Blue

The Rogers' backyard was, for all intents and purposes, the hottest wedding venue in town. 

At least if anyone asked nine-year-old you and 11-year-old Bucky, as much was true. 

The cracked sidewalk leading to the clothesline was the aisle, peony and dandelion flower beds were the decorations. The old apple tree was the altar at which Steve stood taller on an upside down wooden crate, one of your father's old dress shirts over his shoulders to pretend he was a preist, or a pope, or some sort of higher entity able to witness this whole thing. 

Bucky had one of your dad's suit jackets on, the navy fabric completely swallowing his frame, overlapping at the front and masking the Yankees jersey he had on, and all the dirt and grass stains on it. 

You had a pillowcase that definitely needed to be in the hamper for laundry day pinned to your hair with your favorite hair clips, of a little crystal blue butterfly. 

"Everybody be quiet," Steve announced, nose high up in the air like he was presenting a case to the Supreme Court. "This is serious business."

"It is serious business," you agreed immediately, failing to bite back a grin, missing your top right canine tooth.

One that Bucky held your hand the whole time so you'd let Steve run away with the string and pull it out. 

"We are gathered here today because Bucky and my sister wanted to play wedding instead of baseball."

"You said you'd play too!" you accused. 

Steve ignored and just kept going. "Now, Bucky Barnes." He cleared his throat, trying to make his voice lower. "Do you promise to be nice to her forever, always save her a seat to watch fireworks on my birthday, and never eat the last s'more?"

Bucky rolled his eyes, his dimple coming out as he smiled wth the side of his mouth. "Yeah," he said simply. "I promise."

You raised your brow, mock-scolding him. "You're supposed to say I do."

"Okay, yes," Your heart did an odd flip. "I do."

Steve then turned to you next. "And do you promise to be nice to Bucky forever, not tell Mrs. Barnes when he sneaks cookies before dinner, and always let him have the red Popsicle if there's only one left?"

"But they're the best ones!" You whined. 

Steve sighed, ever the dramatic, looking at Bucky with fake sorrow. "Okay, then I guess you don't love him as much as—"

That set panic in your little heart. "I do! I do!" His face changed immediately, and Bucky smiled at you. 

The kind of smile that always made you feel like maybe the sun shined a little brighter on your side of the street than everybody else's.

Steve smiled, as if everything was back on track. "Now, for the rings."

Bucky dug into his pocket and produced two dandelions he'd twisted into little circles. Your eyes widened. "You made those?"

He nodded, brown hair bouncing up and down his head with the gesture. "Took me forever, but they're your favorites."

He held one carefully between his fingers before sliding it onto yours with all the concentration in the world.

"You made me a flower ring." Your grin stretched so wide your cheeks hurt.

Bucky shrugged. "Yeah."

Steve interrupted your thoughts, "Okay, okay. By the power in this vest… or in me, whatever they say in movies, you are now married." He pointed at Bucky. "No cooties." Then at you. "And don't make him play tea party every day."

Your stomach did that weird fluttery thing it always did around Bucky Barnes. It did the same thing when you rode rollercoasters, felt like it was gonna fly away and take you with it. 

"You may now high-five the bride." Steve announced, stepping down from the crate. 

Bucky extended his pinky towards you, "We'll be best friends forever."

"No take-backs." You smiled, wrapping your pinky around his.

TEN YEARS LATER

As time passed, you grew up. You got new interests, all of you got new friends, and the found family you had just seemed to get bigger. Of course, you weren't as close with Bucky anymore, no college sophomore wants to hang out constantly with his best friend's kid sister.

It's kind of uncool.

The house was loud in that familiar, comfortable way—the kind of loud that doesn’t feel chaotic so much as lived-in. Every sound has a place. Every voice belongs. Bucky, as much as he isn't family by blood, grew up running up and down these stairs the same you and Steve did, as Steve did in his house. 

Both of your moms were best friends since diapers, and it was only fate that Bucky and Steve were too. 

The kitchen doorway had his height and age and name scratched on it just the same as it did yours, he knew that house in the dark just as much as Steve, trying to sneak around to get snacks during late nights playing video games. 

Controller clicks. Steve muttering under his breath. Bucky’s low laugh every time he wins—because of course he’s winning.

“Dude, you’re cheating,” Steve groans, tossing his controller down for a second.

“I’m just better than you,” Bucky shoots back easily, stretched out on the couch like he owns the place, long legs kicked up, completely at home.

He always is.

Him and Steve drove back home from their Sophomore college parties for your graduation weekend, still half-running on energy drinks and bad decisions from the night before, which just happened to fall in the same one as your prom, only separated by three days. 

They could hear your speaker booming in your bathroom while you got ready with your two best friends, Yelena and Kate, and Natasha, Steve's girlfriend, helped you with your makeup. 

It was a mix of Megan Thee Stallion playing and giggles coming from the three of you, your two best friends gushing over their dates.

Makeup scattered across the counter. Curling iron plugged in and dangerously close to knocking something over. Dresses half-hanging, half-draped over the shower rod.

And Natasha’s laugh, warmer, older, threaded through all of it as she tried to keep things somewhat under control.

Kate is perched on the edge of the tub, kicking her heels against the porcelain. Yelena is leaning into the mirror, fixing her lip gloss with unnecessary intensity.

And you—

You’re standing between them, half-finished, dress still unzipped, hair clipped up, trying to decide if you feel as good as you’re supposed to.

“Okay, no—seriously,” Kate says, pointing at you like she’s making a case in court. “John is going to lose his mind.”

Yelena hums in agreement. “He already looks at you like he has no thoughts.”

You laugh, a little breathy. “That’s not even true.”

“It is completely true,” Kate insists.

“You’re just saying that.”

“We are not just saying that,” Yelena shoots back.

Natasha, standing behind you, gently brushes powder along your cheek, more focused than the rest of them—but she’s listening. And she notices there's a sparkle in your eye that's missing when John's the subject. 

He's nice, he's good looking, he's captain of your football team, maybe he has some anger issues with other guys, but all in all he's a solid boyfriend. He's just not—

“Alright,” Natasha says finally, pulling you from your thoughts, lightening her tone again. “Turn around. Let me see the full thing.”

You do as she asks, and she takes in her work of art, your hopeful eyes, and the soft blownout curls of your hair framing your face. 

"Perfect!"

Careful with your steps as she reaches for the zipper, pulling it up your back slowly, sealing you into the dress, into the night, into everything that’s supposed to happen.

A knock sounds on the bathroom door. "You girls alive in there?" Steve calls. "Or did the hairspray fumes get you?"

"We're decent!" Natasha calls back.

Steve pokes his head in for a second. "Oh."

You raise an eyebrow. "Oh?"

His expression shifts immediately into something resembling offense. "What happened to my little sister?"

"Oh my God." You snorted. 

Steve's broad frame now came into full view in the tiny bathroom as he stood on the dorway. "Who is this grown woman and where did she put the gremlin that used to steal my fries?"

You rolled you eyes. "I'll still steal your fries."

He shakes his head. "You look beautiful, Bug."

Your expression softens. "Thanks, Stevie."

As Pietro and Bob scrolled their phones impatiently at the bottom of the stairs, making small talk with Steve and Bucky, you were almost wearing a path into the carpeted floor of your bedroom.

Seconds after he was supposed to arrive with the other two, he texted you some shitty excuse as to why he was taking Olivia, his ex, to prom instead. 

“I was gonna explain,” John says finally, like that makes it better.

You let out a short, disbelieving laugh. “Explain what? That you’re ditching me the night of prom?”

“I’m not ditching you,” he says quickly, defensive already. “It’s just—Olivia asked me to go with her and it’s complicated.”

“Complicated?” you repeat, your grip tightening around your phone. “John, it’s prom. We’ve had this planned for weeks.”

“I know, I know,” he says, exhaling like you’re the one making this difficult. “But she’s going through stuff right now and I don’t wanna make things worse.”

Your chest tightens. “So you thought canceling on me last minute wouldn’t make things worse?”

“That’s not what I said.”

You huffed. “That’s exactly what you’re doing.”

He goes quiet again for a second, and you can practically hear him thinking—calculating—trying to figure out how to spin it in a way that makes him look less like the bad guy.

“Look,” he says finally, voice shifting into something more controlled, “you’re gonna have fun no matter what. You’ve got your friends, it’s not like you’ll be alone.”

The words hit harder than anything else he’s said.

Because they’re so easy for him. So dismissive.

“So that’s it?” you ask, quieter now, but it wavers anyway. “You just—drop me and go with her, and I’m supposed to be fine with that?”

“I’m not dropping you,” he insists again, frustration creeping in. “It’s one night.”

“It’s prom,” you snap, the word catching in your throat. “It’s not just some random thing, John.”

“Why are you making this such a big deal?” he shoots back.

That’s what does it.

Your eyes sting, tears blurring your vision as you shake your head even though he can’t see it. “I’m making it a big deal?” you echo. “You’re the one who decided, what, an hour before we’re supposed to leave, that I don’t matter as much as your ex?”

“It’s not like that,” he says, sharper now. “You’re twisting it.”

“I’m not twisting anything,” you say, your voice breaking despite your best effort to keep it steady. “You just told me exactly where I stand.”

He exhales, long and annoyed, like he’s already over the conversation. “You’re being dramatic. The words land like a slap. And for a second, you can’t even respond.

“Okay,” you say finally, and your voice is quieter now, but steadier in a way that feels final. “Okay. Go with her.”

“—See? That’s all I’m saying, it’s not that—”

“No,” you cut him off, shaking your head again, even though he still can’t see you. “I get it now.”

There’s a shift on his end, like he didn’t expect that. “Wait—”

“Have fun at prom, John.”

And before he can say anything else, you hang up.

The silence that follows is immediate and heavy, pressing in around you as you stare at your reflection, your chest rising and falling too fast, your phone still clutched in your hand.

For a second, you just stand there. And then your face crumples, and the tears come before you can stop them. 

Great. You think. An hour of Natasha's hard work gone in two seconds. 

You ripped a couple squares of toiled paper off of the roll, trying to dab away the tears when a knock interrupted you. You didn't even have time to tell whoever it was to leave you alone, the door opened anyway. 

And of course it was Bucky. 

"Hey, Walker finally—" Then he saw your face. The red rimmed eyes, the puffy nose and lips, he'd recognize your crying face if he was in a dark room blindfolded and you were three states away. "What happened?"

His voice wasn't panicked our loud, just immediate. 

"Apparently my boyfriend had a better offer." You said with a humorless laugh, fiddling with the corner of the tissue. 

His expression then changed to confusion, then disbelief, then anger. "He did what?"

Your eyes stayed on the paper, humiliated. "He took his ex to prom instead." It sounds ridiculous out loud. Embarrassing. "I know it's stupid—"

He shook his head. "It's not stupid."

You shrugged one shoulder anyway. "It kind of is."

"It kind of isn't." Bucky insisted. 

Your laugh broke apart into another shaky breath. "He said I was being dramatic." Your voice was small, like a small part of you almost believed John. 

"No the fuck he didn't." Bucky's voice, on the contrary, sounded like he was about to make sure John was in three zipcodes at the same time.

You wiped at your face furiously. "Can we not do the whole protective older brother routine thing right now? Steve's probably already planning a felony downstairs."

Bucky nodded, as if agreeing that yes, Steve should be planning felonies. "Good."

Despite yourself, a tiny laugh escapes you. "Bucky."

"I'm serious." He took the couple steps needed to lean back against the sink, back to the mirror, while you faced it. The familiar weight of him beside you settled something in your chest. "You know what I think?" he asks.

You sniffled. "What?"

"I think he's an idiot."

You snort. "Very eloquent."

"You spent weeks excited about tonight." You shrug. "You talked about your dress for months." A smaller shrug, your head shaking like you agreed with him three weeks was a little excessive. "And some guy decides at the last second that he doesn't feel like showing up?"

His eyes looked for yours, and he continued once you met his gaze. "That's his loss." 

Downstairs someone was shouting something about finding the car keys. "I just feel stupid."

His brows furrowed immediatelly. "Why?"

"Because I was excited." The words came out smaller than you meant them to. "I really thought tonight was gonna be special."

Bucky's expression softens. "It still can be."

You laughed weakly. "My date literally dumped me an hour before prom."

"Okay." He says, like the solutions is obvious. Like a dragon staring you in the face. 

You were confused. "Okay?"

"Okay." He stands up straight. "Counterpoint." You raise an eyebrow. "I've seen enough terrible teen movies to know where this goes." Despite yourself, curiosity wins.

"Oh yeah?"

"Oh yeah." He nodded, and started counting on his fingers. "Option one: you go with your friends and have an incredible time."

"Mm." An amused smile played on your lips. 

He continued. "Option two: Steve commits a crime."

You smiled widened. "Likely."

"Or a secret, better option three—"

You quirked a brow. "There are three options?"

Bucky rolled his eyes playfully. "There are always three options." You gestured for him to continue and he grinned. "Option three: some devastatingly handsome college sophomore heroically steps in and saves prom."

You stared at him in disbelief. "Bucky Barnes."

"What?" 

"You are not asking me to prom."

"Why not?"

"Because that's ridiculous." You stammered. "You're a college guy and it's gonna be a bunch of drunk high school seniors and—"

"Seems pretty straightforward to me."

You crossed your arms over your chest, the action making your breasts stand out more, and Bucky had to hold back from looking briefly. "You drove eight hours home from college."

"Correct."

"You haven't slept." Another excuse.

"Also correct."

Truth is… You didn't trust yourself not to ruin your friendship, and Steve's, with Bucky as your date. Yes it was a childhood crush, yes it was stupid, yes he only saw you as a little sister, but for some reason every time you smelled sandalwood and listened to divorced dad rock, your stomach did the same fucking thing it always did.

It flipped. 

"I'm serious." The grin on his face faded into something gentler. "You shouldn't miss your prom because some idiot couldn't see what was standing right in front of him."

Your throat tightens. "I don't want a pity Bucky Barnes date."

"I wouldn't dream of it." Bucky shook his head. "I want to go to a high school prom sleep deprived, listen to bad music, and drink shitty punch."

You pretended to think about it. "I want milkshake and fries from Juniper's after."

Bucky got down on his knees dramatically, clutching his hands together, play-begging. "Please, let me spend my hard earned student loans on a malted brownie shake for you, m'lady."

You signed, as if you weren't blushing seven shades of red at the moment, all hidden by Natasha's foundation. "I suppose."

After Nat talked Steve down from whatever Law Abiding Citizen crap he was gonna pull, Bucky borrowed one of your dad's suits while you touched up your makeup, and off into his jeep you went. 

Bucky lingered back as he watched you walk to the old car excitedly, Natasha stopping right beside him as your friends walked to their cars, watching you get twirled by Kate. 

Bucky noticed Natasha staring at him and raised a brow in question. "What?"

She gave a noncommittal noise. "Nothing."

"Romanoff." Bucky scoffed.

She put her hands up in surrender. "I didn't say anything."

"You've got the face."

Now it was her turn to raise a brow, trying to bite back a grin. "What face?"

Bucky rolled his eyes. "The face where you've figured something out before everyone else."

Nat shrugged her shoulders. "I always figure something out before everyone, Bucky." Tapping him on the shoulder and turning arounfd to go inside. 

The prom commitee worked very hard to make sure the night looked exactly like every movie promised it would.

String lights draped from the ceiling of the gymnasium like stars somebody had caught and hung overhead. Balloons clustered in the corners. A photo booth occupied one wall. The basketball hoops had been disguised beneath enough tulle and fairy lights to fool almost everyone.

Turns out, getting ditched by John Walker was the best thing that ever happened to your prom night. You didn't even notice when Olivia was cryingin the bathroom because she caught him making out with someone else. 

No. 

You were too busy slow dancing with Bucky Barnes.

When the first chorus of the song came on, he held out his hand. "May I have this dance?"

You rolled your eyes. "You're such a dork."

"Tick tock, Rogers." He wiggled his fingers impatiently.

You took his hand as if it didn't make your fingers go numb with excitement, and Bucky quickly nestled a hand on your low back, your forehead to the side of his jaw. 

"You know," Bucky said after a minute, "this is definitely better than my prom when I was your age."

"Okay, grandpa." You laughed softly. "What happened at your senior prom?"

"My date spent forty-five minutes crying in the bathroom because her friend wore the same shoes she did."

You clicked your tongue. "That's tragic."

"It was devastating." Bucky agreed, nodding his head, laughing softly. 

You nudged his jaw. "I'll try to hold it together."

"I appreciate that."

A moment passed, then another, and you spoke up. "Thank you for doing this for me."

"Anytime." He let out a soft breath, leaning back the slightest bit so he could look at you. "You do look beautiful, I mean it."

Thank fuck for Natasha's foundation, powder, and concealer for hiding your flush. "Thank you, Bucky." Oh how you wished you hadn't looked into his pretty eyes, reflecting the lights off of the mirrorball back onto the dancefloor. 

The ten seconds seemed to stretch an entire decade. Somehow Bucky's face getting closer and closer to yours, eyes switching from your lips back to your eyes and to your lips again. 

Oh my God, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, he's gonna—

"Hey." The word cut through the moment like broken glass. Fucking John Walker. King of never in the history of the world reading anything. Specialy the fucking room. "Can we talk?"

Bucky's hand tightened around your waist, "What do you want, John? Olivia is probably looking for you."

"C'mon, baby, you're not gonna throw our relationship away over one bad call, are you?" He was seriously trying to play this off. "I made a mistake." His hand reached for you but you stepped away. 

"I'm not your baby."

He scoffed. "Aw, c'mon." And tried again. 

This time, Bucky got between you two. "She's done, Walker. Walk away."

Now John got… Defensive. "This isn't any of your business."

Bucky clicked his tongue. "She kind of is." The words slipped out before he could stop them.

The air stood still for a minute before the football bros came to get John, leaving you and Bucky with the weight of unsaid words and unspoken looks. 

Juniper's was closed by the time you finally left prom.

Not closed enough to stop Bucky from leaning halfway out of the driver's side window and convincing one of the employees locking up to sell him two milkshakes and an order of fries out of pure pity.

It wasn't until you were stargazing in his jeep with soft music from his Spotify mixing with the crickets hiding in the grass that your heart settled again. 

You were in the passenger seat, your burger already eaten, just finishing your delicious fries and your milkshake with Bucky in the same predicament in the driver's seat. 

Now the two of you sat on the hood of his Jeep in the empty parking lot overlooking the river, the New York spring air cool enough that your bare shoulders prickled every time the wind picked up.

Without a word, Bucky shrugged off his suit jacket and draped it over your shoulders. You blushed. "Thanks."

He shrugged. "'M not using it."

"You literally had it on 30 seconds ago." You rolled your eyes. Bucky just muttered details between a mouthful of fries. 

"You know," you said eventually, "this wasn't exactly how I pictured prom going."

Bucky laughed quietly. "No?"

"I don't know. There was significantly less public humiliation in the original draft." You laughed softly. "But I like this version better."

Bucky nodded. "I had fun."

You looked over. "Yeah?" Hopeful little edge in your voice giving you away to anyone that knew you remotely well. 

"Yeah." His expression softened. "Got to dance with a pretty girl."

Heat climbed into your cheeks immediately. "You flirt with everybody." You rolled your eyes. 

Bucky made an offended expression, clutching his chest. "I absolutely do not."

"You absolutely do." You lolled you head to the side, raising a brow to make your point. He laughed.

God, you loved his laugh. Always had. The thought came and went so quickly you almost didn't notice it.

Your eyes drifted back toward the sky. "You know what this reminds me of?"

"Hm?" He lifted his eyes from the milkshake cup he was trying to get every last bit out of. 

"The meteor shower."

Bucky smiled immediately. "Oh man."

You grinned. "You remember?"

"Remember?" Bucky chuckled. "I had baseball tryouts the next day and I was up all night to make sure you didn't miss it."

It stopped you dead in your tracks. He did what? "No, you didn't. Your mom came and woke us up."

Bucky nodded. "Yeah, because I woke her up. I was outside waiting for it while you and Steve snoozed it off. Played like shit the next morning." He continued. "You had the date circled on the calendar."

Your brow furrowed. "I did?"

He nodded. "You drew stars around it."

"Oh my God."

Bucky chuckled, his own head lolling to the side on the head rest to look at you. "You made Steve and I promise we wouldn't stay up late the night before because we had to be rested."

You buried your face in your hands. "That sounds insufferable."

"It was kinda cute." He smiled at you like he always did, and your heart promptly forgot how to function. Bucky, meanwhile, was blissfully unaware of the devastation he'd just caused.

Trying so desperately to change the subject to something that wouldn't make you tear up or your heart jump, you fiddled with your milkshake, taking a sip and making a face. "You know, I think this thing is eighty percent whipped cream."

Bucky grinned. "I can see that, it's all over your face." His left thumb came up to wipe down the leftover shake on the corner of your mouth, and it lingered just a second too long. 

For a second, or three years, the world felt like it stilled. A moment frozen in a snow globe to be forever replayed. 

Neither of you moved, not entirely sure how to. Suddenly Bucky was very close, close enough to see the tiny scar in his eyebrow from falling off his bike when he was fourteen, to count the freckles dusting across his nose, enough that you could feel your heartbeat somewhere in your throat.

His eyes flicked down to your mouth, then back up, and your heart and lungs stumbled over themselves. 

His hand lowered slowly, resting on your thigh. The night around you seemed quieter somehow. Smaller, as if the entire world had narrowed down to the space between you.

"Buck..." His name came out softer than you intended.

His expression shifted into something you'd never seen directed at you before. "If you don't want—"

And then your body moved forward on instinct, your brain a mess of fuzzy TV static, and when you came back to your body, your lips were on his.

Not because you were brave or even confident, just mostly because if you let him finish that sentence you thought your heart might actually explode.

For one terrifying second you were convinced you'd made the biggest mistake of your life. Then you felt the warmth of his hand on your cheek, pulling you closer and deepening the kiss as his tongue slipped past your lips.

The kind of kiss that felt less like fireworks and more like coming home after a very long trip.

One of your hands quickly found the nape of his neck, gently scratching your manicured nails against his scalp. He whined against your lips, hand drifting to your waist, and just as much as he pulled you onto his lap, you climbed over the console to him, food wrappers forgotten on the floor. 

You shrugged the suit jacket off, accidentally honking the horn with your butt in the process, and Bucky's hands rubbed up and down your thighs as you rocked your hips against him, feeling the heat of him against the suit pants. 

Your hands dropped from his shoulders down to his arms, then forearms, directing him to paw at the zipper on the back of your dress.

That made him pull away, looking for your eyes. "Are you—"

You could not have nodded more feverishly if you were a damn bobblehead.

Bucky needed no further incentive, he made quick work of the zipper, excitement bubbling in your stomach like freshly popped champagne while he peppered kisses along your jawline and neck. 

The now bothersome fabric of the dress fell to your waist as you worked on the buttons of his shirt, hands moving to his belt and pants after.

He kissed you again, deeper as his hand snuck under the hem of your dress to find the wet spot on your panties. 

You moaned against his mouth, your own hand finding its way inside of his boxers. You broke the kiss, gasping for air.

"Is this— I mean— okay?" It was hushed and murured against his lips as you stroked his length. "I've never— oh!"

You got rudely interrupted by Bucky's index and middle fingers rubbing your sensitive clit over the blue cotton of your panties.

He nodded against you, "Y-yeah, you're— fuck— you're doing so good."

His hips bucked up against you, and the second he slipped out of his pants with your movements his hand left your core and now were both squeezing your ass.

Bucky brought you flush against him, the angry red tip of him begging for friction found it when you started to dry hump him through your underwear, gasping into his mouth every time it nudged your clit.

"Bucky, please…" He couldn't not give you what you wanted, right? "I can't take it." Not when you begged this pretty.

He nodded against you, "I know, baby." And his right hand went under your dress, behind you, and pulled your panties to the side. "I know."

The second his bare cock made contact with your wet slit, he hissed, and a lightbulb went off in his head.

Condom.

He did not trust himself to pull out. Not of you. "Condom." His voice was almost distant to you, like it hadn't crossed your mind to use protection. Not with Bucky, anyway. He'd never hurt you, he was your—

"I—" You were dazed, lost and drunk in the scent and thought and feel of him. "My purse."

His hands let you go and you leaned over the seat to grab your purse from the backseat, your ass right beside Bucky's head. 

Of course he took advantage of that fully pull your panties down, now that you had the leg space. 

You sat back down on top of him with a little huff, trembling hands fumbling with the wrapper.

Bucky hissed as you rolled it down on him, and one of his hands lined himself up with your entrance.

As you sank down on him, you thought maybe you should've thought twice about it. I mean, you knew he was packing, you walked in on him changing one time a couple years ago, there was no way you could—

"Hey," Bucky's voice brought you back from your spiral. "Look at me." Beautiful cerulean eyes stared up at you like the moonlight was made to bounce off them specifically. "Breathe."

His other hand brushed your hair away from your face, just as the hand that was holding his shaft traveled up, thumb finding your clit rubbing soothing circles on it.

"Just take it slow." Your eyes fluttered closed. 

"How do you not get knocked over hauling this thing around?" That brought a chuckle out of him, landing straight onto the skin of your neck. "Oh, God..."

You rocked yourself back and forth, until he was fully inside of you, your lips touching the light hair at the base. 

Bucky kissed all over your face, his thumb never stopping its work. "You're doing so good, baby."

"Feels full." He laughed softly. squeezing your waist and helping guide you into a rhythm. "Feels good."

"Yeah?" Hushed and right by your ear, you felt like drowning and the happiest person alive at the same time. "You're so tight," He continued. "So warm."

You whined against his lips, the vibration going all the way down to his core.

He moved you up and down his cock, listening to the obscene wet squelch each time you sat up and sank back down on him, and each time it dawned on him what was actually happening, he got louder.

Bolder.

He bounced you on his length, hissing each time, you squeezed around him. "Feel good, Buck. Hah!"

It surprisingly didn't take long for Bucky to have you right at the edge, not as long as people online led you to believe losing your virginity would feel like. "Can feel you fluttering." His thumb worked faster.

"Wanna come, Bucky." You whined, kissing him, and pulling away with his bottom lip between your teeth, "Can I?"

He hissed, the question making it hard for him to not blow his load right then and there. "F'course you can, pretty girl, c'mon."

Your release felt like a million meteors hitting you at once. Like Earth came apart and got put together all in the same breath. 

It felt entirely different, better, than when you tried to do it on your own. And your orgasm triggered Bucky's, waves of pleasure milking rope after rope of cum from him into the unworthy latex of the condom. 

For what it felt like forever for the milionth time that night, neither of you spoke. Your breaths and the crickets were the only sounds. 

It was quiet after. 

Just… quiet.

The kind that only existed when two people had known each other so long that silence wasn't something to fill. Starts lit up the sky that was now your ceiling, and Bucky had taken the condom off and tied it, throwing it inside of the trash with the fry bag and the milkshake cups.

For once in his life, James Buchanan Barnes appeared to be completely out of words.

Which was concerning.

You smiled a little, back in the passenger seat with the suit jacket around your chilly shoulders. "What?"

He glanced over. "Hm?"

"You're thinking too loud." That got a laugh out of him. A quiet one, but still a laugh. "Sorry."

A beat of silence, then another. "I don't want this to ruin anything."

Your smile faltered slightly.

Of course, you thought. Of course he doesn't feel that way about you, why would he—

"Oh, Buck." You faked a smile as his eyes met yours. "We'll be okay."

A sheepish, hopeful look hit his face. "Yeah?"

"Of course." You nodded and reached over and laced your pinky with his. "We're us."

His expression softened when he looked down at your joined fingers. "We're us," he echoed.

You smiled. "We survived Steve's bowl cut phase." You listed off. "The great Thanksgiving mashed potato incident."

"Traumatic." He chuckled.

"The time I accidentally backed your Jeep into Mrs. Russo's mailbox." You continued. 

He scolded you playfully. "You still owe me for emotional damages."

You laughed softly. "We'll be best friends forever."

The words came so naturally, so easily. The same words you'd said years before ona hot day beneath a tree. A pinky promise.

Forever.

Beside you, Bucky went quiet. Of course she wouldn't want anything to do with you, you're her brother's best friend. That shit only works in mov— "Right." His eyes dropped for a moment. "Friends."

Your stomach twisted at the word for the first time in your life. Because why did that sound disappointing?

Why did it sound like something had slipped through your fingers without you realizing you were holding it?

a little bit of fran in your life: okay did we like it??????? it was meant to read like a first chapter but also a standalone in case you wanted to just be done with it. yippieeeeeeee

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Bucky smirks—super soldier senses tuning into your every movement. He can hear the slight quivers in your breath and your heart beating out of your chest.

He leans in until you can smell him—warm and clean and earthy, something that makes your heart skip another beat.

“What's wrong, doll?”

He sees the sweat beading at your temple as you try desperately to ignore him, calm your breathing.

He’s so close—so warm and big and right there.

“Nothing,” you say. Too quick, too breathy.

He chuckles to himself, pressing his fingers lightly to your neck, brushing your hair back and feeling your pulse, hot breath fanning over your skin.

“Oh yeah? Why has your pulse jumped then? You nervous?”

You want to say you’re not nervous, that he doesn’t make you shake. You want to be defiant. But you don’t trust your voice, breath caught at the back of your throat as you hold yourself rigid against his touch. So you shake your head—and immediately regret it when his knuckle grazes your jaw.

“No, not nervous?” You shake your head again, less sure this time with his fingers pressed to your jaw.

“How about now?” His lips graze the side of your neck and your breath hitches in your throat.

Suddenly the driver’s door opens, and Steve climbs in.

“Right. Ready?”

You feel Bucky’s absence immediately as he pulls away, sitting back in his seat. But his touch is like a brand on your skin, the timbre of his voice rattling through you.

Dragging in a shaky breath you drop your hand between the car seat and the door, sliding it backwards. The angle is awkward, and your heartbeat is in your throat, but you hold there for one breathless moment.

Warm fingers close around yours, tangling, his thumb pressing into the pads, and it’s like electricity shoots up your arm, making you gasp.

Steve’s eyes dart to yours.

“You okay?”

That feeling returns; those blue eyes staring at you, through you, and you can feel Bucky's silent laughter at the way your voice quivers.

You wet your lips. “Fine, Steve.”

It almost sounds convincing. Bucky’s fingers squeeze yours.

The car ride stretches on for what feels like forever, tension thick. You can feel every breath, every movement, every slight shift of his body behind you. When Steve finally pulls to a stop, you can't get out fast enough, stumbling over your own feet and you feel as though you can finally breathe.

It doesn't last long—Bucky crowding you against the car door before you can move—the others barely noticing, having already walked inside the building.

“What's wrong, doll?” His voice is velvet in your ears, smoothing down your spine and sending a shiver through your body.

You press back against the car—not to get away from him—but because you don’t know what else to do with yourself.

“Easy,” he murmurs, vibranium arm coming to rest against the door at your side.

You’re completely caged in, metal at your back, his arm at your side, and the thick wall of his chest before you. You look up, and up, meeting the glittering blue gaze, and his smug expression makes you squirm.

“Tell me,” he says, flesh hand nudging your chin up. “What’s got you all hot and bothered?”

“Bucky, please.” Your voice is so soft, so sweet, barely reaching his ears over the sounds of the city.

He moves back slightly, giving you the space to move if you want to.

You don't.

You lean closer to him, the smell of his cologne mixed with that warm smell that was so Bucky drawing you in.

“Bucky— I'm—” You don't know what you're trying to say, the only thing running through your mind being him. Beautiful, big—warmth radiating off him in waves.

“Yeah?” His fingers rest gently on your chin, pulling your gaze up to him.

You feel your stomach flip at the look in his eyes, the feel of his breath fanning over your lips.

“I just— I want—” You try again, words failing you as his tongue darts out to wet his lips.

Your eyes lock on them—pink and wet and slightly swollen from his fussing and you bite your own.

Bucky's gaze drops to your lip caught between your teeth and presses his thumb gently into your lower lip, pulling it free.

“Yeah, you do don’t you.” His voice is low and gravelly and sends heat rushing through you. His thumb presses in and your tongue flicks out. A reflex, one that has him dragging in a breath quickly, mouth parting and his eyes fixed on your mouth.

Warmth slices through you because now you know you’re not the only one.

His hand hasn’t moved. Your tongue darts out again, sliding against the pad of his thumb, and you watch as he swallows thickly, eyes never wavering.

He can't help it now—leaning in to kiss you, lips crashing against yours, hand resting on the side of your jaw, pulling you in closer. Everything goes white-hot—your stomach flipping, letting out a gasp into his mouth and Bucky takes the opportunity to slip his tongue into your mouth, tasting you properly now.

Your hands twist into the front of his top, pushing your body into his, chasing his warmth.

His hand strokes your jaw, the other rubbing slow circles into the side of your waist that have you melting against him. He pulls back for a second, breathless, chuckling into your mouth when you pull at his shirt, drawing him closer, lips chasing his with a soft whine, not ready to let him go. You kiss him deeper than before, memorizing the shape of his mouth, the taste of his lips against yours.

Bucky pulls back all the way then—breath ragged, pulse jumping at the soft, wanting look in your eyes. He glances around before leaning into you, voice rough against your ear.

“Wanna go to your place, doll?” He leans back slightly, eyes boring into yours as he waits for your answer.

You nod, hands still twisted into the front of his shirt.

“I need your words, doll.” He brushes your cheek with the back of his finger.

“Yes Bucky, let's go, please.” You try not to whine at the last word, fingers untwisting from his shirt, reaching shakily for the car door.

Bucky's hand closes around yours, broad chest pressing into your back until you can feel every hard plane of his body molding to your curves.

“Here, let me.” You inhale sharply at the feel of his breath on your neck, his voice gruff, fingers brushing over yours like you're something precious.

“You’re shaking doll.” He chuckles softly, amused at the way your hand shakes around the handle.

“Bucky, fuck— I don't— I just want you please.”

He grins smugly at the way you say it—all breathy and soft, back still pressed into his chest, practically vibrating in his hold with anticipation.

“Let's go doll.” He opens the door for you, hand resting gently on your waist, his fingertips burning holes through your shirt.

“What about—”

“They can figure themselves out. Need you.” He says the last part low and rough, and your stomach flips, chest rising and falling quickly.

Bucky rushes to the driver's side, pulling his seatbelt on and starting the car before his attention turns to you, hand resting heavy on your thigh, rubbing slow circles.

He looks over at you—slow, careful, scanning your features for any sign of hesitancy. He lifts his hand from your leg, reaching for your hand instead.

“You sure about this, doll? We don’t have to—”

“I want this. I want—I want you Bucky. I have for a long time.”

Something deep and heavy settles into Bucky’s chest then—overriding the lust and the way your breath has him hungry for all the other sounds you might make for him.

You want him.

He takes a shaky breath, lifting your hand to his and kissing the back, smiling at the way your heartbeat picks up, breath hitching in your throat at the simple movement.

“Yeah?” He tries to sound casual, like he hasn’t been wanting you for just as long, like this moment doesn’t mean anything more than hot heavy kisses and want settling deep into your bones.

“Yeah.” You bite back a smile, heart still beating out of your chest as Bucky’s thumb brushes slow circles into the back of your hand.

Because yes, you’re still nervous, still shaking slightly at the man next to you—all broad shoulders and pure force and hands that could crush a car beneath them.

But now you know how they feel against your body—soft and gentle, warm against your skin like you’re something to be worshipped—and you can’t wait to see exactly how he’ll use them.

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“If I get too close—”

“Don’t. You’re not gonna hurt me Bucky.”

“But if I do, if I get close to—”

You shake your head furiously, already knowing where he’s going with it, his eyes focused on the gun on the table.

“No— I won’t do that— I won’t.”

You’re looking down at the floor, a tear slowly dripping down your cheek when you feel a hand lift your chin gently. Bucky’s thumb brushes away the tear—gentler than anything.

“Okay.” He presses his forehead to yours and you let out a shaky exhale, placing your hand over his and leaning into his touch.

“Okay.” You pull away, gathering your things as you watch him carefully. “Please just be here when I get back. I need to get more food, connect to the internet, see what the latest is.”

Bucky nods, eyes downcast.

“You’ll be here?”

“Yeah I will.”

You nod, kissing his forehead briefly before shutting the door behind you.

—

You get back no more than an hour later.

The door’s unlocked.

You open it carefully, hand placed over the gun tucked into your waistband.

“Bucky!” You call out, voice trembling. Your hands shake as you move through the safe house.

“Bucky…” You trail off with a sniffle.

You know he’s gone.

Know he won’t be coming back.

That you won’t be able to find him.

And there was you.

Bucky used to swear he saw you before he really met you, though half the time he changed the story just to hear you argue with him.

Sometimes he said the first time had been outside Delmar’s, when you’d stood on the curb with your hands on your hips, telling the butcher he’d overcharged Mrs. Carlucci by six cents and ought to be ashamed of himself. Sometimes he said it had been on the train, where you’d been reading with your brow furrowed in concentration while three boys across from you tripped over themselves trying to get your attention. Once, when he was feeling especially impossible, he said the first time he saw you had been in church, sunlight through the stained glass turning your face soft and full of color, and that he’d known right then he was done for.

“Liar,” you’d told him, laughing into your teacup.

“Sweetheart, I’ve been called worse.”

Steve, sitting at the table with a pencil smudged across the side of his hand, had snorted without looking up from his sketchpad.

“You told me the first time you saw her,” Steve had said, “you walked into a lamppost.”

Bucky had pointed a finger at him, scandalized. “Traitor.”

“You nearly broke your nose.”

“I was distracted.”

“You were showing off.”

“To a beautiful girl,” Bucky had returned, easy as breathing. “Which, if you ask me, is noble.”

You had rolled your eyes, but you’d been smiling. Bucky had always been able to make you smile, even before he had any right to it.

The truth was simpler than any of his stories and somehow more dear for it. You met because Steve introduced you.

He’d been sketching in the park, shoulders hunched, too thin coat buttoned up wrong, when a gust of spring wind had stolen his paper and sent half-finished drawings scattering across the path. You’d gone chasing after them before he could even stand, catching one under your shoe and another against the iron fence with your fingertips. By the time Bucky arrived with two coffees and a complaint already on his lips about Steve working through lunch again, he found the two of you kneeling in the grass, gathering pages and laughing like old friends.

Steve looked up first. Bucky looked where he was looking.

And that, as far as you were concerned, was that.

He liked you at once. Not just because you were pretty, though you were. Not just because you had a laugh that came from somewhere deep and honest, though that certainly didn’t hurt. He liked you because you treated Steve like he mattered before you even knew him. He liked you because you spoke quickly when you were passionate, because you never backed down from an argument, because you tipped your chin up when you were unimpressed and did not seem, in any real way, impressed by him at all.

“Barnes,” you’d said that first afternoon when Steve introduced you properly. “Steve says you’re trouble.”

“Steve,” Bucky had said, hand over his heart, “wounds me.”

Steve had only shrugged. “You are.”

And you had laughed, sunlight catching in your hair, and Bucky had been lost enough to feel it.

After that, he started appearing everywhere.

At first it was by chance, or close enough. He and Steve walked you home after the library. He found you at the grocer and carried your bag though you told him not to fuss. He waited outside the shop where you worked the register three streets over, leaning against the wall like he had nowhere else to be, just to escort you home. Then it became less accidental and more deliberate. He saved you a seat at the cinema. He showed up with flowers he definitely had not paid for. He took you dancing where the floorboards shook under too many feet and the whole room smelled like sweat and powder and cheap perfume, and afterward he bought you a soda and drank from the same glass because he said one straw was enough for two people in love.

“We are not in love,” you’d told him.

“No?” he’d said, leaning in just enough to make your pulse jump. “Could’ve fooled me.”

You did not kiss him for another three weeks.

It happened on your stoop after rain, the whole street silvered and shining, the air cool enough to raise goosebumps on your arms. Steve had gone home early with a cough he refused to call a cough, and Bucky, for once, had walked quietly beside you. No teasing. No swagger. Just the warmth of him at your shoulder and the sense that the night had narrowed down to the two of you and the sound of your footsteps.

He had stopped one step below you and looked up.

You remembered that look for the rest of your life.

Not cocky, then. Not smooth. Just earnest in a way that seemed almost to embarrass him, all his usual charm set aside. His hair was damp from the mist and his lashes were darker for it. The streetlamp painted one side of his face in amber and left the other in shadow.

“I keep trying not to,” he’d said.

“Not to what?”

“Think about you all the time.”

And because you were twenty and brave and dizzy with wanting, you bent and kissed him before he could say anything else.

For all Bucky’s confidence, for all the girls people said had come before you and would surely come after, he kissed like the world was ending and he’d been promised one last beautiful thing. His hands were gentle where they cupped your face. His mouth softened in surprise, then deepened with hunger. When you pulled back, his forehead rested against yours, and he laughed one helpless little breath like he could not believe his luck.

“See?” he murmured. “In love.”

You kissed him again just to shut him up.

He was good at loving you. Not perfect, never that, but good in all the ways that counted. He remembered things. He noticed when you were tired and walked a little slower. He stole oranges from a market stall because you said winter felt less cruel when there were bright things in the kitchen. He took you to Coney Island one hot Saturday and won you a stuffed bear that looked nothing like a bear at all, then spent the rest of the day acting offended when you told him it was ugly. He kissed your scraped knuckles when you cut your hand on a soup tin. He learned which songs made you drag him onto a dance floor and which books made you cry. He listened.

And you loved him for it.

You loved him for the way he filled space, like he had more life in him than one body ought to hold. You loved him for the steadiness under the charm, for the kindness he never announced. You loved him for the way he loved Steve with a loyalty so old and instinctive it seemed knitted into his bones.

Because Steve was always there, somehow. Always written into the shape of things. 

Steve at your kitchen table, paint under his nails, accepting seconds your mother pressed on him with a muttered comment about him being all elbows and no sense. Steve on the sidewalk outside the movie house, Bucky throwing an arm around his shoulders while the two of them argued over some serial neither of them had enough money to see twice. Steve holding your coat while Bucky tied your skate laces at the winter rink, Bucky looking up at him to say something and Steve already smiling as though he knew the words before they were spoken.

You loved Steve too, in your own way. It was impossible not to.

He was gentler than Bucky and quieter, but no less fierce. The world had spent years telling him what he was not, and he had met it all with a jaw set in stubborn defiance. He saw people. Really saw them. Sometimes you’d catch him watching Bucky when Bucky wasn’t paying attention, something soft and aching in his face, and then he’d look away so quickly it was easy to pretend you’d imagined it.

The thing was, you didn’t imagine it.

You saw things. You always had.

At first, you thought it was only protectiveness, the kind that comes from growing up with someone, from years of scraped knees and shared meals and defending each other in alleys. And maybe some of it was. But there were moments that did not fit inside friendship no matter how determinedly they were both trying to force them there.

The way Bucky looked for Steve first in any crowded room.

The way Steve’s whole body eased when Bucky touched him, like relief.

The way their arguments carried a strange intimacy, all heat and certainty, because each of them knew exactly where the other one ended and began.

The way silence sat easily between them.

The way, once, at a summer dance, you found Bucky watching Steve across the hall instead of the girl Steve was attempting not to step on, and the look on Bucky’s face was so open, so tender, it stole the breath from your chest.

When he turned and found you seeing it, he’d smiled, easy and bright, and come to kiss your cheek. You’d said nothing.

What was there to say?

You were in love with him. He was in love with you. That was real.

And still.

Still, there was some small quiet part of him that seemed to tip toward Steve like flowers toward the sun.

You did not resent it. Not then. Maybe not ever. You simply tucked the knowledge away, somewhere deep and private, because the world in 1940 had no mercy for certain truths, and because whatever lived between Bucky and Steve belonged to them to understand in their own time, if time was ever kind enough to let them.

For a while, life was kind.

Bucky proposed on a rooftop in August.

There was no grand plan, not really. No orchestra, no down-on-one-knee rehearsed perfection. Just the city spread out around you in brick and steam and evening light, and a bottle of contraband wine he claimed he’d gotten honestly, and Steve downstairs pretending very hard not to give the two of you privacy while absolutely giving the two of you privacy.

You had your shoes off. Bucky had his tie loosened. The heat hadn’t broken yet, and the air felt thick and humming against your skin.

He’d been quieter than usual all night. Restless, maybe. Looking at you as though trying to memorize something.

“You’re making that face,” you said.

“What face?”

“The one that says you’re about to do something dramatic.”

He smiled at that, but it trembled at the corners. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a little velvet box.

For a second the whole world went still.

“Buck,” you whispered.

“Now, before you say anything, I want you to know this was supposed to go smoother.” He cleared his throat, laughed once at himself, then seemed to decide honesty was the only thing left to him. “I had a speech. It was a good one too. Very persuasive. Real charm offensive.”

Your hands were already shaking.

“But you look like that, and I can’t remember a damn word of it.” He opened the box. The ring caught the last gold light of the day and flashed. “So I’m gonna have to tell you the truth plain.”

He stepped closer.

“I love you,” he said, and all the joking was gone now. “I love you when you’re mad and when you’re laughing and when you’re so tired you can’t keep your eyes open at dinner. I love the way you take care of people. I love the way you never let me get away with anything. I love that every good thing in my day feels better if I can tell you about it after.” His voice roughened. “I want a life with you. A real one. A home and Sunday mornings and kids if we’re lucky and old age if we’re blessed. I want to be yours for all of it. So—”

He swallowed.

“Marry me.”

You did not even let him finish asking properly before you were crying and nodding and kissing him hard enough to nearly send the ring box skidding across the roof.

Behind the stairwell door, there was an unmistakable muffled thud.

Bucky broke away, laughing against your mouth. “Stevie just hit his head on the rail trying not to eavesdrop.”

You laughed too, watery and bright, and then Bucky slid the ring onto your finger.

It fit.

Of course it fit.

Afterward, when Steve finally came up pretending innocence and failing miserably, he hugged you so tightly your ribs protested. Then he hugged Bucky even harder. Bucky made a show of complaining, but his eyes were suspiciously shiny.

You remember that night sometimes as the truest shape of happiness: the city warm around you, your ring glinting every time you moved your hand, Steve leaning against the low wall with a grin, Bucky at your side, the future opening ahead like a road lit golden and sure.

You had no way of knowing how quickly war could swallow a future whole.

At first it was just headlines, names of places too far away to feel real. Then it was ration books and tense voices on the radio and boys from the neighborhood standing straighter than they used to, as if posture alone might prepare them for the things they were about to lose.

Steve wanted to go before anyone else. Of course he did. You could see it in him every time a newsreel flickered across a theater screen, every time someone talked about duty. Bucky argued with him and worried over him and marched him out of more than one recruitment office by the elbow. You understood both of them. One trying to save the world with his bare hands. The other trying to keep the world from taking the person he loved most.

By the time Steve finally got his miracle and his uniform and the impossible body that seemed to startle even him, Bucky had already made up his mind.

He enlisted with the rest of the 107th. He kissed you in the train station under a sky the color of tin and tucked his forehead to yours like he could hold the moment there through force of will alone.

“I’ll come back,” he said.

“You’d better.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

His smile was brave and terrible. “You keep that ring on?”

You lifted your hand between you. “Try and stop me.”

He kissed you then, slow and desperate enough to make the noise of the station fall away. When he drew back, he pressed his mouth to your knuckles, right above the ring.

Steve stood a few feet off, duffel slung over one shoulder though he wasn’t shipping out with Bucky, not yet. You looked at him over Bucky’s shoulder and saw, just for a second, the same grief on his face that you felt cracking your own heart open.

Bucky hugged him next, rough and fast, like if he made a joke out of it maybe it wouldn’t hurt.

“Don’t start any fights without me.”

Steve huffed a laugh that failed halfway through. “You don’t leave me with much choice.”

“You write to her if I can’t,” Bucky said quietly.

Something flickered over Steve’s face. “I will.”

Then the conductor called final boarding. Bucky kissed you once more, touched Steve’s shoulder, and climbed onto the train.

You stood with Steve until the last car vanished.

For a long time after, loving Bucky meant living by letters.

His came when they could, sometimes in clusters, sometimes not at all for weeks. You learned the shape of his handwriting the way some women learned prayer. He wrote about mud and lousy coffee and men snoring loud enough to shake tents. He wrote about missing Brooklyn, missing your terrible coffee, missing the way you frowned when you were reading. Sometimes there were jokes, and sometimes there were lines so simple they hurt worse than anything elaborate could have.

Had peaches today. Tasted like the summer we went to Coney.

Saw a dog with one ear and thought of the mutt you keep trying to adopt from Mrs. Levin.

Dreamed of you last night. Woke up smiling like an idiot.

You wrote back and filled pages with ordinary things on purpose. The butcher. The weather. Mrs. Carlucci’s grandson losing a tooth. The new tear in the coat Bucky swore he could mend and absolutely could not. You told him about Steve’s work with the USO, though you didn’t say how the neighborhood pointed at him with wonder now, how strange it was to see the boy from the alley turned into a symbol. You told him you missed him. You told him you loved him. You never ended a letter without that.

Steve visited when he could. Sometimes he read Bucky’s latest letter with you at your kitchen table, smiling at one line and going quiet at the next. Sometimes he didn’t have a letter, only worry, and he’d sit with you on the stoop in a silence that needed no apology. The two of you grieved in advance together, though neither of you would have admitted that was what you were doing.

When news came that Bucky’s unit had been captured, Steve went white as the paper in his hand.

You thought, for one impossible sick second, that he might stop breathing.

Then he looked at you.

“I’m going to get him,” he said.

Not I’ll try.

Not if I can.

Just I’m going to get him.

And because you knew him, because you knew what lived in him where other people kept self-preservation, you believed him.

He left. He came back. Bucky had been saved.

For one shining terrible minute, it seemed like maybe the world might still bend toward mercy.

Then the mission in the Alps happened, and mercy ran out.

There was no body. No grave. No certainty. Just words like fell and missing and presumed, none of them strong enough to carry the weight of what they meant.

You sat on your bed with the telegram clenched in your fist until your mother pried it free because your nails had cut your palms open and you had not even noticed.

After that, everything became measured by absence.

The ring stayed on your finger for months. Then, when wearing it felt like ripping the wound open every hour, you put it on a chain beneath your blouse and carried it there, warm against your skin. Steve came home changed too, grief sitting under his skin like a fever. Then he was gone again, swallowed by ice and legend.

And just like that, the boys who had been the center of every room they entered were gone from Brooklyn, and the neighborhood kept going anyway.

That, you learned, was the cruelest part. Not that the world ended. That it didn’t.

Years passed. Then more.

You did what people do when their hearts break and no one comes to stitch them back together: you kept living.

You worked. You moved apartments. You laughed again, which felt at first like betrayal and then, eventually, like survival. You married once, years later, a kind man with patient hands who knew from the way you sometimes looked at old photographs that your heart had not started with him, and loved you anyway. You had a daughter. Then a son. You lost your husband too early and buried him with one hand clenched around the memory that love could come in different shapes and still be holy.

You grew older.

The ring Bucky gave you stayed in a box with your keepsakes. Sometimes you touched it. Mostly, you let it rest.

Far away, in ways you could never know, James Buchanan Barnes did not die on that mountain after all.

He was stolen instead.

By the time he got himself back—by the time the Winter Soldier and Bucky Barnes had become two names for one bruised, fractured man—the world had become something neither of you would have recognized.

He fought alien invasions. He slept in cryo. He woke to loss after loss after loss. He learned how to live inside the wreckage. He learned Steve had been alive all along. He learned that surviving is not the same thing as being saved.

And then came the end of everything.

Then came the battle.

Then came the impossible, ragged miracle of winning.

After Tony Stark’s funeral, the world felt hushed in the way it only ever does after catastrophe, like even the birds ought to speak softly out of respect for the dead. The lake behind the cabin held the morning light flat and pale. The quantum platform stood waiting like a question no one quite wanted to answer.

Bruce fussed over the controls. Sam paced and tried not to. Bucky stood a little apart with his hands in the pockets of a jacket that wasn’t really warm enough, looking at the machine, then away from it, then back again.

Originally, Steve had been the one meant to go.

Return the Stones. Put Mjolnir back. Close the loops they had torn open. Simple, in theory, which meant not at all.

But sometime before sunrise, with the grass still damp and the ache of too much history hanging between them, Steve had found Bucky sitting on the porch steps staring at the water.

“You don’t have to do that,” Steve had said.

Bucky had looked up. “Somebody does.”

“I mean you.”

A pause.

“I know.”

Steve lowered himself beside him. Age had not caught up to either of them the same way it caught up to ordinary men, but weariness had. It lived in the set of Steve’s shoulders, in the lines at the corners of his eyes, in the quiet that had settled where youth used to be.

“She’d still be there,” Steve said after a while.

Bucky’s breath left him slowly. “Maybe.”

“You think about it?”

Every day, Bucky almost said. Instead he shrugged.

The truth was he had thought about you in all the strangest moments. Not always with sharpness. Sometimes as a flash of laughter in the middle of a mission, the remembered feel of your fingers fitting between his, the image of a yellow dress on a fire escape. Sometimes as grief so sudden it nearly brought him to his knees. You belonged to the life Hydra had taken from him before he’d even understood it was being taken. You belonged to everything soft and human and ordinary. Sometimes he had believed that if he let himself want you too much, the wanting alone would split him apart.

Steve had always known when Bucky was lying to himself.

“You could go back,” Steve said. “Stay, if you wanted.”

Bucky turned to look at him then. “You’re tellin’ me that?”

“I’m telling you if there’s something good waiting for you, you should have it.”

There was no jealousy in him. No bitterness. Only that fierce, impossible generosity Steve carried like it had been built into his bones. It made Bucky’s chest ache.

“And what about you?”

Steve’s mouth tipped, sad and small. “I’ll be okay.”

Bucky looked out at the water again.

He thought of seventy years stolen. Of cold rooms and commands and blood he could never wash from his hands. He thought of you with your ring and your stubborn chin and the way you had said his name like it was a promise instead of a wound. He thought of how simple it would be, maybe, to step backward into a life that had once been laid out for him. To choose the road war had ripped away. To let himself be loved by someone who knew him before the breaking.

He thought of Steve, beside him in the dawn.

And something painful and old shifted under his ribs.

By the time Bruce called them over, the decision had settled in him heavy as stone.

“I’ll go,” Bucky said.

Sam blinked. “You?”

Steve said nothing.

Bruce looked between them, then nodded slowly. “We can make that work.”

No one asked any of the questions that mattered. Was this about the Stones or about regret? Was this duty or escape? Was he returning to the past or running from the present? Sometimes those questions are the same.

When Steve clasped his forearm before he stepped onto the platform, Bucky held on a second too long.

“You come back if you want to come back,” Steve said quietly.

Bucky forced a smile. “That your way of sayin’ you’d miss me?”

Steve’s answering look was warm and wrecked all at once. “Pal, you have no idea.”

The machine hummed alive around him. The world went white.

When it settled again, he was standing in Brooklyn.

Not the Brooklyn of memory, softened by distance and grief, but the real one. Brisk air. Wet pavement. Laundry snapping between buildings. A truck rattling by with milk bottles clinking in the back. The street looked smaller than he remembered and somehow more vivid, every detail sharpened by the shock of being able to see it again.

For a long moment Bucky could not move.

Then he did what wounded men always do when offered one impossible chance to return to the site of the wound.

He went to you.

You were not in the apartment he remembered. Life had shifted you one building over by then, to a second-floor walk-up with cracked green paint on the door and geraniums trying valiantly to survive in a rusted window box. He knew that because he remembered the date Bruce had fixed for him, remembered when you still wore his ring openly and still thought the war might end in anything resembling fairness.

He climbed the stairs like a ghost.

When he knocked, his hand shook.

You opened the door with a dish towel over one shoulder and your hair pinned up badly, like you’d twisted it in a hurry. For one impossible heartbeat you looked exactly the same. Then his mind caught up to what his eyes were seeing: younger, yes, but not a memory. Warm. Alive. Startled.

The dish towel slid from your shoulder and landed on the floor.

You stared at him.

He had not prepared for this part. Had not prepared for your face going slack with shock, for your mouth opening with no sound behind it, for the way his whole body seemed to remember how to ache only when looking at you.

“Buck?” you whispered.

He took one step forward and stopped because he was suddenly terrified that if he touched you, this would all dissolve.

You made the decision for him.

You crossed the threshold like the space between you was an insult and threw your arms around him so hard he nearly stumbled. The sound you made into his neck was half laugh, half sob. Bucky’s hands came up on instinct, crushing you close, and for a second the years vanished. For a second he was only a man returned to the woman he loved.

“You’re alive,” you breathed. “Oh my God, you’re alive.”

He closed his eyes. “I’m here.”

You pulled back just enough to look at him again, your hands on his face like you had to confirm the shape of him. “How?”

The simplest answer—I fell off a train and into hell and then into the future and now I’ve stepped out of time to stand on your landing—would have sounded like madness. You must have seen something impossible in his face, because your own expression shifted from joy to confusion to a strange, searching stillness.

“Buck,” you said softly. “What happened to you?”

A person can only carry so much truth at once. Bucky looked over your shoulder into the little apartment. Familiar curtains. Familiar chipped table. The ordinary details of a life he had once been meant to enter. It struck him then with almost physical force: if he stepped inside and closed the door, he could stay. He could become the man he had once expected to be. He could lay his head down in the past and let it keep him.

You were still looking at him.

“Can I come in?”

“Of course.”

You led him inside with your hand wrapped around his wrist, as if letting go might tempt fate into cruelty again. The apartment smelled like onions and clean soap and the lavender sachets your mother used to tuck into drawers. On the table sat two teacups. One was yours. The other, he guessed, belonged to Steve.

“Steve was just here?” he asked.

You froze almost imperceptibly, then nodded. “He left maybe half an hour ago.”

Something in your voice made Bucky look at you more closely.

You knew.

Not everything. Not the whole shape of it, maybe. But enough.

You set the kettle back on the stove though it did not need setting. “Sit.”

He sat because his knees felt unreliable.

You turned to face him, hands folded together too tightly. “Now tell me the truth.”

He opened his mouth with several lies lined up ready and watched every one of them fall apart under your gaze.

So he told you.

Not all of it. Not Hydra’s every horror or the roll call of names he could never forgive himself for. But enough. He told you about the future in broad, impossible strokes. About surviving the fall and losing himself and finding Steve again decades later. About a war beyond anything your generation could imagine. About a machine that could fold time in on itself like paper.

You listened without interrupting, which was somehow worse than disbelief would have been.

When he finished, the room had gone utterly quiet except for the soft whistle of the kettle beginning to boil over. You reached back automatically to pull it off the flame and set it aside. Your hands were steady now.

“So,” you said at last, “you came back.”

He looked at your face and saw grief there already, grief not for the past but for the decision forming in the room between you.

“I had the chance,” he said. “I thought—”

“You thought you’d come home.”

“Yes.”

You sat across from him. The old ring gleamed on your hand. He stared at it like a starving man.

“Do you still love me?” he asked, and hated how young the question made him sound.

Your expression gentled immediately, painfully. “Oh, Buck.”

“Because if you do, if there’s even a chance—”

“I do love you.”

He stopped breathing.

You smiled then, small and sad. “I think some part of me always will.”

Hope rose so fast it was almost dizzying. “Then—”

“But not like this.”

The word struck clean through him.

You leaned forward, elbows on your knees, still watching him with unbearable tenderness. “I loved the boy I knew. I loved the man he was becoming. I would have married you. I would have built a life with you and been happy in it.” Your voice shook once and steadied. “That’s all true.”

Bucky swallowed around the sudden ache in his throat.

“But that isn’t why you’re here,” you said.

“Yes it is.”

You tilted your head. “Is it?”

“I came back for you.”

“No,” you said softly. “You came back because you think this is the last unopened door. Because you think if you can have what was taken, maybe all the years in between will hurt less.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I know.” Your eyes shone. “But it’s still true.”

He stood up too quickly, chair scraping. “You don’t get to tell me what I feel.”

“No,” you said again, and there was steel in it this time. “But I do get to tell you what I’ve seen.”

You rose too, facing him across the small kitchen table. He had forgotten that part of you, how impossible it was to move you once you had decided to be honest.

“I have watched you and Steve look at each other for years,” you said quietly. “Long before either of you had words for it. Long before the world would have let you use them if you did.”

Bucky’s whole body went still.

“That’s not—”

“Don’t,” you interrupted, not unkindly. “Don’t lie now. Not to me.”

He laughed once, harsh and broken. “He’s my best friend.”

“I know.”

“That’s all.”

You gave him such a patient, heartbreaking look that he nearly turned away from it.

“Buck,” you said. “You love me. But when the room shifts, when something frightens you, when something delights you, when your heart goes running ahead of you before your brain can catch up, where do you turn?”

He did not answer.

You stepped closer.

“Who do you look for first?”

Still he said nothing.

“You asked Steve to write me if you couldn’t,” you whispered. “Do you know what that meant to me? It meant you trusted him with the tenderest parts of your life. It meant somewhere in you, beneath all the things you were supposed to want, you knew he was home too.”

Bucky’s throat worked.

“You think I didn’t see it?” you went on. “The way he watched you walk away from the train like losing you was tearing him apart from the inside out. The way you spoke his name like it belonged under your tongue. The way neither of you ever fit quite right beside anyone else because some part of you was always turned toward the other.”

He took a step back. “Stop.”

“Why? Because it’s easier to say you came back for me than admit you’re afraid to let yourself have him?”

“That’s not what this is.”

“Then what is it?”

He opened his mouth and found, to his horror, nothing there.

Because beneath the grief and exhaustion, beneath the desperate wanting to reclaim something untouched by Hydra’s hands, there was a fear so old it felt prehistoric. Not just of loving Steve. Of being seen loving him. Of naming the thing that had lived in the spaces between them for so long it had become air.

You saw the moment he understood that you knew, and your face went soft.

“Oh, Buck.”

The fury went out of him all at once.

He sat down hard in the chair behind him and covered his eyes with one hand. “I was gonna marry you.”

“I know.”

“I wanted to.”

“I know that too.”

He dropped his hand. “Then how can you stand there and tell me to leave?”

Your own tears spilled then, though you smiled through them. “Loving someone isn’t always the same thing as being the place they’re meant to stay.”

The room blurred.

You came around the table and knelt in front of him, taking his hands in yours. He looked at them—your smaller fingers around his, the ring on your hand catching light. Once, he had imagined those hands growing older with his. In some broken branch of the world, maybe they did.

“You gave me beautiful things,” you said. “You gave me youth and laughter and a love that mattered. Don’t make it smaller than it was by turning it into a refuge from the rest of your life.”

His voice came out shredded. “What if I don’t know how to do that?”

“Then learn.”

“With Steve?”

“With Steve.”

He stared at you.

You gave a watery laugh. “Did you think I was blind?”

He almost smiled despite himself, because of course you weren’t.

“He loves you,” you said. “Maybe not in neat little ways. Maybe not in ways either of you know what to do with yet. But he does. He always has.”

Bucky shook his head like he could dislodge the truth. “You can’t know that.”

“I know the look of a person trying to survive their own heart.”

He thought of the porch at dawn. Of Steve saying I’ll be okay in a voice that plainly meant the opposite. Of every time Steve had come for him, every time he had chosen him, every time Bucky’s chest had gone too tight when Steve smiled at someone else and he’d told himself it was because he was overprotective, because they were family, because there had to be another explanation for the way devotion sometimes tipped toward longing when he wasn’t watching it closely enough.

You squeezed his hands.

“You’ve spent enough of your life in the dark,” you whispered. “You deserve sunshine, Buck. Go get it.”

For a long moment neither of you moved.

Then Bucky bowed his head.

He wept.

Not loudly. Not neatly. Just the ugly, exhausted grief of a man who had spent decades being torn away from himself and had been handed, in one cruel kind stroke, the truth of what he actually wanted. You held his hands and let him cry. When he finally lifted his head, your own cheeks were wet.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“For what?”

“For all of it.”

You smiled through your tears. “Me too.”

He leaned forward and rested his forehead against yours, just once. A goodbye and a benediction and an ending. Then he kissed you.

It was gentle. Brief. Full of gratitude and mourning and the strange, shining peace that comes when two people tell each other the truth at last.

When he pulled away, you touched his face the way you had at the door.

“Tell him,” you said.

He gave a broken laugh. “You make it sound easy.”

“I didn’t say easy.” Your thumb traced the line of his cheekbone. “I said worthwhile.”

He stood because if he didn’t, he never would.

At the door, he looked back once. You were still in the middle of the kitchen, hands clasped to keep from reaching for him again, sunlight from the window catching in your hair. He wanted to fix the image in himself forever.

“I loved you,” he said.

You nodded. “I know.”

Then, after a beat, with all the warmth in the world tucked into your grief: “Now go.”

The platform yanked him out of the past before cowardice could do what time had not.

He reappeared on the lakeshore with a violent gasp, knees nearly buckling. Bruce jerked toward the controls. Sam exclaimed something he didn’t catch. But Bucky only saw Steve.

He was standing just beyond the rail, fear written plain across his face because for one awful second he must have thought Bucky had made his choice and that choice had not included coming back.

Then Bucky took one step off the platform.

Steve’s whole body loosened.

It was such a small thing. Anyone else might have missed it. But Bucky had known him since before either of them had enough meat on their bones to cast a proper shadow. He saw the exact instant relief struck Steve hard enough to be almost visible.

And suddenly there was no room left to hide.

Later, after Bruce was satisfied the timelines had not collapsed and Sam had given Bucky a look equal parts curious and fond before tactfully disappearing inside with the others, Bucky found Steve down by the lake.

The sun was lowering, laying copper over the water.

Steve turned at the sound of his steps. “You came back.”

Bucky huffed a laugh. “Observant.”

Steve smiled, but it was careful around the edges. “You okay?”

No. Yes. Maybe for the first time in a long time, maybe almost.

“I saw her,” Bucky said.

Steve’s face changed. “Oh.”

“She was beautiful.”

A silence. Then, “I bet she was.”

Bucky shoved his hands into his pockets. “She told me not to stay.”

Steve’s brow furrowed. “Why?”

Because she saw me more clearly than I’ve ever managed to see myself.

Because she loved me enough to tell the truth.

Because she knew before I did.

Bucky looked out over the water and said, “She told me I was being an idiot.”

That startled a laugh out of Steve. “Sounds like her.”

Bucky smiled. Then the smile faded.

“She said I should live here. In the present.”

Steve nodded slowly. “Okay.”

“She said I should be with you.”

The silence that followed seemed to alter the shape of the whole world.

When Bucky finally looked at him, Steve had gone completely still.

“Buck,” he said very carefully.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Bucky laughed once under his breath, all nerves now, all tenderness and terror. “Not until today, maybe.”

Steve’s gaze searched his face like he was trying to decide whether hope would be too dangerous. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“I know that too.”

“Then don’t do this because somebody else told you to.”

Bucky stepped closer. “I’m doing it because she said out loud the thing I’ve been too scared to name.”

Steve’s breath caught.

“All those years,” Bucky said, voice low and rough, “I thought maybe what I felt was just habit. Loyalty. You were my best friend, and that was supposed to be enough. Then everything happened, and wanting anything at all felt selfish.” He swallowed. “But every time I came back to myself, even in pieces, it was you. Every time.”

Steve looked wrecked.

“Buck,” he whispered again, and this time it sounded like a plea.

Bucky gave him the truth plain, the way he should have given it years ago, the way maybe some part of him always had in every action if not in words.

“I think I’ve been in love with you longer than I knew what the word meant.”

Steve closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, they were shining.

“You think?” he managed.

Bucky barked a laugh, relieved and terrified all at once. “Shut up.”

Steve stepped close enough that their shoulders almost touched. “I was in love with you when we were sixteen and stupid,” he said softly. “I was in love with you before you shipped out. I was in love with you every day I thought you were dead.” His voice broke. “I never stopped. I just got very good at pretending that was survivable.”

Something inside Bucky, knotted for decades, finally loosened.

He lifted a hand, hesitated only a second, and cupped Steve’s jaw. Steve leaned into it on instinct, eyes going dark and unbearably tender.

“You really are an idiot,” Steve murmured.

“Took you long enough to say yes.”

“I didn’t say yes.”

Bucky leaned closer. “Stevie.”

The old nickname undid them both.

Steve kissed him like he had been waiting across several lifetimes for permission.

There was nothing polished about it. It was all the years between them, all the grief and relief and hunger and homecoming, poured into one long, shaking exhale. Bucky made a broken sound into Steve’s mouth and pulled him closer. Steve’s hands found his coat, his waist, his face, as if touching him everywhere at once might make up for time.

When they parted, foreheads pressed together, the sun had dropped lower behind the trees.

“I think,” Steve said, smiling in that dazed, disbelieving way Bucky had only ever dreamed of being the cause of, “we might have wasted a lot of time.”

Bucky traced a thumb over his cheek. “Maybe.”

Steve huffed. “Lot of confidence for a guy who only just figured it out.”

“I had help.”

Steve’s expression softened. “From her?”

Bucky nodded.

“Then I guess,” Steve said quietly, “I owe her more than I can ever repay.”

“So do I.”

---

Their life after that did not become easy. The world did not stop being cruel simply because two men who had suffered enough finally chose each other. Healing was still slow. Nightmares still came. There were days Bucky withdrew into himself so completely Steve had to sit beside him in silence for hours until the dark passed. There were days Steve’s guilt climbed his spine and made him restless, unable to believe he was allowed peace when so many better people had been denied it.

But there was also coffee shared in the morning light. There were walks where Bucky’s hand found Steve’s without thinking and stayed there. There was laughter in the kitchen and bickering over music and the quiet miracle of building routine after a lifetime of chaos. There was the astonishment of tenderness returned freely, without fear. There was waking in the night and finding Steve warm beside him, real and breathing, and feeling something like gratitude so fierce it almost hurt.

There was sunshine, in the end.

A year later, on a cool afternoon edged with early autumn, Bucky found your name in a directory for a nursing home in Brooklyn.

He sat with the paper in his lap for a long time before Steve came in and looked at his face once and understood.

“You want me to come with you?” Steve asked.

Bucky thought about it, then nodded.

The nursing home smelled like lemon polish and old books and the faint medicinal tang of too many years gathered in one place. A volunteer at the desk smiled and led them down a corridor lined with framed watercolor flowers. Bucky’s pulse beat hard in his throat. Beside him, Steve moved with that calm steadiness that had anchored him since childhood.

Outside your room, Bucky stopped.

Steve touched the small of his back. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes,” Bucky said softly. “I do.”

You were sitting by the window in a cardigan the color of buttercream, a blanket over your knees, reading glasses low on your nose. Age had changed you, of course. Softened you. Lined you. Silvered your hair. But not even time had touched the core of you, the particular intelligence in your eyes when you looked up at the sound of the door opening.

For one breathless second, you only stared.

Then your mouth parted.

“Well,” you said, voice thin with age and still unmistakably yours, “I’ll be damned.”

Bucky laughed, sudden and helpless. “Hi, doll.”

Your eyes flicked from him to Steve and back again. Something knowing and bright bloomed in your face.

“Oh,” you breathed. “You listened.”

He crossed the room in three strides and took your hand carefully, as if it were made of light. It felt papery and warm and real. Emotion rose so quickly it nearly closed his throat.

“I wanted to thank you,” he said.

You squeezed his fingers. “For what?”

“For not letting me make the wrong choice.”

A gentleness passed over your face.

Behind him, Steve hung back respectfully until you crooked a finger at him with surprising authority.

“Don’t loom, Steven. Come here.”

Steve obeyed, smiling despite himself, and you took his hand too, linking the three of you together for one brief, perfect moment.

You looked between them and laughed softly. “There you are.”

It undid Bucky more than he expected. He dropped to the chair beside your bed, still holding your hand.

“I used to think,” he admitted, “that if I went back and lost you again, it’d break me twice.”

“And?”

“And it didn’t feel like losing.”

Your thumb stroked once over his knuckles. “Because it wasn’t.”

You asked about their life then, with a delighted nosiness that had not diminished in the slightest. Where did they live? Who cooked? Was Steve still terrible at lying? Was Bucky sleeping enough? They answered everything. Steve showed you a photograph from his wallet—both of them on a quiet beach, wind in their hair, smiling so openly it almost looked like another universe. You touched the picture with reverence.

“Good,” you murmured. “Good.”

Eventually Bucky asked about your life too, because the years had belonged to you whether he had been there for them or not. You told him about your children, about grandchildren who visited on Sundays and cheated at cards, about the husband who had loved gardening and terrible radio comedies. You spoke of him with fondness, and Bucky felt something in his chest settle gently into place.

You had your sunshine too.

When visiting hours thinned and the light outside the window turned honey-soft, Bucky stood reluctantly.

“I should let you rest.”

You waved that off. “I’m old, not dead.”

Steve laughed.

You looked at Bucky one last long moment, and the room seemed to hold its breath around the tenderness in your face.

“You look happier,” you said.

He glanced toward Steve without thinking. That alone made you smile wider.

“I am.”

“Good.” Your eyes shone. “That’s all I ever wanted for you.”

He bent and kissed your forehead.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

You patted his cheek. “Go on now. Take your sunshine home.”

Out in the corridor, Bucky had to stop and press the heel of his hand to his eyes. Steve waited beside him, close enough to touch and wise enough not to speak until Bucky was ready.

When Bucky lowered his hand, Steve was looking at him with that same expression from the lakeshore a year ago: full of wonder, full of love, still a little unbelieving.

“You okay?” Steve asked.

Bucky let out a breath that felt like the last of a very old grief leaving him.

“Yeah,” he said, and meant it.

Steve took his hand.

They walked out together into the late afternoon. The sun was low, pouring gold over the sidewalk, over the parked cars, over the city that had once held three young hearts and all the futures they could not yet imagine. Bucky tipped his face into the warmth for a second, then turned toward Steve, who was smiling at him like he still couldn’t quite believe this was allowed.

Maybe it had taken them too long.

Maybe the road to this kind of happiness had been bloodier and crueler than anyone deserved.

But they were here now.

And after everything, after war and ice and time and all the ways the world had tried to deny them, James Buchanan Barnes finally understood what you had known all along.

He deserved sunshine.

And he had found it.

oh my godd the detail of Bucky liking you because of how you treat Steve. the 40s atmosphere and 40s Bucky's characterisation was so so perfect!! THE KISS ON THE STEP 🥹🥹 and you loving him for how he loves Steve

Still, there was some small quiet part of him that seemed to tip toward Steve like flowers toward the sun.

OH MY HEART 😭😭🥺

You did not resent it. Not then. Maybe not ever. You simply tucked the knowledge away, somewhere deep and private, because the world in 1940 had no mercy for certain truths, and because whatever lived between Bucky and Steve belonged to them to understand in their own time, if time was ever kind enough to let them.

IF TIME WAS EVER KIND ENOUGH TO LET THEM 😭😭

“You write to her if I can’t,” Bucky said quietly.

my heartttt oh my god

Not I’ll try. Not if I can. Just I’m going to get him. And because you knew him, because you knew what lived in him where other people kept self-preservation, you believed him.

this is so beautiful and so Steve i just -

There was no jealousy in him. No bitterness. Only that fierce, impossible generosity Steve carried like it had been built into his bones. It made Bucky’s chest ache.

because they love each other so much they would give up the one thing they want most for the other to be happy 😭

Steve’s answering look was warm and wrecked all at once. “Pal, you have no idea.”

“Buck,” you said. “You love me. But when the room shifts, when something frightens you, when something delights you, when your heart goes running ahead of you before your brain can catch up, where do you turn?”

THIS. you put it into wordssss oh my god i'm crying

“You gave me beautiful things,” you said. “You gave me youth and laughter and a love that mattered. Don’t make it smaller than it was by turning it into a refuge from the rest of your life.”

oh my god yes! because it makes it somehow less important. i love this so much

“You’ve spent enough of your life in the dark,” you whispered. “You deserve sunshine, Buck. Go get it.”

BRO PLEASE I CAN'T

That startled a laugh out of Steve. “Sounds like her.”

okay but i love how it's like they both love you, like this love runs so deep that Steve can't help but love you too because Bucky loves you, so how could he not?

Steve kissed him like he had been waiting across several lifetimes for permission.

this is so beautiful, my heart hurts

Steve obeyed, smiling despite himself, and you took his hand too, linking the three of you together for one brief, perfect moment.

And after everything, after war and ice and time and all the ways the world had tried to deny them, James Buchanan Barnes finally understood what you had known all along. He deserved sunshine. And he had found it.