chia ✩°｡⋆

Gentle Hand

Domestic

Post Hydra

Cut Your Hair

Rinse Cycle

Bleeding Heart

Pretty

Alpine

Fugitives

Filthy Fingers

Orange Guts

Condition

Just as You Are

To Where and Back

Your hand pressed into the wound on your side. It gaped with a slow-warm intelligence, a second mouth opening and closing around your palm. Your breath steamed in uneven ropes as you struggled to blink.

In an unsettlingly clean way, you understood that if you closed your eyes you would not open them again, so you fixed them on the sky and let the snow find you, let it rest on your cheekbones where your skin still knew how to be skin.

The treetops were black wires against the white sky. A rook cawed once and then the forest went back to listening. You had always thought the snow would be silent if it came to this, a pillowed quiet, a gentle drift into nothing, but it was not. 

It crackled where it landed on your jacket, hissed where it touched blood. You could hear the far low groan of ice shifting in the ravine. Your breath whistled at the edges, a thin reed instrument you could not quite control. Somewhere to your right, your rifle lay half-submerged like a sleeping animal. The scope glass had frosted over. The magazine was still heavy. Useless now.

You tried the comm again because that is what you would do. Thumb found the push-to-talk and held it, out of habit if not hope. The headset answered with the same blunt silence, the same small stutter of static that might have been wind crawling along the antenna. 

You pictured the little red light on your vest, the one that had stopped blinking. You pictured the map in your head, the way Bucky had tracked it with a gloved finger over the hood of the truck, the way he had tapped the switchback that led to the outbuilding and said he would keep to your flank. 

He always did that. Quiet promises. No showy heroics. Just the fact of him at your side when things went bad.

It had gone bad at the bend, where the cut barrels ringed the slope, where the snow hid the old razor wire and the men inside the outbuilding were faster than they looked. You heard the shots the way you might hear bees. You had not felt the first hit at all, only a sudden looseness in your knees, the ground reaching up, the smack of your shoulder on ice that felt like a door closing.

The second hit had been a flower opening under your ribs. There was maybe a third, but you couldn't remember. After that there had been movement and then there had not. Someone had shouted. You had returned fire and the fire had not mattered because the world had already tilted toward this.

He would be coming. 

You believed that because it was true every other time. 

Bucky Barnes did not leave people behind. He did not leave you behind. 

He could move through a fight like a shadow that knew exactly what needed to be done. He could put his body where the bullets wanted to be. He had a way of speaking into your comm when you were about to do something reckless, a low note that slid under panic and clicked into place. 

You could hear it then like you always did, the memory of his tone more than the words. Steady. Breathe. Two more steps. On your six. He never told you to be careful. He never told you to wait. He met you where you were and made all of this survivable.

The cold creeped into the wound on your side like unwelcome fingers. You felt it as a clarity first, as a kind of antiseptic truth. Then you stopped feeling the edges of it at all. Your fingers had gone rigid where they cupped your side. 

You meant to dig in harder and there was no difference. You meant to curl your knees and they were heavy stone ovals under the snow. You had a thought about how you might look from above, the black of your suit like spilled ink, the red staining out around you like a map you had not intended to draw. 

You did not like that thought, so you watched the snow again and let it occupy you.

Footfalls would sound, you told yourself once more.

He made no noise when he wanted to, but for you he would call out first. Bucky had learned that after the first time a year back in Russian tunnels when you put a round into the wall an inch from his head. 

He had laughed later, head tipped back, teeth bright and quick in the dim light, but his voice had gentled when he came up on you after that. He would say your call sign before he said anything else. He would say it like a question with an answer built in. 

You heard it now the way you wanted to hear it. The syllables hit the frozen minutes and shattered, nonexistent.

You couldn’t turn your head, so you turned your eyes. The world rimmed in salt-white. The wind barely moved and yet every flake fell as if purposeful, one after another. You counted them as if counting could keep you awake. You ran out of numbers and began again, and the counting became a hum that anchored you to the moment of your breath and the moment after that. 

Your tongue had the taste of iron. Your throat felt lined with glass. You swallowed and the glass complained. You tried to cough and even that was too much. The cough lived inside your chest without moving the air.

On the edge of hearing, like a trick the brain plays when it catalogs what it misses, a radio chirped. You froze inside the body that could not move. The chirp became a crackle. The crackle opened like a curtain to a voice that was there and not there, a sound shaped like him.

You did not know if it was memory or mercy. You knew what he would say if it was real. You waited for the habit of him to arrive.

You had met Bucky Barnes in winter, which felt like a private joke you had never admitted out loud. He was winter the way a river is winter. Cold only to the touch. Underneath, the force of him moved dark and certain. 

He wore layers like armor and then shed them like a man shrugging out of a story he did not want anymore. He stood with his weight balanced as if ready to break into motion with a breath and he could be still for longer than anyone else. 

The first time he had handed you a thermos after a long, dead stakeout, his mouth had moved around the shape of a smile that pretended it was not one. That motion lived in your head even now, precise as a photograph. You let it play behind your eyes to distract yourself from the creeping quiet at your extremities.

Another minute slid past with the round edges that minutes have when they are running out. The treetops shifted. Somewhere distant, an engine coughed and went silent. You could not tell if that was the truck or a memory of a truck you had slept in once, shoulder to shoulder in the back while frost filmed the windows and the only warmth was breath and shared curses. 

Bucky had said you snored. You had said he slept with his eyes open sometimes and it creeped you out. You had wanted to touch his knuckles where his flesh hand rested on his thigh. You had not. You were very responsible about some things.

Now you wanted a miracle and all you had was snow. 

You wanted a hand to move the hair out of your face because it had stuck there, stiff with melted snow and blood, because it tickled in the way you could not reach. You wanted Bucky to cut through the tree line with that clean, predatory economy of his, to drop to his knees beside you and say your name like you had not wrecked him for weeks with an almost-confession you did not know you had made. 

You wanted his breath in your ear as he told you to hold on, and you wanted to because he would say it.

But you did not have that. 

You had the memory of his palm spanning your shoulder when he pushed you down behind a barrier two missions ago. You had the sound of his boots on concrete, always closer than you expected. You had the little ordinary things he did that felt like a prayer. He fixed the strap on your holster without comment. He handed you his spare knife when yours went skidding. He stood in the door while you fell asleep and then left to watch the hallway whenever the two of you were stuck in a safehouse.

He never made it feel like a favor. It was just that he was there.

You thought about how he would be angry at himself for not being faster, how he would scuff the snow with the heel of his boot while he gathered you up, how he would look at your face first and then at his hands to check for what he had missed. 

He would allow himself that one loss of composure, that tiny tic of self-cruelty, and then force it down because there was work to do. He did not yell when it mattered. He moved. He made use of whatever he had.

He had you. And that had always surprised you more than it should have.

You let your eyes slide to the right as far as they would, just enough to catch the slope where the path cut through. You imagined the curve of his body as he dropped into a run. You imagined the precision of the vibranium arm, the way the plates caught light and gave it back in sharp pieces.

You had once watched him at a bench under a bad flickering bulb, oiling the joints with the concentration of a man tending a garden. You had wanted to ask what it felt like. He had looked up at you as if he had heard the question anyway. He had said it felt like a hand. He had said it felt like the rest of him. You believed him.

Snow settled in the hollow of your throat. It itched like a memory you could not place. You wanted to laugh because it was so stupid, to be bothered by that while the center of you opened into the cold. 

Your breath clouded and thinned. You tried to flex your fingers and the signal did not travel. You tried to say his name and the sound stuck to your teeth. The wind shifted and brought you the faintest scent of gunpowder and sap. The outbuilding door slammed somewhere behind the drift and the sound was very small from here, like a door closing in another house in another life.

You knew you should keep fighting. You knew the list of things to do, the order in which to do them. You had given that brief yourself like a bedtime story before ops. Breathe. Pressure. Elevation. Communicate. Stay awake. Count. Catalog your surroundings. Find a landmark and fix on it. Feed yourself tasks so the panic has no room to move in. 

You had been good at it because you were stubborn and because you wanted to keep coming back to the people who made the fight make sense. You wanted to keep coming back to him and the unspoken thing that sat between you like a live wire taped neat and tucked out of sight.

He had said your coat looked ridiculous that morning. He had said it in a way that meant he liked it. You had rolled your eyes and said his needed patching and he had allowed the insult because you were the one who did the patching. He had watched your hands move the needle through the fabric with a stillness that felt like being seen.

 If you closed your eyes now you could see that exact thread shining between your fingers. If you closed your eyes now…

No. Your eyes stayed open. They burned. They watered. The world doubled at the edges and then sharpened again like a lens trying to find you. You focused on the nearest branch where a clot of snow thickened and slid in slow motion, fell without a sound, punctured the layer beside your ear. You tried again to drag breath past the weight in your chest and the breath went in like a reluctant guest.

When he looked at your headset later he would press it to his ear as if that could pull your voice back through. You saw that so clearly it might as well have been happening beside you. He would check the wiring, not because he did not know but because his hands needed a job. 

He would track the blood you had left against the white and it would lead him here. He would call for you then, low and sure like he could will it into an answer. He would kneel and the snow would creak and the world would tilt back toward the side where you lived.

You wanted that. You had never wanted anything the way you wanted that.

The wind picked up. A veil of snow dusted across your face and your eyes blinked clean on reflex. It was getting darker in a way that had nothing to do with time. The clouds had thickened into a single sheet and the line of the hill melted into it. 

You thought for a split second that you heard his boots. You thought for another that you saw a shadow detach from the trees and start down the path. You held yourself ready for the relief that would follow, for the way your body would answer that presence by remembering itself.

It was only the wind playing with the shape of the trees. It was only the little mean tricks the cold does as it settles into you.

You told yourself a story anyway, because that had always been how you kept the worst edges from cutting too clean. You told yourself he was close enough to hear your heartbeat. You told yourself he was swearing in that quiet way of his, the syllables clipped, the heat under them banked. 

You told yourself he had the med kit out and the tourniquet ready. You told yourself his breath clouded the air above you and you turned your face into it because it was warm. You told yourself you would give him hell for taking so long and he would give it back, eyes crinkled at the corners, mouth a line he could not stop from lifting.

Your story could not move your blood. It could not knit flesh. It could only hold you in place while the world kept snowing.

Pain flared once, brilliant as a flare against fog, and then folded into itself and left a ringing quiet. You breathed into that quiet and felt something in you unspool, a slow ribbon, warm where it left.

If he had been here, you would have leaned into his chest while he got the bleeding under control. You would have let the lines of him hold the lines of you together. You would have listened to the steady drum of his heart like a metronome you could set yourself to. He would have said your name then. Not your call sign. Your name. He would have said it like a fact, like an anchor thrown into deep water that hits bottom and holds.

You thought you saw a figure again and you let yourself believe it this time without interrogating it. The snow had a way of making lies tender. You watched the shape come closer in the long patience of someone who had run out of choices and found, to your small surprise, that there was no fear in you at all. Just the strange, clean relief of not needing to move. 

If it was him, he would kneel. If it was not, you would not have to know.

If he was coming.

You took another breath because breath was a thing you could still do. The snow touched your lips like hands would. Your vision narrowed its aperture. For a heartbeat the world clicked into focus with such precision it hurt. Every needle on the firs was an individual thing. Every flake was a star with a private trajectory. Every memory of how he looked at you slotted into place behind your eyes like rounds into a magazine. 

You felt the heat of your blood where it pooled under your palm. You felt the stiffness of the fabric where it froze at the edges. You felt the small ceiling of sky press down and you pressed back by staying.

The figure did not resolve. The comm did not spark to life. The snow kept falling because that is what it does. You tasted iron. Your tongue was heavy. Your throat had learned silence and did not want to unlearn it. 

You thought of the way he held the world together when he could. You thought of how he would hate this. You thought of his hands, one flesh, one forged, both equally careful when they touched what mattered. 

You let those thoughts sit with you in the snow like companions. You let them be enough to keep your eyes open one minute more. Then another. You let them be the warmth you did not have, the promise the moment did not offer, the echo of a voice that had so often been the last thing between you and the dark.

Hold on, you heard, whether from memory or mercy you did not know. Hold on.

You did, the way you always had, with your teeth even when your hands had nothing left in them, with your attention fixed like a blade on the next small thing you could ask your body to do. 

Breathe. Watch the snow. Wait for the sound of him. Refuse the easy closing.

The snow on your lashes blinked, and when your eyes opened, it was dust floating in the gym's fluorescent light.

You were still on your back, but the sky had become a ceiling, low and stained and hummed through with old wiring. The cold pressing into your spine softened into the thin ache of concrete that had stored years of footsteps. Your breath no longer streamed white; it fogged in front of your face in little bursts that smelled like recycled air and metal. 

Somewhere nearby, a door slammed, the sound familiar in a way the crack of gunfire had never been.

You knew this room. You knew this version of the world like the inside of your own mouth. The compound. Early days. Before anyone trusted you with anything that mattered; before you believed them when they did. 

You watched the dust drift between you and the light overhead and realized you were not lying on snow anymore but on the mat inside the gym, chest heaving, lungs burning from the last set.

"You good?"

Bucky’s voice came from just beyond your line of sight, lazy as if he already knew the answer and didn't trust it. 

You turned your head and there he was, sitting with his back against the wall, knees drawn up, forearms resting across them. Hair damp at the temples, a darker ring on the collar of his shirt where sweat had soaked through. Dog tags winked once when he shifted, catching the light like a tiny, private snowfall.

"Pretty sure I'm dying," you had rasped, and the way your voice sounded then layered perfectly over the way it sounded now, raw and edged with something you hadn't named yet.

He huffed, that almost-laugh he did when something amused him but he refused to give it the satisfaction of a real reaction. The corner of his mouth tilted. His eyes dragged over you, fast and brief, like a scan for damage first and always.

"If you were dying, you wouldn't be whining about it," he said. "You'd be quiet. Terrifies me, remember?"

You remembered. You remembered the way he'd said it once after a mission, when you came back bleeding and making jokes, and his shoulders dropped like someone had cut a wire. Quiet, for him, meant missing. Meant gone. Meant tombstones with names that never should have had dates carved underneath. 

He preferred noise. Preferred the way you swore when you took a hit, the way you grumbled when he pushed you too hard, the way you argued about tactics with hands moving in sharp little arcs.

You hadn't understood how much that meant, back then. You only knew the look in his eyes now, in this hallway, as he watched you fight for breath after another training session you insisted on taking too far. The look that said he was cataloging you into the part of his brain where things he couldn't lose got stored.

"You should've let me stop two rounds ago," you said, still trying to drag air into lungs that didn't want to expand.

"You said don't go easy on you," he reminded you, shrugging one shoulder. "You wanna take it back, now's the time."

"Not in front of a witness." You gestured weakly at the doorway to the gym, where the heavy bag still swung on its chain. "Gotta maintain my image."

He snorted, finally, a real sound. It scraped warm along your spine, an internal reflex you didn't have a name for yet. His metal hand flexed once against his knee, the plates catching the light in that soft ripple that fascinated you no matter how many times you saw it.

"Your image," he said slowly, "is the person that doesn't back down when a guy like me tells them to call it for the day."

Guy like me. You heard it the way he meant it, heavy with every history he still wore like old scars under his shirt, the ones no serum could smooth out. You pushed yourself up on your elbows, hands shaking, and looked at him full-on, your vision still rimmed in spots.

"A guy like you is the reason I'm not dead already," you said. "So if I wanna keep up, I can't tap out every time my muscles cry about it."

He watched you while you said it. Didn't look away. That was new; for months he had skated around full eye contact like it would reveal something he hadn't agreed to show. Now his gaze stayed on you, steady, thoughtful. 

The blue of his eyes was darker here than it looked under the harsh lights of the briefing rooms. Closer, you could see every line at their corners, the little tightness that settled in when he was thinking too much.

"You keep talking about being dead," he said quietly. "Kinda makes me wanna wrap you in bubble wrap and lock you in a closet."

"Kinky," you had shot back, on instinct more than intention.

Silence, then, followed by a slow blink and a breath that might have been a laugh if he'd let it. He shook his head at you, hair falling into his eyes for half a heartbeat before he smoothed it back with his flesh hand.

"You're impossible," he said. "Get up. Hydrate. Before I end up explaining to Steve why you passed out in the hallway."

You remembered the way his hand had hovered for a moment before it caught your forearm to help you to your feet. The warm hand first, a firm grip, fingers bracketing bone. The metal one resting loose on his knee, deliberately not touching. As if he had made some kind of private rule about where each belonged when it came to you.

You let him haul you up, your legs wobbling, shoulder bumping his chest when you overshot your center of gravity. For one heartbeat you were pressed up nearly against him, every breath you took syncing with his, your cheek inches from his sternum. You remembered the way his heart had felt like a steady drum against your skin, even through layers.

He smelled like soap that had nothing to do with who he was and everything to do with who he was trying to be now. Coffee and gun oil ghosted under it. Something citrus, faint.

"Careful," he had murmured, reflexive, hand tightening on your arm.

"That's your job," you'd said, and then the hallway, the gym, the dust all shifted as if the whole compound inhaled and exhaled at once.

The air changed temperature. The fluorescent buzz smoothed itself into the softer hum of an old refrigerator. The light over your head yellowed, warm and uneven. Your back didn't ache from concrete anymore but from the unforgiving springs of a cheap mattress. The smell of metal and sweat thinned into the smell of rain hitting pavement outside a cracked window, exhaust and wet asphalt and cheap takeout.

You blinked, and you were on your side in a safe house bed, blanket tangled around your legs, shirt twisted, heart doing something reckless in your chest. The room was small, all peeling paint and mismatched furniture, but it felt too big with just the two of you in it. 

The storm outside smeared shadows across the ceiling. A leak tapped somewhere in the corner. The warmth in the air was borrowed from an ancient space heater rattling in the corner.

Bucky was sitting on the edge of the bed, back to you. His metal arm reflected faintly in the gloom, the delicate seams between plates tracing their own geometry. He was rolling his neck like it hurt, head tipped back just enough to show the strong line of his throat.

You shouldn't have been awake. You should have been sleeping off the mission, letting the adrenaline seep out of your muscles. But he had been too quiet when you came in, too neat with his movements, and your body had learned to wake up when quiet wrapped itself this tight around him.

"You're thinking loud," you said, voice soft in the thick, late hour. The words arrived in this room and in the snow at the same time, as if they had never left your tongue.

He half-turned, enough for you to see the line of his jaw, the way his mouth pulled when he tried to decide whether to deny it. He didn't. He just shrugged one shoulder, the muscles there jumping, the metal arm resting on his thigh like an animal at ease.

"Can't sleep," he said simply.

"Nightmare?"

You watched the way his hand—flesh this time—tightened on his knee. The flicker at the corner of his eye. He didn't answer and that was answer enough. Your chest ached in that familiar way it did when you thought about all the nights he had lived through that had no decent ending.

"C'mere," you said, like you were offering him a glass of water instead of the mess of your own heart.

He hesitated exactly long enough for you to know this wasn't simple. And you knew it wasn’t. 

Finally, he shifted, the mattress dipping under his weight as he turned toward you. The room was too small to pretend this was casual; when he lay down on top of the blanket, it was with a care that bordered on reverent. 

He shoved his boots off, like he was taking at least one step toward comfort but refusing the rest. The metal arm stayed angled away from you at first, braced against the headboard, like a part of him was holding himself up off you even while the rest sank down.

You rolled onto your back to make room. The old bed squeaked. Your shoulder brushed his. The contact felt like it should have set off alarms. You stared up at the cracked plaster above you, tracing the faint water stains with your eyes.

"You know," you said, after the silence nested too comfortably in the room, "you are allowed to sleep. The world keeps spinning without you supervising it."

"Does it?" His voice was quieter here than it was on the field, as if the walls might tell on him. "Pretty sure every time I let my guard down, something goes sideways."

"The heater's the only thing going sideways tonight," you replied. "And if it explodes, at least we'll go in our sleep. Real mercy kill."

He made a sound that might have been a laugh or a frustrated exhale; with him, they were almost the same. You could feel the vibration of it through the mattress, through the few inches between you. 

His gaze flicked over to you in the dark, catching just enough of your features to make them real: the curve of your cheek, the line of your mouth, the way you stared stubbornly at the ceiling as if refusing to look at him too much might save you from something.

"You got a real cheerful streak, you know that?" he murmured.

"I work with what I have." You let your hand rest near his on the blanket, not touching but close enough that the heat of him gathered in your palm. "You wanna talk about it?"

The storm outside filled the pause. Rain hit the window like thrown gravel. Somewhere far off, a car rolled through water, the sound dopplering away. He breathed in, slow and precise, like a man approaching a minefield.

"Same old," he said. "Faces I don't remember. Things I did. Things I didn't do."

"And me?" you asked, before you could tell your tongue to mind its business. "Do I show up in there yet?"

You had meant it as a joke. Light, deflecting. You had not expected the way it landed between you with weight. 

His head turned, full-on now, eyes finding yours in the half-light. There was something like surprise in them and something like resignation, like he'd been waiting for you to ask and had hoped you wouldn't.

"No," he said simply. Then, after a beat, "You show up after."

"After?"

"Yeah." He let his gaze drop to the line of your shoulder, your throat, the rise and fall of your chest. "After I wake up. After I remember where I am. You're there. You sound annoyed. Tellin' me I'm hogging the covers or snoring or…something." He swallowed. "It's not like the dreams. It's quieter. Easier to breathe."

You could have said a dozen things. Any of them might have broken the fragile, careful balance of the moment. So you picked the least dangerous one and hoped it was enough.

"For the record," you said, voice softer than you meant it to be, "you absolutely snore."

"Yeah?" He huffed again, mouth curling despite himself. "You keepin' notes?"

"I'm a professional," you replied. "I observe. I report. I'm very thorough."

His fingers moved then, just a fraction. The metal ones, where his arm had been anchored to the headboard. They flexed like they wanted to close around something. Maybe around your hand. Maybe around his own throat. 

You shifted your hand the smallest distance, letting the back of your fingers brush the cool plates where his wrist rested near your head. The contact was brief, accidental on the surface. It lit up a whole system in you that had nothing to do with nerves or blood and everything to do with the careful way he drew in his next breath.

"Gonna put that in the report too?" he asked, but his voice had gone lower, roughened at the edges.

"Only the important parts," you said. "Bucky Barnes: snores, hogs blankets, represses emotions, has decent hair."

He rolled his eyes, but he was smiling now, real and reluctant. He let the metal hand turn under yours so your fingers could rest in the thinner seam between plates, the place where warmth leaked through from the machinery underneath. You felt that warmth travel up your arm, lodging somewhere inconvenient behind your ribs.

"Decent?" he repeated. "That's the best you got?"

"Don't push your luck," you murmured.

The room held onto that, tucking it into its corners, into the creak of the bed, into the whisper of rain on glass. You had laid there, side by side, not touching more than that point of contact, and felt the entire axis of your life tilt by degrees you couldn't measure. 

Outside, someone in the world was dying, someone was being born, someone was making coffee, someone was stealing a car. Inside that little room, the biggest thing happening was two people lying very still, pretending breathing wasn't a confession.

The bed beneath you now, in the snow that had become the gym that had become this safe house, gave one long, low groan, and you blinked again.

The warmth of his arm under your fingers cooled, the hum of the heater faded into the distant, steady roar of engines. The rain against the window turned into the shudder of metal walls under heavy wind. The mattress pitched, and you were strapped into a seat instead, shoulder harness biting into your chest. The air tasted like high altitude, thin and filtered, tinged with jet fuel and sweat and something like anticipation.

You looked up at the interior of the quinjet around you, all matte black surfaces and exposed wiring, the faint blue glow of instruments painting everyone in cold light. Across the aisle, Bucky sat with his forearms braced on his knees, eyes fixed on the floor between his boots. Gloves on this time. Strap secured. Weapon at his feet. The set of his shoulders said he was thinking too much. Again.

"You look like you're about to bolt," you said over the engine noise, because you had never really learned how to leave him alone when he folded into himself like that.

He lifted his head, eyes dragging up to meet yours, and the motion happened here in the jet and out there in the snow where you imagined it, where you waited. The duality of it made your lungs stutter. He frowned at you, familiar and fond.

"Remind me which one of us jumped out of a plane without a parachute once?" he called back, mouth quirking.

"Peer pressure," you shouted. "Terrible influence in my life."

"You volunteered," he said. "I remember."

"You asked," you shot back. "There's a difference."

He gave you that look then, the one he reserved specifically for you, where exasperation and something softer wrestled to a draw. His gaze flicked over you quickly, checking gear, checking weapons, checking the line of your mouth like it could tell him if you were lying about being okay.

"You don't gotta prove anything," he said, the words bending around the roar of the engines but still reaching you clearly. "Not to me."

"Maybe I'm not doing it for you," you said, but it came out gentler than you intended. "Maybe I like jumping out of planes."

"You're a menace," he muttered, but there was a hint of pride threaded through it. "You stick to the plan this time, yeah?"

"I always stick to the plan."

He arched a brow.

"Most of the plan," you corrected. "Some of the plan."

His eyes closed briefly, like he was making a wish he didn't believe in. When he opened them again, they were steady, all business, that sharp, clear soldier-killer-operative gaze that saw everything and revealed nothing. Except—when it landed on you, there was that fraction of a degree softer, that fractional tilt of world where you fit.

"Just…" he said, pausing, the word hanging between you. His hand lifted, then dropped, as if he'd thought about reaching for you and changed his mind at the last second. "Come back."

It wasn't an order. It wasn't even a request. It was more like a fact he was trying to negotiate with the universe directly. You felt something in your chest catch on it, like cloth snagged on a nail.

Before the feeling could settle, he added, "I am not writing a report on this mission if you die halfway through. That's paperwork I don't need."

"You too, Barnes," you replied, trying to keep it light.

He shook his head, lips twitching. Then, quietly, not quite over the noise but close enough that your brain filled in the missing pieces, he added, "Not planning on going anywhere."

The jet bucked slightly, turbulence or a shift in altitude. You remembered the lurch in your stomach, the way your fingers curled around the strap of your harness. You remembered thinking, let him be right. Let him be right this time.

The engines roared louder. The jet blurred. The straps bit a little deeper into your shoulder, then loosened like someone had cut them. The black interior faded to gray, then to white. The air thinned and sharpened. The metal floor under your boots dissolved into snow again.

You blinked back into your own body, the one lying on the slope, blood soaking into cold earth. The flash of his face in the quinjet flickered like a film frame over the blank sky. For a second you saw both at once: him across from you under humming lights, and the emptiness above you now where his silhouette should be.

The snow brushed your cheek. Your breath hitched, shallow, then steadied again in its fragile rhythm. Your mind, stubborn thing, refused to stay in the present for long. It reached for him again and found him somewhere else, somewhere softer.

The compound kitchen this time. Late enough that the overheads were dimmed. The fridge hummed louder than seemed reasonable. The world had shrunk down to the island countertop, the half-empty mug in front of you, and the way he leaned against the opposite edge like he owned the space without meaning to. 

He wore a t-shirt that had seen better days, a line of text you couldn't quite make out in the low light, and sweatpants that told you he'd likely been asleep before a nightmare yanked him out of it. His hair was a riot, sticking out in directions that made him look younger, almost, if you ignored the tired etched into the corners of his mouth.

You had been raiding the cabinets for something with sugar in it, bare feet cold on the tile. The mission was over, debriefs done. Your formal mask was off. You were holding a spoon in one hand and a jar of Nutella in the other like they were standard-issue equipment.

"You know they make actual food here," he'd said from the doorway, surprising you but not really. He had a way of appearing wherever you were like the universe had assigned him the job of shadowing you.

"This is actual food," you answered, dipping the spoon. "It's got nuts. And…ella."

"That's not how that works." He pushed off the doorframe and came closer, eyes narrowing at your haul. "You plan on sleeping ever again, or you just gonna ride that sugar high 'til you pass out?"

"Bold of you to assume I sleep now," you said. "Besides, you drink coffee like it's a religion. At least my terrible coping mechanism tastes like chocolate."

He made a face like he wanted to argue and couldn't quite find a foothold. After a second, he extended a hand, palm up, expectant.

"What?" you asked.

"Gimme the spoon," he said.

"Get your own."

"I'm not stickin' my fingers in there like an animal," he replied. "Now share before I tell Sam you got caught double-dipping in the communal snacks."

"Coward," you muttered, but you handed over the spoon anyway, heart doing that stupid flip it did when he took something from you like it was the most natural action in the world. His fingers brushed yours in the exchange, warm and callused. He didn't seem to notice. You absolutely did.

He took a scoop and made a face like he wanted it to be terrible and it foolishly, traitorously, wasn't. The spoon clicked against his teeth. He handed it back with a little nod.

"Okay," he admitted. "Could be worse."

"High praise," you said. "I'll take that glowing review to my grave."

The word lodged in the air between you in this kitchen the way it was lodging in your throat in the snow now. Grave. You had meant it as nothing, throwaway hyperbole. A joke. As you always did. You hadn't known how literal it would feel later when cold seeped into your bones.

He set the jar down on the counter, closer to you than to himself. His metal hand rested on the edge, the fingers leaving tiny crescents in the laminate where the pressure concentrated. You watched his knuckles turn faintly white in the flesh hand.

"Don't talk like that," he said, quietly enough that the fridge almost drowned it out.

"Like what?" You took another scoop, feigning ignorance.

"Like your grave's a funny punchline all the time," he said. His eyes were on the spoon, not on your face. "Like you're not…" He exhaled, searching for the word. "Like you're not important."

Something inside you stilled. You leaned your hip against the counter, letting the spoon hover halfway to your mouth.

"Bucky," you said, because his name felt like a hand wrapped around your wrist, steadying. "I'm not—"

"I know what it looks like out there," he cut in, finally meeting your gaze. "I know how quick it can go bad. I know you think if you joke about it all the time, it won't get to you. But it gets to me."

The honesty in it landed like a blow. You swallowed, the taste of chocolate turning faintly metallic at the edges. The kitchen seemed too small to hold all the implications of that sentence.

"It gets to you," you repeated, because you needed to be sure you heard him right.

He nodded, once. Barely. "Yeah."

"Because…?" you prompted, the word gentle as you could make it.

He made a small, frustrated noise, like the problem wasn't what he felt but the fact of being asked to name it. His fingers tapped once on the counter, a little staccato rhythm. Finally, he shook his head and settled on the simplest version, the one that carried the least risk but still told the truth.

"Because I don't want anything else on my conscience," he said quickly. "And that includes you."

It wasn't the whole truth. You heard the missing pieces in the space between syllables. But it was enough to send a flush creeping up your neck, enough to make your chest feel like it had grown too small for your ribs.

"Well," you said softly, the jokes falling away one by one until only sincerity remained, raw and exposed, "for what it's worth, I don't particularly wanna end up dead either. So." You lifted the spoon in a mock toast. "I'll do my best not to traumatize you and ruin dessert for everyone."

He snorted again, but his eyes softened. You watched the tension in his jaw loosen by fractions. He reached over and, without comment, took the spoon back from you, scooping one last bit before setting it deliberately in the sink.

"Alright, that's enough," he said. "You'll be bouncing off the walls."

"Jealous?" you asked. "You could join me in the sugar high, stay up all night. We could make a whole thing of it."

He shook his head at you, fond and exasperated. "Go to bed," he said. "We move early."

"You bossing me around again?"

"Somebody has to," he replied, already turning toward the door. Then he paused, glanced back over his shoulder. "And hey," he added, tone lighter, almost tentative. "Try to get some actual sleep, okay? Just because you're up doesn't mean you gotta…think the whole time."

You stared at him, caught off guard by the care in the suggestion. "You too," you said, because it felt like something you owed him. "No brooding in the dark. Doctor's orders."

"You're not a doctor," he said, but the corner of his mouth twitched.

"Field medic," you shot back. "Close enough."

"Goodnight," he said, and it sounded heavier than the word should, like it was doing more work than just ending the conversation.

He left the kitchen smelling like sugar and something fragile. The overhead light buzzed once and then steadied. You had stood there a moment longer, hand wrapped around the jar like an anchor, feeling the shape of his concern settle over your shoulders like a jacket you weren't sure you had earned.

Now, in the snow, with your blood seeping out into the earth and your body growing too heavy to own, that jacket felt like the only thing keeping your mind from sliding off the edge. Every memory of him layered over the last—gym, safe house, quinjet, kitchen—until they formed a continuous film, running frame by frame behind your eyes. 

You felt the shove of his hand between your shoulder blades when he pushed you behind cover. You heard the crack in his voice the one time he said your name like a plea instead of a warning. You saw the way his face had changed the first time you came back from a mission you were supposed to be too far away from, how shock melted into relief so intense it nearly knocked him to his knees. 

All of it lived inside you now, playing on a loop as the present thinned around the edges.

You didn't want to die.

The snow kept falling. The sky kept being indifferent. But in your head, you were still in all those rooms with him, still laughing, still arguing, still pressing fingers to scars and pretending you weren't memorizing their map. You were still hearing his voice cut through static, through nightmare, through the heavy, dragging exhaustion of a life you hadn't expected to survive this long.

You realized, with a strange, quiet clarity, that if this was the last thing your brain chose to circle around—the shape of him in doorways, the weight of his gaze, the way his hand felt when he chose to touch you and when he chose not to—it wasn't the worst road to go out on.

You took another breath, thin and rattling and precious. The white above you blurred, then sharpened, then blurred again. Suddenly it was dark. You must've closed your eyes. Somewhere in the overlapping layers of your life, he was still sitting on the edge of your bed, still arguing with you in the quinjet, still stealing your spoon or mug in the kitchen. Somewhere he was still saying your name like a promise, even if he never meant you to hear what sat under it.

The corridor of memories snapped like someone cutting film.

All of it tore away in one sharp, white-hot jerk, and you were back in your body like slamming into a wall. Cold vaulted up your spine. The snow on your face was real again, not dust or rain or flickering fluorescence. Your lungs forgot how to work for a second, then clawed for air that burned going in.

Sound arrived in pieces.

First, the muffled crush of boots in snow somewhere above you. Then the ragged, too-fast drag of someone breathing hard, closer than your own, overlapping it. A voice, too low and blurred to make out at first, like the comm when it had started dying—static wrapped around syllables, desperation chopped into fragments.

Then, all at once, the volume snapped up. The world caught.

“—no, no, no—”

The words landed right above you, sharp and terrified and half-swallowed, and if you hadn’t known better you would have thought they belonged to someone else.

The weight in your side changed. Something pressed harder against the wound, firm enough to drag a rough sound out of your throat. It hurt in a way that felt almost bright, almost clarifying. Your eyes flew open on reflex.

Sky. Still white, still falling. But there was a shape cutting into it now, leaning over you, blocking some of the snowfall. A shadow with a familiar outline. Broad shoulders in dark gear, hair half-plastered to a sharp, pale face framed in the blurred halo of his breath.

Bucky.

You stared up at him through lashes crusted in frost and whatever your brain had left of coherence tried to reorder itself around the reality of him actually being here. He wasn’t a memory version this time. He wasn’t lit by kitchen fluorescents or quinjet LEDs. He was right there, real, close enough that flakes were catching in his hair and melting on his skin.

His eyes found yours like they’d been looking for that exact thing and nothing else.

“Hey,” he said, too loud, too rough, like the word scraped its way out of his chest. “Hey. Look at me. Stay with me, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart. The nickname cracked something in you that pain hadn’t touched. He didn’t toss that one around easy. It slipped in the spaces when he was tired, when his guard thinned. Hearing it here, now, felt like your name and something more, stuffed into one, pressed into your ribs.

You tried to say his name and your tongue—or maybe your whole mouth, your whole fucking face—didn’t get the message. It came out in a broken exhale, more air than sound. You weren’t even sure it made it past your teeth.

His gaze dropped to your mouth for half a heartbeat like he was checking, like he was reading the shape of what you’d tried to say.

“Yeah,” he breathed, quieter, like you’d managed it anyway. “It’s me. I’m here. I got you.”

His hands moved at your side, all business, the familiar, efficient brutality of field triage. The pressure on your wound redoubled, making the edges of your vision bloom black and crowd in. You felt the firm, unyielding plates of the metal hand digging in over your own useless fingers, the warm clamp of his flesh one above it, like he was trying to compress not just skin and muscle and ruptured vessels but the entire situation down into something he could actually handle.

You made a sound. You didn’t mean to. It wasn’t a word, just a hoarse, wet choke that twisted up and out of your throat. The cold had lined you on the inside; every breath felt like you were inhaling razor wire.

“I know,” he said immediately, the words snapping down over your noise like a shield. “I know, I know. Hurts like hell. That’s good. Means you’re still with me.”

You focused on his mouth because his eyes were too much—too full, too bright, too terrified. You could see the line of concentration there, the way his lips flattened when he was doing a dozen calculations at once. Distance to extraction. Time to bleed out. Temperature. Your weight. His own stamina. Probability curves. You knew that brain. You’d watched it grind through worse.

He shifted his weight and your world rocked with him. The snow beneath you squelched, a wet sound that had nothing to do with melt. He peeled your hand away from your side—somehow, at some point, your fingers had gone numb enough that they didn’t even try to resist—and replaced it with a balled-up compress from the kit. Pressure. Constant. Unrelenting.

“Lost you on comms,” he said, hands working while his mouth did. “Went dead right as you hit the bend. Static, then nothing. You know what that does to a man with my track record?” His voice cracked once, just a fracture in the middle of a sentence that he pretended wasn’t there. “Drove me fuckin’ crazy trying to pick a signal outta snow and concrete.”

His movements were fast but controlled. Tourniquet pulled tight above the wound. Seal slapped over an entry you couldn’t see. Somewhere, he’d ripped your jacket open; you didn’t remember when. The cold had burrowed into every exposed inch of you, but where his hands were, it was just heat, just pressure, just the fierce, stubborn insistence of him refusing to let anything leak out that he hadn’t given permission to.

“Thought—” He cut himself off, jaw locking. You saw the muscle jump there, the tendons stand out. He swallowed hard and tried again. “Fuck. You weren’t where you were supposed to be. Trail was half-covered. You bled all over my damn map, sweetheart.”

There it was again. A soft name in a place it didn’t belong, said like he didn’t have time to filter anything. You latched onto it the way your body tried to latch onto oxygen.

You could hear other noises now, too. Distant, on the periphery. Voices over his shoulder—Sam, maybe, or whoever else had made it to the treeline with him. Footsteps crunching, the whine of a quinjet engine ramping up in the far-blue distance. Someone on comms yelling coordinates. But all of it sounded like it was happening underwater. He was the only thing in crisp focus.

Your lips moved again. It felt like dragging them through wet cement. You were trying for something simple. Two words. You came. It was a stupid thing to say, redundant and childish, but it was the only thought that had enough weight to make it to your mouth. You had pictured him not making it over and over in the snow. The fact of him kneeling here, cursing under his breath and leaving dents in the earth with his knees, felt like it needed acknowledging.

It came out a fragile stutter of consonants and air. “Y—you… c—”

His head dipped, forehead nearly touching yours as he leaned in, like he could catch the sound before it froze.

“What?” he said, and the word was gentler than anything had any right to be out here. “Say it again. I got you. I’m right here, I can hear you.”

You tried. You dragged breath in past the thick, heavy thing sitting on your chest and shaped it as best you could. “You… came.”

It barely existed. Not even a whisper, more like the ghost of one.

But he heard it.

Of course he did. This was the man who could pick out the click of a safety in a firefight. Who heard the difference between your footsteps and anyone else’s in the hallway. His eyes flared, a flash of something raw that made your pulse jump weakly in your throat.

“Yeah,” he said, voice going rough again in a whole new way. “Yeah, of course I came.” He let out a shaky, humorless huff. “Took you long enough to notice, layin’ here making snow angels in your own damn blood.”

You blinked up at him, slow and stupid, and for half a second his mouth actually curved. The expression was a mess: relief trying to be a joke, fear trying not to be a sob, anger at himself coated in that familiar exasperation he used to keep from unraveling.

“Had to make, you know,” you rasped, every syllable sandpaper. “Dramatic… entrance.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Almost made a dramatic exit, too. Overachiever.”

He slid his hand under your head, lifting it just enough to wedge something rolled—his jacket? your pack?—beneath it to keep you from sinking deeper into the cold. His fingers were warm against the back of your neck. Calluses pressed into skin. You felt the precise care in the way he moved you, every angle measured so he didn’t jostle the hole in your side any more than he had to.

“Stay with me, okay?” he said, and the steadiness in his tone did not match the frantic glitter in his eyes. “I know you’re tired. I know. But you don’t get to tap out on me now. We’re not done arguing about proper nutrition or whatever dumb thing you’re gonna pick next.”

You wanted to tell him you’d absolutely fight him about nutrition, about sleep, about whose turn it was to wash the damn mugs in the kitchen. You wanted to point out that if he’d wanted you to rest, maybe he shouldn’t have made breathing around his presence so difficult. Instead, all that came out was a small, wrecked noise that could have been a laugh in a better world.

“S’rry,” you breathed, though you weren’t sure what for. For bleeding on the snow. For dropping comms. For scaring him. For not being stronger. For all of it and none of it.

His face hardened, not at you but at the word.

“No,” he said, sharp and immediate. “No ‘sorry.’ You hear me?” He shook his head once, snow scattering from his hair onto your cheeks. “You got nothing to apologize for. I should’ve been closer. I should’ve—”

He cut off again, like he’d hit a wall inside his own head.

Should’ve. You knew the rest of that sentence without hearing it. Should’ve checked the bend myself. Should’ve stood in front of you instead of trusting the angle. Should’ve known the comms were about to die because everything that could go wrong tended to when he had something to lose.

You wanted to tell him to shut up. That it wasn’t his fault. That you never listened to perfect plans anyway. That if he’d been any closer, maybe the bullet would’ve gone into him instead, and that was a timeline you refused with a kind of exhausted certainty that surprised you.

Your lips tried to shape his name again, but your throat rebelled. Your lungs were working so hard on the simple inhale-exhale loop that adding consonants seemed rude.

He saw the effort and leaned in like he could carry some of it for you.

“I know,” he said, soft. “I know what you’re tryna say. Save your breath for yelling at me later, okay?”

The metal hand kept pressure on the wound with relentless, uncomplaining force. The other was everywhere at once—checking your pulse at your throat, brushing wet hair away from your face, adjusting the angle of the bandage, reaching back to gesture furiously at whoever was behind him.

“Med evac, now!” he snapped, hand coming quickly to his comms, without looking away from you. “I don’t care if you gotta land that bird on one engine, Wilson, you get it down here.”

“We're landing, as fast as we can” Sam’s voice crackled through faintly, far and tinny to your ears but apparently in his. “You just keep them breathing.”

“Working on it,” Bucky muttered, more to himself than the comm, his hand moving back to you.

You felt his thumb drag once along your jaw, an absent, grounding touch like he wasn’t even aware he was doing it. There was a smear of red across his knuckles now, not all of it yours; he moved like he’d already gone through dozens of other people to get to you.

“Eyes on me,” he said. “Don’t look at the sky. Don’t look at the snow. That’s my job. Yours is just…” He hesitated, searching. “…just stay here.”

“I… am… here,” you mumbled, every word a separate, clumsy attempt. The syllables frayed at the edges, but you got them out.

“That’s right,” he said quickly, like he was rewarding a kid for doing something hard. “That’s it. That’s my girl.”

The phrase detonated quietly between you. He seemed to hear it a second after he said it, because his mouth pressed into a thin line—and for half a breath his eyes flicked away, like he needed to look at anything else.

My girl. You would have replayed it a thousand times in your head if you’d had the spare oxygen. As it was, all you could do was let the resonance of it hum through the spaces pain hadn’t filled yet.

You swallowed, the action slow and foreign. It felt like the first time you’d tried to use your voice after a bad smoke inhalation mission—everything scraped, everything resisted. “Thought…” you managed, vowels dragging. “You… didn’t… like… paperwork.”

He blinked, thrown. “What?”

“Reports,” you slurred, vaguely proud of yourself for getting the word mostly intact. “If I… didn’t… come back… you’d… have… to…”

“You are not, not dying because I hate forms,” he said, incredulous, and for the first time since he’d appeared, something like real, rough amusement flickered through his panic. “Jesus. Only you would try to guilt-trip me from a bullet hole.”

“Tactic,” you whispered. Your chest hurt from this much talking, but you couldn’t make yourself stop. It felt important to crowd the air with anything but silence. “Weapon… of choice.”

“Yeah, well, it’s working,” he said. His hand slid from your throat to your cheek, thumb pressing lightly at your cheekbone as if to keep your eyes open by sheer force. “Don’t you dare check out on me, you hear? I’m not done givin’ you shit for this. You went off alone, comms dead, no backup on the blind side—”

“Backup…” you wheezed before thinking. “S’pposed… to be… you.”

He flinched like you’d hit him. Just a tiny jerk, barely there, the kind someone who didn’t know him would’ve missed. You felt it in the way his fingers tensed.

“It was,” he said, voice dropping low and rough, like gravel under tires. “It is. I’m here now. I’m sorry.”

You might have reminded him of his own rule about apologies. You might have told him you didn’t blame him. Instead, your body chose that moment to curl in on itself, a cough tearing up from somewhere deep. It felt like your lungs turned inside out. Pain stabbed through your side like a hot, clean blade, and for a second everything white-ed out, the world narrowing to a rushing in your ears.

You would have rolled if you could move. He stopped you before the impulse even finished firing.

“Whoa, hey, easy—easy,” he said, bracing you with one hand splayed against your sternum, the metal still clamped at your side. “You gotta breathe gentle, sweetheart. Little sips. In and out. Don’t fight it. Atta girl.”

His voice did something to the panic clawing at your chest. It cut through the animal urge to thrash, to escape the burn, and threaded command through the chaos instead. You clung to it. In. Out. The breaths were shallow, ragged, but they happened. Your vision stuttered, then steadied enough to find his face again.

“There you go,” he murmured, relief bleeding into the words. “There you are.”

You saw it then, in the tiny lines around his eyes, in the way his mouth kept trying to settle and couldn’t: he was terrified. Not the kind of fear that froze. The kind that sharpened everything until it cut him from the inside.

“Couldn’t—” You swallowed, tasted blood. Your eyes pricked. “Couldn’t… hear you.”

“At the bend?” he asked, knowing exactly what you meant. “Yeah. I know. Comms fried. Whole channel went dead. I was callin’ you for twelve full minutes, felt like two goddamn years.” His jaw clenched. “By the time I got eyes on this slope—”

He glanced down at the trail you’d left, the carved red path in the snow. You watched his throat work like he had to physically swallow something.

“—I thought I was too late,” he finished, quietly. “Thought I was gonna be diggin’ you out, not patching you up.”

“Almost,” you croaked, because honesty had never really left you a choice. “I… thought… you weren’t…”

“I know what you thought,” he said, and there was a rawness in his tone you’d only heard a handful of times. The night he’d told you about the first time he woke up in HYDRA hands. The time he’d confessed, in a roundabout way, how many names he woke up with on his tongue.

He leaned in closer, until his nose almost brushed your temple. You could feel the heat of his breath on your ear, the trembling in it he was trying so hard to hide.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, quieter. “For that. For that feeling. For every second you lay here thinking you were alone. You weren’t. I swear to you, you weren’t. I was coming. I was… I’m here now.”

Your vision blurred—not from blood loss this time, but from something hot that had no business existing in this cold. You blinked hard, lashes sticking.

“Didn’t… want…” You had to stop, breathe, gather what little strength you had left. “Didn’t want… you… to see.... if I...”

His head drew back a fraction so he could see your face. His brows pulled together.

“See what?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“Like this,” you whispered. It sounded pathetic out loud, but there it was. “You’ve… seen enough.”

The words hung between you, heavy with all the images you knew lived behind his eyes. War. Blood. The bodies he’d made and the ones he’d failed to save. You weren’t arrogant enough to think you’d be some special exception to that catalog. Still, the idea of your shape joining that crowd in his head made something in you rebel.

His expression shifted, something fierce and almost offended tearing through the shock.

“Hey,” he said sharply, fingers tightening just enough on your jaw that you had to look at him. “You don’t get to decide what I can handle. You hear me? You don’t get to take choices away from me ‘cause you’re trying to protect me.”

You would’ve laughed if you had the breath for it. “Hypocrite,” you rasped.

He barked out a strangled sound that might have been a laugh, might have been a choked sob. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Yeah, I know. But I mean it. You think I want my last image of you to be a fuckin’ radio going quiet? An empty patch of snow? No chance.”

His thumb stroked once along the hinge of your jaw, almost reverent. He looked at you like he was trying to memorize every line, every fleck of color in your eyes, every shape your mouth made—even while those eyes fluttered and that mouth barely moved.

“If this is what I get,” he said, voice low and rough, “if this is the moment I gotta hold on to if everything goes sideways, then I’m gonna be here for all of it. You don’t get to protect me from that. That’s not how this works.”

The if in that sentence sat in your chest like a stone. He’d said if, not when. He believed in some version where you walked away from this. You wanted that too. You wanted it so badly it felt like a second wound under the first.

“Bucky,” you whispered, and this time your mouth cooperated, got all the letters out.

His eyes shut for a second, just one. When they opened, they were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the snow.

“There you go,” he said, like you’d done something heroic by managing two syllables. “That’s me. I’m here. Look—” He shifted his grip, lifting your hand with his, guiding your fingers clumsily to press over the back of his metal knuckles where they pressed into your side. “You feel that? That’s me. Not going anywhere.”

The metal was warm, almost hot, from the constant work. Under your numb fingertips, the faint whir of servos thrummed, steady as a heartbeat. You latched onto it, on the pressure of his hand and the solidity of his arm, as if the contact alone could tether you.

“You’re… gonna be okay,” he said, like he could bully the universe into compliance. “We’re gonna get you on the jet, we’re gonna get you to a med bay with actual walls and not these goddamn trees, and then I’m gonna sit in the corner and glower at every doctor that comes near you until they’re too scared to discharge you before I say so.”

“Gonna… scare… them,” you breathed, a ghost of a smile twitching at your mouth.

“Good,” he said promptly. “They should be scared. You’re my favorite pain in the ass. I’m not lettin’ anyone half-ass your care.”

Favorite. The word slid in under your ribs. It fit with my girl in a way that made your chest throb for reasons that had nothing to do with trauma.

Somewhere behind him, closer now, you heard the heavy thump of the quinjet’s ramp hitting snow. Voices rose, clearer. Sam calling his position. Someone else—maybe a med tech—barking orders. The world expanded slightly, the edges of your focus dragging outward to include more than just Bucky’s face.

He didn’t look away.

“Okay,” he said, more to himself than you. “Okay, they’re here. We’re gonna move you now. It’s gonna suck. You’re allowed to hate me for it. You can yell at me later. Right now, you go limp, you hear? Don’t fight it. Let us do the work.”

“Bossy,” you muttered, the word slurring.

“Yeah,” he said. “Somebody’s gotta be. You’re terrible at following suggestions.”

Hands slid under you—Bucky’s, solid and sure, and another pair you couldn’t place. Maybe Sam’s. Maybe the medic’s. The moment your body lifted off the ground, pain screamed through you in an electric wave so intense your vision went fully white. You didn’t even realize you’d cried out until you felt your throat rasping.

“I know, I know,” Bucky’s voice cut through, right at your ear. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Breathe. I’ve got you.”

Your head lolled against something firm and warm. You realized it was his chest when the rhythm of his heartbeat crashed into your ear—fast but steady, a pounding drum against your skull. The world tilted as they carried you, the snow-sky trade flipping: white above, then sideways, then replaced by the dark maw of the quinjet’s cargo bay.

“Watch the IV line—no, we don’t have one yet, goddammit—just get them in and shut the door!” someone yelled.

The ramp clanged under booted feet. The air changed, the outside cold trading places with the metallic warmth inside. The thrum of the engines deepened, vibrating through the floor, up through Bucky’s legs, into your bones.

He didn’t put you down right away. Even when they reached the stretcher, he lowered you onto it like he was afraid you’d shatter. His hands never fully left you—palm on your shoulder while the medic worked, fingers brushing your wrist when they inserted a line, the metal still hovering near your side as if he’d punch anyone who got the tourniquet wrong.

“BP’s in the toilet,” a voice said somewhere to your left. “They need volume now. Who did this dressing?”

“I did,” Bucky snapped.

“It’s solid,” the medic said immediately, no challenge in it. “Good work. Let’s build on it. Hey—” A face swam into your peripheral. “Stay with me, alright? Can you squeeze my hand?”

You tried. Your fingers twitched weakly. The medic smiled like you’d just done a backflip.

“There we go. Keep that up. What’s their name?” they asked, presumably to Bucky.

He answered without hesitation, your name landing heavy in the air. Hearing it like that, in his voice, made you ache. Made you want to live out of sheer spite, just to hear it like that again without blood in your throat.

“Okay, Y/N,” the medic said. “I’m putting something in your line that’s gonna feel really warm. That’s normal. Gonna help your blood remember what it’s supposed to be doing. You’re doing great.”

Warmth spread up your arm, alien and strange, different from the dull, dead cold of the snow. This was sharper, focused, purposeful. It raced to your chest and blooming there, chasing some of the heavy fog back from the edges.

Bucky hovered at your head, his body between you and the rest of the world. He was a wall you’d never been more grateful for. He kept one hand braced on the stretcher as the jet shifted, like he didn’t trust the laws of physics to handle it alone.

“You still with me?” he asked, leaning into your line of sight again. His face was closer now than it had been on the ground, every freckle, every scar, every crease up for inspection. “C’mon. Gimme somethin’. Blink if you’re planning on ignoring my orders for another few years.”

You blinked. It took effort. Felt like pushing against a heavy door. But you did it. Once. Twice.

His mouth kicked up in a breathless, disbelieving grin that looked like it hurt him to make.

“That’s my girl,” he said again, softer. “God, you’re stubborn.”

“You… like…” you tried, the words slurring beyond recognition even to your own ears.

“Yeah,” he said, not even bothering to pretend he didn’t understand. His eyes didn’t leave yours. “I do.”

You didn’t know which part of that he was answering. Your weird half-formed accusation. Your blink. Your existence. It didn’t matter. The warmth of it threaded with the medicine in your veins, tangling until you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

The medic rattled off numbers. Someone said something about ETA to the facility. The engines roared, then steadied as the jet leveled out. The pressure in your side settled into a brutal, throbbing ache rather than an active, tearing burn. Each breath hurt, but it was less like drowning now and more like treading water with bricks tied to your ankles.

“You’re doing good,” Bucky murmured. “Proud of you.”

You almost rolled your eyes at him. Proud of you, like you’d done anything but lie here and bleed. But you could hear what he meant under it: thank you for not dying. Thank you for still being here where I can see you. Thank you for not adding another ghost to the pile.

“Can’t… get rid… of me…” you forced out, the words thin but there.

The edges of the world dimmed again, but it was different this time. Less like slipping away into cold and more like someone gently turning the lights down. Your body had reached its limit. You could feel it in the way your limbs refused every command, in the heavy pull at the back of your eyes.

Sleep, your bones whispered. Just for a second. Just to stop holding everything together so hard.

You must have let some of that show, because Bucky leaned closer, his forehead almost touching yours.

“Hey,” he said, and his voice had gone soft and dangerous, the way it did when he meant every word. “Listen to me. You wanna close your eyes, you can. You earned that. But you remember—this isn’t you checking out. This is you letting us carry some of this for a while. You get to rest because we’re not lettin’ go. You understand?”

You stared at him, at the lines of his face, at the snow still melting in his hair, and thought, wildly, that if this was the last thing you saw, it wouldn’t be the worst. But something stubborn and mean in you, something that had survived things it shouldn’t have long before you’d ever met him, reared up at the idea.

“‘Kay,” you breathed, because it hurt to argue even in your own head. “But… you’ll… be… there.”

It wasn’t a question. It felt like one anyway, hanging between you.

His eyes went glassy at the edges. He nodded once, like swearing an oath.

“Yeah,” he said. “You wake up, I’ll be the one you’re pissed at for letting the nurses poke you. I promise.”

You held his gaze for one more beat. Two. You watched his mouth press into a line that was half determination, half fear. You felt his thumb stroke along your cheekbone again, slow and almost absent, like he couldn’t stop touching you now that he’d started.

Then, finally, you let your eyes slip closed.

You woke up to the sound of something insisting you were alive.

A steady, thin beeping cut through the dark first, clinical and patient. It met the dull throb in your chest and the heavy ache in your side and negotiated with them, beat for beat. Light came next, too bright even behind your eyelids, pressing red against them like someone had laid the sun on your face. Your mouth tasted like cotton and metal and the ghost of plastic. Your throat ached deep, as if something had been there that didn’t belong and had been yanked out in a hurry.

For a second, you didn’t move. Couldn’t, really. Your limbs felt wrong—too heavy, too far away—as if someone had put your bones in the wrong gravity. Even trying to tell your fingers to twitch was like shouting down a long, empty hallway.

You cataloged what you could without opening your eyes. The air was warm and dry, smelling faintly of antiseptic, recycled ventilation, and the weird, overboiled tang of hospital food you hoped wasn’t for you. Sheets brushed your forearms, stiff and too clean. 

Something tugged at the inside of your elbow—IV line, taped down. A cuff squeezed your bicep in steady pulses. There was weight across your midsection, not crushing but firm: heavy bandage, maybe a brace. Something cold and foreign sat against your ribs on one side, the ache around it deep and pulsing. Chest tube, your training supplied, clinical and calm. Good. Bad. Both.

You were in a med bay. Facility, probably—one of the ones with real walls and humming machines and doctors who glared at Avengers like they were walking malpractice suits.

You were not in the snow. You were not staring up at a white sky and waiting to find out if the last thing you saw would be nothing.

The beeping ticked on, counting heartbeats you had been very close to not having.

You pried your eyes open. Slowly. The world came in a messy blur—light overhead, pale ceiling. Peripheral shapes of monitors and hanging bags. The room swam once, then steadied. Your vision sharpened in increments until you could track lines and edges again.

To your right, in a hard plastic chair shoved as close to the bed as physically allowed, was Bucky.

He looked wrong in med bay lighting. Too human and too haunted at the same time. The overhead fluorescents bleached the color from him, highlighting every shadow under his eyes, every line carved into his forehead. 

His hair was a wreck, pushed back in a way that spoke of frustrated fingers and zero regard for mirrors. Stubble darkened his jaw. He was slouched forward, elbows on his knees, metal hand braced around his own wrist like he needed the grip to stay anchored.

His eyes were closed. For half a second, you thought he was asleep. The idea of Bucky Barnes letting his guard down enough to actually sleep in a chair next to you made your chest lurch. Then you saw the way his thumb kept tracing the line of your wrist where your hand lay in his, skin to skin, as if he needed the movement. 

Not asleep.

Your throat tried to clear itself and immediately regretted it. The cough you meant to be quiet scraped up like broken glass. You choked on it. Every muscle between your neck and hip spasmed in miserable protest. Pain flared white-hot along your side, radiating out from the bandaged hole like someone had poured acid into your nerve endings. Your lungs seized, then dragged in air too fast, too shallow. The monitor at your head sped up, a frantic little staccato.

Bucky’s eyes snapped open instantly.

“Hey—hey, whoa,” he said, already on his feet, the chair skidding back with a harsh squeak. “Easy.”

He was at your side before you’d even finished the first broken inhale. His hand left your wrist only long enough to hit the bed control, raising the head a fraction so you weren’t flat. The movement made your side scream again. You winced, teeth grinding together, fingers clawing at the sheet.

“Buck,” you rasped. Or tried to. It came out like someone dragging a shovel over gravel.

His gaze dragged up to your face. When your eyes met, a whole storm passed through his expression in about half a second—shock, relief, anger, something so raw and bright it almost hurt more than your side.

“Yeah,” he said, voice gone rough, like he’d been yelling or not talking at all for too long. “Yeah, it’s me.”

He put his flesh hand around the back of your neck, not lifting you, just steadying, thumb careful against the tender tendons there. The contact grounded you in a way the machines couldn’t. Your pulse thudded under his fingers, frantic but real.

“Slow,” he added, softer, eyes never leaving yours. “Breathe slow. They gave you some fun stuff. Your lungs are gonna feel all kinds of weird about it.”

You tried to listen. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Each breath dragged over the sore spot in your chest where the tube sat, but it settled, inch by inch, into something more manageable. The monitor agreed, its panicked blip easing back into a steadier rhythm.

“Where…?” you managed, glancing around, though moving your head even that much made black spots flirt at the edges of your vision.

“Med facility,” he said. “Off-grid. Good docs. Good equipment. Terrible coffee.” He hesitated a beat. “You’re okay.”

The word hung there. Okay felt like a stretch. You felt like you’d been run over by a truck, stripped for parts, then stapled back together. Your side burned in a deep, wet way that said serious internal damage, not just a flesh wound. The bandage pulled uncomfortably with every breath. Your chest ached in time with the IV pump.

But you were not dead.

You blinked, trying to fit that fact into your skull. Your brain snagged on another question instead.

“How… bad?” you whispered.

His jaw flexed. You watched him decide between lying and not. The lines around his eyes tightened. He hesitated for a moment, dragging the chair back with his free hand and sitting back down.

“Bad,” he said finally, because he respected you too much to sugarcoat. “Bullets went in shallow, but it hit all the wrong shit—ricocheted, tore through part of your liver, nicked your lung. Lots of blood. You gave the surgeons a real workout.”

You swallowed. Your mouth felt like sand. “And I…?” You had meant to ask something flippant—did I win? do I at least get a lollipop?—because that was how you handled this stuff. The effort of forming the words stripped the humor out of them.

“You made it,” he said. No joke in his tone. Just flat, stubborn certainty. “They had to transfuse you, patch you up from the inside out, shove a tube in your chest to help you breathe. They were talking about percentages for a while. I didn’t like their math.”

You pictured him, pacing like a caged animal outside an OR door, counting every second with his teeth. It did something ugly to your heart.

“How long…?” you asked.

He glanced at the cheap wall clock in the corner like it had offended him personally. “You’ve been out, off and on, for…about four days. Longer if you count the part where you were half-conscious in the snow and arguing with me.”

The fact that he was measuring time in arguments almost made you smile. Almost. Everything in your face hurt when you tried.

“Sorry,” you said automatically, because the idea of him stuck in this room that long, with nothing to do but watch monitors and think, made guilt crawl under your skin.

His eyes snapped back to yours, sharp. “What did I say about that?”

You frowned, brain moving slow through the fog.

“No ‘sorry,’” he reminded you, voice softening but not backing off. “You did your job. Didn’t exactly throw yourself in front of a bullet for fun.” He paused. “At least I hope not, ‘cause that would really ruin the ‘you’re not expendable’ speech I’ve been rehearsing.”

You huffed a tiny sound that might’ve been a laugh if it hadn’t felt like your ribs were full of knives. “You… rehearsed… a speech?”

He shifted his weight, suddenly looking almost…sheepish. It didn’t sit naturally on him, like the chair under him. “Yeah, well. Had some time on my hands.”

You let that sink in: Bucky Barnes, former brainwashed assassin, current pain-in-your-ass, sitting in a too-small med bay chair for days, crafting a lecture about your value. Because of course he did.

“You… didn’t have to…” you started.

“Yeah,” he cut in, “I did.”

The firmness in his tone made your breath stutter. His hand at your neck tightened fractionally, thumb resting in the hollow under your skull.

“You remember,” he went on, staring at you like he could pin your attention in place, “all those times you joked about not making it? About your grave? About going out in some blaze of glory?”

Heat flushed under your skin, embarrassed and defensive all at once. “That’s…just how I cope, Buck.”

“I know,” he said. “Believe me, I know about coping mechanisms.” His mouth twisted. “But seeing you lying in the snow after following a trail of your blood, looking at you half-frozen and half-gone, hearing you wheeze about how I ‘came’ like you were surprised I showed up? That wasn’t coping. That was…”

He broke off, eyes closing for a second. When he opened them again, they were too bright.

“That was you actually thinking I might not get there,” he finished, quieter. “That I might not come. And that? That’s not a joke I can live with.”

You stared at him, throat thick. You remembered it all too vividly: the snow, the silence, the distance between where you were and where he might have been. The way your brain had quietly considered the possibility that he wouldn’t make it in time, and how you’d tried to make peace with that by replaying him in your head.

“I didn’t…” you started, then stopped. Honesty tasted like antiseptic and fear. “I didn’t want you to see me like that.”

He let out a humorless scoff. “Newsflash: I’ve seen worse.”

“That’s exactly the point,” you said, voice scraping but gaining a little strength. “You’ve seen too much. Done too much. I didn’t want to be another—” You gestured weakly, the IV tugging. “Another body on the ground somewhere in your head.”

His jaw clenched. You watched the tendons jump.

“You’re not,” he said, firmly. “You’re not a body on the ground. You’re—”

He cut himself off again, looking abruptly away, like the words had gotten too close to something he hadn’t decided whether to say. His metal hand flexed at his side, fingers curling and uncurling with a faint whir.

“You’re loud,” he muttered instead, after a second. “Annoying. Stubborn. You steal my coffee. You hide my knives as a ‘trust exercise.’ You call me on my bullshit. That’s what you are in my head. Not…this.”

“Loud,” you repeated, trying to keep your mouth from shaking. “I almost died and that’s the best you can do?”

He shot you a look, exasperated and fond and utterly, painfully familiar. “Don’t start,” he said. “I’ve been nice to you for like seventy-two hours straight. I’m exhausted.”

You would’ve rolled your eyes if they weren’t already fighting to stay open. “This is you…being nice?”

“This is me not putting you in a medically induced coma myself so I can yell at you without anyone interrupting,” he said dryly. Then the humor drained, leaving something softer behind. “This is me telling you I’m glad you’re still here to piss me off.”

Silence settled between you for a moment, thick and humming. The monitors filled it with a steady, background reassurance: you’re here, you’re here, you’re here.

“You stayed,” you said, because it felt necessary to name it. “The whole time.”

He shrugged, as if he were answering a question about the weather. “Yeah.”

“You could have…slept. Showered.” You sniffed faintly. “You smell like jet fuel and bad coffee.”

“Romantic,” he murmured. “Look, they came in and poked you, and cut on you, and yelled about blood loss. You coded once.”

You blinked. “I…what?”

“For about eight seconds,” he said, voice going flat in that way it did when he forced his emotions into a box. “Heart stopped. They shocked you. You came back.” He inhaled slowly. “I did not feel like going to take a nap after that.”

Eight seconds. A tiny rip in time. Long enough for him to stand in a doorway and watch your monitor flatline. Long enough for every bad thing that had ever happened to him to line up behind that moment and wait its turn.

You swallowed hard. “Bucky…”

He shook his head once, like he could physically dislodge whatever memory you were about to apologize for.

“Doc says you’re past the worst of it,” he said. “Liver’s patched. Lung’s reinflated. They’ll pull the tube in a day or two if your numbers behave. You’re gonna hurt like hell for a while. You’re gonna hate physical therapy. You’re probably gonna try to skip half your meds and pretend you’re fine.”

“That sounds…accurate,” you admitted.

“And I,” he continued, “am going to be here, making your life miserable, making sure you do none of that.”

“You gonna…hover?” you asked, the word weaker and more hopeful than you meant it to be.

He huffed, eyes flicking heavenward like he was asking for patience. “I’m gonna make sure you don’t pull your stitches trying to prove something,” he said. “If that qualifies as hovering, then yeah.”

You let your gaze roam over him properly now, taking in the details you’d missed in the initial foggy panic of waking. The dark crescents under his eyes. The dried smear of something on his sleeve that looked like blood but might not be yours. His shoulders were hunched in that way that told you he’d been braced for bad news, arms crossed so tight over his chest earlier he might have left bruises on his own ribs.

He looked like something a storm had chewed up and spit out. And still, he was here.

“You look like shit,” you said, because that’s what you did when things edged too close to unbearable.

His mouth actually curled. “You always this charming after almost dying?”

“You always this…clingy after saving someone?”

“Only the ones who make fun of their own funerals,” he said. “Gotta keep an eye on you. Can’t trust you not to try and skip out on your own wake.”

A memory flickered: the kitchen, the jar of Nutella, the way his face had gone hard when you joked about taking what he said to the grave.

“Guess I’m not as funny as I thought,” you murmured.

He exhales through his nose, slow. “You’re funny,” he said. “You kill me sometimes. But maybe ease up on the death jokes for a bit, yeah? They hit different when I’ve watched you bleed out.”

You swallowed around the sudden lump in your throat. “Too soon?”

His gaze softened, the edges of his eyes crinkling in a way that always made you feel like the air had thickened. “Way too soon,” he said. “Gimme, like, ten years. Then you can start with the graveyard material again.”

You tried to laugh, then winced as the movement tugged your side. He caught the wince like it was his own.

“Okay,” you said, breathless. “No more…grave jokes. At least for a while.” You paused. “Maybe… just favorite patient jokes?”

He blinked, something flickering in his expression that wasn’t just relief. “You’re not my patient,” he said, almost automatically.

You raised a brow, or tried to. “I'm not?”

He looked at you for a long moment. Then his shoulders dropped a fraction, as if some invisible weight had shifted. His metal fingers flexed against the bed rail, a tell you’d learned to read like a paragraph.

“You’re more than that,” he said quietly.

The words slipped out too honest, too bare. He didn’t look away this time. He let them sit there between you, like a live wire.

Your pulse monitor ticked up a notch. You felt it. You were sure he heard it.

“Bucky…” you started again, for what felt like the hundredth time, and this time you didn’t know what you were apologizing for or trying to say. You only knew that the room felt too small for everything pressed into your ribs.

He beat you to it.

“Thought I was gonna lose you,” he said, the words coming out low and fast, like if he didn’t get them out now, he never would. “Out there. On that hill. In here. Eight seconds on a flatline feels a lot like every other time I watched somebody die. And I—I can’t—”

His voice cracked, just once, violently. He sucked in a breath like it hurt.

“I can’t go through that with you and pretend you’re just another teammate,” he finished hoarsely.

Your heart did something painful and grateful at the same time. “Good,” you whispered. “Hate to be…generic.”

He let out a strangled laugh that sounded a little like he might cry. “You’re the least generic person I’ve ever met,” he said. “You drive me up the wall. You scare the hell out of me. You make me…want things. For myself. That I thought I was done wanting.”

You stared at him, words gone.

“When I couldn’t reach you on comms,” he went on quietly, eyes fixed on the line of your shoulder now, like looking directly at your face might be too much, “all I could think about was every stupid joke you’ve ever made about not making it. About going out. About it not being a big deal. And I was—I was furious. At you. At me. At every bastard who ever made you think that maybe you were…not worth staying for.”

Your throat tightened. “Bucky—”

He looked up then, finally, and the intensity in his gaze pinned you to the bed more effectively than any strap.

“I would miss you,” he said. No hesitation. No deflection. “I do. When you’re gone for an hour on a run, I feel it. When you’re not in the kitchen at 2 a.m. raiding the cabinet, I notice. When you’re not bitching about my music or falling asleep on the couch with a book on your face, the whole place feels…wrong.”

The monitor tattled on you, speeding up again. He didn’t flinch.

“You’re in my day even when you’re not there,” he said. “So don’t you ever think for one second that I wouldn’t move heaven, hell, and every goddamn city left on this earth to get to you.”

You blinked hard, the world blurring in that way that had nothing to do with drugs.

“I only joked like that,” you managed, voice small, “because…if I said it serious, it would sound pathetic. Needy. Like I wanted…more than I should.”

His expression shifted—something pained and tender all at once.

“You’re allowed to want more,” he said. “Especially from me.”

That last part hung there, thick as smoke.

“You…want more?” you asked, because apparently you’d almost died and your brain had decided to stop filtering anything.

He let out a breath that sounded like surrender. “Maybe,” he said. “Yeah.”

He raked his flesh hand through his hair, like he was bracing for impact.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he said. “Didn’t go out and decide, ‘hey, let’s catch feelings for the one person on this team who actually has standards.’ It just…kept happening. Every time you rolled your eyes at me. Every time you patched me up without making it a big deal. Every time you made some awful joke about us going out in a blaze of glory but still checked my six before your own.”

He shook his head slightly.

“I kept telling myself it was just…combat attachment,” he said. “Buddy cop bullshit. Shared trauma. Whatever label made it easier. But the second you went quiet out there, it wasn’t tactical. It wasn’t about losing an asset. It was—”

He swallowed. The word stuck. He pushed it out anyway.

“It was personal,” he finished.

You lay there, heart pounding unhelpfully fast, trying to process the fact that Bucky Barnes was confessing he cared about you more than made sense, in a tone that suggested he’d been fighting it every step of the way.

“Funny,” you whispered, “that you think I have standards.”

His mouth twitched. “You do,” he said. “They’re just weird.”

A breathless laugh escaped you. It hurt. You didn’t care.

“You know,” you said, “I kept…joking about dying because…honestly, I thought that’s how it’d be. Quick. Messy. No warning. That nobody would…care enough for it to really…matter after the fact.”

His fingers tightened on your neck again, gently but firm enough to yank you back from that cliff.

“Wrong,” he said, simply. “On all counts.”

You believed him. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was the fact that you’d seen the look on his face in the snow, the way his hands had moved over your wound with a desperation he hadn’t allowed into his voice. Maybe it was the way he was standing here now, like the only thing keeping him upright was the fact that you were.

“Bucky,” you said, letting his name hold everything you couldn’t fit into sentences yet. “I…didn’t plan on this either, you know.”

“On what?” he asked, voice cautious.

“You,” you said, because there was no point dancing around it anymore. “Getting under my skin. Making it…hard to breathe, and not just because I have bullet holes in my side.”

A soft, disbelieving breath of laughter escaped him.

“You’re really gonna make jokes in the middle of this?” he asked.

“That’s how you know it’s me,” you murmured.

He nodded, eyes damp at the corners. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that tracks.”

You wet your lips, gathering what scraps of courage you had left. “I didn’t want to…say anything,” you admitted, “because I figured…if you didn’t feel the same, I could just…keep joking about dying and never have to deal with it.”

He winced, like he’d been physically hit.

“That,” he said, “is the worst plan I’ve ever heard you have. And you’ve had some terrible ones.”

“Hey,” you croaked. “I survived. Mostly.”

“Yeah,” he said. “In spite of your best efforts.”

You let your head sink a little deeper into the pillow, exhaustion pulling at your edges. The IV pump clicked. The monitors hummed. Somewhere outside the door, a cart rattled by, tires squeaking. The world felt weirdly distant, like you were wrapped in glass. The only thing that felt real was the way his thumb kept moving in slow circles against your skin, like he needed that contact as much as you did.

“So what now?” you asked softly. “We…pretend this didn’t happen? Go back to making morbid jokes and hiding in safe house kitchens?”

He took a breath, slow and deliberate, like he was bracing to step onto a minefield.

“No,” he said.

The word settled in your chest like a warm weight.

“I can’t go back to pretending I don’t…” He trailed off, searching for the right phrasing, as if every word was a potential trap. “That I don’t care this much. That you’re just another mission file. That I’d be fine if you didn’t come back one day. I’ve done enough pretending in my life.”

“Me too,” you admitted.

His gaze softened, something like pride flickering in it.

“So we don’t pretend,” he said. “We…figure it out. Slowly. Carefully. When you’re not on enough meds to take down an elephant.”

You snorted, the sound dissolving into a wince. “Are you…asking me out…or scheduling a…feelings debrief?”

He shook his head, a wry smile tugging at his mouth. “Little of both, maybe,” he said. “I’m sayin’…when you’re cleared, when you’re not held together by staples and sheer spite, I’d like to take you somewhere that isn’t a safehouse or a warzone. Get coffee that isn’t from a shitty machine. Maybe sit in a park like normal people and argue about something stupid.”

“Sounds dangerous,” you whispered.

“Yeah,” he said, eyes crinkling. “Terrifying. I’ll bring backup.”

“Sam?” you asked.

“Hell no,” he said. “He’d never let me hear the end of it.”

You smiled, small and wobbly. “I’d like that,” you said, and the simplicity of the words nearly undid you.

His shoulders loosened, just a fraction. You saw the tension bleed out of him like air from a too-tight balloon.

“Okay,” he said, like the decision had been a battle and he was finally letting himself believe he’d won. “Okay.”

The room seemed to breathe with you then. Everything felt a little less sharp, a little less precarious. The pain was still there, deep and insistent, but it had context now. It had a shape that wasn’t just fear.

“You know,” you murmured, because your brain refused to stop offering up mortifying honesty, “if this had gone the other way…you would’ve been the last thing I thought about.”

His face went very still.

“I know,” he said quietly. “I could see it on the hill. You were looking right through me like you were seeing everything all at once. I figured at least some of that was my charming face.”

“Always,” you whispered. “Annoying to the end.”

He huffed, but there was no bite in it. Only relief.

“Do me a favor?” he asked.

“Depends,” you said.

“Next time you wanna test-drive dying,” he said, voice dipped in dry sarcasm to hide the shake under it, “don’t.”

You nodded, or tried to. “I’ll…put in a formal request,” you said. “File it with…whoever’s in charge of…mortality.”

“I got connections,” he said. “Guy with a hammer owes me a favor. I’ll see what I can do.”

You snorted again, exhausted and weirdly light.

“Can I…sleep again now?” you asked, suddenly bone-deep tired. The drugs and the adrenaline crash and the conversation had wrung you out. Your eyelids felt like they had weights sewn into them.

He studied you for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, you can sleep.”

“You’ll still…be here?”

He didn’t even pretend to consider the alternative. “Yeah,” he said. “Right here. When you wake up, when you start trying to sign yourself out against medical advice, when you worry about the scars—I’ll be here for all of it.”

“That’s…a lot of Bucky,” you mumbled, already drifting.

“Well, get used to it,” he said, like it was the easiest thing in the world.

You smiled, eyes finally sliding shut. The darkness that rose this time was softer, edged in steady beeping and the low hum of the med bay. Somewhere in the middle of it, his thumb kept tracing that slow, grounding circle at the base of your skull.

Right before you slipped under, you heard him say it, voice barely above a whisper, like he was talking to himself.

“I love you,” he murmured. “So don’t pull that shit again.”

If you’d been any more awake, you might have grabbed his wrist, forced him to repeat it, teased him until he turned red. As it was, the words sank into you like morphine, warm and heavy and strangely clean.

You drifted, pulled under before you could shape even a half-formed answer. Maybe that was for the best. It gave you something to wake up to. Something real, not imagined in the snow.

It used to mean something to him. Marriage. A porch swing. Warm soup. A house with windows that didn’t rattle in the wind. The kind of thing you promised a girl in church shoes, hands clasped over the Sunday paper. 

James Buchanan Barnes had once thought he’d get that life. That he’d earn it. If he fought hard enough, if he came home in one piece, if he smiled the right way when he walked her back to her door.

Then war had cracked the world open like a rotten egg, and everything inside had spilled black.

There were no porches where Hydra took him. No rings. Just cold steel and code phrases. Needles and electrodes. Years swallowed by fog. And when he remembered again, when he started to remember, he couldn’t even picture a wedding band without wondering how deep it would slice if it caught against bone.

So no, marriage hadn’t crossed his mind in years.

Not until you.

Not even with you, not in the usual sense. You hadn’t crawled into his life and started naming curtains or pointing out flower arrangements like a threat. You’d just…stayed. Through the Accords. Through the fallout. Through Wakanda and the long, sterile quiet of the recovery halls. You never flinched when he woke up screaming. You never tiptoed around the word past like it might set off a bomb.

You were there during the repairs. The recalibrations. You’d worked with Shuri on something far above his understanding, fingers stained with grease and ink, hair always pinned messily away from your eyes. You’d curse under your breath in three different languages. You argued with Ayo. You laughed loudly.

By the time he was sent back into the field—once he had left the mountains, left the quiet—he expected the connection to die out. Most things did. The world had taught him that. You could try to keep something alive outside the place it was born, but roots snapped when you pulled too hard.

And it had. He had left you. Not by choice, not really. One blink and he was gone. Another blink, and you’d aged five years without him.

But then he saw you again. In D.C. In New York. Even in Louisiana. Out of nowhere, standing in a pair of sunglasses too big for your face, grinning like it hadn’t been years for you.

“Miss me, Barnes?”

And damn him, he had.

You’d joined the mission against the Flag Smashers. Temporarily, at first. That’s what you both said. Just this op. Just this briefing. Just this one joint task force run with Sam. 

And then it wasn’t temporary anymore. And then there was a room in the same safe house that you’d claimed. A bunk on the same floor. Your stuff beside his. And his toothbrush in your travel kit, and he had no idea how or when that had happened.

There were no conversations. No declarations. Just a slow merging.

He liked your laugh. The dry, cut-glass one you used when Joaquin said something stupid. The low, real one that came out when you let your guard down, when the weight on your shoulders slipped just enough to let joy through.

You liked to touch him. Not in the way that made him flinch. In the way that made the back of his neck burn. A casual hand on his spine when passing behind him. Fingers brushing his sleeve. A nudge with your elbow when he got too serious. You were constant.

You grounded him.

And he didn’t know how to name that. He wasn’t good at words anymore. Hadn’t been in decades. But he knew how it felt when you were hurt. When you bled. When someone touched you too rough during an extraction and he saw red before he even registered why.

He had never said “I love you.” Not outright. Neither had you.

But there were nights you fell asleep on his chest, breathing slow against the metal plates, and he’d whisper it in your hair like a secret. Like a curse.

Because he did love you.

And it terrified him.

Not because he thought you’d leave, though that was always a part of it.

But because he didn’t believe in the future. Not really. Hydra had broken that part of him, rewired him to think in terms of seconds, triggers, threats. Even now, after all this time, after all this healing, the idea of forever felt…dangerous. Unrealistic. Like planning for spring in the middle of a war zone.

But the truth was: he wanted to grow old with you.

He didn’t say it. But he wanted it.

The thought came loudest during quiet missions. When your hand found his under the table. When you scolded Sam like a sitcom wife. When you kissed him before leaving in a rush and forgot your ID badge, and he chased after you just to hear you laugh when he caught up.

That was what marriage looked like to him now.

Not churches or tuxedos. Not parties or speeches. Just this. Just you.

It was raining now. Somewhere deep in the woods outside of Vienna, a safe house blinked on like a dying star. One generator. One flickering lamp. One bullet in your leg, and his hands slick with blood that wasn’t his.

You hissed as he dug the tweezers in.

“I told you,” he said, voice low, steady even as his gut churned, “you were too exposed on the ridge. You shouldn’t have gone up alone.”

You shot him a look. “Wasn’t alone. You were covering me.”

“I was supposed to be covering you,” he muttered, breath tight. “Didn’t exactly do a great job, did I?”

You didn’t answer.

He hated this part. The way the pain made your voice tighten, the way you bit your lip hard enough to bleed rather than make a sound. It reminded him too much of everything he couldn’t fix. Of every mission where he hadn’t been fast enough. Every loss that had turned to ash in his mouth.

You were trembling now, sweat slicking your brow. The bullet was lodged deep. He could feel it with the tip of the tweezers, but it wouldn’t come clean.

His jaw clenched.

“Bucky.”

“Almost got it.”

“Bucky.”

He angled the tweezers just slightly, catching the edge of the casing with a surgeon’s precision, eyes fixed on the wound like it was the only thing keeping him tethered. You were trying to steady him. He knew that. Heard it in your voice. But he couldn’t afford to believe you were okay. Not yet. Not until the metal was out and you were still breathing.

“James.”

He looked up at that. Your eyes were glassy, lips pale. And yet, somehow, you smiled.

“You smile too much when you’re in pain,” he muttered, tweezers angled again.

“Maybe you just give me a lot to smile about.”

“Yeah?” His voice came quieter, almost bitter. “Like what?”

“Like this charming bedside manner,” you rasped. “And your tendency to monologue when 

you’re worried.”

“I’m not—”

“You are.”

The bullet shifted. Your body jerked, a hoarse cry caught in your throat.

“Shit—sorry,” he said instantly, his free hand anchoring you at the hip. His palm was warm. Steady. “You okay?”

“Peachy,” you breathed.

And then, silence.

Heavy. Close. Pressed between bodies that had seen too many battlefields, too many exits. The only sound was the storm outside, ticking against the roof like bones, and your ragged, uneven breath.

He bent closer, eyes narrowed on the wound.

“You need to hold still,” he said softly. “If I nick your femoral, it’s over.”

“I know.”

“I mean it. It’s deep. If I miss this—”

“You won’t.”

“I might.”

“You won’t.”

Another silence.

He couldn’t look at you. Not now. Not with the bullet half-extracted and your skin flushed with shock and fever and trust. Trust he hadn’t earned. Trust that felt too close to faith. 

And he was always bad at faith.

He adjusted the angle of the tweezers again, fingers tight with precision, breath shallow. If he moved just a millimeter too far to the left, he'd sever an artery. Too far right, and he'd leave metal behind. His mind kept listing the options like a file folder: all the ways he could fail you. All the ways he could lose you. 

“Keep talkin’ to me,” he said roughly, not looking at you. “You pass out, I’m gonna be pissed.”

“What, no pressure or anything,” you slurred, but he caught the strain in it. The thin layer of humor barely stretched over real pain.

The tweezers hit resistance. He felt it in his bones.

“You’re doing good,” he muttered. “You’re—fuck. Just hang on. Almost there.”

“Bucky.”

“I said keep talking.”

You let out a ragged breath. “You want a story or a monologue?”

“Dealer’s choice.”

Your voice wavered. “One time I saw Sam fall off a boat trying to impress a group of kids with his balance—”

“Not funny enough.”

“He hit his head.”

“That’s better.”

Silence ticked between your words. His grip steadied. He’d have to go in again. Just a little deeper.

You winced as the metal tip shifted.

“Fuck,” you whispered. “You know, I thought this would be the day we got pizza. Not playing Operation.”

“We’ll still get pizza,” he muttered.

“Oh yeah? You cooking?”

“I’m not cooking. I’m buying.”

You didn’t reply. And when he glanced up, your eyes were fluttering, breath shallower.

“Hey,” he barked. “C’mon. Eyes open.”

“M’tired.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

You laughed faintly again, breathe hitching, and it cracked something in him.

“Do me a favor?” You asked.

He hummed.

“If I lose consciousness…don’t let someone else try to patch me up.”

“Not a chance.”

“And if I die…”

“You’re not gonna die.”

“If I did. Hypothetically.”

His jaw ticked.

“If you did,” he said slowly, “then I’d kill whoever touched you. Then myself, probably.”

You let out a hoarse huff. “Jesus. That’s grim.”

“It’s honest.”

And it was.

Because he would. That was the part that terrified him. He would level cities for you. Not because it was right. Not because he’d made a vow. But because he couldn’t breathe without you anymore and he didn’t know when that had happened.

He leaned in. Flashlight shifting under his elbow. Blood soaked the makeshift cloth beneath you. The bullet was lodged against something slick and resistant. He knew the second he twisted, you’d scream.

He swallowed. Adjusted his grip.

“If this fucks up, it’s gonna hurt like hell,” he muttered. “So you need to stay with me, alright?”

You made a noise. Not quite a word. Not quite a yes.

He couldn’t stop now.

“Just keep talkin’, sweetheart. Anything. Tell me what kind of pizza we’re getting. Tell me a lie. Tell me where you see yourself in five years—”

“I’m bleeding out on a rotting cot in the woods, Buck,” you rasped. “Not interviewing for my dream job.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t wanna hear it.”

You blinked slow. “You first, then.”

He didn’t think. Couldn’t. The panic had tunneled too deep. He started speaking before he meant to.

“Five years from now,” voice low, working the metal free inch by inch, “we’re retired. You hate the house I picked but only complain about the goddamn mugs. You make fun of me for how I fold laundry. You still steal all the blankets. And some poor bastard down the road asks what it’s like being married to the grumpiest man alive and you tell them I’ve always been soft on you.”

His fingers adjusted instinctively, and there it was, the clean edge of the casing caught between the tips. A perfect hold. He didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink. Just braced himself, every nerve wound tight as wire.

He cleared his throat. “Got it. On three.”

You didn’t speak.

“Three.”

He yanked.

A scream ripped from your throat, half-swallowed into his shoulder as you surged forward, clutching at his arm. Blood poured hot and fast, but the bullet clinked into the basin beside the cot.

He dropped the tweezers. Hands went to pressure. To cloth. To you.

“You’re okay,” he murmured. “You’re okay. Just keep breathing.”

You nodded faintly, head lolling back against the pillow.

He didn’t realize how close his face was to yours until the storm flash lit up the room—and he saw the way your eyes were fixed on him. 

“Did you mean that?” 

He blinked.

“What?”

Your lashes were heavy, lips pale, but there was no mistaking the way your gaze held him now. Steady. Anchored. Like you’d come back to yourself just enough to feel it. The weight of what he’d said, the shape it had taken, the shape it could still take if either of you were stupid enough to say it again.

“You said we’d be married,” you whispered.

His jaw ticked. “You were going into shock.”

“I wasn’t hearing things.”

“You were half-conscious.”

“And you still said it.”

He exhaled through his nose, sharp and shallow, dragging the blood-soaked cloth tighter around your thigh with more care than force. His hands didn’t match the way his mouth tensed.

“It was nothing. Just words.”

You didn’t believe that. He could see you didn’t. And that was worse. You weren’t teasing. You weren’t cornering him. You were just looking at him. Like maybe you’d known this was in him before he did. Like maybe you’d been waiting for it to slip out.

And god, he wanted to run.

Not because he didn’t mean it. But because he did. Too much. Too fast. In ways he couldn’t survive.

He pressed the cloth harder against your leg, then grabbed another strip of cloth from the field kit, wrapping it tight, methodical, just above the wound. Tourniquet style. Not too high and not too tight, just enough to slow the bleed. 

His hands moved on instinct, the muscle memory of field medicine kicking in even as his mind spun. He checked your pulse. Inner thigh. Faint, but steady. He exhaled. Forced himself not to shake.

“I wouldn’t mind,” you said softly, “being a Mrs. Barnes one day.”

He stilled.

For a second, you thought maybe he didn’t hear you right. Or maybe he’d frozen, like his mind shorted out and hadn’t rebooted yet.

His heart flipped. Fucked off entirely, probably.

You shifted slightly, voice smaller. “But only if you keep folding laundry the wrong way. And keep picking ugly mugs.”

His laugh cracked at the edges. Like old bark. Like something split down the middle.

“You hate those mugs.”

“Yeah,” you murmured. “But you love them. And I love you.”

His breath caught. Chest tight. No armor. No dodge. No shield left between the two of you now.

“You’re not allowed to say that,” he said hoarsely. “Not when you’re this fucked up.”

“I’m lucid enough,” you whispered. “Don’t make me take it back.”

He didn’t.

He looked at your hand, still curled near his arm. Blood beneath your nails. Pulse stuttering in your wrist.

“I don’t even have a ring,” he said before he could stop himself.

You laughed. Soft. Breathless. Real.

“That’s okay. You’ve got gauze.”

He swallowed.

“I’d want to do it right,” he said, more to the floor than to you.

You reached up, brushed your knuckles against his cheek. Just barely there.

“Right now,” you whispered, “you just pulled a bullet out of my leg and said you’d kill the world for me. I think that counts.”

He leaned into your touch. Just for a second. Just long enough to let the part of him that still believed in things like vows and porches and soft lives feel it.

“Mrs. Barnes,” he murmured, testing it, letting the sound break in his mouth. “You sure about that?”

Your lips barely moved. “Why don’t you ask me?”

His head lifted just slightly, eyes catching yours through the stormlight. And it hit him like a second shot to the chest—cleaner than the first, but just as deep.

Why don’t you ask me?

So simple. So fucking impossible.

Because it was too big. Because it wasn’t a joke anymore. Because the second he said the words, really said them, he couldn’t take them back. Not like all the other things he’d lost to time. Not like the names they’d stripped from him or the missions they’d made him forget. This one, he’d remember.

He looked down at your leg, at the blood still leaking through cloth. His hands had steadied. His breathing hadn’t.

Why don’t you ask me?

Because what if you said yes just because you were scared. Because you thought you were dying. Because he looked like a man who needed saving and you were always the type to offer your hands even when yours were already shaking.

He looked at you, chest tight, and thought you don’t know what you’re saying. Not really. Not now. Not like this.

But then your thumb moved. Just once. Across the hinge of his jaw. And the quiet in your eyes told him yes, you did know. You always had.

He dropped his gaze, voice rough. “It’s just…”

He let it sit there. Let it ache.

“It’s not supposed to be this way,” he murmured, eyes flicking to the bloodied gauze still pressed to your leg. “I was supposed to have flowers. A ring. I was supposed to have something better for you than a leaking roof and a med kit that expired in 2015.”

His throat worked. His jaw locked.

He should’ve said it right then. Should’ve just spoken.

But instead—

“I didn’t think I was allowed to want this,” he said, voice low, uneven. “Not after everything I did. Not after everything that was done to me.”

You didn’t interrupt.

He swallowed. Continued.

“I used to think if I ever got out, I’d live quiet. Alone. Keep to myself. Go somewhere cold. Make peace with the fact that I’d never get to be anyone real again.”

His hand twitched where it held yours.

“And then you showed up. Like some pain-in-the-ass fever dream with too many opinions and terrible taste in music. You just—you didn’t leave. You stayed. You made fun of my shirts. You memorized my nightmares. You never once flinched at what I used to be.”

He looked up, then. Just barely. Just enough to meet your gaze.

“You made me want things again.”

You blinked. He could see the tears gathering now, not falling yet, just clinging to the edges like dew. Shaking. Waiting.

He shifted, exhaled through his nose, then slowly reached toward the chain tucked under his shirt. The tags clicked quietly against one another as he drew them out—worn, scraped, edges dulled. He hesitated. Thumb running along the groove of his name.

Barnes, James B.

Property of the U.S. Army.

And below that werenumbers. Codes. The echo of orders that used to own him.

They were the only thing he’d ever been given back when he’d stopped being a person. They were the last thing that made him his.

He huffed a breath. Shaky. Wet around the edges.

“And I don’t know how long I’ve been in love with you. I think maybe it was the first time you told Sam to shut up without looking up from your lunch when you knew it was a bad day. Or maybe it was the time you stayed up with me for four hours just so I could get ten minutes of sleep without a nightmare.”

His mouth quirked, not a smile, just a break in the grief.

“I’d want to give you more than this. Not a safehouse or some half-muttered promise with your blood on my hands. I’d want to give you everything.”

He looked at you now. Really looked.

“But I can’t.”

Your breath hitched. “Bucky—”

“All I’ve got is this.”

His voice was rough, worn down to its bones. He lifted the tags where they rested, cold and inert against his chest, like they hadn't once hung heavy with every name he’d buried, every order he’d followed. He hadn’t taken them off in years. Not since Wakanda. Not since they rewired the storm in his head and called it healing. Not since he’d started remembering how to breathe without a trigger warning stitched into his ribs.

But now?

Now he held them in his palm like they were something fragile. Like they might mean more in yours.

“I know it’s not a ring,” he muttered. “I just... I didn’t want to wait.”

His heart was punching up into his throat, each beat louder than the last. He wasn’t sure when he’d started shaking. Just that it was everywhere—under his skin, in his voice, in the ghost of a life he’d never thought he’d want back until you gave it shape.

He didn’t look away. Couldn’t. You were still bleeding. Still half-broken in his arms. But you were there. And alive. And looking at him like maybe he wasn’t a ruin of a man. Like maybe, even now, there was something left in him worth holding onto.

So he asked.

“Will you marry me?”

It didn’t sound the way it had in his head. It wasn’t confident. Wasn’t clean. It cracked at the center, frayed at the edges, barely held together by the breath it rode in on. Wrecked and unguarded and true in the way only something broken and rebuilt could be.

But it was his. And it was real.

You didn’t answer at first. Just stared at him—wide-eyed, wrecked, like the question had hollowed you out from the inside. And maybe it had. Maybe this was a bad time. Maybe he was a goddamn idiot for doing it now, here, with blood on his hands and guilt in his lungs and everything still burning in the corners of the room.

But then you nodded. Once. Then again. And again.

“Yes.” A whisper. Broken glass and salt. You swallowed hard, voice splitting again as you said it louder. “Yes. Of course I will.”

The sob hit him sideways. He didn’t mean to. Didn’t plan it. It just caught in his throat and stayed there, and suddenly your hands were on his face, and he was leaning in, and—

He kissed you.

It was desperate. Salty. A little off-center. His lip caught on yours, and your nose bumped his, and neither of you could breathe right but it didn’t matter. It was messy and clumsy and wet with tears and still somehow perfect.

His hand cradled the back of your head like he thought you might slip away, like if he didn’t hold on, the whole world might tilt again. And yours fisted into his jacket like you’d forgotten how to let go.

You were both shaking.

You pulled apart only because you had to. Because the world hadn’t stopped spinning even if it felt like it had. And then, quiet again, he moved.

He brought the tags forward.

Didn’t rush.

Didn’t speak.

He waited until you nodded, slow, sure, already teary again, and only then did he lift the chain and slide it over your head. Careful. Reverent. Like it mattered.

The tags settled on your chest, clinking softly as they touched your skin. They were cold. Real. Still streaked faintly with red.

But they were yours now.

His breath caught again, sharper this time. Not because it hurt. But because it didn’t. Because maybe this was what hope felt like when it didn’t come with a body count.

He pressed his forehead to yours and closed his eyes.

Mine, he thought. Not the government’s. Not the ghost’s. Not the weapon’s.

Yours.

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