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Bucky was a light sleeper. Even before HYDRA, before the war, he woke to the sound of horns blaring, or his sisters crying when they were babies. Now, he woke to the sound of Valkyrie's muffled whimpers next to him.
He turned onto his left side so he draped his arm over her waist. He didn't dare try to wake her. In his experience, waking Val from a nightmare resulted in getting punched in the throat. However, unlike Bucky, Val slept like a rock, so he could at least hold her through it.
It was still new, sharing a bed with someone. The quarters were tight in the temporary dormitories, as it was a slow process to build a New Asgard from scratch. Anyone who could bunk together, for any reason, was welcome. And Bucky and Val had found a reason.
Val's whimpers turned deeper, a guttural sound in the back of her throat, until she shuddered awake with a gasp. Bucky held onto her as her limbs relaxed, but he released her when she rolled her shoulders, a signal that she wanted him to back off..
"You okay?" Bucky asked.
She pushed back the blankets and sat up. Her naked body was silhouetted against the light streaming in from the crack at the bottom of the door. "I need a drink."
"That bad, huh?"
He could see Val's eyes gleaming in the darkness as she considered him. "What's the good of you having that robot arm if you can't stash drinks in it?"
"If we had drinks, I could try," Bucky replied, both of them knowing full and well that's not how any of this worked. At the moment, they were on bare necessities. Hopefully, that would change soon. "You want to talk about it?"
"There's nothing to talk about. It's nothing new. I've got a brain full of nightmare fuel and it picks a new show every night." She rubbed the palms of her hands over her bent knees. "When I left Sakaar, I thought I was saving something. I couldn't save any of it. I never could."
He gently rested his warm hand on her thigh and she didn't brush him off. It still made his heart race every time she allowed him to touch her.
From the first time Bucky had seen her, standing on the cliffside that would become the peak of New Asgard, the wind whipping her hair over her face, he had been drawn to her. Maybe he had recognized her pain, but in the days following the snap, everyone had been in pain. It had been months and everyone was still in pain, like it had happened yesterday.
Everyone was finding ways to fight off that pain.
"Do you want to commiserate or do you want a pep talk?" Bucky asked.
"Neither." Val shimmied back down into a lying position, but instead of resting her head on her own pillow, she curled up against Bucky, her head on his chest. He couldn't see her face and her voice was soft, her lips just grazing against his skin as she said, "Did you know the Valkyrie would ride pegasus into battle?"
No, I didn't."
She never talked about it, right down to why she had taken on the, for all intents and purposes, military rank as her name. He didn't even know her real name, not that it mattered. He went by a nickname, too, after all.
"We did. It was the greatest honor. None of the other warriors in Asgard rode them—they didn't take kindly to men. When you finished your training, you traveled to the Cloud Realm, and I know it sound stupid and fake, but it's real. It was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen. And there were hundreds of them, these wild pegasus. You had to earn one's trust. It could take days, even weeks. But once you bonded with it... it wasn't like anything else. I'm strong, but it made me feel invincible."
Bucky rubbed his thumb along the inside of her wrist. "Is it still there? The Cloud Realm?"
"As far as I know. It wasn't part of Asgard."
"The pegasus aren't extinct, are they? Could you still go there?"
Val tensed slightly. "I'm sure half of the pegasus are still there. In theory, yes, we could go, but I'm the only person alive who has ever been there and we travelled by Bifrost. I don't know the long way."
"We could figure it out," Bucky said. "There are still some intergalactic contacts who might know a guy, you know? We have access to ships."
"And where, exactly, would I keep a pegasus?"
He shrugged. "I'll build you a paddock."
She turned, shifting her weight onto her elbow so she could look up at Bucky. "Why do you want to do all of this? You barely know me. Fucking isn't the same as knowing."
"No, but I know what it's like to lose yourself. If there's anything I can do to give you even some of it back, then I want to try. It's the whole reason I'm here. I've had nothing, and then I had help. I want to do the same."
"Searching for pegasus in space isn't the same as building a few houses," Val said.
Bucky laughed. "Yeah, it sounds way cooler when you say it like that."
"You're ridiculous." She leaned in and kissed him. It was soft at first, but as she reached up to touch his cheek, Bucky's skin began to tingle with arousal. Val tightened her grip on his shoulder, her fingernails biting into his skin.
His arms snaked around her body. His flesh hand cupped her backside and he pulled her into his lap. She straddled him, and it would have been so easy to push right into her.
Val tipped her head back. "We'd have to wait until the town is put together. Even if we figure it out and map a course, the people come first."
"Of course," Bucky said. He hadn't put a lot of thought into this yet, and even less thought since Val started kissing him, but that seemed obvious.
"And you don't build a paddock for a pegasus. They need a place to nest."
Bucky tucked his hand around the back of her neck and kissed her again. "Then I'll plant a tree."