Love U Drake

She nodded once, glanced between the two of them, and slipped out through the curtain without another word.

Jack pulled the stool closer and sat down, reaching for his stethoscope. "Sorry," he said, placing it against the man's chest. "You just really look like him."

Too much like him.

And suddenly he understood. He had spent years assuming you were avoiding the guilt, the weight of a night that hadn't gone the way it was supposed to. But this was different. Seeing Rafael felt like reopening something that had never fully closed. For him it was a shock. For you, seeing that face, it had to be something else entirely.

"Take a deep breath," Jack said.

Rafael inhaled.

"And let it out."

Jack listened carefully, moving the stethoscope across his chest. Rafael exhaled slowly and then spoke into the quiet. "That's why she doesn't want to meet me, right?" he said. "I bring back bad memories."

Jack said nothing.

Rafael gave a small shrug, though the sadness behind it was visible. "My parents still get teary-eyed every time they look at me," he admitted. "Grief does strange things to people."

Jack looked down for a moment. "Gabriel talked about you," he said finally. "Never showed us a photo though."

Rafael raised an eyebrow.

Jack huffed quietly. "He used to say, just look at my face, we look exactly the same." He glanced at Rafael again and exhaled slowly through his nose. "Now I get it."

Rafael let out a soft laugh. "We used to mess with people all the time." The smile faded slightly at the edges. "After he came back I kept meaning to take more photos with him. That's my biggest regret."

The room went quiet for a moment.

Jack finished listening to his lungs and pulled the stethoscope away. "You don't need the head of the OR for this," he said. "Your lungs sound fine. It's asthma."

"Yeah." Rafael rubbed the back of his neck. "I figured."

Jack leaned back and crossed his arms, studying him. "Then tell me something. Why do you keep trying to meet her?"

Rafael looked at him for a moment. Really looked at him, the way someone did when they were seeing more than the surface of a thing. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled.

"Gabriel was right about you," he said.

Jack frowned. "What?"

Rafael leaned back against the bed, easy and unhurried. "You always get protective when it comes to her."

******

FLASHBACK Diaz. Gabriel Diaz was the soldier who had gotten closest to you during the deployment. The two of you had fallen into something that looked, from the outside, almost exactly like siblings. Specifically the kind where the older one had decided the arrangement without asking and the younger one had never quite managed to get rid of them.

Diaz appointed himself the older one. You never agreed to this. It didn't matter.

One morning, six in the morning, too early for anything to be tolerable, he appeared at the entrance of the medic tent holding two protein bars and wearing the expression of someone who had slept well and wanted everyone to know it.

You didn't look up from the supply inventory. "No."

"I didn't ask anything yet."

"You're going to. I'm preventing the problem early."

Somewhere behind him a few soldiers laughed. Diaz turned to them with an expression of genuine wounded dignity. "You hear this? I survived deployment just to get bullied by the smallest person in the camp."

"You survived," you said, still not looking up, "because everyone else got tired of listening to you talk."

"Cold," he muttered. Then he tossed a protein bar onto your table anyway.

You looked at it. "No."

"You haven't eaten since yesterday."

"I'm busy."

"You say that every single day."

"I mean it every single day."

Diaz pulled a chair over, turned it backward, and sat down on it with the energy of someone who had nowhere else to be and had decided your workspace was a perfectly good place to be nowhere. "You know what your problem is? You have scary only child energy."

You finally looked up. "What does that mean."

"It means nobody taught you basic survival." He counted on his fingers. "Eat food. Sleep. Drink water. Stop staring at supply charts like they said something personally offensive to you."

"I'm a doctor."

"You're sleep deprived and you haven't eaten and you're approximately this tall." He held his hand at a height that was designed to be annoying. "I'm concerned."

"I know where the morphine is stored."

He raised both hands immediately. "Okay. Respectfully terrifying. Eat the protein bar."

Jack was leaning against the tent pole nearby, arms crossed, watching the whole exchange with the quiet amusement of someone who had seen this play out before and had stopped trying to intervene. "There's a lot of him," he said to you dryly. "You might as well get used to it."

You sighed the sigh of someone accepting a fate they didn't choose. "It's annoying older brother energy."

Diaz pointed at himself immediately. "See? Family."

"You invited yourself."

"Still counts."

Jack looked between the two of you. "You actually see him like a brother?"

You glanced over at Diaz, who had located someone else's coffee and was drinking it without asking. "He bothers me too much to be anything else."

"Rude," Diaz called from across the tent. "I care about you deeply." Then, louder, with great satisfaction, "Unlike Abbott over here."

Jack closed his eyes briefly. "Don't."

Diaz grinned. "Oho." He looked between the two of you with the energy of a man who had just found something interesting. "There's tension."

"There is no tension," you said flatly.

Jack looked away. Slightly too fast.

Diaz pointed. "You see that?" He addressed the nearest soldiers like a man presenting evidence. "That right there. That is unresolved workplace chemistry."

"You're inventing things," you muttered.

"Oh please." He leaned forward on the chair back. "You only yell at people you actually care about."

"I yell at everyone."

"Not like him." Diaz tilted his head toward Jack. "With him it's different. It's got feeling in it."

Jack sighed. "I miss when soldiers had respect for authority."

"You started it, sir," Diaz said pleasantly. "Walking around being all intense and mysterious."

Jack looked genuinely offended. "I'm not mysterious."

"You absolutely are." Diaz turned to you. "Doc. Back me up."

You looked at Jack. Just for a second, maybe a second and a half, which was already longer than was strictly necessary. Then you looked away. "Little bit."

Diaz slapped the table so hard the supply jars rattled. "I KNEW IT."

"Eat your protein bar," you said.

"You know what," Diaz said, standing up and pointing between the two of you with absolute conviction, "when you two finally get married I want full credit. I want a speech. I want a framed photo at the reception."

You grabbed a roll of gauze from the table and threw it at him. He was already moving, ducking out of the tent with a laugh that carried across half the camp, and you stood there for a moment before deciding it was completely pointless to chase him and walking back toward the tent entrance.

Jack was still there.

"So," he said, with the particular casualness of someone who had thought about how to phrase something and was pretending they hadn't. "Big brother energy." A beat. "I thought that was your type."

You stopped walking.

You turned and looked at him, just briefly, just long enough. "He's not my type," you said simply, and walked back into the tent.

Jack stayed where he was for a moment. The camp moved around him, the usual noise and heat and motion, and he stood in the middle of it thinking about those four words with an expression he was grateful nobody was looking at.

"God help me," he muttered under his breath.

*************

The next morning came too quickly. War had no respect for sleep.

You were halfway through paperwork when a shadow fell across the table beside you.

"You look terrible."

You didn't glance up. "So do you."

Diaz placed a hand over his chest. "That's rude. I came here because I care about you."

"You bother me. That's not the same as caring."

"Same thing," he said cheerfully, and pulled a chair over.

You finally looked up.

Combat vest. Full gear. The particular way soldiers carried themselves on mission days, weight distributed differently, movements a little more deliberate.

Something tightened in your chest without permission.

"You heading out?"

"Easy mission." He shrugged. "In and out."

You hated when soldiers said that. Easy never meant easy. It just meant they hadn't found out what it was yet.

You reached across the table without saying anything and grabbed a medical patch, tossing it toward him.

Diaz caught it and grinned. "Aw. You do care."

"I care about paperwork. One less incident report is good for everyone."

"Cold," he said, and meant it as a compliment.

He stood up, checked his gear once with the automatic efficiency of someone who had done it a thousand times, and then reached over and patted your head with his full palm the way he always did specifically because he knew it annoyed you.

You shoved his shoulder immediately. "Idiot."

"Tiny doctor."

He started walking backward toward the tent entrance, pointing past you. "Tell Abbott he needs to stop walking around looking miserable. It's affecting morale."

Jack, leaning against the supply shelf nearby with a coffee in hand, did not look up. "I heard that."

"Good." Diaz pointed between the two of you. "Figure your thing out before I get back. It's painful to watch."

"There is no thing," you said.

Diaz looked at Jack. "She always this deep in denial?"

"Every single day," Jack said.

Diaz shook his head with the solemn disappointment of a man who had tried his best. "Unbelievable. Both of you." He turned back toward the entrance and lifted one hand in a lazy salute. "See you later, Doc."

"Go be useful," you said, not looking up.

He laughed and walked out into the morning light, and the tent felt slightly emptier after him the way it always did, the particular absence of someone who took up more space than their size accounted for.

The medic tent was busy as usual. Minor injuries, routine checkups, the steady controlled chaos of a normal day. Until Clark appeared in the entrance and the expression on his face made the room change before he said a single word.

"We got casualties."

Everything sharpened immediately. You were on your feet before the sentence finished.

"Where?"

Clark gave the coordinates and your heart stopped. Because Diaz's unit had been sent there. You grabbed your trauma bag too fast, hands moving on muscle memory while your brain was still catching up. Vest. Gloves. Equipment. Your ears were ringing.

Jack was already outside beside the vehicle in full combat gear when you came out of the tent. Helmet on, weapon secured, ready in the way that meant he had already heard and had already made his decisions.

"Abbot."

He opened the passenger door. "I know." A beat. "Let's hope everybody made it."

You hated how carefully he said it.

The drive felt too long and not long enough at the same time.

When you arrived the smoke was still settling. Dust covered everything. The smell hit before anything else, burnt metal and gunpowder and blood, the specific combination that your brain had learned to file under work faster. Jack scanned the perimeter while he talked. "IED. Roadside. The enemy's position was down but the blast caught them badly."

You nodded and moved. Because hours ago these men had been eating breakfast and arguing and laughing and complaining about the heat, and now some of them were screaming and some were silent and you had learned by now that the silent ones were the ones to run toward.

You never got used to that part. Not fully. You just got better at moving through it.

"Where's Diaz?" You turned to Jack. "Have you seen him?"

Jack shook his head and grabbed the radio. "Anyone got eyes on Gabriel Diaz?"

Static. Voices overlapping. Then, "We found him!"

You ran before they finished the sentence.

He was sitting against a damaged wall with his rifle still in his hands, breathing too hard, blood soaked through his vest in a pattern that made your stomach drop the moment you saw it. Too much. Wrong location.

"Diaz."

He looked up. "Hey." Then coughed, and the cough brought blood, and you were already crouching.

"Don't talk." You pulled open the front of his vest and went still for just a second. Small entry wound, left chest, close to the sternum. Shrapnel. Small and precise and devastating.

Jack arrived beside you and read it at the same moment you did.

"Cardiac tamponade," you said, hands already moving. Blood filling the pericardial sac, compressing the heart, preventing it from pumping the way it needed to. "He's bleeding internally."

Jack looked at Diaz. Then at you. Weak pulse, too pale, consciousness coming and going like a signal in bad weather.

"It's too late," he said quietly.

You looked up at him. "No."

"Y/N."

"Jack." Your voice cracked at the edge, just slightly. "I've read the studies. There's still time. He's still conscious." You looked back at Diaz, at the rise and fall of his chest, shallow and wrong but there. "We decompress in the helicopter. We still have the golden hour."

Jack was quiet for a moment, watching you, watching the way you were holding onto this with both hands.

"Do it," he said.

Inside the medevac helicopter everything was loud and violent. The rotors roared and the aircraft shook and blood coated your gloves and Diaz kept sliding in and out of consciousness in a way that made your chest seize every time his eyes went unfocused.

"Hey." You snapped your fingers in front of his face. "Eyes open."

He blinked slowly. "You always this bossy?"

"Yes."

"Scary," he murmured.

"Diaz."

Jack sat on the other side applying pressure, handing you supplies without being asked, his movements steady and practiced in a way that you were grateful for because yours were not as steady as they usually were and you both knew it.

Diaz looked between the two of you with the dimmed, half-present expression of someone running on fumes. "You guys arguing means I'm alive, right?"

Neither of you laughed.

You inserted the needle carefully. Emergency field decompression, a needle into the chest cavity to relieve the pressure around the heart. Temporary. Imperfect. Just enough. Your own heartbeat was loud in your ears.

Come on.

The monitor shifted. Not good. But less bad than it had been thirty seconds ago.

You exhaled a breath that had been sitting in your chest since the moment you saw the wound. "He's stabilizing."

Jack looked at you across Diaz's body and for the first time since arriving at the blast site he allowed himself something that was almost hope. Just barely. Just enough to get through the next hour. 

Clark met you outside the medical tent when you landed. He looked at your face and then at your hands and then back at your face. "You did it?"

You pulled off your gloves slowly. "Yeah." You looked exhausted in a way that went deeper than physical. "I'm sorry."

Clark frowned. "For what?"

"It was risky. I made a call without full information and if it had gone wrong—"

"It didn't," Clark said. He looked toward the helicopter and then back at you. "It was risky," he said honestly, because Clark never softened things unnecessarily. "But you bought him time." He tapped your shoulder once. "You did good."

You nodded and walked toward the tent.

Clark waited until you were out of earshot. Then he walked to where Jack was standing and lowered his voice. "He's not going to make it."

Jack said nothing.

"The damage is too extensive. We can transfer him, get him into a proper surgical facility, but." Clark looked toward the tent where you had gone. "The fact he's still breathing is already past what it should be."

Jack looked over at you through the tent opening. You were at the wash station, scrubbing your hands with the focused mechanical motion of someone keeping themselves together through sheer discipline. Still believing. Still moving. Still carrying every patient like they were yours to save personally.

His jaw tightened.

"I know," he said quietly.

A long pause settled between them.

"I don't have the courage to tell her," Jack said.

Clark looked at him for a moment. Then he looked away.

Neither of them moved.

****

You adjusted Diaz's blanket one last time. The medication had made him quieter, and the quiet made him look smaller somehow, which you hated because Diaz had never been a small presence in any room he occupied.

"You've got that face again," he said.

"What face?"

"The one where you're thinking too much and pretending you're not."

You checked his IV instead of answering. "You should rest."

"You always avoid the question."

"I'm a doctor. It's professionally sanctioned."

"You're annoying is what you are."

You looked at him flatly. "You're literally dying and still irritating. That's genuinely impressive."

"Talent," he said.

Despite yourself, something almost became a smile.

His expression softened then, the performance dropping into something quieter and more honest. "Hey."

You looked at him.

"Thanks," he said.

"For what."

"For yelling at me in the helicopter." His breathing stayed uneven, careful, the kind of breathing someone did when they had learned their body needed to be managed. "Kept me awake."

"Someone had to."

"Yeah." A weak smile. "You're pretty good at bossing people around."

"Get some sleep," you said, shaking your head.

He looked at you for a moment longer than the conversation required. Then, "Go check on the others."

"You sure?"

"I'll still be ugly when you get back."

You rolled your eyes and adjusted the blanket corner one final time. "Debatable."

That earned the smallest laugh. The kind that cost him something.

"I'll be back," you said.

"Yeah." His voice had gone softer, quieter, in a way you didn't examine too closely. "See you later, Doc."

You didn't understand why that sentence stayed with you until later. Until it was too late to ask him what he meant by it.

Jack came in a while after you left. Pulled a chair up beside the cot and sat down without ceremony.

Diaz looked over. "Sir."

"Stay still."

"Yes, sir." A beat. "You look terrible too, by the way."

"So does everyone in a war zone." Jack crossed his arms. "How are you feeling."

"Like a miracle, apparently." Diaz shifted carefully against the pillow. "Clark keeps saying that word."

Jack said nothing.

Diaz was quiet for a moment, looking at the tent ceiling. Then, "Sir."

"Hm."

"I kinda want to see you both get together."

Jack blinked.

Of course. Half dead, barely breathing, and still. "No wonder she finds you exhausting," Jack said.

Diaz let out a weak laugh that turned into a cough that he rode out with his eyes closed. When he opened them again his expression had shifted into something softer and more deliberate. "She doesn't find me exhausting," he said. "She just doesn't know how to say she cares about people without making it an argument."

Jack looked at him.

"Neither do you," Diaz added quietly.

The tent was still around them. Outside, the camp moved and breathed and carried on, and in here it felt like a separate thing entirely, a small pocket of honesty that the rest of the world wasn't part of.

"I'm gonna miss you both," Diaz said. Simply, softly, the way soldiers said the things they actually meant. No drama, no ceremony. Just the sentence, placed down carefully between them.

Jack's jaw tightened. He looked away briefly, at the tent wall, at nothing. This was the part he hated most. Not the explosions, not the chaos, not even the loss itself. This part. The part where someone knew and said it sideways so the people around them didn't have to carry the weight of a direct goodbye.

"You can tell her yourself," Jack said.

Diaz smiled. It didn't reach his eyes the way it usually did. "Yeah," he said.

They both sat with that for a moment.

Then Jack leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees, and looked at Diaz directly. "I'll take care of her."

Diaz looked at him. Really looked, the way he did when he was deciding if someone meant something. Then something settled in his expression, something that looked like relief and something else underneath it, something that might have been peace.

"Knew it," he said quietly.

Jack looked away before his face could do anything he'd have to account for.

***********

Exhaustion finally caught up to you hours later.

Every patient had been checked. The paperwork was done. You had eaten half of something that Diaz would have found deeply inadequate and he would have told you so and you would have rolled your eyes and eaten the other half just to make him stop talking about it.

The chair beside the supply shelf was close enough. Just twenty minutes. That was all you needed.

You closed your eyes.

When you woke up the light had changed.

Your heart dropped before the rest of you was fully conscious. Too bright. Too quiet. The specific quality of silence that a tent had when it was holding something you weren't ready for.

You were on your feet before you had decided to stand.

"How long was I—"

Nobody answered fast enough. You were already moving, boots hitting the ground, the wrongness of the quiet pulling you forward before your brain had caught up with what your body already knew.

You pushed through the tent flap and stopped.

Your knees went weak so suddenly that stopping was the only thing that kept you upright.

Diaz.

Still. Too still. The blanket pulled up, the monitor dark, the cot holding the particular terrible silence of something that had been a person and was now just the absence of one. No stupid comments waiting. No grin. No protein bar appearing from somewhere you hadn't seen him go.

"No." Your voice cracked open. "No."

You stepped forward and your legs almost went out from under you and then a hand caught your shoulder, firm and steady, and held you up.

Jack.

"It wasn't your fault," he said.

You shook your head. The tears were already there, burning. "I should have checked on him. I should have stayed, I promised I'd come back, I told him—"

"Listen to me." His voice was quiet and steady, the voice that cut through noise, the voice that had pulled you back to yourself in the middle of chaos more times than you could count. "It's already a miracle you brought him back here at all. You gave him more time."

"But I lost him." The words came out in pieces. "I lost him anyway."

Jack looked at Diaz once. Then back at you. And then you stopped thinking about what you were doing and pressed your forehead against his chest because there was nowhere else to go and your legs were not going to hold you up through this alone.

The grief came ugly and exhausted and entirely without dignity, the kind that had been waiting behind the work and the adrenaline and the deliberate forward motion for hours, and now it had found the gap and it came through.

Jack went still for half a second. Then his arms came around you slowly and carefully, one hand resting against the back of your head, and he held you the way someone held something they were trying to keep from breaking entirely.

He didn't tell you it was okay. He didn't tell you to stop. He didn't say the things people said when they didn't know what else to offer, because Jack had been in enough of these moments to know that sometimes there was nothing to say and the only honest thing was to stay.

So he stayed.

And held you together while you fell apart.

And outside the tent the camp kept moving, indifferent and relentless, the way war always did.

********

PRESENT TIME

You were at the park because of one very annoying text message.

Can I have a playdate with Riot on Saturday?

There was no reasonable way to say no to that. Especially when Riot wagged his entire body every time Jack Abbot existed within a fifty meter radius.

Jack was standing near the bench with his hands in his jacket pockets when you arrived, relaxed and annoyingly good-looking for someone who probably considered coffee a complete breakfast. When he spotted you something in his face softened in a way he didn't bother to hide.

"I thought you wouldn't come," he said.

Before you could respond, Riot made the decision to slip his leash entirely.

"Riot—"

Too late. The dog sprinted toward Jack with the full committed energy of an animal who had been waiting for this specific moment all week. Jack crouched immediately, arms open, completely unbothered by the seventy pound German Shepherd throwing himself forward.

"There's my favorite guy." Jack caught him, both hands going straight to his ears. "Missed you too, buddy."

Your lips almost moved. Almost.

Then you noticed someone standing a short distance away and everything in your body went still at once.

Same face. Same eyes. Same build. Grief had apparently learned how to walk around and show up at parks on Saturday morning.

You turned to Jack.

"No."

He already had the expression of someone who knew exactly what was coming. "Listen to him first," he said quietly.

"Is this an ambush?"

"A badly planned intervention," he corrected.

"Abbot."

He sighed once, soft and resigned. "If you want to yell at me later, that's fair. But hear him out first."

You crossed your arms. "You have no idea what his family said to me."

"I know." He stepped slightly closer and lowered his voice. "He told me." A pause, quieter still. "You didn't deserve any of it."

He said it with the particular certainty of someone who had already made up their mind about something and wasn't interested in arguing the point. No hesitation, no qualification. Just that.

Something shifted in your chest in a way you didn't have a clean response to.

Jack glanced toward Rafael and then back at you, voice dropping to something that was almost conversational except for the edge underneath it. "If he says anything that bothers you, I'll punch him."

You blinked. "You can't punch grieving people."

"I can if they're rude."

"Abbot.”

"And if his family tries to contact you again," he continued, with the calm of someone discussing the weather, "I'll make sure that stops."

You stared at him for a second. It was a little terrifying. It was also, against your better judgment, oddly comforting. You looked away before your face did something about that.

"I'll be right here," Jack said simply.

You looked over at Rafael. He was standing with his hands at his sides and the specific posture of someone who had been nervous for longer than just this morning. Gabriel had walked into every room like he had been expecting and was simply arriving. This man looked like he wasn't sure he had the right to be here at all.

You walked over slowly.

Rafael straightened immediately. "Hi," he said, and there was an awkward honesty in the word that disarmed you slightly. "I'm Rafael Diaz. Gabriel's twin." He paused. "Which I guess is obvious."

"Hi," you said quietly.

You looked away for a moment, at the path, at Riot still occupying Jack's full attention nearby. "I'm sorry I've been avoiding you," you said finally.

Rafael shook his head immediately. "No. It's understandable." He looked down briefly, then back at you with the expression of someone who had been rehearsing this and had decided to abandon the rehearsed version. "After what my family did to you, I understand completely."

The silence that settled between you was heavy with everything neither of you had said yet.

Rafael rubbed the back of his neck. "I wanted to apologize," he said. "For my mom. For all of them." His jaw tightened slightly. "They were grieving. I know that. But grief doesn't excuse what they did to you." He swallowed once. "The letters. Showing up at your place. I didn't know how bad it had gotten until recently. If I had known earlier, I would have stopped it."

He looked genuinely ashamed. Not performing it, not offering it as a transaction. Just carrying it and putting it down in front of you.

FLASHBACK

The first thing you did after landing in the States was visit Gabriel's grave. Alone. Still carrying guilt like something stitched between your ribs that hadn't loosened since the helicopter ride home.

The cemetery was quiet in the way only cemeteries were. Flowers rested against his headstone, fresh ones, which meant someone had already been. You crouched slowly, hands trembling slightly, and stared at his name in the stone.

"I'm sorry," you whispered.

The words tasted hollow. Because sorry didn't restart hearts. Didn't undo war. Didn't change what had happened in that tent while you were sleeping twenty feet away.

"You should be."

You turned.

His mother stood at the edge of the path. Eyes swollen, grief sharpened into something with edges. Before you could speak the slap landed hard, snapping your head to the side.

"You left him." Her voice shook. "You were supposed to save him."

"I tried," you said quietly.

"We heard you left him alone."

No. She’s wrong. 

"I was checking on other patients. I came back as soon as—"

"You left my son to die alone." Her voice broke open into something raw and terrible. "Do you know what that did to us?"

You stood there and said nothing. Because grief made people cruel and maybe, in the part of you that ran the scenario on a loop at three in the morning, you believed her. Maybe if you had stayed. Maybe if you had checked on him sooner. Maybe.

"I'm sorry," you said again.

She looked at you like the words made it worse. "You should have died instead."

That one stayed. Long after everything else faded, that one stayed.

The letters came after. Blaming you, calling you careless, calling you worse things than that. Flowers left at your door and then notes and then sometimes strangers showing up with questions that were really accusations wearing a different face. You moved apartments. Then moved again. Eventually you stopped using your real address entirely, redirecting everything to your university mailbox. Cleaner. Safer. Further away.

Because grief had teeth. And sometimes it bit whoever was standing closest.

You didn't see Rafael for years.

Until an ordinary shift at your previous hospital. Busy day, nothing remarkable about it, and then you looked up from the nurses station and the room stopped making sense.

Gabriel. Standing at the desk. Alive. Same face, same eyes, same everything, smiling politely at the receptionist like he had just walked out of a memory you had spent years trying to put down.

Your ears rang. Your chest seized so completely and so fast that you had no warning before the floor came up.

You woke up in an exam room with someone handing you water and someone else saying, “You fainted”, and it took longer than it should have to understand what had happened. Rafael. Gabriel's twin. Not Gabriel. Obviously not Gabriel.

But trauma didn't care about logic. Every time you saw that face your body remembered the grief before your mind could catch up. And suddenly you were back in the medic tent, too tired, too late, watching the monitors go flat while the camp slept quietly outside.

So yes. You had been avoiding Rafael Diaz for a very long time.

PRESENT TIME

"I appreciate the apology," you said quietly.

Rafael nodded immediately, like he had expected nothing more and was grateful for what he got. "I don't think," you started, then exhaled slowly, "I can look at your face without feeling guilty."

"I understand," he said. Too quickly, too easily, the way someone answered when they had already made peace with a harder version of the answer.

A small sad smile crossed his face. "I just wanted to say sorry." A pause. "And maybe finally meet the people Gabriel wouldn't stop talking about."

He pointed toward Jack. "Him." Then toward Riot, who was sitting on Jack's foot with the contentment of an animal who had no concept of complicated human situations. "And the dog."

"Riot?"

"He said the puppy liked you more than him." Rafael's smile shifted into something more genuine. "Apparently that was the whole thing."

Behind you, Jack said, "Still is," with complete sincerity.

Rafael laughed. Softly, briefly, but real. The first time since he'd arrived that he actually looked lighter, like something had come loose. "Yeah," he said quietly, looking at nothing in particular. "That sounds like my brother."

He reached into his jacket pocket and held out the folded piece of paper. You looked at it for a moment before you took it. Your name on the front in handwriting you would have recognized anywhere. Messy and fast and entirely unbothered by the concept of neat penmanship.

To my scary tiny doctor.

Your throat tightened in a way you couldn't swallow down completely.

"I found it when I went through his things again recently," Rafael said. "I think he meant it for you."

You folded it carefully and held it without opening it. You weren't going to open it here. Not in front of anyone. Not yet.

"He talked about you both a lot," Rafael continued, glancing briefly toward Jack. "He said you were the only doctor who ever scared him more than the enemy." A small pause. "He meant it as the highest compliment he knew how to give."

Something moved through you that was almost a laugh. "That sounds exactly like him."

Rafael smiled properly for the first time, and it was so familiar, so completely and painfully familiar, that you had to look at the ground for a moment and breathe through it.

He stayed quiet for a beat. Then he looked between you and Jack with an expression that had something resolved in it, something that had come here needing to be set down and had finally been set down.

"I'm glad my brother met you both," he said simply. He looked at you directly, no performance in it, just honesty. "Thank you for giving him more time." A breath. "We watched the video he made. In the tent." His voice stayed steady but only just. "He was still himself in it. Right until the end." He pressed his lips together briefly. "That was because of you."

You didn't trust your voice enough to answer that. You nodded once, and he seemed to understand that was everything you had right now, and he accepted it without asking for more.

Rafael looked down at Riot, who had wandered over at some point and was now sitting directly on Rafael's feet with the calm authority of a dog who had decided something. Rafael crouched down and let Riot sniff his hand, and then Riot leaned into him, heavy and warm and certain.

Rafael exhaled slowly. His hand moved over the dog's head. "Hey, buddy," he said quietly.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

*********

Rafael eventually left. The silence he left behind felt awkward and heavy in equal measure, the kind that settled after something necessary and painful had finally been said out loud.

You stood there for a moment. Then you turned toward Jack and glared.

He sighed immediately. "Yeah. I deserve that."

"You ambushed me."

"I know."

You crossed your arms. "I thought you were on my side."

Jack's expression shifted, the easy deflection gone, something more direct underneath it. "Always." Too fast. Too certain. Like there had never been another option worth considering and he didn't understand why you would ask.

You looked away first.

"Then why?" you asked quietly.

Jack shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. "Because I wanted to hear him apologize too." He paused. "For what his family did to you."

The words landed steadily between you. Not dramatic, not performed. Just honest, the way Jack was when something had been sitting with him long enough to stop being careful about it.

He looked toward the path Rafael had taken, jaw tightening slightly. "If I had known sooner." He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. Because you understood what sat behind it. Every letter. Every accusation. Every stranger showing up at your door with grief wearing the face of blame. Jack would have burned the whole thing down without hesitating.

"It wasn't your fault," he said quietly.

You looked at him. Really looked, the way you didn't usually let yourself because it gave too much away. Because Jack always sounded the most serious when it came to you, and you had never fully worked out what to do with that.

A beat passed.

"Are you seriously going to beat them up?" you asked.

Jack didn't hesitate. "In a heartbeat."

You blinked. Then a laugh escaped you, small and genuine, the kind that arrived without permission. And with it something lifted, not everything, not all at once, but enough. Like a weight that had been sitting between your shoulder blades had shifted slightly and given you room to breathe.

"Well." You exhaled slowly as Riot happily trotted ahead. "That was a tough morning."

The conversation with Rafael had been heavier than expected. Necessary, but heavy.

Jack glanced at you. Then toward Riot. Then back. "I'll make it up to you."

You looked at him. "Then take Riot today."

He blinked. "That's it?"

"Do you think I'd ask for more?"

He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. "I thought you'd ask for dinner."

You stopped walking. Riot stopped too, looked back at both of you, decided nothing interesting was happening, and went back to sniffing the path. Jack turned toward you. "Or a triathlon bike?"

You smiled. Wide and genuine, the kind that arrived before you could curate it. "Are you going to buy it for me?"

Jack saw it and something settled quietly in his expression. After the weight of the last hour, that smile felt like something worth paying for. "If it could brighten your day," he said simply. "I will buy it."

You tilted your head. "Do you even know how much it costs?"

"How much are we talking? "Three thousand?"

You scoffed. "That's adorable."

He looked offended. "How much?"

"Almost right."

"How is that almost right?"

"You're only missing a few thousand."

Jack stared at you. "Do people pedal gold now?"

You laughed quietly. And damn it, that alone almost made the morning worth it. Jack looked at you for a second longer than necessary. If money fixed that look on your face, he'd honestly consider it.

"You seriously don't want dinner?" he asked.

"Nah." You stretched your arms lightly above your head. "I think I'll run thirty miles and shake the rest of this off."

Jack nearly stopped walking. "You run thirty miles for emotional regulation?"

"Yes."

"That sounds medically concerning."

Before you could reply, Riot suddenly redirected his entire existence toward Jack. Circling him, tail wagging violently, jumping with the energy of an animal who had been waiting for an excuse.

You frowned. "I think you put a spell on him."

Jack looked deeply pleased with himself. "I absolutely have charm." He looked down at Riot. "Even Riot understands quality people."

Riot shoved his nose straight into Jack's tote bag and emerged with half a sandwich.

Jack looked down. "Oh."

You raised an eyebrow. "You brought breakfast?"

"Emergency sandwich."

"Emergency."

Jack nodded seriously. "For low morale."

"Woof."

Riot took a large, satisfied bite. Jack sighed dramatically and looked down at him with the expression of a man who had already accepted his fate. "Seems like I need to start preparing better."

"For?"

"This boy has expensive taste."

You crossed your arms. "Do you even know what to buy if he stays at your place?"

Jack went quiet. Then, with complete honesty, "No."

You laughed. "At least you're self-aware."

Jack looked at you with that casual ease he had when he was about to say something that landed harder than it appeared. "If you stayed too, I probably wouldn't have that problem."

You blinked.

There it was again. That thing he did. Dropping something dangerous into the middle of a perfectly normal sentence and then standing there looking completely unbothered by it, like he hadn't said anything worth noticing.

"Excuses," you muttered.

"Creative problem-solving," Jack corrected.

You rolled your eyes. He smiled. Riot finished the sandwich without apology.

*************

The pet shop happened naturally, the way things did when neither of you had technically suggested it but somehow you were both inside one anyway. Jack had decided Riot deserved better snacks, which was either very thoughtful or a reason to extend the morning, and you weren't going to examine which one too closely.

You stood beside him in the food aisle debating nutrition labels like two people sharing custody of something they both loved and would never admit out loud.

"It feels like the old supply runs," you muttered.

Jack picked up a bag of treats and looked at it with genuine suspicion. "At least this food looks edible."

"Honestly? Better than army food."

"When you're surviving," Jack said seriously, "that stuff tasted like luxury."

"It ruined my tastebuds for months."

Jack grabbed another bag from the shelf. "That explains why you drink hospital coffee."

"You drink the same coffee."

"I'm emotionally damaged." He said it without hesitation. "It's different."

You considered that for a moment. "Fair."

From across the aisle came the very specific sound of someone going completely still.

Princess had not planned on running into anyone from the Pitt today. It was her day off. She was buying cat food. She was minding her own business entirely. Then she heard a voice that sounded familiar and her brain did the thing where it refused to let her keep walking without checking.

She leaned slowly around the end of the aisle.

Oh my God.

Dr. Abbot. Dr. Y/N. And the dog, sitting in the cart like he belonged there, which apparently he did.

Princess stood very still for approximately two seconds, running the calculations. Then she reached into her bag, pulled out her phone, and raised it to her ear with the practiced ease of someone making a very important call that was definitely not a cover for taking a photo.

She was absolutely taking a photo.

She angled it carefully. Got all three of them in the frame. The cart, the matching coffee cups, the dog bed, Jack reading a nutrition label while you pointed at something on the shelf with the focused energy of two people who had done this kind of thing before.

Click.

She lowered the phone, tucked the cat food under her arm, and walked to the other end of the store at a pace that was not quite running.

The message sent before she reached the exit.

The Pitt ER Group Chat had been quiet for exactly four minutes.

It was a good photo, unfortunately. You and Jack standing in the pet food aisle, a shopping cart between you containing a dog bed, two bags of food, and two matching coffee cups that had ended up there without either of you noticing. Riot sitting on Jack's foot. Both of you reading the back of the same nutrition label.

guys. explain this.

The chat woke up immediately.

Whitaker: ????????

Santos: WHY DO THEY LOOK LIKE THEY FILE TAXES TOGETHER

Princess: NO BECAUSE WHY DOES THIS LOOK DOMESTIC

A minute passed.

Robby: Why does this look like a family outing?

Whitaker: DR ABBOTT HAS A SECRET LIFE???

Princess: ARE THEY LIVING TOGETHER???

Jack's phone buzzed. He glanced down at it with the unbothered expression of a man reading something mildly interesting.

Robby: Be honest. Is this what you meant when you said you had plans today?

Robby: Also. Since when do you willingly enter pet stores?

Jack scoffed quietly, the sound of someone privately entertained.

You glanced over. "What?"

"Nothing."

"You made a face."

"What face?"

"The one that means trouble."

Jack put his phone in his pocket and looked at you with the particular calm of someone who had already decided what they were going to do. "Come here for a second."

"Why?"

"Just stand there."

Before you could question it further he had his phone out and the camera open, and Riot, with absolutely no prompting, squeezed himself between the two of you with the satisfied energy of an animal who understood his assignment.

Click.

You frowned. "What are you doing?"

"Making things worse."

"What?"

"You'll see."

He uploaded it before you could look at the screen. 

Caption: Buying stuff for our son. Co-parenting is expensive.

The chat responded immediately and without mercy.

Santos: SON??????

Whitaker: WAIT THEY HAVE A KID?????

Princess: I KNEW THEY WERE OLD MARRIED PEOPLE

Dana: I'm muting this chat.

Then, Jack got a message from Robby. 

Robby: Jack. Please tell me the child is the dog.

You had no idea any of it had happened until the parking lot.

Your phone buzzed. Then again. Then three times in quick succession. You frowned and pulled it out, opened the notifications, and stopped walking entirely.

The photo. The caption. The comments multiplying in real time.

You stood there for a moment reading it. Then very slowly, with great deliberateness, you turned around.

Jack was opening the car door for Riot with the composed expression of a man who had done nothing wrong and was fully prepared to stand by that position.

"Jack," you said.

He looked up with a calm that was almost insulting. "Hm?"

"Jack Abbot."

The corner of his mouth moved. Just slightly. "You know," he said, turning back to Riot, "that's the first time you've called me by my first name."

You stared at him. "Delete it."

"No."

"Jack."

"Say it again."

You glared at him over the roof of the car. "I hate you."

Jack leaned casually against the door like he had nowhere else to be and no intention of moving anytime soon. "No, you don't."

You opened your mouth. Closed it. Then opened it again. Nothing came out, which was its own kind of answer and you both knew it. Because annoyingly enough he sounded way too sure of himself, the specific kind of sure that came from knowing something for a long time and simply waiting for the other person to catch up.

Jack's smirk widened just slightly. "See?"

You hated that smirk.

Almost as much as how badly you wanted to prove him wrong.

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Because despite the reader’s stoicism, and despite the flashbacks being filtered through her perspective—the relationship, the loss, the grief, the hesitation, the guilt, all of it—felt so emotionally charged that I genuinely didn’t know where to put all those feelings while reading. And then there’s the aftermath.

The fact that she had to return home and navigate all of that grief alone absolutely broke my heart. It’s almost as if losing Diaz shattered an entire family unit, scattering everyone in different directions. And even though it was a collective loss, she still ended up having to carry so much of it by herself, in isolation. And as if surviving that kind of grief wasn’t already enough, she also had to endure everyone else’s misplaced hurt. She never asked for any of that, but I understand why things unfolded the way they did. That’s what makes it hurt so much 😭😭😭

But I really hope that finally finding the courage to face Diaz’s brother gave her some measure of closure after carrying all of that hurt for so many years. After everything she’s endured, she deserves some kind of peace. And okay, MAJOR side-eye at Jack’s ambush tactics, lmao. But tbh I also know there was probably no other way to get her there. She’s stubborn enough that subtlety was never going to work 😅

And speaking of emotional survival—

You have no idea how grateful I was for all the Pitt shenanigans immediately afterwards to help offset the absolute emotional trench warfare I had just crawled through, lol. But what I really love is that, despite all the walls the reader puts up between herself and other people, she somehow keeps stumbling into found families wherever she goes. Of course, The Pitt could never replace what she lost.

But I love that she’s found another place where she can belong. Another place where love exists in that familiar, reluctant, messy way. A place where people care about her even when she doesn’t quite know what to do with that care.

And honestly, I think that’s one of my favourite things about her journey!

This was probably the worst decision you have ever made.

But, hell, now you officially jumped without a parachute, the ledge is gone, the air is passing by quickly, and your only hope is that you’ll somehow learn how to fly on the way down and you’ll be able to land on your feet.

The hallway outside has lost its symmetry, as you have lost your sanity, and now nothing seems to make sense anymore. Everything seems longer and crueler, your panic stretching the hallways into a long, suffocating throat. Each of your hectic footsteps makes you feel too exposed in this big mansion, they seem to echo your exact coordinates throughout the floors. Every hallway hears you, the walls themselves are turning their heads.

You take the first turn on instinct, then another, and another, trying to remember the route, trying to retrace the thread that brought you here, but your terror and all that bottled-up panic smashes sequence, steals direction, leaves you with nothing but speed because you know that if you stop, you’re done.

Your feel your heart everywhere. In your throat, in your ears, behind your eyes, beating against your teeth.

You blow past a side table where a cluster of pale lilies sits, blooming so aggressively, looking so wrong and even ugly in the corner of your eye, you have to take another turn.

You’re no longer thinking, you’re just running.

Your chest is a hollow chamber and all you hear is your own pants when you pass a maid who startles and calls something you don’t catch. You pass a window tall as a church promise and for one insane second consider throwing yourself through it. 

Somewhere behind you, from the office, you hear a loud crash. His voice follows. His voice. It sounds so much more blood-curdling now. 

He’s calling your name. Loud and baffled and then sharper. He doesn’t sound angry yet, but definitely alarmed in a way that makes every warning bell inside you turn rabid. Because there is something uniquely petrifying about hearing alarm in the voice of a man like him. It means you have disrupted the script. It means he does not understand. It means he is coming.

You run harder, every nerve in your body overflowing with adrenaline.

But, as expected, the house doesn’t simply spit you out. Corridors feed into corridors, archways into alcoves, burnished halls into rooms you have never seen, and every choice you make seems to slide you deeper into the belly of the place instead of toward freedom. 

With a ragged and desperate breath, you shove through one swinging door expecting another passage, and stumble instead into a kitchen vast enough to feed a wedding. There is all this gleaming steel and those butcher-block islands and hanging copper, bright under the lights in a way that feels grotesque after the dim severity of the office. 

It is wrong, all wrong, too open and yet somehow still a trap, because there is no front hall here, no visible exit, only counters and cabinets and startled staff, and you realize with a sick plunge of your stomach, that you have run yourself into a dead end dressed as luxury. 

This is bad, this is so bad. 

You stop abruptly, spinning around helplessly. The breath tears in and out of you like it is trying to escape without the rest of your body. The halls behind you are full of pounding footsteps, and you know it’s just one single set, but you also know it’s him.

He’s advancing and you can’t keep escaping.

A woman near the far counter goes still with a mixing bowl in her hands. Another man freezes by the sink with his hands in water. No one speaks. No one moves. The whole room seems to hold itself in suspension around your panic, everyone watching without watching, and then from somewhere behind you in the corridor comes Bucky’s voice sounds again, practically yelling your name—no confusion left now, only alertness, apprehension; and it punches you in the gut. It rings through you, through the kitchen, through the bright metal and tile and silence, and you know it has all been for nothing. 

But before there is anything you can do, before the ground can open a portal for you to fall through, Bucky appears in the kitchen doorway, looking like an avalanche with a name. A big name. A dangerous name. A name that will be the end of you. 

He doesn’t look raging in the obvious way, but he’s lost a bit of control. And for the man that he is, you don’t know how to survive it. And this intensity with which he came thundering after you is so extremely frightening because it looks expensive on him, tailored to fit, like one of his suits, like one of his watches, like all the impeccable and dangerous things he wears so naturally you once mistook them for elegance instead of that blaring warning sign they actually are. 

Why just have you been so stupid, my god.

He’s totally got you wrapped around his finger—and dick, as embarrassing and daunting as it is—or you would have maybe been able to open your eyes for a second, you idiot. 

But now they are open, wide, wide open, and you see him. You see him as the man he is. But maybe it’s a little too late now. 

He stops the moment he sees you pressed half-backward against the dark island, sees the way your hands have come up slightly as if your body has decided on defense without consulting you, sees the wet shine gathering in your eyes, the terror you are no longer managing to powder over, and something happens to his face that is so brief and so devastating, but all you can do is stare at him so you see that clean strike of realization. 

He doesn’t look confused anymore, and it makes him even more menacing.

He knows. He knows that you know. And he probably knows what he’s going to do to you now but you don’t know if you want to know that.

The air seems to cinch around you, seems to wrap itself around your throat, and squeezes. You can’t breathe. You don’t try to.

Bucky—James, your mind insists now with a sick recoil, James Buchanan Barnes, James Buchanan Barnes, biggest crime boss in the city—does not look away from you when he tilts his face to the staff. That, more than anything, makes your blood run strange. His attention stays fixed on you with a steadiness so absolute it feels like a physical thing, a hand at the back of your neck, while his voice turns toward everyone else in the room and comes out low and unquestionable. “Everyone out.” 

His command is dropped into the kitchen and nobody argues. The immediate obedience of his people makes you visibly shudder. 

A woman near the stove sets down a towel with trembling fingers. The man by the sink lowers his eyes and moves. Another staff member glances at you once with a quick look that seems almost guilty, almost pitying, and you feel the pulse of it pounding all around you, everywhere inside you. 

Nobody looks at you too long, nobody does anything besides leaving the fucking room. They won’t meet your fear and they won’t step between it and the source. Nobody here belongs to themselves enough to choose you over him. But it’s clear that they don’t. They’re his people for a reason. Nobody here will be on your side, whatever happens. 

A door swings. The kitchen empties in a matter of seconds, everyone slipping out with the furtive speed of people evacuating a room where something dangerous has just unsheathed itself. They leave with the scene in their eyes. They leave you with him. And the silence after the last one goes is so sudden it roars.

You take another step back and only feel the unhelpfully solid press of marble against your spine. There is nowhere else to go unless you want to climb onto the counter like a cornered animal, and for one hysterical beat of a second, the idea does not even seem ridiculous. 

You keep your eyes on him because looking away feels somehow more chilling, but your gaze is frantic within that line of sight, darting to the side entrance, to the swinging service door, to the corridor beyond him, to windows that suddenly seem decorative rather than useful, to every possible seam in the room where escape might be hiding in miniature.

There is none. The whole kitchen gleams at you with pitiless order that’s just full of steel and stone and copper, knives in their block and pots all around. 

He notices you looking, but you can’t care; all you have to care about is the distance between you and him, the distance between you and anything that might become escape if panic suddenly grew wings. 

Could you run past him? Maybe, if he were anyone else. Maybe, if this were some ordinary man with ordinary reflexes and an ordinary body and an ordinary life. 

But he is none of those things. You’re in this damn situation because he’s none of those things. 

He fills the doorway without even trying. He stands there in the collectedness of his dark clothes and encroaching presence, looking at you as if he can hear your thoughts tripping over each other and your fear has turned you transparent. 

His shadow has finally caught up to his skin and you now realize how dark it is.

Even if you got around him, where would you go? The front hall might as well be on another continent. Every corridor in this house has already left you stranded. There is no map in your mind now, only panic. No way out.

The knowledge gathers in your chest until it hurts. Behind your eyes, heat stings. Your throat tightens around a lump and only something choked leaves your lips. 

And Bucky sees all of it. You keep trying to shrink back from him because his very outline has now become a threat, and it doesn’t make your situation better, but he already knows, so you don’t have to pretend anymore. 

And his face alters. It’s as if the floor has given way under him. As if he had stepped expecting hard tiles and found air.

He does not advance. That should help. It does not. He stays where he is, one hand dropping slowly from the doorframe to his side, as if he understands that any sudden movement from him might send you straight through the nearest pane of glass. 

There is a fervor to him now that feels different from the one you knew in bed, at dinner, in the soft-lit luxury of his attention. It has made you feel protected, loved, worshipped. 

But there is no feeling of that anymore, none of that, because now it’s stripped of adornment, revealed as what it perhaps always was beneath all that heat and gentleness. It’s focus. Pure and frightening focus. 

His eyes are on you in that unwavering, devastating way of his, but the expression in them is nothing easy. There is something dark in there, something grim and braced, something that knows a door has just slammed shut and is already calculating what can still be salvaged from the wreckage. 

His mouth is set. His jaw is hard enough to cast shadows. He looks, absurdly, heartbreakingly, like a man who has been struck and is refusing to touch the bruise. But he stands, and he’s still so tall, much taller than you thought he could become, and he is not the man you thought you knew. 

He stands there with his hands visible, shoulders squared but not aggressive, and the intensity in him is bridled.

His stare does not feel like a threat in the crude sense, but it’s so full of attention, too much attention, because total attention from a man like him is its own species of fear. 

“Sweetheart.”

His voice has changed. It is calm but only in pretense. It is soft, technically, but not the way it was before. Before, his softness had warmth in it, a hand held out in the dark. 

But this is lower. Straighter. It has gone cool around the edges. It’s not vicious or unkind in any sense, but your body clocks it instantly. It’s almost formal in its restraint, as though he’s speaking across the lip of something that’s close to breaking and he’s trying not to widen the crack.

And that nickname makes you want to let the tears fall. Whatever he tries to achieve by calling you that, it doesn’t work. It’s just torture how familiar he tries to make it sound. 

His gaze falls in fast snaps over your face, your posture, your trembling hands. “This looks bad,” he concedes roughly. His throat works once before he continues. “I know it does. But it isn’t what you think it is.”

The words land in you and do nothing. They just sink. Sit there.

He studies your face, sees he has not reached you at all. “What did you see, baby? What has you—” He breaks off with a crack, shakes his head slowly, and lets out a shuddering breath, eyes still on you. “Tell me what you saw.”

What answer could you possibly give him? 

That you are looking at his mouth and thinking of all the times it softened around your name, and your own mind keeps turning traitor and overlaying that tenderness with headlines, with whispers, with ravening rumor? 

That the same voice which once coaxed and soothed now sounds capable of making rooms empty and men obey and whole situations forgotten? That the current version of his voice is a masterclass in control and it terrifies you to no end?

That his hands are hanging open at his sides, looking so damn human and ordinary, as though they’ve never done anything wrong? 

Which is a lie, you now know, a lie that runs deep and leaves you scarred, because all you can think is that these bare hands are the same hands you’ve had under your chin, lifting your face to his, tucking hair behind your ear, buttoning you up against the cold, and you’ve had them gripping you tight in the dark, moving inside you until you couldn't breathe, wrecking you in the best way possible.

These hands were your favorite things. 

But looking at them now, you picture what they are doing when you aren’t around. Doing the dirty work, the ugly work, the unspeakable work, hidden back in the blacked-out corners of a life he kept under lock and key.

Your throat feels too dry to talk and you stay quiet, letting the stillness in the room ripen, letting your lack of words and the fear in your eyes speak for themselves.

A hard, hollow tension knots his face, makes his jaw grind, and look as solid as a piece of rock. His hands ball into fists and when your eyes snap to them immediately, your body already flinching, he flexes them, but it seems forced. There is an almost brute rigidity to his throat, a silent scream of dread choked down only barely.

“What do you know?” he grits out through clenched teeth. 

The question is gentle in shape and brutal in substance. It makes your stomach turn. Because it sounds like a test. It sounds like inventory. It sounds like the kind of thing a ruthless man would ask before deciding what to do with the damage.

You let your fingers grip the edge of the counter. You can’t answer him. All you can do is try to breathe. All you can do is stare at the exit behind him, and his body standing between it. 

He draws in a slow breath, lets it out. “Look at me, Y/n. Please.”

You didn’t know some part of you would still obey, but you notice too late. Maybe it’s better this way. Your eyes lift fully to his. 

And you can actually see the way he has lost his grip. It’s right there in his eyes. If you were to describe it you’d say it looks distraught. As if he’s lost, his entire biography that’s been neatly written on paper now ripped away and he can’t find the next line. 

Judging by the way you act and look at him, he knows you know something, he just doesn't know what, and the mystery is eating him alive. Just for one disorienting second he doesn’t look that much like this untouchable figure from all those disturbing rumors, but rather like a simple man who knows that if he tries to force his way out of this, he’s just confirming your worst fears about him.

“My name,” he starts with a little hesitance. The gravelly low timbre of his voice makes you shudder, “is James Buchanan Barnes.”

Something in your face gives you away. 

You feel it the moment it happens. Some tiny involuntary flinch. Some helpless widening. 

Because something crosses his expression, his throat bobs hard enough to show that everything inside him is suddenly in pieces. 

He sees that the name is not new to you. He sees that you are already standing several steps ahead of where he hoped this conversation was.

He goes very still.

“You knew that already,” he acknowledges, and it almost hurts how he tries to sound calm about it all. 

Your mouth is dry. Your whole body feels like a struck match. You let out a pitiful small breath.

He takes one careful step forward, and it’s not really a step, not even truly an advance, but you recoil so sharply, you ram your whole body against the wall of marble behind you. Your back stings, but your eyes sting more. 

His face changes with your reaction, something like pain flashing through the severe framework of him before he reins it back in. 

“How?” he asks, and he’s no longer trying for calm. He ducks his head, pleading eyes on you, and he speaks with a wounded quiet. “Sweetheart, how did you find out?”

Your throat works around the answer. “Your tags.” It comes out so faint it is almost nothing, just a shaking breath that accidentally caught a few letters on the way out. 

For a second he shuts his eyes. For just one cut of time. 

His head tips back the slightest amount, and he deflates. A breath of air leaves him in a hitching, rattling shudder, like he’s finally run out of things to hold onto.

He looks back at you and seems briefly at a loss. James Buchanan Barnes, man of closed doors and fixed outcomes, with no ready sentence in his hands. 

It is strange and unnerving and it makes you talk more, bracing for him to yell and threaten and turn cold. 

“And,” you whisper, voice wobbling and blundering around in your mouth, “there was a gun.“ 

You want to explain, want to urge that you didn’t mean to find it, didn’t mean to come across anything at all. You want him to know you would like to dump your eyes in a container of white paint so your vision is a blank canvas and you can color it with other pictures, but it’s too late, and your words already seem to break across him, differently.

He does not move at first. He almost flinches, but catches it halfway, as if his body forgot for a moment to be disciplined. 

His eyes stay on you, and all that’s in there are things you’ve never seen in him before. Or in anyone, really. It is a stricken grief, resulting from the way every new piece of your fear is arriving inside him one by one and finding purchase. 

He looks at you like he can see the exact route your mind took from one discovery to the next, and hates every mile of it.

“Baby, I—” he croaks, having to pause. Instead, he starts toward you again, even slower this time, palms open a little, perhaps meaning only to soothe, perhaps meaning only to be nearer, but simply more trepidation triggers in you before thought can intervene. “Please listen to me—”

Your gaze snags on the knife block. 

The sleek black handles. The bright clean suggestion of defense. It’s without thought that you run to grab one. 

It is graceless and frantic and you don’t brandish it like someone brave in a film. You don’t know how to do this well enough for that and you don’t have the nerve to think about it. 

Your hand shakes around the handle almost immediately, and you pull it close to your chest, because fighting this vile man would be ludicrous considering who he is and who you are, knife or not, but you use it to protect yourself with the mere fact of holding something sharp. Hopeful that this thing will keep your horror from spilling out of your body altogether. 

The blade catches the light and makes it meaner. You hate that you have done this. You hate more that you had to.

Bucky stops dead.

The whole room seems to stop with him.

His eyes go first to the knife, then back to your face, and what crosses his expression then is so nakedly agonizing it is difficult to bear. 

Because he sees that you are not trying to threaten him, unlike how someone in danger might. 

You are not foolish enough to think a kitchen knife turns you into his equal. You are holding it because your body needs one small fiction to survive on—the fiction that you are not entirely empty-handed in a room with a man who could ruin you if he chose to. The fiction that you still belong, in some tiny harrowed way, to yourself.

“Hey,” he says, and his voice cracks clean through the middle of the word.

You have never heard that happen to him before. Never heard his composure split like badly fired glass.

His stare stays locked on yours, but now there is no distance in it, no coolness, no stranger’s cadence. Just a visceral, human ache. “Hey,” he says again, softer, but it sounds so incredibly heavy. It’s the way you’d talk to someone who’s just woken up from a nightmare and doesn't know where they are yet. “I’m— I’m not going to hurt you.”

Your grip tightens. The knife trembles visibly. “Don’t come closer.”

He stops breathing for half a beat and nods slowly. 

“Okay.” The word is a single rasp. “I won’t.” He swallows. You see the muscle move hard in his throat. “I won’t come any closer.”

You cannot stop shaking, no matter how hard you try, because a man with his power shouldn’t see you be so obviously afraid, but there is nothing you can do.

“Please believe me, sweetheart, when I say that I never intended to hurt you,” he swears, and there is no command in him now, none of that cold-sounding authority from a moment ago when he emptied the room with few syllables.

This is worse, in its own way. This undone version of him, this man trying to hold himself very still because the sight of you recoiling has clearly perturbed something structural inside him. “I have a thousand sins on my head, and it’s no use to claim otherwise now,” he speaks with a vulnerability in his tone that washes past you. “I’ve done a lot of things I can’t take back, but hurting you was never on the table. Okay? It was never even a possibility. You were supposed to be the only thing I didn’t ruin,” he ends with a lacerated wince.

You stare at him and have no idea how you can understand anything at all.

The knife handle bites into your palm. Your chest rises and falls too fast. The kitchen is suddenly too loud with all that humming of the refrigerator, the lights, the distant bloodstream of the mansion; and in the center of it all he stands facing you with that wrecked look in his eyes, as if your fear is not merely inconvenient to him but unbearable, and he’d rather be struck than watched this way by you.

And in a world that wasn't currently collapsing, maybe you’d actually care, maybe you’d actually notice how he would take a bullet to the chest just to stop you from flinching, but all you can think is that you are standing in the house of James Buchanan Barnes, with a knife against your own ribs as much as against him, and the man looking at you like heartbreak has found him at last is still the same man the city says should never be underestimated.

It’s so silent all of a sudden that the kitchen seems to be held in a trance. It feels as if there is a vacuum pressing against the walls and now the molecules of the room are terrified to touch the mess of what’s happening. 

The last bit of help you could have possibly still leaned on due to your desperation has vanished, echoes of footsteps now pull back into the depths of this mansion.

The overheads feel hostile, throwing down a flat glare that skims over the stainless steel and floorboards with an inert eye. 

And centered in that manufactured peace is him. 

James Buchanan Barnes.

The name has already erupted once inside your chest, but it keeps echoing, reverberating through your bones in smaller aftershocks. It feels strange to attach it to the man standing in front of you, when his hands have mapped every part of you—right to the most intimate ones—you’ve come to recognize his voice even in half-sleep and his laugh once wound through the cage of your ribs, vibrating against the bone until you couldn't tell its rhythm from your own heartbeat.

It feels like a wronged ownership. It feels like a glitch, an error in the logic of the world, but who are you to find a way out of it. Surrounded by him, in a mansion that is now suddenly as big as the world itself.

But you see it now. And god, it’s so painfully clear. So agonizingly obvious. 

You were delusional, you know that. It’s what hurts so terribly bad. You know exactly how this looks to anyone else. After all, this all started with you dating a guy for over a month and not even knowing his actual, legal name. But when you’re used to being nobody, a little bit of hyper-focused attention feels like a drug. He looked at you as if you were the only person in the room, and you would get this tight, anxious knot in your throat, thinking don’t ruin this. Asking for a last name or a background check felt like a quick way to feel high-maintenance, and you didn’t want to give him a reason to feel uncomfortable and walk away.

It was a habit born of pure insecurity, being so grateful for the crumbs of love that you don’t dare ask who’s baking the bread. He must have picked up on that on day one. He must have realized right away that as long as he kept making you feel special, you’d keep your mouth shut and let him stay hidden.

He used your loneliness, your blind spots. You were so desperately hoping to be seen, that you fell for the most obvious trap. And it’s your own fault, really. But it still makes you feel completely hollow, like someone scooped the air right out of your lungs with a cold spoon.

Now you have to live with the shame of that mistake.

Your jaw aches from clenching it, trying to swallow down the urge to throw up right there on the kitchen floor.

His presence alone seems to pull at the corners of the ceiling, dragging it down to squash you like a grape. He anchors the room to his foundation, consumes it with all he has, and tracks you with a pinpoint focus that has you shivering and sweating, because his gaze is treating the harsh thudding of your pulse as more vital than the massive, blood-stained kingdom currently cooling its heels on the other side of the door.

The roar in your ears turns outwards, seemingly engulfing the whole room with your panicked pulse. Your vision narrows down until the room stops spinning, and for the first time, you actually feel the air in the kitchen

And in the quiet, your awareness gives you the alarm that there is still something jarringly chilling resting just above your heart. It takes you a moment to realize it’s something physical. There is a weight there that now suddenly feels so deeply misplaced. 

Your hand moves on its own, your fingers lifting toward your throat to find the source of that cold, sinister pressure.

The tips of your fingers brush pearls. 

And for a moment, you stay frozen there, grazing the smooth curve of one luminous bead where the necklace drapes across your throat. 

It once made you smile, had your shoulders drop in ease when you made contact with this present of Bucky. But it no longer feels like a present at all, it feels like a bribe, a hook, a trap because its ultimate purpose surely wasn’t meant as a gift but rather to restrict your freedom and keep you bound to him.

This necklace, these shiny pearls, they aren’t about you. Honestly, you don’t think anything is about you. It never was. It’s just a reflection of what he wants you to be, confining you in his version of your identity.

He manipulated you and stole you and wanted to make you believe you’re the luckiest damn girl in the world.

And you had been. But now you’re just the stupidest.

And you keep on being, because your mind just continues jumping back to the evening he gave it to you, how it felt so soft and intimate, something chosen carefully and fastened around your neck with that glint of pride that lived in Bucky’s eyes. And you want to cry and break down at the way he stood there in front of you so awkwardly with the luxurious velvet box in his hand like it was something far more serious than jewelry. The way his voice had gone rough when he said he saw them and thought of you.

And now, sitting against your collarbone all cold, these are no longer gems, but tiny hooks sinking deeper into your skin, reminding you with every little sting, that you walked into this prison willingly.

You let James Buchanan Barnes clasp it around your neck. The man whose name crawls across newspapers like a stain. The man whose stories carry blood and conspiracies and savagery in their wake.

Somehow you manage to close your fingers around the strand despite of their shakiness.

Across the kitchen, Bucky’s gaze drops to your hand the moment it moves.

The necklace feels impossibly smooth beneath your touch, each pearl round and shining like a row of innocent little moons.

A gift.

From a man you didn’t know.

Or maybe a man you knew too well, just not in the way the world did.

Your throat feels hot suddenly and you know it's the cursed pearls burning holes there, pressing into your pulse with every overwhelmed beat of your heart.

You cannot stand it.

Your fingers curl harder.

Bucky's gaze snaps up to your face, then quickly back to your hands, and then he goes still. But still in the way of an animal that sensed the crack of a branch in the forest. Every line of him tightens in subtle increments, his shoulders locking, his breathing halting so abruptly you see the pause ruffle through his chest.

He knows what your heart doesn’t yet.

His attention sharpens and his eyes grow wide. It almost seems like he’s about to move toward you.

“Hey—” he starts softly, though the word is unfinished, frail, fearing the direction your thoughts are taking.

But your brain is no longer interested in choosing to make decisions carefully.

The necklace feels oppressive, every inch of it tied to a truth you did not have when he first placed it there, and so you can’t think or react any differently.

Your hand jerks in one swift motion just as Bucky releases a desperate choking sound.

The strand snaps free from your neck with a sharp little noise, like a thread breaking under too much strain, and now the pearls explode outward from your hand and scatter across the kitchen floor like a sudden spill of tiny white stars. They strike the tile with a bright, haphazard clatter that echoes far too loudly in the empty room.

tik—tik—tik—tik—

Some bounce high, ricocheting against cabinet legs. Others roll wildly across the floor, spinning in spasmodic circles before coming to a stop beneath stainless steel counters and chair legs.

The sound fills the kitchen in poignant, crystalline bursts.

A rain of little impacts.

A beautiful mess.

For a second you don’t even breathe.

You just stare at them—those small, perfect pearls—rolling farther and farther away from each other, punctuating the heartbreak in the air.

Across from you, Bucky doesn’t move. Something is breaking across his face. His breath leaves him in a soft, stunned exhale, and all he can do is stare with his eyes unguarded. It startles you.

He takes a step back. Not a deliberate one. More like his body forgot the floor was there. His boot slides half a pace behind him as though the sound of those pearls hitting the tile physically pushed him away from you.

His mouth parts.

For a moment he looks like he cannot quite process what he just witnessed.

His eyes—those confident, storm-colored eyes that usually hold such controlled intensity—have widened in a way you have never seen before. It doesn’t seem to look like anger, or anything like it.

It looks like hurt. Pure, unhidden hurt.

His gaze falls to the floor, tracking the scattered pearls skittering across the kitchen tiles, watching them roll away from where you stand with that look in his eyes that says he never wished to see them destroyed.

Then his eyes return to you. Slowly. And the expression there is devastating.

Because it is not rage.

It is not even disappointment.

It is heartbreak so unexpected and unfiltered it seems to hollow his chest from the inside.

His jaw tightens as if he tries to speak, but no words come immediately. The muscles along his throat move with a hard swallow, his chest rising and falling once in a slow, unsteady breath.

You realize then that he is looking at your bare throat.

The place where the necklace used to rest, and he stares at the place with sullen eyes.

Then his eyes lift again, meeting yours, and they are still wide, still aching.

For the first time since you’ve known him, Bucky Barnes looks like a man who has just watched something precious fall apart in his hands and realized too late that he cannot gather the pieces fast enough to put it back together.

And in the bright, echoing kitchen, the last pearl finishes rolling.

Tick.

Then silence returns, and your dread turns harrowing and now Bucky doesn’t seem to know where to put his hands, which is such a small, irrational thing to notice in the middle of your terror and yet your mind notices it anyway, because this is a man who has always seemed like a structure that was built out of conviction, who has been a straight line for you to follow in your world of scribbles, a man who enters every room as though the room had the good sense to expect him, and now he stands before you with your fear pointed at him in the shape of a kitchen knife and looks, inarguably, like he has been shoved off-script and dropped into the crack that formed in his foundation and now he is walled in by the very bricks he laid.

His eyes stay on your face, then the knife, then your face again, careful, heartbroken, alert in that frighteningly intense way of his, and you feel yourself shiver as he is tracking every tremor in your fingers, every drag of your breath, every microscopic shift in your balance in case you bolt again or collapse or cut yourself by accident on the trembling edge of your own panic.

“What you think you know about me,” he starts, and his voice is lower now, roughened at the seams, “what you’ve heard… what people say, it isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t even most of it.”

You barely hear the words. They hit the air and fall uselessly to the floor. Because what else would a man like him say, standing in a cathedral-sized kitchen in a house full of people who obey him before he finishes speaking, after you found the gun and the tags and the name that can turn a city’s rumor mill rabid by itself?

No matter what he says, no matter that he looks so unbelievably shattered—the shape of him is wrong now. That is what your body keeps insisting on. Wrong in the doorway, wrong under these lights, wrong with that caution and that gentleness still trying to live in his face as if it is genuine. You cannot make him fit into one meaning anymore. He is split down the middle in your mind—tender and terrible, gentle and catastrophic—and the fracture is making noise inside you.

He takes a breath, slow, as if he is trying not to startle you even with the sound of his lungs working. “I know how this looks.”

A cough breaks in your throat, or maybe it's a huff or a wet laugh, or whatever, but it hurts coming up and out of your throat. Your hand shakes so badly the knife glints in nervous little flashes. “You used me.”

The sentence leaves you wheezy and small and much too true-feeling inside your own head. But they are out, and you take a whimpering breath, and two tears fall. They don’t arrive elegantly, and they sure as hell don’t spill subtly. They feel hot and you feel humiliated and betrayed, so deeply betrayed, and you hate that they are coming in front of him, giving him the satisfaction because your body is not able to choose a fight, to give you steel and armor and an exit and a miracle. All it can provide you with is dread and tears, and a terribly shaking kitchen knife in your unpractical hands. Your whole body has become an argument against calm and there is nothing you can do.

His face changes so sharply it is almost like watching a flame twist drastically in wind.

“No,” he gets out quickly, and his voice trips over itself. It is denial stripped to the bone. Pure and cruel because he’s genuinely the greatest actor on earth. “No,” he chokes out again, softer and somehow more desperate. “No, no, I— It's not— I never—” He swallows, the line of his throat moving hard. He looks like he is about to walk barefoot through broken glass without letting you see the blood. “You matter to me. You— God, shit, that doesn’t even come close to—”

“Stop,” you whimper while a fresh tear slips down. You shake your head because the words feel obscene now, feel almost insulting in their tenderness, like someone laying roses on a crime scene.

“I’m not pretending.”

“Stop.”

His jaw flexes. He looks toward the ceiling for half a second, and it seems like he is trying to gather language before it deserts him entirely, and when his gaze comes back to you there is something naked in it, something grim and pleading and painfully real. He seems to grope for something that keeps him standing.

“I wanted to tell you,” he despairs, voice scratchy. “I was going to.”

You stare at him through your blurred vision. Every instinct in you rejects the sentence on impact. It sounds nonsensical. The knife quivers against your chest with each breath you are somehow able to take, but they are shuddering.

“When?” you choke out. “After what? After I was stupid enough? After I—”

“No.” He takes a step before remembering himself and stopping immediately, hands opening at his sides. “No. When it was safe.”

The word safe almost makes you laugh, except there is nothing funny left in you.

He hears how deranged it sounds in this room, and grief moves across his face in one dark, swift shadow. “Listen to me,” he presses, and his voice cracks, stripped of that expensive control he wears so well. “I know this life is ugly from the outside. I know what my name sounds like to people. I know what kind of stories get told. I knew if I handed you all of it too soon, all at once, you’d run before you ever had the chance to know what was real.”

Your tears keep coming and you don’t have it in you to wipe them away. You fear your heart won’t ever be able to unclench again after this day. If you even make it out of here. “So you thought you’d just let me” —fall in love first— “into your life the way you did?”

He closes his eyes, and you know the sentence hit exactly where it meant to. When he looks at you again there is nothing smooth or seamless about him, and you have never seen him this way. Because you have never really known him. He is no longer buttoned-up and bulletproof. He honestly looks about ready to be hit in the heart one final, fatal time. “I thought I would give you time,” he supplicates quietly, voice husky. “I thought I would let you know me before the rest of it ruined everything.” The breath that follows his words sounds full of sorrow and a deeply seated regret. “Which it seems like it has.”

Yes, it has. Yes, he ruined it. But would you have felt any other way if you found out another way? In another setting, maybe while you were tangled in the sheets together, or while he was holding your hands? You don’t know because it didn’t happen that way and you found out the way you did and now the world is upside down and all wrong-angled, and your mind is spinning in a room with no corners, completely unanchored by a lie you never saw coming, or maybe you have, because a guy like him couldn’t ever want a girl like you, and perhaps first and foremost you’re just mad at yourself.

Your throat has gone tight with crying, with fear, with the dizzying effort of keeping your body upright when your whole nervous system is trying to flee in eight directions at once. He sees you struggling and looks halfway to moving again, then stops himself so hard the restraint shows all over him.

“I’m a patient man,” he keeps going, and you just want to run past him, out of this hell. You don’t hear how there is no pride in his voice, no menace, just a worn sort of honesty, as if this is the one truth he can still offer without it breaking on impact. “I would have waited. As long as I needed to. I was waiting for the right moment, for when you felt safe with me, for when I knew you wouldn’t hear my name and only hear every lie this city tells itself at night.” His voice lowers further. “For when you loved me enough to at least stay in the room while I explained.”

You blink at him as if he has said something in a language your body no longer speaks.

And then, because this nightmare apparently still has room to worsen, he says, very softly, “Because I love you.”

All you can do is stare at this stranger, and it feels like you are looking at him through a broken window.

It is not the first time he has said it, not at all, and you had loved how he had no shame in telling you, how he pressed those very words into your skin night after night, even this early into your relationship.

Gosh, you had cherished it, fallen deeper for him because of it, and now you know it's all been part of his manipulation. So what else should it be now. But at the same time—why should he still be saying it? How can he still say that? How can he say that now, after all of this, after you know who he is, after the room has filled with the bomb of revelation? What kind of man says I love you while being the very thing you are trying to escape from?

You don’t understand him. You have no clue about who this man is and it is making your hands sweat around the handle. You don’t understand how his eyes can look this shattered, how his voice can sound this human, how his face can hold this much pain and still belong to James Buchanan Barnes.

The knife is still trembling against your chest. Your arm aches from holding it so tightly. The tears keep slipping down no matter how furiously you blink. He stands there with grief in his eyes and power in every line of his body, and both things are true at once, and both things are hurting worse because no single version of him will stay still long enough to be hated cleanly.

“I was going to ease you into it,” he explains achingly, as if confession has broken loose now and cannot be coaxed back in. “Slowly. Over time. I was going to tell you what I could, when I could, and let you decide what to do with it piece by piece. I was never going to throw you into the deep end and watch you drown in it.” His throat works. “Y/n, I’m so fucking sorry you had to find out like this.”

But you are not really listening anymore. Or rather, you hear every word and none of them settle. They clatter against your panic and bounce off immediately only to land in a repressed corner of your mind.

Because maybe he means them. Maybe that is the tragedy of it. Maybe he means every single inconceivable word. But meaning them does not open the door. Meaning them does not make this house less of a trap or his name less of a threat or your pulse any less palpitating in your throat. Meaning them does not undo the gun, the tags, the scathingly smooth way everyone in this place disappears when he tells them to. Meaning them does not turn James Buchanan Barnes back into only Bucky, back into the man whose shirt you wanted to pull on because it smelled like him.

All you need now is a way out.

You don’t want justice, or answers, or even the damn truth. You just want a way out of this. You want to get the hell away from him and everything that smells and looks like him. And the room starts reorganizing itself around that instinct. The service door behind him. The hallway to the left. The distance to the far counter. Whether he is standing on the balls of his feet or flat. Whether the island might slow him for a second. Whether dropping the knife would help or harm you. Whether there is any point at all in planning when this is his house, his kingdom, his maze, and you are just a girl crying in the center of it with shaking hands and nowhere good to go.

He sees your eyes move and something in his face folds inward with understanding, with woe, with the excruciating knowledge that while he is pouring his heart out in rough little pieces, all you are doing is looking for exits. He looks completely emptied out, as if his ribs had been pried open and the only soft part of him had been torn away.

“Baby—” And now he just sounds pleading. But he doesn’t get the chance to keep on going with his drama.

The kitchen ignites with noise before you even understand what you are hearing. There was just you with your messy breathing and Bucky standing a few feet away with that awfully gutted look on his face and then the door slams open so hard the plaster cracks and the sound ricochets against your nervous system.

A crowd of men comes flooding through the opening, like a breach in a dam, so fast and threatening and all of them primed for dirtier work than anyone should ever have to do. The floor shudders under their hard slam of boots. Nobody hesitates and nobody asks questions. They all just move on some sick instinct, weapons out and raised in the space of a single heartbeat.

And now all of them are pointed at you.

The sound that hitches in your throat is not at all dignified or brave. You wish you could stare at the end of your life with at least a small sense of bravery, but it doesn’t seem like it. Every weapon these uniformed men hold is fixed on your ribs, your throat, your eyes, and the paring knife you are gripping feels pathetic. It is a useless piece of household metal against a wall of black iron, against men who don’t care that you are small and fearful.

Even so, your knuckles go numb around the handle from how hard you are gripping it. Your fingers lock up, your skin flashing from freezing cold to scorching hot while your heart thrashes against your ribs.

You think, irrationally, that this is how it happens then. There is no big speech, no lightning strike from the sky. It is just going to happen here on the linoleum, next to a bowl of apples on the counter, and a row of clean water glasses that are catching the light of the kitchen while strangers decide to put bullets in you.

Bucky pivots.

It happens so quickly it feels supernatural, like a weather change, like the room altering under the weight of him. He steps in front of you without quite blocking you, but enough that every single man in that doorway seems to remember all at once who exactly they have just disobeyed.

His expression does not merely harden; it shears. Whatever softness had remained in his face a moment ago is gone so completely it is frightening, scraped away until all that remains is authority in its most lethal form.

You feel fused to the counter behind you. You wish you would be.

He fixes his stare on his men and his eyes become glacial, pale and freezing, incandescent with a fury that somehow feels far more menacing than an outburst. He speaks, and the volume is so low that the room has to go completely breathless to catch it.

“Guns down.”

The response isn’t fast enough. No one moves quickly enough. One of the guards hesitates—just a fraction, just long enough to die for it in any other circumstance—and Bucky’s gaze lands on him so heavily, it’s as if he is deciding where to leave the body.

“I said,” he repeats, and his voice comes out with a rough friction, stripped of any emotion except the promise to do harm, “if any one of you ever points a weapon at my girl again, I’ll put you in the ground myself and make sure nobody bothers digging you back up. Do you understand me?”

His words are deadly. It doesn’t even sound like he’s acting at all, he just sounds absolutely lethal. He talks as though he has already buried people before and wouldn’t think twice about doing it again.

Around you, the momentum of the raid falters. The guards look genuinely unnerved, expressions switching so quickly between shame, panic, and obedience in ugly little flashes. Guns lower and now point toward the floorboards. A muted apology gets muttered into the silence and some of them take a step back. But it is too late, far too late, because the last thread inside you has already snapped, and your body no longer cares about reason.

You run.

There is no time for anything else; you simply hurl yourself at the nearest gap in the room, toward the delusive hope of open space, of slipping between bodies, of somehow becoming smoke, becoming speed, becoming anything but this cornered and shaking thing inside your own skin.

You aim for the narrow corridor between Bucky and the island counter, convinced by sheer panic that if you can just get past him this once, just this once, the house might cleft and let you go. Your shoulder twists, your breath catches, your feet slip against tile and then catch again, and the world blurs into motion and noise and the blood-bright animal need to escape.

But Bucky is faster.

His arms hook around your waist in one brutal, seamless movement, and it yanks you backward before you’ve even made it past his shoulder. Suddenly you are no longer running, your feet lose the air, leaving you floating for half a heartbeat, before you are driven hard into the breadth and heat of his chest.

The cry you let out this time actually tears your throat. You thrash on instinct, your body fighting him with the full deranged force of your mind freaking out, and somewhere in that struggle your hand jerks.

The knife you have been using as a means of senseless protection, hits resistance. It slides cleanly, sinking into skin and it makes you gasp sharply, your lungs suddenly jamming. It’s not your skin.

The blade has opened a shallow red line across his forearm.

And that’s gotta be it. You’re now totally and completely fucked.

The knife drops from your hand and clatters to the floor.

For one aghast second you stare at the bead of red welling against his skin, bright as a neon sign, and horror crashes through you so adamantly it almost eclipses your fear.

But Bucky does not let go. He does not even flinch properly or draw back his arms. His wounded arm stiffens only enough to keep you from pitching forward, his other hand coming up to cradle the back of your head, not pinning now so much as containing, as if he is trying to physically keep something from breaking apart right there in his grip.

He seemingly is completely blind to his own bleeding skin, as if the knife you were holding was never a danger to his life and only a threat to yours. Even with his blood on the floorboards, his only instinct is to pull you deeper into his chest.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he calls, and the transformation in his voice makes your head spin, because the man who just threatened death into a roomful of armed soldiers is gone again, folded away, leaving only this hoarse, pleading tenderness that feels almost more agonizing. His mouth is at your temple, right at your hairline, his breath gasping against your skin. “Baby, baby, stop. Please—please, don’t do this, you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

You fight him anyway because your body refuses to do anything else. Your hands shove uselessly at his chest, your shoulders wrench, your whole body convulses with the effort of getting free. But he is built like a locked gate, and every single push only burns through the last of your energy. Tears pour hot and shamefully down your face. Your lungs burn. The room swims at the edges. Somewhere nearby, boots shuffle, and Bucky snarls over your head without releasing you.

“Out.”

It is one word, but every person in the kitchen obeys it instantly. You hear the kitchen staff backing away, hear the door open and shut, feel the room empty until there is no one left but you and him and the sound of your own sobbing.

Bucky’s hold eases just a fraction, softening the pressure so you can actually draw in air even if inhaling right now feels like swallowing water. He presses his cheek against your hair for one heavy second, and when he speaks again his voice is breaking in places you have never heard it break before.

“Listen to me,” he murmurs, each word roughened by strain, by remorse, by something that sounds so heartbreakingly sincere you almost hate him for it. “Hear me out, sweetheart, please. I got you. I got you. Nobody’s gonna touch you, nobody’s gonna lay a hand on you. I won’t! I would never. You hear me? You’re safe.”

Safe.

The word is a total deformity. It is so grotesque in this moment you could probably laugh, except it comes out as a broken cry instead.

You feel the way his body tenses around the sound, how it seems to travel straight through him with his heart as the target. He bows his head, his lips brushing your temple by accident or desperation, you cannot tell which.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and now there is nothing controlled left in him, no command, no careful poise, only a man fraying in real time. “Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry. I wanted you to know, doll, I did, just—not like this. Fuck, not like this. You mean everything to me. You gotta believe that. You are everything.”

You shake your head against his chest, small and uncoordinated, feeling spent. You do not know whether you are denying him, begging him, or simply coming apart. His shirt is damp beneath your face now, whether from your tears or the sweat chilled over your skin or the blood from his arm, whatever it is, it feels symbolic somehow—one more blurred line in a night made of them.

“I wasn’t gonna let anybody hurt you,” he whispers, and even that seems to drag through his throat, hitting the walls of it. “Nobody would ever be able to hurt you. Especially me, my love, especially me! I swear to God.” His forehead grinds into yours until you can taste the heat of his skin. “I’m still the same guy who kissed you this morning. I don't care if I’m a monster to the rest of the world, but not to you, sweetheart, please not to you. I would never—god, I would cut my own hands off before I ever used them to hurt you. You have to believe me, darling, please!”

But your body no longer knows the language of swearing, or soothing, or reason. Your muscles don’t translate his pleading into safety. Your body only knows that he is stronger than you, and that the arms holding you are the same arms that can dismantle a life without raising his pulse. The palm mapped so carefully across the curve of your head is the exact same hand that commands a firing squad, directs the local precincts, and seals fates with a slight tilt of his chin.

Every touch from him now delivers a repulsive duality—a rescue that feels like an arrest, a stroke that resembles a chokehold, an overwhelming affection that wears the exact outline of a cell.

You can feel how easy this is for him, how negligible his effort is in keeping you contained even while he tries his best to appear harmless. That insulting fact finally starves out the last bit of resistance left in your veins. Your nervous system runs out of fuel, leaving your body to go completely toothless against his chest, without actually surrendering or any returning trust. Your body is simply done.

Your fingers drop their useless leverage against his chest, your joints go limp and your knees refuse to carry your weight anymore.

You sag in his hold all at once. The sobs keep coming, but weaker now, thinning out, scraping instead of breaking. Bucky feels the change immediately. His grip loosens just enough to become support instead of restraint, his palm rubbing between your shoulder blades in one of those soothing motions you used to love so much and it makes your chest ache with a fresh wave of grief.

“That’s it,” he coos, though his voice sounds completely mangled by the words. “That’s it, honey. I know. I know.”

You don’t know what he means by that. You’re not sure he does either. Perhaps he simply recognizes that your stamina has bottomed out, that even the sharpest panic has its boundaries, and that the rush of survival instincts always burns hot and fast, leaving behind this full-body collapse.

He holds your dead weight upright anyway. He keeps murmuring into your hair but it doesn’t glue your broken pieces back together or erase the reality of what he is, what this fortress hides, and what you stumbled into. His sliced arm stays locked around your waist. You can feel the sticky warmth of his blood soaking through your clothes. It is startlingly human, and it should probably make him look less like a monster, the simple fact that he can bleed. But it makes every detail about your situation so real and dreadful.

When your body finally ceases its rebellion entirely, it isn't an act of submission. It is pure depletion.

And Bucky, keeping you pinned against the wall of his chest, seems to grasp that exhaustion better than anyone else could. His lungs expand and contract in uneven hitching motions. He drops his chin heavily onto the crown of your head. He closes you in not like a conqueror taking a prize but like a man trying, too late, to keep a catastrophe from widening under his hands.

Beyond the kitchen threshold, the entire estate drops into a dead, listening sort of silence, as if the plaster and timber have cocked an ear to the room.

He keeps holding you as if you are something he has no right to touch anymore and still cannot seem to make himself release, and it’s crazy that even like this, even with your body rigid from all the things you have learned too quickly and too late, he is still somehow heartbreakingly careful, his hand spread wide and warm between your shoulder blades, his hold immovable but never bruising, his mouth close to your temple as though he cannot bear to put distance between you if distance means losing you for good.

It is all just so utterly confusing because this is not entirely what you had expected would happen.

“The way you looked at me,” he continues, and his voice comes out rough as gravel dragged through water, ruined by restraint, by panic, by the sheer effort of trying not to frighten you further with the depth of what is in him. He does not sound like the man in the hallway, not like the man who commands rooms into silence with a glance, not like the man whose name can make other people blanch and step backward and say yes, sir, with their pulse all up in their throats. He sounds flayed open. He sounds like the sight of your fear has gone into him like shrapnel and lodged somewhere vital. “The way you looked at me in there—” He stops, breathes in shallowly, like he has run straight into a blade and is trying not to lean on it harder. “Christ. I’ve taken bullets that didn’t hit like that. To have you look at me like I’m something you need to survive.”

Your face is turned into his chest, your tears soaking through the expensive dark fabric of his shirt, and still your whole body is listening against your will, because his voice is all around you now, low and urgent and splintering in places that make something cold move through you.

His hand slides back up the back of your head, not forcing, only cradling, his fingers threading carefully into your hair as though the gesture itself aches. When he speaks again, there is something almost disbelieving in him, some stunned grief that does not seem feigned, cannot possibly be feigned for this long without becoming madness.

“If I could do it over, I would do every goddamn thing different,” he breathes brokenhearted. “Every part of it. I would tell you sooner. I’d tell you cleaner. Shit, I should’ve just told you. I should’ve given it to you straight before it got this messy and before you had to figure it out by yourself and piece me together out of all the worst parts with nobody there to shield you. I would have died before I let it happen like this. I swear.” He swallows hard enough that you feel it where your cheek presses near his sternum.

The kitchen is too bright and everything is stinging so harshly with those clean counters, the severe gleam of copper pans above the island, the neat little arrangement of knives in their block where one slot is now empty, the overhead lights turning everything brutally visible.

There is nowhere for your agony to hide. It shivers right out in the open, lives in the tightness of your lungs and the salt on your mouth, and the fact that every soft word from him only makes the unreality of this more baffling. Because he sounds sincere. He sounds devastated. He sounds like a man speaking over the body of something precious he helped kill.

He says all of this like he’s offering you his throat, while all around you the evidence of his power still glints and twinkles from every glazed surface, every distant footstep, every forced silence in a house built to keep his secrets and carry out his will.

He is talking with all the gentleness he has. He is nearly breaking with it. And still, inside you, fear sits and it pants and it is unconvinced, because love does not make a cage less locked simply because the hands closing it are shaking.

You make a small sound then—not a word, not even close, just some thin and wrecked little fracture of breath—and he tightens around you reflexively, then instantly checks himself, as if terrified you will read force into even that involuntary movement.

His next words come faster, crowding each other, not panicked exactly but pressed by urgency, by the sense that you are slipping through his hands even while he is still physically holding you.

“I know what I am.” He breaks off again, and this time you feel the tremor that runs through him. “I know what kind of man I’ve been, what people say about me, what they’re right about. I know exactly what it looks like from where you’re standing.” His voice goes raw. “But, darling, I never meant for you to be afraid of me. This was never supposed to happen.”

The words enter you but you just don’t know where to store them. There is something so naked in the way he says them that your mind keeps tripping over it, keeps trying and failing to fit it beside the other truth—the guns, the guards, the coldness in his authority, the name that belongs in whispers, the empire standing tall all around you in all its obedience. Or maybe it’s just loyalty. Respect? What even is it?

It’s hard to acknowledge that he still sounds like himself. James or Bucky, the man who kissed sleep into your skin and tucked blankets around your legs and pressed absent-minded kisses to your shoulder while reading beside you in bed still exists inside this other, larger, more terrible man. He has not vanished cleanly enough to make your fear simple. You give a small whimper.

“I was selfish,” he rasps, and now the confession lands without defense. “That’s the truth. I was selfish as hell. Because I wanted you anyway. I wanted you even knowing I should’ve stayed away from you. I know I should’ve left you out of all this. A girl like you deserves something clean and safe, and I’m neither of those things. I knew that. Fuck, I knew that. And it’s been killing me. I let myself have you and it’s been so fucking selfish.”

His breath hitches around the last word, and the grief in it is so unexpectedly torturous it almost makes you nauseous. His forehead lowers for a second against your hair, and he scarily looks so weary, suddenly too full of feeling to carry it elegantly.

“Because you are...” He exhales a broken laugh with no amusement in it whatsoever. “Christ, sweetheart, you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. You couldn’t ever imagine what you walking into my life did to it.”

Your eyes squeeze shut and fresh tears slip out anyway. Somewhere inside you, some tired and furious part wants to scream at him for speaking like this now, for laying tenderness over terror as if one can cancel the other out, as if love—even if it is love, even if it is real and not just another instrument in his alluring hands—can unmake what you know. But before you can push any of that into sound, he keeps going, quieter, the words drawn so close to your skin they seem less spoken than confessed into it.

“If you want to go,” he states, and there is a pause before it, the kind that tells you the sentence is costing him blood, “I’ll let you go.”

Your breath snags. You don’t trust it nor believe it instantly, but even imagining the words coming out of him feels like a tectonic event, a mountain bowing. He does not release you yet, but his body changes with the promise, some iron set inside him going rigid with the effort of saying it and meaning it.

“I will,” he says, with more force now, as if he knows you don’t believe him and cannot bear that either. “If that’s what you want, I will. I’m not gonna keep you somewhere you don’t wanna be. I’m not gonna turn into that for you. But, baby—” and here his voice gives way altogether, drops into something so human and stripped down it hardly seems to belong to the same man who froze a room full of armed guards with one look, “—I am begging you not to make that choice before you hear me. I am begging you. Stay this one night, give me one chance to explain it all to you, to answer every possible question you could have. One chance to do this right, even if I already did it all wrong.”

Begging. The word would sound absurd from almost any other man. From him, it sounds cataclysmic. His hand shakes at the back of your head before steadying, his chest rises too sharply under your cheek, and he continues speaking as if silence might kill him.

“I love you too much to let this be the end of it if there’s anything I can do to stop it,” he croaks. “Too much to let you walk out of here thinking none of it was real. It was real. Every second of it was real. Me wanting you, loving you, worrying about you, making room for you in my life in ways I never made room for anybody—none of that was a lie. The only lie was thinking I could hold both worlds apart long enough to protect you from what I am. That was the lie. That was my arrogance. My mistake.”

The mansion remains hushed in that eerie, cathedral-like way that comes after a disturbance, as if everyone occupying this huge mansion is pretending not to hear the aftershocks.

But here in the kitchen, everything feels narrowed to his voice and your breathing and the blood drying on his forearm and the fact that he is speaking to you like a man on his knees, even if he is still standing, even if his arms are still around you, even if his kind of desperation does not know how to unclench fully.

There is a daunting sincerity in him now, not because it is soft but because it is not. Because it is fierce. Because even his tenderness carries the shape of obsession, of decision, of something chosen with his whole irreversible heart.

What can you possible answer here. What can you possibly think.

“I’ll do whatever I have to do.” He sounds so full of conviction. Technically, the words are quiet, but there is a hard core somewhere in his tone, and it glows fiercely. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make you feel safe again. To prove this to you. To earn back one inch of your trust. I don’t care how long it takes, I don’t care what you ask for, I don’t care what I have to lay down at your feet. I’ll do it. I will.” He takes a beat and the next words are so low you almost miss them. “I know I don’t deserve another chance and you have all the best reasons to run, but I’m asking for it anyway, Y/n.“

At that, finally, he leans back just enough to look at you. It’s not much, but the hand at the back of your head can guide your face up with painful gentleness, giving you every opening to pull away if you need to, though you are too wrung out now to do much except tremble.

His eyes find yours and stay there, and the sight of his face nearly brings you to your knees all over again. There is no coldness in him. No cruelty. No mockery. Only a kind of bereft intensity, a ravaged devotion, and beneath it the severe understanding that he is seeing himself reflected in your fear and cannot survive the image.

The whole fact of how broken he sounds starts to mess with your head. It cracks the armor of your panic, if only just a little bit. You’re trying to hate him. Because, honestly, you want to. You want the fear to be this insurmountable wall between you, but his voice keeps crumbling pieces of it.

The worst part is that you can’t just flick a switch and stop loving the guy you were tangled up with this morning. You fell for him so fast, so completely, because his version of happy felt like the safest place on earth. But with all those shocking revelations, that same love feels like a trapdoor that just dropped you into a cellar, and you are so angry at your own heart for still wanting him to hold you.

Underneath the exhaustion, there is a nauseating doubt starting to rot everything you remember about the last few weeks, and you really don’t need your mind going that far, but it does. You start wondering if you ever actually loved him, or if you were just hooked on the way he looked at you.

He treated you like you were the only important thing in the world, and you just hung off that affection, soaking up the protective way he took care of you. Even though he’s standing here right now, bleeding and hollowed out, swearing that every single touch was real, how can you ever be sure? Every memory you have is suddenly poisoned by the thought that it was just a beautifully built illusion, and the whole thing makes you feel completely seasick.

It’s just too much to handle all at once. Your brain is trying to hold two completely different men in the same space—the gentle guy who tucked the blankets around your feet in the dark, and the boss who froze a kitchen full of killers with one word. They are both real. They are both right here in front of you, and the fact that he isn't a cartoon villain makes it a hundred times worse.

If he were just a monster, you could run. But he’s a monster who tells you he loves you with this gut-wrenching, unyielding honesty, and looking at his ruined face, all your willpower just turns to mush.

“I should have asked more questions,” you whisper, and still, your voice breaks, the words tumbling out of you like loose gravel. You aren’t trying to be eloquent anymore, you are just trying to get the noise out of your head before it chokes you. “From the start, I— When you wouldn’t tell me things. I— I don't know, I was scared, I guess.”

Your fingers tighten into the expensive wool of his lapels just to keep your knees from giving out. Letting this mob boss know about your fears is probably a bad idea. But your life consists of you making bad decisions and so your mouth keeps opening. “I think I just liked the way you were to me too much to risk messing it up.”

The words drag themselves out of you like they do not want to be born, like each one has to force its way through the knot in your throat and the salt on your tongue and the simple, mind-numbing fact that nothing in you knows where to place anything anymore—not him, not yourself, not the last weeks, not the hands that held you so tenderly and the empire those same hands command with a flick of the wrist.

Bucky’s gaze is piercing as he looks down at you, listening with his breath visibly held.

“But I— I still don’t understand. I think.“ Your voice comes thin at first, scraped nearly transparent by crying, but it sharpens on pain the way a blade sharpens on a whetstone. “I just— I saw this gun, and—,” you blur out, the memory making your heart do that awful stutter against your ribs again while Bucky nearly flinches. His eyes go wide, pupils shrinking until they look like two dark pinpricks. “It was an accident. I swear it was an accident. I was just— you told me to grab a shirt of yours but I couldn’t reach up your wardrobe and so I was just going to go grab the shirt you've been wearing, but your jacket was there and then it just fell out. And I— I completely lost my mind because I realized I didn’t actually know anything about you, and I’ve been so stupid, and I’m really not good at this. I'm not good at talking things out or figuring out the right things to say. It’s just— this is so much to take in.”

Bucky´s chest hitches, a rough, dry stutter or air that sounds like he just took a fist to the solar plexus. His face looks almost unrecognizable with the pain plastered on it. You feel his hands tremble against you and he slowly takes them away, putting himself at a small distance to perhaps give you some space. His palms stay open, as do his eyes. He looks entirely unhinged by the clumsiness of his own life seeping into yours.

How could anyone understand how a man can kiss your forehead like a saint and still have blood and fear braided into his name. It’s so hard to understand how someone can look at you the way he is looking at you now—like you are both miracle and mortal wound—and still have lied, still have omitted, still have arranged the world around you so skillfully that you walked through it unknowing, barefoot and bright-hearted, straight into the center of his hidden life.

You do not understand what parts were real and what parts were merely curated, and worst of all, there is a terrible little splinter of you that already suspects the answer is not clean enough to save you. That some unbearable amount of it was real.

Your mouth trembles and you know that he can see it.

“You lied to me,” you sob, and although you mean for it to, it doesn’t sound like a weapon you’re throwing at him. It just sounds sad. “You made it so easy. I didn’t even think about it. I just— I just woke up every day and trusted the way you looked at me. And the whole time, I didn’t even know you.”

You look down at his chest so you can stop having to meet those devastatingly sunken eyes. “You let me fall in love with you not knowing who you were.” Your sentence has a shape now, the grief in you finally managing to find a spine. But you still can’t make your words sound all that accusing. Because you got yourself into this situation. You’re supposed to be furious at yourself first.

You haven’t used the word love before. You just dropped it, being the first time it cleared your teeth and the timing of it feels completely disastrous.

And Bucky suddenly undergoes a drastic freeze, as if his nervous system has been struck by lightning. He seems to tip back just a tiny bit but stays in your orbit. He stares down at you, his mouth parted, his chest stalling on an intake of air that he forgets to let back out.

The fact that you love him—and that you are saying it right now, while covered with dread and shivering nearly against his chest—seems to completely break his brain.

There is a dark heat flooding his face, his jaw tight enough to snap a tooth. He looks agonizingly vulnerable like this, the dangerous mob boss utterly gutted by four letters. His fingers twitch where they are now hovering near your neck, desperately wanting to bury themselves in your hair and pull you back into his skin, but he forces his hands down to his sides, his knuckles trembling against his tailored trousers.

“You…,” he starts, eyes burning with a starved intensity that makes the air in the kitchen feel boiling hot. He swallows loudly, taking a moment, staring out into some space behind you, and switching focus back to you. “Don’t call yourself stupid,” he goes on, voice dropping into a rasp that shakes with the failure of his own arrogance. “None of what you told me and none of what you felt makes you stupid.”

His face leans closer to yours and somehow you only shrink back a tiny bit, not really at all. You can feel the wavering rhythm of his breath against your lips. He looks thoroughly undone by his own greed, stuck in the realization that he won the only thing he ever wanted, right at the exact moment he stopped being the man who holds you in the dark and turned into the reason you’re afraid of the dark.

“The love was real,” he sounds so convinced. His face is breaking, but his voice is not. He knows what he is saying. “Every single second of it was real. I am the one who ruined it. But what I feel, and what we have, that isn’t a lie. I swear to you on my life, it was never a lie.” His eyes close briefly, and it looks like he is losing his footing somewhere internal. “I know how it feels from where you’re standing. But I wasn’t playing some game with you. I wasn’t trying to—” He drags a hand over his face, and for an instant he looks older than you have ever seen him, not in years but in burden, in wear. “I wanted more time. That was my sin in it. I wanted time. I wanted to tell you in a way that didn’t make you look at me like this.”

Like this.

The phrase feels unkind. Because yes—there it is again, the damn nucleus of the whole thing. The way your eyes have changed on him. The way he has noticed every flicker of fear in you as if each one were a cut and he keeps taking your terror not as an insult to his pride but as an injury to something much more private and much more vulnerable. And that, more than any fake excuse could have, is so hard to process. 

Because men who only know cruelty do not usually grieve like this over being feared by the woman they supposedly love. Men who are only monstrous do not usually look half-unmade by it.

You don’t want that thought, you honestly don’t, but it does arrive.

Because he has not hurt you. He hasn’t done a single thing to hurt you, and that makes him so much more complicated at the exact moment you most need him to stay simple.

He has had a thousand opportunities by now to become the thing you are bracing against. In the hallway. In the office. In the kitchen. When you ran. When you fought. When you took the knife. When you cut him. At every turn, there has been room for rage, for punishment, for the kind of retaliatory violence your frightened mind keeps expecting from a man like him, and instead he has done nothing but hold himself on a brutal leash, speak softly, plead, bleed, look at you as if your fear is the one thing in this world he has no defenses against.

And it makes you weaker.

Because fear is easier when it is clean. Outrage is easier when there are no counterweights. But now your thoughts begin to buckle under the strain of contradiction, and you feel yourself growing tired in some deeper way, not merely from running or crying or panic, but from the effort of sustaining one total version of him against the evidence of another.

The story you are trying to tell yourself—that he is simply bad, simply dangerous, simply false—keeps snagging on the memory of his hands shaking when he begged, on the way he threw his men out for aiming guns at you, on the heartache in his face now, open and unarmored and miserable with not knowing how to reach you.

None of it erases anything, how could it this fast, but still it matters, and still some fatal hope flares.

Your lungs are burning. You become dimly aware that your body is leaning, not exactly by choice, but because exhaustion is making choices for you now. The kitchen feels too bright and too far away at the same time. Your fingers feel chilled, your knees unreliable, your heart still overworked from all that horror. Even your anger is beginning to lose its clean edges, dissolving into something wetter and more helpless.

“I don’t know what to do,” you admit, and there is no strength in it at all.

The sentence is barely more than breath, but it changes him instantly, makes his misery seem softer, as if your confusion pains him almost as much as your fear did. His gaze searches your face carefully, greedily, looking for any sign that you have not vanished completely from him.

“You don’t have to know right now,” he comforts, and this time his voice is gentler still, worn down to the most tender parts of his body. “You don’t have to decide anything this second. I know I dropped all of this on you in the worst possible way. I know you’re overwhelmed.”

Overwhelmed. The word is so pitifully insufficient you want to cry some more, but the sound catches and turns to another shivery exhale instead.

Overwhelmed is a rainstorm. A bad day. A missed train. This is seismic. This is having the floor beneath your life cleave open and discovering it was built over a fault line all along.

Still, you know what he means.

Because beneath all the fear, and the betrayal and the urgent need to flee, there is now also this leaden, disorienting fatigue, this collapse of certainty.

You cannot keep all your alarms ringing at once forever. The body is not made for it. At some point even terror begins to sag under its own weight, and in that sagging comes the most dangerous thing of all. Maybe not trust or forgiveness yet, but confusion. A human confusion. The realization that if he truly meant to destroy you, perhaps he would have done it already. That if cruelty were the point, he has passed up too many easy chances. That whatever else he is—and God, he is still intimidating, still hidden, still a man with too much power and too many locked rooms in his life—his feelings for you do not look counterfeit. They look catastrophic. They look real enough to have ruined him too.

He had every opportunity to end this argument with force, not even making his hands dirty in a physical sense. But he didn’t, and that roughened sincerity that seems so deeply wounded keeps gnawing at all the things you thought you found out about this man, the stereotype you made him out to be. It makes a guilty stone drop into your belly and land with damaging intentions.

And you do not know what to do with all this honesty and realness, when real arrives dressed as the very thing you were trying to escape.

But you have to acknowledge that your lack of strength is not the only reason why you have stopped fighting him, stopped trying to get away.

Bucky seems to read some fragment of this in your face, because he does not press harder. He does not crowd you with arguments. He simply stays where he is, close enough for warmth, far enough now that his care has space to breathe. His injured arm hangs at his side, blood drying in a dark seam along his skin, ignored. His other hand lifts as if to touch your cheek, then stops halfway and falls again when he sees the flicker in your eyes. That tiny restraint breaks something in you all over again.

“I know I lied by not telling you,” he says quietly. “I know that. I’m not asking you to call it something prettier. I’m just telling you it wasn’t because you meant nothing. It was because you meant too goddamn much, and I was trying to find a way to bring you closer without making you run.”

The honesty of it is so ugly, so naked, so free of self-congratulation that it feels like he just threw a wet sandbag right at your chest, knocking every scrap of air straight out of your lungs. It’s not an excuse, not quite. More like the shape of the selfishness itself, held out in his own hands for you to look at. He wanted you. He kept you. He delayed the truth because he was afraid the truth would cost him the one bright thing he had allowed himself to love. There is no innocence in that. But there is something crushingly human.

Your eyes burn again and your grip on your own certainty loosens another inch.

You hate that, too, because, damnit, it would be easier to stand here shaking and loathing him if he would just become less tender and less heartbreakingly earnest in his regret. But he stays persistently, ruinously genuine, and all at once you feel not only afraid, not only betrayed, but emptied out by the effort of trying to hold every contradiction at once. He is a bad man. He may also love you. He lied. He is also hurting. He hid things from you. He is also standing here looking like your fear is flaying him alive. None of these truths cancels the others. They just crowd together until your thoughts feel waterlogged, too swollen to separate.

So all that is left is the simplest truth again.

You really are overwhelmed.

You are so overwhelmed that language itself seems too heavy to lift.

Your breathing has started to slowly settle in increments, like a storm reluctantly retreating from a coastline it battered too long. It feels like there are bruises left behind in your lungs, but it no longer aches with each inhale.

Your fear has ebbed enough to make you think again, to make you see again, to make you look at him not as the single monstrous shape your panic tried to build, but as the complicated, human contradiction standing in front of you now.

His shoulders are still too tight, drawn up, and perhaps trying to seem smaller. He keeps his hands visible and loose at his sides to perhaps avoid startling you. The cut along his forearm has darkened into a narrow seam of red, drying in flaking lines against his skin and remaining completely ignored by the man attached to it.

His focus hasn’t left your face. And in that focus, there is not an ounce of triumph. Rather, the opposite. There is only pain. Such a grave torment that lives in the corners of his mouth, the prominent crease between his brows, in the cautious way he keeps tracking your movements as though you still might shove him away and try bolting for the door again.

You swallow and feel the ballast of everything press back down on your chest.

“I—” you start, timidly, using every last scrap of your bravery. You don’t meet his eyes, staring at the floor beside him. “I’ve seen them.” Your voice sounds strange to your own ears, small but a little bit more poised now, like glass that hasn’t shattered but still remembers the impact. “I've seen the news, and the headlines. All the stories about you.”

The words suspend themselves in the space between you.

Bucky takes a moment to answer. His gaze drifts downward, just briefly, as if the floor might offer him something easier to look at than the defenselessness sitting in your eyes. The vulnerable questions there. When he exhales it is long and tired, and it sounds like all the versions of himself he has spent years outrunning are catching up to him anyway.

“Yeah,” he mutters out breathily. But a little flat. There is no denial in it or some sort of excuse. He drags a hand across the back of his neck, his jaw flexing slightly before he speaks again. “I figured you probably had.” He takes a shivering breath, his whole chest lifting. “They’re not all lies.”

You hold your breath, but don’t step back, don’t let fear take its seat at the forefront of your mind again.

He lifts his eyes back to yours then, and the seriousness in them deepens, intensifying into something resolute.

“I’m not gonna stand here and tell you I’m a good man,” he says. The words come slowly, and his eyes are searching yours while he talks. He is placing them carefully like he’s building something honest out of wreckage. “I’m not.”

Your heart stumbles in your chest, but you still keep your feet grounded and meet his eyes.

“I’ve done things I’m not proud of. Things most people wouldn’t forgive if they knew the full story.” His voice lowers slightly. His eyes are full of sorrow. Despite the things he’s saying he unexpectedly doesn’t look threatening at all and it makes something startle abruptly in your chest. “And yeah, I’ll probably keep doing some of those things.” He doesn’t force anything into his tone that maybe should be there. He´s not saying those things with pride or arrogance or even threat. He has just accepted the callous contours that make his life the way it is. “But not for the reasons people think.”

His eyes soften then, slightly. And it makes you realize that they’ve actually been soft all along.

“I do what I do because there are people in this world who deserve protection. People who don’t have the power to protect themselves.” His gaze holds yours a little more firmly now. “And sometimes the only way to keep those people safe is to be the guy willing to do the ugly work.”

Your throat tightens.

“I’d do just about anything to protect you, Y/n. Even if it’s me you want protection from.”

The kitchen feels very still.

You don’t know what to say to that. You’re not even sure there is something to say. The statement isn’t a justification so much as a window, and looking through it leaves you with more thoughts to sort through and you’ve already gone through so many. But you hear him. You really do.

And he seems to notice that you’re listening now—maybe not agreeing, not forgiving, but truly listening, hearing him out—and some small measure of relief loosens the tension in his shoulders.

He doesn’t move a single muscle, standing before you like a brick wall, his legs pinned wide on the kitchen tiles, his frame perfectly still except for the anxious heave of his chest. His arms are hanging at his side, and shit, your gaze just has to focus on that bloody trail on his forearm. Because right, you’ve cut James Buchanan Barnes through his expensive suit enough to make him bleed. The redness runs from his wrist to his knuckles and you see some dots on the floor. The fabric of his suit is soaking it up, turning a dark wet black around the tear.

He still doesn’t glance down at it. He’s still so entirely anchored to your face, his broad shoulders squared as if he’s trying to shield you from the very room he owns. The survival instinct that had you clawing at the air drops away and now there is a sudden freezing emptiness in your head. And in that blank space, something takes place.

You look at the knife on the linoleum, then at the wet red tracking down his arm, and your stomach completely plummets through the ground. The panic you felt earlier didn’t protect you, it turned you clumsy and ignorant.

“Oh, no,” you choke out, gaze fixed on his arm, your words hacking up from your chest miserably. “Bucky, I— Your arm, I— I didn’t mean— This is my fault, I swear I didn’t mean to—”

“Hey,” he cuts in, his voice lowering into a rough, immediate hush that clips the words right out of your mouth. “Hey, no, sweetheart. No.” He steps back into your space and his huge palms come up, traveling slowly until they map themselves carefully across your jawline.

His fingers are trembling and the pressure is incredibly light. His skin is warm, smelling of that same familiar soap from upstairs, and his thumbs softly brush the wet tear tracks off your cheekbones, forcing you to look straight into his eyes. He doesn’t even spare a glance at his forearm.

“You don’t ever apologize to me for that,” he whispers hoarsely, his chest hitching against yours as he tries to get his breathing normal. There is so much regret in his voice, it is too much for your heart to handle. “You were scared out of your mind and I did that to you. That?” He tilts his arm toward you, indicating that he is talking about the cut. “That is nothing, sweetheart. Nothing.” The corner of his mouth lifts faintly, but the expression is gentler and definitely much more somber than humorous. “I’ve taken hits that should’ve put me in the ground, and none of them touched me.”

You shake your head in his palms. “But, I—”

“Doll,” he shushes, his arms keeping your chin locked, but not firm at all. His gaze is drilling into yours and it feels like he’s bleeding more from the inside and not the outside. “That little scratch hurts a hell of a lot less than watching you run from me.”

Your hands slowly stop trying to find leverage against his chest. The heat of his palms against your jaw feels like a grounding force, something so familiar but also completely new. It’s not entirely unpleasant in its newness.

You look up into his eyes, seeing the complete lack of the monster he just unleashed on his guards, and you can’t help but feel a little unmoored.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,” you admit breathily, your voice cracking as your forehead drops forward to rest against his tie.

Bucky lets out a long, ragged exhale, his chin resting against the top of your head as his arms wrap around your shoulders, pulling you into a hold that feels firm but unforced.

“You don’t have to figure it out right now, darling,” he eases, his words spoken with a splintered scrape into your hair. “You don’t have to decide anything today, or tomorrow, or next week. Take all the time you need. Turn it over in your head. Think about everything you saw, everything I am. And whatever you choose to do—if you want to pack your bags, and disappear, if you never want to see my face again—I will let you go. I will make sure you are safe, and I will support whatever choice you make. I swear it.”

He pulls back just an inch, his thumbs gently guiding your face up again so he can look straight into your eyes. There is something desperately begging in his stare, but he keeps his posture completely still, refusing to pressure you.

“But please.“ His knuckles tremble slightly against your cheek. “Just stay the night. Don't run out now while this is all still so new. Stay until morning. As soon as the sun’s up, the car is yours,” he promises sorrowfully, his thumbs catching the last of the dampness on your cheek. “If you want to leave, you leave. You can walk out of here and never look back, and I won’t follow you. I won’t look for you. If that’s what it takes to make you feel safe, I’ll let you go.”

He stops, his jaw clamping tight for a second, a sharp, jumbled hitch in his ribs breaking his breathing.

“But god, I hope you don't,” he shoves the words past the tightness in his throat, his eyes wide and burning into yours so achingly. “I will spend every single day of my life doing whatever it takes to fix this. I’ll earn back an inch of your trust at a time. I’ll show you the rest of me—the real parts—if you just give me the chance to try. I want you to love me again. I want that more than anything.”

He hitches his weight just a fraction closer, his large hands still framing your jaw with agonizingly slow caution.

“But just stay this single night,” he pleads with a strain in his voice, his forehead dropping down to rest lightly against yours. “Just stay until morning. Let me get you out of this kitchen, and you can just sleep. That’s all. Just tonight.”

You stare at the dark red crusting on his wool cuff, then look into that heavy, broken-down look in his eyes. Trying to picture next week or even tomorrow feels like watching a knotted ball of wire and not finding out where to start untying it.

But right now, your muscles are just running on empty, completely flattened and powerless from feeling all that panic. You let out one long shudder of air, asking your awareness for any reasons why you should still try to get the hell away from this guy, and come up with nothing yet. It’s all too fresh to truly give this some thought and right now all you want to do is curl up in those silky sheets and sleep it all off.

You give him a small nod. “Okay. Okay, Bucky, I’ll stay the night.”

Bucky’s shoulders drop with a massive, rattling relief. He doesn't say anything else, he just tucks your head back under his chin, his big arms closing around you to carry your weight out of the quiet kitchen, leaving the knife and the blood behind on the floorboards.

You don’t know what comes when the sun is up. You don’t know what loving a man like him means. You don’t know if the life he lives can ever exist beside the life you thought you wanted.

You don’t know if trust can grow again from the cracked ground beneath your feet, and considering your decision making skills, you shouldn’t let your heart handle things anymore.

But, frighteningly and also not all that much surprisingly after all, when you imagine leaving now—truly leaving, turning your back on him and walking out of this mansion forever—the image doesn’t bring relief.

It brings something bleak.

Because for all the discoveries of tonight and all that fear, all that shock, and the trust that has been abruptly broken, there is a bullheaded part of you that understands something you can’t yet put into words for him to hear.

You could run from this house.

You could run from his name.

But you are not sure you could run from him.

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”

- Oscar Wilde

A/n: Looking at the word count now, I honestly probably could’ve turned this into a mini series but because this whole thing is essentially one long scene, splitting it up even more just didn’t feel right to me. So I guess I just have to admit that this became an unexpectedly long two-parter lmao.

As always, I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on this continuation, if it gave you hope, or even if you expected something different to happen. I always enjoy hearing your interpretations and feelings after reading ♡

I also wanted to gently address something else. I’ve received a few critical comments regarding certain reactions, choices, and dynamics in the story, and I truly hope this second part helped answer some questions or at least offered a little more perspective. If it didn’t, that’s completely okay too.

What I want you to know, I genuinely do appreciate helpful criticism, especially when it comes to my writing itself, because I’m always trying to improve and become better at what I do. Constructive feedback that gives me something to work with is always welcome and appreciated. But if something in the story simply wasn’t for you, or you personally disliked a choice I made, then sometimes it’s okay to just move on from it instead of tearing it apart. And if you do choose to criticize something, I just ask that you do it kindly. We’re still a community here, and there’s no reason to be harsh or blunt. Talk to me like a human being.

I put a lot of time, emotion, and effort into these stories, not to be told this makes no sense or this is weird without any real conversation behind it. Sometimes I don’t think through every single detail deeply because at the end of the day, this is still fiction born from messy little ideas in my head, written for comfort, entertainment, and emotion—not perfection!

Still, thank you to everyone who continues to boost me and my work and helped me stay motivated to finish this part ♡

Then you’re tracking a skinwalker in Illinois, then a wraith in Iowa. Weeks go by, and then three months. You’re the model of hunter efficiency, practically operating like a machine. As soon as you finish a hunt, you’re looking for the next, like a woman obsessed. Like there’s nothing else essential to life other than hunting. You drive through the nights, sleeping less and less until it starts to show on your face. Still, you keep moving. This is the only pace you know. You’re pretty sure if you stop moving, you’ll drown, so you keep going. 

You get better at focusing and avoiding. At shuffling through the facts of a case in your mind, like you’re handling a deck of cards, while simultaneously banishing any thoughts that’re attached to your emotions. There are places in your mind you just don’t go. Anything evenly remotely associated with Dean is sectioned off with a rope, off limits. 

He’d tried calling in the beginning. You’d been so angry that night, when you’d sped out of the inn parking lot, plumes of dirt billowing up from your tires. You’d tried your hardest to not look back. But despite all your self-control, you were still weak. You’d looked, and Dean had been standing in the darkened doorway, gripping the towel at his waist. And the way he was looking after you…even you couldn’t fully kill the way that made you feel. Lips parted like there was more he was dying to say, eyes misty. And he’d yelled your name, frantic. You wished you hadn’t heard that. You wondered if he’d been dressed, would he have chased after you? Would it have made a difference if he did?

All the same, you left. Didn’t know where you intended to go, other than just away. Which meant even if Dean had the mind to follow, he couldn’t. And you’d take care to be untrackable. 

He started calling you an hour after you left. You couldn’t stomach listening to any of the messages until two weeks later, and by then, he’d stopped trying to reach you. You told yourself to be relieved. Now you wouldn’t have to feel like you were breaking some kind of Pavlovian conditioning by ignoring him. 

He started the first message by huffing your name. “Look, I understand I fucked up. Just…come back. You can have the room, and you can leave in the morning, if you still want to. Hell, you can scream at me all night if that’s what you wanna do…I just-Nothing was gonna happen with the waitress. Really.” He sighed. “You shouldn’t be driving tonight… Please…just come back.” 

“Goddamnit, can you at least call me back so I know you’re not wrecked on the side of the road or something? We don’t even gotta talk…I just wanna know you’re okay.”

In the next one, which he left just as the sun started to rise, he sounded angry and frankly drunk. “Alright, you made your fuckin’ point. I’m an insensitive asshole and you hate my fuckin’ guts. But this disappearing act isn’t cute, okay? You’re acting like a child, and this is just a fuckin’ tantrum. But it’s not gonna work on me. You wanna leave? Fine. Good fuckin’ luck with the rest of your life, sweetheart.” 

You didn’t hear anything from him for a few days but then he called to let you know he was leaving town, joining up again with his brother. Said they would be working a job a few states over and that they could use an extra set of hands. Dean’s voice had been stiff, like it cost him something to reach out again, when you’d remained silent.

You got the last message two weeks after you left. You’d been sitting in the cab of your truck, listening to the radio, too bone tired from a particularly rough day to go into your motel room. You’d been going nonstop for weeks and now you were run ragged. The phone rang on the passenger seat, illuminated in the darkness, and you stared at his name on the screen until it went away. 

Figuring you’d be too drained to have anything he could say on the voicemail affect you, you put the phone to your ear. His voice washed over you like cold water. He spoke in a low voice, and you picture him speaking to you from whatever motel he was in, keeping his voice quiet while Sam slept. 

“Hey…I know you don’t wanna hear from me…but the way we left it…it just doesn’t feel right. I think we could- I don’t know…We’ve had fights before…and we always make it right, don’t we? Please, I just wanna make it right. And if you don’t want that…just let me know you’re doing okay.” 

You refuse to acknowledge the raw distress in his voice as anything other than an attempt at manipulation. You aren’t ignoring him to hurt him, though truthfully you feel some sick satisfaction that you’ve been weighing on his conscience. More than once, you’ve considered relenting, reaching out just to let him know that you’re okay. But the truth is, you’re unwilling to reopen communication for the same reason you tell yourself you can never see him again. It’s easy to make rules for yourself, to shove uncomfortable feelings into boxes, but only when he’s not around. You have no control of yourself when he’s near you. Already, there’s a small part of yourself that aches to forgive him. To go back to how it was. And it's because of that part that you dedicate yourself to hating him, and hating yourself, too. 

You hunt, you live, and you don’t think about Dean. And it works…mostly. 

The job takes you to Brandon, South Dakota, where you uncover a minor nest of vampires. You’re near Sioux Falls, so you consider reaching out to Bobby for help. He’d been a close friend of your father, but you stopped coming around as much after he’d died. Then there was the matter of Bobby trying to reach you for the better part of a month now.  

You only find evidence that there’s three vampires, and so you decide to handle it on your own.  

That decision proves to be a near fatal mistake. You manage to waste the first vampire without much difficulty. This one had gone off on his own to find a meal, and in your adrenaline fueled desperation to save the young girl that he’d taken for dinner, you’d beheaded him in a blur of blood and metal. When you circled back to the nest for the remaining two vampires, they were ready for you. They beat the shit out of you, broke your left leg in two places, and sometime during it all, you had to grapple with the terror that this might actually be how you die. That fear inspired the last of your energy, and by some miracle, the last of your dead man’s blood subdued the vampires long enough for you to get yourself to the hospital, just before blacking out. 

You jolt awake. 

The light sears your eyes, igniting a pounding headache that incapacitates you for a full minute before you try opening your eyes again. You stiffen as you realize you’re laid up in a bed, but you’re not in the hospital- just some room. There’s salt on the windowsill and across the entrance to the room. Holy symbols adorn the wall, and there’s a Christian cross above the bed. 

The events of the vampire hunt come flooding back in, disorienting you, and you tense, ready to spring up from the bed in a panic, but everything fucking hurts, even your face, so you don’t move.

From what you can catalogue, your arms are covered in scrapes and hideous bruises. Your left leg is bandaged from your foot to just below your knee, the cast heavy and bulky. Your head throbs and when you run your tongue over your dry lips, you taste blood from the cuts across your mouth. When you’re not trying to move, the pain fades into the background at a bearable level. 

The door across the room opens, and you brace yourself for a fight you know you have no shot of winning, but it’s just Bobby that walks in. At the sight of his face, you relax. Your surroundings contextualize and you realize you’re in one of the extra rooms in his scrapyard house.  

“Hey, kid,” He says quietly, walking into the room slowly, like you’re an animal that will spook. Your eyes follow him as he sits on the side of the bed beside you, careful not to jostle you at all. “Can’t tell how glad I am to see ya finally awake.” His eyes are wet even though he smiles. 

Your lips part, but your mouth is dry and you have nothing to say. Shame pricks at you under the relief in his eyes, and you feel immense guilt. 

“Bobby,” You force yourself to speak and your voice is rough like sandpaper, and it hurts, but you decide you deserve the pain. “I-I’m okay.” 

Bobby shakes his head at you. “Look at yourself, kid. You ain’t okay.” He pauses. “But you will be with some time.” 

“How did I get here?”

“Well, you’ve been real hard to get in contact with these past months.” He says with a pointed look. “So I’ve been keeping eyes and ears out for ya. Just in case. Got a buddy at the hospital that helped me get you out here, once they’d patched ya up. Was touch and go for a day or two there…I was worried we were gonna lose you, kid.” 

“God, Bobby,” You mumble, unable to meet his eyes any longer. “I’m sorry. You didn’t have to- I’m sorry-” 

It’s been a while since you’ve cried, so at first, you try to blink away the burning in your eyes. But tears come anyway. This isn’t your first scrape with death, but this might be the first time you were reckless enough to nearly get yourself killed. Not sleeping, constantly on the road until there was nothing left in your tank, and then confronting the vamps on your own…he might not say it but you’re both thinking it; you did this to yourself. 

“Hey,” Bobby scolds, leaning closer to meet your eyes. “Don’t you apologise. You’re still here, ain’t ya?” 

“How long was I out?” 

“Few days,” He says. “The docs set your leg in the hospital. And they stitched you up in a couple of places, too. Two broken ribs. And you should know…those vampire pals of yours followed ya here. Got your scent ‘n all. You’re safe inside, but they’ll be waiting to finish the job. They ain’t too happy you killed their buddy.” 

“I’m really sorry,” You mumble through your tears. “I didn’t want to get you involved-” 

“Listen here,” He interrupts. “I’ve been involved. Since the moment your daddy had ya and I made him a promise I’d always look out for you, alright? That’s how it is, kid. Now stop all that crying.”

His reassurance and acceptance makes you feel worse, somehow. Like you can’t accept the way he’s so openly expressing his concern for you. Your instincts yell at you to flee at the first sign of affection, and Bobby’s been looking after you for days. 

It goes against everything in your nature, but you reach out with a shaking hand and clasp Bobby’s in yours. The tears freely streaming down your face make your cuts sting harshly. 

“Thank you, Bobby,” You say after swallowing. “I-I don’t know how I’m gonna ever thank you enough for this.” 

“You’ll thank me by stayin’ put.” He says, gripping your hand hard back. “And gettin’ better.” 

“S’not like I’m exactly in a position to go anywhere,” You joke wryly, glancing down at the monstrosity of a cast pinning your leg to the bed. 

“It’s gonna be slow goin’ for the next few months, that’s for sure.” He agrees. “Don’ wan’ you even thinkin’ of huntin’ until yer standin’ on two legs again. But something tells me maybe you could use the break.” His eyes search your face. 

“Maybe.” You quietly agree. 

When you try to shift your weight in the bed, your pain intensifies and you have to grit your teeth against it. 

“Almost forgot,” Bobby mutters, leaving the room and then returning shortly after. He shakes a white pill bottle that reads oxycodone. 

“I-I’m fine-” 

“Just take the damn pills.” 

Bobby doesn’t linger at your bedside, even though you have the feeling there’s a lot more he intends to say.  He lets you rest. 

You know you’re lucky to be alive, but now you’re trapped. There’s nothing for you to do except lie there and think, which is exactly what you’d been avoiding for the past three months. You take one of the painkillers and wait to feel something. Your mind travels back to the altercation with the vampires, replaying the crisp snap of your leg breaking. You’re fairly certain that noise will stick with you for as long as you live. You think about your mortality, about how you never want to come so close to dying again, about how maybe Bobby is right, you need a break from the life, and now, you have no choice but to take one. You keep thinking, staring at the ceiling, until your thoughts swim together and the drugs must be working. The last thing you think about before you fall back asleep is Dean’s face. 

A week goes by. You stay in bed for the most of the day, with Bobby checking on you like he thinks you might sneak off. He brings you crutches but even with him supporting a lot of your weight, it’s exhausting to attempt to move around. You’re genuinely touched by how tenderly Bobby looks after you. He’s attentive to how much you’re eating and makes sure to clean some of your worse wounds every few days. He freshens the salt around your room and updates you on your vampire stalkers. You’re nowhere near being able to navigate the stairs with your leg yet, so he sets up a chair in your room. He tells you to take your pills when the pain gets too bad, but it’s pretty much always bad, so you just take them at night to help you sleep. Bobby seems almost proud when you stop resisting his care. 

It feels good to let someone take care of you. 

One day, you’re sitting by the open window. If you close your eyes, with the breeze on your face, you can almost imagine you’re outside. Your mind is restless from being stagnant for so long. 

Bobby clears his throat in the doorway before saying, “I gotta talk to you about somethin’.” You let him continue. “I gotta leave for something important. Shouldn’t needa be gone more than a week or two, if things go to plan.” 

You’re disappointed to be losing his company, but you figure you might as well start regaining some of your independence back, and that won’t happen if he keeps taking care of everything for you. Still, you can barely stand on your own, so the thought of being left in the house by yourself makes you a little bit anxious, but you try to hide it. Bobby’s already done more than enough for you. 

“Alright,” You say. “I’ll be here when you get back.” 

“You sure as hell will be.” He says and pauses before continuing. “We both know you ain’t fit to be here on your own, kid. Especially with those vamps on your scent still.” 

“I’ll be okay. Besides, what are you gonna do, find me a babysitter?” 

“Well, yeah. Didn’ even have to look. He offered.” 

“He who?” You ask with narrowed eyes. But you know. 

“Now look here,” Bobby says in a tone that suggests he’s about to give you a lecture, but he also seems uncomfortable. “I don’ know what happened between you and that boy and frankly, I don’t want the details. But we both know he’s a good kid. When I told him about what happened to you-”

“You told him?” You interrupt without meaning to. “I’m none of his business.” 

“Of course I told him.” Bobby says firmly. “Kid’s been calling practically every day the past few months, asking if I’ve heard from you. It was goddamn annoying until I started feelin’ sorry for the son of a bitch.” 

“Tell me he’s not coming here, Bobby. No way in hell.” 

“Y’know, it’s alright to accept help.” He says with a scowl. “‘Specially from people that wanna help ya. Now don’ gimme that look. Y’need someone here that can deal with those bloodsuckers if they show their face.” 

“I’d rather the vampires-” 

“S’happening, kid.” 

“Y’know I’m not actually a kid, right?” You snap. “I don’t need anyone to babysit me, especially not fucking Dean Winchester, okay?”

Bobby smiles. “Well, I see you’ve got that fiery spirit back.” He walks out of the room but lingers in the doorway, studying you for a minute before he admits, “And you’ll always be a kid to me,” 

Then, there’s nothing for you to do but wait. It’s not like you can make a run for it, and you probably wouldn’t, even if you could. You aren’t afraid of Dean. You’re more afraid of how you lose yourself when he’s near. You’re not sure what you’re feeling, just that it’s just as uncomfortable as all your combined injuries. Your heart begins to race and your stomach twists every time you imagine seeing his face again, picturing that despondent, raw anguish he wore as he yelled your name as you drove away. On the surface, you hoped you wouldn’t have to see him again, and maybe if this hadn’t happened to you, you could have continued your life of being repelled by anything associated with the Winchesters. But you’re here. And he’s coming. He volunteered. Maybe he feels like he owes you. 

You focus on the sounds of Bobby shuffling around downstairs. On the sharp throbs of pain coming from your ribs every time you shift your weight, until it gets bad enough that you have to swallow a pill dry. The light in the room fades, and you’re feeling weightless by the time you hear the loud rumble of an engine pull up to the house. You begin to slip in and out of consciousness. There are deep voices grumbling from downstairs that rouse you, but you can’t hear well enough to concentrate on the conversation. 

A gentle nudge wakes you. Blinking away the grogginess, Bobby’s face swims in your vision. “Take care of yourself while I’m gone, kid.” He says softly. 

You stare at him with wide eyes and almost ask him not to go, but you know that’s childish, so you just nod. You really are going to miss him, and you hope that whatever he’s off doing, that he’ll be okay. You want him to know but you can’t make yourself say any of it. 

When Bobby leaves the room, you notice Dean. Your head is still cloudy, but the way his eyes rake over you to take in your appearance is obvious, even in the low lighting. His eyebrows are pinched together, mouth pressed into a tight line. He steps forward slowly, boots falling softly until he’s at the side of your bed, wavering before sitting carefully bedside. Something inside you opens, the closer he comes. 

He’s hesitant to meet your eyes, but when he does, they’re glossy. 

You can’t make sense of the emotions that rush through you at seeing him. Maybe it’s the drugs. Maybe you’ve just ignored your feelings for so long that you’ve actually become incapable of understanding them. 

He’s staring at you, cataloguing every cut, scrape, and bruise on your face with those unreadable, stormy eyes. 

“How bad is it?” You ask softly, feeling small and unsightly, the longer he looks at you. You’d caught one glimpse of your face earlier in the week, when it was all fresh. After that, you’d pretty much avoided your reflection. 

Dean gives you an awkward smile. “It’s not…too bad.” You give him a pointed look, and he licks his lips, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. “Alright…you look like you’ve gone twenty rounds with a block of concrete.” 

He’s just blunt enough that you know he’s being honest with you. 

“Well, the block of concrete won.” You mumble. 

Dean smiles, eyes searching your face intently, and the way he’s looking at you is so uncomfortably sentimental that you have to ask, “What?”

“Nothin’,” He shrugs and pauses. “S’just good to hear your voice.” 

The silence that settles between you is charged. And just a bit awkward, like you both don’t know how to navigate a conversation that doesn’t involve provoking one another. With the way Dean’s jaw keeps clenching and his lips keep parting before he looks away, you figure there’s something else he’s struggling to say. He seems nervous. Like he’s building up the nerve to open some old wound. Whatever it is he’s hesitating to say, you want to be in your right mind to hear it. He says your name in a gruff voice but you stop him. 

“It’s late.” You murmur. “And I’m tired.”

“Right.” He agrees, clearing his throat, and you can practically see the momentum of his thoughts halt. “Of course you are. Uh, goodnight. I’ll be…uh, I’ll be just downstairs. If you need anything.” 

“Goodnight, Dean.” 

He lingers in the doorway before disappearing. You hate that you wish he would have stayed. 

*** 

When you wake, it’s early morning. You would replay the fuzzy memories of seeing Dean again last night, but you really, really have to pee. It was one thing to let Bobby, a rough father figure, assist you to the bathroom, but you think you would rather face off with the vampires in your current state than call for Dean to help you.

As you struggle to sit up and get yourself out of bed, the clunky casting around your leg seems to actively work against you. The crutches Bobby brought you don’t provide much help either, as you really can’t use any of your upper body strength without reigniting the pain in your ribs. You manage to balance on your good leg for half a second but before you know it, you’re stumbling, then tumbling, and then falling to the ground. You land hard on your side opposite your broken ribs, but it still fucking hurts. 

You pant through the sharp pain, squeezing your eyes shut against fresh tears. You’ve become your own antithesis- pathetically incapable of doing anything independently. Frustrated, you throw the fucking useless crutches away from you. 

The door flies open and Dean rushes into the room, chest heaving from bounding up the stairs at the commotion. He crouches beside you, eyes wild with confusion and concern, but still bleary from the early hour. And he’s in the clothes he slept in, a grey t-shirt and boxers. 

He rasps your name, hands hovering over you without actually touching your skin. 

He’s the last person you want to see you like this- damaged, miserable, and feeble. Just another thing for him to try to save. 

“Hey-you’re alright,” Dean says firmly, finally touching your shoulders to guide you into a sitting position with your back against the bed, as you struggle to catch your breath. “You’re alright, sweetheart.” Still crouched in front of you, he takes a steadying off your shoulder and brushes the hair stuck to your forehead aside, withdrawing like you burned him when you flinch. 

You don’t know what to make of his gentleness, other than he’s feeling sorry for you. He’s never gentle with you, so you’d rather spit it back in his face than accept it. 

“Yeah- I know.” You hiss, holding yourself across your thorax. 

Dean recoils from the sharpness of your tone. “The hell happened?”  

“Obviously I fucking fell-”

“Easy, smartass. How?” 

This is so humiliating, and you still really have to pee. “I needed t-to go to the bathroom.” 

“I told you to call me if you needed anything! That’s the whole reason I’m here, to help you-” 

“Did it ever occur to you that I don’t want your help?” You seethe. 

Dean exhales sharply through his nose, maintaining an uncomfortably intense, unblinking stare. “Yeah. It did, actually. Kind of got the hint after being ignored for months.” He swallows and finally looks away. 

“But you’re still here. Why?” 

“You might not want my help, sweetheart, but you fuckin’ need it.”

There’s no time to protest before he’s hooking a thick arm under your knees, the other arm carefully sliding around your shoulder blades. He lifts you off the floor and supports you with his chest before standing. You brace yourself with a hand on his chest, and you feel his heart pounding under your palm. 

“What the hell, Dean-” 

“Y’need the bathroom, right?” He asks, with the audacity to smirk down at you in his arms. “That just happens to be our next stop.” 

“Dean, put me down!” You demand. “Seriously. You’re fucking pissing me off.” 

“Sunshine, you’re always pissed off.” 

“I have crutches. I don’t need you to carry me-” 

“Yeah. Sure. And I didn’t just find you on your ass. Y’know Bobby threatened me, said he’d have to beat my ass if he came back and you were in any worse shape.” 

“S’not really my problem if you’re intimidated by a man in his sixties.” 

“You were much nicer last night.” Dean says, seemingly unaffected by your additional weight. 

“I was on drugs.” 

“That explains it.”

You glare at him as he lowers you onto the porcelain lid of the toilet. Him carrying you did spare you the effort of clumsily hobbling along the hallway, but you hate that the firmness and heat of his body feels imprinted on your skin now. 

He stares at you and you stare back. 

“Okay, you can leave now.” You say. 

He waits outside the bathroom while you use the toilet, but comes back in when he hears the sink going. You roll your eyes at him standing behind you as you brush your teeth. 

“You’re really going to hover over me until Bobby gets back?” You ask monotonously. You and Dean never lasted more than a handful of days together, and Bobby said he could be gone for two weeks. 

“That’s the deal, sweetheart. We can think of ways you can thank me later.” 

“You’re gross.” You say with a fake smile. 

Dean offers to carry you downstairs, so that you can eat somewhere other than the same four walls. You decline. The less he touches you, the better. But he ignores you and carries you down anyway. It’s not like you can exactly get away from him. You remind him about your crutches, but he leaves them upstairs. 

“Y’don’t need them while I’m around.” He dismisses. “I’ll be your personal transport service.”

You grumble under your breath that you’d rather he keep his hands off you and get the damn crutches. He acts like he doesn’t hear you. 

Dean cooks while you sit at the table. You didn’t even know he could cook but then he sheepishly admits the only dish that he can make of semi-edible standard is eggs. He’d pulled up another chair for you to prop your injured leg up on. You’re both quiet as he cracks eggs onto a pan, but the silence feels suffocating. Here and there, his eyes meet yours, and while his gaze lingers on you, you immediately look away.

All you can think about is why him. Why does it have to be him, out of all the hunters Bobby knows, out of all the hunters you know. It just had to be the one person that scrambles your insides into disrepair. 

Dean clears his throat and sets a plate of eggs in front of you. They’re cooked exactly how you like them, with none of the yolk runny. You thank him in a small, stiff voice, thinking about the last time you’d been together. The eggs at the diner. The fucking girl at the diner. When you risk a glance at him, you’d guess he’s thinking about it too, from the expression on his face. 

He sits across from you at the table. You both eat in silence and when you’re finished, you pointedly stare out the window. 

“I get that I’m not your favorite person right now,” Dean says gruffly, breaking the silence when you really wish he wouldn’t. 

“Fucking understatement,” You mumble under your breath. 

Dean’s jaw clenches.  “But I’m angry with you, too.” 

That gets your attention. “You’re angry with me?” You repeat with a raised eyebrow. 

“You fuckin’ disappeared for months. No one knew if you were dead or alive.” He accuses. “You don’t do that to people, make them worry about you-”

“You used me and you lied to me, but you’re angry at me? Jesus Christ, Dean.” 

He blinks, as if momentarily derailed by the grit in your words. “Used you? How the fuck did I use you?” 

“You really need it spelled out?” 

Dean shakes his head, knuckles white where his hand is fisted on the table. “Because we fuck? News flash, sunshine, you use me to get off, too. Hell, you’re worse than I am.” 

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” 

His azure eyes narrow a fraction before he looks away, that muscle in his jaw tensing. When his eyes meet yours again, there’s something sour about the way his lips are smiling but his eyes are hard. 

“You only come around when you wanna get fucked.” 

A slap to the face would have probably hurt less. Or a kick in the broken ribs. 

“Go to hell.”  You spit, shaking your head at him in disbelief. 

“Feels like I might already be there.” He counters. 

You can’t believe that’s what he thinks of you. It makes you feel sick. “That’s a terrible thing to say.” 

“It’s fuckin’ true, so don’t act like I’m an asshole for saying it-“ He presses. 

“You’re just lucky I can’t walk over there to slap you.” Your voice raises a fraction but you’re truly fed up with him right now. He might as well just call you a whore, for all the dark places your mind is going. 

“You realize it’s all on your terms, right? Can’t get a fuckin’ response from you unless you want somethin’ from me. You’re the one that calls the shots, sweetheart. And then you skip town before I can even get my pants on, every single fuckin’ time. You run away from me like I’ve got a venereal disease or something. So tell me exactly how I use you.” 

You gape at him. “I do not call the shots.” 

He shakes his head at you. “Trust me, y’do.” He hesitates before continuing. “If I had it my way, I’d see you more than just once in a while.” 

That deflates some of your irritation. His expression softens as he observes you closely, even as you look away in disbelief and apprehension. 

“Why d’you think I call you for cases?” He asks in a lower voice. “Think we both know I’m more than capable of ganking anything on my own, but I fuckin’ call you. And you don’t answer half the damn time.” 

“Bullshit. You call me because you’re horny, Dean.” You snap. 

“Jesus fuckin’ christ, it’s like I’m talking to a brick wall.” He groans your name. “You don’t get it. If I just wanted to fuck someone, I could find a chick. With very little effort. But I don’t-”

“Right. You let them find you.” You sneer. “I’m not interested in hearing about the girls you do or don’t sleep with, alright? Do whatever you want, spare me the details.” 

“No, you gotta understand.” He presses. “It’s fun to look and flirt, but I mostly do it to get a reaction out of you. You giving me shit for lookin’ at another girl is the only time I feel like you give a damn about me.” 

The sensitivity in his tone gives you pause. This is a different side of Dean, unguarded and resolute, and it makes you nervous. He stands, bringing his chair right beside yours. 

“We don’t need to have a heart to fuckin’ heart here, but you need to know that I care about you.” He says in that same low voice. “I’m sorry about last time. Right hand to God, am I fuckin’ sorry. I don’t know what I was fuckin’ thinking, but I won’t ever lie to you again. About anythin’. I’m done pushin’ you away.” 

A wave of heat passes over you. You kind of feel like you can’t breathe. You definitely don’t know what to say to any of that. 

But it’s just your nature to deflect, so you shake your head, refusing to let a few confusing sentences derail your anger at him. “You’re only saying this now because I almost died.” 

“Maybe.” He licks his lips. “You disappeared for three months…and I just couldn’t let go. I couldn’t let you go. I don’t want to.” 

He reaches across the table and lays his hand over where you’re digging your nails into the wood. You stare at where your hands are joined, momentary speechless. Something stirs in your stomach at the notion that he’s confessing feelings for you, but your mind struggles to accept that this isn’t some immaculate form of manipulation. But just the slightest possibility that his words hold any truth, when your gut is screaming he’s being genuine, has your pulse racing. 

It infuriates you that you want him just as bad as you always have. You’re perfectly susceptible to his fucking charm, even when he’s making you so angry you can’t think straight. It’s like foreplay to you two. You can’t help but go dry mouthed at the way the morning sun illuminates the lush color of his eyes, highlighting the light stubble across his jaw. His lips part, and he watches as your eyes fall to his mouth. 

There’s a light headedness that creeps over you at the intensity of the moment. When he shifts closer, his own eyes fixated on your lips, you wince before he can kiss you, pulling your hand away. When you speak, it’s with finality. 

“Try harder.” 

***

Living in such close proximity to Dean would have been a challenge on its own, without you having to constantly rely on him for everything. He never complains or gives you a hard time. He doesn’t make his usual innuendos, doesn’t push your buttons, doesn’t try to tell you he cares about you again. It’s awkward at first, but there’s really no avoiding him. You don’t think about anything he said to you and that makes it easier to accept his help, to co-exist with him. 

You can’t run from him and it makes you realize that you really don’t want to. 

As the days go by, the bruises on your body begin to fade. Everything becomes less painful- your injuries and the words exchanged with Dean. You don’t need the painkillers anymore to sleep through the night, and while Dean’s presence has actually begun to comfort you, it also sets you on edge. This is the most time you’ve spent with him and besides almost letting him kiss you in the kitchen and him carrying you up and down the stairs, there’s nothing physical between you. And you hate that it drives you crazy. It’s like your body has been conditioned to respond to him by wanting the most depraved, degrading sex. You pay attention to where he is within the house. You start to miss him when he’s not in the room. 

Some days, Dean works out in the junkyard on his car. He comes back into the house drenched in sweat, shirt sticking to his chest and back, outlining his sculpted muscles. Grease stains his biceps and his face, and when he comes inside, he always gives you a smile that has you feigning nonchalance, when really, you’re avoiding squeezing your thighs together so obviously. 

You slowly start spending more time together. He says it’s just in case the vampires try to make a reappearance, and you roll your eyes at that but don’t say anything else. You sit with a book on your lap, and he’s in the same room, cleaning his guns quietly, to avoid disrupting your focus. Every so often, you lift your eyes from the page and watch his hands move, or the way he looks almost like he’s frowning as he concentrates. 

You watch old movies together. Dean talks through them a lot, but it doesn’t bother you as much as you pretend it does. Without asking, he scoops up your calves and lays your legs across his lap. 

“What’re you doing?” You protest. 

“C’mon, it’ll feel better like this.” He rests his hands respectfully on your cast, and he’s right. It’s more comfortable for you to lay with your legs in his lap. “You just hate when I’m right, babygirl.” 

And that’s new, calling you babygirl. It makes you feel gooey inside. It starts off slow, but when he realizes you aren’t going to challenge him for calling you it and that your cheeks actually flush when he does, he stops calling you anything else. 

You find an old photo album of Bobby’s and start to flick through it. Your heart feels like a hummingbird flying in your chest as you search the pages for the face of your late father. You don’t find any. 

“Snooping through Bobby’s things?” Dean asks when he finds you. 

“We’re hunters. Snooping is about half the job.” You say tensely. “I-I was just wondering if Bobby had any pictures of my dad. They, uh, used to be friends.” 

It feels strange to talk about something personal with Dean, but he listens with rapt attention as you talk about your dad for what feels like the first time in forever. 

Dean even helps you shower, when you finally grow tired of washing yourself with rags at the sink. The bathroom fills with steam from the shower running, and you have to remind yourself to breathe when he kneels down in front of you to pull your shorts down and around the awkward thickness of your cast. 

You’re in your underwear and shirt, clearing your throat awkwardly, reminding yourself it’s just your legs, and he’s seen more than that, but this feels different. Besides, he’s not really even looking at you or any of your exposed skin. That kind of irritates you, even if he’s doing it to respect your wishes, so you pull your shirt over your head, too, leaving just your under garments on, just for any kind of reaction. 

He guides you to sit on the lid of the toilet so he can lift your casted leg up, crouching in front of you. He concentrates on securing a plastic garbage bag around the cast, and you take the opportunity to concentrate on him. His jaw is clenched as he works, the tips of his ears pink as he keeps his eyes level with your leg. 

“Dean,” You say with raised eyebrows. 

“Yeah?” He doesn’t look up at you until you slide your other foot onto his jean clad thigh, going closer and closer to the very noticeable bulge at his crotch. His face goes pink as he steps away from you. More awkward than you’d ever seen him. “Sorry-um-it’s been a while.” 

You scoff, as if the fact that he’s hard isn’t making your panties dampen. “What’s a while for Dean Winchester, a couple of days?” 

He doesn’t meet your eye as he takes your hands, hoisting you onto your unstable feet. He puts a hand on your waist as he helps you into the shower. He waits until you have a good grip on the stability bar on the wall before pulling the curtain closed. He sticks a hand in for your undergarments a moment later. 

“Well?” You prompt, standing naked under the hot water. It feels fucking amazing. 

“Uh, about three and a half months.” 

You poke your head out of the curtain to catch his eye. The look on his face confirms what you suspect. He hasn’t slept with anyone else since the last time with you. It feels like something unlocks inside you.

You duck back under the water and say, “Yeah…me too.” Just admitting that feels like you’re exposing yourself for him to rip you to shreds, and your body instinctively braces for some kind of hit or dig, something that will discourage sharing your sentiments in the future. But none comes. 

Over the next week and a half, Dean helps you get better at using the crutches, but stands firm on carrying you up and down the stairs. With his help, you begin to navigate the stairs a few days later, though. He takes a call from a hunter colleague, and together, you pour over the books of lore and supernatural theory you can find around Bobby’s. 

He takes you for joy rides in the Impala, and when he sings along badly with the music that’s about one hundred decibels too high, you find yourself laughing and smiling at him, rather than rolling your eyes. He drums dramatically on the steering wheel, every so often glancing over at you in the passenger seat to make sure you’re still laughing. When a song comes on that you know, you start singing along, too, and Dean joins in with doubled enthusiasm. 

Dean sleeps on the couch downstairs, and you sleep upstairs, but just knowing he’s close fucks with your head. The tension from the small touches throughout the day, those lingering looks that you can’t be reading into, have you wound tight. The second you’re alone in that room, you’re shoving your hand into your panties to absolve the ache. 

You wonder if he has to do the same

One night, when you’ve discovered you’ve watched all the decent movies in Bobby’s collection, Dean sits on the couch beside you and pulls your casted leg up onto his broad thighs. He bites the lid off a sharpie and raises his eyebrows at you for permission. 

“Are we in grade school?” You ask but there’s no real bite in your voice. 

“I’ve been staring at this ugly thing for two weeks. S’about time I enhance it.” He talks around the cap in between his teeth. 

“Let’s see what you got, Picasso.” 

“Anything I want?” He asks, meeting your eyes and letting his gaze linger there. 

“Anything you want.” You agree. 

He winks at you and then brings the marker to the material of your cast. When he’s done, at the top, just below your knee in choppy handwriting, reads, “Property of Dean Winchester”. 

Your stomach flips. “You own my cast?” 

“For now.” He shrugs, stroking his addition with his hand absently on your bare knee. “Gonna upgrade to the whole girl soon,” 

You laugh awkwardly. “Good luck with that. I heard the whole girl is a bit of a headache.” 

“Depends on who you ask, I guess.” He murmurs. “She sure makes me ache, but it's not my head.” 

A few days later, Dean gets a call from Bobby. 

“Yes, we’re both still alive…” You hear Dean say from the kitchen. Closing your book, you glance down at where he wrote on your cast. It’s become impossible to ignore the turmoil you feel at spending so much time with him and actually enjoying it. If you hadn’t spent so much time running away from this, so much time being afraid of wanting something like this, could you have had it earlier? And that hurts to realize, too. You didn’t need to be alone. It was your own choice. 

After hanging up on Bobby, Dean joins you. “So that was Bobby.” 

“Is everything okay?” You ask. 

“Yeah, he’s good. On track to be back tomorrow afternoon.” He says stiffly. 

“Oh. Okay. Well…that’s good, right?” You stumble through your words and wonder if he’s thinking the same thing, that when Bobby returns, whatever had been growing between the two of you would most likely die. 

“Yeah,” Dean agrees quickly. “At least, y’won’t have to put up with my sorry ass anymore.” 

“Right.” You sort of feel like you’re choking as the silence expands. There aren’t words you can put to your feelings, to the panic you suddenly feel at the idea of him walking away from you. 

“Y’know…I’m not happy you got hurt, but part of me is grateful you did.” He muses quietly. 

“That’s kind of fucked-” 

“I think if you hadn’t gotten hurt, if it was up to you…you’d never see me again.” His expression is sober and thoughtful, his gaze penetrating. “Am I right?” 

“I did…feel like that.” You admit quietly. 

“And now?” 

Your lips part but no words form. You feel the pressure of the moment, knowing if you say the wrong thing he’s gonna shut down, and the moment will pass. But you have no faith in yourself.

“I-I don’t know.” You flounder. 

“You know.” He rasps, kneeling between your legs where you sit. His hands are fire hot on your thighs. “Do you want to see me again?” His brow is furrowed, his eyes shining. “Do you want me?” 

Your brain is malfunctioning at the tenderness in his tone. After starving yourself of him, the simplest touch from him has your concentration flying away. How are you supposed to know what you want when he’s looking at you like that? 

“I-I said I don’t fucking know.” You huff, wrapping your hand around his wrist. 

“You’re overthinkin’ it.” His torso straightens, so his face is only a breath’s distance from yours. “You’re always overthinking it.” He moves slowly as he cups your cheek with a gentle hand, dragging his fingers down the column of your throat, to rest at the base of your neck. 

He’s wrong because you’re not actually thinking at all. You’re hypnotized by his proximity, by the way a simple brush of his fingers along your neck has you throbbing between your legs. Subtly, you spread your thighs, making more room for him to crowd into your space. Maybe right now you’re thinking more with your pussy than your head, but your powerless to stop it. 

“You know that I want you.” He murmurs in encouragement. “Since that first time you yelled at me. And every second since.” 

“If I did…want to see you again…” You mumble, shivering as his hands slide farther up your thighs, closer to the hem of your shorts. It takes all of your effort not to slide to the edge of the couch and press your pulsing core against him. “What would that m-mean?” 

He smiles gently. “Whatever you want it to mean, babygirl.” 

He’s rubbing his thumbs over your hips, as if you need anything more to be turned all the way on. You feel your heart beat between your legs, and you know you want him to fuck you, right here and right now, but everything else evades you. 

“And if I want it to mean nothing?” You ask breathlessly as you wrap an arm around his neck, enjoying the flutter of his eyelashes as you touch him. 

“Then we pretend it means nothing.” He murmurs. “Even though I know you’re lyin’.”

“Okay.” You mumble, staring at his lips. His fingers dig into your hips, pulling you a fraction closer, until your chest brushes his. “T-That works. For me. And if I wanted you right now-” 

“I’d tell you to shut up and fuckin’ kiss me.” His lips brush yours and you gasp into his mouth. 

He takes the opportunity to invade your mouth, and you moan immediately, arms tightening around the solid form of his body. You fucking missed the way he tastes, missed the way he kisses you so forcefully that you’re one step behind trying to keep up. He’s a little rough in his desperation to have you close, his hand knotted in the roots of your hair, kissing you so passionately that your lips buzz from the pressure. 

“Fuckin’ missed you.” He murmurs, hooking his arms around your hips to lift you. He holds you so you can feel the rigid outline of his erection against your core as he carries you. Panting, you dig your fingernails into his shoulders, wiggling awkwardly to create friction between your bodies while your casted leg dangles heavy beside his hip.

“Easy there, tiger.” He warns, now gripping the globes of your ass as he carries you up the stairs to your room. “Don’t wanna fall off the saddle before we even get started, d’ya?”

“Shut up.” You groan.

He gently lowers you onto the bed, watching you with lidded eyes as he removes his shirt. You scramble to follow suit, pulling your shirt and bra off in a tangle of fabric. Saliva fills your mouth at the site of his chest and abdomen, eyes immediately falling to the dark line of hair descending into the jeans that sit low on his hips. 

“That’s not very nice, babygirl,” He scolds, hands going to his belt, moving slowly to unclasp it as he realizes you’re paying close attention, practically foaming at the mouth waiting for him to pounce on you. 

“‘M never nice to you.” You bite your lip as he starts shucking his jeans down his thick thighs. You can see the shape of his length through his boxers, and your pussy twitches helplessly. 

“Hm. Yeah, I’ve noticed that.” He says, climbing onto the bed and over your body. “Must be because you want my attention, right?”

You hook your good leg around his ass, forcing his weight to press down on you. He’s careful to avoid putting pressure on your casted leg. Releasing a shaky breath, you tilt your hips to rut against his hard-on. “Think I have your attention, don’t I?”

He releases a shaky moan, his jaw unhinging as he drops his eyes to where you’re grinding against him. Your panties are soaked and so are your shorts. The insides of your thighs are probably glossy with your arousal, with how desperate you feel. 

“Yeah, keep going, baby,” He encourages softly. “Feel how fuckin’ hard you get me?” He drops his head to your chest, and you whine as his tongue draws a series of wet circles around your nipple before nipping it with his teeth. “Have to try not to get hard when you yell at me, I know it’d only piss you off more, but you’re so fuckin’ hot when you’re pissed.” 

“So that’s why you’re always picking a fight with me.” You say as he repositions with his back against the headboard, dragging you back with him so your back is tucked against his chest. You can feel his ragged breathing match yours as he pulls your good leg up to the side, exposing your throbbing cunt to his touch. 

“Yeah, baby.” He says against your ear, dipping his fingers into your shorts. “Your little pussy is a fuckin’ mess, babygirl.” 

You cry out his name at the first minor touch of your pussy, gripping his wrist as if your strength could ever rival his. His mouth attaches to your neck, kissing and biting you gently, forcing your eyes back inside your skull. He uses two fingers to stroke your pussy lightly, withdrawing his touch every time you try to thrust your hips further into his hand. He gives your clit a quick graze and you throw your head back to plead with him. 

“Dean-please,” You gasp. “Stop teasing-” 

He grabs your face with his free hand, squeezing your cheeks gently. “My girl’s so tough until she needs someone to make her cum, huh?”

You nod while he continues to stroke your swollen pussy with no real pressure. It’s maddening. When he lets go of your cheeks, his fingers start rubbing at your nipples until you’re whining loudly. The throbbing between your legs is incessant. 

“Dean, please, please, please-” You chant, dropping your chin to your chest to watch where his massive hand disappears into your shorts. 

“Poor babygirl.” He nuzzles into your neck, sending shivers down your spine. “M’being too mean? Your little pussy hurts? You need me to make it better for you?”

“Fuck-yes, Dean!” You whine in frustration as sweat beads down your spine, where it’s pressed to his chest. 

“Wanna hear you beg a little more, princess.” He grasps your breast in his hand, still giving your pussy featherlight caresses that have you thrashing in his embrace. 

 Your need is blinding enough that you can forget your pride, and you submit to him. “Please, Dean, please make me cum. I need it. I really fuckin’ need it.” 

“That’s a good fuckin’ girl. Who do you want to make you cum?” 

“You-you!” You gasp, trembling from how badly you need him to touch you properly. “God-” 

“Not God-” 

Tears of frustration burn your eyes and your jaw aches from gritting your teeth so hard. “Dean- okay! You, you, now, please-” 

“Love it when you cry my name, babygirl.” He pants against your neck, his forehead resting on your shoulder. 

He rewards you by finally, finally playing with your pussy with intent. He rubs at your clit until you’re tensing in his arms, plunging a finger inside of you, hurtling you toward your peak at an embarrassingly quick pace. He clutches at you, the sounds of his fingers sliding in and out of your cunt loud and slick. 

“Ohmygod Dean-” You scream, throwing your head back to rest on his shoulder. He immediately surges forward to put his mouth on yours, stifling the eruptions of pleasure building up in your throat.

“Yeah, baby, fuckin’ say my name. Missed hearin’ it. There’s my dirty fuckin’ girl, cumming on my fingers like such a good babygirl. Gonna come on my cock next? Just know you’re gonna feel so fuckin’ good. Been thinking about this pussy nonstop-”  

You cum violently, shaking in his arms while he kisses you sloppily, his words only adding to the overwhelming feeling.  

Still dizzy from coming down, Dean slides out from behind you, laying your limp body down flat on the mattress. 

“Wanna get my face between your legs so bad, babygirl. But I gotta be inside you.” He groans, carefully maneuvering your ruined shorts down your thighs, taking extra care to tug them off your broken leg without hurting you. You roll your head to the side to watch, chest still heaving. He’s staring at the swollen, puffy mess of your cunt, glistening in the low light, rubbing his crotch with one hand. He removes his boxers before crawling back over you. 

He hikes your good leg up, improving his view, but you’re fixated on where his length is in his hand, the head of him flushed red. You whine impatiently, mesmerized by his hand pumping his cock, then dragging the leaking head teasingly up and down your slit until you’re writhing. 

Dean’s shoulders pinch in, shuddering at the blazing liquid heat of your pussy against his sensitive head, teeth bared. 

You prop yourself up on your elbows to see better, your hips pinned to the bed by one of his powerful hands. 

He pops the head inside your fluttering hole for half a second before pulling back, smirking at your protests, before resuming his torture. A flush blooms across his broad chest, the muscles of his abdomen flexing as he fights to control himself. 

“Jesus Dean-” You complain in a whimper as he nudges the fat head in just an inch before thrusting his cock back between the lips of your cunt. “C-Can you just put it in-”

“Always so impatient, baby-” He positions his cockhead back in your clenching hole, then drapes his body over yours, pressing a chaste kiss to your cheek as he slowly drives forward. “Don’t I always give ya what ya want?” 

“Fuck-yessss-” You gasp, grasping at the meat of his shoulders as you feel his balls snug against your ass. You wiggle underneath him, puffing, straining to adjust to the intrusion. You can feel your heart in your throat now, your eyes glued to where you can see his cock withdrawing, covered in your creamy arousal. 

“Wasn’t that worth the fuckin’ wait?” He asks before kissing you softly. 

You nod, still struggling to adjust to the size of him. 

Dean grabs your chin, forcing you to meet his stormy eyes. “Eyes here, babygirl. Right here.” 

You cry weakly as he starts pounding into you, using the grip on your thigh for leverage. The pace is slow, slower than what you’re used to with him, but the strokes are so rigorous and hard. You whimper freely as his hips slap yours, his hand on your face forcing you to keep staring into his eyes. 

You’ve always avoided eye contact with him while fucking like the plague, preferring any position that feels good without having to look at his face unless you wanted to. Sex with him was always great. You always got off. But this is the next level. Every sensation feels heightened under his greedy gaze.

“S’that feel good, baby?” He husks, brushing your wet bottom lip with his thumb. 

“Dean-” You cry his name, gritting your teeth. Allowing yourself to touch his face, something that would have felt criminal a few months ago. 

He moans lewdly in response. “Say my name, baby, just like that. Such a fuckin’ perfect slut, aren’t you? Only for me, right?” 

He punctuates his questions with sharp thrusts that would drive you further up the bed if he wasn’t holding your hips. His hand releases your face, retreating around your neck, where he holds you softly. 

“Tell me, baby.” He grits out, sweat beading down his face. “Say it. Say you’re my slut.” 

Under any other circumstances, you would fight him on it. At least a bit. But your body’s been waiting for this for so long and wants the instant gratification. And then there’s the part of you that wants to do whatever he tells you to do. 

“Oh-fuck! M’your slut.” 

“Only for me?” He goads. 

You’re practically crying as you struggle to agree with him, gasping and fighting off the urge to cum immediately, the second his thumb finds your clit, rubbing it relentlessly. “Only for you!” You parrot, eyelashes fluttering wildly as you do your best to keep looking into his eyes, but you’re losing the periphery of your vision. 

“That’s fuckin’ right.” He rasps. “You might not know it, but your pussy fuckin’ does. You belong to me.” 

That sets you on fire. 

You feel your pussy start quivering as you start to cum, and you throw your head back to cope with the feeling. It feels like your cunt is trying to strangle his cock, and he starts groaning lowly in your ear, prolonging the waves of your orgasm as he releases into you. You put an arm around his waist, feeling his body tremor, and as you cum together, he grabs at your hair to pull you into a kiss that takes the air right from your lungs. 

As your pulses decrease and the last effects of your orgasms fade, Dean keeps kissing you. You try to pull away to get air, but he stops you with the hand in your hair, and keeps going. 

“Holy shit.” He huffs, finally letting you go. His lips are swollen and red, smeared with saliva. He carefully positions himself at your side. 

“Yeah.” You say, at a loss for words. You did the thing you said you wouldn’t do, but surprisingly, you don’t even feel bad about it. 

“No running off this time.” Dean says, meeting your eyes. 

You carefully roll into his extended arm, putting a hand on his chest. He seems to relax as you draw closer. You rest your chin on your hand and murmur, “As long as it doesn’t mean anything.” 

Dean helps you shower after, by getting in with you after wrapping your cast. He washes your hair and body, and you’re genuinely shocked that you aren’t crawling out of your skin to get away from him. It’s actually pretty fucking nice to just stay. 

He sleeps in the bed with you that night. You don’t think about what any of this could mean if you let it. You still aren’t sure if you’re strong enough to let it. 

Sometime past 3 am, you wake up but you’re not sure why. Dean’s sleeping beside you, taking up the majority of the bed with his naked form, and it actually warms your heart how young and boyish he looks while asleep. 

You take your crutches and miraculously manage a trip downstairs. You start towards the fridge for a glass of water, but feel a breeze. You turn and notice the little window over the sink is shattered. Hobbling over on your crutches, you inspect the shards of glass scattered around and in the sink. 

You see it a second too late- that the salt line had been disrupted. There’s no time to even scream before darkness encompasses you. 

The man is a menace. A complete and utter disaster of a human being who somehow manages to fail half his classes while looking like he stepped out of a cologne ad. He doesn't give a single flying fuck about his GPA, shows up to lectures hungover more often than not, has this way of smirking at you that makes your blood pressure spike in more ways than one. 

Three days ago, everything changed. And by changed, you mean you fucked him in a club bathroom like some kind of feral animal in heat, and now you're sitting here trying to pretend it never happened while your pussy has the audacity to clench at the memory.

It went down like this. Steve and Nat had dragged you both to that overcrowded club downtown, sticky floors and watered-down drinks that cost twenty dollars. You'd volunteered to be the designated driver because you're a good friend, responsible, the kind of person who thinks ahead. What you didn't know — because why the fuck would you, since you and Bucky barely exchange civil words — was that he'd made the same decision.

So there you were. Stone-cold sober, watching Nat and Steve get progressively more handsy on the dance floor while nursing the same Coke you'd been working on for an hour. You were contemplating faking a family emergency just to escape when you noticed some guy sidling up to you at the bar.

He was fine. Decent smile, nice enough jawline, generically attractive. And you were bored, so you smiled back. Laughed at his mediocre joke. Let him lean in close enough that you could smell his cologne, woody and expensive that did absolutely nothing for you.

What you didn't notice, what you were too focused on Mr. Mediocre to catch, was Bucky watching from across the bar, jaw doing that tense thing it does when he's pissed, fingers drumming against his beer bottle.

The guy's hand landed on your lower back, and that's when Bucky materialized beside you like some kind of vengeful spirit. "We need to go."

You turned to look at him, ready to tell him exactly where he could shove his we, when you caught the look on his face. "Excuse me?"

"Steve's sick. We're leaving."

The guy next to you raised his eyebrows, clearly picking up on the tension, and Bucky's gaze slid to him with something that might have been a smile if smiles could draw blood.

"Bucky —" But he was gripping your elbow, steering you away from the bar, toward the bathroom hallway, and you were too stunned to resist.

The second you were out of earshot from the main crowd, you yanked your arm free. "What the actual fuck is your problem?"

"My problem?" He laughed, and it wasn't a nice sound. "My problem is you throwing yourself at some random dickhead when you're supposed to be here with us."

"I wasn't throwing myself at anyone, you absolute asshole. I was having a conversation. You know, that thing normal people do?"

"Looked like more than a conversation to me."

"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize I needed your permission to talk to people." Your voice was getting louder, going shrill. "And Steve's not fucking sick, so what's the real issue here? Mad I'm not paying attention to you?"

Bucky's jaw clenched and unclenched before he spat his next words. "You're such a fucking brat."

"And you're a mean drunk. As usual."

"I'm not drunk."

"What? Then why the hell am I not drinking?" The words came out with frustration that had been building. "This whole time I could've been getting shitfaced instead of playing babysitter to —"

"I'm not taking care of your ass," Bucky cut in. His chest was rising and falling too fast, the way his eyes kept dropping to your mouth and then snapping back up like he was fighting himself.

"Fuck off, Barnes."

You turned on your heel and headed for the bathroom, needing space, needing air, needing to be anywhere but near him and the confusing mess of anger and heat that seemed to tangle in your stomach whenever you fought.

The bathroom was one of those single-occupancy ones with a lock on the door and a mirror that had seen better days. It was blessedly empty. You braced your hands on the sink and took a breath, trying to calm the frantic beating of your heart.

The door flew open behind you. Bucky filled the frame, broad shoulders and wild eyes, and before you could tell him to get out, to leave you the fuck alone, he was inside with the lock clicking home behind him.

"What are you —"

His mouth crashed into yours, and every coherent thought evaporated. The kiss was mean, biting, aggressive, tasting like the anger that had been simmering between you for months, since the first time you met maybe. His hand fisted in your hair, yanking your head back so he could devour your mouth properly, and you heard yourself moan before you could stop it.

"Shut up," he growled against your lips. You wanted to argue, push him away and knee him in the balls for being such a presumptuous prick, but his other hand was sliding up your thigh, shoving your skirt up around your hips.

"You're such an asshole," you did manage to gasp out when he moved to your neck, teeth scraping over your jugular.

"Yeah?" His fingers found the edge of your underwear, you felt him smirking against your skin. "Is that why you're soaked?"

God, you wished he was wrong, but your pussy had apparently missed the memo about hating him, embarrassingly wet and dripping down your thighs already. His thick fingers made filthy, wet squelching sounds as they slid through your slick folds, spreading your juices everywhere. "Bucky —"

"That's right. Say my name." He pushed two fingers inside you without warning, and your knees nearly buckled. "Let everyone in this shitty club know who's making you feel this good."

You bit down on your lip, trying to stay quiet out of pure spite, but he crooked his fingers just right and a whimper escaped before you could stop it. He was good at this, unfairly good. His thumb found your clit while his fingers worked inside you, and you could feel yourself getting close already, wound too tight from months of unresolved tension.

"Look at you," he murmured, wonder creeping into his voice even as his words stayed cruel. "So fucking desperate. How long have you been thinking about this, huh? How long have you been getting yourself off to the thought of me?"

"Fuck you," you spat. Spat might've been an exaggeration for it came out breathy and weak.

"Oh, I'm gonna fuck you, baby. Gonna fuck you so hard you forget that asshole's name. Forget your own name."

He pulled his fingers out. Before you could protest the loss, he was spinning you around and bending you over the sink. Your palms slapped against the porcelain, as you felt him behind, the hard length of his cock pressing against your ass through his jeans. The sound of his belt buckle alone made you wetter.

"You want this?" Voice rough, he tugged your hair to make you meet his eyes in the mirror. "Tell me you want this."

"Yes." It came out as a hiss. "Now stop talking and fuck me already."

"Needy little thing." Bucky shoved his thick cock inside you in one brutal thrust, stretching your open around his girth until you were gasping and clawing at the sink. Nothing could have prepared you for the stretch. He was big, bigger than you'd let yourself imagine in the privacy of your own room. The burn of it mixed with pleasure, had you gasping. "Tight," he gritted out, pupils blown so wide and face slack with pleasure as he gripped your hips, and thrusted into your weeping cunt. "Jesus Christ, you're squeezing me so fucking tight." Brutal, punishing strokes had you scrambling for purchase on the sink. Each thrust pushed you forward, and you had to brace yourself to keep from smacking into the mirror, heavy balls slapping against your clit with every snap.

"This what you wanted?" he panted, one hand gripping your hip hard enough to bruise while the other slid up to wrap around your throat. "Wanted me to ruin this greedy little cunt?"

"Yes — fuck — yes —"

"Who's making you feel good? Say it."

"You — Bucky — oh my god —" The bathroom filled with the obscene sound of skin slapping against skin, the wet slide of his cock pistoning in and out of you, and your moans that you couldn't control anymore. He felt incredible, impossibly good

"That's it, fuck." His grip on your throat tightened just enough to make your head spin. "Take it."

You could feel your orgasm building, coiling tight in your belly like a spring wound too far. His cock was dragging against your walls, thick and perfect, so much you were babbling now, words falling out of your mouth, uncontrolled. "Please — please — I need —"

"You need to cum?" His laugh was mean. "Look at you, begging so pretty for me. Such a good girl when you're getting fucked stupid." The hand on your hip slid around to your clit, pressing down hard, circling the swollen bundle of nerves in time with his thrusts. That was all it took. You came with a broken cry, clamping down around him so hard you felt him stagger.

"Fuck — fuck —" He pounded into you through it, chasing his own release, getting sloppy, losing his rhythm. "Gonna fill this pussy up. Gonna make you drip with my cum."

True to his word, he buried himself deep and came with a groan that you felt vibrate through your whole body. You could feel him pulsing inside you, spilling hot and thick, triggering another smaller aftershock that left you trembling. His forehead pressed between your shoulder blades, cock still buried inside you.

Reality started creeping back in. The uncomfortable reality that you'd just fucked Bucky Barnes in a club bathroom, smeared makeup and all. He pulled out slowly, his cum immediately starting to leak out of you in a thick, creamy trail down your thigh. You felt him watching it, possessive. "This is never happening again," you said, trying to inject some steel into your voice even though your legs felt like jelly.

Through the smudged mirror, you could see his expression, something like disappointment or hurt taking over his features, but it was gone so fast you couldn't be sure. "Yeah. Never again."

When you turned to face him, his face was carefully blank. Expecting a fight or at least some sarcastic comment, you stared at him, but he just looked at you with those blue eyes that gave nothing away. "Seriously? You agree?"

He shrugged, already tucking himself back into his jeans with an insulting efficiency. "You said it, not me. But yeah, probably a bad idea."

It shouldn't have stung. You were the one who said it first. But how quickly he agreed, how easily he dismissed what had just happened, made your chest feel tight. 

Of course he agreed. He hated you just as much as you hated him. This was just... what? Hate sex? Getting it out of your systems? It didn't mean anything. "Right. Bad idea," you echoed, trying to fix your skirt with shaking hands.

He watched you struggle with your appearance for a moment, then reached out and gently tucked a strand of hair behind your ear. The gesture was so at odds with everything that had just happened that you froze. "You good?" his voice was soft.

"Fine."

"Okay." He unlocked the door but paused with his hand on the handle. "Wait like five minutes before you come out. Don't want anyone getting ideas."

Now, he’s sitting right in front of you, hands flying over his phone, not one look to your face.

Nat's grip on your wrist is unrelenting, dragging you down the hallway toward Steve and Bucky's dorm like you're a toddler being hauled to the dentist.

"I don't know why I have to be here," you complain, but she's not listening. She never listens when she's on a mission. And tonight's mission involves you third-wheeling while she and Steve do whatever disgustingly domestic couple activity they have planned.

"You've been holed up in your room for two days and it's getting weird," Nat says, not breaking stride. "Besides, we're just watching a movie. It's not a big deal."

It shouldn't be a big deal. You've done this a thousand times before. You've crashed at their place, sprawled across their furniture, stolen their snacks. But that was before. Before you knew what Bucky looked like when he came, how his cum felt like dripping down your thighs. Before everything got weird and complicated in ways you're desperately trying to un-complicate. 

Steve opens the door, and you scan the room behind him automatically. The couch is empty. The kitchen is empty. No dark-haired asshole anywhere in sight. There's an annoying twist happening inside you. 

"Where's Barnes?" Nat asks, stepping inside and immediately gravitating toward Steve.

"Class ran late," Steve says, slinging an arm around her shoulders. "He texted like twenty minutes ago. Should be back soon."

You settle onto the couch and try to figure out why you're irritated. There's a prickling sensation under your skin, this restless energy that has nowhere to go. It doesn't make sense. Usually when Bucky's not around, it's a relief. A chance to breathe without his smirking presence taking up all the oxygen in the room. Since when do you care if he's here or not?

Since never. You don't care. You're just... noticing. That's all.

Nat and Steve are doing that thing where they're technically watching the movie but mostly just existing in each other's space. It's sweet. It's nauseating. It's making you feel like a massive third wheel, which is exactly what you told Nat would happen.

An hour creeps by. The movie's some action thing with explosions you're not paying attention to. You're checking your phone every thirty seconds like a psycho, which is ridiculous because you don't even text him, the chat is nonexistent. 

The door finally opens and Bucky looks like shit. Like he's been awake for seventy-two hours straight and spent most of that time getting hit by a truck. There are dark circles under his eyes, hair a mess. His usual sharp energy has been replaced by something dull and heavy.

"You good, man?" Steve asks, pausing the movie.

"Fine." Bucky's voice is rough. His eyes sweep the room and land on you for half a second before skittering away. "Long day. Gonna crash."

"There's pizza in the kitchen if you want —"

"Not hungry." He disappears into his room, door clicking shut with a finality. Steve and Nat exchange a look, shrug and go back to the movie. But you can't focus now, can't stop thinking about the way he couldn't quite look at you.

Before, he'd have said something. Some stupid comment designed to get under your skin, to start a fight, to make you snap at him. Before, he was always here, always present, finding new and creative ways to piss you off. Now he's not. It's wrong somehow. Off-balance.

You last another fifteen minutes before you can't take it anymore. "Bathroom," you mutter, standing abruptly.

The hallway to Bucky's room is short. The actual bathroom is to the left, and you don't care. You turn right and knock on his door before you can talk yourself out of it.

"Go away, Steve."

"It's not Steve."

Silence keeps you company before his voice comes. "What do you want?"

Without waiting for permission, you push the door open. Bucky's sitting on his bed, still fully dressed, looking up when you enter. His face slips for a fraction of a second, a raw, unguarded edge breaking through before he shuts it down like it never happened. "Can't you read a room? I said I was tired."

"You look like shit."

"Thanks. That why you're here? Give me a wellness check?" His voice comes out sharp, waking your frustration that was simmering beneath. 

"No, I'm here because you've been acting weird and I want to know why."

He laughs, but it's not a nice sound. "I'm acting weird? That's rich coming from you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. Forget it." He stands up, and you realize how small his room feels with both of you in it. "Seriously, go back to the movie. I'm not in the mood for whatever this is."

"Whatever this is? You're the one who's been avoiding me."

"I haven't been avoiding shit. I've had class and practice and a fucking life that doesn't revolve around you."

"Oh, so now I'm being self-centered? That's hilarious, Barnes, really. Because last I checked, you're the one who can't go five minutes without being a condescending asshole."

"And you can't go five minutes without starting a fight. What do you want from me? You said never again. I agreed. So what the fuck are you doing in my room?"

He's inside your bubble, closer, and you don't have a good answer. Don't have any answer that makes sense except for the truth, which is that you missed fighting with him. Missed the way he looks at you like you're the most infuriating person on the planet. Missed him, which is insane, stupid and absolutely cannot be true. "I don't know — I just... you weren't here and then you were and you looked like hell and I —"

"You what? Cared? Don't waste your energy. The only good thing about me is my dick, right?"

Oh. He's pissed about that. About how you treated him in the bathroom, one round of messy sex and immediately shutting down anything else.

"I didn't —"

"Yeah, you did." He's so close that you can smell him, the sweat of a hard day. "And you know what? You're right. That's all this is. All it's ever gonna be. So if you're here for round two, say it. But don't pretend it's anything else."

Your heartbeat stutters, starts hitting too fast, like it’s trying to climb out through your ribs. "Fuck you."

"That an offer?"

"You're such a prick."

"And you're a fucking brat who can't figure out what she wants." His hand comes up to grip your jaw, forcing you to look at him. "So let me make it simple for you. You want me to fuck you again? Is that what this little tantrum is about?"

Slapping him would make sense. Turning around, walking out, cutting him off completely. But your pussy is getting wet, he can probably see it in your eyes, the way you're leaning into him despite yourself. "That's not true." It sounds weak even to your own ears. "Your dick's not the only good thing about you."

His fingers press in harder, thumb digging into the skin just beneath your chin. "No? Then what else?"

"I don't know... your mouth?" It's a gamble. A stupid, reckless gamble that could blow up in your face. But his eyes darken, a dangerous smile curving his lips.

"My mouth," he repeats it syllable by syllable. "Wanna know what my mouth can do besides piss you off?"

Before you can answer, he's kissing you. More urgent, more hurried than the bathroom, but not any less filthier. His mouth moves over yours and then deeper, testing how far he can go before you pull away. The drag of his tongue lingers, presses, coaxes your mouth open wider until you’re reacting before you can think about it. A sound slips out, caught somewhere between your throat and his mouth, swallowed almost as soon as it happens. "Get on the bed."

"You can't —"

"I said get on the bed." The command goes straight to your cunt. "Unless you want Steve and Nat to hear me make you scream."

That gets you moving, climbing onto his bed, him immediately on trail, caging you in with his body. Hands slide up your thighs, pushing your skirt up. "These are cute," he says, fingers hooking into your underwear. Light pink with a little bow. "Be a shame to ruin them."

"Don't —"

He yanks them down your legs and dangles them in front of your face before shoving them into his pocket. "Too late."

"You're —"

His hand sliding between your thighs cuts you off, thick fingers spreading your soaked lips wide open, putting your dripping cunt on full display for him. He spits directly onto your exposed cunt, the warm, thick glob of saliva landing with a wet splat right on your swollen clit. He rubs it in, smearing the spit all over your slick folds until it mixes with your own juices and drips down your ass. Holding your pussy lips open even wider with both thumbs, his fingers dig into the soft flesh so nothing is hidden. He spits again, this time aiming straight into your twitching hole, watching the spit disappear inside you. "Look at this needy little pussy. Already soaked and I've barely touched her."

Humiliation and arousal both flood your system as he's inspecting you like you're something he owns, thumb dragging through your slick folds, smearing your juices everywhere before circling your swollen clit with just enough pressure to make you squirm and whine. "Bucky —"

"Shh. Let me look at what's mine."

His?? 

"It's not—"

"Whose cum was dripping out of this cunt two days ago?" He slides two thick fingers inside you, pumping them slow and deep, a moan slipping out, teeth clamping tight to pull it back. "Who fucked you so good you could barely walk straight?"

"That doesn't mean — oh fuck —"

"It does." Broad, rough fingers pump into you faster, your slick juices coating his knuckles and dripping down to his palm. "Got my cum all in this greedy pussy and you loved it. Loved being full of me. Bet you've been thinking about it, haven't you? Getting yourself off to the memory of my dick splitting you open."

What's worse is that he's not wrong. You have been thinking about it. Every night since it happened, fingers between your legs, trying to recreate the feeling of him inside you. "You're delusional," you lie through your teeth, and he laughs like he's caught you in it.

"Am I?" His fingers curl inside your walls, hitting that sweet spot that makes your vision blur. "Then why are you clenching around my fingers like you're trying to keep me inside you? Why's this pussy begging for more?"

Bucky pulls his fingers out abruptly, a filthy wet sound echoing as a whimper slips past your lips in the wake of the loss. Bringing them to his mouth, maintaining eye contact the whole time, he licks them clean, sucking every drop of your slick off with a groan. "Taste so fuckin' good."

Without wasting another breath, he moves down your body, shoving your thighs apart roughly and settling between them, mouth sealing over your throbbing clit like he's starving for it. Nothing is gentle about this. Calloused fingers dig into your thighs, holding you spread obscenely wide while his tongue works your clit in ruthless, sloppy circles, sucking hard enough to make your back arch off the bed. "Oh my god—"

"Let me hear how much you love my mouth. Thought it was only good for pissing you off?" The words against your cunt are muffled, but the vibration of it makes you writhe under him. 

"Shut up and — fuck — keep doing that —"

He slides his tongue deep inside you, fucking your dripping hole with it in long, filthy strokes while his nose grinds against your clit. You forget how to breathe. Forget your own name. One of his hands leaves your thigh to push two fingers back inside you. The combination of his tongue and fingers has you climbing toward orgasm embarrassingly fast. "Such a messy girl," he says, pulling back to look at you. His chin is wet with your arousal, the sight of it making your pussy clench around his fingers. "Making a mess all over my face. Getting my sheets wet. Think they can hear you whimpering in here?"

"Bucky, please —"

"Please what? Use your words."

"Make me cum, you asshole —"

"Nope, ask nicely." A sharp smack lands straight to your swollen clit, the sting shooting straight up your spine, making your pussy clench hard around nothing.

"Please, Bucky. Make me cum." The words leave you in record speed, the need for release much more than the desire to keep your self-respect. 

"Since you asked so nicely." His mouth goes back to your clit, sucking, while his fingers work inside you. You come with a strangled cry, thighs clamping around his head. The squeeze doesn't do anything to him, he continues his attack on your weeping hole, until you're pushing at his shoulders.

Looking entirely too pleased with himself, he pulls back to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. "Still think the only good thing about me is my dick?"

You're still trying to remember how to form words, whole body feeling like jelly. There's a suspicious wet spot spreading beneath you on his sheets. "You're still an asshole."

"Mhmm, but I just made you come so hard you nearly broke my jaw with your thighs. So, be nice." The finger which was buried inside your cunt, still slick with your release, taps your nose once.

He's hard, painfully so, you can see that. You almost say 'fuck me', beg him to put his dick in you and make you forget your own name again. But then reality creeps back in. Steve and Nat are just down the hall, more than that, you two are supposed to hate each other, and this was supposed to be never again.

"This can't keep happening." Sitting up, you try to fix your skirt even though your underwear is currently in his pocket.

"Right. This again."

If you didn't know him better, you'd think his face was neutral. Unfortunately for both of you, you do know him better. "I'm serious. This was — this was the last time."

"You said that two days ago."

"Well, I mean it now."

For a second too long, he stares at you, an expression you can't read this time. Hurt or anger or frustration or all three. "Fine," he finally says. "Last time. Got it."

"I'm serious, Barnes. We can't — I don't want —"

"I said fine." He stands up, adjusting himself in his jeans. "You should probably get back out there before they notice you've been gone for twenty minutes."

On shaky legs, you stand, very aware that you're not wearing underwear and that your hair probably looks like a disaster. At the door, you pause. "Bucky—"

"It's fine. Really. We're good." His back is to you. 

Nothing about this feels good at all. You slip out of his room and head to the actual bathroom, taking a minute to clean yourself up and try to put yourself back together. When you look in the mirror, your lips are swollen, eyes too bright, and you look like exactly what you are — someone who just got eaten out within an inch of her life.

This was the last time. It has to be. Even if some traitorous part of you is already wondering when the next never again will happen.

Bucky Barnes never ignores you. He might annoy you to death, but ignoring you was beyond him. That is, until now. 

The coffee shop smells like burnt espresso. There's a crack in the table that keeps catching your pen, your notes are all haphazard, the result of you not paying enough attention in class. But none of that matters because Bucky is sitting across from you and acting like you don't exist.

Before, he'd make a show of it, intentionally looking past you, making little comments to Steve that were clearly designed to get a rise out of you. This is different. He's genuinely not paying attention. Eyes on his textbook, highlighter moving across the page in steady strokes, completely absorbed in whatever bullshit he's supposed to be learning.

It's infuriating.

Steve and Nat are comparing notes, discussing, you're supposed to be doing the same but you can't focus. Because Bucky's right there, close enough to touch, and he might as well be on another planet.

You stretch your leg out under the table, let your foot bump against his calf. Nothing. No reaction. He just shifts slightly and keeps reading.

Fine. Maybe that was too subtle.

You lean forward to grab your coffee, making sure to press your shoulder against his. He's warm, you can smell that soap he uses, the one that's been haunting you for days. He glances up, shifts to give you more room and goes back to his reading. 

What the actual fuck.

"Can you pass me that?" you ask, pointing to his highlighter even though you have three of your own sitting right in front of you.

He hands it over without looking at you.

There's a pressure building in your chest, hot and uncomfortable, anger or something much worse. You click the highlighter open and close, open and close, the sound obnoxiously loud, out of place.

Bucky doesn't say anything. Again. 

You highlight a random sentence in your notes. Then another. You're not even reading what you're marking. Neon yellow drags across the page while you watch him from the corner of your eye. But he's a statue. A really attractive statue that ate you out yesterday and is now acting like it never happened.

At this worst possible moment, you also remember what his mouth felt like between your legs, the filthy things he said, how he pocketed your underwear like some kind of trophy. Fuck him for being able to compartmentalize like this. Fuck him for sitting there looking all studious and put-together while you're falling apart.

'Accidentally', you knock your notebook off the table. With a soft thud, it lands on his foot. Bucky closes his eyes, takes a breath that looks like it's taking considerable effort, and leans down to pick it up. When he hands it back, his expression is carefully neutral.

"Thanks." The word is saccharine. 

"Mhmm." That's it. That's all you get. Not even a proper word.

You last another five minutes before you physically can't take it anymore. You nudge his leg again, harder this time, and he finally looks at you. Exhaustion in his eyes makes an ugly twist in your gut. 

"You done?" His words are simple. Calm, even. But they land like a slap, and suddenly you're furious. Furious at him for being so unaffected, at yourself for caring, at this entire fucked-up situation that you can't seem to escape.

"Yeah. I'm done."

It's been fifteen minutes and Bucky hasn't even acknowledged that you exist. 

The bar is crowded, loud, and you're three drinks deep, feeling pleasantly buzzed. The tall, dark haired, decent smile guy, has been buying you drinks.

His name is Mike or something with an M. You're just nodding while you scan the room. You spotted Bucky the second you walked in, sitting at a high-top with some guys from his team, nursing a beer and looking like he'd rather be literally anywhere else.

He hasn't looked at you once. Not when you walked in, not when M-name put his hand on your lower back, not when you threw your head back laughing at something that definitely wasn't that funny.

You don't care. Why would you care? He made it perfectly clear at the coffee shop that he's done with whatever game you two have been playing, agreeing oh-so readily that it was a mistake.

The alcohol makes this easier somehow, looser. That's how you let the guy pull you towards the mass of bodies near the speakers, when he says something about dancing. The music is too loud, bass thumping in your chest. His hands land on your hips, chest to chest. You press back against him, definitely more grinding than dancing.

Over his shoulder, you can see Bucky. Still at his table, still not looking.

Fuck him.

You roll your hips, let this random guy's hands wander, and pretend you're having the time of your life. The guy's mouth is at your neck, saying something you can't hear over the music, hands sliding too low but you don't stop him.

Three songs. That's how long you last before you can't take it anymore.

You extract yourself from his hands, with a smile and an excuse about needing another drink, and make a beeline for Bucky's table. His friends scatter like they can sense the incoming storm. Then it's just the two of you. "Having fun?" you ask.

Bucky takes a long pull from his beer. "Could ask you the same thing."

"I am, actually. Matt's a great dancer."

"It's Mark, actually. And that wasn't dancing."

You lean against the table, invading his space. "Oh, so you were watching? Thought you were too busy brooding over here to notice."

"Hard to miss when you're putting on a show."

"I'm not —" You cut yourself off, force a breath. "Why do you even care?"

"I don't." He clearly doesn't, what with you storming over here to make a point. But his knuckles are white around the bottle and there's a muscle jumping in his jaw that makes you look closer.

"Liar."

"Go back to your date." His voice is so cold it actually makes you flinch. "I'm sure he's missing you."

"What's your problem?" The words come out loud, but the music swallows most of it. "You've been acting like I don't exist. Like nothing happened."

"You said it couldn't happen again. I'm respecting that."

"By ignoring me completely? By acting like we're strangers?"

"What do you want from me?" He finally looks at you, a burn in his eyes. "You want me to what, pine after you? Beg you to change your mind? You made your choice. Multiple times, actually."

"You agreed!"

"What the fuck was I supposed to say? No, I won't respect your boundaries? Jesus Christ." He runs a hand through his hair. He looks tired, worn down. "Go dance with Mark. Go home with him. Do whatever you want. Just stop —"

"Stop what?"

"Stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you want me to do something about it."

The bass of the music has nothing on your heart, you can feel it in your throat. You do want him to do something. To fight for this, whatever this is, to care as much as you’re suddenly realizing you do.

Reckless with alcohol and frustration, the words get past you. "Maybe I want you to —"

He sets his beer down with a force. "Well I'm not going to. So go find someone who will."

The dismissal stings, the casual way you're written off, like you're an inconvenience he's tired of dealing with. You're drunk enough that your filter is nonexistent, angry enough that you don't care about the consequences. "You know what? Fuck you, Barnes. I was trying to —"

"Trying to what? Start another fight so we can fuck about it later? I'm not playing that game anymore."

"I'm not —" But you are. You came over here specifically to get a rise out of him, to make him react. "God, you're such a —"

"Watch it," he warns, but you're too far gone to stop now.

"Or what? You'll ignore me harder? Give me the silent treatment? Real mature, Bucky. Really —" His hand shoots out and catches your nipple through your flimsy top, pinching hard enough to make you gasp. Right there in the middle of the bar, where anyone could see.

"Mind your manners," his words are quiet, only to your ears, but there's nothing quiet about the look in his eyes.

The pain mixing with pleasure makes your brain go numb. The shock of him touching you after days of ignoring, shoots straight to your cunt. The way he's looking at you like he wants to devour you whole definitely helps. "Or what?" The words come out breathy, challenging.

His other hand comes up to your mouth, calloused fingers pressing against your lips, pulling your lower lip down, even as you try not to give in. "You really wanna find out?"

When your mouth opens — to say what, you're not sure, — his fingers slip inside. The taste of salt and skin floods your senses. And because you're you, because you can't help yourself, you bite down. Hard enough to make a point.

Saliva smeared fingers pull out, only to hold your cheeks, smushed together. "That's it. We're leaving."

"'m — ngh — n’goin’ any — wheh —" 

Bucky doesn't let you finish your pathetic excuse of a sentence, he's pulling you through the crowd, fingers wrapped around your wrist in a grip that's just shy of painful. You could fight him, dig in your heels and make a scene. But you do what lost causes do best, follow him. 

He drags you out a side door into an alley that smells like garbage and stale beer. The door slams shut behind you, muffling the music. It's just the two of you in the dim light from a flickering streetlamp.

"You're a real piece of work, you know that?" His voice is rough, angry, and he's backing you up against the brick wall.

"Takes one to know one."

"Can't go five minutes without running your mouth. Can't follow a single fucking boundary you set yourself. What am I supposed to do with you?"

His hand slides under your skirt, where you're already wet. You've been wet since he pinched your nipple in the bar, maybe since you saw him sitting there looking miserable.

"This what you wanted?" His hand yanks your soaked panties aside so his thick fingers can drag through your dripping folds. "Wanted me to lose my shit? To stop being nice?"

"You're never nice," you gasp as he pushes two fingers inside you.

"No, I'm not." He curls them viciously, battering that spongy spot inside you while his thumb grinds rough circles over your swollen clit. "I'm the guy who can't stay away from you even though I know I should. I'm the guy who gets hard every time you look at me like you hate me, who's so fucked up over you I can't think straight."

The confession should probably mean something, but you're too busy trying not to collapse as he fucks you with his fingers. Fast and rough, his thumb circling your clit, his other hand gripping your hip to hold you in place. "Bucky — please —"

"Please what? You want my cock?" He's grinding his rock-hard bulge against your thigh so you can feel every thick inch straining against his jeans. "Want me to fuck you against this wall where anyone could see?"

"Yes —"

"No." He emphasizes the word with a particularly brutal thrust of his fingers. "Bad girls don't get cock."

"That's not fair —"

"Life's not fair, darling'." His fingers are pistoning into you, three thick digits stretching your pussy open, the wet squelching sounds obscene in the quiet alley. "You cum on my fingers or not at all."

Whimpering, you're chasing your orgasm, feeling his hard length against your hip, but he's not giving you what you want. Won't give you what you need. "C'mon," he murmurs, almost gentle despite the way he's finger-fucking you. "Let me feel it. Let me feel this greedy pussy cum for me."

It crashes over you sudden and intense, your cunt clamping down hard around his fingers, gushing slick all over his hand as your legs shake. He works you through it, fingers gentling as you breathe hard against each other.

After the post orgasmic haze, you realise you you just let him finger you outside a bar. He just made you cum, now he's pulling his hand away and putting distance between you like he can't stand to be close anymore. "Bucky —"

"Go home." He won't look at you. "Go home and sleep it off."

"I'm not drunk."

"Then you've got no excuse for acting like this." His eyes finally meet yours, the look in them makes your chest ache. "We're done with this. Whatever this is, we're done." Walking away into the bar, he leaves you standing in the alley his fingerprints bruised into your skin.

The first thing you register is that your mouth tastes like something died in it. The second thing is that you're not in your bed. The third thing, the thing that makes your eyes snap open in pure panic, is that you're in his bed.

Bucky's bed. The same bed where he'd eaten you out two days ago, where you'd gripped his sheets and fallen apart on his tongue. The same room you'd stormed into and started a fight that ended with his hand between your legs. The mattress is firmer than yours, and there's this indent in the pillow that smells like him.

You sit up too fast and immediately regret it. The room spins, a pounding in your skull that suggests last night was a terrible series of decisions. You're wearing a t-shirt. Not yours though. Grey and soft from too many washes, hits mid-thigh, it's his. 

Your jeans are folded on his desk chair. Your top, the black one with the low cut, is there too, along with your bra. Which means you're bare under his shirt, which means —

The door opens and Bucky walks in holding a bottle of ibuprofen and a mug of what smells like coffee. He's already dressed in a jeans and a Henley, that looks ridiculously hot on him. Hair is slightly damp like he just showered, looking way too put together for whatever the fuck happened last night.

"Did we—" You can't even finish the sentence, mortification crawling up your throat. "Did we fuck?"

Bucky laughs, a sound you realise you've grown to miss these past few days. "We've fucked before," he says, setting the ibuprofen on the nightstand. "But no. Not last night."

The relief is immediate and confusing. "Then why am I wearing your shirt?"

"You don't remember?" His words are soft, so soft so as to not spook the skittish animal — you. 

"No?"

Something flickers across his face as he sighs, too quick to read. Could be frustration or concern or maybe just exhaustion with your bullshit. He sits on the edge of the bed, which feels weirdly intimate considering you're barely dressed, and runs a hand through his hair. "After the alley, you went back to the bar. Did a few more shots with Nat. Then you puked in the bathroom, I had to change your clothes because you'd gotten it all over yourself."

Oh god. Oh god. You want to sink through the mattress, disappear into the floor and maybe cease existing entirely. He had to change you. He had to see you messy and puking, had to strip off your clothes and put you to bed like you're some kind of disaster he's responsible for. Your voice is small when you ask, "why didn't Nat help me? You didn't have to do that."

"Nat was in the exact same condition as you." He hands you the coffee, your fingers brushing his when you take it. "Steve took care of her."

The parallel. Steve and Nat. You and Bucky. Like you're couples, like this is normal, like taking care of each other when you're shitfaced drunk is just what you do. Except you and Bucky aren't anything. You're just two people who can't stop fucking each other in semi-public places and then insisting it'll never happen again.

Panic starts crawling up your spine. This is too intimate and domestic.

"You can shower before you go," Bucky says, standing up. "I'll get you some clothes to wear home. Your stuff from last night is probably beyond saving."

He's being nice. That's what's so disorienting about this whole thing. He's being genuinely nice to you, and you don't know how to process it. Where's the smirk? Where's the condescending remark? Where's the Bucky who makes you want to simultaneously punch him and jump his bones? This version, the one who brought you coffee and pills and is offering you his shower, is uncharted territory. "Thanks." The word feels awkward in your mouth.

Bucky nods, closing the door behind him with a soft click. You sit there, holding the coffee mug and trying to organize your thoughts into something that makes sense. The coffee is exactly how you take it, meaning he's been paying attention. This is somehow worse than you thought.

The shower helps. There's something grounding about standing under the hot water, washing off last night's mistakes with his soap and shampoo. You're now going to smell like him all day, which is just another thing to add to the list of problems you're actively ignoring.

When you come out, there's a stack of clothes on the bed. Sweatpants with a drawstring, another t-shirt, a pair of boxers. Which you're definitely not going to wear. A lie to keep yourself sane.

The walk home is a blur. You spend the rest of the day aggressively not thinking about any of it. His hands steady while he dressed you when you were too drunk to manage it, the coffee fixed exactly how you take it, the way he didn't just drop you off, even though he could've. You wouldn't blame him. 

By evening, the guilt sets in. You need to return his clothes. That's what a decent human being would do. Definitely not because you want to see him, not because you can't stop replaying the morning in your head.

You fold the sweatpants and t-shirt neatly, walk to his dorm with a stomach full of nervous energy. The boxers you're keeping, because returning used underwear is a level of awkward you're not prepared to handle. That's what you tell yourself now, what you'll tell him if he asks. 

He answers on the second knock, surprise in his eyes.

"Hey," you hold out the clothes. "Wanted to return these."

"Could've kept them." But he takes them. There's this moment where you're both just standing, not knowing what to say.

He looks good. He always looks good, but right now he's in joggers and an old t-shirt, barefoot and relaxed, something you rarely see in him. Your stupid brain is reminding you of all the ways you know what's under those clothes, all the ways he's made you fall apart.

Bucky does what you're not expecting, he leans in slowly, giving you time to see it coming, time to stop him if you want. Close enough that you can feel his breath before it happens.

No, not again. You turn your head at the last second, his mouth missing yours, catches your cheek instead, the contact soft and wrong all at once. He goes still, not sure of what he just touched. "We can't do this anymore." The words taste like ash on your tongue.

His expression is carefully blank as he pulls back. "Right."

"I'm serious, Bucky." You're talking fast, words tumbling out before you can stop them. "Last night was — this morning was — we need to stop. This whole thing, whatever it is, it needs to stop."

"Okay."

"No offense, you're a great lay —" God, could you sound more like an asshole? "— but this is getting too complicated. And I just think it's better if we —"

"I said okay." His voice is flat, face carefully set, not to give anything away. The problem is, you don't want him to just agree. You want him to fight you on it, to argue, to do literally anything other than just accept it. But he's standing there looking at you with those blue eyes that give nothing away, and you're realizing that maybe he's relieved. Maybe he's been looking for an exit and you just handed him one.

The insecurity, the pain in your chest, doesn't reflect on your words. "Okay. So we're good?"

"Yeah. We're good."

There's nothing left to say after that. Walking away feels wrong, even though it was you who'd suggested it. 

The truth you're not ready to admit, the one that's been building since that first bathroom encounter is that Bucky's not really that much of an asshole. Or maybe he is, but you're starting to not find it annoying. You like the way he challenges you, pushes back, doesn't let you get away with your bullshit. You like the quiet moments too, the coffee this morning, the way he took care of you when you were a disaster, how he looks at you sometimes like you're more than just someone to fight with.

You can handle hating him. You can even handle wanting him. What you can't handle is this other thing, this softer thing that's taking root in your chest and making everything more complicated than it needs to be.

So yeah. It has to stop. It has to. Even if you're already missing him, and he's only been gone from your sight for thirty seconds.

The thing about trying not to think about someone is that the harder you try, the more they invade every corner of your brain like some kind of parasitic thought you can't evict. It's been three days since you handed back Bucky's clothes, since you told him it was over, did the mature, responsible thing and ended whatever fucked-up situationship you'd stumbled into.

It's also three days of failing spectacularly at not thinking about him.

You see him everywhere. In the guy at the coffee shop who orders black coffee, the way Bucky takes. In the dark-haired stranger at the crosswalk whose shoulders are just a little too broad. In every fucking corner you turn, there he is. 

Except he's not. He's never actually there.

Fourth afternoon you end up at Steve's dorm. Not on purpose — well, maybe a little on purpose. Nat wanted to pick up some textbook Steve borrowed, and you tagged along. With a thin, embarrassing hope inside your ribs that thinks Bucky would be there on the couch like always, smirking at you over his laptop.

He's not.

Steve's alone, doing dishes in his hideous yellow rubber gloves, and he barely looks up when you walk in. "Bucky's at practice," he says, like you asked. Like it's written all over your face that you're looking for him.

"Cool," you aim for casual and land near manic. "I wasn't — I didn't ask."

Steve gives you a look that says he's not buying it, but he's nice enough not to call you out.

The next day, you hit the cafe where you do study group. Your regular table is empty. The corner booth where Bucky always sits, is occupied by some freshman with headphones the size of dinner plates. You order your latte and sit in the wrong seat. Everything feels off-kilter.

Your phone sits on the table in front of you. You've opened his contact approximately sixty-seven times in the last three days. His name just sitting there, never texted him, never called. The message thread between you is completely blank, just a white screen full of possibility and cowardice.

What would you even say? Hey, remember when I said we should stop? Yeah, about that. Or maybe: I think I made a mistake. Or the truth, which is something closer to: I can't stop thinking about you and it's making me crazy and I don't know what to do.

Your thumb hovers over his name. You close the app. Open it again. Close it.

Next night you end up at the bar. Same one where he fingered you in the alley, where you drank too much and ended up in his bed wearing his shirt. The bar is busy, some kind of hockey watch party that you don't care about. You scan the crowd automatically. Looking for dark hair and blue eyes.

He's not here either.

You end up doing a shot with some girls from your class. They're nice alright, but you're barely listening to what they're saying. An exam, about a professor's office hours. Your brain is white noise and static, all Bucky all the time, and you hate it. Hate that he's taken up residence in your head without paying rent, and that you can't seem to function like a normal person anymore.

The group chat is the worst part. Steve posts a meme about a professor. Nat responds with crying-laughing emojis. Bucky texts back with 'lmao'. Your thumb swipes his text, ready to reply, or react. But what use is it? 

He's alive. He's fine. He's out there somewhere living his life like nothing happened, like you didn't happen, while you're spiraling in this pathetic tornado of your own making.

What do you say to someone you pushed away? What do you say when you're realising that maybe you made the biggest mistake of your life?

Next morning, Nat corners you in your dorm room.

She uses the key you gave her for emergencies. You're still in bed even though it's almost eleven, wrapped in your comforter like a burrito. She takes one look at you before sighing, sitting on the edge of your bed. "Okay. We're talking about it."

"Talking about what?"

"Don't play dumb. You've been weird. You're not eating, you're not sleeping —"

"I'm sleeping fine."

"— and you've been moping. So we're talking about it."

You could deny it, brush her off, change the subject, keep pretending everything's fine. But you're so tired of pretending, and it's Nat. Maybe if you say it out loud, it'll make more sense. "I slept with Bucky."

There's not an ounce of surprise in her face, she doesn't even blink. "I know."

"What? How —"

"Please. You two have been eye-fucking each other for months. It was only a matter of time. How many times?"

"Does it matter?"

"Humour me."

You count in your head. The bathroom at the club. His room when he ate you out. The alley. "Three. Ish."

"Ish?"

"It's complicated."

"It always is with you two. So what happened? Why do you look like someone kicked your puppy?"

You spill all of it. Nat listens without interrupting. By the time you're done, you feel wrung out and empty. "I told him it was too complicated. That we needed to stop. And he just... agreed. Like it was nothing. Like I was nothing."

"Did you want him to disagree?"

The question you don't know the answer to, or rather, gaslighting yourself into not knowing the answer. "I don't know. Maybe. Yes. I don't know."

"Babe." Nat reaches over and squeezes your hand. "Why did you tell him to stop?"

"It was getting messy. Because we were supposed to hate each other and instead we were —" The words gets caught in your throat.

"Instead you were what?"

"I don't know. Something else."

"Like what?"

You close your eyes, and try to find the words for this feeling that's been building in your chest for weeks. "He knows how I like my coffee. When I was drunk and disgusting, he took care of me. He gave me his clothes. He's an asshole but he's also... he's not. He's funny and smart when he's not trying to piss me off, and the way he looks at me sometimes —"

"You like him." Three words you were not ready to hear. 

"No. I don't — we hate each other. We fight constantly. He drives me crazy."

"Yeah, because you like him." Nat says it gently, like she's explaining something obvious to a child. "You like him, and it scares you, so you pushed him away before he could hurt you."

"That's not —"

But it is. The realization hits you like cold water. You like Bucky Barnes. Not just his dick — though, that too —, but him. The way he challenges you, the way he sees through your bullshit, the way he makes you feel alive in a way nothing else does. You like him, and you sent him away. "Oh my god. I'm so stupid."

"Little bit, yeah."

"What do I do?"

"Tell him."

"I can't just — he agreed it was a mistake. He was probably relieved when I ended it. He hasn't tried to contact me once in three days, Nat. Not once."

"Because you told him it was over. What's he supposed to do, ignore your boundaries?"

She's right. Of course. You set the boundary, and he respected it, he even said so. Now you're mad at him for doing exactly what you asked.

Your phone is in your hand before you fully decide to grab it. You don't let yourself think this time, thinking is what got you into this mess. It rings, and rings, and rings. 

After more ringing and more nothing, you're ready to give up, and he picks up. "What?" His voice is rough, annoyed, your courage almost failing you.

"I need to talk to you."

There's silence first, sigh second, and then, "I'm busy."

"It's important."

"I said I'm busy."

"Bucky, please."

Another pause, longer. You can hear noise in the background. Voices, music maybe. He's somewhere, anywhere but talking to you. "Fine," he finally says. "Library. Tomorrow. Two o'clock."

"Okay. Yeah. I'll be —"

He hangs up before you can finish.

Bucky is ten minutes late.

Not that you're counting.

Eleven minutes now.

You picked a table in the back corner, the one behind the stacks where people go to make out or cry during midterms. Private enough for this conversation, whatever this conversation is going to be. Your hands are shaking, like you're some kind of nervous wreck, which you are.

Twelve minutes.

Maybe he's not coming. Maybe this was his way of telling you to fuck off without actually saying the words. You pull out your phone, pull up his contact for the thousandth time, and that's when you see him.

He looks wrong. There's no better word to describe him right now. Bucky always carries himself like he owns whatever space he's in, loose, confident and just arrogant enough to be annoying. But right now he's tense, shoulders up near his ears, and he won't quite look at you as he drops into the chair across from you.

"Hey." Your voice comes out too soft.

"Hey." That's it. That's all you get. He's looking at the table, at his hands, at anything that isn't you. There's this wall between you that wasn't there before. Or maybe it was always there and you were busy being annoyed to fully notice it.

"Thanks for meeting me," you try again.

He shrugs. 

This is going great. Really stellar. You've had more productive conversations with your houseplant.

"I wanted to talk about — about what happened. About what I said."

"It's fine." His voice is flat, bored almost. "You were right. It was getting complicated."

"No, I wasn't right. I was —" You take a breath, try to organize the thoughts that have been ping-ponging around your skull for four days. "I was scared. And I said things I didn't mean because I didn't know how to —"

"Don't." The word cuts through your rambling, sharp enough that you stop mid-sentence.

"Don't what?"

"Don't do this." He's finally looking at you now, his eyes cold in a way you've never seen. "Don't come here and try to rewrite what happened. You said you didn't want this. I respected that. We're done."

"But I do want —"

"Want what? To fuck again? Is that what this is?" He leans back in his chair, arms crossed. "Because if you're just looking for a booty call, you could've just sent a text."

The casual cruelty of it makes you flinch, you try to hold yourself together. "That's not what I'm saying."

"Then what are you saying?"

Okay, here it is. The moment you've been building toward, the confession you practiced in your mirror this morning like some kind of lunatic. Your heart is trying to beat its way out of your chest. "I like you." The words feel clumsy and inadequate. "I know I said it was just sex, and I know I pushed you away, but I was wrong. I like you, Bucky. I want to — I don't know what I want, but I want to try. To see if this could be something."

The silence that follows is excruciating. He's just staring at you, face completely blank, you can't read anything even if you try so hard. 

"You're confused," he says finally.

"I'm not —"

"Yeah, you are. You're confusing good sex with feelings. It happens."

"Don't tell me what I'm feeling." There's an edge creeping into your voice now, frustration bleeding through. "I know the difference between —"

"Do you?" He leans forward, there's a meanness in his smile. "Because from where I'm sitting, this looks like buyer's remorse. You ended things, realized you miss getting fucked, and now you're trying to make it into something it's not."

"That's not fair."

"No? Then explain it to me. Explain how four days ago you couldn't get away from me fast enough, and now suddenly you're catching feelings."

"Because I was scared, okay? I was scared because it was starting to feel like more than just sex, and I didn't know how to handle that, so I —"

"So you ended it. Which was the right call."

You're getting angry now, the frustration boiling over. "Why are you like this?"

"Like what?"

"Like an asshole. Like you don't —" You take a breath. "You took care of me. When I was drunk and disgusting, you took care of me. You made my coffee the way I like it. You gave me your clothes. That wasn't nothing."

"That was basic human decency. Don't make it into more than it was."

"I'm not —"

"You are." He stands up, the sudden movement making you jerk back. "You're making up a story in your head where this was something it wasn't. We fucked. It was good. It's over. That's it."

"Bucky —"

"I don't like you that way." Each word lands on you like a physical blow, bruising your skin. "I liked fucking you. That's not the same thing."

Sitting feels wrong now, feels too vulnerable, too small compared to him, you stand too. "I don't believe you."

"I don't care what you believe."

"Then why did you take care of me? Why did you —"

"Because I'm not a complete monster. Leaving you to choke on your own vomit seemed like a dick move. Don't romanticize it."

You're too close now, in his space, you can see the tension in his jaw, the way his hands are clenched into fists at his sides. Under all that, there’s a raw, painful part of him he’s trying to hide behind cruelty. "You're lying."

"I'm really not."

"Then why are you so angry?"

"I'm not angry. I'm annoyed. There's a difference."

Without giving yourself time to think it through, you reach for him. Your palm lands against his chest, warm through the fabric, fingers curling like you can hold him there, keep him from slipping out of this moment. It comes out of you all at once, that need to make him stay, to make him understand what this is doing to you. You push up on your toes, closing the distance, tugging him closer as you go for his mouth like it might fix something, like it might make this real in a way words haven’t managed to.

He turns his face away, just a quiet shift, a small angle of his head at the last second. Your lips miss his mouth, drag across his cheek instead.

The contact is wrong. You feel it immediately, the way your mouth presses into skin that isn’t answering, isn’t meeting you halfway. Your hand is fisted in his shirt. You can feel the rise and fall of his breathing under your palm, steady, unchanged, like this isn’t cracking anything open for him the way it is for you. The rejection is clean, absolute, leaving a sharp burn behind your eyes you can’t blink away fast enough.

"I just wanted to fuck you. That's all this was. That's all it's ever going to be. So if you're looking for feelings, if you're looking for some kind of relationship, you're barking up the wrong tree."

"No — no — you're —" You choke on your own words, trying to get the word 'lying' out, but you cannot. 

"I'm not. You're just too caught up in your own bullshit to see it. You want the truth? You're too much drama. Too much back and forth, too much hot and cold. I don't have the energy for it. The sex was good, great even, but dealing with you? With all your shit? Not worth it."

Each word is a knife, precise, designed to cut you, gut you, you feel yourself bleeding out right there in the library.

"Fuck you." Your voice cracks on the words.

"Yeah, that's about all you're good for."

Whether you want them or not, the tears flow. But you're not going to cry in front of him and give him the satisfaction of breaking you. You just won't. Grabbing your bag, you run. Past the stacks and the reference desk, you don't stop until you're outside in the cold air that bites at your wet cheeks.

What use is knowing you like him when he doesn't like you back? When he never did? When all those moments you thought meant something were just your imagination filling in blanks that were never there to begin with?

You were stupid to come here. Stupid to think he felt the same way, to think you were anything more than a convenient fuck.

He wasn't respecting your boundaries. He was relieved when you ended it. The anger, the coldness, the cruelty, that was all him, telling you the truth. That was him showing you exactly what you meant to him.

Nothing.

You meant absolutely nothing.

Heartbreak is supposed to be metaphorical. That's what you always thought, anyway. Just a turn of phrase people use to describe feeling sad. But it turns out your body doesn't know the difference between metaphorical and literal, and it's staging a full-scale revolt against the fact that Bucky Barnes doesn't want you.

Day one, you can't eat. Your roommate makes you toast. It sits on your desk going cold and hard while you stare at the ceiling. Your stomach feels like someone filled it with concrete, and the thought of putting anything in your mouth makes your throat close up.

Nat texts. You don't answer. She texts again. You turn your phone face down and watch the light bleeding around the edges when it buzzes.

Sleep doesn't come. You lie there in the dark, and your brain plays the library scene on repeat like some kind of sadistic highlight reel. Too much drama. Not worth it. That's about all you're good for. The words have teeth, and they're chewing through your chest cavity, making a home in the empty space where your self-respect used to be.

Day two, your head starts pounding. It's this dull, persistent ache that sits right behind your eyes and pulses in time with your heartbeat. You take two ibuprofen and they sit in your empty stomach like rocks. Everything hurts. Your muscles, your joints, your skin when the blanket touches it, everything. You tell yourself it's just tension. Just stress manifesting physically. Just your body being dramatic because apparently you are, according to Bucky, too much of everything.

The crying comes in waves. You know how in the movies, a single tear rolls down your cheek? Yeah, it's not that. This is ugly, snotty, hiccupping, making your eyes swell up so bad you can barely open them. You cry so hard you throw up, and then you cry about that. The whole thing is so pathetic you almost laugh. 

Throat feels you swallowed glass. Every time you try to drink water it's a special kind of torture. You've got a fever. Skin too hot, too cold at the same time, thoughts getting fuzzy, everything feels like burning. 

Nat comes by. You pretend you're asleep. She leaves soup outside your door that you don't touch.

You're not heartbroken, you tell yourself. You're just sick. Getting sick right after emotional trauma is just a coincidence. People get colds all the time. This has nothing to do with the fact that you put yourself out there and got eviscerated for your trouble, nothing to do with the fact that you cried your eyes out. 

The room swims when you open your eyes. Everything's blurry and soft, like someone smeared Vaseline on your corneas. You try to blink, the ceiling fan is on, rotating slow because you're freezing even though you're pretty sure you're burning up. There's your hot water bottle on the nightstand, the one shaped like a box that Nat got you as a joke. There's your water glass. There's Bucky.

There's Bucky? 

Sitting in your desk chair like he belongs there, you must be hallucinating, delirious with fever because there's no way he's actually here, in your room, looking at you with something that might be concern if you didn't know better.

You reach out without thinking, hand stretching toward him like you could touch him if you tried. Your fingers are shaking. Everything's shaking. "Hey," you mumble, voice sounding like someone beat you up for days. "You're not real."

He leans forward, and dream-Bucky looks tired. Worried. Nothing like the cold, cruel version from the library. "What do you want?" Dream-Bucky asks, his voice soft. Softer than he's ever used with you, softer than you knew he could be.

"Not fair," you slur, coherent sentences are beyond you right now. "S'not fair of you to haunt my dreams."

"It's not a dream, baby."

Baby. He's never called you that. Not even when he was inside you, not even in the heat of the moment. You almost laugh, but it comes out as a cough that rattles your chest.

"Sure isn't," you speak when the coughing stops. "Dream-Bucky would hate me too. Just like real Bucky. Can't even have nice hallucinations."

You think dream-Bucky says something else, but the words blur together and you're already sliding back under, into the dark where nothing hurts quite as bad.

Hours later — could be three, could be ten, time is meaningless when you're this sick — you surface again. The room is dimmer now. Your mouth tastes like death, and your whole body aches like you got repeatedly hit.

And dream-Bucky is still there.

Still in your desk chair, but now he's got his elbows on his knees, head in his hands, hasn't realised you're awake yet. It's nice watching him, even if it's just a dream. He looks tired. "Can't you just leave me alone? I don't want to dream of you."

Your voice brings him to your room again, head snapping up, relief plastered on his face. "You're not dreaming."

He reaches out, hand cupping your face, palm cool against your too-hot skin. Real. Definitely not a fever dream. "You've still got a temperature."

You jerk back from his touch like it burns. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Nat told Steve you were sick —"

"Why the fuck do you care?"

Bucky flinches, like the words hit him physically. "Can we not do this right now?" he asks, tiredness in his voice prominent.

The audacity of this man, flinching like you hurt him and not the other way around. "Yeah, of course. Get out."

"I just want to help you. You're in no shape to take care of yourself."

"Better me than you. So get out." You try to sit up and the room tilts sideways. 

"I'm sorry. Please let me help you." His words are pleading, an act, you think. 

You're upright now, barely, using the wall for support. "Sorry for what? For saying I'm just a good fuck? For telling me I'm too much drama? For —"

"For everything. I'm sorry for everything." There's hurt in his eyes, but you're too angry to care about right now. 

"I don't fucking care, Bucky. Get out."

His jaw sets in that stubborn way you recognize. "No. I'm not doing this push and pull again."

"Oh, that's great. Because I'm just pushing you. There's no pull whatsoever."

He stands up, takes a step toward you. "Please. Let me just take care of you, help you, and then I'll be gone if that's what you want."

"What are you gonna possibly do that I can't do myself?"

"I made broth." He gestures toward your desk where there's a thermos you didn't notice before. "I'll heat it up. It's supposed to help with the cold. I also got aspirin for the fever, and some throat lozenges, and —"

"Fine. Leave that here." You swing your legs over the side of the bed, trying to stand, the floor immediately rushes up to meet you.

Bucky catches you, though you wish he didn't. His hands are on your arms, steadying you, you're too dizzy to push him away. "Did I say you can touch me?" you snap when the world stops spinning.

"Please. I just didn't want you to fall."

The irony is not lost on you. Didn't want you to fall. The audacity of that statement when he's the one who made you fall in the first place — metaphorically, emotionally, completely. Now he's worried about the literal fall? Fuck him. Fuck him for every mixed signal, every cruel word, every moment he made you think you might mean something.

You're too weak to fight his hands on you, the touch burns, even if you're the one running hot now. "You know," you say, and you hate how shaky your voice sounds, "I can't really fuck you right now. Since — you know — I'm sick and all."

The embrace of his touch leaves you like you'd slapped him, hands dropping to his sides. "That's not — I didn't come here for that."

"No? Then why are you here?" You're shuffling toward the bathroom because you desperately need to pee and also need to get away from him. "Come to finish the job? Make sure I'm completely destroyed?"

"I came because I was worried about you."

"Well, don't be. I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You can barely stand."

"Not your problem." You make it to the bathroom and shut the door in his face, leaning against it, legs shaking.

Through the door, you can hear him moving around. The sound of your microwave running. Cabinet doors opening and closing. He's still here, still in your space, you don't have the energy to keep fighting him.

You finally emerge, teeth brushed, face washed, feeling slightly more human. The smell hits you first, however slight they may be. Savory and warm that makes your stomach remember it exists. Bucky's set up your desk like a sick station: the bowl of broth with a spoon, aspirin, a fresh glass of water, those throat lozenges he mentioned. "Sit," he says, gesturing to your bed.

"I'm not a dog."

"Please sit down before you fall down."

You sit, mostly because standing is taking more effort than you have to give. He gently moves the bowl to sit in front of you. 

"I'm not hungry."

"You need to eat something."

"I said I'm not —"

"When's the last time you ate?" His voice is gentle but firm, and it pisses you off how much he sounds like he actually cares. If you didn't know what he's capable of, you'd trust this act. 

"Doesn't matter." Truth is, you can't remember. Day before yesterday, maybe? Time is soup.

"It matters. Drink the broth."

"You're not my mother."

"No, I'm the guy who made you soup at four in the morning because I've been losing my mind worrying about you. So please, for the love of god, just drink the fucking broth. "The words come out sharp, frustrated. 

You don't point out that he has no right to lose his mind worrying about you, and take the bowl mostly to shut him up. It tastes even better than it smells, rich and salty with actual vegetables and herbs you can't identify. Your stomach wakes up properly, growling, and before you know it you're halfway through the bowl.

Bucky sits back in the desk chair, watching you with what looks like relief.

"Happy now?" you ask between bites, because you can't let him think this means anything.

"Getting there."

You want to throw the bowl at his head and scream at him for showing up here, for being nice to you, for confusing everything when you were just starting to build up the walls you need to survive this. You want to ask him why he said all those horrible things if he was just going to show up at your door with homemade soup like some kind of reformed asshole.

But you're so tired. Tired of fighting, of hurting, of not understanding what he wants from you.

After the soup, your body decides it's had enough excitement for one day. Bucky helps you back to bed, his hand on your elbow, steadying you even though you don't ask for it. The sheets are cool against your fever-warm skin, and you're asleep before you can tell him to leave.

When you wake up, the room is bright with morning light. Your head feels clearer, the fever-fog lifted enough that you can think in actual sentences instead of fragmented thoughts. The chair where Bucky sat is empty.

Of course it is. He came, he did his good deed, checked the 'take care of sick girl' box off his list, and now he's gone. Probably relieved to escape before you woke up and made things awkward again. The thermos is still on your desk, the bowl washed and sitting in your dish rack. The whole thing feels like something you might have dreamed except for the physical evidence that he was here.

You sit up slowly, testing your body's response. Better. Definitely better than yesterday. Your throat doesn't feel like shredded glass anymore, the headache has downgraded from horrible to a dull throb. Progress.

Thing is, you can still feel where his hand was on your face. The ghost of his touch like a brand, and you're pathetic enough to wish it was still there. To wish he was still here, sitting in that stupid chair, looking at you like you're worth worrying about.

You're reaching for your phone, to do what, you don't know, maybe check the time, maybe torture yourself by looking at his contact, when your door opens.

Bucky walks in carrying another bowl, and you just stare at him. He's wearing different clothes than last night, so he definitely left and came back, which means this is intentional. A choice he's making. "Sorry. I went to my dorm to make this. You didn't have enough ingredients here."

You continue staring. Your brain is trying to process the fact that he left to make you soup. That he came back. That he's here, in your room, in the morning light, and he doesn't look like he's planning to run.

He sets the soup on your desk and crosses the room quickly, crouching beside your bed. "Are you feeling better?"

Words seem beyond you right now. You're too busy cataloging the worry in his eyes, the tension in his shoulders, how he looks at you like he's afraid you might shatter.

"Hey." His voice softens, warmth seeping through. "I'm gonna check for fever, okay? Is that alright?"

He's asking you permission to touch you. You want to trust this. The gentleness, the care, the softness he's showing you. But soft can turn sharp so quickly. You learned that in the library.

"People usually do that with a thermometer." Your voice is still rough but functional.

"I'm a college student. I don't own a thermometer." The corner of his mouth twitches, almost a smile, and you feel an answering pull in your own lips before you remember you're supposed to be mad at him, supposed to be protecting yourself.

When you nod, his hand comes to your forehead, gentle, soft. His palm is cool, and you fight the urge to lean into it. "Better. Still warm, but better."

The shower helps. Standing under hot water, letting it beat against your sore muscles, washing away two days of sick-sweat and misery. You take your time because the steam feels good, and also because you're half-convinced that when you come out, Bucky will be gone. This is a fever dream. An elaborate hallucination. He's not really here making you soup and checking your temperature and asking permission to touch you.

But when you open the bathroom door, wrapped in your towel, he's still there, still sitting in your chair. Very much real. You really should've brought a change of clothes inside. 

His eyes drop to the floor immediately, color creeping up his neck. "Uh. Uhm. I'll go — I'll step out. While you — you know — change."

The awkwardness is almost funny. This is the same guy who's been inside you, seen you fall apart on his tongue, who's had his hands all over your body. Now he can't look at you in a towel?

"Dude, you've seen me naked before. You don't have to be this awkward."

The memories hit you both at the same time, you can see it in the way his jaw tightens. All the ways he's touched you, all the sounds you've made for him, all the times you've been bare and vulnerable.

Maybe it's defiance or maybe you're just tired of this dance, but you reach for the edge of your towel and start to unwrap it. Bucky crosses the room in three strides, hand catching yours. "No."

You're backed against the wall. He's close enough that you can feel the heat coming off him, close enough to see the specks of gray in his blue eyes. "Yeah, sorry." The words tasted bitter in you head, tastes bitter when they come out too. "Forgot you can't keep it in your pants with me. That's all I'm good for, right?"

"Stop." His hand moves to your waist. His other hand catches both of yours, pins them gently above your head, no force in them. You could break free if you wanted. Except you don't want to.

"Bucky, what the fuck —" You twist against him, pushing at his hold, more stubborn than urgent, trying to get free more out of principle than actual desire to escape.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, okay? I fucked up. Monumentally." His words are earnest, desperate. 

Your heart is trying to break out of your ribcage. He's so close, and he smells like coffee and that stupid soap he uses. This is too much, confusing, reminiscent of all the times you've been in this position, pinned, wanting and completely at his mercy.

"I was horrible to you that day," he continues. "In the library. I haven't been able to sleep since I fucked up."

You stop squirming inside his touch. Stop breathing, maybe. Because he's looking at you like you matter, like hurting you actually hurt him. "Then why did you — You don't get to simply apologize and be done with this."

"You know you're confusing, right?" He sighs as he says it, almost a fond exasperation. His thumb is tracing circles on your waist through the towel, probably without him realizing.

"What?"

"Baby, you fucking confuse me. All the fucking time."

Baby again. He keeps saying it like it's natural, like it belongs in his mouth when he's talking to you.

You're still very aware that you're in a towel. That his hand is on your waist, warm through the terry cloth, your hands still above your head, however light his hold is. "You know, if you don't want to see me naked, maybe don't put me in this position. The towel's gonna slide off my tits any second now."

He drops your hands like they burned him, steps back, putting distance between you that feels wrong now that it's there. "Sorry," he mutters.

You want to tell him to stop apologizing. Or maybe apologize more. Or maybe come back and put his hands on you again because the absence of his touch feels like a loss. Your thoughts are tangled up in themselves, a mess of want, hurt, anger and confusion that you can't sort through.

"I liked you." The words burst out of him like he's been holding them in too long. "Fuck it— I like you. I've liked you since the very start. Since Nat and Steve started dating. No, even before that."

Hope starts building in your chest, easing the pain, soothing the hurt, which is dangerous, which you can't afford right now.

"I saw you in class one day and I've liked you ever since." He's rambling now, words spilling out faster than he can organize them. You've never seen him like this. Bucky doesn't ramble. "That's how Steve got to know Nat, actually. Because Nat's your friend. I talked about you all the time to Steve and that's how Steve got to know Nat."

Wait.

"And then you're this firecracker who can't shut up, and we got off on the wrong foot —"

"What?" Your brain is trying to rewrite history, slot this new information into the narrative you've been carrying around forever.

"I didn't mean to pick a fight with you that day." He runs his hand through his hair, looking almost sheepish. "I didn't mean to pour coffee over your notes, I was — I was nervous. And we've been butting heads ever since, and it's my fault because I had this huge crush on you and I poured coffee all over your fucking notes. How dumb is that?"

The coffee incident. You remember it, the way your carefully highlighted notes had turned into a brown-stained disaster. You'd snapped at him, and he'd fired back instead of apologizing. That was the start of it. The first battle in a war you thought he wanted to fight. But he's saying it was an accident. An accident born from nerves, from liking you, from being so focused on trying to impress you that he'd fucked it up spectacularly.

You think about all the fights since then, all the barbed comments and intentional provocations. You'd convinced yourself he hated you when, this whole time, he was just trying to get your attention the only way he knew how.

"Ever since then, you've not let me know peace." He's pacing now, and you're still standing against the wall in your towel like an idiot. "I just wanted to get to know you, and then we started annoying each other, and I started liking it because it was kinda our thing. Our love language, you know?"

Love language. Like fighting with you was how he showed affection, like every argument was actually him trying to be close to you. 

"And then we — uh — had sex that day," he continues, "and you told me it wasn't happening again. I was crushed. Then it happens again, and you say the same thing."

"You agreed," you point out, because that part still stings.

"What was I supposed to say? No, I love you so much, please don't break my heart? I thought if I could just have you in whatever way you'd let me, that would be enough. Even if it was killing me."

Love. He said love. Did he notice? His face doesn't change, like the word slipped out without him registering it, and you're standing here holding this piece of information in your chest, this fragile thing, while he's still walking back and forth like standing at one place could kill him. 

"And then that night," he says, and his voice gets quieter. "The night you got drunk."

"What about it?"

"You told me you liked me."

Suddenly, the room starts spinning, like you're both drunk and hungover at the same time. "What?"

"We — uhh — I — I fingered you in that alley, and then we went inside, you got drunk, and you told me you liked me. Said you'd been thinking about me, that you couldn't stop thinking about me."

No, no, no. You don't remember that. You remember drinking, remember Bucky's hands on you in the alley, remember waking up in his bed. But confessing your feelings? That's a blank space in your memory. "I don't — I don't remember that."

"I know." He stops pacing, looks at you with what might be sadness. "The next morning, you didn't remember anything. Asked if we'd fucked like the idea horrified you. And I realized you had no idea what you'd said to me."

Oh god. Oh god, the morning after. You'd been so mortified, so convinced it was just another mistake, and he'd been hoping. He'd been carrying your drunken confession around like a promise, and you hadn't even known.

"I thought maybe — I don't know what I thought. That maybe on some level you meant it, even drunk. So I was hopeful. And then that evening, you came to return my clothes, and when I tried to —"

The way you'd turned your face, the way you'd said he was a great lay but it was too complicated. Fuck. 

"You pulled away, said I was — I was — Like that's all I was to you."

The hurt in his voice is tangible, the way he couldn't even repeat your words, and you're realizing how many ways you've wounded each other without meaning to. Or maybe meaning to, because hurting him felt safer than being vulnerable.

"That fucking destroyed me," he admits. "I'd just heard you say you liked me, and then hours later you're reducing me to a dick. So when you showed up at the library saying you liked me, I — I panicked. I thought you were confused, or trying to spare my feelings, or that you'd just had some realization about missing the sex. I couldn't go through that again. Couldn't let myself hope and then watch you take it back."

It's all clicking into place now. The cruelty in the library wasn't because he didn't care. It was because he cared too much, because you'd hurt him first, even if you didn't know you were doing it.

"So you decided to hurt me first," you say. 

The pain in his face is visible, pulling at your heartstrings even though he was the one that hurt you. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. That wasn't fair at all. I thought I was protecting myself, because I couldn't bear to be hurt like that again."

He's pacing like a caged animal now, three steps one way, pivot, three steps back. His hands are running through his hair, tugging at the ends, and he's still talking, apologizing, explaining, words tumbling out in this stream of consciousness that you can barely keep up with.

"Bucky," you call, but he's not listening. 

"— and I just kept fucking it up, kept saying the wrong thing, kept pushing you away when all I wanted —"

"Bucky." 

"— and in the library I was such a dick, I can't believe I said those things to you, I can't —"

You step into his path, hands on his chest, and physically push him backward until his the back of his knees hit your bed and he sits. The look of surprise on his face would be funny if this whole situation wasn't so fragile, so precarious, like one wrong move could shatter whatever's happening between you.

This position — him on your bed, you between his legs — feels intimate, maybe even more than those three times. His hands come to your hips automatically, looking up at you with eyes that are red-rimmed and devastated, pulling you closer, wrapping his arms around your waist, pressing his face against your stomach. The hug is tight, almost desperate, you can feel him shaking. "I'm sorry." His voice is muffled against the towel. "Please don't leave me."

His words pry you open from the inside. This is Bucky Barnes, the guy who struts through life, who never asks for anything, who'd rather die than show weakness. And he's holding onto you like you're the only thing keeping him anchored, like the thought of you leaving is unbearable.

Your hands find his hair without conscious thought, fingers threading through the dark strands. You've had your hands in his hair before, have pulled it while he was between your legs, gripped it while he fucked you. But this is gentle, tender, you offering comfort instead of taking pleasure.

There's wetness seeping through your towel. At first you think it's just water from your shower-damp skin, but then you feel his shoulders hitch, feel the way he's breathing in these controlled inhales like he's trying not to fall apart completely.

He's crying.

Bucky is crying, face pressed against your stomach, arms locked around you like you might disappear.

The realization hits you at the same moment you feel wetness on your hand. Your hand that's still in his hair, your own tears dripping onto your fingers. When did you start crying? You didn't notice, too focused on him, on the way he's holding you, on the impossible fact that this is happening.

You're both crying. Two people who've spent months hurting each other, finally breaking down.

"You hurt me." The words need to be said, need to exist in the space between you, even if he's not ready to hear it again. "What you said in the library — it hurt me so much I got physically sick."

His arms tighten against you, pulling you closer. "I'm so fucking sorry." The words are desperate, broken. "I will never hurt you. Ever again. I said those things and I couldn't breathe afterward — hurting you hurt me too, baby. I'm so fucking sorry."

Baby. This time it doesn't make you bristle or question. "I thought you hated me," you whisper. "I thought I was nothing to you."

He pulls back enough to look up at you, face wrecked, tears tracking down his cheeks, eyes swollen. Beautiful, broken and completely open in a way you've never seen. "You're everything to me. You've been everything to me for so long, and I've been too scared to say it. Too scared you'd walk away."

One of his hands leaves your waist to cup your face, thumb brushing away your tears even as his own keep falling. The gentleness of it makes you want to sob. How many times has he touched your face? But never like this. Never with this kind of reverence.

"I'm not walking away. I'm right here." You mirror his movement, your hand on his cheek. 

"You're right here," he repeats, like he can't quite believe it.

You're both a mess. Crying, shaking, holding onto each other, towel soaked through with tears. You're pretty sure you look like a disaster, and Bucky's face is blotchy, eyes red. But none of it matters.

None of it matters because he's looking at you like you hung the moon. "I love you." This time there's no mistaking it for a slip. "I'm in love with you. I don't even know how long. I love the way you argue with me. I love how you never back down. I love that you called me out on my bullshit from day one. I love —"

You kiss him. Soft, tentative almost, afraid of breaking whatever fragile thing is forming between you. His lips are salty with tears, so are yours, and you can feel him trembling as he kisses you back. He's pulling you closer while trying to be gentle about it. The towel is probably going to fall, but you can't bring yourself to care. This kiss feels like a promise. Like an apology, a confession and a beginning all wrapped into one.

Breathing hard, you pull back. His forehead drops to rest against your stomach again, his breath hot against your skin through the damp towel. "Say it back," he whispers. "Please. I need to hear you say it."

Maybe it's too soon, maybe you should make him work for it, make him prove he means all these pretty words he's saying. Maybe the smart thing would be to guard your heart a little longer, keep some walls up just in case.

But you're so tired of being smart, of protecting yourself, of pretending you don't feel what you feel. "I love you too." The words feel like jumping off a cliff. "I love you even though you're an idiot. I love you even though you hurt me. I love you even though — maybe because — you drive me completely insane."

His whole body sags with relief, like he was holding his breath waiting for your answer. "Thank god," he breathes.

No more pretending this is just physical when it's been emotional from the start.

He kisses your stomach through the towel, pulling you down onto the bed with him. You land in a tangle of limbs as he wraps himself around you like he's trying to merge your bodies into one.

He's quiet for a second, looking at you with those devastated blue eyes, "I'll never hurt you like that again." Unadorned, nothing poetic or flowery about the words. 

You're a realist even now, even in this moment. "You can't promise that. People hurt each other. It happens."

His hand caresses your face, thumb tracing your cheekbone. "Not like that. I'll never speak to you like that again, never make you feel like you're nothing to me. I promise. I promise, baby."

There's a desperate sincerity in his voice that makes you believe him. Or maybe you just want to believe him. Maybe it's the same thing. "Okay," you whisper.

"Okay?"

"I believe you."

His exhale is shaky, relieved, and he pulls you closer, the towel finally giving up its fight to stay in place and gaping open at the side.

"I'm gonna fuck this up sometimes," he says. "Probably a lot. I'm gonna say the wrong thing or do something stupid because I'm an idiot who doesn't know how to handle feelings."

"Yeah, probably. I'll fuck up too. I'll push you away when I get scared. I'll pick fights because it's easier than being vulnerable." You're tracing patterns on his chest through his shirt, random swirls and shapes that don't mean anything. 

"So we're both disasters."

"Seems like it."

His laugh is quiet, almost surprised, like he didn't expect to be laughing right now. "At least we're disasters together."

Together.

Your fingers find the hem of his shirt, slip underneath to touch warm skin, the need to feel him solid beneath your hands, maybe to tell yourself this is real. "Tell me something."

"Anything."

"That first day. When you spilled coffee on my notes. What were you actually trying to do?"

He groans, the vibration of it you feel against your cheek. "I was trying to ask you out. Had this whole speech planned. Then I got nervous and forgot I was holding coffee and — yeah. Disaster from the start."

"What was the speech?"

"Absolutely not. That's going to my grave."

"C'mon."

"Nope. Some secrets stay buried. All you need to know is I'd been watching you for weeks like a creep. Knew your coffee order, knew what corner of the library you liked, knew your schedule."

"That's actually kind of creepy."

His hand slides into your hair, fingers gentle against your scalp. "I know. I'm not proud. But then you yelled at me about the coffee and you were so pissed and so pretty, and I just... kept trying to talk to you. Even if it meant fighting with you."

You think about all those fights. The debate that got so heated the TA had to separate you. The time you fought about nothing at all, just because you could, because it meant you got to be in each other's space.

"I liked fighting with you," you admit.

"I know. I could tell."

"It was the only time you paid attention to me."

"Baby, I was always paying attention to you." His voice gets more serious. "Every single second you were in a room, I knew exactly where you were, who you were talking to, if you were smiling. I was so far gone for you it was pathetic."

All this time you thought he barely noticed you except to annoy you, he was cataloguing your every movement.

"The club. That first night. You got so mad. Was it — was it about that guy?"

There's no shame in his words. "I wanted to punch him, wanted to drag you away and tell him you were mine even though I had no right. I was jealous, pissed off and I followed you to the bathroom to yell at you about it."

"And then we fucked instead."

"Best decision of my life. Fuck, it was incredible. But, after that I couldn't pretend anymore, couldn't pretend I just wanted to annoy you. I was addicted."

You lift your head to look at him, there's a softness in his expression that makes him look vulnerable.

"Every time you said it was the last time, I died a little," he continues. "But I kept coming back for more because having you for a moment was better than not having you at all."

The words hurt in the best way. You did the same thing, kept saying never again while knowing you'd end up right back in his orbit. "I'm sorry," you say.

"For what?"

"For pushing you away. For not seeing it sooner. For — For making you think you were nothing to me."

"Hey." He sits up, brings you with him so you're straddling his lap, towel falling away completely now but neither of you caring enough to correct it. His hands cup your face, making you look at him. "We both fucked up. We both hurt each other. But we're here now, right? We're figuring it out."

"Yeah. We're here."

His lips brush yours, and you think about all the ways you've kissed before. It's nothing like before, it's a kiss that means something beyond want, that says I'm sorry and I love you and I'm not going anywhere.

There's a specific kind of torture in wanting someone you think you can't have. You'd lived in it for months — watching Bucky, fighting with Bucky, fucking Bucky, all while convinced it meant nothing. Convinced you were nothing to him beyond a convenient release. The torture was in the wanting, in the knowing it could never be more, the way your heart skipped when he walked in a room even as you told yourself you hated him.

You'd gotten good at that torture, had made a home in it, learned to navigate the ache of unrequited feelings dressed up as animosity.

Now it's gone. This is having Bucky, knowing he wants you back.

He is lying next to you now, your head on his chest, his heartbeat steady under your ear. Your towel is somewhere on the floor. You're still sick, still running a fever, but he's here. He stayed. 

He's going to keep staying, you realize. Through the sickness, fights and the moments when you both fuck up. 

It won't be easy. You're both too stubborn, too quick to anger, too used to hurting each other to suddenly become soft and gentle all the time. There will be fights. Real ones, not the foreplay kind. And there will be days when you drive each other crazy, and there will probably be moments when you wonder if this was a mistake.

But then he'll make you coffee exactly how you like it. Or you'll catch him watching you like you're precious. Or you'll patch him up after a game, or you'll fight about something stupid and end up laughing instead of crying.

His fingers are tracing patterns on your bare shoulder and you think about how touch can mean so many different things. All the times he's touched you in anger, in desperation, in hunger. And now this. Gentle, aimless touching, just because he can, because you're his and he's yours.

"What are you thinking about?" he murmurs.

"How we got here."

"Long fucking journey."

"Worth it?"

"Every second of it."

The torture of wanting someone you can't have is finally over. The torture of having someone you could lose is just beginning.

But as Bucky presses a kiss to the top of your head, as his breathing evens out and his heartbeat steadies under your ear, you think maybe this is the kind of torture you can live with.

Maybe this is the kind of torture that's actually called love.

MY MASTERLIST!

EXTRAS. first time writing smth where both of them are this toxic, please go easy on me! thank you for reading!

A few seconds of silent followed your answer, and genuine hope began blooming in your chest at the prospect of falling back asleep peacefully.

Letting out a satisfied sigh, you buried a bit deeper under the covers, eyelids dropping again, and your mind focused on trying to chase back the fragments of the dream you had been rudely awaken from—

“Bitch get up.”

Natasha opened up your door so violently you almost jumped out of bed.

“Jesus Christ, Nat ! Ever heard of knocking ?” You glared at her, hesitating on throwing one of your pillows her way.

“Come on, get up, we are going.” She declared, standing in your doorway with her arms crossed across her chest.

Not intending to move one bit, you simply put up your elbow, head resting on your palm to look at her better.

“Why do I even have to go anyway ?”

“Because it’s a team bonding activity,” she explained, looking a bit desperate now to get you out of your room, “so we can’t properly bond if we’re missing someone.”

“Are you kidding me ? We already bond eight hours for three hundred days a year ! I think you’ll do just fine without me. And actually, I think it’s better that way, we need to learn how to be independent from each other.”

“You know, seeing you like that really makes me wonder how the hell you manage to get up for early training.”

“If I don’t show up to base I’ll literally go to prison, Nat. And besides, this is the only two weeks of vacation we get, so please,” You whined, “please, let me enjoy it how I see fit. If you guys’ idea of relaxing is going on an eight miles hike at five in the morning out in the snow, suit yourself. My idea of relaxing is getting a little sleep, so what, sue me.”

Before putting in your vacation dates with the base’s administration, Natasha had suggested that you all synchronize them, so that you could go somewhere together.

The idea had seemed exciting enough at the time.

It was Bradley who had suggested to go somewhere cold, to escape, if only for a moment, the grueling heat of California. Everyone had eagerly agreed. Settling on a place in the mountains came as an evidence, you had a privileged access to the beach twenty four seven, and the need to see something else than sand and water could be felt simmering along everyone in the squad.

Bob was the one who had suggested Vermont, of all places, to settle down for a week of vacation. Quickly after that, flights were booked, as well as a beautiful little cabin perched up in the snowy mountains of the state. To find something somehow affordable, you had to settle on a cabin with only three rooms… for all eight of you. Since you all bunked enough on deployment, it was a fight to the death to get to have the only single room.

A fight through a tournament of rock, paper, scissors. One you had won by a landslide, mostly due to your squad mates’ inability to change the pattern in which they played the signs, but you were certainly not complaining. This trip was simply the best, exactly what you had needed to unwind. That was… up until now.

When three days into the trip the squad had decided that you would climb up the mountain near the cabin to go see the sunrise from the summit. A fantastic idea you had thought, until you had realised at what time you’d have to wake up. Which all led to the whole squad, already suited up in puffer jackets and snow boots while you were still cuddled up in bed.

“Actually, we don’t even know if it’ll be eight miles, we haven’t decided which trail we’re gonna use.” Bradley said, coming up behind Natasha to pear at you.

“Thanks for the info, Bradley, there was already no chance I was getting up before but this just sealed it. I mean, what kind of organization is this ? Cyclone would whoop your asses if he were here,” you said before putting on a perfect imitation of your superior, “this is not professional of you, you are naval aviators, top guns graduate, the best of the best, we expect better from you.”

You heard Mickey’s laugh from the hallway before you saw him pop up in your doorway, “I love when you do that.”

Reuben was quick to join, along with Bob and Javy. It was beginning to feel like a mission brief in the entrance of your room.

“Come on, Y/N.” Reuben pleaded, “we’ll have tons of fun and it’s gonna be beautiful up there, plus, you promised last night you’d come.”

You frowned, “did I ?”

“Yes.” All your friends affirmed in unison.

A beat.

“Well obviously that was a lie.” You deadpanned at them before fluffing out your pillow and lying back down, “enjoy the hike, and close the door on your way out, please.”

Before any of them could protest, heavy footsteps echoed in the stairway.

“What the fuck are you all doing, you having a meeting in there ? We’re gonna miss the sunrise.”

The sound of Jake’s drawl made you bury yourself deeper under the covers. This was absolutely not what you needed right now.

“Y/N doesn’t want to come,” Bob replied.

You heard Jake let out a snicker, “of course she doesn’t.“

“Bradley, which trail did you say we’re gonna use again ?” Javy asked.

“Oh I don’t know yet.”

You swear you almost heard the sound of Jake’s head whiplashing to look at Bradley.

“You don’t know ? We’re leaving in thirty minutes tops, how the fuck did you make it in the military with that organization ?”

Barely containing a laugh you suppressed it in your pillow at the last minute.

“Alright,” Jake clapped his hands, obviously about to take control like he, so often, loved to do, “everyone go back downstairs, pack your bags, chicken,” he pointed to Bradley, “choose a damn trail, I’ll be down with sleeping beauty in twenty minutes. Be ready by then.”

If your eyes weren’t scrunched shut you would have seen Bradley putting his middle finger right in Jake’s face, who was only harboring a smirk and even winked at him.

Natasha was squinting dubiously at Jake, “what do you even think you’ll be able to do to make her come that we couldn’t ?”

Jake‘s smirk only widened at Natasha’s choice of words, “oh you know, I have my techniques.”

Your heart skipped a beat and you could feel the hair on your neck stand up.

“Alright everyone get out now,” Jake practically pushed them out when they only stared at him dubiously, “and I mean it,” he called out as they were going down the stairs, “I want everyone in front of the door and ready to leave in twenty minutes !”

The sound of the door closing made your heart race in your chest and each step that Jake took towards your bed wasn’t helping.

You felt the mattress dip slightly where he sat next to your lying body and you forced yourself to sound as exasperated and firm as possible, “get out.”

Jake’s hand reached out on your cover covered waist, rubbing lightly. And the simple weight of it, even through thick layers, was enough to have you flush under the cover.

“You don’t mean that,” he almost cooed.

Finally looking up at Jake, the sight of him made you pause for a second, the harsh retort you had ready and loaded dying on your tongue.

If there was one thing you’d reproach to this beautiful cabin, it would be was the lack of effective blinds in your room. The only thing supposedly holding off the light from drowning your room in unwanted sunlight in the morning was a very, very thin beige curtain, which was approximately as useful as Jake when it came to being a supportive wingman in dogfight training.

But that’s not something you were going to complain about now, not when it was letting the moonlight grace Jake’s features in a way that made him look so angelic, making his green eyes full of mischief pop out even more than usual.

Fuck, was he hot.

“I do mean it,” was the only thing you were able to say, tone very much not conveying the authority you had meant it to.

Humming, his gaze quickly flicked to your lips before returning to your eyes, the small smile never leaving his lips, and you wished you could say that your stomach flipped out of repulsion and not… something else entirely.

A beat of silence passed then and it was enough to almost make you squirm under his prying gaze.

“If I eat you out, do you promise to get up ?”

Your eyes almost bulged out of your eyes.

“What ?!”

Jake let out a chuckle at your outburst, “oh please, don’t be so shocked, I thought we were past that now.”

He seemed to be, but you sure weren’t.

It was no secret that you and Jake didn’t always get along, it was basically public knowledge, even the higher ups knew it. To be fair, it was pretty hard to miss when the both of you would engage in your weekly screaming match in the middle of the tarmac.

He just seemed to have a special talent to drive you up the wall, he made you so angry it was sometimes hard to deal with the fury burning up in your stomach. Natasha liked to joke that this whole rivalry and hating game between the two would disappear with a simple, good heated hook up, to blow off the steam between the two of you.

And in a way, she had been right. Except that you hadn’t stop at one.

You wouldn’t even be able to explain how it happened the first time, it was kind of a blur. All you could remember was really how fucking good it was, and how much you hated that it had been. The regret after had been almost soul crushing… But, on second thought, it must hadn’t been that bad because it didn’t stop from you from doing it again, and again… and again.

Jake was like an addiction, no matter how much you wanted to quit him, he made it impossible to.

And after a while, you just accepted it, stopped beating up yourself for it. He made you feel fine, good, great.

Fuck that, he made you feel things you didn’t even know you were capable of feeling.

After that it had become an implicit agreement that since the only place you seemed to cooperate in was the bedroom, why not just enjoy it ?

And you did consummate your arrangement pretty regularly, so you guessed it was hypocritical for you to act so offended by Jake’s proposition. But if you had accepted the situation as it was, it didn’t stop you from putting up a bit of a fight from time to time, if only to hold on to some of your dignity.

Getting over your initial shock, his casualness over all this still unsettled you a little, but you guessed it was to be expected for a guy like Jake. You wondered if there was anything in this world that he considered to be a big deal.

Now that you were sitting up, his hand had gone down to your calf, gently rubbing it over the covers.

“So, what do you say ?” He inquired, voice having naturally dropped an octave.

A shiver ran through your spine at his tone and you just prayed to God it wasn’t visible. If you were honest with yourself, wetness had began pooling in your pajama pants as soon as he had closed the door behind him.

Feeling your cheeks heat up you averted your eyes from his for a second, if only to get a breather from his intense jade eyes.

“Twenty minutes to make me cum is a bit of a long time, don’t you think ?” You provoked, voice coming out a bit breathier than you intended, “thought you were better than that.”

When your eyes flicked back to him, his smirk had gone from cocky to downright predatory. Jake leaned in, catching your lips in a strangely sweet kiss given the situation. The way his lips moved against yours was enough to send butterflies in your stomach swarming around endlessly. And you almost chased him when he pulled apart, his lips made a descent down your neck. Leaving open mouthed kiss on the thin skin, the heat coming from his mouth made your thighs squeeze together. God, it was almost embarrassing how easy you were for him.

“You know I only need five,” he whispered into your neck, his tongue darting out to lick a stripe of skin up to your jaw, “the other fifteen minutes are for you to get ready.”

Taking a deep breath, you desperately tried to not sound like you were already on the edge of begging, “you better get to it then.”

You watched with a racing heart as Jake made his way down your body, keeping his intense stare right on you. He lifted the covers, revealing your lower body and gently stripped down your pajama pants. Feeling a deep flush rush to your face at witnessing Jake’s pupils dilate so much upon landing on your already glistening folds, you almost closed off your legs.

No matter how much time you did this with him, it always felt a bit embarrassing at first, at least for you. Jake didn’t seem to mind one bit. He never did.

An appreciative sound resonated low in his throat, “you’re already dripping, sweetheart,” he said, and the sheer tone of his voice was enough to make you clench around nothing, “was this your intention all along, act all stubborn so I would come in here and eat your pretty little pussy to give you some motivation ?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” you tried to scoff but it turned into a gasp when Jake placed a kiss right on top of your clit, “I was having a great dream before you all came barging in here, bugging me about some stupid hike.”

He raised a brow, staring up at you, “a dream, huh ? Was I in it ?” He asked in a grin.

“No.”

Yes, and he was very much doing what he was about to do now.

He only hummed in a smirk, his eyes returning to the task at hand. He lapped up a big stripe from your hole up to the very top of your clit, his thumbs were keeping you open for him, allowing his tongue to explore every surface of your arousal swollen pussy.

“Fuck, you taste like heaven right now,” he groaned right against your entrance, tongue dipping in slightly, making you moan loudly and immediately slap a hand over your mouth.

Jake only chuckled soflty, quickly returning to lap up and kiss at your clit. Your hips had instinctively began to grind into his mouth. Your eyes nearly rolled all the way back to your head when his tongue began flicking the underside of your clit, and you had to bite your hand to muffle the desperate whine piling up in your throat.

“Jake, fuck—“ you choked on a moan when he did it again, “right there, stay right here— oh my god,” your hands flew to his blonde hair, intent on keeping him right where he was.

“I know,” he cooed against your twitching bundle of nerves, “you have such a sensitive clit, baby,” he gave it a gentle suck, making your hips buck right into him, “can feel it twitching in my mouth.”

Letting out a drawn out moan at his actions and words, you pulled on his hair slightly, “don’t be— ah fuck, don’t be weird.”

“That’s not a very smart move,” he commented, looking up from your glistening folds, a smirk pulling at his lips when he noticed the frown of your brows, confusion slipping through the pleasure, “there’s no use in lying, darlin’. Your sweet pussy is more honest than you are, I can feel you clenching around nothing.”

And as if your own body decided to betray you, your core desperately clenched again at his words. Whining, you tried to close your legs around his head out of embarrassment.

But Jake’s hold on your thighs kept them firmly opened up for him, “huh huh, none of that.” He warned, his teeth playfully grazing the hood of your clit, making you yelp.

“What do you even get out of this ?” You asked in a quick breath, prompted up on your elbows and forcing your eyes to stay open and focused on him.

His tongue stopped the kitten kicks it was inflicting on your clit for a second, he looked up at you, something like indignation flashing in his eyes.

“That’s a stupid question and you know it,” he remarked, collecting the slick that had accumulated between your inner lips, “I get to worship this gorgeous pussy of yours, taste you… fuck look at her, she’s dripping for me.” He watched, almost mesmerized as a string of slick was slowly getting pushed out of your cunt, and you wished you could pretend that the way he was referring to your pussy as if it were a whole person wasn’t making pleasure flash hot in your lower stomach, “already swollen from just a few licks,” Jake marveled, “doesn’t take you much, huh, sweetheart ?”

Your head had long since thrown back against your pillow, a mix of wanton moans and whines were interjecting your labored breaths. The effort to try and be quiet long forgotten.

“Stop— Ngh, shit, stop narrating everything.”

Jake’s tongue circled your clit, as if grazing every single nerve of the sensitive pearl with his mouth.

“Why would I ? She clearly loves it,” he pointed out, voice heavy with lust as his thumbs opened you up more, watching with an obvious hunger the way your inner walls were fluttering around nothing.

Growing closer and closer to your high, you started to become more and more desperate, legs shaking and squirming in Jake’s hold.

“Jake, just—“ a moan interrupted you when he licked into your hole, “ah— just make me cum.”

Looking up you, he stopped everything, his lips left your puffy folds to stretch out into a smirk.

When he made absolutely no move to dive back into your burning core, you let out a pathetic whine, hips instinctually bucking into his face.

“Jake…” you groaned, frustration bubbling low in your stomach alongside the remains of the pleasure he was providing you only seconds before.

“Come on,” he coaxed, voice husky, almost purring, “we both know you can beg better than that.”

You would never be caught admitting this out loud but the way he spoke to you was enough to build you back up towards the edge.

“Looks like she knows it too,” he hummed low in his throat, appreciatively eyeing your pussy pushing out another string of slick arousal.

Moaning out of sheer desperation and frustration, you swallowed back your pride. The need to cum was making the urge to fight him at every turn slowly dissolve, overtaken by the overwhelming desire to feel him on you.

“Jake,” you whined, looking down at him between your legs, a deep flush taking over your neck and face, “could you make me cum, please ? I… I need it really, really bad, please make me feel good ?”

“Good girl,” he praised, his hands affectionately rubbing your inner thighs, “so sweet for me…” Jake immediately went back to suck on your twitching bud.

Feeling the white, hot pleasure spark again in your lower stomach made you arch and cry out in bliss.

“Shh, I know, baby, I know.” Jake shushed you softly, “try to quiet down a bit for me, mmh ? I’m gonna take good care of you, but just try not to alert the whole squad, okay ?”

Nodding quickly, you put up your hand over your mouth, trying to conceal every one of the desperate noise that were translating just how much Jake was unraveling you with simply his mouth.

“I know just what you need, sweetheart…” he whispered into your cunt.

His hands snaked their way up your body, slipping under your shirt. And through the hazy fog taking your brain hostage, an understanding of his plan shined through, and the prospect alone made you clench. With a shaky and almost frenetic hand, you pulled up the hem of your shirt, exposing your breasts to the slightly cold air of the room. Your nipples were already erect and perky, practically begging for Jake’s attention. And he wasted no time to indulge them.

“Jake— Jake, fuck… that feels amazing,” you moaned out when his big hands cupped your breast, squeezing them passionately.

The groan he let out sent delicious vibrations in your clit. It was like every little thing he did was purposely meant to make you lose your mind, and you didn’t know if you loved or hated the fact that he knew your body so well, knew you so well, that he was able to unravel you in just a few minutes.

“I know, you feel amazing too, sweetheart, feel fucking perfect.”

Jake’s fingers pinched and pulled at your nipples, occasionally rubbing the perked up nubs, all the while his tongue never stopped its sweet torture. Flicking your clit, sucking on it, licking between your outer and inner lips, lapping up at your weeping hole…

Your moans were freely echoing in the room now, along with the lewd sound of Jake slurping you up. Growing more restless as you could feel the rubber band in your lower belly threatening to snap at any moment, your hips were squirming against his mouth, and from an external point of view it wasn’t very clear if you were chasing him or trying to get away from him. Feeling your frenetic desperation, Jake was quick to reassure you.

“Relax, baby,” he soothed, “focus on me, okay ? Just let yourself feel it, let go sweet girl…”

And all it took after that was a very gentle suck on your swollen clit for the coil in your lower belly to finally snap. A cry left your mouth as white hot pleasure locked your body into place. The hold you had in Jake’s hair tightened as your legs closed around his head, your chest rising in quick breaths as your pussy fluttered sporadically around nothing.

“That’s it, baby, just like that, make a mess… Jesus, look at you.” He groaned, almost reverently while staring at your convulsing form.

After the peak of your orgasm faded, fatigue seeped into your bones as you tried to catch your breath, and the way Jake’s hands were raking all over your satisfied body was not helping.

“You did so well, sweetheart. Shit, I wished we had time to fuck.”

“We could, we could just stay here,” you immediately said, the idea of staying in bed while Jake thoroughly took care of your body was much more appealing than going on that stupid hike, “we’ll find an excuse.”

“Sorry,” he grimaced, not apologetic at all, “we made a deal, remember ?”

You pouted, “you’re no fun.”

He chuckled, all warm and affectionate and you were scared to admit it maybe made your stomach flipped harder than when he was avidly lapping you up just seconds before. His hand came up to cup your cheek, he leaned and left the most gentle of kisses on your cheek.

“I did also wanted you to come on the hike, that’s the second thing I get out of this. The sunrise is gonna be beautiful, don’t want you to miss it.”

That stunned you for a moment, but Jake didn’t give you the time to answer.

“How about I properly take care of you when we come back, hm ?”

Your heart did something weird in your chest, and all you could do was nod.

“Yeah,” your voice came out way too breathy for your liking, you cleared your throat, “yeah, let’s do that.”

Jake smiled brightly at you, stealing one last kiss, smearing a bit of your own arousal on your lips in the process.

“Alright, get your pretty little ass up darlin’ and get ready.”

When you finally came downstairs after the exact twenty minutes that Jake had announced, the whole squad was by the door, all eyeing you with a weird mix of disgust and fascination.

But it was Natasha who spoke up first.

“Oh you two are fucking disgusting !”

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Author’s note : unfortunately I need him so bad.

This has been on my mind for a long time, I’m weak for the rivals with benefits dynamic, I hope you liked it !💞

Also, will I one day be able to write something that’s straight to the point without 1k words of useless squad banter ? No, I don’t think I will.

Are you still reading? 😉

Status: WIP, last updated May. 17, 2026

Bonus: Theme Song

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