the only love I know is fictional

The pasta had long since stopped steaming. The television droned quietly in the background, though you couldn't have said what was playing. Every few minutes your eyes drifted back toward the digital clock on the oven before reaching automatically for your phone. No missed calls. No messages. You typed out three different texts asking where he was before deleting each one. Clark hated making people worry. If he hadn't reached out, there had to be a reason.

The sound of a key finally scraping against the apartment door pulled you to your feet before you even realized you'd moved.

Relief came first.

Then it disappeared just as quickly.

"Hey," you started, a smile already forming.

It faded the moment Clark stepped inside.

He was still dressed for work. Blue button-down with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, tie hanging loose around his neck, messenger bag slipping carelessly from one shoulder. His hair looked windswept, though not in the usual way it did after flying. It looked as though he'd been running his hands through it for hours.

But none of that was what stopped you.

It was his face.

Every bit of warmth had drained from it. His skin looked almost gray beneath the apartment lights, his jaw tense enough to ache, his eyes unfocused as they wandered across the room without really seeing any of it. He looked like someone who had walked home in a dream and wasn't entirely certain where he'd ended up.

"Clark?"

He looked at you then.

Slowly.

As though he'd forgotten you were supposed to be here.

His expression didn't change. No tired smile. No quiet "Hi, honey." No teasing apology about being late.

He simply stared.

Your heartbeat stumbled.

He closed the apartment door with unusual care, one hand lingering on the handle long after it clicked shut. His fingers loosened around his keys. They slipped from his hand, clattering against the hardwood floor with a sharp metallic echo that filled the silence between you.

Clark didn't even look down.

You crossed the room in seconds.

"Hey." Your voice softened instinctively. "Talk to me."

He blinked as if your words had reached him from somewhere far away. Only then did you notice how bloodshot his eyes were. They weren't red from exhaustion or lack of sleep. They weren't irritated from smoke or dust after some rescue.

He had been crying.

Your stomach dropped so suddenly it almost hurt.

"Baby, what happened?"

For several long seconds he said nothing.

His mouth opened.

Closed again.

His throat worked around words that refused to come, and you watched his chest rise in one uneven breath after another. Clark Kent, who always seemed to know exactly what to say, suddenly looked like language itself had abandoned him.

Then, barely above a whisper, he managed one word.

"...Pa."

Your mind refused to process it.

"What?"

He swallowed so hard you saw it.

"My dad."

His voice cracked around the second word, splintering into something so raw it hardly sounded like him anymore.

"He..."

Another breath.

Another failed attempt.

"He died."

The apartment became impossibly quiet.

Jonathan Kent?

No.

That couldn't be right.

Not Jonathan.

The man who greeted everyone with a smile that reached his eyes. The man who insisted on sending you home with leftovers every time you visited the farm. The man who hugged you like family before you and Clark had even said the word love to each other.

He couldn't be...

Clark gave a tiny shake of his head before you'd spoken a single word, almost as though he knew exactly where your thoughts had gone.

"It was his heart."

His voice sounded hollow.

"They said it happened fast."

He stopped.

His lips trembled.

"They..."

The sentence never finished.

His hand came up to cover his eyes as if hiding from the words would somehow make them less real. His shoulders, broad enough to carry collapsing buildings and crashing airplanes, suddenly folded inward.

It happened so quickly you barely caught him.

One second he was standing.

The next his knees gave way.

You wrapped both arms around him before he reached the floor, feeling the full weight of him sink against you. Clark clung to you with both hands, his forehead pressing into your shoulder so tightly it almost hurt, as though you were the only solid thing left in a world that had suddenly come apart.

"I'm sorry."

The words were barely audible, carried into the fabric of your sweater more than spoken aloud. His forehead remained pressed against your shoulder, his hands clutching the back of your shirt with surprising desperation. You had never felt Clark hold onto anything like this. Usually, whenever life knocked him down, he was careful not to let too much of his weight settle on anyone else. Even exhausted, even bruised, there was always something restrained about the way he leaned on people.

Not now.

Now he seemed to be holding onto you because he wasn't entirely convinced he could stay standing without you.

You slid one hand slowly into his hair, your fingers combing through the dark curls at the nape of his neck. "Clark?"

"I'm sorry."

Your brow furrowed.

The apology sounded genuine. Not polite. Not automatic. It was the kind of apology that came from somewhere deep enough to make your own chest ache.

"What are you apologizing for?"

He didn't answer immediately. Instead, his grip tightened almost painfully around your sweater. You felt him inhale, but the breath caught halfway into his lungs, breaking apart before it ever became steady.

"I should've known."

His voice was hoarse, scraped raw.

"I should've..." He swallowed hard. "I don't know."

The confession seemed to frustrate him as much as the grief itself. He let out a humorless laugh that lasted less than a second before it dissolved into another shaky breath.

"I just..." His fingers flexed against your back. "Something should've felt different."

You stayed quiet.

You'd learned a long time ago that Clark didn't need someone to finish his sentences. He needed someone willing to wait for them.

"I always know they're there."

His words came slowly now, as though he was trying to explain something he'd never had to put into language before.

"Even when I'm here."

He lifted his head just enough to look somewhere over your shoulder instead of at you.

"If I wanted to..." His voice cracked. "I could focus and hear Ma humming while she's making coffee. I know the sound of the porch swing when Pa sits outside after dinner. I know which floorboard creaks in the hallway because he never remembers to step over it."

His lips trembled.

"I never listened because I was checking on them." A sad smile flickered across his face before disappearing again. "I listened because..." He stopped, struggling to find words large enough for the feeling. "Because they were there."

Silence settled between you.

"I always knew they were there."

The last sentence came out almost childlike.

Small. Lost.

His eyes finally found yours, red-rimmed and impossibly tired, and something inside them seemed to give way. "And now..." His breathing faltered. "I keep reaching for him." Almost unconsciously, his hand lifted toward his own chest, as though some instinct still expected to find his father there, before falling uselessly back into his lap. "I keep... trying to listen."

He stopped, swallowing around words that suddenly seemed too heavy to carry.

"And there's nothing."

The word barely rose above a whisper, but it seemed to hollow him out from the inside. You watched the realization settle across his face all over again, not simply that Jonathan was dead, but that the silence wasn't temporary. It wasn't the kind that ended when someone came back from the store or walked in through the front door after finishing chores. There would never again be a heartbeat to find if he reached for it. Never another laugh drifting across the Kansas fields while Clark worked beside him. Never the absent-minded whistle Jonathan always seemed to do while repairing the tractor, or the familiar creak of the porch steps beneath his boots at the end of the day.

That was the grief written across Clark's face.

Not one terrible moment.

A lifetime of ordinary moments that had ended all at once.

"I know that sounds ridiculous," he whispered.

"It doesn't."

"I flew there."

His eyes drifted toward the apartment window as if he could still see the farm from here.

"They'd already..." His jaw tightened so hard you thought it might hurt. "The paramedics were packing up."

His voice grew quieter.

"The house was so loud."

You frowned slightly.

"What do you mean?"

"People."

His gaze remained fixed somewhere beyond the apartment walls, seeing a place hundreds of miles away instead.

"The sheriff," he said quietly. "The neighbors. Someone crying outside. The radio in the ambulance." His throat worked painfully. "So many heartbeats."

He swallowed, and for a moment you thought he was finished.

"But not his."

The words settled heavily between you, too final to push away. He closed his eyes as another tear escaped down his cheek. "I've never..." His voice faltered. "I've never heard the farm without him in it."

Your own vision blurred. Slowly, you reached up and cupped his face, brushing away the tears with your thumbs. His skin felt cold despite the warmth of the apartment, his breathing uneven beneath your hands. When he finally looked at you, there was nothing left of the man who stood in front of cameras or walked into danger without hesitation. There was no certainty in his expression, no quiet confidence that everything would somehow work itself out. There was only a son who had just discovered the world could become unrecognizable in a single afternoon.

"I keep thinking..." His voice was so quiet you had to lean closer to hear it. "If I'd left work earlier... if I'd called him this morning instead of thinking I'd do it tonight... if I'd gone home this weekend instead of next..." He squeezed his eyes shut. "I know it wouldn't change anything." His shoulders sagged beneath the weight of the admission. "I know that." Another tear slipped free. "But my mind won't stop making bargains anyway."

Your heart ached because you understood exactly what he meant. Grief was cruel like that. It didn't care about reason or facts. It took every memory, every decision, every ordinary moment and turned it over in desperate search of one tiny change that might somehow rewrite the ending. It convinced you that if you looked hard enough, there had to be a version of the day where the phone never rang.

You rested your forehead gently against his, your hands never leaving his face. "You know what I think?"

He barely moved, only the smallest shake of his head.

"I think the little boy who used to race through cornfields looking for his dad still believes he can find him if he searches hard enough."

Clark's breath caught sharply.

"You're not trying to solve this because you're Superman," you whispered, your thumb slowly tracing beneath his eye. "You're doing it because you're his son. Sons aren't supposed to know how to lose their fathers. They look for reasons because the alternative is accepting that there wasn't anything they could have done."

The words seemed to stop something inside him. His face crumpled all over again, but this time it wasn't panic. It was recognition. As though you'd finally named the ache he'd been carrying since the phone rang.

"I just..." His voice broke into something heartbreakingly small. "I wasn't ready."

It was the truest thing he'd said all evening.

Not ready for the call from Martha. Not ready to walk into a house that had always felt impossibly alive and realize something essential had been taken from it. Not ready to discover that, for all his strength, all his speed, all the impossible things he could do, there were still moments that reduced him to exactly what Jonathan had always insisted he was before anything else.

Just his boy.

You pulled him back into your arms before he had the chance to retreat into himself again, and this time he came without hesitation. He folded against you completely, burying his face in the curve of your neck, his hands clutching the back of your sweater with the quiet desperation of someone trying to anchor himself to the only thing that still felt steady. His shoulders shook as another sob finally escaped him, softer now, exhausted rather than frantic, the kind that came after fighting against grief for far too long.

You didn't tell him it would get easier. You didn't promise that time healed everything or that Jonathan would always be with him. Those were truths for another day, when the wound wasn't still fresh enough to bleed with every breath.

Tonight, your only job was to carry what little weight you could.

So you held him.

The drive to Smallville passed in almost complete silence.

Clark had insisted on driving.

You hadn't questioned it, even though the trip that normally took hours could have lasted less than a minute if he'd wanted it to. Flying would have been easy. Effortless.

This wasn't about getting there.

It was about postponing the moment he had to arrive.

His hands never left the steering wheel. They stayed locked in the same position for mile after mile, his fingers wrapped so tightly around the leather that the skin across his knuckles had gone pale. Every so often you watched his grip loosen for the briefest second before tightening all over again, as though his body remembered how to relax only to immediately decide it couldn't afford to.

Neither of you reached for the radio.

The only sounds inside the truck were the steady hum of the tires against the road and the occasional click of the turn signal whenever the highway gave way to familiar country roads.

Outside, Kansas stretched endlessly beneath a fading evening sky.

Fields of corn swayed in the breeze exactly as they always had. Weathered fences divided acres of farmland. Windmills turned lazily in the distance. A farmer climbed onto his tractor as though this were any other day.

Everything was exactly the same.

That was the cruelest part.

The world hadn't changed to acknowledge that Jonathan Kent was gone.

The fields he'd worked were still standing.

The roads he had driven every morning were still there.

Life had simply... continued.

Clark's eyes never left the road, but you watched his jaw tighten as familiar landmarks appeared one after another. The old grain elevator. The church where the annual harvest festival was held every autumn. The diner where Jonathan insisted they made the best pie in Kansas despite Clark teasing him every single time.

You wondered if he was seeing what was in front of him.

Or remembering everything that had happened there instead.

When the farmhouse finally appeared over the hill, your chest tightened.

It looked exactly as it always had.

White paint.

Red barn.

The porch swing Jonathan had repaired himself after one particularly bad storm.

A light glowed warmly from the kitchen window, spilling across the front porch.

For one impossible second your mind expected the front door to open and Jonathan to step outside, wiping his hands on an old dish towel with that familiar smile already spreading across his face.

"There they are!"

You could almost hear him.

Instead, the front door opened slowly.

Martha stepped outside.

She had always seemed so steady.

The kind of woman who somehow made every room feel safe simply by standing inside it.

Tonight she looked smaller.

Not physically.

Grief had a way of folding people inward, softening the edges of them beneath a weight no one else could see.

She wrapped her cardigan tighter around herself against an evening that wasn't particularly cold, her eyes searching the truck before it had even come to a complete stop.

Clark shut off the engine.

Neither of you moved.

His hands remained on the steering wheel long after the truck had fallen silent.

He stared at the farmhouse.

At the porch.

At the empty rocking chair beside the front door.

You reached across the center console and rested your hand gently over his.

Only then did he blink.

As though remembering where he was.

He climbed out of the truck.

For a single heartbeat, he and Martha simply looked at one another across the yard.

Neither of them spoke.

Neither of them smiled.

They didn't have to.

Whatever strength Clark had managed to hold together during the drive disappeared the instant he saw her standing there alone.

"My boy."

Her voice was soft.

Tired.

Full of a love that had survived one impossible day already.

Clark crossed the yard in two long strides.

He reached her almost before you'd registered he'd started moving, and the second Martha opened her arms, he folded into them without hesitation. He bent instinctively, burying his face against her shoulder like he had done a hundred times as a child, and for the first time since the phone call, he let himself be somebody's son instead of someone everyone else depended on.

"Ma..."

The word broke apart before he could finish it.

"I'm sorry."

Martha's own eyes filled immediately, but she only held him tighter, one hand cradling the back of his head exactly the way she must have when scraped knees and childhood nightmares had still been the worst things she'd ever had to comfort him through.

"Oh, Clark."

His shoulders shook beneath her hands.

"I'm so sorry."

"No."

"I should've been here."

"No."

"I should've come home sooner."

She pulled back just enough to cup his face between both hands, making him look at her despite the tears running unchecked down both their faces.

"This is not yours to carry."

"It should've been."

"It isn't."

Her expression softened in a way that somehow made your own throat tighten.

"If I'd known..." he whispered.

"I know."

"No, Ma, if I'd just..." His voice cracked. "If I'd come last weekend instead. If I hadn't kept saying next week..."

She shook her head before he could finish.

"Clark."

The way she said his name was gentle, but it carried the same certainty that had guided him since he was a little boy.

"Listen to me."

He did.

"Your Pa spent every single day of his life making sure you understood one thing."

She brushed away a tear with the pad of her thumb.

"He loved you because you were his son."

Not because he could fly.

Not because he could lift tractors or outrun storms or hear heartbeats from miles away.

Just because he was Clark.

"He never looked at you and saw someone responsible for fixing everything."

Her own voice wavered now.

"He saw the little boy who tracked mud through my kitchen, who stayed up too late reading with a flashlight under the covers, who still called every Sunday just to ask if we needed anything from Metropolis."

A watery smile touched her lips for only a moment.

"He never expected miracles from you."

Clark squeezed his eyes shut.

"He just..." Martha's voice finally broke. "He just wanted his son to come through that front door."

She rested her forehead against his.

"And you did."

For a long moment neither of them spoke.

Mother and son simply stood in the middle of the yard, holding onto each other. both grieving the same man in different ways, each trying to be strong enough for the other while quietly falling apart themselves.

You stayed where you were beside the truck.

It didn't feel like your place to step into that moment.

Jonathan had welcomed you into this family without hesitation, had always greeted you with a hug before you'd even crossed the threshold, had somehow managed to make the farmhouse feel like home every time you visited. Even so, this grief belonged to them first. You folded your hands together, giving them the privacy they deserved, your own heart aching as you watched Clark's shoulders shake beneath his mother's embrace.

Martha who noticed you immediately.

She slowly lifted her head from Clark's shoulder, her eyes finding yours across the yard. Even through the exhaustion written into every line of her face, something softened.

"Oh, sweetheart."

Her voice was quiet, but it carried across the evening air.

"What are you doing all the way over there?"

You hesitated, suddenly feeling unsure of where to put your hands, your feet, yourself.

"I just..." You offered a small, uncertain smile that disappeared almost immediately. "I wanted to give you both a moment."

Martha's eyes filled again.

"You never have to stand over there."

The invitation wasn't loud.

It didn't need to be.

It was the same warmth she'd shown you from the first day Clark had nervously brought you home, insisting you call before making the drive because she'd "have something in the oven by then."

You crossed the yard slowly, almost reluctantly, stopping a respectful distance away. Suddenly, you weren't sure what to do with yourself. Jonathan had always been the one to close that distance first, waving you over before you'd even reached the porch, pulling you into one of his warm hugs while insisting you come inside because dinner was nearly ready. Standing there now, with only the wind moving through the fields, the absence of that familiar welcome felt almost tangible.

"I'm so sorry, Martha."

The words felt painfully small the moment they left your mouth.

"So, so sorry."

Martha reached for your hand before you could say anything else, holding it gently between both of hers. Her hands were cooler than you remembered, but the gesture was exactly the same as it had always been, warm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

"I know," she said softly, her thumb brushing across your knuckles. "Thank you for coming, sweetheart."

You blinked back the sting behind your eyes.

"I wouldn't have been anywhere else."

Something fragile passed over Martha's face, the corners of her mouth lifting into the faintest, saddest smile.

"Jonathan would've been happy you were here. He couldn’t stop talking about you, and how proud he was of Clark that he chose you as his life partner."

Your throat tightened. Without thinking, your eyes drifted toward the porch, almost expecting the front door to swing open and Jonathan to appear with that familiar grin, asking why everyone was still standing outside when there was coffee getting cold on the kitchen table. Instead, the porch swing rocked gently in the evening breeze, empty except for the memories attached to it.

"I keep expecting him to come out that door," you admitted quietly.

Martha followed your gaze. For a long moment she simply looked at the farmhouse, at the windows glowing warmly against the coming dusk, at the home she'd shared with Jonathan for decades.

"So do I."

She didn't try to hide behind comforting words or quiet strength. She didn't pretend she was coping better than she was.

It was simply the truth.

Clark’s hand searched for yours with quiet instinct, fingers finding yours almost immediately before weaving themselves between them. The gesture was so natural, so unconscious, that it made your chest ache. He didn't look at you. He didn't have to. The small squeeze of his hand said everything he couldn't put into words.

You squeezed back just as gently.

Sometimes love wasn't knowing the right thing to say.

Sometimes it was simply refusing to let someone grieve alone.

For a long while, the three of you remained exactly where you were, standing together beneath the porch light without moving toward the house or away from it. Eventually Martha drew in a slow, unsteady breath and looked toward the front door.

"We should go inside," she murmured, her voice catching almost imperceptibly. "It doesn't feel much like home right now."

Clark finally lifted his eyes to the farmhouse. They lingered on the porch, the empty swing, the kitchen window where the light still burned, before he gently squeezed both your hand and his mother's.

"It still is," he said quietly. "It just... needs us in it."

Martha smiled. It was small and exhausted, but unmistakably real.

"Your Pa would've said exactly the same thing."

Clark lowered his head with a broken smile of his own.

"I know."

The funeral took place three days later beneath a sky so painfully blue it almost felt cruel.

Smallville seemed to empty itself into the little white church on the edge of town. Every pew filled long before the service began, and people continued standing quietly along the back walls and outside beneath the open doors. Farmers arrived in polished boots that still carried traces of dirt from the fields. Elderly couples walked in hand in hand. Teachers who had retired years ago. Mechanics. Cashiers from the grocery store. Children Jonathan had once coached in little league who now had children of their own. Men spoke in hushed voices about the time he'd helped rebuild a barn after a tornado. Women remembered casseroles that had appeared on their porch after difficult winters without anyone ever asking for them. Someone quietly laughed through tears about the old tractor Jonathan had somehow managed to keep running decades longer than it should have.

You realized, listening to the conversations around you, that half the people in this room weren't here because Jonathan had done one extraordinary thing for them.

They were here because he'd spent an entire lifetime doing ordinary things with extraordinary kindness.

One fence repaired.

One meal delivered.

One conversation on a front porch that lasted longer than it needed to because someone looked like they needed company.

One life at a time.

Clark accepted every hug offered to him. He thanked every person who stepped into the receiving line, shook every hand, listened to every story about his father with quiet patience, even when you could tell he barely heard the words. His smile never quite reached his eyes, but he gave it anyway because that's what Jonathan would have done. Watching him was like watching someone move through water. Every gesture looked slightly delayed, as though grief had slowed the world around him by just enough to make everything feel unreal.

When the pastor quietly announced that Jonathan's son would like to say a few words, Clark froze.

You felt his hand tighten around yours.

He hadn't wanted to speak.

The night before, he'd sat awake at the kitchen table long after everyone else had gone to bed, staring at a notebook that remained mostly blank.

"I can't do it," he'd whispered.

"Yes, you can," Martha had answered gently as she rested a hand over his. "You don't have to say everything. Just tell them about your father."

Now, standing in front of the church, Clark unfolded the piece of paper he'd carried in his jacket pocket all morning.

He looked down at it for several long seconds.

Then he smiled to himself.

Small.

Sad.

He folded it back up.

"I wrote something," he admitted, his voice carrying softly through the sanctuary. "I even practiced it." A few quiet smiles appeared around the room. Clark glanced toward the casket, his eyes lingering there. "But..." His smile trembled. "...Pa would've spent the entire service making fun of me if I stood up here reading from a script."

A gentle wave of laughter rippled through the church.

Not because the joke was particularly funny, but because everyone could picture Jonathan doing exactly that.

Clark let the sound settle before speaking again.

"My dad believed every problem had a solution."

He rubbed one thumb nervously against the folded paper still in his hand.

"If your fence broke, you fixed it. If the crops failed, you planted again next season. If your neighbor needed help, you showed up before they had the chance to ask." He smiled faintly. "And if something couldn't be fixed..." His eyes drifted downward. "...he still believed nobody should have to carry it alone."

Silence settled over the room.

"When I was little," Clark continued, "I honestly thought my dad knew everything."

Another soft laugh drifted through the pews.

"He always had an answer." His smile grew just enough to soften his face. "And when he didn't..." He looked toward Martha. "...he had a way of making you think we'd figure it out together."

His voice became quieter.

"I got older."

A slow breath.

"I realized he didn't have every answer," Clark said with a faint, bittersweet smile. "He just never stopped trying to become the kind of man who could help."

He lowered his eyes for a moment, gathering himself before continuing.

"When I found out I was adopted..." His voice tightened almost immediately. "I spent a long time wondering who I was. I wondered if I belonged here. I wondered whether being different meant I'd always be different."

The church became impossibly still.

Clark looked toward Martha, whose eyes never left him.

"My father never wondered."

The words came out rough, his voice catching around them.

"Not once."

A tear slipped free before he continued.

"He found me abandoned in a field, brought me home, and..." He laughed quietly, shaking his head. "That was it."

He looked down at the folded paper in his hands, turning it over between trembling fingers.

"He didn't ask where I came from. He didn't spend his life waiting for me to become somebody else. He never looked at me and saw a burden or a problem that needed solving." His throat tightened. "He looked at me once..." He paused, swallowing hard enough that the microphone picked it up. "...and decided I was his son."

His hand closed around the paper until it crumpled beneath his fingers.

"That was enough for him."

No one moved.

The room had become so quiet that somewhere near the back of the church you could hear someone trying unsuccessfully to hold back tears.

Clark stood in that silence for a moment before drawing a slow, uneven breath.

"I've been called a lot of things."

A small smile touched his face, fragile enough that it looked like it might disappear at any second.

"Reporter."

A few knowing smiles spread through the congregation.

"Boyfriend."

His eyes found yours.

The look that passed between you lasted only a heartbeat, but it said everything Jonathan never needed to say aloud. The way he'd always pulled out an extra chair for you at Sunday dinner. The way he'd hugged you goodbye every single visit. The way he'd quietly welcomed you into the family long before anyone made it official.

Clark looked away before his composure disappeared completely.

"I've been called other things too."

His voice softened.

"But none of those titles ever mattered as much to me as one."

He stopped.

The sentence refused to come.

His mouth opened once.

Then closed again.

He pressed the heel of his hand briefly against his lips, fighting for a breath that wouldn't shake, and the entire church waited with him. No one looked away. No one hurried him. They all seemed to understand that this wasn't a speech anymore.

It was a son trying to imagine introducing himself to the world without his father in it.

When Clark finally managed to speak, his voice was barely above a whisper.

"The title I've always been proudest of..."

His eyes filled completely.

"...was being Jonathan Kent's son."

The words hung in the sanctuary long after he'd finished speaking.

Clark lowered his head, unable to say another word.

He didn't have to.

There wasn't a single dry eye left in the church.

Long after the last car disappeared down the gravel road and the quiet murmur of voices faded into the distance, Clark remained where he was.

The cemetery had emptied hours ago. Fresh flowers rested against polished headstones, their colors softened beneath the golden light of late afternoon. Somewhere beyond the rows of graves, the wind carried the rustle of cornfields and the distant cry of birds settling for the evening. It was peaceful in the way cemeteries often were. Too peaceful.

Jonathan's headstone looked impossibly small.

You stood several steps behind Clark, close enough that he would know you were there if he reached for you, far enough that this moment could still belong to him. He hadn't spoken since everyone left the church. He hadn't cried either. He simply stood staring at the stone carved with his father's name, as though his mind still hadn't accepted that a lifetime could somehow be reduced to a few dates separated by a dash.

Eventually, he lowered himself onto one knee.

His fingertips brushed carefully across the engraved letters, tracing each one with the same quiet concentration someone might use to memorize a face they were terrified of forgetting. His hand lingered there for a long time before he finally spoke.

"I keep listening."

His voice was barely louder than the wind.

"I keep thinking..." He stopped, swallowing against the tightness in his throat. "I keep thinking if I focus hard enough, I'll hear him."

Silence answered him.

Not dramatic silence.

Just the ordinary sounds of Kansas continuing exactly as they always had.

The grass swayed.

Branches shifted overhead.

A pickup truck rumbled somewhere in the distance.

Clark let out a quiet laugh that broke apart almost as soon as it escaped him.

"You know what's stupid?"

He didn't wait for an answer.

"I can still hear Ma back at the house."

His gaze never left the headstone.

"She's making coffee because she doesn't know what else to do with herself." His lips twitched faintly before the expression disappeared. "I can hear the porch swing moving every time the wind catches it." He drew in another slow breath. "There's a freight train about twelve miles east." Another pause. "Lois is probably arguing with Perry about a headline right now."

His voice grew softer with every sentence.

"The whole world is still..." He searched for the word. "There."

Another long silence settled over the cemetery.

"But not him."

The words seemed to leave something hollow behind.

"I spent my whole life knowing that if I wanted to..." He pressed his fingertips more firmly against the cool stone. "I could find him."

His eyes closed.

"I never needed to."

A tear slipped quietly down his cheek.

"I just knew I could."

His shoulders sagged beneath a weight that no amount of strength could lift.

"And now I keep reaching for something that isn't there anymore."

That was the sentence that finally made you move.

You crossed the few steps separating you without saying a word and lowered yourself into the grass beside him. The earth was still warm from the afternoon sun. You sat close enough that your shoulders almost touched, but you didn't reach for him immediately. Grief had a rhythm of its own, and you'd learned over the last few days not to interrupt it.

For several minutes, neither of you spoke.

The silence between you wasn't uncomfortable.

It was simply shared.

Eventually, almost absentmindedly, Clark leaned sideways until the weight of his shoulder rested against yours.

It was such a small movement that anyone else might have missed it.

You didn't.

"So..." he whispered after a while. "This is what people mean."

You turned your head slightly.

"When they say someone's gone."

You nodded.

He stared out across the cemetery, his expression distant.

"I always thought..." He exhaled slowly. "I don't know."

"You can say it."

"I thought there'd still be..." His brow furrowed in frustration. "Something."

He laughed softly at himself.

"That doesn't even make sense."

"It does."

He looked at you for the first time since sitting down.

"There is something left."

He frowned.

"What?"

You reached over, gently taking his hand where it rested against the grass. His fingers were cool despite the warmth of the evening.

"The way you laugh."

He blinked.

"The way you stop to help people even when you're exhausted."

Your thumb brushed slowly across the back of his hand.

"The way you make pancakes every Sunday because that's what he always did."

A tiny, surprised breath escaped him.

"The way you hold doors open. The way you always ask if everyone got home safely. The way you call your mom every week because you know she'll pretend she doesn't worry if you don't."

Another tear rolled down his face.

"You think those things came from nowhere?"

You gave his hand a gentle squeeze.

"Clark... your father isn't only buried here."

You nodded toward his chest.

"He's walking around inside you."

Clark's eyes drifted back to the headstone.

"I don't know how to do this."

There was no shame in the admission anymore.

Only exhaustion.

You leaned your head carefully against his shoulder.

"You don't."

He frowned.

"What?"

"You don't know how."

You looked out across the endless Kansas fields stretching beyond the cemetery.

"Nobody does."

"I feel like..." He searched for the words for a long time. "...like somebody picked up the whole world and put it back down crooked."

"It probably feels that way because they did."

He let out a shaky breath.

"I can't fix this."

You nodded once.

"No."

"I hate that."

"I know."

He was quiet for a long time before speaking again.

"So..." His voice had become very small. "What am I supposed to do now?"

You thought about Jonathan.

About the way he'd always laughed with his whole chest. The way he'd insisted everyone stay for another slice of pie. The way he'd looked at Clark with uncomplicated pride every single time he walked through the farmhouse door.

Then you answered as honestly as you could.

"You miss him."

Clark closed his eyes.

"You let yourself cry when it hurts."

Another silence.

"You tell stories about him until they stop feeling like stories and start feeling like memories you get to keep."

Your fingers remained intertwined with his.

"And you let the people who love you carry you for a while."

He didn't answer.

So you continued.

"One day, somebody will say something that sounds exactly like him, and you'll laugh."

A faint smile appeared despite the tears.

"And then you'll remember why it sounds like him."

His throat tightened.

"And you'll cry."

You smiled gently.

"For a while, yes."

He looked at you.

"And then?"

You looked back toward the stone.

"And then one day you'll laugh first."

Clark considered that for a long time.

"Do you really believe that?"

"I do."

His thumb slowly brushed across your knuckles.

"My dad used to say..." His voice was steadier now, though still fragile. "'Grief is just love that doesn't have anywhere to go.'"

You smiled through your tears.

"That sounds exactly like Jonathan Kent."

A real smile found Clark's face then.

Not a happy one.

Not even an unbroken one.

But unmistakably real.

"It does."

His gaze lifted toward the endless Kansas sky, where the first hints of evening had begun to soften the horizon.

"You know..." he said quietly, "I spent my whole life believing I was sent here to save the world."

His eyes returned to the earth beneath which his father rested.

"But Pa..."

His voice caught for only a moment.

"He spent his whole life showing me why it deserved saving."

The sun slipped lower, washing the cemetery in amber light.

Clark reached for your hand before you reached for his. His fingers threaded through yours with quiet certainty, holding on not because the grief had become any lighter, but because, at last, he had stopped trying to carry it as though it were his alone.

Your breathing, still trying to find its rhythm again. A little uneven, a little soft, like your body hadn’t quite decided whether to rest or stay suspended in that lingering warmth.

And your heartbeat.

Just a little faster than normal. Not racing anymore, but not settled either. It fluttered in a way that made something in Clark’s chest tighten, something warm and almost disbelieving.

After sleeping with him.

For the very first time.

Clark felt… giddy.

It was such a strange, boyish feeling, so out of place with everything he was supposed to be. Grounded. Controlled. Steady.

And yet it bubbled up anyway, quiet and bright, like he couldn’t quite contain it.

Like he hadn’t been part of it himself.

Like he hadn’t been there with you, hadn’t felt every moment of it just as deeply.

His mind replayed it in fragments, not sharp or overwhelming, but soft, glowing at the edges.

The way you touched him. Careful at first, then more certain. Curious.

The way he touched you, slower than he’d ever moved in his life, like he was afraid of missing something if he went too fast.

The sounds you made. Quiet, breathy, honest in a way that made his chest ache.

How soft your skin felt beneath his hands. Warmer than he expected. Realer than anything he had ever held.

Every single detail felt etched into him, not just remembered but kept.

Like something he would carry for the rest of his life.

Clark lay on his back, one arm tucked beneath his head, the other resting loosely around you. His fingers traced absent patterns along your arm, slow and careful, like he was still grounding himself in the fact that you were right there.

Still here.

That this hadn’t disappeared the moment it was over.

Like if he stopped touching you, even for a second, he might wake up and find it had all been something he imagined.

You were half draped over him, cheek pressed to his chest, your breath still uneven but softening. Your hair was slightly messy, warm against his skin, and every so often your nose brushed him when you shifted, small and absentminded.

There was a kind of lightness in you.

Clark had noticed it before, in quieter moments, but it felt stronger now.

Like something inside you had loosened.

Like your thoughts weren’t lining up neatly anymore, just spilling out, soft and unfiltered.

“I think,” you murmured, voice a little dreamy, “if I tried to stand up right now, I’d just… fall over.”

Clark huffed out a quiet laugh, the sound low and warm, vibrating beneath your cheek. His hand smoothed up and down your arm instinctively, soothing, affectionate, like he couldn’t help but take care of you even in the smallest ways.

“That so?” he asked softly.

“Yeah,” you said, tilting your head just enough to look up at him. Your eyes were bright, a little unfocused, and Clark felt that familiar, fond realization settle in.

You were about to start talking.

“Like my legs forgot how to be legs,” you continued, very serious about it. “Which feels unfair, considering I need them. Usually.”

Clark’s mouth curved into a soft smile, his gaze warm as it settled on your face. “We can file a complaint later.”

You snorted, the sound quick and unguarded, then immediately softened again like it melted out of you. Your hand drifted lazily across his chest, fingertips brushing over him in slow, wandering paths.

It wasn’t purposeful.

Just… curious.

Like you were still discovering him.

“You’re making jokes,” you murmured. “That’s not fair either.”

“No?” he asked gently.

“No,” you said, squinting at him slightly like you were trying to make a point but couldn’t quite keep your thoughts lined up. “You’re supposed to be… I don’t know. Serious and mysterious.”

Clark’s brow lifted just a little. “Is that what I’m supposed to be?”

You nodded, very solemn for about half a second before it softened again. “Yeah. Brooding. Definitely brooding. You’ve got the face for it.”

“I do?” he asked, amused.

“Yeah,” you said, reaching up and lightly touching his cheek like you were demonstrating. “Strong jaw. Thoughtful eyes. Very broody potential.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Clark said, though the smile tugging at his mouth betrayed him instantly.

He could never quite manage brooding around you.

Not when you looked at him like that.

Not when you touched him like he was something worth exploring.

Silence settled for a moment, but not the kind that felt empty.

Your fingers traced over the faint line of his collarbone, then up toward his shoulder, then back down again, slow and thoughtful. Like you were mapping him out, memorizing the shape of him through touch alone.

Clark let himself relax into it.

Into you.

Into the quiet miracle of this.

Your weight against him. Your warmth. The way your breathing was evening out little by little.

The way you stayed.

He wasn’t used to that part.

People didn’t usually stay like this with him.

Not knowing everything. Not feeling everything.

But you did.

And then, softly, like a thought you couldn’t quite hold in anymore, you spoke again.

“You know what I was thinking about just now?” you said, your voice softer this time, but no less full, like the thoughts were already lining up behind your lips, waiting their turn.

Clark shifted slightly beneath you so you were more comfortable, his arm tightening around you without even thinking about it, instinctive and careful all at once. His hand slid a little higher along your back, thumb brushing slow, absent circles there.

“What were you thinking about?” he asked, his voice low, steady, like he didn’t want to disturb whatever quiet little world you were in.

“How weird it is that this is real.” You gestured vaguely between the two of you, your hand brushing his shoulder, his chest, lingering there like you needed to confirm he was solid. “Like, you. Me. This whole… thing.”

His gaze softened further, something warm flickering behind his eyes. “Weird?”

“In a good way,” you added quickly, your nose scrunching a little. “In a ‘how did I get this lucky’ kind of way.”

Clark went still for a moment.

Not frozen, just… quiet in a different way. Like something in your words settled deeper than he expected, somewhere under everything else.

“You think you’re the lucky one?” he asked softly.

You blinked at him, then broke into a small, incredulous smile, like the question itself was ridiculous. “Clark.”

“What?” he asked, but there was something vulnerable there now, something quieter than before.

“You’re…” You waved a hand again, your thoughts clearly moving faster than your ability to organize them. “You’re you.”

He tilted his head, amused despite himself. “That’s a compelling argument.”

“No, I’m serious,” you insisted, pushing yourself up just enough to look at him properly. Your hair fell around your face, a little messy, a little perfect, and Clark had the sudden, overwhelming urge to just… look at you for a while.

“You’re kind,” you continued, counting it off slightly on your fingers like you needed structure to keep going. “And you’re patient. And you look at me like I’m… I don’t know. Important. Like I matter in some big, cosmic way.”

Clark’s hand came up to rest against your cheek without hesitation, like it belonged there. His thumb brushed lightly along your skin, slow and grounding.

“You do matter,” he said quietly. “More than you know.”

The sincerity in his voice made something in your chest ache in the best way. For a second, it almost stole your words.

Almost.

“I feel like I’m floating,” you admitted, your voice dropping softer now, like you were letting him in on something fragile. “Like everything’s a little brighter and a little slower. And I can’t stop thinking, which is probably annoying, I’m sorry, I just… I keep noticing things.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Clark murmured immediately, his thumb still moving gently against your cheek.

“I know, I just…” You exhaled, then continued anyway, because of course you did. “Okay, listen.”

He smiled faintly. “I’m listening.”

“Like your heartbeat,” you said, settling your cheek back down against his chest as if to prove your point. “It’s really steady. I noticed it earlier, but now it’s like… I don’t know, it’s calming. Like if I just stayed here long enough, I’d start matching it.”

Clark’s fingers stilled for just a second at that, something in your words catching him off guard, before they resumed their slow tracing along your arm, even gentler now.

“And the way you held me,” you continued, voice softer, more thoughtful now, like you were replaying it in your head. “You were so careful. Like… not in a weird way. Just… like you were making sure I was okay the whole time. Like nothing bad could happen.”

Clark swallowed quietly, his hand shifting slightly on your back, holding you a little closer without even realizing he was doing it.

“I was making sure you were okay,” he said, just as softly.

“I know,” you said, smiling a little against his chest. “That’s what I mean. You didn’t rush anything. You kept checking on me without making it feel like… I don’t know, like a checklist or something. It just felt… natural.”

Your fingers traced a slow line along his chest, thoughtful, absent.

“And safe,” you added quietly. “I felt really safe with you.”

That landed somewhere deep in him.

Not loud, not overwhelming. Just… solid. Like something locking into place.

“I’m glad,” he said, his voice low, steady, but there was something more in it now. Something fuller.

“And your hand,” you continued, like your brain had already moved on but your heart hadn’t quite caught up. You took his hand and guided it again, pressing it more firmly against your side. “It fits perfectly here. Like it was supposed to go here. Which sounds dramatic, but I’m right.”

Clark let out a quiet breath, his fingers naturally settling where you placed them. “I think you might be.”

“And earlier,” you went on, clearly not done, “when you pulled me closer like this—” you nudged yourself closer to demonstrate, even though you were already very much there “—that was unfair.”

“Unfair?” he echoed, a hint of a smile returning.

“Yeah,” you said, very serious about it. “Because how am I supposed to recover from that? You just… did that. Like it was nothing.”

Clark huffed out a soft laugh. “I didn’t realize I was causing lasting damage.”

“Oh, it’s permanent,” you said immediately. “I’m never leaving now, by the way. Just so you’re aware.”

“I’ll start clearing some closet space,” he replied, just as easily.

You hummed approvingly, then continued, because of course you did.

“And your apartment smells like you,” you added, very seriously.

Clark blinked. “It does?”

“Yeah,” you said, nodding slightly. “Like… clean laundry and something warm. I don’t know how to explain it. But it’s nice. It makes me feel safe.”

That did something to him.

Something quiet and steady that settled right under his ribs, heavier than before but not uncomfortable.

Good.

He swallowed softly, his hand shifting again at your back, holding you just a little closer. “I’m glad.”

You relaxed more fully against him, like that single sentence anchored you further into the moment.

“And I don’t want to move,” you went on, your voice turning softer, almost sleepy now, but still carrying that bright, wandering energy. “Because this feels too good. Like if I move, it’ll… I don’t know. Break the moment or something.”

“It won’t,” Clark said gently.

“I know,” you said, even as you shook your head a little. “But it feels like it might. So I’m just going to stay here. Forever.”

“I don’t think I’d mind that,” he replied, a small smile in his voice.

You tilted your head up again, studying him like you were trying to memorize his face this time, your gaze lingering on every detail.

“You’re really okay with me talking this much?” you asked.

Clark let out a quiet breath, something warm settling in his chest as he looked at you.

“It’s my favorite part.”

You blinked, caught off guard. “What is?”

“This,” he said simply. “You talking. Just… being like this. Letting me hear everything.”

Your expression softened, something a little shy flickering through before your usual warmth returned.

“Really?”

“Really.”

He brushed a strand of hair away from your face, tucking it behind your ear with slow, careful fingers. He let his hand linger there, thumb brushing your cheek again, softer this time.

“You don’t hold anything back,” he continued, his voice softer now, like he was choosing each word carefully, like this mattered more than he knew how to fully explain. “You say what you feel, even when it’s messy or doesn’t quite make sense yet. I like that. I like knowing what makes you happy. What you notice. What you think about.”

He paused just slightly, his thumb still tracing slow, absent circles against your skin, grounding himself in the feeling of you.

“It feels like I get all the important parts,” he added quietly.

You smiled at that, small and warm and a little dazzled, like something in his words settled somewhere deep and unexpected.

“So you like that I ramble,” you said, tilting your head just enough to look up at him, a hint of teasing slipping back in.

“I like that I get to hear what’s going on in your head,” he corrected gently, his gaze steady on yours.

There was no hesitation in it. No hint of tolerance.

Just… fondness.

You studied him for a second, really studied him, like you were trying to figure out if he meant it as much as it sounded like he did.

Then your smile grew, softer, deeper, something a little more touched.

“That might be the nicest way anyone’s ever said ‘you talk too much.’”

Clark chuckled, the sound low and warm, his chest moving slightly beneath you. His hand slid down to rest at the small of your back, his thumb brushing slow, steady circles there, like he couldn’t quite stop touching you.

“For the record,” he said, “I don’t think you talk too much.”

You narrowed your eyes at him slightly, playful but suspicious. “You don’t have to say that just because we—”

“I’m not,” he said quietly, cutting you off before you could finish, not sharp, just certain.

That made you pause.

“…okay,” you said, softer now.

He held your gaze for a second longer, like he wanted to make sure you believed him.

Then you let yourself relax again, settling back down against him, your cheek finding its place on his chest like it belonged there, like it had always belonged there.

“Good,” you murmured. “Because I’m not done.”

“I figured,” he said, closing his eyes briefly, just to feel you there, the weight of you, the warmth of you, the way you fit so easily against him.

You let out a content little sigh, your fingers continuing their lazy, wandering path over him, tracing nothing in particular. Just… feeling.

“Okay,” you said softly. “Next thought.”

Clark smiled to himself, eyes still closed, his arm tightening around you just a little, instinctive, protective, like he was holding something fragile and precious all at once.

“I’m listening.”

You paused, like you were sorting through everything in your head, your fingers slowing slightly as your thoughts tried to line themselves up.

Then you spoke again, softer this time.

“I think…” you started, then hesitated just a little. “I think this is my favorite version of you.”

Clark’s eyes opened.

He looked down at you, something in his expression shifting, quiet and attentive.

“Yeah?” he asked, just as softly.

“Yeah,” you said, your voice a little more grounded now, though still warm, still floaty around the edges. “Not the reporter. Not… anything else.”

Your hand moved slightly against his chest, like you were anchoring yourself to him as you spoke.

“Just this,” you continued. “You being… soft. And close.”

You hesitated for a fraction of a second, like the next word mattered more.

“And mine for a little while.”

Something deep and steady in Clark shifted at that.

Not sudden.

Not overwhelming.

Just… certain.

His hand came up again, cradling the back of your head, fingers threading gently through your hair, holding you there like something precious, something he didn’t want to lose.

“I’m always yours,” he said before he could overthink it.

The words left him easily.

Too easily.

And for a second after, he didn’t move at all.

You went very still.

Not tense.

Just… still, like everything in you paused to take it in.

Clark felt it. The way your breathing hitched just slightly. The way your fingers stilled against him.

For a brief moment, he wondered if he’d said too much.

If he’d gone too far.

Then you smiled against his chest, softer than before, something quieter and more certain in it now.

Your fingers curled slightly in his shirt, holding onto him in a way that felt instinctive.

“Okay,” you whispered, like you were tucking that away somewhere safe, somewhere you could keep it.

Clark let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, his hand smoothing gently over your hair.

A small pause settled between you.

Comfortable.

Full.

Then, very quietly, already drifting but still you, still full of thoughts that refused to fully settle:

“Also… I think I’m definitely not walking anytime soon.”

Clark let out a soft laugh, the sound fond and a little breathy, his lips brushing a gentle kiss to the top of your head.

“That’s alright,” he murmured. “You don’t have to go anywhere.”

“Good,” you mumbled, your voice already softer, sleepier. “Because I wasn’t planning to.”

Your hand shifted slightly, curling more securely against him, like even in your half-drifting state you wanted to make sure he was still there.

Clark’s arm tightened around you in response, instinctive, protective, his hand resting warm and steady against your back.

And you stayed.

Exactly where you were.

Tangled up with him, your quiet rambling slowly fading into softer, sleepier murmurs, your words blurring into half-sentences and little hums of contentment.

Clark didn’t interrupt.

He didn’t move.

He just listened.

To every word. Every pause. Every small, drifting thought that slipped past your lips.

Like it mattered.

Like it was something rare.

Something he didn’t want to miss.

And maybe, to him…

It was.

Clark’s hand is warm in yours, fingers laced together easily, naturally, as if they were always meant to fit that way. His thumb moves in slow, unconscious circles against your skin, grounding and steady. He hasn’t let go of you all night. Not during the dances, not during the laughter, not even when people pulled him away for congratulations. Somehow, he always found his way back.

He leans down now, tall frame bending instinctively toward you, and his lips brush your ear as he whispers.

“You okay?” he asks softly.

It’s the same question he’s asked you a thousand times before. On quiet mornings. On difficult nights. In moments of fear and moments of joy. Like he’s checking in not because he doubts you, but because he wants to know you, every second of you.

You nod, a quiet laugh slipping out before you can stop it. “Perfect,” you whisper back.

The word feels fragile in your mouth. Too small. Too simple for something this big, this overwhelming, this achingly beautiful. But it’s the only word that doesn’t crumble under the weight of everything you’re feeling.

Perfect.

Clark smiles, the kind of smile meant just for you—soft at the edges, full of warmth. His forehead dips briefly to rest against your temple, and for half a second, the rest of the world disappears entirely.

Then—

The sharp, clear clink of a glass cuts gently through the room.

Heads turn. Conversations taper off. Chairs scrape softly against the floor as people shift, attention drawn forward. The energy changes—not abruptly, but expectantly, like the air before a deep breath.

You feel it before you see it.

Clark straightens beside you, shoulders rolling back just slightly as he draws in a breath. It sounds different than his usual steady inhale—just a little unsteady, just a little heavier. His hand tightens around yours, not enough to hurt, just enough to anchor himself.

Across the room, Lois grins like she’s been waiting for this moment all night. She raises her glass with a playful tilt.

“Well,” she calls out, voice bright and teasing, “I guess it’s the groom’s turn for a speech.”

Laughter ripples through the hall—warm, affectionate, filled with familiarity. A few cheers follow. Someone whistles. Martha presses a hand to her chest, eyes already shining.

You feel Clark squeeze your hand just a bit tighter.

He stands.

And somehow—somehow—even now, after the vows spoken with trembling voices, after the rings slipped onto waiting fingers, after the laughter, the tears, the kisses, the dancing—your breath still catches at the sight of him.

Clark Kent.

Your husband.

He looks impossibly handsome, suit slightly rumpled from hours of movement, hair not quite as perfectly neat as it was earlier. There’s a softness to him now, an openness, like the weight of the day has settled into his bones in the best way. He adjusts the microphone with careful hands, clearing his throat once, then again.

He glances out at the room—at his parents, at friends, at coworkers, at people who have loved him for years and people who have only just begun to know him.

Then his eyes find you.

They always do.

The room seems to fade.

He clears his throat once.

Then again.

The sound carries softly through the microphone, small and human and unmistakably him. A few people smile already, recognizing the nerves he didn’t quite manage to hide.

“Uh,” he starts, and a gentle chuckle rolls through the crowd before he can stop himself. Clark huffs out a quiet laugh, one corner of his mouth lifting as he rubs the back of his neck. “Hi.”

The laughter that follows is warm, affectionate. Not mocking, never that. It’s the sound of people who love him, who know him. You feel it ripple through the room and settle in your chest like a familiar embrace.

You smile back at him without thinking, heart swelling at the sight of his sheepish grin, the faint flush at his cheeks. Even now, even today, he looks a little surprised that everyone is looking at him like this.

“I—” He exhales, shaking his head slightly. “This wasn’t supposed to make me nervous,” he admits, glancing down at the podium for a moment before lifting his gaze again. His eyes shine—not with fear, but with something too big to hold quietly. “I’ve… I’ve talked in front of people before.”

That earns another ripple of knowing smiles, a few murmured laughs. Lois raises her eyebrows theatrically from her table. Someone near the back mutters, “Understatement,” and Clark smiles wider, shoulders loosening just a fraction.

“But this—” His voice softens, dropping into something more intimate. “This feels bigger.”

He looks at you again.

This time, he doesn’t look away.

The room seems to dim around the edges, like the world has gently narrowed until it’s just the two of you. You feel his gaze settle into you—steady, reverent, full of awe—as if he’s memorizing this moment all over again.

“When I was a kid,” Clark begins, “my parents taught me that love is a choice.”

Jonathan nods slowly, pride and emotion written plainly across his face. Martha presses a hand to her mouth, eyes already glassy.

“They taught me that it’s something you show up for every day,” Clark continues. “Not just when it’s easy. Not just when it’s loud or grand. But in the quiet moments. The ordinary ones. The ones no one else sees.”

His voice is calm, but there’s weight in it—years of belief, of lessons learned at a kitchen table in Smallville.

“They showed me that love is steady,” he says. “Patient. Real.”

He swallows.

“And for a long time… I thought love was something I watched from the outside.”

Your throat tightens instantly, like your body knows where this is going before your mind catches up.

“I thought it was fragile,” he admits, the word chosen carefully. “Temporary. Something that people were kind enough to offer—but not something that stayed.”

He lets out a breath, slow and controlled.

“I learned how to stand on the edges. How to protect myself by not reaching too far. By not wanting too much.”

Your chest aches.

“Then I met you.”

The words are simple. Unadorned.

The room goes completely silent.

So quiet you can hear the distant clink of glass from the bar, the subtle hitch in Clark’s breathing as he steadies himself.

“You didn’t just see me,” he says, voice thickening. “You looked at me.”

His eyes flicker over your face, your tears, your smile, the way you’re holding yourself together by sheer will.

“You asked questions,” he continues. “You listened to the answers. Even the ones I didn’t know how to explain yet.”

A tear slips free, trailing down your cheek.

“You stayed,” Clark says, emotion creeping into every syllable. “Even when I tried to pull away. Even when I didn’t know how to let someone stand that close.”

His hands curl briefly at his sides.

“Even when I didn’t think I deserved to be chosen.”

Your vision blurs completely now. You don’t bother wiping the tears away. You don’t want to miss a single second of this.

“You taught me,” Clark says, voice steadier now, grounded by the truth of it, “that love isn’t about being perfect.”

He shakes his head softly.

“It’s about being honest. About letting someone see every part of you. The strong parts, the hopeful parts… and the scared ones too.”

His hand lifts slightly, fingers twitching like he wants to reach for you, to ground himself in your touch. He lets it fall back to his side, trusting the moment to hold him instead.

“I’ve faced a lot of impossible things in my life,” he says quietly.

There’s a murmur of understanding. Some knowing, some unaware of just how true that statement is.

“But loving you?” He lets out a breath that sounds almost like a laugh. “That’s never been hard.”

His smile is soft, genuine, awed.

“It’s the easiest, most natural thing I’ve ever known.”

Someone sniffles loudly. Then another. You hear a quiet sob near the front row.

“You make me laugh when the world feels heavy,” Clark continues. “You remind me to rest when I forget that I’m allowed to. You remind me that hope isn’t just something to fight for, it’s something to live in.”

His voice cracks, just slightly, and he pauses.

Just long enough to breathe.

“And today,” he says, swallowing hard, “you said yes.”

A fresh wave of tears spills over your lashes.

“You chose me,” he says, awe clear in his voice. “Not just for today. But for every day after this.”

He shakes his head, overwhelmed.

“Every morning. Every night. Every version of me I haven’t even grown into yet.”

His eyes glisten openly now.

“And I promise—” His voice wavers, and he doesn’t try to hide it. “I promise to choose you right back.”

He smiles through tears.

“On the quiet days. On the hard days. On the days when we’re dancing barefoot in the kitchen at midnight,” a few soft laughs ripple through the room, “and the days when we’re too tired to speak at all.”

His breath shudders.

“I promise to protect your heart as fiercely as I protect this world,” he says, the words heavy with meaning. “To listen when you speak. To learn when I fall short. To grow with you, not away from you.”

He straightens, voice steadier now, stronger.

“To love you with everything I am,” he says. “Human. Hopeful. And whole.”

His gaze never leaves yours.

“You are my home,” Clark finishes, barely above a whisper. “My greatest truth.”

A tear slips down his cheek.

“My forever.”

For a moment, no one moves.

It’s like the entire room is holding its breath.

Then it breaks.

Applause crashes through the hall. Cheers. Tears. Open sobbing. Martha stands, hands pressed together, crying without restraint. Jonathan wipes at his eyes, jaw tight with pride. Lois is a complete mess—mascara streaked, laughing and crying at the same time as she claps.

Clark sets the microphone down gently and walks straight toward you.

You stand before you even realize you’ve moved.

You meet him halfway, hands coming up to cradle his face, thumbs brushing away tears as he leans his forehead against yours, breath warm, familiar.

“I meant every word,” he whispers, voice breaking.

You laugh softly through your tears, pressing a kiss to his lips, then another. “I know,” you whisper back.

The room erupts again—cheers, applause, joy—but it all fades into the background.

All you feel is him.

His warmth.

His love.

His steady heartbeat beneath your palm.

You’ve said I do.

And the rest of your life has already begun.

The days leading up to any leave or holiday were always the most chaotic. In journalism, there was no such thing as getting ahead. No matter how many drafts you filed, how many interviews you wrapped up or how many loose ends you tied off, the work simply piled up somewhere else, waiting for your attention.

You made your way through the bullpen with Jimmy trailing closely behind. For the past few days, a persistent unease had settled beneath your skin. Everyone seemed to need something from you before you left, another question, task or last-minute request, and on top of that, you couldn't shake the feeling of being watched. 

Eyes appeared to follow you wherever you went.

Right now, though, the only thing demanding your attention was Jimmy's steadily rising panic.

"I…I can't do that." He shook his head again, likely for the hundredth time that morning.

"Jimmy, it's just my email." You stopped at the coffee station, reaching for your mug and filling it. "All I'm asking is that you log in once a day, check if anything's worth investigating and follow up if necessary." You stirred your coffee before lifting your eyes to him. "You won't have much to do…Lois will be helping too."

"What do I do if he contacts you?" Jimmy asked quietly, watching your hands move with nervous intensity.

"What if who contacts me?" you asked, only sparing him a brief glance.

"You know." He shrugged. "Superman."

A laugh escaped you as you picked up your mug and started back toward your desk, taking a sip as you walked. "You think Big Blue has an email address?"

"I…" Jimmy frowned as he tried to explain himself. "Well, I believe he's a modern man."

You snorted into your coffee.

"Who knows," he continued. "Maybe he'll want to meet up. To…talk."

You stopped beside your desk and turned to face him fully, narrowing your eyes. "About what?"

"I don't know." Jimmy lifted both hands. "Whatever it is you two usually talk about."

"Sure, Jimmy. Maybe he'll need help setting up an email account." You nodded thoughtfully. "Let's just hope nothing too big happens while I'm gone so I can enjoy some uninterrupted rest." 

As you spoke, your gaze drifted across the bullpen and landed on Clark.

Your eyes narrowed immediately at his staring but the moment your eyes met, he jerked into motion. His attention snapped downward as he began fumbling with the papers on his desk, shuffling folders that clearly didn't need sorting and reaching for things that weren't there.

You had only held his gaze for all of two seconds before he folded completely under it, which was suspicious. Your attention lingered on him even as Jimmy continued talking.

"Alright, but just in case, tell him I'm perfectly fine with meeting in dark alleys during pouring rain and all that." Jimmy nodded once, looking entirely too eager for the possibility.

"He's more of a rooftop kind of guy, but I'll pass the message along." The reply came automatically, your focus already elsewhere. “Thanks Jimmy.”

Your gaze dropped to your own desk as Jimmy finally wandered off. Taking your seat, you looked over the organized chaos spread across the surface and got to work clearing away the last of it, though most of the clutter simply disappeared into drawers and folders. You wanted to return to a clean workspace, not a disaster waiting for you after a week away.

Your final drafts had already been submitted and every article due before your leave had been filed and approved. There were still two hours until lunch and for the first time in days, there was nothing immediately demanding your attention.

You intended for the following week to be dedicated entirely to rest. Well, rest and unpacking the mountain of moving boxes currently occupying Clark's apartment, which was now yours too.

The thought alone made you look up.

Clark now sat perfectly still at his desk, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the bullpen. His head was tilted slightly, his attention caught by something none of the rest of you could hear. If there was one thing you'd learned about him, it was that there usually was something, a distant cry for help, an emergency unfolding miles away or a hundred voices filtering through the world at once.

You watched him for a moment until he rose from his chair, the movement quick and purposeful. He reached for his messenger bag, slinging the strap over his shoulder as he stepped around his desk, his eyes finding yours immediately.

The look was familiar, it was the same one he always gave you right before disappearing. You pushed yourself to your feet and followed after him, weaving through the bullpen until the two of you reached one of the quieter hallways.

"How bad is it?" you asked worriedly.

The question and tone had nothing to do with your upcoming week off. You were never worried about canceled plans, you were worried about Metropolis. If Superman was needed in the middle of a workday, something somewhere had gone terribly wrong.

Clark suddenly turned and you barely had time to react.

The momentum of your hurried pace carried you directly into his chest and as always, the impact barely moved him. Before you could stumble back, his arms were already wrapping around your waist, pulling you closer as he dipped his head and pressed his lips to yours.

It caught you completely off guard. You knew kissing with your eyes open wasn't particularly romantic but you couldn't help the way they widened in surprise. For a moment, all you could do was stare at him as you failed to kiss him back.

Only when he pulled away did you finally speak. "That bad?" you asked, eyes searching his face frantically.

Clark blinked as his brows furrowed. "What do you mean?"

"You have to go to your other thing, right?" You gestured vaguely. "I know you heard something."

The confusion on his face matched your own. Still, his arms remained around you.

"I did." He forced himself to pause and collect his thoughts because keeping things from you had never gotten easier. "It isn't bad, sweetheart. I just need to go check it out."

At the same moment, footsteps echoed from farther down the hallway, so he reluctantly released you. Neither of you was particularly interested in becoming a more serious conversation for Human Resources yet. 

You cleared your throat as Clark adjusted the strap of his bag and the silence stretched until the employee rounded the corner and disappeared again.

"Will you be long?" 

"I'm not sure." He shook his head softly.

You nodded. "Be safe…I'll cover for you." 

Your hand came up to pat his chest before you stepped back. Already turning toward the bullpen, you glanced down at your watch, mentally calculating how many hours "checking something out" usually translated into but a few steps later, another thought occurred to you. 

"Oh… anything special I should make for di–" You turned to face him just as a rush of wind swept through the hallway. Your words died instantly and the corridor stood empty, Clark now gone. You sighed. "Takeout it is." 

Muttering to yourself, you turned and headed back toward the bullpen.

Lately, Clark had been acting strange, not in the usual "I'm the last son of a dead planet" kind of way. This was different, he was distracted, restless and keeping himself busier than usual. At first, you'd assumed it had something to do with the upcoming week off. Maybe he felt guilty about stepping away from work for that long and the idea of slowing down made him uneasy, but you'd made it clear more than once that the vacation wasn't meant to be a break from who he really was.

You would never ask that of him. Clark Kent could take a week off but Superman never truly could, which only made his recent behavior feel all the more unusual.

You supposed your concern must have been written all over your face.

"Where is he?" Lois stopped in front of Clark's desk, a thick folder tucked beneath her arm.

The question snapped your attention away from his absence. Straightening your shoulders, you forced your expression into something more neutral before walking over.

"His parents needed him at the farm." You motioned vaguely toward the elevators.

Lois looked unconvinced. "He was supposed to send Perry a final draft for tomorrow's print edition."

"Is that it?" You pointed toward the folder she held. She barely lifted it before you plucked it from her grasp and pivoted back toward your desk. "I'll do it."

You dropped into your chair and opened the file immediately.

"It isn't exactly impartial." Lois crossed her arms.

"It never will be, Lois." You flipped through the first few pages of his notes. "We're about to move in together and I doubt he'd react particularly well to me firing him when I become Editor-in-Chief."

Your grin finally earned a small laugh from her.

"Besides," you continued, glancing back down at the paperwork, "I need something to do, otherwise today is going to feel even longer than it already does."

The humor faded from her face. "Is something wrong?" Her voice lowered enough that the question felt genuine rather than curious.

You opened your mouth, then stopped. For a moment, you simply stared down at the pages in front of you. "I don't know. I'm usually really good at reading him." Your fingers paused against the pages. "But I just can't do it."

"You can't?" The surprise in her voice was immediate as she settled herself on the corner of your desk. "You think it's about the two of you moving in together?" she asked. "If it is, don't. You've been together for so long…most people would've expected you to move in together the second you both got to Metropolis."

A soft laugh escaped you. "No. No, that's not it…I mean, I hope not." You leaned back in your chair. "It's all going well." The words came easily because they were true. "As much as I love him, moving in with my first ever boyfriend straight out of college would've been a terrible idea."

Your smile softened. "We learned how to live separately first…how to have our own lives. I think that was the right decision and I know he does too."

Lois nodded. "So what's the problem?"

You hesitated, then cleared your throat and rolled your chair a little closer, lowering your voice despite the noise of the bullpen around you. "Have you ever wanted something so badly that you're afraid to call it what it is?"

Her brows knitted together. "Is that supposed to be a riddle?"

You laughed despite yourself. "No." Your gaze drifted away, settling somewhere beyond the bullpen. "There's something I want this whole situation to be..." The words felt strangely fragile once spoken aloud, like giving them a voice somehow made them more real. "What if I start asking the questions I want to ask and find out it isn't?" Your fingers toyed absently with the edge of the folder. "Then I'd be mad at him for not wanting to move at the pace I want to move at."

Lois watched you carefully and for once, she didn't rush to answer. "This isn't a race."

A small smile tugged at your mouth before quickly fading. "If it were, he'd win…I just wish I knew what we're running toward now." Your voice dropped quieter. "And if he still wants to get there with me…precisely."

You let out a long breath, hoping it would carry away some of the anxiety that had been nesting in your chest for weeks. The truth was, you had never once believed Clark would leave you, that fear had never existed.

You knew how he looked at you when he thought you weren't paying attention, you knew the certainty behind every promise he made, every plan he included you in and every future conversation that naturally assumed you'd be standing beside him.

The fear wasn't losing him, it was timing and getting it wrong.

Had moving in together been too soon? Was he having second thoughts now that it was actually happening? Maybe he simply wasn't ready to leave behind living alone, he needed more time before taking another step forward and the answer was that simple…Or maybe you were working yourself into knots over something that had never crossed his mind at all.

"You're one hell of a reporter, Y/n." A smile tugged at the corner of Lois's mouth. "I've never known you to hesitate when it comes to asking questions."

She pushed herself off the desk and headed back toward her own. 

The conversation ended there but her words lingered as your eyes wandered across the bullpen again and they landed, inevitably, on Clark's empty desk. 

His abandoned coffee cup still sat beside his keyboard and a stack of notes remained exactly where he'd left them. Everything still looked normal, so why didn't it feel that way?

You couldn't keep living with the uncertainty and maybe it was time to stop dancing around the questions that had been circling your mind for months, but as much as you wanted answers, you'd never been someone who forced them out of Clark, never someone who cornered him into confessions he wasn't ready to make.

Your gaze lingered on the empty desk for another moment before moving to the clock. Only five more hours and you'd finally be out of this place.

Clark flew to the Fortress of Solitude at a speed he'd never thought he could reach, responding to a signal from the Superman robots. He absolutely hated hiding things from you, no matter how good the reason but this was taking longer than planned. It didn't just involve the usual planning and sourcing, this was as close to science as he'd ever get.

The cold arctic air caressed his skin as he sped up, the crystalline structure growing in the distance as it revealed itself to him.

His feet eventually sank into the snow as the doors parted before him. The Fortress received him the way it always did, silently, the crystals catching his footsteps and scattering them into nothing. Four was already standing at the central console, two of the other robots positioned at the secondary array flanking what Clark recognized as the solar concentrator, reconfigured into something smaller and more precise than he'd last seen it.

"Sir, you're here." Gary, the fourth Superman robot, turned before Clark had fully cleared the entrance.

"I got your signal," Clark told him as he moved to the center of the main room.

"I calculated twenty minutes before your arrival." Four's optical sensors held on him a moment.

Clark didn't answer. He crossed closer to the console, eyes already moving over the readings. "Tell me."

Gary turned back to the array. "The theory is sound. Whether the application holds is a separate question." He indicated the containment chamber at the center of the concentrator, it was small, built for a single stone. "The isotope that produces the radiation is not inert by nature, it requires destabilization. Conventional neutralization attempts have failed historically because they addressed the emission rather than the source."

Clark’s brows furrowed. "You went after the isotope directly."

"We modeled different broad approaches over the last year. Sixteen produced either incomplete neutralization or structural destruction of the sample." Gary paused. "The seventeenth is this. Concentrated solar saturation at a specific frequency, not broad spectrum, which scatters. The isotope absorbs until it cannot sustain the radioactive chain. It burns out rather than being suppressed."

He looked at the chamber. "And the stone?"

"Structurally intact in our simulations. The color will change, the green is a function of the active radiation. Once the isotope is spent, the stone retains its crystalline structure but loses the glow. It will read as pale…residual hue only."

Clark was quiet for a moment. "You said it would only work on a very small piece."

"Correct. The solar saturation has to penetrate the sample completely and evenly. A larger stone creates differential exposure, the exterior burns out and the interior remains active. At the scale you require–" Gary moved to the secondary console and brought up the dimensional rendering, a stone large enough to yield a single, flawless diamond.  “–full penetration is achievable. We have run the model four hundred and twelve times over the last hour."

"And it holds?"

"In simulation. Yes." Another beat. "We will not know with certainty until we attempt it on an actual sample."

Clark exhaled slowly, he'd known that was coming.

"You cannot be present for the extraction phase," Gary continued, without inflection, as if this were simply logistical. "Or the initial handling. Your proximity to an active sample at that size would still produce symptomatic response. We will handle and chamber the stone. You will monitor from the secondary console at a distance of approximately fifteen feet. Once it is inside the concentrator and sealed, the chamber will contain the emission. You can approach then."

"And the concentrator–" Clark glanced at the machine. "Same as the healing protocol?"

"Modified from it. The frequency is different as healing requires broad cellular stimulation. This requires narrow isotopic targeting but the core mechanism is the same." Gary looked at him directly. "It should not harm you. The chamber is sealed, the emission goes inward, not out...but again, it’s a hypothetical."

Clark nodded once. He stood there a moment, looking at the small containment chamber and the re-rigged concentrator, it’d been a year of work sitting quiet and precise on a console in the Arctic.

"You've been thorough," he said finally.

"You were specific about what it needed to mean, sir." Gary nodded, as Clark turned to look at him. "When you told me what the ring was for," He continued. "I did not think imprecision was appropriate."

"And the piece I chose?" Clark asked, looking around for it.

One of the other Superman robots pushed a closed lead box onto the console. "Still untouched, sir." Twelve nodded. "As are the other uncut stones, as you requested."

"The band?" Clark asked as One approached, opening a chamber on his own structure and revealing it.

Clark reached for it and held it up to the light between his fingers. He still remembered waiting for you to fall asleep so he could measure your ring finger, holding his breath the entire time, terrified you might wake and catch him in the act. The memory made warmth settle in his chest.

"It's perfect," he said quietly.

"It must be, sir. You've been working on it for almost a year," Gary spoke.

"And it's finally done."

Gary lifted a cautionary finger. "Remember there are still hypotheticals, sir. We must test the machine."

Clark shook his head. "It's going to work and when it does, I want her here for it." He turned to look around the Fortress, taking in the crystalline walls, the hum of advanced technology and the sanctity of the space. "You know the plan." His gaze swept across the main chamber. "I want this place spotless and the sunglasses ready." He drew a breath, letting the weight of the moment settle over him. "The day has come…I can’t wait any longer." He turned back to the robots. "Thank you, all of you."

"No need to thank us, sir, as we will not appreciate it. We have no consciousness, we are merely automatons here to serve," Gary reminded him.

Clark simply pressed his mouth into a thin line, long accustomed to their peculiar bluntness while some of the Superman robots scurried away, already beginning to clean. Gary, however, lingered.

"Shall we prepare for the baby?"

Clark's head snapped toward him, eyes slightly widened. "What baby?"

"My knowledge indicates it is a natural succession of events, sir."

He smiled despite himself, shaking his head. "Let's prepare for a ceremony first…That's if she says yes."

"She will," Twelve said brightly in passing, already carrying a stack of crystalline components toward the secondary console.

"Shall we rehearse the speech?" Gary pressed. "We have yet to hear it."

"No can do, Gary." Clark's voice was gentle but final. "And you won't...It’ll be for her ears only."

He stuck around long after, helping clean and organize with no real need other than the comfort of keeping his hands busy. He had thought about the day plenty, in the small hours of the morning when sleep wouldn't come, during long flights over empty ocean and in the moments just after saving the world when everything went quiet again. He had imagined it a hundred different ways, in a hundred different places and it had to be perfect.

You got home late, stopped at the door as you still couldn't quite figure out how the new lock worked. After a moment of fumbling that felt much longer than it should have, you finally managed to push inside, carrying takeout bags and immediately running into scattered moving boxes in the dark.

"Fuck," you muttered under your breath as you reached for a light switch and turned it on. "Clark?" You called into the silence of the apartment, leaving the bags on the kitchen counter. 

You then walked toward the bedroom, weaving around moving boxes you'd take care of soon, phone already in your hand as you dialed his number.

You pressed call, setting the phone on the bed as you began to undress.

Back at the Fortress…

"Superman, we have intercepted a call from your human lover."

Clark chuckled, shaking his head as he moved gear out of the main room. "There's no other kind, Gary. It's just 'lover.' Please, patch it through."

There was a soft crackle and then, "Clark?” Your voice slipped through the sound systems, warm and familiar and Clark felt the anxiety in his chest ease at the sound of it.

"Hi, sweetheart. Everything okay?" 

"Uh, yeah. Where are you? I'm at your–" A pause, then a quiet correction. "Our place...Any idea when you'll be back? It's starting to get late."

Clark realized then that he'd lost track of time completely. He began heading toward the exit, your voice trailing after him as you launched into what was clearly the beginning of a longer rant. The sound of you faded from the Fortress's speakers and transferred directly into his ears as he lifted off, flying fast in the direction of your voice.

He heard you kicking off your shoes and the soft thump of your pants hitting the floor.

"I'm not saying I'm worried and I don't expect you to always be back at a certain time…That's just not reasonable. I mean, I knew what I was getting into before we ever started dating–" Then came the sound of the closet door sliding open as you were surely, definitely, picking a shirt of his to sleep in. "Not that it's complicated or anything. I feel like that word has never really applied to us. I mean, I hope not. You've never been complicated to me, even after you told me who you really were."

He heard the rustle of fabric as you peeled off your shirt and the soft sound of your bra hitting the floor. Clark flew even faster.

"I remember telling you Kal was a pretty good name," you said and he could hear the smile in your voice. You cleared your throat, "I also remember that one time I moaned it while we were–"

A faint breeze drifted through the room, making you turn to the window to check if it was open. You suddenly screamed, shirt clutched to cover your naked chest as your heart hammered so loud he could count every individual beat.

Clark unexpectedly stood there unmoving and smiling unapologetically, hair slightly messy from the flight. "Having sex?" He continued for you, grin widening. "I also remember." 

You exhaled a sharp breath, rapidly pulling his shirt over your head, feeling his eyes on you, "I get carried away."

He shrugged, still grinning. "It's happened more than once."

Your eyes narrowed at him, already desperate to change the subject. "Mind making a little more noise next time? I intend to live long."

He stepped toward you, wrapping both arms around you and pulling you to his chest. "You make enough noise for the both of us, don't you think?"

"Ha. Funny." You said dryly because it was true. Once close to him, you felt his chest while observing his face as you always did, checking for injuries. He looked untouched, which was always ideal, but… "You're really cold."

He smiled and something changed in his expression. "Do you know where you packed the winter clothes?"

You blinked, eyes going to the moving boxes and suitcases scattered across the bedroom, your mind already cataloging the rest of the clutter throughout the apartment. "I'm not sure. Why?"

Clark let go of you, eyes scanning through the boxes as he activated his x-ray vision.

"It's about to be summer, Smallville…And I don't think you've ever needed them."

He walked out of the bedroom, looking into boxes as you trailed behind him, accidentally stepping on the long cape pooled at his feet.

"Oops, sorry," you muttered as you coughed yourself with a gentle hold on his shoulders.

"You're going to need them."

"Need what? Apologies?" you asked, lifting a brow.

"Winter clothes," he specified with a breathy chuckle, stopping by a box that read ‘Kitchen’ in your handwriting.

"In June?" You watched as he opened the box anyway. "That says ‘Kitchen’, Clark."

He fumbled for a second as he lifted it from a pile and put it on the ground, then he carefully opened it and pulled out your winter coat by the hood.

"That's why it was so light," you said under your breath.

"We're taking a trip tomorrow."

Your eyes widened slightly as you searched his face and found no humor there. "Did you use that little trick to find my passport and book the trip?"

"Never needed a passport to fly Clark Kent Airlines." He grinned.

"Never needed a coat to sit on a plane." You shrugged with a gentle smile. "Where are we going?"

Clark's smile faltered. His eyes searched the room, looking for anything to change the subject and landed on the takeout bags still sitting on the kitchen counter. "We should eat dinner before it gets too cold," he said, already reaching into the box and pulling out a scarf, hat and gloves. "You'll need your snow boots too." He set everything on the couch, almost distractedly and walked right past you into the bedroom, already peeling off his suit.

Your eyes followed him, narrowing at the deflection. "Good thing we have a microwave." You noted as you followed after him. "You've been acting weird lately."

"Weird?" He echoed with a light, forced chuckle. "There's nothing weird about me…Besides the obvious." He paused, pulling his shirt over his head. "Which you like telling me you love." There was another pause, longer this time. "You still do, right?"

"You mean the part of you that likes to take me along while soaring through the sky?" You questioned hypothetically, already nodding to yourself. "Yeah."

"That's good…That’s really good." He reassured himself more than you as he changed into a plain shirt and plaid pajama pants. "That you still do."

"I don't like how you keep saying 'still,'" you pointed out quietly, looking at him as if you could read his mind…and you probably could, if you weren’t suddenly scared of what you might find.

He chuckled breathily, stepping toward you and placing both hands on your arms, caressing them gently. "You're making me really nervous right now."

You narrowed your eyes at him again. "I weirdly think you're doing that to yourself." You paused, letting the words settle. "I love you, Clark…No amount of weirdness is going to change that."

His hands went to your face, cupping your cheeks slowly, thumbs brushing over your skin with so much love in his eyes that it made your chest ache. Tomorrow had to be perfect..because you were.

"I'll fly slowly," he murmured, in an attempt to reassure you.

"No, you won't…and that’s fine," You laughed softly, poking his stomach playfully. "Just make sure you hold me tight."

He pulled you closer, pressing a kiss to your forehead that lingered long enough to make your eyes flutter shut. "I love you so much," he confessed against your skin. "I don't know how to hold you any other way."

Moments like that had a way of dissolving whatever fear or doubt had quietly accumulated and that night was no different. By the time you had dinner and you'd both found your way to sleep, there was nothing left to worry about.

The next morning was perfect. Genuinely and unqualifiedly perfect, the kind that felt almost unfair in how completely it arrived. No alarm pulled you out of it, no distant sound of something collapsing somewhere that would take him away before you'd finished waking up, just sunlight coming in at an angle through the curtains and Clark, who woke up like he had nowhere else to be and no intention of pretending otherwise. 

He pressed kisses into your skin slowly and without urgency and the morning dissolved the way good mornings do, in warmth, weight and the breathlessness of someone who loves you, knows how to show it…and how to make you feel it. You lost track of time entirely and you didn't try to find it.

At some point he slipped away. You hadn't noticed the exact moment, sometime in the narrow window between you getting up and the shower warming, enough time for him to go somewhere and come back, which for Clark could mean almost anywhere. When you stepped out of the bathroom, towel around your chest, a bouquet was sitting on the kitchen counter and beside it, breakfast, already plated and still warm.

You ate together at the counter, knees touching, talking through where the art should go and whether the bookshelf fit better against the east wall or broken up between two rooms. 

It wasn't much later that he started mentioning getting out for the day.

You didn't question it. You started getting everything he'd laid on the couch the night before, working through the layers methodically while he stood somewhere behind you watching you with an expression you couldn't fully read.

"I think you should add another scarf," he suggested. "Just in case."

You looked at yourself in the mirror, at the coat, hat, gloves, boots and the scarf that already looped twice around your neck… and it was June. "Clark." You turned to look at him with a gentle, reassuring smile. "This is enough…You'd think we were going to the Arctic."

You meant it as a joke. You were already smiling when you said it, turning back to the mirror to adjust the hat which meant you didn't see his face go completely still behind you.

Flying with Clark was its own category of experience, one that didn't get easier to explain the more times you did it, only more familiar. The first five minutes were always the same, your stomach hadn't made peace with the altitude yet, your eyes stayed forward or shut and some part of your brain spent the whole time insisting that this was not how bodies were supposed to work but underneath all of it, was certainty. He had never once made you feel like you might fall, not for a second. His arms around you were absolute, his chest solid and warm against your cheek and the cold that hit everything else somehow didn't touch the space he made around you.

"We're almost there!" he called over the wind.

You didn't answer, only nodded against him and held on.

Then, gradually, the quality of the air changed as the speed bled out of it. You felt him adjusting his descent in small corrections and a minute later your feet met the ground with a soft crunch that traveled up through your boots and into your knees. It was snow, fluffy and undisturbed in every direction.

You kept your eyes shut even as he released you and you stood on your own.

"Sweetheart." He called softly, you could hear the smile in it. "You didn't need to close your eyes."

"Oh. I thought I'd–" you started explaining as they fluttered open.

The light hit first, that particular brightness that had no equivalent, white reflecting white under a sky that was almost cloudless. You blinked against it, adjusting and inevitably, as you looked around, your gaze landed on the structure in the distance and everything else stopped.

Your lips parted.

It rose from the landscape like it had grown there, which in every way that mattered it had. It was an eruption of crystal spires reaching at different angles, pale blue-white and enormous even from that distance, catching the flat Arctic light and fracturing it into something that barely looked real. 

You took a few steps toward it without deciding to.

"Is that your–" you started, pointing at it in awe as the words died somewhere between your throat and your lips. You stood frozen in the snow, staring at it.

Clark stepped beside you, footsteps quiet in the snow as the wind tugged gently at his cape. Your shoulders almost brushed when he spoke, "I'll show you around."

You faced him then. He was smiling down at you with his hand extended between you, patiently waiting for you to take it, which of course, you did. 

The two of you walked the remaining distance without rushing. There was no path, no track worn into the snow from use, no indication that anyone came and went from this place by foot. Just the flat white expanse and the crystal rising out of it and now, appearing behind you in a clean double line, your footprints beside his. You looked back once at the trail you were leaving and felt something open up in your chest that you weren't entirely prepared for.

He had never brought anyone here, you understood that without needing it said. This was the place that belonged to the man beneath everything else, the person who was both Clark Kent and Superman and neither of them entirely. He was bringing you into that, he was walking you to the door of the most private place he had and holding your hand while he did it, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

You looked up at the Fortress as it grew larger with every step, feeling the weight of being trusted with something irreplaceable.

His thumb moved slowly, across the back of your hand as the entrance came into view and the doors began to open before him.

The inside of the Fortress opened up in a way that made you stop walking for a second without meaning to. Everything climbed, walls, ceilings and structures you didn't have names for, all of it crystalline and catching the same pale light from a dozen different angles at once. It was somehow colder and warmer at the same time, the air sharp but the light itself almost golden where it pooled. You could feel Clark watching you take it in, his hand still wrapped around your gloved one, waiting for you to need him to say something.

"Welcome back, sir."

You turned at the voice as footsteps approached from your right. For a moment, you simply stared.

Clark had talked about the Superman robots before, he'd mentioned their names, their functions and the way they helped maintain the Fortress but none of those descriptions had prepared you for seeing them in person.

"Ms. Y/l/n. I have long possessed information regarding you. It is noteworthy to finally confirm your existence through direct observation.”

You looked up at Clark first, a small laugh escaping before you could stop it, then back at the robot in front of you, eyes dropping briefly to the number four stamped into his chest plate.

You smiled softly. "Nice to finally meet you too, Gary."

Gary turned smoothly toward two more robots crossing the floor behind him. "I have observed that Superman references us during conversations with his human lover…Identifying the species is unnecessary, as there is no other kind of lover for him." A brief pause, as if confirming the data was correctly filed. "This is Twelve. She is new."

You looked at Twelve and smiled.

Twelve looked back, head tilting slightly in your direction. "Oh, she looked at me!"

Seven approached next, arms already extended, holding a folded red blanket and a metallic blue thermos. Gary continued without missing a beat. "We have prepared warm blankets and tea. The tea has been heated for three minutes to the ideal temperature of eighty degrees Celsius, with two sugars, per Superman's specification."

"I'll take the tea." You took the thermos from Seven, wrapping both hands around it gratefully. "Don’t think the blanket will be necessary. Clark already had me wrapped up like a burrito before he swept me off my feet…Literally." You took a sip, the warmth spreading through your body.

"'Swept off my feet,'" Gary repeated, processing it audibly. "This is a common idiom among your kind. I hope you also intend it in the romantic sense, in the event further confirmation is required."

You narrowed your eyes slightly, glancing up at Clark. "Confirmation for what?"

Clark cleared his throat, a little too quickly. "Let me, uh, give you a tour." His hand found the small of your back, gently steering you down the hall before you could press further.

"We shall prepare for the activities, then," Gary said, already turning toward the main room. "The clock is, figuratively, ticking."

"Thanks for the tea!" you called back over your shoulder, lifting the thermos in salute.

"They're not very good at saying 'you're welcome,'" Clark told you quietly as you walked.

"Noted."

He smiled as he watched you sip more tea. "So…what do you want to see first? The glass bedroom or the bathroom? The toilet seat is heated."

You stopped walking, eyes widening slightly at the possibility of a glass bed. "Are you serious?"

His grin only widened, he shook his head. "There's no glass bedroom."

You let out a breath, shaking your head as you started walking again. "They’re doomed…The Superman robots are certainly learning from your sense of humor, Clark. Your jokes are setting their development back by decades...They need an upgrade."

"We should probably get you better winter gear, then. If you're going to be spending more time here." He glanced over at you, already thinking out loud. "I'll look into some kind of heating system." He kept walking, leading you down the corridor. "There aren't many rooms, but there's one I really want you to see."

You looked over at him, slowing your steps. "Clark…wait."

The teasing had dropped out of your voice entirely and he heard it instantly. He stopped and turned to face you and for a moment neither of you said anything.

You chose your words carefully, offering a reassuring smile. "You've already trusted me with so much…and I'm honored to be here, truly, I am, but..." You shook your head slowly. "You don't have to do this, any of this."

He listened in out of worry, the way he sometimes did without really meaning to, to your heartbeat. It was steady and still unafraid, just nervous in the ordinary way. "What do you mean?"

"This is your legacy, Clark. It's a piece of where you come from. It could just be yours…I'd understand that.” You paused, “Once I've seen it, I can't unsee it. I’ll become a part of it too, whether you meant for it to or not."

He stepped closer, taking your unoccupied hand in his. "I've always wanted you to know all of me...every piece, if you're willing to hold it." His voice dropped, steady and certain. "This isn't a sacrifice, sweetheart. Showing you this doesn't cost me anything…You've always belonged at the center of who I am. This–" he glanced around, at the crystal stretching up into the light, "–this is just proof of it."

You nodded slowly. Your breath caught and you sniffled, blinking hard against the sudden sting in your eyes. "Do you happen to know the temperature at which tears freeze?" you asked, voice thick.

He laughed softly, pulling you gently forward by the hand as he led you toward the next room. "Yeah, I think a heating system really would be a good idea."

"Wouldn't a heating system melt the whole place, though?"

"It's Kryptonian crystal," he explained. "Not ice. It can withstand a lot more than that. It's just naturally cold in here."

"Well, insulation would ruin the aesthetic anyway, so think it through." you decided and felt him softly squeeze your hand.

He spent the better part of an hour walking you through the Fortress. Through the rooms that mattered and rooms that didn't but that he showed you anyway because you asked, small alcoves of crystal that hummed faintly when you got close enough. You stayed in a state of quiet awe through most of it but the room that stopped you completely was the one lined with his suits. Row after row, the same emblem rendered over and over in different materials and ages, the symbol of an entire dead world that he had carried across galaxies and made his own among people who barely understood what it meant.

You felt his eyes on you the entire time, watching you take it in and no matter how simple or obvious your questions were, he answered every one of them and you could hear the smile in his voice with each one.

Eventually, the two of you made your way back to the main room, where all of the Superman robots stood arranged in a loose half circle and at the center, set on a low pedestal, sat a small sealed box. You knew exactly what was inside before you directly saw it, that particular sickly green you'd only ever glimpsed in passing, in places you tried not to look too long.

Your hand tightened around Clark's, your first instinct pulling him back half a step.

"It's okay, sweetheart." His voice was steady, hand staying exactly where it was, not pulling away from yours. "Gary?"

Gary approached, holding out a pair of sunglasses toward you. "Please keep these on until we give the all clear," he said. "Your eyes are not equipped to withstand what you are about to see."

You took them carefully, turning them over once. They looked like ordinary sunglasses, maybe a little heavier and the lenses a shade darker than you expected. 

You slid them on. "Is this some kind of science class?"

"I certainly won't be the one teaching it," Clark said, the corner of his mouth lifting. He looked past you toward the console. "Gary, are we ready?"

"Whenever you are, sir." Gary moved toward the main console, where two of the other robots were already standing by, lights along their forearms beginning to pulse in slow sequence.

"Clark, what's going on?" you whispered, eyes flicking between the box and his face. 

"I wouldn't let anything happen to you, you know that, right?" He squeezed your hand as his gaze met yours. 

"You, on the other hand–"

"I like experimenting." He shrugged, like it cost him nothing.

Your eyes widened slightly, "With Kryptonite? Since when?"

"Uh…a year, give or take." He smiled down at you and then his eyes lifted to Gary, he nodded once. "Gary. We're ready."

Gary moved to the console without hesitation and the rest of the robots fell into position around the central platform like they'd rehearsed it a hundred times, because they had.

Twelve lifted the small box from the pedestal, carrying it with both hands toward the center of the room, where a shallow chamber sat recessed into the crystal floor, lined with something dark and metallic that looked nothing like the rest of the Fortress.

"That’s a containment chamber," Clark said quietly to you as his thumb moved slowly over your knuckles. "Built specifically for this."

"Sir," Gary said, eyes still on the console, "might I suggest you and Ms.Y/l/n retreat to the secondary platform. Fifteen feet, as discussed."

Clark's hand tightened slightly around yours. "Come on."

He guided you back, until you were standing on a raised section of crystal floor that put you above and away from the chamber. From there you could see the whole room laid out steps beneath you, the concentrator rising above the platform like an enormous lens angled toward the sky, panels of crystal catching light that wasn't there yet.

Seven lifted the lid of the box and even through the dark lenses the green light intensified, throwing long shadows across the floor, catching every facet of the Fortress and scattering it back in shades of sick emerald. Nestled inside, on a bed of dark fabric, sat the stone. Smaller than you'd expected and uncut, glowing from somewhere deep inside itself like it had a pulse of its own.

Twelve lifted it with a pair of long, articulated tools and lowered it carefully into the chamber. A transparent shield slid closed over the top, sealing it in. The glow didn't stop but it dimmed, pressing against the inside of the shield like something trying to get out.

"Sample secured," Gary announced. "Beginning calibration."

The concentrator began to hum. It started low, almost beneath hearing, a vibration that traveled up through the crystal floor and into the soles of your boots. Far above, panels began to rotate, realigning toward the chamber below and what little Arctic sunlight there was began to gather and bend, funneling down through the lens.

"Finally," Clark breathed, watching it. "We've been working on this for so long…there’ve been thousands of simulations." His jaw worked once. "I didn't want to tell you until I knew it would work."

"Tell me what?” You asked quietly, eyes never leaving the scene as worry crept in. “And do you actually know?"

"I trust the math." He nodded firmly.

The column of light reached the chamber and the room changed color. For a moment the green and the gold fought each other, the stone lit from above in concentrated solar light while it pulsed back against it, radiating that same sickly glow like it was resisting. The light intensified in stages, the hum climbing in pitch and beside you Clark's hand went rigid in yours.

You immediately looked away from the machine, eyes moving across his face, searching instinctively for every symptom you'd learned to recognize over the years. "Clark? What’s happening?"

"It's fine." His voice was rough. The green glow spilling from the chamber reflected across his face as he kept his eyes fixed on the stone. His fingers tightened once more around yours. "This is the part where it resists…Gary said it would resist."

"Isotopic activity decreasing," Gary reported. "Forty percent…Thirty-five."

You watched his shoulders ease slightly, the tension starting to bleed out of him the way it had a moment ago and then it spiked.

The green flared violently, brighter than it had been at any point and the hum from the concentrator stuttered, a half second of dissonance that set your teeth on edge. Clark's hand crushed around yours, hard enough that you gasped and beside him his knees buckled enough that you felt him catch himself right on time.

"Sir." Gary's voice changed, the flatness cracking for the first time. "Output is exceeding modeled parameters. Fifteen feet is no longer sufficient at this intensity…I recommend immediate retreat."

"No." Clark's voice came out through his teeth, low and rough.

Twelve approached. "Sir, your vitals–"

"I said no." He straightened, forcing it, his free hand braced against the crystal wall beside you, now that sweat had broken out along his hairline despite the cold. "This is the spike before it breaks…It has to be. We modeled this."

"We modeled a spike.” Twelve corrected and for the first time there was something almost uncertain underneath the calculation. “Not this one."

"Clark, baby." Your voice cracked. Both your hands were on his arm now, gripping tightly enough to feel the tension underneath his skin, the controlled violence of him holding still on purpose. "Clark, please, if it's hurting you–"

"It's not going to last." He said it through gritted teeth, eyes locked on the chamber, on the violent pulse of green fighting against the gold. "It's a means to an end. It has to burn through, that's the whole point, it can't resist forever–" He cut himself off, breath hissing out through his nose and you felt his legs lock, refusing to let his body do what it wanted to do, which was fold.

"Gary," he called, "how much longer?"

"Unknown. The output is not behaving according to any modeled curve."

"Then we wait." His hand gripped yours again like an anchor. "We wait."

The green surged again and this time you heard him make a low and involuntary sound. His head dipped slightly as if something heavy had pressed down on him. His eyes shut for a second and every muscle in his jaw worked under the strain, the effort visible in the smallest movements of his face.

"Clark, look at me." You said as you stepped in front of him, both hands coming up to his face, so he’d look at you. His eyes opened and once they found yours, they held on. "Whatever this is about…it’s not worth the pain."

"It is…" His voice was barely above a whisper now. "You’ll see."

The green light convulsed one more time, violent and bright, the air around the chamber shimmering hard enough to blur the shape of it until it broke, the same way ice breaks, all at once, the resistance simply gone. The green collapsed inward on itself and the gold flooded in to fill the space it left behind and the hum of the concentrator dropped, smoothed out and settled.

"Isotopic activity," Gary announced and there was no mistaking the relief in it now, flat as he tried to keep it, "Twenty percent…Twelve percent...Six percent."

Clark's head lifted as he watched over your shoulder, eyes moving away from yours while yours simply couldn’t. He exhaled, long and shaking and you felt the tremor in his body ease as you too turned to watch.

"Two percent," Gary continued. "Zero point eight…Zero point three…Zero point zero…one." He paused. "Within acceptable margin…The sample is inert."

The column of light thinned, it drew back up into the ceiling and the panels above began to rotate closed and the machines powered down in sequence as the Fortress went quiet.

The shield over the chamber slid back and where the green stone had been, something else sat now, pale and almost colorless, holding the ambient light of the room differently than it had before, no longer pulsing or alive with that sickly glow. 

Your lips parted at the sight as Clark straightened slowly, drawing himself back together piece by piece before stepping down from the platform and offering you his hand. You took it, following him as your eyes met his.

“It’s okay,” he said before you could ask. “I’m okay. It’s over.”

You crossed the floor behind him while every robot in the room stood motionless, watching him the same way you were. He stopped at the edge of the chamber and looked down at the stone for a long moment before reaching in and picking it up with his bare hand.

Nothing happened.

He stood there holding it, turning it slightly, watching the light shift across its surface and you realized you’d stopped breathing somewhere in the last minute and hadn’t started again. He looked up, found your gaze and set a gentle hand against your cheek.

“It’s safe now. You can remove your glasses,” he said, still looking at you.

Your hands were already moving. The Fortress returned in full, unfiltered color as you stepped closer to him, staring at Clark holding something small and pale in his open palm, like the last few minutes hadn’t happened at all, like he’d been waiting this entire time just to show you this.

You swallowed. “I think…we need a breather,” you said, mostly to yourself.

You were already turning toward the nearest corridor when Clark suggested he take you somewhere outside. It took him only a moment to follow your movement and you didn't see what all the shifting and movement among the robots behind you had been about but only felt the change in atmosphere as Clark caught up.

His arm slid around your waist and a second later, the ground dropped away.

Air rushed past as he lifted you into the sky, carrying you through the open structure of the Fortress until the cold Arctic light returned in full. He set down on a platform high among the tallest crystalline spires, where the wind moved freely and the horizon stretched wide and white. 

Snow shimmered below and the sky was pale, endless.

“I don’t…” You let out a breathless laugh, the wind catching at your words. Your eyes swept the view once before you turned back to him. “I’m not sure what I just saw in there.”

Your voice tightened slightly. "And trust me, I tried to keep my eyes open through all of it, but you scared me." You gave his chest a firm hit with your fist. "What were you thinking, Clark Kent?"

The impact barely moved him, it only made him chuckle lightly.

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, his gaze stayed on you, unreadable in that scary way that always came just before something important.

Slowly, he reached into his belt and your attention locked instantly. 

He pulled out a carved band, holding it between two fingers like it mattered too much to be careless with. You could hear, or maybe just feel, your heartbeat speed up, loud enough that it felt like it filled the space between you.

He reached in again and produced a small, rough stone, one that bent the light in a way you'd never seen any diamond do, every facet catching a slightly different shade as it turned.

You watched as he closed his hand around it and when he opened his palm again, fragile shards fell away, revealing a small, clear stone underneath, which he carefully set into the first empty socket on the band. 

You blinked, eyes following his hand as he reached in again and drew out another rough stone, this one glowing faintly the same way the untouched walls of the Fortress had. He crushed it the same way, the stone giving under his grip, not shattering so much as yielding, and a larger stone emerged from inside it, settling into its place on the band.

Then he reached into his belt one last time and pulled out the disabled kryptonite. Of the three, it was by far the clearest, though somehow it still caught the light in a way none of the others quite managed.

He crushed it in his hand and set the final ‘diamond’.

You stared at the ring as his eyes began to glow red, the heat focusing into two narrow beams that swept carefully along the edges of each setting, sealing the stones into place. Once he was satisfied they were secure, he lifted the ring to his lips and let out a slow breath of super breath, cooling the metal until it no longer shimmered with heat.

Your heart was pounding now, lips parting slightly as you watched him lower himself onto one knee, his eyes never leaving yours. When his knee touched the platform, he paused, drew in a breath that seemed to cost him more than it should have and swallowed. He held the ring up toward you and whatever he'd rehearsed every day for the past year caught somewhere in his throat.

"...Please."

Your brows lifted slightly, lips curving into a smile you couldn't have stopped if you tried, your heart stumbling so hard in your chest you thought you might actually faint.

It was all a blur of mumbled words, tears, tight embraces, breathless laughter and the strange sensation of height shifting under your feet as the hours folded into one another. You slid your glove off so he could finally slip the ring onto your finger and in the space of a heartbeat the both of you were already cutting through the sky, Clark holding you close as the arctic shrank into light beneath you.

What followed was a mess of emotion and surging energy you had never seen from him in that state. You made it home in record time and the first stop had been the bedroom, the both of you, but especially Clark, letting go of everything he had been holding back. Everything that had stayed trapped behind restraint finally spilled out, fast and unguarded, until the bedframe gave way under the force of it and you both broke into breathless laughter in the aftermath.

After that, everything blurred again.

You sat on the couch as a streak of motion moved through the apartment, Clark unpacking every box in milliseconds, placing everything exactly where you had mentally mapped it out. The remaining cardboard vanished just as quickly, carried away like it had never been there. He returned almost immediately after, kneeling at the edge of the couch in front of you with the same restless energy still burning through him, only now softened by relief and joy. You met it halfway on the carpet, where time stopped mattering in any real sense.

It was late when the rush finally eased into something his body could keep up with at a normal human pace. Only then did you think about food.

You ended up on the kitchen counter, one hand lifted as the ring caught the warm light and threw it back in shifting color. Clark stood at the stove shirtless, moving between pots and fridge with distracted focus, adding things, adjusting heat and insisting you needed to eat before you fell asleep. You had been fighting sleep for a while already, after so many rounds, caught between exhaustion and the aftershock of everything.

The cold air from the opened fridge brushed your bare legs and it brought back the memory of earlier that day without warning.

“Tell me again,” you breathed, eyes fixed on the ring.

Clark stopped, whatever he was doing was abandoned in an instant. He stepped closer, placing both hands on either side of you against the counter, caging you in gently without pressure. His gaze didn’t go to the ring at first. It stayed on you, studying your face and reaction, like that mattered more than anything else he had built.

“Jewel Kryptonite,” he started, voice calmer now.

His hand lifted slightly as he spoke, indicating the first stone.

“I found it in the Fortress but it comes from the Jewel Mountains of Krypton. Its primary function was amplifying psychic abilities…telepathy and mental projection for Kryptonians. In my case…” He hesitated, just briefly, choosing the right way to place it. “It represents my mind…my subconscious, dreams, grief and memories. The parts of me nobody reaches…the parts I want you to have access to.”

He shifted his attention to the largest stone, the one in the middle.

“The Fortress crystal…origin and inheritance. It’s everything I was given, my legacy, my people’s knowledge…Krypton on Earth and Kal-El’s home.” His eyes softened slightly as they stayed on you. “Which you've gone out of your way to love and accept too in ways I never expected or thought possible.”

A quiet breath left him before he continued.

“And the last one but not least…never that.” His thumb brushed lightly against your hand where the ring sat. “Disabled green kryptonite. That was the hardest part and the reason this took so long…It’s what I trust you most with, my vulnerability…but not the only one.”

His gaze lifted fully to yours at that.

You moved closer instinctively, arms sliding around his shoulders and pulling him in as if distance had become unnecessary. You raised your hand again, watching the ring catch the light between you both.

“Who you come from… who you are… and what you trust me with,” you murmured, more to yourself than anything else. Then something else caught your attention.

“What about the band?” you asked softly. You had noticed it earlier, the faint engravings when the light hit just right, the House of El symbol hidden in the design, it was subtle but definitely intentional.

It was clear nothing about it had been accidental.

He exhaled through a small smile. “Everything I am,” he said, quieter now, “set into the thing that led me to you.”

Your brows softened.

“I made it out of my ship.”

The confession pulled the breath straight out of you. “It took you a year,” you said, voice catching slightly, “and so much effort and thought and I–”

"I love you." His voice caught, eyes filling again as they held yours. "I loved you the day I met you…I love you today,” He paused, “Y/n, I'll love you long after we leave this Earth."

You sniffled as a tear slipped down your cheek before you even realized it had formed but still, you smiled, voice cracking with emotion. "And I'll love you as long as it exists."

Clark lifted a hand, thumb brushing the tear away with a tenderness that contrasted everything else about him and gently tilted your face toward his as he pressed his lips to yours, leaving no distance between what he had built and what he had finally given away.

He might have been unable to say anything when he was down on one knee, but that didn’t mean he had no words for you. He simply doubted they existed in any language and if they did, they had a terrible tendency to fall galaxies short.

Outside of the whole superhero thing, you and Clark lived a relatively normal life. You'd wake up together, shower together, eat breakfast together, then head off separately to your jobs.

You and Clark were currently laying on your couch on one of your sparse joint off days. His head was laying on your chest while the two of you watched reruns of The Good Place. Clark had his arms wrapped around your middle, his full attention on the TV.

"Do you think we would make it into the Good Place?" He asks suddenly, lifting his head up to look at you head on. You smile softly at the curl that falls down his forehead, pushing it back behind his ear.

"I think we can certainly try. But that's kind of the whole point, you know? Even when you try and do something good, you end up fucking up somehow." You say with a shrug. "It's a big philosophical question that we are certainly not qualified enough to answer."

"I think all that matters in the end is that you tried in life. It's the content of your heart and character that really matters." Clark mumbles, going back to the TV like it was no big deal. It was one of the things you loved the most about him; he wanted to believe that if you did your best, everything would work out in the end. Even after all this time, he was still that optimistic guy you met 2 years ago.

"Yeah, something like that." You mutter, your fingers continuing their path through his hair. The two of you just sit there, enjoying each other's company. As your hands are coasting through his hair, you realize something. "Are you growing your hair out?"

"Huh?" Clark asks as he lifts his head up once more. "Oh, well, not intentionally. I just haven't gotten it cut in a while. Do you not like it or something?"

"No no, I do like it." You respond quickly, tugging on a strand thoughtfully. "It's cute. I like your hair longer."

"Oh." Clark says, his cheeks tinted slightly pink. "Well okay then."

The two of you went back to just enjoying each other's company, and you didn't think much of the conversation.

But Clark could not stop thinking about it. Ever since that day, he's started putting a bit more effort into how his hair looks. Not that he wasn't before, but longer hair means that you need to spend more time caring for it properly.

He wanted to look good for you, that's all.

And he kept his promise—he didn't go out to get his hair cut. And that was when you finally started to notice.

"Wow, Clark, your hair is really starting to get long." You say with a giggle as you bump his hip. The two of you were standing together in the kitchen; you chopping up vegetables and Clark rinsing the rice.

"Oh yeah, guess I haven't noticed." Clark says timidly as he drains the water from the rice. It's clear that he's lying through his teeth, but you choose to be nice and not comment on it.

"That's fair, you've been pretty busy saving the world and whatnot." You tease as you toss the vegetables in their own bowl.

Clark scoffs and rolls his eyes at that, shaking his head. "I think saying that is a bit of a misrepresentation of what it is I do."

"I think the citizens of Metropolis thank you very much for stopping whatever scheme Livewire has set up for the week." You say, setting everything aside and hopping up to sit on the counter.

"Well, it's not like I can just let her roam around and do whatever she wants." Clark states, setting the bowl of rice aside to stand between your legs. Your arms move up and around his neck on autopilot, pulling him in closer to you.

"My handsome, long haired savior." You say, your mouth split open by your grin. Clark always got a little big-headed when you complimented him like this, so you made sure to do it. Very often.

"Oh yeah? You really like the longer hair this much?" He asks as he rests his hands on your thighs.

You hum softly, your fingers tangling in his hair. "Of course I do. Plus, it gives me something to hold onto."

Clark groans out your name at that, burying his face in your neck. "You can't just say stuff like that out of nowhere, sweetheart."

"What, it's true." A giggle slips past your lips, your legs wrapping around Clark's waist. "Having something to grip onto can come in handy."

"We're supposed to be making dinner, and here you are trying to get me all riled up." Clark complains as he lifts up his head to look at you, but his heart isn't in it. "Are you doing this on purpose?"

"What? Of course not, I would never do that to you on purpose." You say with a fake gasp, hand to your chest to play up the dramatics even more. "I am a lady, Mr. Kent. I would never rile you up for the purpose of having sex."

The look Clark gives you makes it clear that he doesn't believe a word coming out of your mouth, but when you bat your pretty little lashes at him, there's nothing he can do to resist. "You're a tease, did you know that?" He mutters as he trails kisses down your jaw and neck.

"Am not." You say with a scoff as you tilt your head back slightly. "I just know what I want, and when I want it."

"You mean you're bossy." Clark corrects as he moves his lips down to and across your collarbones, sucking a hickey right there. "But that's okay, I can handle a bit of bossiness."

"Clark." You whine, already tugging at the strands of hair at the nape of his neck. Patience had never really been your strong suit, especially when it came to Clark and his mouth.

"'S okay, sweetheart. I got you." You can feel his breath through the fabric of your shirt, watching intently as he works his way down your body. He pulls you closer to the edge of the counter, causing you to gasp and grip onto the counter tighter. "Don't worry, I won't let you fall."

Any other time, you'd knock him a down a peg or two for the smugness that was coloring his tone, but you couldn't bring yourself to care when you were watching his fingers quickly undo the button on your jeans.

You'll get him back for this later. Much later.

You lift your hips up slightly to assist Clark in getting your jeans off, watching the way his eyes dilate as your underwear come into view. "Fuck." You loved when he got like this; when he became so focused on you and your pleasure and his usual farm-boy manners slip away.

"Like what you see?" There's still enough fight in you for that comment, but it quickly fades away when Clark kisses you over underwear. You whine his name, trying to lift your hips to urge him to do more.

"Uh uh, stay put." His hands wrap around your waist, keeping you pressed down firmly onto the counter.

"Yes, sir." The words are out before you can stop yourself, and you barely have time to register what you said before Clark has torn your underwear in half. "Clark—"

"Shut up." He says firmly before beginning to mouth at your clit. Your breath catches in your throat as you look down at him, watching as he licks stripes up and down your slit.

"Clark, please." You moan as you thread your fingers through his hair, trying to push his head down deeper.

Clark pulls away with a chuckle, his fingers digging into the skin of your thighs. "Please, what? If you're gonna act like a brat, then I'll treat you like one."

There was this look in his eye, the one he only got every once in a blue moon. The look that meant that you wouldn't be able to walk straight tomorrow. As soon as you feel his lips on you once more, you try to savor the feeling. The warmth of his tongue as he circles your entrance, teasing you for a moment before dipping in. Your back arches as your eyes roll into the back of your head, the grip you have on Clark's hair and the edge of the counter becoming almost forceful.

For any other guy, it would be too much and he would've pulled away. Thank god for Clark and his Kryptonian genes.

The way that Clark was flicking and sucking and biting was all too much. "Clark, please." The plea comes out almost breathless, all your strength going to keep yourself upright on the counter.

"What is it, hm? Use your words for me, baby." Clark mutters as he nips gently at your clit. "I can't give you what you need unless you tell me, remember?"

"Fuck, just don't stop." You were sure that if he stopped now, you would explode and that wouldn't be any good for either of you. "Please don't stop, Clark. Please keep going, please."

Clark smirked at that, reinforcing his hold on your thighs. "Well, if you insist." That's all the warning you get before he puts almost twice the effort he had before into sucking on your clit, his tongue working it's way in and out of you. Your eyes are practically screwed shut, small pants and moans of Clark's name falling from your lips at the intense pleasure.

"Oh my god, I'm gonna cum." You whine as your legs begin to shake. The coil in your stomach is close to snapping, causing you to grind your hips up against his mouth. Your hand that's in his hair tightens for a second as you finally let go, a moan ripping through you as your release takes over you.

The smell of sweat, your perfume, and Clark's cologne are mixing together in the air around the two of you, your focus going in and out. But Clark? He's focused on helping you ride through this orgasm, his movements slowing down but never stopping completely. "Oh my god, Clark!"

As you came down from your orgasm your hold on the counter slipped a bit, but luckily Clark could hold you up all by himself. You expected him to stop now that you've cum, but his head was still buried between your legs and he was eating you out like a man starved. "Fuck baby, you taste so good. 'S this all for me?"

"C-Clark, I can't—" You gasp, trying to pull away from his hold on you. The overstimulation was too much, but at the same time you wanted more. You wanted Clark to throw you over the edge, over and over and over again until you physically couldn't take anymore.

"Shh, it's okay. You can handle another, I know you can." Clark whispers, sucking and flicking your clit. "Give me another one, yeah?"

And when Clark asked you for something, especially all pretty like with his head between your legs and treating you like you were the only thing that mattered, who were you to tell him no? You're not really sure where Clark ends and you begin at this point, but you don't really care. All that matters right now is the pleasure coursing through your veins.

The second orgasm is somehow more powerful than the first, but this time you could hear the soft grunts Clark was letting out into your pussy. If you didn't already know that he was impossibly hard, you might just think that he would spend the rest of the night down there to give you as many orgasms as you wanted.

Clark makes sure that you're fully sat on the counter before standing up himself, looking at you like he could just ravish you. "You don't know what you do to me." He groans out before smashing his lips against yours.

You use the little bit of strength you have left to pull him closer, one hand finding it's way to his hair and the other grabbing his ass. The two of you stay like for a while, your lips melded together as the two of you try to become Clark. You whine when the two of you pull apart, trying to pull him closer. "I need you. Please?"

"Anything you want." He mutters as he sucks on your collarbone, pulling you off the counter and flipping you around so that he could bend you over. "Just need to make sure that you're ready for me, yeah? Can you be a little more patient for me, sweetheart?"

Your arms are resting on the counter, the cool temperature helping to ground you a bit so you don't grind against Clark like an eager slut. Not that he would complain.

Clark keeps a hand on your waist as he unbuckles his pants and takes himself out of his boxers. "So pretty. So good for me, too." He whispers as he presses kisses along your shoulder. The whine that slips out is involuntary, as well as the way your hips shift back to feel even a hint of him. "Patience, baby. Don't wanna hurt you."

"Just put it in." You beg, pushing back once more. There's a sharp slap against your ass, causing you to gasp and jolt forward.

"What did I just say?" He scolds, rubbing his tip against your slit. "Be patient. Only good girls get rewards, remember? Don't be a brat."

"'M sorry, just—please? I'll be good, I'll be so so good, just put it in." You beg, looking over at your shoulder at Clark. On the surface he looks like his usual calm and composed self, but you know better, because you know him. You can tell that he's on the verge of losing all his control, and now you're determined to be the reason he does.

"Clark, please?" You ask, putting that little lilt in your voice that you know always gets to him. It's almost as if you can see the final thread snapping, and you barely have time to react before Clark is lining up with your entrance and burying himself to the hilt.

"You just couldn't be patient for another second, could you?" He grunts as he slowly pulls out and thrusts back in, enjoying the way your breath hitches in your throat. "I thought you were good at following instructions, what happened to that?"

"No fun." Is all that you can get out, too preoccupied with the slow, deep strokes Clark is giving you. He's doing this on purpose; giving you what you want but holding back just enough so that you won't be cumming again anytime soon. But frankly, you're a bit wound up right now and that just won't cut it. "Clark—"

"No," He says firmly, pressing on your back to make you lay flat on the counter. "I already told you; if you want to act like a brat, then I'm going to fucking treat you like one. And brats don't get what they want."

The speed of his thrusts speed up, knocking the wind from your lungs. Clark's grip on your waist is tight, and you're honestly glad because there is no way your legs work anymore. The feeling of him slamming in and out of you, the way that he's trying to keep his weight off of you— it's all too much too fast, especially after having two back to back orgasms.

"Clark, slow down." You moan, fingers slipping on the counter. "Too much, it's too much."

"You can take it." Clark growls, his hand wrapping around your throat and pulling you up so your back meets his chest. This new angle tears a moan from inside you, your hand clawing at Clark's arm.

"Fuck!" You shout, your eyes screwing shut as you struggle to keep yourself in enough control to not let Clark win.

You're failing. Hard.

"Are you gonna cum again, pretty girl?" Clark whispers as he nibbles on your ear, trailing kisses down your neck and shoulder. "Gonna cum on my cock?"

You nod frantically, your body tilting forward slightly. Clark allows you to, making sure that you don't slam into the counter on your way down. He also picks up the pace, chuckling softly at the weak moan that escapes your lips.

"Need a little help there?" He asks mockingly, his hand sliding down your body and in between your legs to rub tight circles on your clit. "Come on baby, I know you can do it. Cum for me."

Spots of white cloud your vision as you cum this time, your moan fading in and out. You can vaguely make out Clark whispering small praises in your ear as you come down, but you're still too out of it to focus on what he could be saying. Your body is limp, and you no longer have any control over it. But that doesn't matter, because Clark carefully pulls out and lays you on the floor.

"Did so well for me, princess." Clark whispers sweetly as he presses kisses against your chest, gently massaging your sides. "Do you think you can give me one more?"

The more logical part of your brain is screaming at you to say no. To tell Clark to get off of you, because you may never walk again after this. But the greedier, more Clark hungry part of you wants you to say yes. Wants you to keep saying yes and to not let go of him, because there will never be so much thing as too much Clark Kent when it comes to you.

That louder part of you wins, that stubborn little bitch.

"Okay." You whisper, smiling weakly at the look of pure glee that comes across Clark's face.

"Thank you, baby." Clark mummers as he leans down and presses a chaste kiss against your lips. "Thank you." He repeats as he slides back in, groaning at the way you wrap around him.

One of his hands lifts your leg up to wrap around his waist while the other laces your fingers together. He rests his forehead on yours as he starts moving, the thrusts slow and fueled by love and passion. A soft sigh floats it's way in the air, and you can't tell if it came from you or from him.

"I love you." You hum, bringing his hand up to your lips to place a kiss on it. The grin that overtakes his face can only be described as goofy, and he doesn't even have to reply for you to know just how much he loves you back.

His love is in the way he's holding you like you could break at any moment. His love is in the way he kisses from your jaw to you neck to your chest, because he knows that it soothes you and keeps you grounded during intense moments like that.

"Doing so well for me." He says, almost like a prayer. "Always so good for me."

You giggle softly, pressing a kiss on one of the freckles that littered his shoulder. "Only for you."

Clark lets out an unintentional moan at that, his grip on your hand and waist tightening ever so slightly. "I'm gonna cum." His head drops to the crook of your neck, his breath tickling your ear.

"Please, Clark. Inside." You whine, not caring how pathetic or desperate you might sound right now. Clark doesn't need to be told twice, only making it three more deep thrusts before he's spilling inside of you with a loud moan. His release triggers your fourth and final one, your teeth sinking into his shoulder in an attempt to quieten the sounds coming from your mouth.

Clark thrusts shallowly a few more times, kissing you once more as he slowly and carefully slides out of you. "Stay here for a second, okay?" He instructs, leaving one last kiss on your nose as he gets up.

He disappears into the bathroom to get a towel to clean you up, while you lean yourself up against the bottom cabinets. He returns fairly quickly, immediately dropping to his knees and pressing a warm towel between your legs to help get rid of the mess.

"Sorry." He apologizes sheepishly, the tips of his ears tinted pink. You chuckle softly, shaking your head at his sudden embarrassment. "I guess I got a little carried away there, huh?"

"Don't apologize, I enjoyed myself. Like, a lot." You say reassuringly as you push back some of the hair that had fallen in his face.

"Good." Clark declares as he finishes cleaning you up, setting the towel aside to be dealt with later. "Here, let me." He says as he helps you stand up, allowing you to rest your weight on him while you regained feeling in your legs.

"Guess this is what happens when you grow your hair out." You laugh, taking a moment to look at your discarded clothes and the forgotten dinner the two of you were supposed to be making.

"Yeah, I guess so." Clark mumbles, scratching his neck as he takes in the damage for himself. "Why don't you go sit down and rest? I can finish up here."

"Well, if you insist. I'll never turn down an opportunity to sit down and gawk at you." Clark rolls his eyes at your comment, lightly smacking your ass.

"Careful, unless you're looking for round two. And I don't think that you can handle that at the moment." He warns, taking off his shirt and putting it on you so that you'd be covered. Even when he was scolding you, he couldn't help but be a gentleman. It's one of the reasons why you loved him so much.

"Alright, but don't hesitate to call me if you need help, okay?" You say, giving Clark a playfully strict look as you make your way to the living room.

Yeah, Clark was never allowed to cut his hair again. And if all the scissors and clippers in your shared apartment seemingly disappeared overnight? Well, that was between you and the trash cans.

You join the Avengers in the least dramatic way possible.

No alien invasions.

No secret prophecies.

No world-ending catastrophe.

You’re simply very, very good at your job.

You’re a trauma medic attached to a relief organization the Avengers occasionally partner with, and after patching up three agents, one diplomat, and Sam Wilson himself during a mission in Madripoor, Fury offers you a permanent position.

You say no.

Twice.

The third time, Pepper Potts calls personally.

By the fourth offer, you finally cave.

Which is how you end up living in the compound three floors beneath a supersoldier who actively avoids you.

At first, you assume he just doesn’t like people.

Natasha informs you otherwise.

“Oh, he likes people,” Natasha Romanoff says dryly over breakfast. “Just not many.”

You glance toward the empty seat Bucky abandoned the second you walked into the kitchen.

“…Did I offend him somehow?”

Natasha actually chokes on her coffee.

Across from her, Sam suddenly becomes deeply fascinated by his cereal.

“What?” you ask.

“Nothing,” Natasha says immediately.

“Absolutely nothing,” Sam agrees.

You narrow your eyes.

Neither elaborates.

You begin noticing things after that.

Little things.

Bucky always leaves the room when you enter it—but somehow your favorite tea always appears stocked in the kitchen.

You mention once that the compound hallways are freezing, and two days later there’s a thick knit blanket folded neatly outside your door with no note attached.

You complain about a stubborn cabinet hinge in your apartment.

The next morning it’s fixed.

No one admits responsibility.

But when you thank Bucky casually over dinner just to test a theory, he nearly inhales his drink.

“…Wasn’t me.”

You smile slowly.

“Okay.”

He stares at you like you’re dangerous.

Which is ridiculous.

You’re wearing bunny slippers.

The age gap becomes obvious one night during a movie marathon.

You, Sam, Peter, and Bucky are sprawled across the common room while some absurd eighties action movie plays on the screen.

Peter groans dramatically. “This CGI is awful.”

“It looked good at the time,” you argue.

Bucky turns his head.

“At the time?”

You freeze.

Sam bursts into laughter so violently he almost falls off the couch.

“Oh my God,” he gasps. “She thinks the eighties are ancient history.”

“They are ancient history,” you defend.

Bucky stares at you with something between horror and disbelief.

“You were born after the eighties?”

“…Yes?”

“The nineties?” he asks weakly.

“Yes.”

Peter pipes up helpfully. “She was born in 1998.”

Bucky looks like someone shot him.

You blink. “Are you okay?”

“No,” Sam says gleefully. “He is not.”

Bucky stands abruptly.

“I’m going for a walk.”

Sam loses it completely.

After that, Bucky avoids you harder.

Which would almost be impressive if he weren’t terrible at hiding the fact that he cares about you.

He watches you constantly.

Not in a creepy way.

In a protective way.

Like he’s making sure you’re breathing.

You catch it in fragments.

His eyes tracking you during missions.

His body subtly positioning between you and danger.

The way he relaxes when you laugh.

The way he goes still when someone touches you for too long.

You start understanding the truth before anyone says it aloud.

Bucky Barnes is in love with you.

And for some insane reason—

You’re falling for him too.

It happens slowly.

Then all at once.

You fall for his quietness first.

Most people assume silence means emptiness.

Bucky’s silence is full.

Heavy with observation. Care. Thoughtfulness.

He notices everything.

The exact way you take your coffee.

The songs you hum absentmindedly.

Which nightmares leave you restless.

You realize he starts leaving the compound gym earlier on mornings after you wake from bad dreams.

Like he’s trying to make breakfast before you get there.

Like feeding people is the only comfort he knows how to offer.

And God.

When he smiles?

Rare. Small. Crooked.

It feels precious.

Like discovering something hidden beneath ice.

The problem is that Bucky refuses to let anything happen between you.

The closer you get, the more distance he forces between you afterward.

You’ll spend hours talking on the roof at night—sharing stories and terrible coffee and quiet laughter—and then he’ll avoid you for three straight days.

It hurts more than you expect.

Because you know he feels it too.

One night, after a mission in Prague, you finally corner him.

He’s sitting alone in the hangar cleaning his weapons when you walk in.

“Did I do something wrong?”

His hands stop moving instantly.

“No.”

“Then why are you avoiding me?”

“I’m not.”

You fold your arms.

He sighs.

“You shouldn’t be down here.”

“Bucky—”

“You should be out with people your own age.”

The words hit like cold water.

You stare at him.

“…What?”

He doesn’t look at you.

“You’re young. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

“And?”

“And I’m not…” He swallows hard. “I’m not someone you build a future with.”

Anger sparks sharp and immediate.

“You don’t get to decide that for me.”

His jaw tightens.

“You think this is a joke?”

“I think you’re scared.”

That gets his attention.

Steel-blue eyes snap to yours.

“You don’t know what I am.”

“I know exactly what you are,” you fire back. “You’re kind. You’re loyal. You’re infuriatingly self-sacrificing. You bring me tea when I’m stressed and pretend you didn’t. You stay outside the medbay when I work late because you think I don’t notice.”

His expression fractures slightly.

“You deserve someone better.”

“No,” you say softly. “I deserve to choose.”

Silence stretches between you.

Raw.

Fragile.

Bucky looks wrecked by it.

By you.

“You don’t understand,” he whispers. “I remember too much.”

Your anger fades instantly.

Slowly, carefully, you walk toward him.

He goes perfectly still.

“I know,” you say gently.

“You’re twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-eight.”

“That’s not helping.”

Despite everything, you laugh quietly.

His eyes close briefly like the sound physically affects him.

“You’re gonna wake up one day,” he says roughly, “and realize you wasted your life on an old man with too many ghosts.”

You crouch in front of him.

“James.”

He looks at you helplessly.

“You are not hard to love.”

Something inside him breaks.

You see it happen in real time.

Like a wall finally cracking after decades under pressure.

His metal hand flexes once.

“You shouldn’t say things like that to me.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to believe you.”

Your heart aches.

So you do the only thing that feels right.

You take his hand.

Both of them.

Flesh and metal.

Equally.

“I mean it.”

Bucky stares at your joined hands like he’s never seen anything so devastating.

Then he pulls away.

Not harshly.

Worse.

Carefully.

Like it costs him everything.

“I can’t.”

And he leaves.

You cry exactly once about it.

Natasha finds you sitting on the kitchen counter at two in the morning eating dry cereal from the box.

“You look terrible,” she says.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

She takes the cereal from you.

“…He said no?”

You nod miserably.

Natasha sighs the sigh of someone deeply exhausted by male stupidity.

“He loves you.”

“I know.”

“Unfortunately, he’s also an idiot.”

A startled laugh escapes you.

Natasha bumps your shoulder lightly.

“Give him time.”

Time, unfortunately, turns out to involve disaster.

Because of course it does.

This is the Avengers.

Nothing emotionally significant can happen without explosions.

The mission in Bucharest goes sideways fast.

An arms deal.

Bad intel.

Too many hostiles.

You’re there strictly as medical support, tucked safely in the quinjet several blocks away.

At least, that’s the plan.

Then the building collapses.

Your comms erupt with shouting.

“Medic down—”

“—need extraction—”

“Where’s Barnes?”

Dust fills the air.

You’re dragged from the wreckage half-conscious with blood running down your temple and your left leg trapped beneath concrete.

And then Bucky arrives.

You’ve seen the Winter Soldier before.

Cold.

Efficient.

Terrifying.

But this?

This is different.

This is rage.

Pure, horrifying rage.

He tears through debris with his metal arm like the rubble personally offended him.

Someone tries to stop him.

That person immediately regrets it.

“BUCKY—” Sam shouts.

Bucky ignores everyone.

His eyes find you.

And you swear the entire world stills.

“Hey,” you whisper weakly.

He drops to his knees beside you.

Hands shaking.

Actually shaking.

“Don’t move,” he says, voice rough with panic.

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

Your attempt at humor nearly destroys him.

You can see it.

Blood loss makes everything hazy, but one thing becomes crystal clear:

Bucky loves you so much it terrifies him.

He lifts the concrete slab like it weighs nothing.

The second you’re free, he gathers you against his chest.

Protective.

Desperate.

Your face presses against tactical gear and leather and the frantic pounding of his heart.

“You’re okay,” he mutters, like he’s trying to convince himself. “You’re okay.”

“I’m okay.”

His forehead rests briefly against your hair.

For one tiny moment, the world disappears.

No missions.

No history.

No fear.

Just him.

Just you.

Then your pain catches up.

You hiss sharply.

Bucky immediately pulls back. “Medbay. Now.”

The quinjet ride is chaos.

You fade in and out while Bruce works on your leg.

Bucky never leaves your side.

Not once.

At some point you wake to find him sitting beside your cot, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor like he’s praying.

“You stayed,” you murmur.

His head snaps up instantly.

“Yeah.”

“You hate medbays.”

“I hate hospitals.”

“Still counts.”

A faint huff of laughter leaves him.

Relief flickers across his face just hearing you joke again.

You watch him quietly.

Disheveled hair.

Blood on his gloves.

Exhaustion carved into every line of his body.

And underneath it all—

Love.

So much love.

“Bucky.”

His eyes meet yours.

“Come here.”

He hesitates.

Then obeys.

You shift carefully, making room for him beside the cot.

“Doll—”

“Please.”

That word wrecks him every time.

He sits carefully beside you.

You lean into him immediately.

No hesitation.

His entire body locks up.

Then slowly—

Slowly—

He wraps an arm around you.

Like holding you is both instinct and privilege.

You rest your head against his shoulder.

“I meant what I said before,” you whisper.

Silence.

Then quietly:

“I know.”

“You still think you’re too old for me?”

A long pause.

“…Yeah.”

You snort softly.

He looks offended.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.” You tilt your head back to look at him. “You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think you’re using age because it’s easier than admitting you’re scared someone might actually love you enough to stay.”

Bucky goes still.

Dead still.

The truth lands hard.

You see it.

And because apparently you enjoy emotional violence, you add gently:

“I think everyone leaves you eventually, and you’re trying to leave first.”

His breathing catches.

For a second you think he might walk away again.

Instead, he whispers:

“You make me want things.”

Your chest tightens painfully.

“What kind of things?”

“A home.” His voice is barely audible. “A future. Somethin’ normal.” He swallows hard. “Kids, maybe.”

Your eyes sting unexpectedly.

Bucky looks horrified he admitted that aloud.

“You’d be a good dad,” you say softly.

He laughs once.

Broken.

“No, sweetheart. I wouldn’t.”

“You already are.”

His brows pull together.

You smile faintly. “You take care of everyone. Especially the people you love.”

The word hangs there.

Love.

He doesn’t deny it this time.

Instead, he reaches up carefully and brushes hair away from your face.

His fingertips linger against your cheek.

Warm flesh hand.

Not the metal one.

Like he still thinks the other might hurt you.

“Tell me to stop,” he whispers.

Your heart pounds.

“Why would I do that?”

His eyes darken with emotion so intense it almost hurts to look at.

Then finally—

Finally—

He kisses you.

Soft at first.

Tentative.

Like he’s waiting for the world to punish him for wanting this.

But the second you kiss him back, everything changes.

His hand slides behind your neck.

He kisses like a man starved.

Like he’s been holding himself back for months and doesn’t know how to do it anymore.

It’s not frantic.

It’s worse.

Careful.

Reverent.

Every brush of his mouth says something he doesn’t know how to speak aloud.

You pull back breathless.

Bucky’s forehead drops against yours.

“I’m in so much trouble,” he mutters.

You laugh softly.

“Because you kissed me?”

“Because I’m never gonna stop wanting to do it again.”

Dating Bucky Barnes is surprisingly domestic.

You expect intensity.

Drama.

Brooding declarations in the rain.

Instead, you get:

Quiet mornings.

His hand at the small of your back.

Shared coffee.

Movie nights where he falls asleep with his head in your lap despite insisting supersoldiers “don’t nap.”

You get Alpine deciding you’re her favorite human.

You get Bucky standing in the kitchen at midnight making grilled cheese while listening to you ramble about terrible reality television.

You get a man who loves fiercely but carefully.

Like your happiness is something precious he’s been entrusted with.

The age gap still bothers him sometimes.

Usually in small ways.

Pop culture references.

Technology.

The occasional existential crisis when you tease him about being born before penicillin.

“You are never saying that sentence again,” he informs you gravely.

You grin. “You were literally alive during swing dancing.”

“So were old people in the nineties.”

“You are old people in the nineties.”

He glares.

Then kisses you to shut you up.

Which honestly feels like a win.

The real turning point comes six months later.

It’s after a mission.

A bad one.

You wake in the middle of the night to find Bucky sitting on the edge of the bed staring at nothing.

Nightmare.

You recognize the signs now.

Without speaking, you move closer and press against his back.

His shoulders tense briefly.

Then sag.

“You okay?” you whisper.

“No.”

Honest.

Always honest with you now.

You wrap your arms around his waist.

“You wanna talk about it?”

Long silence.

Then quietly:

“I saw you die.”

Your chest aches.

“In the dream?”

He nods once.

You press a kiss between his shoulder blades.

“I’m still here.”

“For now.”

The fear in his voice destroys you.

You turn him gently until he faces you.

“You know what’s really unfair?” you murmur.

“What?”

“You think loving you is a burden.”

His eyes flicker downward.

“But loving you is the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

Emotion crashes across his face so openly it startles you.

You touch his jaw softly.

“I’m not going anywhere, James.”

And for the first time—

He believes you.

You can actually see it happen.

The shift.

The surrender.

His walls finally lowering completely.

Bucky pulls you into his lap and buries his face against your neck.

Holding you so tightly it feels instinctive.

Necessary.

“I love you,” he says roughly.

Not tentative.

Not fearful.

Certain.

“I love you too.”

He kisses you afterward like he finally understands he’s allowed to.

A year later, Sam finds Bucky in the compound kitchen staring at a jewelry website with naked panic.

Sam nearly drops his smoothie.

“Oh, this is serious.”

Bucky slams the laptop shut.

“Get out.”

Sam grins slowly. “You’re proposing.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re absolutely proposing.”

Bucky scowls.

Sam’s expression softens unexpectedly.

“You happy?”

Bucky glances toward the hallway where your laughter echoes faintly from another room.

His entire face changes.

Softens in a way that would probably terrify his enemies.

“Yeah,” he admits quietly. “Yeah, I am.”

He proposes on the roof.

No audience.

No elaborate setup.

Just the city lights below and cold evening air curling around both of you.

You’re rambling about something completely ridiculous when he interrupts suddenly:

“I wanna spend the rest of my life loving you.”

You blink.

“…What?”

Bucky looks nervous.

Actually nervous.

More nervous than when facing down armed mercenaries.

“I had this whole speech planned,” he mutters, frustrated. “Was supposed to be better than this.”

Your heart starts pounding.

He drops to one knee anyway.

“I know I’m older than you.”

You snort through sudden tears. “Slightly.”

“Brat.”

You grin shakily.

Bucky takes your hand carefully.

Reverently.

“But every good thing I have now started with you.” His voice roughens. “You made me believe I could still have a life after everything.”

Tears spill down your cheeks immediately.

“So yeah,” he says softly. “Marry me?”

You don’t even let him finish reaching for the ring box before you’re kissing him.

Bucky laughs against your mouth for the first time since you’ve known him.

Pure happiness.

Unrestrained.

“Yes?” he asks breathlessly.

“Yes.”

Again.

“Yes.”

He slides the ring onto your finger with shaking hands.

Then pulls you into his arms like he never intends to let go again.

And this time—

Bucky's staring at a blank wall in his apartment.

It’s been blank for three months.

He hasn’t put up art, hasn’t mounted shelves. Hasn’t even leaned anything against it to pretend he might one day decide. The paint is that neutral off-white landlords choose when they don’t want tenants getting ideas, it reflects the late afternoon light in a way that makes the room feel larger than it is.

Larger. Emptier.

He folds his arms over his chest and studies the wall like it’s a problem he’s been assigned.

He’s “free” now. No handler. No mission briefs. No coded directives slipped under doors or encrypted messages lighting up burner phones, no one telling him where to go, who to be, or what mistakes to fix. He thought freedom would feel big. He thought it would be loud in a good way, like fireworks or a door kicked open. He thought it would feel like breathing after being underwater too long.

It doesn't.

It feels… empty.

The kind of empty that echoes. The kind that makes every sound in the apartment too sharp, the refrigerator humming, pipes ticking in the walls, the faint traffic noise drifting up from the street.

He shifts his weight.

Bucky knows what you need to have in today's world to do something, to be something that matters. He doesn’t have half of it. He never went to college, the war kind of interrupted that. He doesn't know where he would start with a resume, “Assassin, covert operative and international fugitive” doesn’t format well in bullet points. He tried LinkedIn, once, then deleted it in under five minutes after they asked what his minimum salary was at a past job.

He doesn't have a plan, he's got what he always thought he wanted from his life and now that he has it, it's collecting dust in his empty apartment.

He knows what he does have. A truck. Old yet reliable, rebuilt twice over with his own hands. Mechanical skills. He can fix almost anything with an engine. Most things without one. A terrifying resting face, that he’s been told scares even the brutalist of criminals away. More than once.

And time. So much time.

He runs a hand over his jaw, exhales, and finally looks away from the wall. He tried therapy. He still goes once a week where he sits on a couch across from a woman who asks him what he wants now that he’s allowed to want things.

He doesn’t have an answer.

He tried the gym. That just made him feel like he was waiting for something.

He tried walking around Brooklyn without a destination. That lasted two hours before he found himself counting exits and scanning rooftops out of habit. Freedom is supposed to come with direction, that’s what people imply. You earn it, and then you use it.

Bucky doesn’t know how to do that, how to do freedom. He moves into the kitchen, if you can call it that. It’s more of an open counter situation, and pulls open a drawer. Inside are exactly three pens, a rubber band, and a folded takeout menu.

He grabs a pen. Stands there for a long moment. Then he finds a pad of paper in another drawer that thick, slightly yellow, the kind meant for grocery lists and tears off a sheet. He sits at the small table by the window. The city moves outside. Car horns, voices, someone laughing. Someone arguing, a siren in the distance.

He stares at the blank page. He doesn’t need a career, per say. He needs… something to do. Something simple. Something useful. So he writes in block letters.

NEED HELP?

He pauses. That’s vague, he thinks, but maybe vague is good. He continues. Adding in things like, Protection. Heavy lifting. Fixing stuff.

He considers crossing out “stuff.” Leaves it. He taps the pen against the table thinking with a hum, people won’t call a stranger without reassurance.

He sighs and writes: Not a serial killer.

He leans back and stares at it. It’s terrible. And honest.

He adds his name and cut little strips into the page, writing his number on each one as a DIY tearoff. He learned that word from Sam when he told him he should look up some DIY key holders for his apartment.

He studies the finished product. It looks like something a bored teenager would tape to a telephone pole as a joke. So he makes another one.

And another.

By the time the light shifts toward evening, there are fifteen slightly crooked, slightly uneven flyers spread across his table. He stares at them like they might explain themselves. This is stupid, he thinks to himself. This is civilian nonsense. And it is defintely not a plan. But at least it’s something, and it's better than staring at a blank wall trying to guess how many layers of paint are on it.

He grabs a roll of tape from under the sink, shrugs into his jacket, and gathers the stack. The hallway outside his apartment smells faintly like old carpet and someone’s overcooked dinner. He heads down the stairs instead of taking the elevator, an old habit, and steps out into the early evening air.

Brooklyn hums.

He’s lived here long enough now that the rhythm of it doesn’t jolt him anymore. It’s background noise instead of threat assessment, mostly. He tapes the first flyer to a lamppost outside his building, presses the tape flat with his thumb and steps back.

It looks ridiculous, he moves on to the next one anyway.

He tapes one outside a laundromat, another near a bus stop, one by a small grocery store on the corner. He hesitates outside a coffee shop, then shrugs and sticks one to the bulletin board already crowded with yoga class ads and guitar lessons and “ROOMMATE WANTED” strips.

He doesn’t overthink it.

If he overthinks it, he’ll stop.

By the time he’s done, the stack is gone and his hands are slightly sticky from tape residue. He stands on the sidewalk, truck parked at the curb, and looks around. That’s it. That’s his grand re-entry into civilian life.

A handful of flyers that say “Not a serial killer.”

He huffs a quiet, humorless laugh and climbs into his truck.

Three days pass.

Nothing.

His phone remains silent except for spam calls and a pharmacy reminder. He tells himself that’s expected. That people use apps now, platforms and ratings with verified accounts. Not hand-scrawled paper tabs.

On the fourth day, he walks past the lamppost outside his building. The flyer is still there completely untouched. No numbers torn off. Rain has wrinkled the edges slightly, but the ink hasn’t bled. He stares at it longer than necessary thinking maybe he should take them down.

Before someone reports him.

Before someone thinks it’s suspicious. Before he has to admit that even offering help isn’t enough to make someone need him.

He leaves it up.

A few blocks away, you’re struggling with a box labeled “KITCHEN???” in thick black marker.

The label is inaccurate. It contains exactly one mug, three mismatched plates, and an alarming number of tangled charging cables. You’re sweating. You’re slightly overwhelmed yet feeling the most giddy you had in years.

You’re trying to balance the box against your hip while fishing your keys out of your bag with the other hand. That’s when you see it.

The flyer, taped slightly crooked to the lamppost.

NEED HELP? Rides. Heavy lifting. Fixing stuff. Not a serial killer. – Bucky 718-325-7038

You blink.

Then you laugh. Out loud and it echoes a little on the sidewalk, surprising even you.

“Not a serial killer,” you repeat under your breath. “Well. That’s reassuring.”

You shift the box to your other hip and step closer.

The paper is slightly damp at the edges. The handwriting is bold, deliberate. Careful in a way that suggests the person writing it wasn’t joking, exactly. Just… blunt. There are little handmade tear-off tabs at the bottom with a phone number.

None of them have been taken.

You glance up and down the street. It’s early afternoon. People moving, cars passing, no one paying attention. You tug one of the tabs free. The paper rips with a soft, decisive sound. You fold it once and tuck it into your back pocket.

“Just in case,” you murmur to yourself, like that makes it reasonable.

You don’t actually intend to call. But something about it, about the absurd honesty that makes this new neighborhood feel slightly less intimidating. Like there are real people here.

Like maybe you didn’t just move into a city of strangers.

You juggle your box again and finally get the building door open. Inside, the hallway smells like old wood and someone’s incense. You don’t know a single soul here.

Not one.

After six hours in Brooklyn you have a new apartment, new job starting Monday, no furniture besides a mattress you haven’t unwrapped yet. You drop the box inside your door and lean back against it, exhaling.

You did it. You moved. This means you’re brave now. It also means you’re also starving, sweaty and slightly terrified. You pull the little tab out of your pocket and look at it again.

Bucky. Not a serial killer.

You snort softly, slipping it into your purse that sat in the kitchen, if you can call it that, next to an array of takeout menus left littered on the counter by the previous tenant. Just in case. You sit back on your heels, breathing slightly heavier than necessary, and let your gaze drift to the small strip of paper sitting on the counter.

It looks small there. Almost insignificant.

Like it couldn’t possibly matter.

You push yourself up with a quiet exhale, brushing dust from your palms as you take in the apartment again—really take it in this time. The stacks of boxes are a little less intimidating than they were this morning. You’ve made progress. There’s a mug in the sink now, your mug. A hoodie draped over the back of the door. Your shoes kicked off by the wall like you plan on staying.

It doesn’t feel like a stranger’s place anymore.

Not entirely.

You move slowly through the space, opening a box here, shifting something there. You line your toiletries along the bathroom sink, straighten the sheets on the mattress you finally unwrapped, plug in a lamp so the corners don’t feel quite so shadowed. Each small action presses you further into the room, like you’re anchoring yourself piece by piece.

Like you’re proving to yourself that you’re really here.

Brooklyn.

You pause in the middle of the living room, hands settling on your hips as the quiet settles around you again. It’s different now. Not as sharp. Still unfamiliar, but… softer at the edges. Outside, the city hums. Car horns, voices drifting up from the street, music faint and distant like it’s being carried on the air just for you.

You step closer to the window, the one you’ll later learn sticks, and peer out at the street below. People move like they know exactly where they’re going. Like they belong to the rhythm of it.

You want that.

Not just the city. Not just the apartment.

The feeling.

You glance back at the room. At the half-unpacked boxes, the bare walls, the life that hasn’t quite settled into place yet. You could stay in tonight. Finish unpacking. Eat something out of a container balanced on your knee and fall asleep early.

That would be the easier choice, the safer one. Your fingers tap lightly against your thigh as you consider it. Then you shake your head.

“No,” you murmur to yourself, quieter but firmer. “That’s not why you came here.”

You didn’t drive hours and sign a lease you can barely afford just to sit in silence and wait for your life to start. You didn’t leave everything familiar behind just to recreate it in a smaller space.

You came here to live.

Even if it’s messy, even if it’s uncomfortable, even if you don’t know what you’re doing yet. Especially then. Your gaze drifts back to your purse for a second, to the place where you tucked the little tab away. Something about it lingers in your mind, faint but present. Not a plan. Not even a real option.

Just… a possibility.

You grab a different jacket from one of the boxes, tug it on over your clothes, and glance at yourself in the reflection of the darkened window. You look a little tired. A little overwhelmed.

But there’s something else there too.

Something brighter.

“Okay,” you say softly, like you’re making a deal with yourself. “One drink.”

You grab your keys, hesitate only a second, then head for the door. The lock clicks behind you with a soft, final sound.

Hours later, the city feels very different.

Louder, warmer, brighter.

You hadn’t meant to drink that much. It just sort of… happened. One conversation slid into another. Someone bought you a round because you mentioned you’d just moved. You laughed more than you expected to. The music felt good in your chest.

You wanted to feel like you belonged.

Now you’re standing on a sidewalk that looks vaguely familiar but not enough, the neon sign behind you flickering slightly, the night air cooler against your flushed skin.

Your phone battery blinks 4%.

You squint down the street.

How do people get taxis here? Do they just… appear? You raise your arm experimentally. Nothing happens. A group brushes past you, laughing. You step aside too quickly and nearly trip off the curb.

“Okay,” you mutter to yourself. “Okay.”

You could Uber.

You open the app only to find surge pricing.

Of course.

You check your wallet. Not nearly enough cash after buying that last round and leaving a surmisable tip for the bartender, who was kind enough to let you know that you had put your jacket on inside out after your third drink.

You glance around again, the city suddenly less charming and more overwhelming. Your stomach dips and fear spreads low and cold. You don’t know where the nearest bus stop is, or which line to take, you don’t actually know which direction your apartment is from here.

The alcohol in your system stops feeling warm and starts feeling inconvenient. You dig through your purse, fingers fumbling past lip gloss, receipts, keys.

Your hand closes around paper. You pull it out.

Slightly crumpled.

NEED HELP?

You stare at it.

“Oh my god,” you whisper, half laughing, half mortified.

This is insane. You shouldn’t.

You absolutely should not text a stranger who specified he isn’t a serial killer. Your battery drops to 3%. You hesitate for three long seconds.

Then you type.

Hi. Are you real?

You hit send before you can talk yourself out of it.

Bucky’s phone vibrates against the table. The sound cuts through the apartment like a gunshot.

He freezes and for half a second, his brain does something old and dangerous—threat assessment, immediate spike of adrenaline, body already half-rising.

He grabs the phone to see an unknown number.

A text.

He stares at it. His pulse does not settle. Are you real? That could mean anything. That could mean someone found him, that could mean trouble.

Or—

Another text comes in.

I think I need help.

His jaw tightens.

He’s already standing. He doesn’t deliberate, doesn’t ask for clarification, just grabs his keys off the counter, shoves his feet back into his boots without tying them properly, and is out the door in under thirty seconds.

The truck engine roars to life beneath him, familiar vibration steadying something inside his chest.

He types one-handed at a red light.

Location?

Three dots appear. Disappear.

Then:

Outside Harper’s. On 5th I think. By the hot dog guy??

He knows exactly where that is. He’s there in four minutes.

He spots you before you spot him.

You’re sitting on the curb now, elbows propped on your knees, arguing mildly with a man behind a food cart about whether mustard counts as a vegetable.

You look… small.

Not in stature. Just in the way someone looks when they’re trying very hard to seem fine.

Bucky parks sharply at the curb and steps out. The night air hits him cool and sharp. The city noise presses in — laughter spilling from bar doors, the hiss of the food cart grill, bass thudding faintly through brick walls.

He scans automatically. No visible threat, no one crowding you. Just you. He approaches slower.

“You texted me?” he asks.

You look up and squint as if were the middle of the day and not half past one in the morning. Your eyes travel from his boots to his shoulders to his face.

“You’re not a serial killer, right?” you ask, entirely serious.

He blinks. “No.”

You consider him for another beat.

“Okay, good.” You try to stand. It does not go smoothly. Your foot catches the edge of the curb and you pitch forward slightly.

His hands are on your arms before you hit the ground. Gloved yet warm. Steady and solid.

You freeze for a second, looking up at him from far too close. He smells like clean soap and something faintly metallic. His grip is firm but not bruising.

“You needed help because you’re drunk?” he asks, voice flat but not unkind.

“I needed help,” you correct, wobbling slightly. “Because I don't know how New York works. And I also may be a little drunk.”

He exhales slowly.

“Why didn’t you take the subway?”

You blink at him. “…There’s a subway here?”

He just stares at you, something in his expression shifts and his irritation drains. Not completely but enough for a soft breath to leave his lips as he stands back to look at you.

“How long you been here?” he asks.

"What time is it?"

He glances at his watch. "Quarter 'til two."

“Like twenty hours,” you reply honestly.

That adds up, he thinks to himself and nods once.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “C’mon.”

He keeps one hand lightly at your elbow as he guides you toward the truck. You talk the whole way over-explaining where you live.

“Okay so it’s near a brick building over by a big brown bridge—which I know doesn’t help because they’re all brick—but there’s like… a plant in the window? I think? And the stairs creak.”

He doesn’t interrupt.

He already knows the building, he’s driven past it a hundred times just like he has every building in Brooklyn. He opens the passenger door for you and waits until you’re seated and steady before closing it gently. Inside the truck, the world feels smaller, quieter. You lean your head back against the seat with a relieved sigh.

“Thank you for being real,” you mumble.

He starts the engine. “You text random numbers often?”

“Only the ones that clarify they aren’t serial killers.”

A pause. Then, unexpectedly, he huffs a quiet laugh.

It’s brief. Quiet and low, but real. And you smile at the sound without realizing it. As the truck pulls away from the curb, Bucky glances at you from the corner of his eye to see you’re watching the city pass by, like it’s something you’re still deciding whether to trust.

He understands that feeling more than he’d like to. And for the first time in days, the empty space in his chest feels… lightly occupied.

He parks in front of your building with the kind of precision that suggests he’s memorized the street long before tonight. The engine rumbles low beneath you for a moment before he turns the key and everything settles into quiet. The sudden absence of vibration makes the world feel oddly still, like stepping off a moving walkway and having to find your balance again.

You peer out the window.

“Oh,” you breathe, surprised. “This is it.”

“I know,” he replies simply.

Of course he does.

He’s already out of the truck before you’ve fully processed that, boots hitting pavement with a solid thud. When he opens your door, the night air curls cool around your flushed skin, carrying the faint scent of rain drying on concrete.

You slide down from the seat carefully this time. He keeps a hand hovering at your elbow—not gripping, just there. Just in case.

The building looms a little taller than it had earlier in the day. Dark windows. Narrow staircase just inside the glass door. The porch light flickers faintly like it’s unsure of its commitment to illumination. You hesitate on the sidewalk. It’s not the alcohol now. It’s the strange awareness that this is the end of something. A brief pocket of safety in a night that could have gone differently.

He notices.

He always notices.

“Up you go,” he says quietly, nodding toward the door.

You move together toward it, footsteps uneven on your part, measured on his. The city continues behind you—cars passing, someone shouting down the block, a siren wailing faint and far—but here on the stoop it feels contained. Close.

You fumble slightly with your keys as your fingers don’t want to cooperate.

He waits.

Doesn’t sigh. Doesn’t rush you. Just stands behind and to the side, broad shoulders blocking some of the street’s draft, presence steady and grounded like a wall you can lean against if you needed to.

The key finally slides into the lock.

You pause before turning it.

He’s close enough now that you can feel the residual warmth coming off him, the faint scent of clean cotton and motor oil and night air. You glance over your shoulder. His expression is carefully neutral, but there’s something softer at the edges. The crease between his brows less pronounced than earlier, the sharp lines of his jaw less guarded.

“You can call again,” he says, stiff but sincere. “If you need something real.”

Not judgmental. Not mocking.

Just… open.

And you smile. Not the bright, tipsy grin from earlier. Not the exaggerated one you’d been wearing in the bar to prove you were fine. This one is quieter and softer. It reaches your eyes.

“Thank you, Bucky.”

His name leaves your mouth gently, like it belongs there.

Something in his chest shifts. He hasn’t heard it like that in a long time. Not as an order. Not barked across a battlefield. Not attached to expectation or obligation.

Just his name. Warm. Human.

He clears his throat lightly.

“Welcome to Brooklyn,” he adds, almost gruff again as if to steady himself. “It’s loud. And it smells weird in the summer. But it’s… alright.”

You laugh softly.

“I’ll brace myself.”

He nods once, gaze drifting up to the building behind you.

“Hope the city treats you well.”

There’s more under that than the words carry. A quiet wish. A hope that it doesn’t chew you up the way it can. That it gives you something instead of taking.

You hold his gaze a second longer than necessary.

“Maybe it already has,” you say before you can overthink it.

His mouth opens slightly, like he might respond to that. Instead, you turn the key. The lock clicks open and you push the door inward and step across the threshold, turning back just before it closes fully.

He’s still there. Hands in his jacket pockets now. Shoulders squared against the night air. Watching to make sure you’re inside. Safe.

You lift your hand in a small wave. “Goodnight, not-a-serial-killer.”

A faint huff of breath escapes him, almost a laugh.

“Goodnight,” he replies.

The door shuts.

The sound of the lock sliding into place echoes softly through the stairwell. He waits, hums while he counts to five.

Listens for movement inside—footsteps climbing stairs, a door opening above. When he hears the faint creak of wood and the muffled thud of something being set down, only then does he step back.

Only then does he turn toward his truck.

The city hasn’t changed in the last five minutes. Still buzzing. Still alive. But something in him feels… different. Lighter, maybe.

Or at least less empty.

He slides into the driver’s seat and rests his hands on the steering wheel without starting the engine yet. You called, out of all the numbers in the world, you called him. Not because he was assigned, not because he was ordered, but because you needed help. And he showed up. The thought settles deep, warm and unfamiliar.

Upstairs, you lean back against your closed apartment door and exhale slowly. Your heart isn’t racing anymore. Your head still spins faintly, but beneath that is something steadier.

Safer.

You push off the door and wander toward your mattress, kicking off your shoes halfway there. The apartment doesn’t feel quite as cavernous now, the corners less shadowed, the silence less sharp.

You fish your phone out of your purse and glance at it.

2% battery.

You type quickly before it dies.

Made it upstairs. Thanks again.

You hit send.

Across the street, Bucky’s phone buzzes just as he turns the key in the ignition.

He looks at the screen, the corners of his mouth just barely ticking upwards, thumb hovering over the keyboard for a long moment.

Then he types back.

Good. Get some sleep.

He hesitates before typing out another message.

City’s easier in the morning.

He sends it before he can reconsider. Upstairs, your phone dies before you see it.

But somehow, curled up on your mattress with the window cracked just enough to let Brooklyn’s nighttime hum drift in, you sleep a little easier anyway. And downstairs, parked at the curb a moment longer than necessary, Bucky sits in the quiet of his truck and realizes that for the first time since he put those flyers up with his number—

He hopes it rings again.

The buzz of his phone comes just as Bucky’s settling into the quiet.

He’s halfway through reassembling the carburetor of a bike he doesn’t even own, just something he found on the curb and decided to fix because his hands need purpose the way lungs need air, when the vibration skitters across his kitchen counter.

He stares at it. Unknown number, again.

His jaw tightens automatically. Old habits.

It buzzes again. He wipes his hands on a rag before picking it up, thumb hovering like he’s about to disarm something instead of open a message.

Hi. It's me again. But it’s not a drunk emergency. I can’t open my window and I think I’m suffocating.

He blinks.

Then another message.

I’m not actually suffocating. Probably. But it’s very dramatic in here.

He exhales through his nose. Not quite a laugh. Not quite not.

He types back with one thumb.

Be there in five.

A heart appears immediately.

He doesn’t hesitate.

The building looks different in daylight. Less romantic, with more peeling paint and crooked mailboxes.

He takes the stairs two at a time anyway. You door is already open when he reaches the third floor.

You're standing there like you've been pacing, hair pulled into a messy twist that’s given up in several places, socks on, oversized sweatshirt swallowing your frame. No makeup this time, no glittering party lights reflected in your eyes.

Just… you.

Sober. And clearly mortified.

“Oh my god, hi,” you blurt, words tripping over each other as soon as you see him. “I promise I’m not dying. I just—okay so I tried to open the window and it wouldn’t budge and then I panicked and convinced myself the oxygen was running out and—”

“You know that’s not how air works, right?” he says flatly.

Your mouth snaps shut. “…I did. In theory.”

He steps inside without another word, brushing past your shoulder. You smells like laundry detergent and something citrusy. The apartment is small and bare, boxes still stacked like uneven towers along the walls.

The window in question is in the living room. Old frame. Painted shut.

He walks over, studies it for three seconds.

“You tried pulling?”

“Yes.”

“Pushing?”

“Yes.”

He grips the bottom sash, metal fingers bracing, flesh hand curling over the wood. A small twist of pressure. A sharp upward shove.

The paint seal cracks with a soft pop and the window slides up. Cool Brooklyn air spills in within thirty seconds. He steps back.

You just stare at it, then at him. “…I hate you a little.”

“Join the club.”

You press a hand over your face, laughing despite yourself. “I swear I’m not helpless.”

“Never said you were.”

“You definitely implied it.”

He shrugs one shoulder. “I implied you’ve never met a window before.”

Your eyes narrow, but there’s laughter dancing behind them. “You’re so mean.”

“I’m efficient.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“Sometimes it is.”

You huff, crossing your arms—but you're smiling. Bright and unfiltered, the kind of smile that feels like sunlight hitting bare skin.

It’s… a lot. He’s not used to a lot.

He clears his throat. “You’re not suffocating.”

“Thank you, Doctor Barnes.”

“Don’t call me that.”

You grin. “Mechanic Barnes?”

“No.”

“Freedom Flyer Guy?”

He gives you a look and you laughs again, softer this time. “Sorry.”

A pause settles between you. Not heavy. Just… there.

You shift your weight. “So. I owe you.”

“You don’t.”

“I absolutely do. You just saved my life.”

“You were never in danger.”

“You don’t know that. What if I had spiraled? What if I started hyperventilating? What if I fainted and hit my head and then actually suffocated because the window was closed?”

He just stares at you. “…That’s not how any of that works.”

You point at him triumphantly. “See? You care.”

“I care about physics.”

You beam like he just confessed undying devotion, your eyes twinkling as they bore into his. He looks away first.

“I’m not charging you,” he says.

“I’m not letting you leave without compensation.”

His brows draw together. “Compensation.”

“Yes.”

“I fixed a stuck window.”

“You provided emergency ventilation services.”

“You’re impossible.”

You step closer, hands on hips now, chin tipped up in stubborn determination. “I’m ordering takeout.”

“That’s not payment.”

“It is if you stay and eat it.”

His instinct is to refuse.

He doesn’t linger. He doesn’t sit.

He doesn’t… stay.

But the apartment is quiet except for you and the faint rush of air through the open window. The city noise floats in—distant traffic, someone laughing on the sidewalk, a dog barking.

You look at him like you expect him to bolt. Like you're used to people bolting.

He exhales slowly.

“Fine,” he says. “But nothing fancy.”

Your face lights up like he just handed you the moon. “Yes!”

He winces slightly at the volume.

“Sorry!” you whisper immediately, clapping a hand over your mouth. “I get excited.”

“I can tell.”

You grabs your phone, already scrolling. “Okay, what do you like?”

“Food.”

You snort. “Wow. Insightful.”

“Anything.”

“Any allergies?”

“No.”

“Any strong opinions about noodles?”

He blinks at you.

You gasp, soft yet dramtic. “You don’t have strong noodle opinions?”

“I was alive before noodles were complicated.”

“I don't know if that's a joke or not but that’s deeply concerning.”

He almost smiles. Almost.

You settle on something Thai. Spicy. “It’ll be here in thirty.”

He nods once.

Then you both look at the apartment. No couch yet, no chairs. Just boxes and hardwood floors.

You drop down cross-legged without hesitation. “Floor picnic?”

He hesitates a fraction of a second before lowering himself across from you, back resting against a stack of sealed boxes labeled BOOKS in loopy handwriting.

For a moment, you just sit there.

It’s quiet. Not the uncomfortable kind, just… new. You tuck a loose strand of hair behind your ear. “So. You fix windows often?”

“Second one this week.” he deadpans.

“Wow. You’re basically a specialist.”

“I’ll update the flyer.”

Your laugh bursts out of you before she can stop it, bright and easy. “Please do. ‘Professional Window Hero.’”

“Hero’s a stretch.”

“You got here in, like, five minutes.”

“You were two blocks away.”

You blink, lips parting in light suprise. “You live that close?”

He nods and your smile softens. “That’s… nice.”

“Why.”

“I don’t know.” You shrug. “Feels less scary knowing someone I’ve technically met before is nearby.”

He shifts slightly. “You shouldn’t rely on strangers.”

You tilt your head. “Are we strangers?”

The question hangs there. He studies you face, watching the open curiosity, no edge, no ulterior motive.

“Mostly,” he answers.

You nod slowly, accepting it without flinching. “Okay. Mostly strangers who eat Thai food on the floor.”

“Accurate.”

You lean back on your palms, looking around the half-empty room. “I know it doesn’t look like much yet.”

“It’s fine.”

“I moved here four days ago and everything still feels… unreal.” Your voice softens at the edges. “Like I’m house-sitting someone else’s life.”

He doesn’t interrupt. You glance at him, gauging if he’s listening.

He is.

“I was just…so tired,” you say, quieter now. “Of dreaming about things that only existed when I was asleep.”

He frowns faintly. “Like what?”

“Everything.” You laugh, but it’s not as bright this time. “The job I wanted. The city I wanted. The version of me that wasn’t waiting around for something to happen.”

The breeze moves through the room again, stirring the edges of unpacked papers.

“So I stopped waiting,” you continue. “Packed up my car. Drove here. Signed a lease I could barely afford. Figured if I was going to be scared anyway, I might as well be scared somewhere interesting.”

He studies you gently.

“You moved without knowing anyone.”

“Yep.”

“That’s reckless.”

You grin. “You know some people would call that brave.”

“Debatable.”

“See?” you say, pointing at him. “This is what I mean. You see the worst-case scenario. I see the possibility.”

“I see reality.”

“I see potential.”

“You see suffocating from a closed window.”

You laugh again, bright again and unashamed. “Okay, that one was dramatic.”

“A little.”

“But you still came.”

He looks down at his hands, the metal rubs againt the glove as the leather glints under the overhead light.

“You asked me too,” he says simply.

You watch him for a second too long, stirring something warm and heavy that starts to press at his ribs when the knock at the door saves him.

You scramble up, nearly tripping over a box in your haste. “Food!”

He hears your cheerful thank you through the doorway, the rustle of paper bags, and the quick shuffle back. You set everything between you two like it’s treasure and the smell fills the apartment. You eat straight from the containers, knees occasionally bumping.

It shouldn’t feel like this.

Easy.

But it does.

Bucky watches you, the way that you talkswith your hands, animated, telling him about the tiny coffee shop you found that morning. About the subway map that “looks like abstract art.” About how you got lost for forty minutes and ended up discovering a park you now claims as yours.

“You got lost on purpose,” he says.

“I absolutely did not.”

“You just said you walked in circles.”

“That’s exploring.”

“That’s inefficient.” he grumbles.

You grin around a bite of noodles. “I bet you would’ve hated it.”

“I would’ve brought a map.”

“I had one!”

His face falls. “And you still got lost.”

You points at him with your sauce stained chopsticks. “You’re missing the point.”

“Enlighten me.”

“The point is I was somewhere new. Alone. And it didn’t feel lonely.”

He pauses mid-bite. You don’t seem to realize what you've said until a second later. Your eyes flick to him, softer now.

“Not entirely,” you amend gently.

The air shifts and he swallows the rest of his bite.

“You won’t always feel new here,” he says.

“I know.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I hope not completely.” You smile faintly. “I don’t want it to stop feeling like possibility.”

He doesn’t have an answer for that, he’s still figuring out what possibility even looks like. You finish eating slower than necessary, even when you're done neither of you rush to stand.

Eventually, you gather the empty containers, stacking them neatly.

“Thank you,” you say quietly.

“For what?”

“For showing up. Even when it’s just… windows.”

He nods once. “You can call again.”

The words come out stiffer than he means them to.

“If you… still need something real,” he adds.

Your smile this time is different. Softer, bright but less blinding, more intentional.

“Okay,” you say. “I will.”

He stands, brushing imaginary dust from his jeans and you walk him to the door. The hallway light flickers overhead as you unlock it fully, stepping into the frame like you're guarding it.

He lingers on the threshold.

“I think you'll fit in just fine here,” he says, the words awkward but sincere. “It’s loud. And expensive.”

You laugh softly.

“And,” he adds, after a beat, “it’s not the worst place to start over.”

Something in your expression shifts.

“Thank you, Bucky.”

It lands somewhere deep in his chest just as last time. Warmer than he expects. He nods once, because he doesn’t trust his voice.

“Goodnight,” you say.

“Lock the door,” he replies automatically.

You roll your eyes but smile. “Yes, sir.”

He turns and heads down the stairs. Halfway to the landing, he hears the soft click of your lock sliding into place, and the ghost of a smile curves across his lips.

Only then does he keep walking.

The third time you text him, you stare at the screen for a full minute before hitting send.

Hi. Hypothetically— If someone bought shelves and then realized drywall is apparently not just… wall… what would that someone do?

Three dots appear almost immediately.

That someone would wait.

You grin.

For?

Me.

He shows up with a drill slung over his shoulder like it belongs there.

You open the door before he knocks this time, already smiling. “Hi.”

He pauses just slightly at the sight of you barefoot in paint-splattered shorts and one of those oversized band tees you sleep in. Your hair’s half-clipped up, pencil tucked behind your ear like you’ve been architecting something serious instead of arguing with brackets.

“You didn’t start without me,” he says.

“I considered it.”

“It's good you didn't. You would’ve hit a pipe.”

“I resent that.”

“You should.”

You step aside to let him in, eucalyptus and mint no longer the dominant scent of your place—now it smells like sawdust and fresh coffee and something citrusy you insist on spraying in the mornings because it “feels productive.”

He surveys the wall you’ve chosen. “What’re these for?”

“Plants, books, maybe a tiny ceramic frog. I don’t know yet. It’s about potential.”

He huffs. “Everything’s about potential with you.”

“And everything’s about worst-case scenarios with you.”

“It keeps you from flooding your apartment.”

“You’re so dramatic.”

He levels you with a look.

You grin.

He gets to work, movements efficient, measured. Flesh fingers steady, metal ones precise throught the stretch of their leather glove. The hum of the drill fills the apartment, and you sit cross-legged on the floor watching like it’s a live performance.

“You know,” you say over the noise, “most people would charge for this.”

“I’m aware.”

“You don’t?” You ask curiously.

“You fed me.”

“That was one time.”

He glances at you. “You planning to stop?”

You blink. “…No.”

“Then we’re square.”

The shelves are up in under twenty minutes. You clap softly when he finishes, which earns you a flat look from Bucky.

“What?” You mutter.

“It’s a shelf.”

“It’s a level shelf!”

He exhales through his nose, but there’s the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth.

You don’t mention it. You just notice.

The dresser comes next.

You absolutely could’ve waited for building management to help. Or ordered professional movers.

But instead:

I have made a mistake. The dresser is winning.

He’s there in seven minutes. You open the door breathless, like you’ve been wrestling furniture for sport. “It’s heavier than it looked online.”

“They always are.”

He takes one look at the narrow hallway, the impossible angle to your bedroom door, and just nods once.

“Lift when I say,” he tells you.

“Yes, sir,” you reply brightly.

His jaw tightens. “Don’t.”

You bite back a smile.

The two of you maneuver the dresser inch by inch. Your hands slip once and he steadies it without thinking, metal arm braced, body angled to shield yours from the corner.

“Careful,” he mutters.

“You’re the one who said lift.”

“You’re the one who didn’t bend your knees.”

“You sound like a gym teacher.”

“You’d have hated school with me.”

You laugh, breathless, as the dresser finally slides into place against your bedroom wall before you collapse onto the floor dramatically.

“We did it,” you declare.

“I did it.”

“You emotionally supported.”

“I told you what to do.”

“Exactly.”

He shakes his head, but he doesn’t leave. Not right away.

“Okay,” you say one afternoon, holding up the subway map like it’s an ancient scroll. “Explain this.”

He stares at it. Then at you. “It’s color-coded.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“It literally does.”

You’re standing at the entrance of the station, the late afternoon rush building around you. The air smells like hot concrete and something metallic.

“I get on the blue one,” you say slowly, “unless it’s express? Or local? And then it skips my stop? Why does it skip my stop.”

“Because it’s express.”

“Why would I want that?” You ask.

“So you get somewhere faster.”

“But not where I need to go.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose.

You beam at him behind the map. He steps closer, crowd pressing in around you. His shoulder leans into yours as he points at the map. “You take the local during rush hour if you’re only going a few stops. Express if you’re crossing boroughs.”

You squint. “And how do I know which is which?”

He gestures to the small black circles versus the white ones.

Your head tilts. “Oh.”

“You didn’t see that.”

“No.”

He sighs, but it’s softer than it used to be. “Stay to the right on the stairs. Don’t stand in the doorway, and if the train’s packed, wait for the next one.”

“I don’t mind packed.”

“You will.”

You grin up at him. “You’re very protective over public transit etiquette.”

“I’m protective over not getting shoved.”

The train roars into the station. You hesitate for half a second before stepping forward, his hand finds your elbow without thinking, guiding.

“Move with the crowd,” he says quietly near your ear. “Don’t fight it.”

You nod. Inside, it’s warm and loud and close.

You look up at him, eyes bright. “This is kind of fun.”

“It’s not.”

“It is if you decide it is.”

He shakes his head, but he doesn’t let go of your elbow until your stop arrives. After that, he walks you through shortcuts like he’s revealing state secrets.

“Cut through here if it’s raining.”

“Take the side exit after ten p.m.”

“Don’t get on the empty car.”

“Why?” You ask.

“Just don’t.”

You salute dramatically. “Yes, subway sargeant.”

“Don't call me that.”

You grin. You don’t stop.

You teach him photography in payment.

“Okay, your turn,” you tell him one evening, camera strap looped around your wrist.

He eyes it suspiciously. “What’s that?”

“My livelihood.”

“It looks old.”

“It’s film.”

He pauses. “They still make that?”

You gasp. “You wound me.”

You press the camera into his hands, guiding his fingers over the body. “Manual focus. No screen. You have to feel it.”

He studies it carefully, brow furrowed in concentration the way it does when he’s fixing something delicate.

“You adjust the aperture here,” you say, stepping closer. “Shutter speed there. It’s slower. Intentional.”

He glances at you. “Like you.”

You blink and find his eyes, his gaze like a soft sky blue with a dark edge that held the color in, looking at you like you were the eye of the storm. You look back. He looks away first.

You swallow your smile. “Exactly like me.”

You teach him how to look for light instead of just objects. How shadows tell stories. How grain makes things honest. He listens, really listens, so you start bringing the camera everywhere. To the bodega. To the park. To the subway platform at golden hour.

And somehow—he’s in half the frames. Leaning against brick walls. Looking out over the water. Brow creased at something you said.

He notices eventually.

“You take a lot of pictures,” he says one afternoon when you snap another shot of him sitting on the stoop outside your building.

“I’m a photographer.”

“Of me.”

You lower the camera slowly. “You’re in good light.”

He scoffs, but he doesn’t tell you to stop.

You don’t tell him that you’ve started a folder at work labeled The Brooklyn Study. That half of it is just him, that your boss called the shots “intimate” or that you flushed all the way to your ears and clutched the folder to your chest.

You keep that part to yourself. For now.

Over the next few weeks, the calls keep coming.

Is this radiator supposed to sound like it’s screaming?

He arrives to find you crouched in front of it like it’s a wild animal.

“It’s air in the pipes,” he says.

“It sounds haunted.”

“It’s not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

You watch him bleed it carefully, steam hissing softly.

“You’re very calm around loud, angry noises,” you observe.

He doesn’t answer that.

Sometimes you call and you don’t actually need help.

I think the shelf is… slightly crooked.

It isn’t. He adjusts it anyway.

The hallway light flickers weird.

He tightens the bulb.

Sometimes you just say:

Are you busy?

And when he answers no, you say:

Good.

You sit on the floor again. Or on your fire escape. Or at the small kitchen table you finally bought.

You talk. About work. About how strange it is building a life from scratch. About how sometimes the quiet feels too loud. He pretends he doesn’t notice that those are the nights you text the latest. He pretends he doesn’t notice that you hover a second longer when he stands to leave.

He pretends a lot.

But he starts remembering. Your coffee order—oat milk, no sugar. The way you wrinkle your nose when something’s too spicy. The fact that you hum when you’re editing photos. He starts bringing tools without being asked. A level. Extra screws. A small toolkit he leaves under your sink “just in case.” He checks your building door after you close it.

Always.

You start saving him leftovers.

Tiny labeled containers in your fridge. For Window Hero. Emergency Noodles. Do Not Skip Dinner.

He pretends he doesn’t see the notes but he eats every single one.

One afternoon you hand him a stack of redesigned flyers. His brows lift.

“They were tragic,” you say unapologetically. “No tear-off tabs, no clear services listed and a terrible font choice.”

He flips one over. It’s cleaner and more organized. Still blunt, but somehow warmer.

FREEDOM HELP. Need something fixed, carried, explained? Text. I show up.

Your number added beneath his in smaller print: Subway translations available.

He looks at you slowly. “You added yourself.”

You nod. “I’m your marketing department.”

“I didn’t ask for one.”

“You needed one.”

A beat.

“…They’re better,” he admits.

You beam like you just won an award.

You start calling him before small problems become big ones. He starts answering before the second ring and soon the loneliness shifts. It doesn’t disappear, not all in one big fell swoop. It settles between you instead of sitting on your shoulders, in shared silence instead of empty rooms. One evening you sit beside him on the stoop, camera resting in your lap.

“You know,” you say softly, “I thought moving here would fix everything.”

He stares out at the streetlights flickering on. “Did it?”

“No.” You smile faintly. “But it gave me something to build with.”

He nods once. You bump your shoulder against his.

“Thanks for showing up,” you add quietly. He doesn’t look at you, but his shoulder presses back.

“Thanks for calling,” he says.

It starts small. So small to the point you hadn't even realized anything, until you did and now it's all you can think about. A brush of his shoulder lingering a second too long. The way your apartment feels less like a temporary landing pad and more like a home when his boots are by the door. The way silence doesn’t scrape at you when he’s sitting in it too.

You try not to think too hard about it at first.

You tell yourself it makes sense. He’s the only person you really know here. Of course you call him. Of course you look for him in a crowd on the subway platform without meaning to. Of course your camera finds him before it finds anything else.

It’s proximity. Convenience, familiarity even.

It’s not—

It’s not the way your stomach flips when he says your name like it’s something fragile he doesn’t want to drop. It’s not the way you start cooking too much on purpose. It’s not the way you check your phone at night hoping for a text that never comes because he doesn’t text first.

You sit with that realization longer than you’d like.

Because if it’s not just circumstance…

Then it’s choice, and you know what choosing feels like now. It feels like packing your life into boxes and driving toward something uncertain, it feels like standing in a city that doesn’t know you exist and deciding you belong anyway.

It feels terrifying.

The night you call him, nothing is broken. There's no screaming radiator, no crooked shelf, no stuck window. You’re standing in your kitchen staring at two bowls with steam curling up and realizing you only need one, your thumb hovering over his name for a long moment.

Then you press it. He answers on the second ring.

“What broke this time?”

You huff a soft laugh despite yourself. “Hi to you too.”

A pause. “…Hi.”

You swallow. “I don’t need anything fixed.”

Silence stretches across the line. You can almost picture his face—brows drawn together, jaw tight, waiting for the catch.

“…Then why am I coming over?”

The words slip out before you can overthink them. “Because I don’t want to eat dinner alone.”

You don’t try to make it lighter, you don’t fill the quiet with a joke. You just let it sit there. On the other end, you hear him breathe in slow and measured. You almost backtrack, almost say never mind, it’s stupid, forget it.

But then:

“I’ll be there in ten.”

The line clicks dead and you stand in the middle of your kitchen for a long moment, heart beating louder than it should.

When he knocks, you’re suddenly aware of everything. The new couch you finally unpacked and assembled, the lamp casting soft amber light across the room, the way your hair looks, the way you look.

You open the door.

He’s in a dark Henley tonight, paired with his usual leather jacket, hair slightly wind-tousled from the walk. There’s a crease between his brows that smooths when he sees you standing there, not panicked. Not flustered.

Just… waiting.

“You’re not bleeding,” he observes.

“Disappointing, I know.”

He steps inside anyway. The apartment smells like garlic and sesame oil. Like home, almost.

“I made too much,” you say, gesturing to the dishes in the sink behind you like evidence. “Again.”

“You always do.”

“I don’t.” You pout.

“You do.”

You shut the door behind him, softer than usual.

“I have a couch now,” you announce, like it’s a milestone.

He looks at it. “You assembled it yourself?”

“Yes.”

“…Is it going to give out under me.”

You narrow your eyes. “Sit down and find out.”

He does, carefully, like he expects it to collapse out of spite.

It doesn’t. You sit beside him with a ghost of a smirk, knees brushing for a second before you both subtly adjust. The rest of dinner rests on the coffee table. The TV stays off as the city hum drifts in through the cracked window he fixed weeks ago.

For a while, you just eat. Not rushed, not quiet in a strained way, just something simple and easy.

You steal a glance at him when he’s not looking. The soft concentration when he untangles chopsticks, the way his shoulders don’t seem as tight here. You realize something slowly, like stepping into water and not noticing how deep you’ve gone until it reaches your ribs.

You don’t just call him because he’s helpful, you don’t just want him around because he’s familiar. You want him here.

Specifically. His dry comments, his steady presence, the way he fills space without overwhelming it. You want more than borrowed time and fixed shelves. The realization settles in your chest, warm and terrifying.

You clear your throat gently. “Can I ask you something?”

He glances over. “You usually do.”

“Why did you put up the flyers?”

His jaw shifts and you watch the way he looks down at his hands, at the faint scuffs on metal and skin.

“I didn’t know what to do with my time,” he says finally.

You wait but he doesn’t elaborate. “That’s it?” you ask softly.

His mouth tightens, like you’ve stepped near something he doesn’t show people.

“I spent a long time not choosing anything,” he says after a moment. His voice is quieter now. Less deadpan. “Where I went. What I did. Who I was.”

The words land heavy between you, thickening in the air, you don’t interrupt.

“I was… useful,” he continues. “Just not in a way that was mine.”

Your chest tightens.

“When that stopped,” he adds, “there was just time. And I didn’t know what to do with it.”

The room feels smaller, the air growing warmer.

“So you made yourself available,” you murmur.

He nods once. “That’s it.”

You study him carefully, the rigid line of his spine, the way he holds himself like he’s bracing for impact even now.

“You’re not bored,” you say gently as his eyes flick to yours.

“You’re just not used to choosing.”

The words hang there and something shifts in his expression. Something almost… soft. Not dramatic, not loud. But it hits, hard. You see it in the way his throat works when he swallows, in the way his gaze drops, then lifts again slower this time.

He looks… startled, like you handed him something he didn’t know he’d been missing.

“I didn’t want a job,” he says, almost to himself.

You stay very still.

“I wanted…” He exhales through his nose. “Purpose.”

The word settles between you like a fragile thing.

“You have that,” you say quietly.

He shakes his head faintly. “Fixing windows isn’t purpose.”

“No,” you agree softly. “But showing up is.”

His eyes meet yours again, steady and searching for something. You wonder if he sees it in you.

“You wanted someone to need you,” you continue, your voice barely above a whisper.

The truth is there, plain and unadorned. He doesn’t deny it. And you realize something else at the same time, something that makes your pulse stumble.

You do need him. But not because you can’t lift a dresser, not because the subway map confuses you, not because you don’t know anyone else. You need him in the way you need someone to witness your life as it unfolds. To sit beside you while it’s messy and unfinished and becoming.

“Well I need you,” you add softly. "Not… just to fix a shelf or move a heavy dresser."

His shoulders loosen a fraction and you feel your heart let out a beat that you didn't know could make. You don’t know who moves first. Maybe neither of you. Maybe it’s just gravity curling around you both and pressing in on you, but when your knee presses fully against his this time, and neither of you pulls away.

The city hums outside, your couch holds steady beneath you. There's a beat that passes between you two, and when your eyes find his he looks at you like he’s seeing you differently now. Not as a problem to solve, not as a task to complete. But as a choice, and you realize, heart thudding slow and certain—

You want him to choose you, not because you’re the only person here, not because you called first. But because he wants to sit on this couch, eat these noodles, share this quiet.

And because he wants to do it wth you.

He exhales slowly.

“I don’t mind,” he says, voice rougher than usual, “not eating alone.”

Your chest warms. “Good,” you whisper.

The quiet after your words doesn’t feel fragile anymore.

It feels aware. He’s still looking at you differently—like the ground shifted half an inch and he’s recalibrating his balance. The takeout cartons sit forgotten on the coffee table, noodles going cold. Your gaze drifts, hesitant at first. To his hands. You’ve seen it, of course. Noticed it the first night he fixed your window. The glint of metal under warm apartment light when his jacket would slip past gloved wrist he seamless line where steel warms.

But you never asked. It felt like staring, like something earned, not taken.

You swallow softly. “Can I ask you something else?”

One brow lifts faintly. “You’re on a roll tonight.”

Your eyes flick down again, then back up to his face. “Your arm.”

He goes very still. You feel it instantly—that subtle tightening, the way his spine straightens like he’s bracing for something sharp.

“I’ve noticed it,” you add quickly, gentle. “Obviously. But I didn’t want to… I don’t know. Make it a thing.”

His jaw shifts once.

“It is a thing,” he says evenly.

“I know.” You tilt your head slightly. “But it’s yours.”

That makes something in his expression soften. Barely. You shift on the couch so you’re angled toward him more fully. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay.”

He studies your face carefully, like he’s searching for pity. You don’t give him any, just curiosity, quiet and steady. After a long moment, he flexes his metal fingers once. The faint whir of internal mechanics hums low in the room.

“Lost… the original,” he says, voice stripped down. No performance. No deflection. “A… long time ago.”

You nod once, not pressing.

“It was replaced,” he continues. “Not exactly by choice.”

There’s weight there. History and shadows you don’t ask him to drag into the light tonight, you don’t need details to understand it wasn’t simple.

“It works better than the first one,” he adds, almost wry. “Stronger.”

“I’ve noticed,” you murmur, thinking about the dresser. The effortless way he steadies things. The careful control he uses so he doesn’t break them.

He glances at you. “Doesn’t always feel like mine.”

The honesty in that lands softly against your ribs, you hesitate, then softly murmur. “Can I see it?”

The question hangs between you. He searches your face again, slower this time.

“Yeah,” he says finally.

He turns slightly on the couch, resting his forearm along his thigh. The metal catches the lamplight—dark grey and golden seams, subtle scratches from use. Not polished or pure ornamental but real. You lean closer without thinking, breath slowing. Up close, it’s intricate, not just plating but delicate etchings along the fingers, tiny grooves and segments that shift when he flexes.

“It’s…” You shake your head faintly, almost in awe. “It’s kind of beautiful.”

He huffs softly. “That’s a new one.”

“I mean it.”

You lift your hand slowly, giving him every chance to pull away. He doesn’t. Your fingers hover for half a second before brushing lightly over the plating of his knuckles. Cool and solid, smooth in some places, faintly textured in others. You trace the seam where metal curves into the back of his hand, mesmerized by the craftsmanship of it, by the contrast of it against the warmth radiating from the rest of him.

He watches you instead of your hand. Your touch is careful, not clinical, just… curious.

“It doesn’t scare you?” he asks quietly.

You glance up, still brushing your fingertips lightly over the steel.

“No,” you say simply.

He studies you like he’s trying to understand how that’s possible.

“It’s part of you,” you add. “Why would that scare me?”

Something shifts in his breathing. Your thumb grazes the edge of his knuckles again, softer this time. Not examining, just feeling as he flexes his fingers once under your touch, almost experimentally.

You smile faintly. “Does… can you feel that?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“Everything?”

“Mostly.”

You nod slowly, still tracing the lines like you’re memorizing them, you don’t flinch, you don’t hesitate. You just let your hand rest there a moment longer than necessary. When you finally look back up at him, you realize how close you’ve gotten.

Your knees are pressed fully against his now, your hand still resting over metal and seam and strength. There’s no fear in his eyes, just something open, something quietly undone.

“You don’t have to be useful all the time,” you murmur.

His throat moves when he swallows.

“I know,” he says.

But the way he says it sounds like he’s still learning how to believe it, your fingers slide gently from his knuckles to his wrist, resting there feeling the vibrational hum where a pulse used to sit.

The air between you feels warmer now, denser, like fog settling in over rolling hills. The radiator ticks softly in the corner, no longer screaming—just settling into itself. The lamp beside the couch casts everything in gold, softening edges that usually feel sharper in daylight.

You’re still sitting close. Close enough that the heat of him bleeds through denim and cotton, close enough that you can feel the faint shift of his breathing when you inhale.

“I like coming here,” he adds after a moment.

It sounds almost reluctant. Like admitting it costs him something, but he says it anyway. It makes a small smile pull at your mouth.

“I know that too.”

The words land gently between you, the kind of truth that doesn’t need to be dressed up. You shift on the couch, turning toward him fully now. Your knees slide against his thigh, your shoulder brushes his arm.

You shift closer without standing, without moving anywhere but forward.

“You’re the first person I called when I didn’t know what to do,” you say quietly.

You hadn’t meant to say that tonight, it just feels like the right place to put it. His jaw tightens, then loosens as he swallows.

“You’re the first person who’s called me because they just…” He exhales slowly, eyes flicking down to your mouth and back up again. “Wanted me there.”

The air shifts. Not into anything heavy or suffocating but charged, like the moment right before a thunder cloud in a summer storm breaks but, softer. You can hear your own heartbeat now. It doesn’t feel frantic, it feels certain.

He moves first. Slowly, so slowly you could stop him if you wanted to. His hand lifts, hovering near your waist. Not touching yet, just lingering there giving you time.

You don’t shift back, you don’t flinch. Instead, you lean the smallest fraction closer in silent permission. His fingers settle at your side, warm and steady through the thin fabric of your shirt, you can see the hesitant question in his eyes.

You answer it by closing the distance. The first brush of his mouth against yours is careful. Testing, like he’s afraid you’ll disappear if he presses too hard, but you don’t. You tilt your head slightly, lips parting just enough to deepen it. It’s not dramatic, there are no fireworks, no sweeping orchestration.

Just warmth. His hand shifts at your waist, thumb pressing gently like he’s confirming you’re real. Your fingers slide up to his shoulder, curling into fabric. He kisses you like he’s learning something new, like he’s memorizing it. Soft, unhurried and a little uncertain but real, very real. You can feel the exhale he lets out against your mouth, the way tension leaves him in slow increments. When you pull back, it’s only an inch.

Foreheads nearly touching, his breath mingles with yours and it's like the seconds slowed around you, the whole world dipped into this sedated ease.

You’ve been kissed before. In doorways, in cars, in moments that burned bright and faded just as fast. This isn’t that. This feels like sitting on your couch with noodles growing cold, like subway maps and crooked shelves, like someone showing up every time you asked.

Like belonging. His thumb brushes lightly against your side again, almost absentminded.

“You sure?” he murmurs, searching your face one last time.

You smile, softer than usual.

“I didn’t call you because I was lonely,” you whisper.

His brows knit faintly.

“I called because I wanted you.”

Something in him settles at that, deep in his chest and curling through his ribs. He leans in again, and this time the kiss is less hesitant, still gentle but more sure. Fuller as you let out of a soft breath against him. Your hand slides up into his hair. His metal fingers flex slightly at your waist, cool through cotton but steady, controlled.

That should not have felt like anything. It was practical. Temporary. A matter of access. Work started early, and the lock on the front door still stuck if you didn’t lift and push at the same time. Easier if one of them got there first.

Still, the key sat in his pocket with disproportionate weight. Warm from his body.

He got out, boots crunching over gravel, a thermos in one hand and a paper sack of breakfast in the other. Henley sleeves shoved up to his forearms despite the chill, old jeans, work gloves hanging from his back pocket. Basic. Functional. Forgettable.

Which would have been enough of a problem on its own, because he knew what the henley did. He was not stupid. He had seen mirrors before. Seen the way her eyes sometimes snagged and then moved away like she was pretending they hadn’t.

He just preferred not to examine that too closely.

Inside, the house greeted him with its usual complaints: the sigh of boards under his weight, the draft from the front parlor window, the persistent smell of plaster dust and old wood. He set the thermos and breakfast on the built-in in what would eventually be the dining room, then walked to the back room where they were starting today.

The wall between the kitchen and the old pantry wasn’t load-bearing. He’d checked twice. Then again. Still, he stood in front of it now with his hands on his hips, staring at the faded plaster and old hairline cracks, mentally running through the sequence.

Plastic sheeting first. Drop cloths. Mask. Score edges. Test section. Watch for hidden wires. Take it down slow.

Measurable. Contained. Straightforward.

He liked straightforward.

The front door opened behind him with a scrape and a thud.

Then her voice floated through the hall. “I brought coffee, but now I’m worried you also brought coffee and we’ve become embarrassing.”

Bucky closed his eyes briefly.

He knew that voice too well already. The exact register of it first thing in the morning. A little rough around the edges. Warm in a way that made the whole empty house feel occupied before he even saw her.

He stepped into the doorway and then made the tactical error of looking.

She stood in the front room with a cardboard drink carrier in one hand and a canvas tote over her shoulder, sunlight just beginning to catch at the ends of her hair through the grimy front window. She was dressed, as far as he could tell, for an entirely different activity than knocking out a wall.

Not impractical enough to be ridiculous. That would have been easier to dismiss.

Just… offensively cute.

A soft fitted sweater tucked into high-waisted jeans, the kind that made her look like some impossible hybrid of competent and lovely. Tiny gold hoops in her ears. Boots that were sturdy enough to count as workwear but still looked better than anything workwear had a right to. There was a scarf looped loose around her neck in a color that made her mouth look even softer.

Bucky stared at her for one beat too long.

Then another.

She noticed, because of course she did. “What?”

He leaned one shoulder against the doorway, folding his arms so he had something to do with them. “You know we’re doing demolition today, right?”

She looked down at herself as if checking. “Pretty sure.”

“You’re dressed like you’re going to charm a local bookstore into giving you a discount.”

That made her grin. “And you’re dressed like a hardware store fantasy.”

He said nothing to that.

Mostly because there was, as far as he could tell, no safe response.

She walked toward him, holding out one of the coffees. “Here. Peace offering.”

He took it carefully, fingers brushing hers for half a second too long because she did not seem to have any sense of self-preservation when it came to proximity. Or maybe he was the one lacking it. Hard to say anymore.

“Also,” she added, peering up at him, “that color again?”

He looked down at his henley. Dark red. The same old one, or close enough. “It’s a shirt.”

“It’s a very specific shirt.”

“It’s work clothes.”

“It’s devastating, is what it is.”

Bucky nearly choked on his coffee.

She swept past him before he could recover, like she hadn’t just dropped that at his feet and walked away from the scene of the crime. He watched her go with an expression he would later be grateful nobody had been around to witness.

By the time he joined her in the back room, she had set the coffees down and was tying her hair up with a pencil she found in her tote. The motion bared the line of her throat for one brief, unhelpful second.

He looked at the wall instead.

“Okay,” he said, more abruptly than intended. “Ground rules.”

She turned. “Hit me.”

“Literally, don’t. There’s enough head trauma in this house already.”

Her mouth twitched.

He pointed at the pile of gear on the floor. “Goggles. Mask. Gloves. You do not pull anything until I say it’s clear. There could be old wiring in there, and I don’t trust anything in this place that I haven’t seen with my own eyes.”

She gave him a tiny salute. “Yes, sir.”

Bucky stared.

Her expression went innocent in a way that was so transparent it wrapped back around to being dangerous.

He picked up a pair of safety goggles and held them out. “Don’t start.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You implied enough.”

She took the goggles, smile widening. “Bossy this morning.”

He heard himself say, before common sense intervened, “Only because somebody has to keep you from demolishing a wall dressed like a magazine spread.”

That got him.

Her eyebrows lifted. Slowly. “Oh?”

He realized, far too late, what he’d admitted.

Not the full thing. Not even close.

But enough to make heat climb the back of his neck in a way he deeply resented.

He looked past her shoulder at the wall. “Mask on.”

She made a soft little sound that was suspiciously like a swallowed laugh and obeyed, which somehow felt worse.

An hour later, the room was transformed from neglected old pantry to active war zone.

Plastic sheeting taped off the doorway. Dust in the air. The first section of plaster gone, exposing lath and the dark hollow between studs. The rhythm of the work had settled into something almost meditative: score, pry, crack, pull, clear. Bucky did the heavier parts, controlled and exact even when force was required. She hauled debris, held the light, bagged trash, and handed him tools before he asked for them like she’d been learning his patterns in secret.

Maybe she had.

That thought lodged under his ribs and stayed there.

Sweat dampened the back of his neck. Dust streaked his forearms. His henley was clinging annoyingly in places he preferred not to think about, especially when she had started looking at him in those brief, startled glances and then pretending she was looking at the crowbar in his hand instead.

He drove the pry bar behind another strip of lath and pulled. Wood snapped with a dry crack.

“You know,” she said from where she was crouched over a contractor bag, “for a man who acts like feelings are an administrative error, you really do have excellent hands.”

Bucky froze.

Slowly, he looked over his shoulder.

She was not looking at him. She was tying off the garbage bag with suspicious concentration.

“You wanna repeat that?” he asked.

“No,” she said at once.

He set the pry bar down very carefully. “Thought so.”

Her cheeks had gone pink above the dust mask. He told himself not to notice. He noticed anyway.

To save them both, or possibly ruin them both more slowly, he turned back to the wall and knocked out another section. More plaster fell away. Behind it, the studs stood straight and weathered, old wood still sound.

“Hey,” she said, closer now.

Bucky pulled his mask down under his chin and glanced over.

She was standing with her gloves off, staring at the space inside the wall. At one of the studs, bare and exposed after who knew how many decades hidden inside plaster.

“What?”

She bit her lip the way she did when she was thinking something through. “Can we do something stupid?”

His first instinct was to say no on principle.

Then he saw that look on her face—that dangerous, luminous look that usually meant whatever came next would lodge in his chest and stay there forever.

He sighed. “Depends how stupid.”

Instead of answering, she bent to rummage through her tote and came up with a marker.

Bucky frowned. “What’s that for?”

She stepped into the open section of wall, ducking under the hanging plastic, and touched the wood lightly with her fingers.

“People do this sometimes,” she said. “Before they close up a wall. Dates. Notes. Little messages. Proof they were here.”

He stared at the marker in her hand.

At the stud.

At the patch of open wall they would eventually seal up again, hidden and intact, carrying whatever was written there for decades without anyone seeing.

Something in his chest shifted uneasily.

She glanced back at him, suddenly uncertain. “Only if you want to. We don’t have to. I just thought…”

Bucky didn’t let her finish that sentence. Couldn’t, maybe.

Because there it was again, that same question in another form.

Can this be kept? Can this mean something? Can we leave evidence that we intended to stay?

He took the marker from her before he could think better of it. Their fingers brushed, dusty and warm.

“What do people usually write?” he asked.

Her eyes softened. “Anything.”

That was not helpful.

He looked at the wood. At the grain of it. At the old marks left by other hands, other builders, long gone. For a second all he could think was that hidden things had not often been kind in his life. Hidden compartments. Hidden files. Hidden names. Whole years of himself buried where he could not reach them.

But this would be different.

Not concealed in fear.

Kept in trust.

He uncapped the marker and stood there, broad shoulders blocking the morning light, staring at the stud like it was a confession booth.

She stayed quiet beside him.

Finally he wrote, in careful block letters:

J.B. WAS HERE

He stepped back at once, almost embarrassed by it.

She looked at the words and then at him, laughter tugging at her mouth. “Very poetic.”

Bucky handed her the marker. “Your turn, smartass.”

She took it, smiling now, and under his name she wrote:

SO WAS SHE

He barked out a laugh before he could stop it. “That’s it?”

“She values mystery.”

“She values being annoying.”

She capped the marker and then hesitated, looking back at the stud. After a second, she added the date in smaller writing beneath both lines.

The room went quiet.

Dust moved through the sunlight in slow, floating threads. Somewhere outside, a crow called from the trees. Bucky stared at those few black words on old wood until they blurred around the edges.

It should not have mattered this much.

It was a joke, mostly. A small thing. Something no one might ever see again.

Still, it struck him with disproportionate force, the thought of those marks remaining inside the house long after the wall was finished. Their names—not even full names, not exactly, but enough. Enough to say we were here. Enough to say this was touched by our hands. Enough to say someone chose to leave proof of themselves without any plan to come retrieve it later.

He felt her move closer.

When he looked down, she was watching his face too carefully.

“You okay?” she asked softly.

And because he was tired, dusty, hungry, and losing the ability to lie to her with any consistency, the truth slipped out before he could reshape it.

“Yeah,” he said, voice rougher than he meant. “Just not used to…” He stopped.

“To what?” she asked.

He looked back at the wall.

At the date. At her handwriting beside his.

“Leaving something behind on purpose,” he said.

The silence after that was so gentle it almost undid him.

Then her hand, warm through his work glove, closed around his wrist.

Not to restrain. Not to fix. Just there.

Bucky let himself look at her.

Dust on her cheek. Hair escaping around her face. Sweater ruined now, finally, one sleeve streaked with plaster and the hem powdered white. She still looked too pretty for demolition. Too soft and bright for this gutted room. Too much like a future he had not learned how to stand inside without flinching.

And yet here she was.

In the mess. In the noise. In the middle of the work.

With him.

He swallowed once. “Your outfit’s destroyed.”

She looked down, then back up at him. “Worth it.”

“For one wall?”

Her gaze flicked to the writing on the stud, then back to him.

“No,” she said quietly. “Not just for the wall.”

Something hot and helpless moved low in his chest.

So he did what Bucky Barnes always did when a feeling got too large and had nowhere tactical to go.

He picked up the pry bar again.

“We still have half the room left,” he muttered.

Her smile went all soft around the edges, like she knew exactly what retreat looked like when it put on work boots and a scowl.

“Yes, boss.”

He shot her a look.

She only reached for another contractor bag, humming under her breath like she hadn’t just altered his internal landscape before noon.

By late afternoon, the wall was down to studs, the floor buried in debris, and both of them looked equally wrecked. Her pretty outfit had finally surrendered completely—dust in her hair, smudges on her jeans, sweater hopelessly sacrificed. His henley was damp at the collar and stuck to his back, forearms gray with plaster and sweat.

They stood in the middle of the stripped room drinking lukewarm water, looking at the bones of the house laid bare.

“It already feels bigger,” she said.

Bucky nodded.

It did.

Not just the room.

The day. The house. The terrifying shape of the future itself.

He glanced once toward the stud with their names on it. Hidden now behind hanging plastic and angled light, but still there. Waiting.

For the first time in a long time, the evidence of his presence somewhere did not feel like a liability.

Cheap for a reason, he thought.

Cheap enough to make him suspicious.

Beautiful enough to make him uneasy.

Beside him, she got out of the truck and just… stared.

Not wary. Not practical. Not even disappointed.

Interested.

That was somehow worse.

Bucky glanced at her. “You don’t have to pretend.”

She turned, one hand still on the truck door. “Pretend what?”

“That this isn’t a disaster.”

Her mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. “Oh, it is a disaster.”

He exhaled through his nose. “Okay.”

“But,” she said, looking back at the house, “it’s a beautiful one.”

Bucky actually laughed once, low and brief, because of course she’d say something ridiculous like that. Of course she’d stand there in the thin October light, hair caught by the wind, looking at a dying house like it had merely fallen asleep.

He should’ve known then not to come.

Not because the place was dangerous.

Because she was already seeing a future in it.

The realtor had left the key in a lockbox and a sheet of paper clipped to the front railing with a list of disclaimers that got longer the further down the page it went. Foundation settling. Water staining in the rear bedroom. Updated electrical in only part of the first floor. No guarantees regarding plumbing, insulation, or appliances.

Bucky barely read it. He’d seen worse. Lived in worse. Hidden in worse.

The front door stuck halfway and needed a shoulder to open. He stepped inside first on instinct, the old floorboards groaning under his weight. Dust hung in the air, bright in the shafts of light cutting through the front windows. The place smelled like plaster, old wood, and the faint mineral damp of a house that had gone too many winters without enough heat.

He listened.

Nothing moved except the settling hush of the place around them.

Behind him, she slipped inside and stopped just short of colliding with his back.

“Oh,” she breathed.

It came out soft. Reverent.

Bucky looked around the front room again, trying to see whatever it was she was seeing. The wallpaper had bubbled away from the walls in long curled strips. The fireplace mantel leaned half an inch to the right. There was a water stain on the ceiling shaped almost exactly like a hand.

“It needs work,” he said.

She shot him a look. “You think?”

He moved farther in, checking the hallway, glancing through a doorway into what had once been a dining room. “A lot of work.”

She followed, fingers trailing over the banister, the cracked molding, the edge of a built-in shelf with all the absentminded tenderness of someone greeting an injured animal without wanting to scare it.

That feeling came again, low and unwelcome.

He knew that touch.

Not the literal one.

The intent behind it.

He’d felt it turned on himself a handful of times in his life, always startling, always impossible to meet head-on. That quiet, unarmed consideration. The refusal to flinch from damage. The awful implication that ruin was not the final word on a thing.

He cleared his throat. “You okay?”

She nodded, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was peering into the next room, where afternoon sunlight spilled across warped hardwood in one wide gold sheet.

“There’s so much original trim,” she murmured.

Bucky stared at the cracked casing around the doorway. “Is that good?”

She turned then, smiling properly now, and it hit him straight in the sternum.

“Yes,” she said. “That is very good.”

He had the stupidest, most immediate thought of his life:

I would learn whatever that means if you kept looking like that.

So naturally he said, “Hm.”

She laughed under her breath and wandered into the dining room. He followed because of course he did. Because somewhere along the line, tracking her movement had become as involuntary as checking sightlines.

The back of the house was worse. The kitchen had suffered for years in visible ways. A patch of ceiling had come down over one corner, exposing lath. One cabinet door hung open at an angle. The sink looked original and offended about it.

He crouched to inspect the floor near the back wall, pressing his palm to a darkened board. Soft. Water damage. He could replace sections, maybe. Sister the joists if it had spread farther than this. Strip it back to what was sound. Build from there.

Build.

The word landed strangely.

He stood too fast and bumped his shoulder against the counter.

“You found something?” she asked.

He looked down at the floor. “Rot.”

She came to stand beside him, close enough that her sleeve brushed his hand. “Can it be saved?”

He hated how quickly he answered.

“Yeah.”

Not because he knew for sure.

Because she’d asked it in that tone again.

Not hopeful exactly. Steady. Like the answer mattered, but she wouldn’t break if it was no. Like she trusted him to tell her the truth.

His jaw worked once. “Not all of it. But enough.”

She nodded, accepting that without fuss, and looked down where he was looking. For a moment they stood there shoulder to shoulder over a patch of damaged flooring, and Bucky had the strange sensation that they were not discussing wood at all.

Not all of it. But enough.

He stepped away first.

Upstairs, the back bedroom had the water stain the realtor mentioned, plus a hairline crack running from the corner of the window to the ceiling. The smallest room at the front had better light. The floors were uneven, but solid. One wall had once been painted a pale blue. The color survived in sheltered strips behind where furniture must have sat for years.

She went still in the doorway.

Bucky turned. “What?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

That was a lie.

He had learned hers by now—the soft kind, the harmless kind, the kind that really meant something happened inside me and I’m not ready to hand it to you yet.

He waited.

After a moment, she said, “This would be a nice room in the morning.”

His eyes went to the window. Trees beyond it, leaves gone gold at the edges. Light generous even through the grime.

“Yeah,” he said.

She took a few steps in, careful where the floor dipped. “You could put a chair there.”

He frowned. “I don’t need a chair.”

She looked at him like he was being deliberately dense, which, to be fair, he was. “Everybody needs a chair.”

“For what?”

Now she crossed her arms. “For sitting, Bucky.”

He gave her a flat look.

She huffed a laugh. “For reading. For coffee. For staring out the window when the weather turns bad. For sulking dramatically. I don’t know. Existing.”

Existing.

Said so simply.

As if that were a thing a room could be made for.

Bucky looked back at the patch of floor by the window. In his mind, despite every effort, something disloyal began assembling itself there: a worn armchair, a blanket over one arm, a lamp glowing in the early dark. A winter morning. Heat pushing softly through old radiators. Her passing the doorway in thick socks, carrying two mugs without asking if he wanted one because by then she would already know.

His chest tightened so hard it bordered on pain.

He moved past her into the hall.

The bathroom was a lost cause. The linen closet smelled faintly of cedar under the dust. In the master bedroom, one window had swollen shut in its frame. He tested it anyway, fingers at the sill, shoulder angled automatically for leverage.

“Still doing that?” she asked quietly.

He looked back. “Doing what?”

“Checking all the exits first.”

The house seemed to grow very still around them.

He let go of the window. “It’s habit.”

“I know.”

She didn’t say it accusingly. Didn’t say stop. Didn’t even say you don’t have to.

Just: I know.

Which was, somehow, harder to bear.

Bucky looked out through the cloudy glass at the yard below. Tall grass. Half-collapsed fence. A maple tree leaning red-gold over the back corner.

He said, because honesty sometimes came out of him sideways, “I like knowing how fast I can get out.”

Silence behind him.

Then her footsteps, slow on the warped floorboards, until she was near enough that he could feel her presence at his back like warmth.

“Okay,” she said.

That was all.

No fixing. No reaching in with both hands. No soft speech about safety or healing or what he deserved.

Just okay.

His throat went tight anyway.

He turned around. She was looking at him with that same maddening steadiness she’d offered the rotten kitchen floor, the original trim, the whole lopsided skeleton of the place.

Can it be saved?

Not all of it. But enough.

He looked at the room around them—the cracked plaster, the stains, the draft edging under the sill—and for one reckless second he could see it altered. Not perfect. Never perfect. But lived in. A quilt folded at the foot of the bed. Her book left facedown on the nightstand. His boots by the door. Their voices caught in the walls. Winter outside. Lamplight inside. No countdown. No order coming through an earpiece. No bag packed under the bed.

It hit him so abruptly he almost stepped back from it.

This house frightened him.

Not because it was unstable.

Because it asked a question he did not know how to answer.

Not can you fix it.

Can you stay?

Downstairs again, they stood in the front room while the light began to thin. Dust floated between them in slow bright motes. The realtor’s paper still fluttered outside on the porch railing, full of warnings and disclaimers and sensible reasons to walk away.

She tucked her hands into her sleeves and looked around one more time. Not pushing. Not selling him on it. Just there with him in the middle of all that wreckage, letting the silence be shared instead of awkward.

Bucky studied the fireplace, the sag in the floor, the staircase that would need reinforcing before winter. He saw labor. Time. Money. Setbacks. Splinters. Demolition. Mistakes. Long days. Longer nights.

He also saw her in this room with lamplight at her shoulder.

Saw Christmas lights looped badly around that banister.

Saw a coat dropped over the newel post.

Saw two sets of footprints in snow tracked across the threshold.

Saw, with a force that made him feel almost sick, a life that did not begin with impact and end with extraction.

Just… continue.

He dragged a hand over the back of his neck. “You really think it could work?”

When he looked at her, he knew immediately he had made a mistake.

Because her whole face changed.

Not triumphant. Not relieved.

Only soft. Startled. As if she understood exactly what question he had actually asked, hidden underneath the practical one.

“Yes,” she said.

And then, after a beat, gentler:

“I do.”

Bucky glanced away first, jaw tight. He looked back at the front door. At the windows. At the stairs. At all the possible exits.

Then at the center of the room.

At the place you would stand if you meant to remain.

When he spoke, his voice came out rougher than he intended.

“Okay,” he said. “One room at a time.”

The apartment still smelled faintly like fresh paint and cardboard.

It wasn’t a bad smell—just the quiet, slightly dusty but somehow new scent of a place that hadn’t been lived in yet. Late afternoon sunlight spilled through the tall windows and stretched long across the hardwood floor, catching on the edges of half-opened boxes and the scattered bits of packing paper that had already begun to crumple under your footsteps. The living room looked like a temporary battlefield of belongings, books stacked unevenly, kitchen utensils peeking out of a box with a weird smiley face Bucky drew and a pile of blankets slumped lazily in the corner where you had clearly given up halfway through organizing them.

Your couch hadn’t arrived yet.

The kitchen table was still somewhere in transit.

Which meant you and Bucky were sitting on the floor, backs against the wall beneath the window, sharing a pizza straight from the box because neither of you had any idea where the plates had ended up.

You leaned your head back against the wall with a tired exhale, stretching your legs out in front of you and flexing your toes inside your socks. Moving all day had left that dull, heavy ache in your limbs that came from hours of lifting and walking and rearranging things that would probably be moved again tomorrow anyway.

Across from you, a stack of boxes leaned dangerously close to tipping over.

“I think,” you said slowly, gently scratching your face as you glanced around the room, “we might have underestimated how much stuff two people can accumulate.”

Beside you, Bucky huffed a quiet laugh under his breath.

The sound was soft, warm—still a little rare, like he hadn’t quite gotten used to letting himself relax in moments like this. But always laughing with you, only with you.

“That’s your stuff, honey.” he said, nudging one of the boxes lightly with the toe of his boot.

You turned your head toward him immediately, narrowing your eyes.

“Oh, really?”

He took another bite of pizza, completely unbothered.

“Yes, really.”

You pointed your crust at him accusingly.

“You mean the duffel bag,” you began, counting on your fingers dramatically, “the three backpacks, the heavy box Steve dropped off yesterday and the suspicious amount of knives?”

His brows knit together defensively.

“They’re not suspicious.”

Your eyebrows raised. “You have twelve knives, Bucky.”

“One for every situation.” He says and shrugs while chuckling.

You stared at him.

He stared right back, completely serious.

“…You’re unbelievable.”

“Yet you moved in with me anyway.” he replied, the corner of his mouth twitching.

Your lips curved despite yourself, and the quiet that settled between you afterward was easy and comfortable. Outside the window the city moved in that distant, muffled way it always did from a few floors up—cars passing, someone shouting faintly across the street, the occasional honk of a horn. But inside the apartment it felt strangely peaceful, like the world had paused just long enough for the two of you to sit here together in the middle of it all.

Your gaze drifted slowly around the room again.

The blank walls.

The half-opened boxes.

The sunlight warming the floorboards.

It didn’t look like much yet.

But it would.

Eventually there would be pictures on the walls and plants that Bucky loves taking care of, they would be by the window and bookshelves overflowing with things you insisted on keeping even if you never read them again. Eventually there would be mornings here and quiet evenings and the comfortable little routines that slowly turn a place into something that actually feels like home.

You drew a slow breath.

“Still weird.” you murmured.

Bucky turned his head slightly, blue eyes flicking toward you.

“What is?”

You gestured vaguely around the apartment.

“All this.”

He followed your gaze, his expression shifting—thoughtful now, quieter.

For a moment he didn’t answer.

And when he finally did, his voice had softened just a little.

“… Yeah.”

He looked around again, slower this time.

At the boxes.

At the window.

At you.

For most people, moving into an apartment with the person they loved might have felt like a simple next step.

For him, it felt almost impossible.

For decades he had lived in places that were temporary at best—safehouses, bunkers, cold rooms with metal walls and no windows. Even after everything with Hydra ended, there had always been the lingering feeling that none of it would last. That he was just passing through.

But this—this was different.

No mission briefing downstairs.

No handler waiting in the shadows.

Just a quiet apartment, a stack of unpacked boxes, and the woman he loved sitting beside him like this was the most natural thing in the world.

He rubbed the back of his neck slowly.

“Feels like I skipped seventy years and landed in the part of life where people are supposed to have this already.” he admitted quietly.

Your attention snapped back to him immediately.

“A place,” he continued, voice thoughtful. “Someone waiting for them.”

The words weren’t heavy, exactly.

But they carried the weight of everything he’d lost along the way.

You didn’t say anything right away.

Instead, you reached over and gently slid your hand into his.

Your fingers fit easily between his, warm and familiar.

“Better late than never.” you said softly.

His thumb brushed slowly across your knuckles.

“…Yeah.”

Then suddenly your eyes lit up with realization.

“Wait.”

Bucky frowned slightly.

“What?”

“You mentioned something about some records this morning.”

Instant suspicion crossed his face.

“… Yes?”

“Where are they?”

“In that box Steve dropped off.”

You were already moving before he finished the sentence.

He groaned quietly as you scrambled across the room toward the stack of boxes, digging through them with the chaotic enthusiasm of someone who had absolutely no intention of being careful.

“Don’t—”

Too late.

You lifted one of the records triumphantly.

“Oh my god.”

Bucky dragged a hand down his face.

“No.”

“You never told me you had these!”

“Because I knew you’d do exactly what you’re about to do.”

But you were already crossing the room again, sliding the record onto the small player sitting by the window.

The needle touched down.

A moment later the apartment filled with the warm, lively crackle of swing music drifting through the speakers.

You spun around with a grin.

“Come on.”

Bucky stayed exactly where he was, still sitting on the floor.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not dancing.”

You crossed your arms.

“You absolutely are.”

“Not happening.”

You stepped toward him slowly and extended your hand in dramatic invitation.

“Dance with me. Please, Steve told me you used to dance practically every day of the week. Busy guy.“ You say and give that pout to him.

He looked at your hand like it might explode.

“Doll—”

The word slipped out before he could stop it.

You froze instantly.

His eyes widened.

“…Did you just call me doll?” you asked.

He cleared his throat awkwardly.

“That just—slipped.”

Your grin spread slowly.

“Oh, I like that.”

“Please don’t start.”

“Too late.”

You wiggled your fingers impatiently.

“Come on, old man. Show me those vintage dance moves.”

Bucky sighed heavily—but there was a reluctant smile tugging at his mouth as he pushed himself to his feet.

“You’re insufferable.”

“And you love me.”

“That’s the problem.”

But he stepped closer anyway.

And when his flesh hand closed around yours, something shifted.

His other hand settled naturally at your waist, pulling you just slightly closer as he guided you into position.

Your eyebrows lifted.

“Well, damn.”

“Don’t sound so surprised.”

“I just didn’t expect you to actually be good at this. And we haven't even started.”

“Honey,” he murmured, “I learned way before your grandparents were born.”

And then he moved.

The change was immediate.

The slightly awkward, tired man from moving day disappeared, replaced by someone smooth and confident, someone whose body still remembered crowded dance halls and warm summer nights and music echoing across polished floors.

You laughed softly as he spun you once across the open space of the living room.

“Okay—wow.”

“Careful,” he warned with a quiet chuckle. “You’re stepping on my foot.”

“That’s because you’re doing fancy turns!”

“You asked for dancing.”

The music swelled warmly around you, filling the half-empty apartment with something bright and alive.

You rested your head briefly against his shoulder as he guided you through another slow turn.

“This is kind of perfect.” you murmured.

His hand tightened slightly at your waist.

“… Yeah. You're kind of perfect.”

For a moment neither of you spoke.

Just the soft music.

The creak of the floorboards.

The quiet rhythm of breathing.

When you looked up again, your faces were closer than you realized.

“You gonna kiss me,” you whispered playfully, “or just keep dancing?”

His breath caught.

“You’re impatient.”

“Very.”

He leaned down slowly, pressing his forehead gently against yours.

“First day in our new place.” he murmured.

“So?”

“So,” he said softly, “seems like something worth remembering.”

Your fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt.

“Then remember it.”

The kiss that followed was slow and warm and unhurried, the kind that made the rest of the room fade quietly into the background.

The record kept spinning somewhere behind you.

But Bucky barely noticed.

All he could think about was the way your arms slipped around his neck, the way your laughter softened into something quieter as the kiss deepened just a little, the way his chest felt strangely full in a way he hadn’t felt in… maybe ever.

A home.

A real one.

And you.

When you finally pulled back, slightly breathless, you glanced toward the hallway.

“Well.” you said casually.

Bucky followed your gaze.

The bedroom door was half open.

Inside, the only piece of furniture that had been assembled so far sat quietly in the center of the room.

The mattress.

You looked back at him with a mischievous smile.

“… We should probably test that. See how comfy it is.” You say while your hands were wandering down his body.

Bucky let out a quiet laugh, shaking his head.

“You’re unbelievable.”

“Yet you moved in with me anyway.”

He didn’t argue this time.

Instead he slipped his hand into yours again, lacing your fingers together as he guided you gently down the hallway.

The apartment was still half empty.

Boxes still needed unpacking.

Walls still needed decorating.

But as he stepped into the bedroom with you, the music still drifting faintly from the living room, Bucky realized something with quiet certainty.

For the first time in a very long time he wasn’t just surviving.

He was at home.