barked out of Bucky. Lydia let out a small giggle too, and got up to show him a chart pinned to a cabinet in the kitchen area.
“Yeah, this is Asher’s ridiculous code schedule. He wants everyone to learn it. Sometimes, on a slow day we’ll mix up colours on purpose to piss him off,” she smirked.
Yeah, Bucky was going to enjoy it here.
--
“Steve?”
“Hey! How’d it go?”
“Yeah, great – I start tomorrow.”
Bucky could here Steve’s smile through the phone.
“Ah, amazing! So proud of you, Buck. This- this is gonna be great.”
Bucky smiled at Steve’s encouragement.
“I know, it sounds way better than I thought it would be. The people are great and, I don’t know, Steve, I think I could really care about this? I know it sounds dumb, with my history, but flowers- they’re pretty cool. Agh, I feel like an asshole already-”
“Bucky. This is what we want – this is what I want for you. For me too. We deserve to find what makes us happy. The fact that floristry could possibly bring you that? Makes it the best goddamn job in the world, pal.”
Bucky softly smiled at this, walking down this quiet street in the middle of Nowhere, Virginia.
This is what they’d planned for. They’d moved states, changed their names, together trying to shed every last drop of the lives they’d been forced into for the last 70 years.
They really were getting out.