robin →

ryland - the arrogant prodigy.

the smart man that could get any sponsor he wanted because his contributions to the world were genuinely life changing. he advanced studies in alchemy, sometimes partaking in astronomy.

you grew up with him. learning from the same teachers and mentors, but he clearly ended up being the better student.

he had no title himself, but his mind advanced him in society and let him live comfortably.

but the downside to being a smart man is that he has a smart mouth. and that smart mouth got him in trouble with the king himself.

the king embarrassed and humiliated by the smart man, shunned him from high society and grace was forced to live out in the common folk's city.

his sponsors pulled their support and grace had to figure out how to make a living. it proved difficult for a while because for his whole life, he was the genius in any court and he was allowed to be arrogant. no one dared to utter a disrespectful word to him until the king did.

he figured to put his smarts to better use by helping the common folks' children, setting up a makeshift school in the city at no charge. he found community after being shunned through the community he harbored and even though he doesn't get paid at all, he is taken care of by the people around him.

you were forbidden to see him for a while. the only way you were able to contact him was through letters, but those ended up being rare events.

when unfortunate events struck your family, the title was passed down onto you and your first order of business was to find grace.

you found him at his cramped home in a sketchy part of the city and when you offered to sponsor him, to come back to high society, he refused.

grace didn't want to come back, he found his purpose in the city and even if it meant more struggle, he was not coming back to the world that took from him and then turned their back to him.

both of you being stubborn, you came to an agreement with him. you leave him to his calling, but you sponsor him in whatever he wants to do. you left grace at his cramped home with a pouch of gold coins.

then you kept coming back. you helped grace teach the children in his school and with the gold you gave him, he bought books, clothes, and food for the kids and their families.

he was a brilliant teacher, better than the ones you both learned from. he understood the children and never looked down on them (which was a stark contrast to the grace you remember in high society).

his humble life was good for him and you only made sure he was doing okay.

then the noble families started hearing about grace and started paying him to give their children private lessons. he would go to noble houses time to time and that reintroduced him back into the society.

he was a controversial man in both societies, but you remained steadfast, being his main supporter through anything he wants to do.

he wanted to set up a proper school in the city? you agreed. you would find planners, builders, and more teachers. you didn't care about the protests of noblefolk.

he wanted to have expensive specialized equipments again? you would have a room set up for alchemy, astronomy, medicine, whatever he wants.

he wanted rare books? you were already on it, sending people out to look for it in various kingdoms.

he never understood why you let him take advantage of your wealth, but then it started clicking in his head.

you were good friends with him, you never married, you always looked out for him, and you were risking your own reputation by sponsoring him.

he asked one point if you were interested in him and the only response you gave him was 'for a man so smart, you are incredibly thick headed.'

he was immediately scared. he knows he can't provide a life for you but you only reassured him further. you didn't care if you are risking your standing in society, you only cared about him and the good that he can do.

you believed in him and when he finally got that into his thick skull, he started courting you.

driver - the mysterious horseman.

there were whispers about a horseman of apocalypse riding through towns. a mysterious knight who wielded no insignia nor a weapon and rode a tall black stallion in the dead of night.

whenever a tragic accident befell, the horseman would be there, riding away from the scene faster than the wind.

it was only whispers you heard. no one actually knows if the horseman exist, but everyone was still wary. if anyone did caught a glimpse of him, it only meant misfortune.

it was a foggy night and you snuck out of the castle walls to take a night walk. you held an oil lamp up high to watch the ground ahead of you until it dimmed and went out. then you heard the galloping steps approaching you from behind in the forest.

it happened too quickly, but you were met with a large black stallion towering over you as it came to a halt. the stallion squealed, throwing its legs up, almost trampling you. you fell back onto the forest ground and the rider of the horse was thrown off with a heavy thud.

the rider matched the description of the mysterious horseman of apocalypse. a knight who wore dark steel and wielded no insignia nor a weapon.

the one thing you weren’t expecting was the blonde hair of the rider. his helmet was thrown off and strands of his hair stuck to his face from blood and sweat. he was bleeding from his side under the armor.

you aren’t stupid, but in this moment you let yourself be foolish. you let yourself get close to him and helped him up to the horse. you rode up the horse and lead it back to your castle to get him treated by your own physician.

the rider never understood why you helped him that day and he doesn’t know how to show his gratitude. he thought you were just stupid, but after you insisted he stayed and he got to know you more, he knows you aren’t.

you knew who he was, but you didn’t treat him as a criminal, only as a person who needed help. and he appreciated that deeply.

you treated him as a guest and even if he didn’t talk much, you both got along. you spent time with him as he recovered and when he did recover, you would invite him to the activities around the castle like reading and feasting, and sometimes you would leave the castle to spend time with the nearby town and watch the plays with him.

but after staying for a while, he left quietly with his horse.

you never saw him properly after that, but sometimes when you look out, you catch a glimpse of him over the walls in the fog. still and watching, then he would disappear.

you would only hear about him through whispers. but sometimes he does let you know about his presence directly by leaving a braided strand of black mane on the side door of the castle walls where he knows you sneak out of.

you save every small gift he leaves you, never forgetting the person behind the horseman of apocalypse.

henry letham - the tormented artist.

his work is sought after by the richest lords and ladies. though, the artist behind the work is a bit of an odd one. he’s a son of a nobleman, but he isn’t like every other nobleman’s sons who are mediocre looking, charming with their words, and ambitious. he’s quiet, tall and very attractive, yet he just lurks in the shadows or better yet, he doesn’t show up to social events at all.

he only shows up to gatherings because of his family and to sell his works, but other than that, he’s a total recluse.

you caught him though in the moonlit garden, painting. but this painting didn’t look like most of his famous works. it’s raw, fluid, and emotional, compared to his usual rigid and constrained works.

he seemed to know you were there before you could even say anything, he looked at you once and turned back to painting, never uttering a word to you.

and you only take that as permission to linger, but never too long, to make sure he doesn’t get uncomfortable.

that became the nightly routine. you would catch him in the garden, painting, you would watch for a few moments until you continue your walk. until one night there was another chair next to him, and he took one look at you then to the chair. its only when you sat down next to him that he continued to paint.

then that became the nightly routine. you would sit next to him while he painted until he decided he was tired. you never left early. you enjoyed watching him paint, even if you two had barely any conversation, you enjoyed keeping him company.

then you started seeing him more often in the social events and when he catches the glimpse of you, he would bee line to you. you never minded his company. it made the events much more bearable.

and throughout this quiet relationship of yours with him, he always seemed to read your mind. if you were seeking for an escape from an event, he would gently lead you to a side door that takes you both out a quiet part of the castle. if you were thirsty, he somehow would have a drink for you. if noticed something out of place in his painting, he would brush it over or give you a questioning look. if you were cold while watching him, he would throw over the blanket on his lap onto you.

he is odd, but you never had a reasonable explanation for the mind reading, until you realized it’s not telepathy.

he stopped you before you got into your carriage and dragged you into his. you didn’t question it at all, maybe he just wanted your company. then on your way to the town, the carriage you originally went into snapped from the horses reigns and fell down a cliff, killing the inhabitants inside.

he had prophetic sight. he already knew what conversations or events were going to happen but he answered to them before it could happen. he risked the secrecy of his abilities by saving you from a horrible fate.

you didn’t understand why he would risk such a thing, but just by having the thought, you knew that he already knew that he could trust you. you didn’t have to prove it to him.

and as you stared at him from across in the small confines of his carriage, he gave you a soft smile.

holland march - the lousy king's guard.

for a king’s guard, he was pretty lousy. he made a fool of himself a lot that he had the honorary title of court’s jester. whoever decided to hire him into the king’s army was pretty foolish, but when one of the trusted counsel members was assassinated, he investigated it himself and found the murderer.

no one believed him at first until he showed the evidence and made the murderer confess. in that moment, everyone realized why he was a king’s guard. he was very serious about his job despite how stupid he can be. then he was promoted to commander (along with his good friend, healy) and was trusted into the counsel chambers. he never spoke in those, except just observe.

another event thrusted him into an investigating role when the prince was killed in his sleep during a week long feast at the king’s castle.

you met the foolish king’s guard during this event, asking questions about your whereabouts and your intentions at the event. after the first initial interrogation, he seemed to always have more questions. you started getting worried, thinking you were a suspect, until he asked to dance with you at a party.

you reluctantly accepted and as you danced with him throughout the night, you realized how much fun it is with the man. you laughed, drank, ate, danced some more, joked, and everything else with the man. then you saw the other side of him when the prince’s murderer came at him in a fit of rage during the party to attack him.

he was quick to protect you, he gently pushed you away from harm’s way then he dealt with the man. he disarmed the man and arrested him on the spot.

after that night, you didn’t see him for a while, until he showed up at your door with a stupid smile and freshly picked flowers from the garden.

noah calhoun - the traveling poet

he was apart of the traveling band of entertainers that came to the nearby city. people say he’s a talented writer and speaker. he rarely took the stage, but when he did, people would stop and listen.

you came into the city to enjoy the festivities and you were one of the people that was charmed by his words. you were seeking for the play on the main stage, but you stopped at the secondary stage behind the crowd to listen to him.

and when he finished, you made your way through the front of the crowd to compliment him, but he was already gone.

disappointed, you left and went to the main stage to watch the play. you forgotten all about it until a week later when you saw the familiar figure by the edge of the forest close to the caravans. he was chopping wood in regular plain clothes instead of the showy clothes that he had on stage.

you walked through the grass field to get to him. he stopped in what he was doing to watch you get close. you only spoke to him briefly, but you were determined to tell him that you liked his poems and his voice.

he looked incredibly flustered and after you decided you were done with talking with him, you turned back as he awkwardly bid you farewell.

the next time you saw him was when he was on the main stage to be the narrator of the play. you actually got front seats this time and you listened to him closely, and he watched you reactions throughout.

after the play was done, you were ready to turn away and disappear into the crowd until he came jumped down the stage and took your arm into his. he decided to accompany you the whole day and you swore it is the most fun you’ve ever had.

after that day, he somehow always found you during the festivities and you happily let him keep you company. even outside of the festivities, he would show up at your place in the city to take you around. he never showed you a bad time, he only taught you how to live a little and be carefree.

until the festival was coming to an end. you had to return back to your land and he had to travel to the next city.

you were ready to accept that was it and the next time you see him would possibly be a year later, but a pigeon carrier flew into your window with a small paper. inside was written with a short poem of love and you knew immediately who it was by.

you would return the pigeon with your own letter as a declaration of love. and since then, every day, a pigeon would come in with a new poem by him.

officer k - mysterious loyal guard.

he was sent to your lands as a gift by another kingdom for providing trade routes. he was quiet, tall, and you never saw him out of armor. but he was always there wherever you went.

even if you commanded him to relax, he never left your side. he was your self appointed personal guard.

you didn't mind the company, but you didn't want to subject him to a life he didn't want.

on the rare occasions that an ambush attack happens while you're traveling to another lords' land, he is quickly putting his life on the line for you. he's swift and efficient, almost inhuman.

it wasn't until during one of those travels, that during the night, you finally saw him out the armor. he was bathing himself in the lake, unaware of you watching him. you were supposed to be asleep in your carriage, but you were restless.

you saw the deep scars all over his body. injuries that looked like it shouldn't have been recoverable from.

when you got closer, that's when he turned to look at you.

his eyes were very human, but he seemed distant even when he was directly into you. it was almost the look of a dead man.

and that's what he was. a dead man brought back to life with the sole purpose of being a dog to whatever nobility.

you got into the water with him and reached out your hands to his face. you wanted to see him closer, to understand him underneath the armor. and when your hands touched his skin, it was almost uncannily cold. he softened when your fingers brushed his jaw and he melted into your touch.

for a moment there was a glint of life in his eyes, a longing gaze for something.

and whatever it was, you wanted to know. even if this breaks many rules, you wanted to get closer to him and know who he is.

lars lindstrom - the hidden prince in the tower.

you grew up with lars in your youth. your family worked closely with his, and during your visits, you would play with the young boy, until his mother passed on. you didn't see him and his family after that.

you almost had completely forgotten about that boy until years later, his father passed on and his brother was temporarily head of the family, (he was disowned by his family and therefor can't take the title properly).

gus asked for you to visit and it wasn't until you got to their lands, you realized you were being set up with lars.

lars was next in throne and the only person they could think of was you.

though, no one has seen the prince since his mother passed. he was recluse in the tower where his mother died from her illness. gus didn't know anyone else who could get to him, to be a support to him as he took on the title of king.

gus and karin had no ill intentions, they just wanted to help lars. so you reluctantly agreed to help as well, but no promises of marriage unless it was what he wanted.

they set you both up a dinner for the both of you to meet at and when you went, you almost didn't recognize lars.

he was bigger than you remember. he was no longer the small kid, he had a larger frame, but he seemed small still due to his shy disposition.

he was always shy and you understood that. he remembered you, but you kept your distance, never coming off too forward or asked too much questions.

you both only reminisced on your childhood and only kept it light. you never mentioned the deaths, the overbearing weight of the crown, or even talked about marriage.

you were friends in that moment. and throughout your stay, you found great comfort in each other, but it was a difficult task to initially get there.

at first, you would go to the tower to see him, but he would refuse to see you and you would back off.

you would encounter him around the castle and he'd awkwardly speed off.

then you started bringing the meals yourself to him in the tower, making small conversations and you would go away yourself, never lingering too long.

you spent most of your times in the garden and one time you found a wounded rabbit in the rose bushes.

you aided the rabbit and let it recover in your rooms. when you handed lars his dinner that night, he asked about it.

you were almost surprised but then you realized the tower has a good view of the garden from every angle. you convinced him to come out of his tower and to your room to show him the rabbit.

he seemed to forget about his fears all together when you were both sat around the rabbit. he was eating his dinner and shared his food with the rabbit. the loud crunching of the rabbit's chewing both made you laugh giddily.

since then, lars would visit you to see the rabbit, or you would visit him with the rabbit. sometimes it wasn't even about the rabbit. he started coming out his tower more often just to take walks around with you in the garden or to sit in furthest pew with you in the church.

he seemed to open up more to you. asking questions that aren't light and bringing up topics that are heavier. for you to listen to his thoughts, but also for him to hear your take on it.

On the coffee table sat a discarded notebook filled with Spencer’s neat, meticulous handwriting. You didn't need to read the pages to know what was on them, statistics on developmental psychology, age stratified parental success rates, lists of neighborhood school districts. He was dreaming out loud again.

"Spencer," you said softly, your voice cutting through the hum of the refrigerator.

He looked up from his mug, his warm brown eyes instantly softening as they landed on you. "Yeah? Are you coming to bed soon? I was just reading a fascinating study on bilingual acquisition in early childhood-"

"We need to talk about it. Really talk about it."

The soft, enthusiastic light in his eyes dimmed just a fraction, replaced by the familiar guard he put up when he sensed an impending storm. He set the mug down slowly. "About children."

"About the fact that you want them," you said, sitting down across from him, keeping your hands tucked tightly in your lap so he wouldn't see them trembling. "And I don't. Spencer, I really don't."

He opened his mouth, his brilliant, analytical brain immediately shifting into problem-solving mode. "People's perspectives evolve over time, statistically speaking-"

"I’m not a statistic, Spence. And I’m not going to change my mind," you interrupted, the guilt in your chest tightening like a vice. "You’ve wanted a family for as long as I’ve known you. You want to teach a kid how to read, take them to museums, give them everything you felt like you missed out on. And every time you look at a baby or talk about the future, I feel like I'm holding you hostage."

"You're not holding me hostage," he said quickly, leaning forward, his fingers reaching out to find yours.

You pulled back slightly, and the rejection flickered across his face like a physical blow.

"I am," you whispered, tears finally stinging your eyes. "I love you so much it physically aches. But staying with me means sacrificing a huge part of the life you pictured for yourself. You deserve someone who shares that dream with you, Spence. You deserve to be a dad. Knowing I can't give you that... keeping you here feels selfish. It feels like I'm stealing your future."

Silence stretched between you, long and excruciating. Spencer pulled his hands back, lacing his long fingers together as he stared down at the table. You could practically hear the gears turning in his head, processing the logic, weighing the emotional variables, running through every possible scenario.

When he finally looked up, there were no tears, no grand outburst, just a deep, unwavering clarity in his expression.

"Do you know what the probability is of finding someone who truly understands you?" he asked quietly, his voice steady. "The statistical odds of finding a partner who tolerates my rambling, who knows exactly how I take my coffee, who stays up with me after horrific cases, and who makes me feel anchored in a world that constantly feels overwhelming?"

You swallowed hard, unable to answer.

"It's functionally impossible." He answered for you.

He stood up, crossed the small gap between you, and knelt beside your chair. This time, he didn't ask permission, he took both of your hands in his, holding them firmly against his chest.

"I spent a long time imagining what my future might look like, yes," Spencer said, searching your eyes. "And for a while, that included children. But when I pictured that, I was imagining a hypothetical concept. I was dreaming about an idea." He squeezed your hands, his thumb gently tracing your knuckles. "You aren't a concept. You're real. You're my home. I don't love the idea of a hypothetical family more than I love the concrete reality of you. If I left you to chase a life with someone else just to fulfill a mental checklist, I would be miserable. A future with kids but without you isn't an upgrade, it's a downgrade."

"Spencer, I don't want you to resent me in ten years," you choked out, a tear finally slipping down your cheek. "I couldn't bear that."

"I won't," he promised, reaching up with one hand to brush the tear away with his thumb. 

"Resentment comes from sacrifice forced upon you. This isn't a sacrifice, it's a choice. I am actively choosing a life with you. Just us. Our books, our late nights, our quiet mornings. That is more than enough for me. You are more than enough."

You leaned forward, resting your forehead against his, breathing in the familiar, comforting scent of cedar and old paper that always meant safety. The crushing guilt that had been building in your chest for months finally began to break apart.

"Are you sure?" you whispered against his skin.

Spencer let out a small, breathless laugh, his lips brushing against yours. "I'm a genius, remember? I'm almost never wrong about these things.”

Ruffled, sleep mussed, dark brown hair. Slightly squinted, soft, deep blue eyes. A white sleep shirt that loosely clung to the hard ridges of a muscled body. Grey sweatpants that hung dangerously low and showed the shape of him if you stared longer than was appropriate.

And, god, the low, husky voice that you could feel rumble through your body from metres away. The slender, strong, veiny hands that didn't hesitate to grab the box slipping from yours. The pink lips that stretched into an easy smile, pearly white teeth dazzling and rendering you speechless for a minute.

The heat that crawled up your back was instant—your body reacting to your new roommate before you even knew his name.

Attractive men existed, you knew that. The bar you worked at had handfuls of them come in every night, some that even flashed you a flirty smile with interest in their eyes. But you didn't live with any of them—you didn't see them when they were half-awake, their rough edges softened by sleep and early morning light.

He introduced himself as James Barnes, but he requested you call him Bucky—"only my ma calls me James"—, and mentioned he worked as a physiotherapist at the VA.

He was quick to put the box in your new room, running out to the curb to grab the rest of your belongings from the rental van. You stood near the entrance, frozen in shock. Words failed you, your brain failed you—the only thing you could think about was the shift of his back muscles beneath his shirt as he hauled boxes through the door. It was an intoxicating sight, one you didn't even know would affect you.

You quickly came to learn that the problem was Bucky—everything he did had an intoxicating effect on you.

The smile he flashed you as he handed you your morning coffee, the wink he tossed your way when he took your side in your weekly movie night debate with Sam, his laughs that you could hear through your shared wall when he gamed with his friends.

His laughter was one of the most intoxicating things about him. There were the low, deep huffs when he was tired. The louder, harsher ones when he was caught by surprise. Then your favourite—the long, slightly breathless giggles that crinkled the corner of his eyes and had his nose scrunching. Every time you were blessed with them, you could only think about how cute he looked. It made him even more attractive, and you even more infatuated.

When your friend and roommate said that she was going to move into her partner's apartment once your lease was up, the first thing you felt was dread. You didn't know anyone who was looking for a room, nor did you know anyone who was looking for a roommate. The last thing you wanted was to move in with a stranger—having already lived with complete strangers in the past you could not say it was a pleasant experience. Your friend—an absolute angel—was quick to tell you that a coworker at her law firm was looking for a roommate, and she assured you that Nat would not break into your room and steal your jewellery like your first ever roommate did.

While you weren't exactly ecstatic to move in with four best friends, Nat had quickly won you over when you met for coffee. You sat down feeling like a complete contrast to her—sporting an old sweatshirt over your sweaty work uniform while she was in a creaseless emerald pantsuit. But she made you feel completely at ease—offering up embarrassing college stories about her and the guys, asking you about yourself and actually seeming interested, talking about the brownstone with so much adoration in her voice you couldn't help but love it already.

You felt awkward living with the close knit friends at first—shuffling on your feet as the four of them lounged on the couches, pulling at the loose threads on your sweater as you sat and listened to them bicker.

Fortunately, it didn't take long for you to find your place in the group. Sam played a big part—his teasing and infectious personality making you feel at home within a week. He didn't let you retreat into yourself; he pestered you with a mix of random and personal questions—"what extinct animal do you most identify with" followed by "what was your first heartbreak"—, teased you about your cooking (to which he always stole a mouthful), and was just warm—and yeah, slightly chaotic.

Nat and Steve quickly became one of your favourite couples. They weren't heavy on the PDA—unless red wine was involved—and they balanced each other out perfectly. She was loud, he was quiet. After a few too many on a night out she was ready to start a fight with any asshole who dared to look her way, and he was there to gently steer her away by the shoulders and remind her it wasn't worth ruining her fresh manicure.

Despite having some opposite traits, they were both incredibly kind and comforting people—truly living up to their titles of being the household's mom and dad. Nat was there for you after your gruelling shifts, holding either a glass of wine or mug of hot chocolate. Steve was the one knocking on your door with a bowl of soup and bag of medicine when you had the flu.

And then there was Bucky. He was just as kind, a good middle between Sam's chaotic nature and Steve's quiet one, and he made you feel seen.

Uncomfortably so.

He was the one next to you during social gatherings, gently nudging his shoulder against yours in a silent check in. He was the one suggesting fresh air when your breathing picked up incrementally. He was the one staring at you like he was captivated, sitting forward as you rambled about your niche interests.

Bucky noticed you, paid attention to you, like no one else had in your life.

He remembered what mugs you liked, making sure to use one of them when he made you both coffee—he remembered that too, the way you liked your coffee made. He bought you more body wash when you complained about running out but not having time to go to the shop before your shift. He sat next to you as you rewatched your comfort shows for the fifth time, asking questions like he was genuinely interested—a welcome contrast to Sam's mocking comments.

Each day he was in your life, looking at you like you were worth knowing, was just another day you fell deeper.

And then there were the moments. There weren't many, only a handful, but they were burned into your memory.

The first was when you came back after brunch with old friends, wearing a white sundress that made you feel pretty.

Bucky was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter while eating an apple. You smiled in greeting as you walked in, grabbing a glass to fill with water. You sneaked a side glance at him like you always do when he's in the same room as you, catching his eyes already on you—drifting from the bottom of your dress up to your chest. You watched his adam's apple bob in his throat as he swallowed.

"That's a nice dress, sweetheart."

Goosebumps erupted across your skin at his low drawl, a warmth spreading in your core from the pet name. He had never called you that before.

He pushed off the counter and walked out of the kitchen, acting like those five words hadn't changed your whole day—your whole life.

Where once you thought the dress was pretty, you now saw it as a lifeline—tethering you to the hope that Bucky might just like you back. You found reasons to wear it more often; making an effort to hang out in the common spaces when you came back home wearing it, delaying changing into your comfortable clothes because Bucky wasn't home yet and you wanted him to see it. To see you.

The second moment was when the five of you were at a birthday party for one of Sam's army buddies.

Nat and Steve had left after only being there for half an hour—Nat giggling to you on their way out, telling you and the boys to hold off on coming back home for a couple of hours. Sam was in the lounge with a large crowd hanging on to his every word as he retold his war hero stories— to which Bucky was quick to throw you a look, raising his hands to mimic being strangled, making you laugh and receive dagger eyes from Sam.

The two of you made your way outside towards the game of beer pong being set up. Bucky was quick to accept their offer to join in and that's how you found yourself standing opposite him, a sticky fold out table between you—the ping pong ball in your hand shaking, your breath catching as his lips tilted into a smirk. His eyes were as dark as the sky, the moonlight making them twinkle with their own constellations—staring straight into yours with a silent challenge, daring you to miss your next shot. His tongue sweeping over his bottom lip stole your attention and your hand faltered, the ball almost dropping out of your grip.

"You got this, sweetheart."

Time slowed down as the ball left your hand, your eyes watching it sail through the crisp night air while Bucky watched you. It dropped to the table with a pathetic, dull tock—inches away from any of the red solo cups. Bucky's smile grew even more lopsided, his eyes gleaming with mirth.

"Better luck next time, angel."

What the fuck was with him calling you these stupid, heart stuttering, knee trembling pet names?

Your beer pong partner was quick to brush off your missed shot, chuckling at your flustered expression and offering to help you with your stance. The game continued with you almost missing every shot, your partner guiding you with hands on your hips in the hopes of you sinking a cup. His arms wrapped around your waist when you made your first successful shot, but it wasn't his attention that had your mind clouding—you couldn't even say it was the alcohol flowing through your veins. No, it was the look of pride on Bucky's face that had you freezing, everything else around you fading away until all that remained was shining midnight eyes and curved pink lips.

God, how you wished the arms around your waist were his.

The guys you were playing with retreated inside after the game ended, with your partner telling you to find him before you left, throwing you an easy smile over his shoulder.

Bucky and you lingered in the fresh air, slowly walking towards the backdoor, your bare arm brushing against his denim jacket with every step. Music and laughter trickled out of the open windows, the noise softening in the cool breeze before it reached you. Despite the calm, you felt your body vibrate with a persistent buzz—Bucky's close proximity and the beer you downed making it hard to find the line between your feelings and reality.

"You do realise he was flirting with you, right?" Bucky's voice broke the silence. You turned your head to find him already gazing at you—soft eyes a contradiction to his clenched jaw.

You scoffed, looking at him like he'd grown another head. "What, no he wasn't."

"Uh yeah, he definitely was. The 'let me fix your stance' play is the oldest trick in the book and has a pretty decent success rate." He chuckled softly, shaking his head with an uptick of a smile. "Not with you, though." He paused, giving you a teasing wink. "I'll keep that in mind."

The wink had your body flushing with heat, the words I'll keep that in mind burrowing into your lovesick heart and amplifying the buzzing. Your words stumbled on their way out."Th-there's no way he was flirting with me—he's way out of my league."

Bucky stopped in his tracks, turning to face you fully with a deep crease between his eyebrows. The gentle breeze swept a strand of hair over his face, your hand twitching with the need to brush it behind his ear.

His voice dropped low, the teasing tone subduing. "What are you on about? Tell me you know that's not true, doll."

You crossed your arms over your chest, feeling exposed and vulnerable under the intimacy of the dark sky. You shivered, not just from the cooling wind caressing your bare arms. You gave a small shrug in response.

Bucky started to take his jacket off, exposing the black t-shirt that hugged his biceps a little too tight for your sanity. "While I don't believe in the whole people being in different leagues thing, I can confidently say you are so far out of his league you're on a whole nother planet."

"…Are you saying I'm an alien?"

"If the shoe fits," Bucky responded, a fraction of his seriousness easing into a cheeky smile. He draped his jacket over your shoulders, his thumbs brushing the sides of your neck as he fixed the collar—another shiver running down your spine from his faint touch. The warm, rich scent of his cologne and him wrapped around you and dragged you under—the scent that you now associated with home.

Bucky's eyes met yours, the starlit blue swirling with something you couldn't quite decipher. His hands moved from the collar of his jacket to the hem, fingers toying with the rough fabric. "No, what I'm trying to say is that you're—" he licked his lips, trying to find the right words. "Any guy would be lucky to have you, but I don't think anyone is deserving of you."

Your brain short-circuited, the haze of rose coloured glasses starting to fall over your eyes—threatening to distort the Bucky in front of you with the one you stayed up late daydreaming about.

You found a smaller version of your voice. "I…I'm not that special, Buck."

He tugged on the hem, the force pulling the jacket tighter around your shoulders. "No? Then why are you the only person—other than Steve—that I let call me Buck?"

You stared at him, unblinking. You didn't realise other people didn't call him Buck—the nickname just slipped from your lips so naturally after the first month of living with him.

"One of these days, I'm going to make you see yourself how I do."

He leaned in, brushing the faintest of kisses on your forehead—the mere ghost of his lips burning your skin, eliciting a cascade of sparks to run down your body. He stepped back, stuffing his hands in his pockets and tilted his head towards the door.

"Let's get back inside before Sam tells everyone about the time he had to save you from a raccoon."

"He had very sinister looking eyes!" You cried indignantly. "And I was really stoned—remind me to never have one of Nat's brownies ever again."

The third moment happened during your bar's weekly quiz night.

The four of them were in their usual booth for the night—the one Sam demanded you reserve for them ever since you mentioned your work had a quiz night on Tuesdays. Nat and Steve were sitting on one side, each nursing a pint of craft beer, with Sam and Bucky sitting opposite them—the latter half hanging out of the booth with his hand raised in a beckoning gesture, shooting you one of those irresistible half smiles that made the butterflies in your stomach flutter.

You rolled your eyes at him, knowing exactly what he wanted—but you couldn't stay away from that smile, even if it was starting to get you in trouble at work.

You walked over to them, pocketing your pen and notepad before stopping next to Bucky, your eyebrows raised and arms folded.

"What do you want now?"

"Can I please place an order for the answer to question five?" Bucky held the quiz sheet up to you, pointing at the blank space next to number five like it was a menu. "Oh, and question eight." His smile evolved into a endearing grin, your heart aching traitorously at the sight.

"No."

The smile dropped a fraction, not expecting you to say no to his charm. "C'mon, you're the one here who knows niche pop culture the best—even Sam is stumped. I know you know the answers."

You nodded, looking at the sheet in his hand before his puppy dog eyes made you crumble. "You're right, I do. I'm not giving them to you, though."

"I thought I was your favourite." His voice dropped like he was genuinely upset, but his twitching cheeks gave away the smile he was suppressing. Sam scoffed next to him, Nat and Steve exchanged a knowing look. You ignored them.

Bucky put the sheet on the table, patting it softly like he was about to make a deal. "How 'bout this—I'll make you dinner for a week." He carefully watched your face, trying to find a crack in your resistance. "Two weeks."

You sighed, dropping your arms to your sides. "Bucky, the prize is only a fifty dollar bar tab."

Bucky shook his head. "It's not about the prize, it's about the glory of winning four weeks in a row." He squinted his eyes, tilting his head in the way you knew meant he was thinking—probably something stupid, too. "Wait—is there another prize for that?"

You scoffed, tempted to hit him with your notepad. "Yeah, you get put on the no entry list."

Nat and Steve snickered at Bucky's clearly offended face, and you bit your lip to hold back your smile—he looked too cute, it was tugging at your heart strings.

"Besides," you continued, "you only won them because you cheated."

He raised his hands in mock defence. "Hey, not my fault the pretty waitress was more than willing."

Sam choked on his beer, spluttering a mouthful onto the table. Your eyebrows skyrocketed, heat rushing to your cheeks and ears at his choice of words.

Bucky's cheeks lit up red and he ran a hand through his hair. "No—wait, I didn't—that wasn't what I meant." He nervously chuckled. "What I meant was that you're more than willing to help—help us…" He trailed off, turning and shooting Steve a look.

Some of the tension left your shoulders, along with some of the hope you always carried that Bucky liked you more than a friend. You cleared your throat, your heart rate struggling to slow down after 'pretty waitress'.

"Maybe I've grown a conscience." You looked slightly to your left, your eyes flicking to your manager standing at the end of the bar, narrowing her eyes at you.

Bucky chuckled softly, his confidence back even with his cheeks still glowing. He crossed his arms on the table, leaning towards you. "Are we gettin' you in trouble, sweetheart?"

"There's no we in this, Barnes. It's all you." Nat interjected, pointing a perfectly manicured finger at him. He gave her a dismissive wave, his eyes still looking at you expectantly.

"She said if you win one more time then she's going to put me on the bar for quiz nights—something about testing a theory…" You admitted quietly. You watched his blue eyes soften, his previous amusement dissipating.

"Well, we can't have that happening." He said, serious. "I would stop coming to quiz night."

"Yeah, right." Sam muttered into his beer.

"You'd be on the no entry list anyways, Buck." You said to Bucky, your tone lilting jokingly.

He tilted his head, the right side of his mouth twitching, his eyes looking like a sky full of secrets.

"You wouldn't do that to me, doll. You like me too much."

Your stomach dropped at his low voice, his words piercing right into the chamber of your heart he had unknowingly etched his name on. A breath got stuck in your throat, your usual witty banter getting lost in the sea of thoughts that only screamed his name.

Like an angel pulling you from a seizing riptide, your managers voice called out your name—saving you from saying something stupid, something that exposed how you had gone past the boundary of like six months ago, stepping into a dangerous territory that could tear you apart.

"Duty calls," you laughed out breathlessly, pointing a thumb over your shoulder. You turned on your heels and walked away like you were on fire.

Sam's low mutter made its way to you through the hum of soft pop music and chatter. "Get a room already, for fuck's sake."

Your shoe scuffed on the hardwood floor, your feet almost tripping over each other. You caught your balance—narrowly avoiding falling and making a fool of yourself in front of the guy you're hopelessly in love with.

You reached your manager waiting at the end of the bar, overcome with the desire to kiss her in gratitude.

"I need you to cover the bar while Dean has a smoke. He'll be ten minutes, tops."

You nodded your okay, used to covering the bar for your coworkers breaks. "Unless a pretty girl walks past, then he'll be at least thirty."

Your manager hummed in agreement. "Remind me to dock his pay for pulling that shit on Saturday. Boy gets enough tips from his flirting to make up for it."

You exchanged a small laugh, walking around her to go behind the bar. She touched your forearm as you passed, stopping you with a gentle touch.

"Word of advice?" She started, voice a little quieter. "Don't screw the crew."

You stared at her with furrowed brows, confused. "What? I would never sleep with Dean, that's just—ew, who knows how many untreated diseases he has." You visibly shuddered your disgust at the idea of hooking up with your coworker who was always chasing tail.

She nodded her head in the direction you came from. "They're your roommates, right?" You nodded slowly. "Hon, you look at him like you can't decide whether you want to run in the opposite direction or get on your knees."

Heat rose beneath your skin, your body freezing in mortification. You gaped at her, your mouth opening and closing until you pushed out a forced laugh.

"What—you're—that's ridiculous. You should get your eyes checked because that's, like," you laughed nervously, panic starting to burn through your rib cage, "he's like…a brother to me?" You phrased it like a question, your voice rising uncharacteristically high at the end.

She gave you a deadpan look, not buying a lick of your bullshit. Your shoulders dropped in defeat, your teeth starting to tear at your inner cheek.

"Is it…am I really that obvious?"

She sighed, her hand on your arm giving a reassuring squeeze. "I've worked with you long enough to know when someone is making you uncomfortable, when you're seconds away from exploding at a condescending customer, or when you want to jump over the bar and climb a guy like a tree." She paused for a second, pursuing her lips in thought. "Funnily enough, they all looked like him."

She let go of your arm, nodding towards the bar. "Now, stop thinking about fucking your roommate and get to work. I'm pretty sure table seven just ordered six espresso martini's." She gave your ass a friendly swat, pushing you behind the bar and making you throw your head back with a startled laugh.

You grabbed the docket from the POS printer, seeing an order for five espresso martini's and one spicy mango margarita. You walked down to the cocktail section, hands moving on autopilot as you prepared the margarita first.

Your eyes flicked up out of habit, your attention drawing towards the booth your roommates had practically scratched their names into—finding a pair of piercing blue eyes already gazing at you. The tequila bottle in your hand shook.

Don't screw the crew.

The last moment occurred during a typical movie night, where yours and Sam's raised voices warranted a domestic disturbance call from your neighbours.

"Oh my god, we are not watching Top Gun for the third time this month!" You exclaimed exasperatedly, throwing your head back against the couch with a groan.

Sam scoffed from his spot sprawled on his stupidly large beanbag—the one you're fairly certain is a dog bed for a Great Dane. "Oh, like your suggestions are any better? You made us sit through a fucking Twilight marathon a couple weeks ago! That's precious time I'll never get back."

You glared at him. "That's bullshit, Wilson—I didn't make you do anything. You chose to sit in that exact same spot and watch all five movies." A mocking smile twitched your lips. "And, if I remember correctly, you were the one asking me to pause the movie while you went to get more snacks."

Sam shook his head adamantly. "No, what's bullshit is your taste in movies—I only sat through it so you wouldn't feel bad!"

Nat and Steve were cuddled up on the couch perpendicular to you, their eyes darting back and forth between you and Sam like they were watching a tennis match. Bucky was sitting on the other end of the couch you were on, legs spread wide with a soda in one hand—his eyes shooting daggers at Sam.

You let out a harsh laugh. "Oh, really? So you crying when you thought Carlisle was dead was just you not wanting me to feel bad?"

"Yes!" Sam yelled, throwing his hands up in the air. Then he paused, processing what you just said. "Wait, no—there was no crying! I just acted sad for your benefit."

You opened your mouth to refute his statement when a deep, husky voice rumbled out from next to you.

"Sam," Bucky started, tone low and final, "stop lying, I saw you wiping your eyes." He continued glaring at Sam, his shoulders more tense than they were a minute ago. "Apologise to her so we can move on."

Sam looked at him like he had lost his mind. "Apologise? What the fuck do I have to apologise for?"

Bucky nodded towards you, darkened blue eyes still narrowed at Sam menacingly. "You said her taste in movies was bullshit. Apologise."

You were suddenly speechless—not sure how your usual movie night bickering with Sam led to Bucky being so…commanding. Protective.

You looked over to the other couch, catching Nat's eye—her mouth overtaken by a knowing smile. Your eyes darted to Steve next to her, his cheeks tinted pink and eyes squinted as he looked at his best friend—a sly smile partially hidden by the can he brought to his lips.

Sam shook his head with a disbelieving laugh, grabbing the TV remote off the coffee table.

Bucky reached out a long leg, giving Sam's beanbag a firm kick. "Now."

"Jesus," Sam dragged out, "chill out, man." He turned to you with a sigh, brown eyes glinting as he gave you his best puppy dog expression. "I am truly sorry for calling your movie taste bullshit. I will gladly sit through ten Twilight marathons if that's what you want."

He turned to Bucky with a smug grin. "There, I apologised to your girl. You happy now?"

A breath hitched in your throat, your brain freezing and going offline.

Your girl.

Said so easily, so naturally. Like it was a fact and not a mocking taunt.

Goosebumps prickled across your skin, a pleased shiver running through you at the thought of being Bucky's girl.

Bucky glared at Sam, the apples of his cheeks dusting pink. "Very." He said before leaning forward and snatching the remote out of Sam's hand. He turned to you, cheeks still flushed but eyes considerably softer. "What do you want to watch, doll?"

"…Shrek 2."

Groans erupted from three of your roommates, the fourth keeping his eyes on you while he shook his head with a fond laugh—the one that showed his pearlescent teeth and crinkled his eyes. The one that was your damnation, sentencing you to a life of yearning and false hope.

"It's the soundtrack, right?"

You nodded eagerly, a bright smile making your cheeks ache. "I knew you would get me, Buck."

You faintly heard a fake gagging sound come from the nuisance being swallowed by a beanbag, but you couldn't care less. Not when Bucky was looking at you like you were an astronomical phenomenon.

Condensation beaded glasses stained the wooden tabletop, chewed paper straws slowly disintegrating in melted ice. A half eaten bowl of fries grew stale in the middle of the table—your manager's attempt to get some food in her staff while they abused the (prepaid) leftover function alcohol, yourself included. The disco ball was still spinning, sending a thousand shards of light dancing throughout the empty bar, while an ABBA track murmured softly beneath laughter and gossip.

"I'm telling you," Dean said, spreading his arms over the back of the booth, "the ladies can't get enough of me."

The booth packed full of your coworkers vibrated with long groans, someone to your left loudly booing and your manager threatening to throw her gin and tonic in his face. You shoved his arm off the seat behind you, earning yourself a pinch to your cheek as his arm retreated.

"I'm serious!" Dean continued, pulling his phone out of his jean's pocket. "One of them even left a review about me last week—hold up, I'll get it." He squinted against the glowing light from his screen, bringing up the bar's google page to show everyone.

"Here it is—last Saturday: bartender was cute, would drink here again. Five stars." He leaned back in the booth with a smug smile, barely reacting when your manager ripped his phone out of his hand.

"Did you see who left the review, dingus?" She asked him, her mocking smirk overpowering his. "I don't know about you, but I don't know any ladies who go by the name James." She waved the phone in his face before going back to reading the review.

Dean recovered quickly, holding his hands up with a shrug. "I'm not opposed to having male admirers—they're some of my biggest tips."

You snorted a laugh. "Oh, I bet they are."

The table dissolved into laughter around you, the liquor and line cook's joint lowering everyone's inhibitions.

Your manager looked up from the phone at you, her eyes lighting up. "Weren't you also working on the bar last Saturday?"

You took a sip of your drink, lifting a shoulder in a half-shrug. "I think so? Was that the night we had two bachelorette parties come in?"

"Yeah, we ran out of cold brew because of them." Dean said. "I set a new record for how many numbers I could get in one night."

You rolled your eyes, choosing to ignore him like everyone else at the table. "Yeah, I was definitely on the bar—my arms are still aching from shaking espresso martini's all night."

Your manager leaned forward, her glassy eyes glinting at you teasingly. "I think this review is about you," she said in a sing-song tone.

You couldn't help but feel a little giddy at someone leaving you a review calling you cute, even if they were most likely stumbling drunk.

Allie—your fellow waitress who was sitting on the other side of Dean—grabbed the phone and read the review herself, scrolling on the screen with her eyes growing wider until a delighted gasp left her.

She looked at you with a beaming smile. "This James guy has been leaving reviews about you for months."

"What?"

She nodded eagerly, a small squeal leaving her. "This is so good, nothing this exciting ever happens here!" She was almost bouncing in her seat as she looked back at the phone, her excitement shaking the booth. "Okay, this one is from Valentines Day: waitress's frown is cute, I still should've bought her flowers." She fell back against the booth seat, clutching the phone to her chest with a dreamy sigh.

Your heart stuttered, the tipsy fog in your head clouding further. "That's—it doesn't say my name…" you trailed off with a nervous laugh. "It could be about any of the waitresses."

Your manager snorted. "We called you sourpuss the whole shift, you wouldn't stop frowning."

Before you could start your rant about how Valentine's Day is just another highly commercialised holiday and people shouldn't need a specific day of the year to celebrate love, Allie started reading out another review.

"This one is from four months ago: come to this bar if you want to see a real-life angel."

Dean groaned, "that's so fucking cheesy." He turned to look at you, "I hope you're not falling for this shit."

"We don't even know if it's about me!"

"I think it's cute," the new waitress piped in from the other end of the booth. "You've got a secret admirer."

"More like a stalker." One of the line cooks mumbled.

"Oh," Allie gasped, "this man has it bad. These are borderline love confessions." She reached past Dean, handing you his phone with the review page still open.

You hesitantly grabbed the phone from her, your heart beating rapidly in your chest. There's no way some guy was leaving these reviews about you…right? That just seems insane, like something out of a romcom. Or something that will end with a restraining order and you moving states away.

The phone faintly trembled in your unsteady hands, your eyes narrowing against the screen's bright glare.

James B.

★★★★★ a month ago

Wars were started over smiles less beautiful than hers.

Oh.

That's maybe the most romantic thing anyone has ever said about you.

You don't know if it's about you.

You exhaled shakily, shrugging nonchalantly as you handed the phone back to Dean. "He could be talking about any of the waitresses." You repeated your earlier statement. And then for good measure—"It's hardly a compliment—wars are started over literally anything."

Allie looked at you with wide eyes, bringing her hands up and shaking them in a strangling motion.

"Do you know anyone called James?" Your manager probed, clearly invested.

"No." You answered, ignoring the dull, tingling sensation at the back of your head. "No one significant."

"Well, even if he does turn out to be a stalker, at least he boosted our ratings."

Over the next few weeks, your coworkers had made it their personal mission to find out the identity of James B. Your manager had the brilliant idea to set up a weekly bar tab giveaway—for people to be in the draw they just needed to put their business card in a jar on the bar. What your customers didn't know was that every Friday after close, Allie and Dean were emptying the jar not to find a lucky winner but to look for any cards with the name James B.

It turned out there were a few more James B.'s than they were expecting, and there were no other parameters to narrow down their search. And much to their chagrin, you didn't recognise any of their names.

"Wait!" Dean exclaimed, holding a finger in the air. "Why don't we just reply to one of his reviews?"

"Oh," Allie said, leaning forward in her chair, "that's actually kind of smart. Maybe we could say we have a thank you gift for our number one fan?"

"Or we could just ask who he is."

Something about that made you uneasy.

After the night you all first discovered the reviews, Allie had drawn up a timeline of them which revealed this James guy had been leaving reviews for a year. And while they never mentioned your name, everyone knew they were about you—but you didn't want to believe that; it felt absolutely insane.

Majority of the reviews were brief and mundane, similar to the first one Dean saw. But a few of them…they read like poetry, like the pages out of someone's journal. They mentioned your smile, how your laugh could cure any ailment, that being in your presence was like witnessing a supernova.

It was beautiful and terrifying.

And every day it was looking more like a stalker than someone you knew—you didn't want to give him attention in fear that it could evolve from something harmless to dangerous.

"Already tried that," your manager sighed next to you. "He didn't reply."

Something in the atmosphere felt off when you shouldered the brownstone's front door open with a heavy sigh. It was well past midnight on a Saturday, and the soft murmuring you would usually hear coming from the lounge—Sam had a habit of passing out in front of the TV on Saturday night's—was nonexistent. You didn't think much of it, your mind single-focused on needing a scolding hot shower to wash away the ten hour bar shift.

Your work uniform was drenched and sticking to you uncomfortably, a crust of sugary cocktails and beer lining your skin. It had been one disaster after another—the beer keg soaking you as you tried to tap it, the cocktail shaker exploding in your hands, the new waitress who failed to call out "behind" and you ended up covered in a customers chili cheese fries.

You welcomed the boiling water, scrubbing your skin until it was red and raw. Visible steam swirled from your body even after you retreated into your room, and only then did some of the tension ease from your shoulders. Your fatigue ran bone deep—it felt like you were dragging your feet through mud as you slowly started your nighttime routine.

A noise cut through the eerily silent night, soft and faint, but an unmistakable echo from the room next to yours. It made you pause, your eyebrows drawing together. Then more noise followed, three breathy high pitched moans that the wall separating your rooms failed to drown out. A hot realisation curdled your stomach, rising through your body until it settled in your chest and throat—a tight, unrelenting fist clenching and making it harder to breathe.

Bucky had company.

Your ears zeroed in on the noises against your wishes. The last thing you wanted was to hear the guy you had a debilitating crush on fuck someone else. And yet, you stood frozen—your towel still wrapped around you, water dripping onto the floor, heart trying to beat out of your chest. Your nervous system had entered fight or flight mode, triggered by the sounds of another woman's pleasure.

Sweat started to line your back, your hands trembling where they were clutching the towel, chest stuttering as your breaths turned sharp and quick.

The moans grew in volume and soft thuds reverberated against the wall—then, a faint low murmuring graced your ears. A deep voice you would recognise anywhere, that you had heard through the wall plenty of times during your one year living there.

You snapped out of your shock, ripping open your work bag to find your headphones. Your phone shook in your hands as you searched for 'calming' playlists, your thumb jabbing violently at the first result. You turned the volume up loud enough to vibrate your eardrums, but the damage was already done.

You paced the length of your room, clenching and unclenching your fists in an effort to calm down—to will your racing heartbeat to slow, to tamp down the spiralling thoughts that made you feel like you were drowning.

You got ready for bed in a blur, trying to stay as quiet as possible with your heart beating wildly in your throat. The exhaustion that had your bones aching after your shift was lingering, but had been overwhelmed by the adrenaline surging through your veins. You laid in your bed, trying to concentrate on your breathing.

Inhale. One, two, three, four.

Hold. One, two—

It didn't sound like she was faking it.

The breath rushed out of you quickly.

You squeezed your eyes shut tight, clenching your fists and trying to focus on the sensation.

Inhale. One, two, three—

Bucky's bed is pressed up against your shared wall.

You grabbed the pillow next to you and pressed it against your face, something between a pained whimper and frustrated groan leaving your throat.

Did he like to talk? Was he whispering dirty things in her ear, telling her how good she felt, how much he wanted her? Did she get to hear him moan and whimper?

The music in your ears had become irritating, overstimulating you even more. But there was no way in hell you were taking your headphones off—your heart was already broken enough.

Did he call her sweetheart, too?

You slept for two hours, maybe three if you were being generous. The exhaustion won out against the anxiety around two am, only for you to jerk awake two hours later when the same noises echoed through the wall. At some point in the night your headphones had slipped off and you were defenceless against the noises your body had already filed as a threat.

Your nervous system reacted as if you were being hunted down by a lion, not overhearing your roommate-slash-crush have sex. It was a horrible way to wake up—your body pumping full of adrenaline and cortisol before you even took a deep breath.

The headphones went back on a second too late—leaving a scratched record of giggles looping through your head that the music couldn't drown out. One giggle that you knew well, that had you beaming with pride whenever you coaxed it out of him.

A silent tear slid down towards your ear, disappearing into your hairline as you stared at the ceiling.

Hours passed before it felt safe for you take the headphones off, and even then anxiety gripped your chest whenever you thought about leaving your room. Everything that had once felt safe, had once felt like your solace, now felt like a prison.

You knew you were being dramatic, knew that your jealousy and hurt was unreasonable. Bucky wasn't yours, he would never be yours—you knew that, you'd always known that. But that's the thing with crushes—they are irrational, uncontrollable beasts that mistake kindness for attraction, that disguise inevitable heartbreak as fluttering butterflies.

Opening your bedroom door slowly, you saw the flash of a towel dart into Bucky's room—two faint sets of giggles sounding behind the closed door, slicing into your aching heart. Heat burst behind your eyes and you willed the tears to stay at bay—at least until the shower could drown out your sobs.

You sat on the floor of the shower, staring at the wall while hot water rained down on you, each drop feeling like a knife piercing your skin. You sat there, unblinking, as your vision blurred—the water washing away your endless tears. You sat there as the shower stream changed from a burning fire to an icy bite, your body shivering but unmoving.

Nat's banging on the door about rising water prices snapped you out of your dissociative daze.

"Bucky! Oh, fuck—don't stop, please—"

"Yeah? You like that?"

"Yes—god, so much!"

"You feel so good, baby."

Thump, thump, thump.

You had taken your headphones off for half a minute while getting changed. All it took was thirty seconds for tears to swell in your eyes and a silent scream to claw at your throat.

It had been four weeks since you first heard them. Four weeks of knowing your crush was fucking someone else less than three metres from your bed. Four weeks of debilitating anxiety and heartache consuming you until there was nothing left to take.

You knew their routine; she came over every Wednesday and Saturday, always after ten pm. Depending on your roster for the week, sometimes you were home when she came over—subjected to hearing Bucky's low baritone greet her at the door, their footsteps padding down the hall past your room, the soft click of his door closing and the giggles that followed.

You fucking hated giggles.

By the end of the second week, you had put in a request to work the closing shift every Wednesday and Saturday. The tightness in your chest and churning in your stomach never faded, but you took some comfort in knowing you would only be in the same house as her for a few hours. You hadn't met her—you didn't even know her name—but you were envious of a faceless woman, a voice you heard in the dark, because she had the one thing you wanted but could never have.

No one brought her up—there were no casual chats between the boys, no probing questions from Nat. Apart from the first time, she was out of the house by six am—narrowly avoiding Sam and Steve leaving for their morning run. You weren't even sure they knew she existed—not until Nat gave you a sympathetic smile over a glass of wine, confirming that they did in fact know without uttering a word.

The usual nights the five of you spent together continued as normal. Or, at least as normal as you could manage. The space between you and Bucky grew—he stopped trying to charm quiz answers out of you, and you hugged the arm of the couch like it was a life preserver during movie night. The soft conversations over morning coffee ceased to exist, the nights of you two reading together in the lounge just a hazy memory.

The distance made your heart yearn for him while his proximity made your nervous system overload. It was a push and pull that sucked the life out of you, exhausting you until you were a shell of who you used to be.

When Sam asked you what your first heartbreak was you instantly thought of Liam Turner from the sixth grade. He was the classic class clown that both charmed and annoyed all the girls in your grade. He sat next to you during History and English, always pestering you for help and trying to make you his partner in crime. You did what any smitten eleven year old girl would do—you handed him a note. It was simple, you didn't even write your name—just "do you like me" with tick boxes for yes and no. You handed it to him before recess and watched with bated breath as he ran to his group of friends, watched as all of them turned to you and fell into hysterics. You crashed into your mom's arms once you got home from school, sobs wracking your body as you felt like you were going to die from the crushing sensation in your chest.

What you felt that day wasn't even a drop in the agony that consumed you when you walked into the lounge for movie night.

"You're late!" Nat yelled, her voice travelling down the hall as you rushed through the front door.

"I know, I know," you yelled back, heading for your room and changing out of your work clothes in record time. You made your way towards the lounge once in comfy clothes. "The health inspector would not stop asking me questions, no matter how many times I told him I'm not the—"

Your feet and words came to a halt once you reached the doorway to the lounge, your heart dropping to the floor and shattering into a million pieces.

Because there she was—sitting in your usual spot with her feet resting on Bucky's lap, one of his hands engulfing her ankles.

She was beautiful. And the complete opposite to you in every way possible. From the texture and colour of her hair to the shape of her body. From the clothing and jewellery she wore to the colour of her eyes.

The two of you weren't even comparable—you were from completely different planets, different universes.

It hit like a sucker punch. You weren't his type, not even close.

You're a fucking fool.

She smiled brightly at you, the white of her teeth glaring. You faintly heard her great you through the ringing in your ears, offering you her name. You managed a meek hi in response, dragging your wide eyes away from her over to the other couch.

Big mistake.

Nat and Steve were already looking at you with pity in their eyes, a silent "are you okay?" written all over their faces. Nat scooted closer to Steve, tilting her head towards the small open spot next to her on the couch. You knew the second you sat next to them that her comforting presence would wrap around you and tear away the last of your fraying composure. So, you did something you had never done before.

"Move it, bird brain." You muttered to Sam, squatting down next to his beanbag and shoving his shoulder to make room for you.

"You ever tried not being bossy?" He grumbled in reply, shuffling to the right so you could collapse down next to him.

Normally you would respond with something just as snarky. But that required mental energy that you did not possess—energy that was being drained with each passing second she sat behind you.

You settled into the beanbag, the rustling of polystyrene beads filling the quiet room. You tried to take calming breaths as subtly as possible, the blood from your broken heart clogging your throat and lungs.

"We're watching Interstellar tonight," Nat spoke softly. "Steve's pick."

You hummed, keeping your eyes glued to the TV screen as Steve navigated through the streaming app.

Sam stiffened next to you, turning to you with a peculiar look on his face. "What? You got nothing to say to that?"

You sighed. "Every white guy's number one film on letterboxd. Try being less predictable next time, Rogers." You said in a flat monotone.

A deep, breathy chuckle sounded behind you, and it took all of your diminishing willpower to not turn and get a glimpse of the soft smile that haunted your dreams.

You tried your best to focus on the movie, you really did. You tried to focus on the press of Sam's shoulder against yours, something tangible to keep you grounded. But nothing could distract you from the soft murmuring behind you, the sound of her giggles as Bucky provided commentary throughout the movie. It was something that you normally didn't mind, something you indulged in, even. Not tonight. Thirty minutes into the movie, your eye had developed a constant twitch from suppressing the urge to turn around and tell them to shut the fuck up.

At one point Sam's hand had fallen over both of yours, stopping you from picking at your bleeding hangnails. You didn't even notice the sting from the exposed wounds—too preoccupied with gnawing on the inside of your cheeks.

You walked into your shift the next day with another request.

You clocked into your shift on Tuesday afternoon with a sinking pit in your stomach. A feeling that you had become accustomed to over the last couple months, a feeling that had you walking the scenic route home at night, delaying your arrival. It was the feeling that you had started associating with home, along with the ache in your chest.

You loved quiz night—you loved seeing what stupid team names people came up with, loved judging them when they got such an obvious answer wrong. Once upon a time, you had loved seeing Bucky's handsome face sitting in your section, waving you over with an up to no good smile stretching his lips. Now, it all felt like a taunt.

Nothing was out of the ordinary—the opening shift said it had been quiet as usual, there had been a couple bookings from newcomers for quiz night, and the tabby cat that wandered the block came in to say hi.

And then, she walked in. Strolling in behind Nat and Steve, her arm looped through one of Bucky's, flashing you a kind smile as they made their way to their usual booth. In your section.

You wanted to scream. Cry. Jump into the East River.

The bar had become your safe place—which honestly sounded crazy, you hated half of the customers. But your home hadn't felt like your home since she walked through the door. And now she was in the one place that hadn't been tarnished.

She was nice, you knew she was. But she was a constant reminder that your heart belonged to a man who never looked at you twice.

You rushed over to Allie who was standing at the bar waiting for Dean to finish garnishing cocktails.

"I need you to swap sections with me—please." You said in a frantic breath.

She turned to you, her face already telling you her answer. "Hell no! I've got two tables of big tipper's—I am not giving that away."

Dean leaned his elbows on the bar. "I'll swap with you."

Your head whipped to him at a comical speed, your wide eyes meeting his unbothered grin. "…But you hate working the floor."

He nodded towards one of your tables—one of the newcomer bookings, a booth full of girls in their early twenties. A few of them were already looking over at your trio—more specifically, looking at Dean. You turned back in time to see him flash them a wink.

Your chest deflated with a relieved breath. "This is the only time I am ever going to be grateful for you being such a dog."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"It wasn't." You and Allie said at the same time, matching deadpan expressions on your faces.

Allie turned to you, squinting suspiciously. "Why do you want to swap?"

You shrugged, looking at her forehead to avoid eye contact. "Just felt like a change."

"You said please—pretty desperately, too. It was kinda hot." Dean piped in.

You glared at him, choosing not to acknowledge his comment. You turned back to Allie looking at you expectantly. "Variety is the spice of life?"

She hummed disbelievingly. "Mhm, sure. We'll talk later."

Working the bar brought you no reprieve; every time you walked to the cocktail station, they were in your direct eyeline. Every time you poured a cosmo, shook a lemon drop, garnished a mojito, you could hear them laughing. You watched how she fit in like the missing puzzle piece, her body slotting perfectly under Bucky's arm—like that's where she belonged. You watched your roommates welcome her in with open arms and crying laughter, the realisation hitting you that she replaced the temporary hole your absence had opened.

Your knees were shaking while you closed up the bar, your hands scrubbing the beer grates with an urgency that was cause for concern.

"Hey, hey, woah that's—" Dean came up next to you, his hands gently clasping your wrists. "That's enough," he said, uncharacteristically gentle, "your hands are bleeding." He brought your hands up, your unfocused eyes seeing spots of red raised on your knuckles.

"Oh."

"Yeah, oh. What's up with you today?"

Dean led you away from the bar, grabbing a first aid kit on your way over to where your manager and Allie were sitting, working through the next week's orders. He pushed you into a chair, stepping back with an awkward pat to your head.

"I'm sensing that this is a girl talk so I'm just gonna finish closing the bar."

The two women turned to you with concern painting their faces. Allie glanced down at your hands and opened the first aid kit, pulling out supplies to treat the cuts. Neither of them spoke while she tended to your hands, watching your face closely.

"These aren't too bad, just scrapes." She said softly, packing the kit back up and sitting it out of the way. She clasped your hands lightly, her thumbs rubbing soothing circles on the back of your hands. "What's going on, sweetie?"

You looked up from where you had been staring at the table, seeing her eyes and your manager's shining with worry. A silent tear slipped from your eye, leaving a damp path in it's wake.

"Whose kneecaps are we busting?" Your manager demanded.

That broke you.

Your shoulders started shaking, your throat closing in on itself in the form of a sob. Your heart escaped from your chest cavity, rising up like bile. Your vision was completely blurred, hot tears taking your eyes hostage. You caved in on yourself, wrapping your arms around your body as your frame trembled like a leaf.

You couldn't even feel embarrassed about bawling like a baby in front of your coworkers, the pain you had been sheltering for months overruling any other emotion. Allie wrapped her arms around you, pulling you into her warmth and making you cry harder. Your manager placed a gentle hand on your shoulder, her thumb rubbing calming patterns as they both whispered words of comfort to you.

You gasped for breath, trying to get some air past the ball in your throat. "I-It's so—" your words broke with a hiccup, "it's so fucking stupid." You rushed out. "We were never—ugh!" You wiped at your cheeks furiously, willing the tears to stop. You gulped down a deep breath, trying to focus on the comforting touches and not the agony vibrating every cell in your body.

"We were never anything. God, I'm sobbing over a guy that—he was only being nice, and I made it into something it wasn't." You garbled out, the brine of tears lining your lips.

You opened up to them, telling them about how deeply you fell for Bucky in between sobs. How you felt like a goddamn fool, your lovesick heart reading into things and mistaking your strictly platonic relationship as something else entirely. You told them how you hate going home most nights, finding it harder to breathe the closer you got to the brownstone. You admitted to them that it's not just jealousy over him with another girl, it's something deeper—the fear that you've been replaced, that he doesn't need you anymore.

"…my sleep is fucked, I'm on high alert every second I'm home—I don't feel safe in my own home. Which—I know, it sounds so fucking dramatic. But it's like she's seeped into every crack, changing the foundations I built over a year ago. Now she's turning up here—on fucking quiz night, my night—and I just can't escape." You finished with a deep breath, feeling drained from your emotional monologue.

Allie, who had kept her arms wrapped around you throughout your rambling, lifted her head and looked at you with a mix of understanding and sympathy. "That's why you wanted to swap sections, because she was here." You nodded meekly.

She sighed and sat back in her chair. "Give me a couple days to clear out my spare room. You need it more than I need a second closet."

Before you could start sobbing over her offer a muscular arm reached in front of you, depositing a vodka cranberry onto the table.

Dean's voice rumbled behind you. "If it makes you feel any better, I've wanted to sleep with you since my first shift."

"Dean," both women next to you hissed. You turned to look at him, catching that easy-going smile of his and you started laughing—the first genuine one in weeks.

Thursday 6:18pm

Nat: Hey, you working late tonight? The boys are getting restless, Sam is threatening to watch Top Gun if you're not home in 10…

You: shit i forgot to tell you i'm working thursday nights now! sam can watch whatever mediocre garbage he wants :-)

Nat: We can change movie night to another night! Maybe Sunday? Whatever works for you x

You: don't worry about it, thursdays work for everyone else!

Nat: Is everything ok? I feel like I hardly see you anymore :(

You: aw i'm sorry natty :-( just been picking more shifts up at work - boss has me training the newbies! promise we'll have a wine night soon xx

"I'm moving out."

It was the Sunday after that fateful quiz night, the sun beating down on your four roommates as they laid out in the backyard. Sam was going on about some barbeque he had been invited to—telling the other three that if they behaved he would let them join him. Nat's head was resting on Steve's chest, half asleep while he massaged her scalp. Bucky was lying with a hand behind his head, shirtless, and reading his well-loved copy of The Fellowship of the Ring.

Allie had sent you a photo of her spare room an hour before, a bottle of Tito's sitting on the floor the only thing in the empty room. You couldn't put off telling your roommates any longer, knowing that once you moved out you would start feeling like a human again. You stood in the doorway, arms tight across your body—fearing for their reactions.

Sam stopped talking abruptly, Nat jolted awake and sat up from Steve's chest, Bucky slowly lowered his book to his chest. Nat was the first to speak.

"What?" She asked softly.

You started to shuffle your feet, looking around the backyard—at the fairy lights that flickered like dying stars, the small veggie patch Steve cared for like it was his child—avoiding eye contact with them. "You remember Allie from the bar? We've gotten really close these past few months and she was looking for a roommate—kinda felt like a no-brainer, y'know?"

You finally looked at them, your heart beat rattling your jaw. Sam looked speechless, his face frozen in confusion. Nat was looking at you with that assessing gaze, her eyes squinting like she knew something else was going on. Steve nodded his head solemnly, his features pulled into a frown that looked out of place on him. Bucky had abandoned his book completely, sitting upright with his pretty lips downturned, his sunglasses hiding whatever emotions swam in his cerulean depths.

"I can sort out getting the room filled—can probably pay double rent if necessary—"

"I'll handle it." Bucky cut you off, his tone gruff and curt.

You wrung your hands together, hating being under the spotlight of your roommate's attention. "Are you sure? It's a bit late notice so it might be hard to—"

That same curtness cut you off again,"I said I'll handle it, didn't I?"

He probably wanted his girlfriend to move in.

Your three other roommates momentarily directed their bewildered stares to him, just as surprised as you at his bluntness. Just like Steve frowning, this was out of character for him. You could feel his eyes glaring holes into you through his sunglasses.

Nat shook her head at his attitude, turning her attention back to you. "I didn't know you wanted to move out."

Okay, time for the lies—just like you practiced in the mirror.

"It's not about wanting to move out," you started softly, "it's just something that naturally unfolded. Her landlord upped her rent last month and she can't afford it on her own anymore." Steve and Sam nodded along, while Nat was looking at you with that unwavering stare. You didn't even want to glance at Bucky. "She jokingly asked me over drinks a couple weeks ago if I was looking and after thinking on it, I think it's the best choice for me. It's closer to work, cheaper than what I currently pay and, as I said, we've become really good friends."

Nat continued squinting her eyes at you, watching as you fidgeted with your fingers—your tell that you would rather be anywhere else.

"Okay," she acquiesced. "When are you moving? We'll throw a little goodbye party."

"Great idea," Sam mumbled.

"Sometime in the next week." Everyone's eyebrows shot up at that. "And that's not necessary—I'd prefer it if you didn't do anything; it's not like I'm leaving the city, I'll only be a few blocks away."

Steve recovered from the brief shock at how soon you were leaving them. "Let us know what day and time, we'll help you move your stuff."

"I appreciate the help, really I do, but my coworkers have already offered—we have Dean to do all the heavy lifting."

That made Bucky stir, standing up with a scoff and arms folded across his chest. "Did you think about us at all? Sounds like you can't wait to get away from here."

You froze, the ice running through your veins equal to the frost in his tone. "That's not—I didn't want to bother you—"

"How can you think you bother us after all this time?" He asked, the frost melting into water—revealing something that trembled close to desperation.

"Bucky," Nat warned.

"I just don't understand," He snapped, shaking his head and walking towards where you were stuck in the doorway. He paused in front of you, his sun slicked chest making your heart gallop. You kept your eyes on his chin—locking on the clef still visible through heavy stubble, resisting the desire to glance at his naked chest, or worse, look into his eyes. "Mind letting me through?" He muttered lowly, his frame now blocking you from the sun. You ducked your head, pressing your back to the doorframe to give him space.

"Buck—"

"Not now, Steve." He bit out, your body absorbing the heat radiating from him as he brushed past you. You stood still, head tilted to the floor until you heard his door slam closed.

"Well, that was…" Steve started, his uneasy chuckle filling the heavy atmosphere.

The shock of his attitude left you dazed. You expected some blow back from Nat—she could read you like her favourite book, knowing the emotions you held within yourself better than you did. You expected—hoped, really—that they might be a little down about your departure, but Bucky acting like this wasn't even in your realm of possibility.

"What was that about?" You muttered to yourself.

Sam stood up with a huff, grabbing a beer from the cooler near the table. "Fucking idiots, the pair of you."

You timed the move for the following Wednesday, not wanting to risk another night of hearing what you had labelled your own personal torture. You had been working nights since Sunday, avoiding any interactions with your roommates. The vibe in the brownstone felt off, the air tasting stale even when you were the only one home. Nat had been texting you for updates, apologising for Bucky's strange behaviour, and assuring you your friendship with her wouldn't slip away after you were gone. Sam continued to send you memes—he had an affinity for the gradient instagram reels—and Steve saved you the best strawberries from his garden, hiding them in the fridge for you.

Bucky was radio silent.

Tuesday 5:36pm

Nat: Just spoke to Allie - apparently you're not working quiz night anymore?? What's going on?

You: we thought the new waitress should work it for a bit! good experience :-)

Nat: You should come join us then! We would be unstoppable with you on our team xx

You: maybe another time? don't want the other teams to think you have an unfair advantage lol

Nat: Fuck what they think. We miss you! Movie night was not the same without you last week :(

A month passed before you saw Bucky again.

You had been texting Nat on and off, feeling an awful reluctance to seeing her. It had nothing to do with Nat and everything to do with you continuing to avoid the problem—your feelings. Because you still thought about him, religiously so. You hated yourself for it—hated your brain conjuring up scenarios of him and her, replaying the happiness that glowed on his face the couple of times you saw them together.

Your sleep had improved, at least. There was no anxiety constricting your chest when you walked home, no fear for what you might hear through the walls. Allie encouraged you to cry it out on the bathroom floor, over tubs of ice cream on the couch. While it was horrible to address and to actually feel the heartbreak instead of intellectualising it, you had to admit you did feel lighter. It was a weight off your chest for someone else to know your secret, to let you speak about the pain and not forcing you to move on.

Your manager was quick to approve your request to work the day shifts—asking if you wanted to get your managers license, to be her dependable day shift manager. You were elated to have something else to focus on, and the pay rise wasn't bad either. Working the days also meant you weren't there in case your old roommate's called in for a drink on their way home from work.

But you knew your luck was going to run out some day soon.

It was on a quintessential late summer evening—the kind where the sun was low enough to shine through the tree canopy, casting the ground in a scene of dancing light and shadows. Gravel crunched beneath your shoes as you ambled through Prospect Park, listening to the harmony of kids laughter, dogs barking, and a busker playing guitar. Walking through the park lengthened your journey home by twenty minutes, but on a day like this it was hard to resist.

You heard him before you saw him, too lost in appreciating the world around you to notice him strolling towards you on his trek home. He called out your name softly, hesitantly. And you would recognise that husky baritone even if you were locked in a soundproof pool drowning underwater.

Your gaze ripped away from watching a pair of swans glide along the shimmering lake, your heart jumping into your throat as you saw Bucky a few metres in front of you. He was wearing his gym clothes, the black compression top clinging to his chest with light patches of sweat. His hair was tied back in a small bun, a few strands stuck to his dewy forehead and your fingers twitched to brush them back. Soft sapphire eyes roamed the valleys of your face, his shoulders dropping with an almost relieved sigh.

You hated how your body heated under his watchful gaze in an instant—hated that he still had control over you and he didn't even know it.

"Hey," he said quietly, a small smile tugging his lips. He hesitated for a moment, doubt flickering across his face before he shook his head and stepped closer, lifting an arm and placing his hand between your shoulder blades to pull you into his embrace.

A startled gasp escaped you at the contact, blood pulsing in your ears as his warmth enveloped you. His other arm wrapped around your waist, his hand resting on the small of your back to pull you in closer. Your traitorous body relaxed in his hold, the heady scent of sandalwood, spice, and his sweat clouding your mind.

Fuck him for always smelling so irresistible.

"Hi." You murmured, muffled by his shirt. You kept your arms at your sides, knowing that if you felt his body beneath your hands you would backtrack all the progress you had made over the past month. You could already feel yourself slipping—comparing being in his arms again to lying in front of the fireplace while rain pelted the windows and thunder clapped outside. The feeling of being warm and safe despite a raging storm.

He rested his chin on your head, his chest expanding underneath your cheek as he inhaled deeply. The hand between your shoulders flexed, pushing you further into him. His chest rumbled below you and you felt his words more than heard them. "Missed you."

You stepped back quickly, stumbling out of his embrace. His brows pinched together and his lips turned down with a frown. He took a small step back and cleared his throat, a muscle flexing in his jaw as he stuffed his hands in his pockets.

"I—uh—how, how have you been?"

You folded your arms across you chest, focusing on the light freckle on his neck. "I've been okay."

"That's good, great. I—we've missed you." His throat bobbed as he swallowed hard and his voice dropped lower, softer . "Place isn't the same without you."

You had to leave before you did something foolish—before you dropped to your knees and pleaded for an ounce of his affection.

You cleared your throat, trying to rid the sudden emotion clogging it. "How have you been? How's the new roommate?"

Bucky's eyes flicked away from you, a hand leaving his pocket to rub the back of his neck. "Fine—they're fine." Splotches of red coloured his cheeks. "They don't compare to you, though."

What the fuck did that mean?

"Um—okay, well, that's good? I should—"

"Listen," Bucky interrupted you before you could flee from the increasingly awkward encounter. He stepped closer, his eyes locked on the gravel lining the earth. "I—I want to apologise for my behaviour, when you told us you were leaving." He looked up at you, remorse and distress bleeding from him so viscerally you could almost grab it. "I was in shock, I think—it doesn't really matter, I'm not trying to excuse it. I just wanted you to know that I really am sorry and you didn't deserve that." He closed the distance between you more, hands raising towards you before they dropped to his sides. "I—um, I would hate for that to be the reason you haven't come 'round—if you felt uncomfortable because of me."

It was resting on the tip of your tongue, the truth. It was begging to spill out, to tell Bucky that you were uncomfortable because of him but not for the reason he believed. You could handle a little attitude—what you couldn't handle was hearing the guy you're in love with treat another woman the way you had fantasised about since the day you met him.

Grateful for the fact you had been getting enough sleep to keep a grasp on your filter, you accepted his olive branch instead of starting a confessional. "Thank you, Bucky." You looked into his eyes, trying to express your sincereness. "I appreciate it, really."

Hope flared bright across his face. "So, wanna join us next Thursday? Your pick—I'll tell Sam to keep his comments to himself."

Guilt curdled your gut. "Thank you for the offer, but I can't make it, sorry. I already have plans."

If sitting in front of the TV watching New Girl and doomscrolling on your phone constituted as plans.

And just like that, the flame was extinguished. "Oh."

You interrupted before he could say more. "It was good seeing you, Bucky, but I have to get going." You stepped around him to continue home, giving him a small wave goodbye before focusing forward—walking brisker than the tranquil evening called for, your shoulders too tense for the serene landscape.

"Bye," he murmured, the sound drifting towards you with the light breeze.

You kept your head straight forward the rest of the walk home.

You expected the text from Nat the next day, knowing that Bucky would've told your former roommates that he ran into you. She demanded you meet for brunch at your earliest convenience, and given that it was Saturday and you had no plans you couldn't deny her any longer.

You were sitting on the couch putting on your shoes when Allie burst through the front door, her hands full of bags from the morning market and mouth stuffed with cake from the pâtisserie around the corner.

"Oh my god," you heard her mumble around frosting and sponge. "Guess what I just found out."

"Apparently not what decent manners are. Swallow before you talk."

A mop of floppy blonde hair appeared in your doorway. "That's what he said."

You rolled your eyes as Dean sauntered in with a wolfish grin, closing the door behind him. "What the hell are you doing here?" You shot wide eyes at Allie, wordlessly demanding an explanation.

She took your advice and swallowed before speaking again. "I ran into him at the market—he has an update on James B!"

A mix of anticipation and dread made your morning coffee stir. "I thought he stopped leaving reviews?"

Dean collapsed next to you, eyeing the dress you were wearing with approval. "You dress up for me, angel?"

You shoved his shoulder. "Not in a million years. What's the update, dumbass?"

He pulled his phone out with a sigh. "He left a review last night—don't look at me like that, I set up notifications for this very reason." He tapped on his phone before handing it to you, the screen displaying the latest review.

James B.

★★★★★ 13 hours ago

Quiz night isn't the same without her. Nothing is.

Your heart rate picked up, sweat gathering at the back of your knees.

What the fuck?

"But last night wasn't quiz night?" Was the only thing your dumbfounded mind could vocalise.

"I mean, yeah, but you're missing the point!" Allie interjected, standing behind the couch and leaning her head down to read the review. "Now we know he's a quiz night regular! That narrows the search pool down so much."

"Ooo, what if it's one of the old dockmen?" Dean giddily queried.

"They do normally sit in your section—or, well, what used to be your section." Allie supplied, wandering back to your kitchen to put away whatever trendy new chutney she bought from the market.

Your eyes followed her, catching sight of the clock hanging on the wall. "Shit—I'm going to be late." You jumped off the couch, frantically grabbing your phone and shoulder bag. "We can theorise more later, Nat is going to murder me for being late."

"Bye, honey!" Dean yelled as you ran out the door—stopping for a second to throw him the middle finger.

Nat was sitting at a table towards the back of the cafe, her crimson hair a stark contrast to the soft pastel interior. The atmosphere was buzzing and lively—every table occupied, with laughter and heavenly aromas wafting out the open door. It was the go to brunch spot for Brooklyn natives, it's covered outdoor courtyard an enticing location on a warm summer's morning—you were surprised Nat even managed to score a table.

Her face lit up once she saw you, standing to welcome you with a hug. "One more minute and I would've thought you were ghosting me."

You hugged her just as tight, the smell of her perfume relaxing your shoulders and making your heart clench—you shouldn't have gone this long without seeing her. "God, I know, I'm sorry. Allie came home with gossip before I could make my escape."

You both pulled away and sat down, reading the menu like you hadn't looked at it online on your walk over.

"Gossip? Anything interesting?" Nat asked, wiggling her eyebrows.

You let out a deep sigh. "It's a long story. One that's better told over a bottle of wine."

"Okay, now I am beyond intrigued—you better not leave me hanging for another month." She shot you a small glare, the smile on her face lessening it's sharpness.

The waitress came over and took your orders before the two of you fell into easy conversation. She updated you on what trouble the boys—Sam—had gotten into, and you told her about the time you and Allie were locked out in your pyjamas and tried to scale the fire escape. Neither of you broached the subject of why you moved out, but it was lingering in the air—in the soft way Nat said Bucky's name. Throughout the hour you spent chatting you noticed she didn't mention their new roommate once, and the curiosity was making you restless.

"So, how's the new roommate, really? Bucky didn't say much about them."

An out of place nervous hesitation tightened Nat's face, her eyes darting between yours as she bit her lip. After a tense few seconds her shoulders dropped with a sigh.

"Honey, there is no new roommate."

You reared back, your eyebrows furrowing in confusion. "What? But Bucky said yesterday—he said they were fine."

"Of course he did," she muttered under her breath, pinching the bridge of her nose. She looked at you with a huff. "The room is empty. Bucky…he's been paying for it."

"What?" You nearly exclaimed, your body temperature rising.

"Look, I don't know why he didn't tell you the truth—I honestly don't know what goes on in his mind, he has made some terrible choices the last few months." She placed a gentle hand on top of yours, her tone softening. "Choices that had you leaving us."

"I don't understand." You muttered quietly.

"I probably shouldn't be the one to tell you this, but—Steve and him were drinking after work last week and he admitted he's paying for the room—saving it in case you want to come back."

Shock rendered you speechless—frustration climbing up from your gut, opening the partially healed scars seared into your heart. Confusion, irritation, and heartache swirled together until they formed one emotion—anger.

Your hands balled into fists, your clenched teeth making your jaw ache. "I'm sorry, what?" You bit out.

You barely noticed the smirk twitching her lips, red starting to blur your vision. "Sam and Steve are out fishing today—he's home alone if you want to go bite his head off."

You didn't need to be told twice, the red-hot fury bringing you to your feet quickly. You grabbed your stuff with urgency, your hands already starting to shake.

"Brunch is my shout—go knock some sense into him."

It took you less than ten minutes to reach the brownstone, outrage powering your legs with a speed you didn't know you were capable of. The fresh air did nothing to calm you down—you were too consumed by the memories from the past year, the heartache you endured, your utter confusion at Nat's revelation.

Your fist pounded on the wooden door, not stopping until it swung open to reveal a puzzled Bucky.

His eyes widened at the sight of you, pink lips stretching into a knee trembling smile. Your dress caught his attention, his smile freezing as blue eyes trailed down and back up your body.

He cleared his throat before speaking. "What are you doin' here, doll?"

"Don't fucking call me that," you seethed, pushing him out of your way to storm inside. You barged down the familiar path to your old room, ignoring Bucky as he called out your name behind you.

You opened the door to find the room exactly how you left it—empty. You whipped around to see Bucky standing a few feet behind you, looking down at the ground with a hand rubbing his neck and a fire overtaking his cheeks.

"Why the fuck are you paying for an empty room? No, better yet, why did you lie to me about it?" You loudly demanded, just shy of shouting.

He stumbled over his words, looking up to see you with your eyebrows raised, arms folded across your chest, hip jutted out—the perfect picture of barely contained rage.

"Well, I—you see, it's—" he dragged a hand through his hair, blowing out a breath. "It's complicated?"

"Yeah, no shit. You were so pissy about me moving—it makes no sense! Just tell me the truth for once, Bucky!" Your voice raised higher, your hands flying around as the confusion and aggravation took hold of you.

Bucky's own frustration started to seep through, the volume of his voice a notch below yours. "I was upset because you were leaving—and you didn't seem to care about us, just running straight to Dean for help!"

He was upset? He had no fucking right to be upset.

Hot, frustrated tears flooded your eyes without your permission. "I left because of you, Bucky! No one else, just you." You stepped toward him, pushing a finger into his ridiculously sturdy chest. "And I didn't run to Dean! He offered to help after he watched me have a fucking breakdown over you."

His glistening eyes stared into yours, his eyebrows drawn upwards in distress. "…What?"

A crack had fractured the dam keeping you contained, your pent up thoughts and feelings crashing through and destroying the concrete barrier.

"Every fucking day I came home feeling like my world—my heart—was being torn apart—" your voice cracked and you turned around, starting to pace the length of your old room. "And I know, I fucking know, it's not your fault—that my delusional mind and hopeless romantic heart are to blame for reading into things that weren't there, for creating a fantasy of you—of us."

You wiped away your flowing tears, sniffling as you tried to catch your breath. "But now, you expect me to, what—feel bad for leaving? I was barely human." You let out a wet, humourless laugh.

"What are you talking about?!" He demanded desperately, his face shining with frustration and something akin to hope.

"I'm talking about the goddamn walls, Bucky! I don't know if you know but they're pretty fucking thin! And every Wednesday and Saturday night I heard you and her—I heard the guy I was obsessed with fucking somebody else and it killed me."

"I only started seeing her to get you out of my head!" Both his hands found their way to his hair, tugging the dark strands in frustration. "And maybe I wanted to make you jealous—which I know is a terrible—"

You closed the distance between you in two quick strides, reaching out to shove his chest. "Jealous? You wanted to make me jealous?!" You seethed out, your fists hitting his chest as your vision blurred. "Are you blind?! Everyone could see how infatuated I was with you." Your hits lost their strength, your cheeks growing even more wet.

"Hey," Bucky whispered softly, his hands gently encircling your wrists and his thumbs rubbing tender patterns on your radial pulse. "Breathe for me."

"No," you stubbornly whispered back, despite your panting breaths slowing to match his. You drew in staggering breaths, finally noticing how hard your heart was beating—your body shaking with every thump. Your fists unfurled, your palms resting flat on his broad chest—the fast pounding of his heart a near match to yours.

He let go of your wrists, his hands cupping your face delicately. He wiped your tears away with such care it made your heart ache. Your vision cleared enough to focus on his face, seeing his eyes shining with their own tears.

"I think we're both a bit blind, sweetheart. Everyone can see how smitten I am with you." He rested his forehead against yours, the space around you two growing charged in the aftermath of your anger. "Sam gives me shit about it every day." His breathy laugh ghosted your lips, leaving tingles in it's wake. His voice dropped low, "I'm so fucking in love with you I was leaving reviews about you like some—like a hopeless sap, hoping you would realise it was me."

His confession of love flew over your head, incredulity controlling your mind. "That was you?!" You gasped, pushing his chest lightly. "I thought I had a stalker, you idiot."

The memory of the night you and Allie read all the reviews ran through your head, remembering the disturbingly romantic details written; remembering the reviews you secretly reread like a guilty pleasure, going to sleep with a giddy smile and fluttering butterflies because someone was noticing you.

"That's all you took from that?" He shook his head minutely, one of his hands brushing down your back to cradle your waist. "I'm trying to tell you I'm in love with you here."

You stepped out of his embrace, your mind still picking through all the small details. "But—the first review was, like—" you started to pace again, your hands resting atop your head. "It was well over a year ago!" Your voice raised again, recalling how horrible you felt only a month ago—the heartbreak you could've avoided. "Why did you never say anything?!"

"Because I was scared!" His voice raised to meet yours. "I didn't want to ruin things and lose you forever!"

"Yeah, well look at how that turned out!" You gestured wildly to the empty room.

"Why are we shouting again?" Bucky walked towards you, reaching for your hands. You were both breathing heavily, the sound of your pants echoing in the emptiness as your chests heaved up and down.

"Because I'm mad at you." You finally met his eyes, the blue bleeding with regret and sorrow. Your voice dropped lower, timidness starting to creep in. "You…you broke my heart, Buck."

He gripped your hands tighter, raising one to rest on his chest—right above his heart. "I am going to spend every day until I die trying to make it up to you." His remorse polluted the air around you, tears welling in your eyes once again—this time from the pain clouding his. "If you'll let me."

"That's a bit dramatic," you mumbled, sniffling lightly. "Until you're fifty is fine."

He laughed, wet and husky. He let go of your hands to cup your face again, smoothing his thumbs along your cheekbones. Your breath hitched at the touch, the pain in your system being diluted by the drug that is Bucky.

He leaned in closer, his eyes darting between yours and your lips. "I'm gonna kiss you now, okay?"

You managed a small nod before his lips were on yours—desperate and aching, stealing the breath from your lungs. One of his hands shifted to the back of your neck, tilting your head to kiss you deeper. Your hands found his chest again, fisting his shirt and causing a groan to sound in the back of his throat. He took control of the kiss with no complaint from you—happily letting him suck your bottom lip before nipping it, opening for him when his tongue grazed your lips.

The first touch of his tongue against yours had fire scorching down your body, the intensity of his kisses settling in your gut and awakening the need you've had for him for over a year.

The annoying human need for air had you pulling away from his lips, gasping as you tried to catch your breath. His stubble scratched your skin as he trailed kisses along your jaw, tilting your head to reach the sensitive spot below your ear. He gave it a soft experimental kiss, his tongue darting out and drawing a small whine from you.

His chest rumbled beneath your hands. "You talk about the walls being thin—trust me, I know." He stepped forward, his fingers dancing down your sides to grasp your hips, backing you into the wall. "I know you like to beg, what pretty sounds you make when you're about to come." He trailed his nose back along your jaw and down the other side of your neck, nestling into the crook and sniffing deeply with a small moan.

"Wh-what? I haven't—I never brought anyone home." You stuttered out, head starting to feel heavy from the lust fogging it.

"No, but you still have needs, don't you?" He let out a small chuckle, trailing feather-light kisses along your collarbone. "You thought you were alone, thought it didn't matter how loud you let yourself be." He pulled back, bringing a hand up to brush his fingers along your cheek, making their way down your neck. Onyx eyes met yours—a shiver racing down your spine at the barely contained hunger in them. "I came home with a migraine and you were so wrapped up in pleasure you didn't even hear me—but I heard you. And shit, doll, the noises you made cured my migraine faster than any pain meds ever have." He dropped his forehead to yours, his breath fanning your lips. "I had to fuck my fist three times that night. I replayed every little whimper, moan, every gasp of please until it drove me insane."

A gasp escaped you at his admission, heat rolling through your body—a mix of embarrassment and hunger swirling in your core.

"And then, like it was the universe's sole purpose to bring me to my knees, you walked in the next day wearing this dress." His fingers drifted to the neckline of your dress, toying with it as your breasts moved rapidly beneath. "Looking like a fucking angel sent here to torture me. Like sin wrapped in white lace. I had to leave before I dropped to my knees and begged for a taste—to let me worship you."

Your heart was trying to beat out of your chest, the throbbing in your core escalating with every word he murmured into your lips.

"You kept on wearing it, and I had to pretend like I wasn't replaying those sounds every time I saw you—like my dick wasn't rock hard at just a glimpse of this fucking dress." The hand on your neckline travelled down to the line of lace below your breasts—his thumb stroking along it making your breath stutter and nipples harden. "I had to do something, I felt like I was going insane. I started seeing her to get you out of my head—didn't fucking work now, did it?"

The mention of her cut through the Bucky induced haze, and you hesitated—needing clarification before you could let him consume you.

"Are you still seeing her?" You whispered.

"Fuck no, we were strictly casual. I broke it off the day you left."

Your head reared back an inch, hitting the wall lightly. "You know that doesn't make me feel better, right? That you only wanted to sleep with her because I was in the next room."

Both his hands gripped your waist, squeezing gently. "Okay, that—that wasn't what I was trying to get at." He lifted his head to stare into your eyes. "What I meant was that you leaving really showed how much of an idiot I'd been, wasting my time with her when you were right next door."

"Why didn't you reach out, then?"

He shrugged, his eyes darting away nervously. "I didn't think I had a right to. I wasn't exactly proud of how I acted the last time we spoke."

You saw Bucky almost every day for over a year—you knew he didn't get outwardly nervous often, and you knew when he was being vulnerable and honest. The Bucky in front of you wasn't lying—you could tell he was genuinely worried he'd messed everything up.

You relented with a sigh, lacing your hands around his neck. "I think it's time you start making it up to me."

"Gladly," he said before pulling you into him and kissing you deeply. He pressed his hips against yours, pushing you harder into the wall. You gasped at the feeling of his bulge against your stomach, your core trembling and aching in anticipation.

The pace of the kiss picked up, Bucky's tongue licking into your mouth with a deep moan. His grip on your hips tightened and he spun you around, walking you backwards towards his room without removing his mouth from yours.

He kicked the door shut behind him, leading you towards his bed with his hands drifting down to squeeze your ass. You broke away with a moan, your lips swollen and chin tender from his stubble.

"Sit down for me, sweetheart." Bucky rasped out. You quickly obliged—your need for him making you ready to do anything he said.

He kneeled on the floor in front of you, slowly taking your shoes off. His hands trailed up your bare legs, stopping when they reached the hem of your dress.

He pressed a soft kiss to your knee. "You gonna let me make you feel good?" He mumbled into your skin.

You nodded rapidly, your hands clenching his sheets in desperation.

He clicked his tongue. "I need words, angel."

"Yes, Bucky—please. Please touch me," you gasped out, the sight of him on his knees robbing your intelligence.

His mouth tilted into a smirk, his eyes gleaming. "There you go with that begging again."

He clasped your knees, spreading your legs open. His breath tickled the sensitive skin on your inner thighs, goosebumps erupting and surging up to your core. He pressed light kisses along one thigh, stopping when he got to your dress and switching to the other.

You could feel slick leaking out of your cunt, your clit pulsing from the lack of attention.

"Buck, stop teasing, please." You whined softly, lifting a hand to push the hair away from his eyes. He nuzzled into your hand, turning to press a kiss into your palm. Your hand vibrated as he hummed low.

He grasped the hem of your dress, lifting it slowly up to your hips. "Lean back f'me."

You leaned back on your elbows, your body trembling with need as his hands scorched paths up your thighs.

He let out a low groan once your dress was up past your hips—revealing your soaked panties to him. His eyes locked onto them, his pupils dilating until only a sliver of blue remained.

"All this from a little kissing?" He brushed a thumb along the wet patch, grazing your clit. Your head fell back with a loud gasp, your hips twitching towards his touch.

"Sensitive," he mumbled. His hand moved, tracing the edge of your panties—you were sure he could feel the heartbeat pulsing in your core. "How long has it been?"

You lifted your head up, looking into his dark eyes—the desire in them reflecting your own. "Since before I—"

You cut yourself off with a soft moan, your body jerking as Bucky pressed his thumb to your clit through your underwear—circling it with a steady pressure.

"What was that?" He asked smugly.

Your chest heaved as you tried to wade through the sensations buzzing through you. "Since before I moved in," you rushed out quickly, another moan escaping you at the feeling of his touch directly on your pussy—his hand slipping underneath the wet fabric.

"Fuck," he breathed out through clenched teeth. He grabbed the waistband of your panties and pulled them down your legs quickly. He groaned out looking at your exposed cunt, and you tried to close your legs on instinct.

He gripped your thighs to stop them from closing. "None of that," he growled out lowly. "Let me look at her."

His hands trailed up your thighs until they reached your bare hips, yanking you closer to the edge of the bed. You fell onto your back softly, your breath shaking from the impact.

He pulled your lips apart and moaned loudly. "She's fucking dripping, sweetheart."

You clenched at his words, his teasing leaving you aching and squirming. He chuckled and pressed a soft kiss millimetres away from where you needed him most. He breathed you in deeply making your hips buck up with a needy whine.

"Bucky, please."

He dragged a single finger from entrance to clit, pulling it back with a string of your arousal connecting the two of you. You sighed at the small touch, opening your eyes to see Bucky suck the tip of his finger.

He groaned at your taste, hands grabbing the back of your thighs to push your legs back and spread you wider.

"Gonna make her feel so good, pretty girl." He slurred out, his lips trailing a path of fire up to your core. "Be a good girl and make those noises for me again."

He dove in, licking the same path as his finger. His groan vibrated through you and your hands flew to his hair, gripping the strands as you gasped.

"Taste so fucking good," he mumbled before latching onto your clit. He sucked gently, circling the nub with his tongue. You rewarded him with a tug to his hair and a shaky moan.

He picked up the pace, moaning as he went from tasting you to devouring. He thrusted his tongue into you, lapping up everything he could. The room filled with the lewd sounds of your slick and his saliva coating your pussy—with your unabashed moans and gasps bouncing off the walls.

He pulled away from you, his chin and beard glistening. "That's it, pretty. Being such a good girl." You whined at the praise, using your hold on his hair to push his face back into you.

Your hips rocked against his face, the flame in your core growing fast. He moved an arm to your hips, holding them down to keep you still. He sucked your clit harshly, your back arching at the pleasure he was unleashing on you. You gasped out his name as your orgasm built rapidly.

"Fuck, Bucky—right there! Please, I'm gonna—" you cut off with a loud moan, your body jolting from him lightly biting your clit. Stars started to dot your vision as he continued to feast on you like a starved man—like you were his first sip of water after wandering the desert.

The knot in your core clenched tight before it unravelled, Bucky's groans vibrating through you pushing you over the edge. You came with a cry, your hands yanking his hair hard. A blissful fire spread throughout you, making your toes curl and head float.

Bucky drank up your release, prolonging your high until you were shaking and trying to push his head away. He relented, moving back to kiss and nip your inner thighs. Your heavy panting filled the room, your pussy twitching as you came down.

You propped yourself up on weak elbows, your droopy eyes meeting his glazed, pussy drunk ones.

"You're so fucking beautiful," he whispered reverently. He moved back in closer, his breath fanning your cunt making you clench around nothing. "Another one."

He slowly licked at your hole, leaving your overstimulated clit throbbing painfully. Your arms gave out, a whimper crawling up your throat. You brought a hand up to your chest, squeezing a breast over your dress—trying to relieve the ache in them.

"Fuck, look at you," Bucky cooed, pulling away from you to stand up. "As much as I love this dress, I think you'll look even more beautiful without it."

You nodded, sitting up slightly so he could pull it over your head. Your eyes were level with his crotch, seeing the large bulge tenting his pants—your mouth salivating already. Once your dress was off you reached a hand out, palming his hard dick over his pants. You gasped at the heavy feel of him, your walls clenching at the thought of him stretching you open.

His head rolled back with a moan, a hand catching your wrist to stop your movements. "Not right now." You let out a displeased whine and his mouth twitched with a smirk. "Later, promise. Lay back down so I can worship you."

He grasped the back of his shirt and pulled it over his head, leaving you to gape at his insane torso. You had seen it before but you always adverted your eyes quickly, scared of getting caught staring. Now, you could stare and touch all you wanted.

You leaned up to run a hand over his bare chest, his body scorching beneath your skin. You trailed a finger down the hard ridges lining his body, a thrill running through you as his muscles rippled and breath stuttered. Your mouth found his pecks, lathering them in wet kisses while your hand teased the waistband of his pants. He grasped your chin, jerking your head up to look at him. His jaw was tense and eyebrows furrowed, a slight darkness shadowing his face.

He leaned down and placed a gentle kiss on your lips. "What did I just say, sweetheart?" He mumbled, his tone laced with warning.

Before you could reply, his hands grasped your waist and pushed you up the bed until your head met his pillow. He crawled on top of you, kissing your neck.

"Thought you were gonna be a good girl." He mumbled, biting the spot below your ear and making you gasp. He pulled on one of your bra straps, letting it snap back onto your skin. You gasped louder at the small stinging sensation, the slight pain dousing your core in gasoline.

"Please, I am—I will be. M'sorry." You whimpered out, tilting your head back as he continued his assault on your neck.

He hummed in response, sucking on your pulse point before trailing lower—his stubble scraping the top of your breasts. He reached a hand behind your back, unclasping your bra with ease before pulling the straps down your arms slowly.

Your nipples hardened more once exposed to the cool air, begging for Bucky's attention. He lavished your breasts in kisses, covering every inch of skin with his spit. One of your hands clutched onto his bicep while the other wound into his hair again. He continued to avoid your nipples and you squirmed underneath him, trying to move his head to where you wanted him.

He relented, licking a nipple before sucking it into his mouth. You moaned from the relief and the zaps of pleasure racing down your torso. He pinched your abandoned nipple, rolling it between his thumb and finger as he bit down on the other one. You arched off the bed with a loud whine, the pain and pleasure morphing into one. He switched nipples, dolling out the same sweet torture with moans lodged in his throat.

Once both your nipples were raw and aching he kissed down your abdomen, hands clutching your hips as his mouth worshipped your stomach. You giggled at his beard tickling your sensitive skin and he lifted his head, his blown out eyes meeting yours with a soft—almost unbelieving—smile.

"You're breathtaking," he whispered. "And you're all mine, yeah?"

"Yes, Buck. Only yours."

He hummed in approval, pressing a light kiss to your hip. "Good. 'Cause I'm yours, angel. I'm sorry it took so long for me to say."

He moved back down to where you were dripping onto his sheets, your body wound tight from your first orgasm and his teasing. He licked into you without hesitation, drawing out loud noises from you as he sucked your sensitive clit.

"You're so wet—wanna live between these thighs, doll."

A hand left your hip to poke at your entrance, one finger sliding in easily before your walls squeezed at the intrusion. He pumped it in and out slowly until you were begging for more. A second slipped in, both of them curling upwards and grazing the spot that had you arching off the bed with a sound you'd never made before.

He lifted his head up, praising you for how good you were being—telling you how pretty you sounded. His mouth descended on your clit again and his fingers picked up their pace.

Your head rolled around on his pillow, the dual stimulation to your pussy making a heat rush through you like you'd never experienced with anyone else. You could feel how he was paying attention to you, altering his movements to gauge what sounds he could pull out of you—getting to know what you liked.

The ball tightened faster than the first time, your body edging on being overstimulated. Both your hands were fisting the sheets, your hips grinding against Bucky's face and fucking his fingers—the obscene squelch of your pussy soaking his hand mixing with your moans and gasps.

"Let me come—please. Been s'good for you, Buck—"

You know you didn't need his permission to come, but begging and submitting to him felt so good. Your own words pulled the coil in your core tighter—his resounding moan shaking through you telling you how much they affected him too.

A third finger joined in and you clenched down hard, the stretch almost throwing you off the cliff. They curled into your spot over and over, his other hand moving to push down on your lower stomach—causing something between a moan and squeal to leave you.

"Course you can come for me, sweetheart. I want nothing more than this sweet pussy drenching me."

With one last curl of his fingers and suck to your clit, your body started to shake, the ball bursting and sending waves crashing through you. Your eyes rolled back and your ears started ringing, deaf to the borderline animalistic noises you were letting out. You clamped down on his fingers hard, your juices gushing out and coating his hand—dripping and staining his sheets.

Your head was up in the clouds, cotton filling the space your brain used to be. You briefly registered his mouth leaving your overstimulated and raw nub, his fingers still moving slowly as you floated through your high. Small, gentle kisses across your cheeks, nose, and eyelids had you giggling breathlessly. Your body felt heavy, your eyelids struggling to open.

"You doin' okay?" Bucky whispered into your temple, peppering more light kisses to your forehead. You hummed softly.

"Need'a minute," you slurred out.

His fingers slowed and then left you, a whine slipping past your lips at the emptiness. You felt a hand rubbing soothing circles onto your scalp, your body turning towards his warmth. You slowly opened your eyes to find him staring at you, electric blue lazily roaming around your face.

"Hi," you whispered, lifting a heavy hand to push hair behind his ear. He grabbed your hand and covered it in soft kisses, his eyes never leaving yours.

"Hi. How you feeling?"

You leaned in, nuzzling your nose against his. "Good—really good," you muttered before kissing him softly. Your hand weaved into his hair, pulling him in as your kiss grew more passionate.

One of his hands cradled your jaw and the other spanned the small of your back, pushing you into his bulge. You bit his lip teasingly, revelling in his body shuddering and drinking down the moan he let free.

You grinded your hips against his—gasping and whimpering at the rough fabric of his pants dragging against your oversensitive pussy. He responded in kind, rutting his bulge into you with a groan.

"Want you inside of me," you mumbled into his lips, throwing a leg over his to roll your hips harder.

"Fuck—okay," he breathed out. He pulled away to reach for his bedside drawer but your hand on his chest stopped him.

"Are you clean?"

His eyes widened and he nodded dumbly. "I got tested the other week—wait, I'll show you." He reached for his phone but you stopped him with a giggle.

"I believe you. I'm clean—obviously. And on birth control."

His eyes almost bulged out of their sockets, pupils dilating until they physically couldn't anymore.

"Are you sure?" He gripped your face in his hands, eyes darting between yours. "I only used condoms with her so I understand—"

That fact pleased you absurdly, your hand trailing down his chest to his groin—squeezing his heavy bulge. "I'm sure. Wanna feel you, all of you."

He pulled you into a searing kiss, rolling you onto your back and hovering over you. Your mouth moved against his eagerly, both your hands on his waistband to unbotton and unzip his pants. You reached a hand into his boxers, a gasp leaping out as you wrapped your hand around him—his cock throbbing and big. You briefly worried about the limp you'll have later.

He panted above you, his eyes closing as you stroked him slowly. You could feel his boxers damp with pre-cum, beads of it dripping from his tip. You brushed your thumb over it and he moaned gutturally, eyes opening as you pulled your hand out. You kept eye contact with him as you brought your thumb up to your lips, licking his pre-cum before sucking it into your mouth with a satisfied moan.

He pulled your thumb out, tracing his own along your lip before you sucked on it—twirling your tongue around it.

"You're gonna be the fucking death of me, angel." He groaned out.

He pushed away to pull his pants and boxers off, throwing them behind him carelessly. Your eyes zeroed in on his cock standing proud—your mouth somehow simultaneously drying up and drooling at the sight. He was the biggest you'd ever seen—long and thick, the tip flushed red with his need. Your knees fell apart on instinct, the fire building up just looking at him.

"Wanna take a picture?" He teased.

"Another time," you whispered, surging up to grab his shoulders and pull him back on top of you.

He chuckled into your mouth before it dissolved into a moan, your hips bucking up and smearing his cock with your slick.

He grabbed your hips, pulling them up slightly as he settled between your legs. You both broke off from the kiss with matching gasps, the feel of him sliding along your slit making you both dizzy. His tip bumped into your clit with each glide, whimpers echoing from your chest as you twitched from the stimulation.

"You're so fucking pretty," he mumbled, dropping his head to kiss and nip along your neck.

"Please," you whined, your hips rocking without thought.

He pulled back and looked down between you, groaning at his dick already glistening with you. He wrapped a hand around himself, tapping his head against your clit a few times. You squealed, starting to feel dizzy with desire. He shushed you gently, dragging a thumb along your cheekbone before positioning himself at your entrance.

His eyes met yours as he pushed in slowly, the intensity in them making you choke up. It had never felt like this before—never felt so passionate, adoring. It made everything feel elevated—your nerve endings singing with pleasure wherever he touched you.

You clenched down on him instinctively, your walls stretching around just the tip. Your chest heaved as you tried to relax—you weren't in pain, it just felt so fucking good.

"Be a good girl and let me in," he whispered, leaning forward to kiss you.

Your legs opened wider for him, your core relaxing to let him push in further. Moans and gasps filled the air around you as he thrust slowly, sinking until he reached the hilt.

The breath knocked out of you, the feeling of him filling you completely making your head rush. He moved slowly at first, small thrusts to get you accommodated before pulling back until just the tip was inside. He sank home with deep moans, his cock pushing against your spot with every thrust.

You wrapped your legs around his waist making him reach deeper inside you. He picked up his pace, his hips meeting yours with soft slaps.

"You feel so good—oh, fuck!" He exclaimed as you clenched down on him.

"Harder, please." You moaned out, scratching your nails down his chest.

"Yeah? My pretty girl—my little angel—likes it rough?"

You nodded deliriously, the tension in your core sizzling with every thrust.

He sat up, bringing your hips with him. He held them up and delivered harsh thrusts—each one expelling a gasp out of you. Your legs tightened around him, his strength pushing you up the bed.

The headboard knocked against the wall, adding to the symphony of moans, whimpers, skin slapping that was already deafening the room. Each sound had you soaring higher, each thrust kissing your cervix sending a shock through you.

Bucky removed your legs from his waist, clutching your thighs to push them towards your chest. Your wide eyes met his with a gasp, the change in position igniting a roaring fire everywhere. He dropped forward slowly, pushing into you so far you swear you could feel him in your throat.

He groaned into your ear. "This is—god, you're made for me."

His thrusts resumed their previous pace, your mouth falling open in a silent scream. Sweat beaded along his hairline from the exertion, his hair sticking to his temples—and he looked so beautiful, your eyes started to well with tears.

Everything rushed through you in an overwhelming burst—the heartache you suffered, the months of yearning and uncertainty, how much you loved him. How much he loved you.

Tears fell from your eyes as the sensations built higher and you grasped his face, pulling his forehead to yours. Your gentle kiss to his lips was a stark contrast to his cock drilling into you.

"I love you," you whispered, your words breaking on a sob of pleasure.

His hips stuttered, his eyes squeezing tightly. "You can't say that again or I'll blow my load." You laughed at his clear struggle to hold back, making him groan as you squeezed him tighter.

He continued his thrusts, wiping a thumb under your eye to catch your tears. "This is the only time I'm gonna make you cry from now on, yeah? Only gonna make you sob cause I'm fucking you so good."

You nodded, letting out little "uh-huh"'s as you climbed higher and higher.

"Play with your clit, sweetheart." Bucky rasped out.

Your hand snuck between your bodies to press circles around your clit—your back arching with a whine. Tears continued to track down your temples, wetting the pillow below you.

"Fill me up, please," you managed to get out between whimpers and sobs. Bucky's grip on your thighs tightened, surely leaving marks for you to admire over the next few days.

"Come with me," Bucky moaned, pressing a scorching kiss to your lips as his thrusts grew sloppy. You tensed below him, your body locking up before pure ecstasy barrelled through you. You came with a scream of his name, clenching down on his cock to keep him trapped. Your vision faded to white, your body trembling and pulsing.

Bucky groaned out your name as his orgasm rushed through him, his cock throbbing and pulsing inside you as he filled you completely with cum.

He collapsed on top of you, his sweaty chest heaving against yours. He slowly lowered your legs then wrapped his arms around your waist, nuzzling into your neck.

You laid there for a few minutes, the both of you gradually coming back down to earth. He pulled out of you slowly, the both of you groaning at the feeling. A mix of your releases dripped out of you, coating your ass and staining the sheets.

"Stay right here," Bucky said before giving you a chaste kiss, pulling his boxers on to run to the bathroom. He came back with a wet towel, sitting on the bed next to you to clean you up with gentle, reverent touches.

He climbed behind you, pulling you into his strong chest—a satisfied rumble vibrating your back. He kissed the back of your head, trailing towards your ear and giving your lobe a gentle bite.

"I love you too."

"When can we move your stuff back in?"

Bucky and you were still lying on his bed, basking in the warmth of each other as the afternoon sun trickled through his half closed curtains.

You turned in his arms, slinging a leg over his and booping his nose. "I think we should go on a couple dates before I move in with you."

His nose and eyes scrunched with that laugh you first fell in love with. "Oh, is that right?"

"Living together before you've even bought me flowers? Sounds a bit rash to me."

"I'll buy you a whole flower shop," he mumbled, his fingers tracing patterns on your bare hip. "Well, maybe not right away—I am paying for two rooms, y'know. Would be nice to be able to buy groceries next month."

You laughed softly, poking his bare chest. "Yeah, and whose fault is that again?"

He grumbled something unintelligible, hiding his face in your neck to lavish you in more kisses.

Wars were started over smiles less beautiful than hers.

The reminder of his reviews about you flourished in your mind, prompting you to pull his head away from your neck.

"So, you're James B? This whole time?"

His face bloomed red, a huff leaving him before he nervously licked his lips. "Yeah…"

"Why? Why start leaving them in the first place, why didn't you tell me?"

He shrugged slightly, lifting a hand to trace the lines of your face. "We were at the bar drinking, and some guy nearby pointed to you and said ratings must be higher with you working there. And—I don't know, I guess I was drunk enough to agree and then…it just happened?"

You furrowed your brows at him. "Why not just write in a journal?"

"Trust me, I was already doing that." He laughed softly, his eyes glowing. "I guess, in a weird way, I was telling you how I felt without actually telling you. Stupid, I know."

Warmth started to spread from your chest. "It took us ages to even notice the reviews—we only realised they were there because Dean assumed one was about him."

Bucky tensed under your hands. "Fucking Dean," he muttered.

"…Are you jealous?"

The blush on his cheeks grew, his eyes avoiding yours. "He was always staring at you, and you laughed with him like—like you did with me. I thought there was something goin' on."

Is it bad that him being jealous is turning you on?

"You have nothing to worry about, Dean is a gross womaniser who I only see as an annoying brother." You pushed at Bucky's chest, making him lie on his back as you straddled his hips. You pressed kisses along his chest, your hips slowly rocking against his. "He did tell me he wanted to sleep with me, though."

Bucky's hands grasped your hips harder, his face turning stormy. "I don't wanna hear you talkin' about another guy when you're on top of me, doll." He muttered low.

You leaned in to kiss him, your hips moving faster and drawing gasps out of the both of you—his dick already half hard under you. "You're so hot when you're jealous."

The sound of the front door opening had you both freezing—your former roommate's laughter drifting down the hall.

"Get dressed, lovebirds!" Sam's voice rang out. "We've got fish to fry!"

a/n: thank you to this pic on pinterest that inspired half the plot (i couldn't get the ho to fit into a moodboard 😔)

Saturday means the same coffee stand on the corner where the barista with the chipped purple nail polish starts making his drink the second she sees him coming. It means the farmer’s market under the green-striped awnings in the square, where he buys a loaf of crusty sourdough from the old Polish couple in stall fourteen and fresh eggs from the woman who always insists the yolks are brighter in spring. It means peaches if they’re in season, because one summer in Wakanda he had bitten into one so ripe it had run down his wrist and made him laugh out loud in the middle of a field, and ever since then peaches have felt like proof of life. It means flowers some3times, too, if the apartment feels especially bare. Something cheap and cheerful in a mason jar on the kitchen counter. Something that says a man can make a home even if he was taught for years he did not deserve one.

It is a good routine. A hard-won one. Bucky likes the honesty of it, the way these small rituals ask nothing of him except that he show up.

This morning, June sun already warming the pavement, his paper cup of coffee hot in his hand, he feels almost light. The market is crowded enough to buzz but not so packed he gets hemmed in. A violinist near the fountain is playing something bright and quick. Someone’s kid is trying to pet every dog within reach. The air smells like basil and strawberries and the faint yeasty sweetness of fresh bread.

Bucky buys his loaf first. Then tomatoes. Then a bunch of green onions. He pauses at the peach stand, testing one for give with his thumb, and decides they need another week.

By the time he reaches the citrus table, the vendor is rearranging pyramids of lemons in rough wooden crates, their skins bright and dimpled in the morning light. Bucky reaches automatically, already picturing chicken piccata for dinner, and another hand reaches at the same exact moment.

Your fingers brush his.

The world splits open.

One second he is standing in the farmer’s market with coffee on his breath and sunlight on the back of his neck, and the next—

Neon. Laughter. Chapel bells tinny through cheap speakers. Your mouth, painted the color of a ripe cherry, open on a breathless laugh. White satin clinging to your hips. A fake Elvis in a rhinestone jumpsuit grinning around too-big teeth beneath a plastic crucifix bolted crooked over the altar.

Bucky gasps.

The bag of lemons slips from both your hands and tumbles to the pavement, yellow fruit rolling in wild directions as if they’ve been startled too.

The vision doesn’t stop there. Visions of different lifetimes flash through his eyes like he’s watching the life of ten different couples all at once. 

A steering wheel under his palms, worn smooth with use. Summer wind through open windows. You in cutoff shorts, feet on the dashboard, singing badly and loudly while the road curls ahead of you like a dare.

White sheets. Lace curtains breathing in a warm midnight breeze. Gold band on your finger catching moonlight where your hand presses against his chest. Your mouth moving against his throat with a broken little sound that is half laughter, half prayer.

A rough cabin wall. Splintered pine under his palm. You in a wool shift with your hair braided down your back, cheeks wind-burned, smiling over your shoulder as foxes cry somewhere out in the dark and a baby sleeps in a cradle by the fire.

Smoke and jazz and blackout curtains. East London. Silk black as sin against your skin. Your hand catching his by the wrist before he can disappear back into the war.

A beach. Bright afternoon. Children shrieking at the tide. Orange drinks sweating in glass pitchers while he kneels in the sand with his sleeves rolled up, helping a little girl press shell fragments into the turret of a sandcastle, and you walk toward him laughing, sunlight at your back so fierce it turns you to gold.

Then all of it is gone.

The market snaps back into focus so suddenly it hurts. Sound crashes in—vendors shouting prices, stroller wheels rattling, the violinist sawing away by the fountain. Bucky stumbles backward a step. Across from him, you catch yourself on the edge of the citrus crate, looking exactly as wrecked as he feels.

Your eyes lock on his.

“Oh my God,” you whisper.

Bucky’s heart is pounding hard enough to bruise. “You saw that too.”

It isn’t a question.

In this world, everybody knows about soulmarks and first-flashes. Knows that when you meet the person your soul is tied to, memory can strike like lightning. Some people get a single image. A porch swing. A train platform. A hand in a hospital room. Some get a rush of several lives at once, enough to leave them reeling for days. Most people dream of it when they’re young. Spend adolescence looking at every stranger a little too long. Wondering when it will happen, if it will happen, whether the person on the other end of them is alive or halfway across the planet or just around the corner.

Bucky stopped wondering a long time ago.

HYDRA did not leave much room for destiny.

You swallow. “That was not normal.”

“No,” he says, voice rough. “No, that was… not.”

The lemon vendor is gathering the fallen fruit with admirable indifference, the kind that says he has seen stranger things at this market and will see stranger still. “You two need a minute?” he asks.

You make a sound that could be a laugh or a near-sob. “Maybe five.”

Bucky buys the entire bag of lemons because it feels like the least insane thing he can do, then follows you blindly toward the edge of the square where there’s a row of benches under a sycamore tree. The shade dapples your face when you sit, and for one unmoored second he knows the pattern of it. Not from now. From somewhere else.

He stays standing until you glance up at him and pat the spot beside you with a shaky hand.

“You’re real?” you ask once he sits.

He almost laughs. “I was about to ask you that.”

You rub your palms over your knees as if trying to ground yourself. You’re wearing denim shorts and a white tank top and sunglasses pushed up into your hair, and you look like someone who belongs to summer. Not delicate exactly, but bright. Alive in a way that makes Bucky’s ribs ache. “I know this is a weird question,” you say, “but are you going to tell me your name, or am I just supposed to keep calling you fake-Elvis-groom in my head?”

“Bucky,” he says automatically. Then, because he has spent years relearning how to offer the softer pieces of himself without flinching, he adds, “James. But people call me Bucky.”

Your mouth curves, the first real smile since the vision hit. “I’m glad to know at least one of us looked better in Vegas.”

He huffs out a breath that is almost a laugh. “I looked good.”

“You looked reckless.”

“That too.”

You tell him your name, and the moment it lands between you something in his chest settles with a frightening kind of certainty. Not because fate says so. Not because the universe stamped your names together in some cosmic ledger. Because the sound of it moves through him like recognition. Like stepping into a room he did not realize he had been trying to get back to his whole life.

For a while neither of you says anything. The market hums on around you. Somewhere nearby, a dog sneezes. Someone drops a crate. Bucky stares at the paper sleeve around his cooling coffee and tries to swallow around the strange thickness in his throat.

“I’ve heard of people getting strong first-flashes,” you say at last, quieter now. “But not like that. That was… a lot.”

“A lot,” he agrees.

You tilt your head toward him. “How many do you remember already?”

He thinks of the chapel. The truck. The bed with the lace curtains. The cabin. The club in London. The beach. “Six,” he says. “You?”

“Same.”

A breeze stirs the leaves overhead. It smells like sun-warmed bark and citrus oil.

“I don’t know what to do now,” you admit.

That, strangely, is what steadies him.

Because Bucky knows that feeling. Knows what it is to be handed something overwhelming and not know where to put it. Knows that survival sometimes looks like doing the next smallest thing instead of solving the whole impossible shape at once.

He glances toward the coffee stand, then back at you. “You want to start with coffee?”

You look at him for one long beat, then laugh softly, incredulously, like maybe you can’t believe that is the question that just saved you from bolting. “Yeah,” you say. “I think I do.”

So that is how it begins.

Not with thunder. Not with immediate declarations. Not with some cinematic collision that resolves every loneliness in a heartbeat.

With coffee. With your hand wrapped around a paper cup. With the two of you sitting at the edge of the market, dizzy on each other’s borrowed memories, learning the outlines of the present slowly enough to survive it.

He learns that you come to the farmer’s market most Saturdays too, though usually later. That you always buy flowers you don’t strictly need. That you live twenty minutes away in an apartment with bad plumbing and excellent light. That you work in graphic design and keep odd hours and have a weakness for peaches even when they’re underripe. You learn that he is in therapy. That he likes routine because sometimes routine is the difference between drifting and staying. That his apartment in Brooklyn is small but his windows face west and the light there in the evening is good. That he cooks. That he bakes bread when the weather turns cold because kneading something until it rises feels like a miracle he can participate in.

He does not tell you everything that morning. Not about HYDRA, not about the winter that lasted decades, not about the names he no longer answers to. But you do not push. Maybe because you can feel, in the strange echoing chambers of whatever ties the two of you together, that he has already been dragged open too many times to count.

When you part, it is almost noon.

You both hover awkwardly by the fountain, neither one wanting to be the first to say goodbye.

“So,” you say, shifting the bouquet of daisies and feverfew you bought somewhere along the way into one hand. “Do soulmate rules say we’re supposed to immediately move in together now, or is there like a grace period?”

Bucky smiles before he can stop himself. “I think there’s paperwork.”

“Tragic.”

He glances at the lemons peeking out of your canvas bag. “You still owe me half of these.”

You grin then, bright and quick and devastating. “That sounds fake.”

“Maybe,” he says. “But it’s a reason to see you again.”

Something softens in your expression. “Okay,” you say. “Then I’ll take the fake reason.”

He gives you his number. You type your own into his phone and hand it back, your fingers brushing his again. No flash this time. Just warmth. Just the sharp, impossible awareness of skin.

“All right, Bucky Barnes,” you say. “Text me when you want to split custody of the lemons.”

He watches you walk away.

At the corner, you turn and look back.

The city seems to hold its breath.

Then you smile at him one more time and disappear into the crowd.

Jesus Christ on a plastic sign

The Vegas lifetime comes back first.

Not all at once. In drips. In flashes that catch Bucky at strange moments over the next few days, as if the memory has been jarred loose and is still deciding how much of itself to reveal.

He is washing dishes on Tuesday night when he looks down at a ring of soap suds circling the drain and suddenly he is twenty-six—or thirty, or some other age in some other body—and the air smells like desert heat trapped in asphalt. He can hear slot machines from the lobby below the motel balcony and your laugh from inside the room, where the air conditioner is fighting a losing battle and you are standing in front of the cracked mirror pinning your hair up with bobby pins you bought from the gift shop downstairs.

“Tell me again,” you say, smiling at him through the mirror, “why exactly we’re doing this.”

Because you had met forty-eight hours earlier in line for dollar margaritas and spent the night talking until sunrise on the motel roof. Because you had missed your flight on purpose. Because he had looked at you over watery eggs in a diner the next morning and known, with the same bone-deep certainty he feels now on a Brooklyn Tuesday in a kitchen lit by one warm overhead bulb, that life was sometimes simplest when it was ridiculous.

Because you had asked if he wanted to get married as a joke and then kept grinning at him after he said yes.

“Tax benefits,” he answers solemnly, sitting on the end of the bed in his borrowed suit jacket.

You laugh. “Romantic.”

“Practical.”

“Liar.”

You cross the room barefoot, white dress swishing around your thighs. It is not really a wedding dress. It is a satin slip from a resale shop with a tiny champagne stain at the hem and thin straps that make him forget his own name every time he looks at you. You stop between his knees and hook your fingers in the lapels of his jacket.

“Tell me not to do it,” you whisper. There is laughter in your voice but something trembling under it too, a softness that asks to be taken seriously. “Tell me we’re being insane and I’ll call it off.”

He looks up at you and feels his whole impossible life narrow into one clean, brilliant line. “I think,” he says, resting his hands on your hips, “that if we don’t do this, I’m gonna spend the rest of my life wondering why I let the best idea I ever had walk out of a motel in Vegas.”

Your expression cracks open into something so nakedly happy it almost undoes him.

The chapel is tiny and tacky and perfect. The plastic crucifix is screwed above a velvet curtain backdrop. The fake Elvis officiant keeps winking like he personally invented love. You say your vows through laughter because your bouquet is made of silk roses that smell faintly like dust and the minister’s sideburn is half detached. Bucky can barely get the ring onto your finger because his hands won’t stop shaking.

Afterward, you run into the sun with your shoes in one hand, your new husband’s name in your mouth as if you were born to say it.

On the sidewalk outside the chapel, there’s a sign for a twenty-four-hour wedding package with JESUS CHRIST LOVES YOU printed above a blinking arrow in red bulbs, and the whole thing is so absurd that you double over laughing. Bucky catches you around the waist before you can fall.

“Mrs. Barnes,” he says into your hair, tasting the words.

You lift your face to his, eyes wet from laughing. “That sounds made up.”

“Probably is.”

You kiss him anyway.

In the present, water runs cold over Bucky’s hands in the sink. He blinks hard and finds himself staring at a plate gone slippery in his grip.

He dries his hands, sits on the edge of the counter, and texts you before he can think better of it.

Got another one. Vegas.

The reply comes so fast it is almost a breath.

me too

Then, after a beat:

did we really get married because the line for margaritas was too long and we needed something else to do?

Bucky smiles helplessly at his phone.

we were committed to the bit

You start texting every day after that.

At first it is practical. Did you remember this detail? Did the chapel carpet have stars on it or was that just me? Do you think the fake Elvis was secretly judging us? 

But the practical gives way to easy almost before either of you notices. He sends you a picture of a dog in a raincoat outside the bodega. You send him a photo of the flowers you bought even though your rational brain said you didn’t need them. He tells you when therapy goes badly. You tell him when work is making your eyes cross. By Friday, your name on his screen feels less like a surprise and more like the continuation of something that was already in motion long before lemons hit pavement.

The next Saturday, he finds you at the market before he reaches the citrus stand.

You are standing at the peach table, frowning at a fruit in your hand with the seriousness of someone evaluating a gemstone.

“You know those need another week,” he says.

You glance up and smile in a way that makes his whole body wake up. “I know. I’m being optimistic.”

“Reckless.”

“Wow. You meet one man in Vegas and suddenly he thinks he knows you.”

He laughs, and there is no fear in it this time.

You spend the morning together again. Coffee, bread, flowers. At the tomato stall your shoulder brushes his and warmth skates down his spine, but no memory comes. At the herb table he tucks a stray basil stem behind your ear and your breath catches, but still nothing.

It hits later, when the two of you are leaving the market and pass an old pickup truck parked crooked by the curb, windows down, classic rock spilling tinny from the speakers. You stop dead. So does he.

Your head turns toward him.

His chest caves in around a heartbeat that is no longer entirely his own.

Winding roads, doing manual drive

In that life, you are eighteen and everything feels enormous.

Summer stretches in front of you like a dare. The town is small enough to suffocate if you stay still too long, so you never do. Bucky has a beat-up blue truck with a sticky clutch and a radio that only works when you slap the dashboard in exactly the right place. He teaches you how to drive manual in the abandoned church parking lot at the edge of town, laughing every time the engine stalls because you keep popping the clutch too fast.

“You’re mean,” you tell him, gripping the steering wheel.

“I’m helpful.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“Because you cuss like my grandpa.”

You cut him a glare so ineffective it makes him grin wider. He reaches across the bench seat to guide your hand to the gearshift, his palm warm over your knuckles.

“Slow,” he says. “Feel it catch. Don’t force it.”

Outside, cicadas scream in the heat. The sun is dropping behind the trees, turning the windshield gold.

You try again. This time the truck lurches, shudders, then rolls forward smooth as breath.

“Oh my God,” you say, startled into laughter. “I did it.”

Bucky looks at you the way boys in movies are always supposed to look but almost never do in real life—like the sight of you happy is enough to rearrange his whole future. “Yeah,” he says softly. “You did.”

Once you know how, you drive everywhere with no destination at all. Back roads. County lines. Winding stretches of blacktop between soybean fields and creeks and gas stations with flickering signs. You drive because gas is cheap and the cab of the truck is a world no one else can enter. You drive because Bucky’s knee pressed against yours feels better than anything either of you have a name for yet. You drive because being young and in love can make movement feel holy.

Sometimes you pull over on the shoulder just to watch the sky bruise purple over the fields. Sometimes you kiss at red lights until the truck behind you honks. Sometimes you park at the overlook above the quarry and share a bag of gas station peanuts while Bucky tells you all the places he wants to see one day, voice gone soft with wanting.

“Anywhere specific?” you ask.

He shrugs one shoulder. “As long as you’re there.”

You laugh because you think he is teasing. Then you look at him and realize he is not.

The air changes.

He reaches up, pushes a strand of hair behind your ear with trembling fingers. “I know we’re eighteen,” he says, trying for casual and failing spectacularly. “I know people say that means we don’t know anything. But I know this.”

Your breath catches.

Behind you, the truck ticks and cools in the dusk.

“I know,” he says again, “that I could drive with you forever and never get tired of the road.”

Then he kisses you, and the whole wide summer tilts.

The memory drops away while a bus sighs to the curb and someone nearby curses over a jammed stroller wheel.

You are breathing hard. So is Bucky.

“That one hurt,” you say quietly.

He knows what you mean. Not because it was bad. Because it was good in the simple devastating way only youth can be. Because watching some other version of yourself love with that much unguarded certainty feels like pressing a bruise you didn’t know you had.

“You drove stick,” he says.

“I was bad at it.”

“You were terrible.”

You laugh then, startled and watery, and he thinks he would do almost anything to keep hearing that sound.

There is a diner half a block away with cracked vinyl booths and a waitress who calls everyone honey. He nods toward it. “Come on.”

“Is this where we process our cosmic psychic episodes now?”

“Pancakes seem medically necessary.”

So you sit across from each other in a booth smelling faintly of syrup and coffee grounds while the waitress tops off your mugs and pretends not to notice that the two of you keep staring. The market bag rests by Bucky’s boots. Your flowers lie across the seat beside you like a witness.

“You ever think about what it means?” you ask after a while.

He traces a thumb over the seam of his coffee cup. “The past lives?”

“The soulmate thing. Any of it.” Your gaze is steady on his. “Like… are we supposed to just trust that because we loved each other before, we automatically will now?”

Bucky is quiet for so long, the waitress comes by to ask if he wants more bacon.

When she leaves, he exhales. “I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I think maybe it’d scare me if it worked like that.”

You nod once. “Me too.”

Because obligation is not love. Because destiny without choice starts to look too much like a cage.

Bucky leans forward, forearms on the table. “I don’t want this to be automatic,” he says, surprising himself with the urgency in his own voice. “I don’t want you because of… cosmic paperwork.” Your mouth twitches at that. He presses on. “I want to know you. Now. Here. I want whatever this is to be because we choose it.”

Something in your face softens so completely it leaves him winded.

“Okay,” you say.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” you repeat. “Then we do it the hard way.”

His mouth curves. “Dating?”

“Scandalous, I know.”

He looks at you across the table, sunlight striping the booth through the blinds, and feels a piece of his life click gently into place.

“Yeah,” he says. “Dating.”

The smile you give him then follows him home and waits with him through the week and sits with him at the edge of sleep. It is still there when he picks you up for your first actual date on Thursday, when you buzz him into your apartment building wearing jeans and a green top that makes your eyes look unfair, when he spends ten whole seconds forgetting why he came.

You cook together in his kitchen because restaurants feel like too much too soon. Lemon chicken. Roasted potatoes. Salad with too much parmesan because you insist there is no such thing.

It is simple. It is easy in the kind of way Bucky once would have distrusted on principle. You move around his kitchen as if you’ve already learned its shape. You lean against the counter and steal bites from the pan. You laugh when he pretends to guard the sauce from you and do not look startled when he laughs back.

After dinner, you help him wash dishes. After dishes, you stand by the open window drinking wine while the city breathes warm and loud below.

“I had a nice time,” you say, glancing at him over the rim of your glass.

His pulse kicks. “Good.”

“I’m serious. For a man who hoards lemons as a manipulation tactic, you clean up pretty well.”

He snorts. “I’ll put that on my dating profile.”

“You should. Honest branding.”

He smiles, and you smile back, and the air between you changes.

It is not sudden. Not violent. Just the slow, unmistakable tightening of a thread.

He sets his glass down first.

You do the same.

When he steps closer, you do not move away.

“Can I kiss you?” he asks, because in every life he has ever loved you there has been want in it, but in this one he wants the shape of your yes more than he wants air.

Your eyes go soft. “Please.”

He kisses you carefully at first, because he is not eighteen in a truck anymore and he is not some reckless fool in Vegas with rings in his pocket and a grin too wide for his face. He is a man who has taken years to learn how to touch gently. Who knows what damage carelessness can do.

But then your hand lifts to his cheek and your mouth opens beneath his and the careful part of him turns molten.

The flash hits so hard he breaks the kiss with a gasp.

You are hit by it too. He sees it in the way your pupils blow wide, the way your hand clutches the front of his shirt.

“Oh,” you breathe.

The apartment falls away.

Early nights in white sheets with lace curtains

The room is small and gold with lamplight.

In that life, you have been married for six hours.

Your shoes are by the door. Your veil lies in a pearly heap over the chair back. Somewhere downstairs the last of the wedding guests are still laughing over cake and champagne, but up here the inn is quiet except for the tick of rain against the lace-curtained window and your own uneven breathing.

You stand with your back to Bucky near the bed, fingers trembling where they rest at your throat. The silk of your nightdress skims the backs of your knees. Your wedding band glints like a promise.

He has never seen anything more beautiful.

You are not delicate. Nor candlelight that makes you look like something painted. You are real in all the ways that matter most—nervous and wanting and trying to be brave.

You glance at him over your shoulder, and the vulnerability in your face brings him to his knees faster than reverence ever could.

“We don’t have to,” he says softly.

Your brows draw together. “I want to.”

“I know.” He steps closer, slow enough to stop if you need it. “But I want you to know we don’t have to do anything tonight except be married.”

Something in you loosens. Relief. Love. A tenderness so intense it almost aches to look at.

“I want to be married,” you whisper.

He smiles, cupping your jaw. “You already are.”

“No,” you say, eyes luminous. “I mean like this. Here. With you.” Your breath shakes. “I want tonight.”

He kisses you then, gentle enough to ask, deep enough to answer.

The nightdress slips from your shoulders a little at a time. He learns your skin by lamplight and fingertips, by the soft sounds you make when he touches somewhere that matters, by the way you cling to him when pleasure finally starts to outrun nerves. The white sheets twist around your legs. The lace curtains stir in the open window. Rain cools the room, but your bodies are all heat.

You are not shy for long.

He kisses his way down the column of your throat, your collarbones, the slope of your breast. Your fingers knot in his hair when his mouth finds your nipple and he sucks gently, then harder at the sound that tears from you. By the time he lowers you onto the bed your hair is loose around your shoulders and your face is flushed and he is so hard it hurts.

“Bucky,” you whisper, reaching for him.

“Tell me what you need.”

You laugh softly, dazed with wanting. “You. Obviously.”

He smiles against your mouth, then works two fingers between your thighs and nearly loses his mind at how wet you are for him already. Your hips jerk. Your eyes flutter shut.

“That’s it,” he murmurs. “There you go.”

He takes his time because he can. Because there is no war waiting outside this room, no clock to race. Because after the vows and the music and the endless hands grabbing at you all day, he wants this moment to belong only to the two of you. He strokes you until your body learns the shape of pleasure under his hands. He brings you apart once with his fingers, your back arching off the bed, then again with his mouth until you are clutching the sheets and crying his name into the rain-soft dark.

When he finally settles between your thighs, braced on one forearm, your gaze on his is wrecked and certain all at once.

“You still sure?” he asks, voice gone rough as gravel.

You wrap a hand around the back of his neck and pull him down until your foreheads touch. “I have never been more sure of anything.”

He pushes into you slowly, giving you every inch with a care that feels like worship. The stretch of you around him steals the breath from his lungs. Your mouth opens on a gasp. He stills.

“Okay?” he whispers.

You nod, biting your lip. “Move.”

So he does.

Slow at first. Then deeper when your nails dig into his shoulders and you lift to meet him. The bed creaks softly. Rain taps the window. He kisses you whenever your face crumples with feeling, every thrust turning more desperate as your body opens for him. You cling to him, legs wrapped around his hips, whispering his name like a secret you intend to keep forever.

When you come, it is with your mouth against his throat and tears bright at the corners of your eyes.

He follows with his forehead pressed to yours, his whole body shaking with it.

Afterward, you lie tangled in white sheets gone warm and wrinkled around you, the lace curtains stirring like breath. He draws lazy circles over your stomach while you trace the line of his mouth with one sleepy fingertip.

“This counts as a successful wedding night,” you murmur.

He laughs softly. “Good. I was hoping.”

You turn into him, already half asleep. “Anywhere is home,” you whisper, the words blurred at the edges with exhaustion, “if you’re in the bed.”

He never forgets them.

When the memory releases you both, Bucky is still standing in his apartment with his chest heaving and your hands fisted in his shirt.

The kitchen light is too bright. The city outside the window too loud. He can taste you without ever having had you in this life.

Your face is flushed all the way down your neck.

“Well,” you say after a stunned second, voice frayed. “That was wildly inconvenient timing.”

He laughs once, brokenly, because if he does not laugh he might combust.

“You okay?” he asks.

Your gaze lifts to his, honest and heated. “Ask me in five minutes.”

He brushes his knuckles over your cheek, a touch so careful it is almost absurd after what you both just saw. “I mean it.”

“I know.” Your hand slides down to cover his where it rests against your face. “Yeah. I’m okay. A little overwhelmed. A lot turned on. But okay.”

Heat hits him hard and immediate. He closes his eyes for a second.

You laugh softly. “Right. Sorry. That was—”

“Don’t apologize.”

When he opens his eyes again, your expression has gentled. “Bucky.”

He knows what you are asking. Not just whether he wants you. That is almost insultingly obvious. You are asking whether he can separate memory from present. Whether he can stand in this kitchen and want what is in front of him without letting the weight of every before crush what could be now.

He answers by leaning down and resting his forehead against yours.

“I want this,” he says quietly. “But I want our first time in this life to be ours.”

Your breath leaves you in a rush. So does some tightness in his chest he hadn’t fully realized he was carrying.

“Okay,” you whisper.

He kisses you once more, soft and lingering. Then he walks you home because if you stay the night he is not sure either of you will survive your own restraint, and because there is something holy in wanting badly and still choosing patience.

At your door, you touch his wrist before he can step back.

“For the record,” you murmur, eyes warm, “that other us had very good taste.”

He grins helplessly. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I get it now.”

Then you kiss him quick and disappear inside with a smile that haunts him for days.

The weeks that follow feel like being built from the inside out.

The flashbacks do not stop, but they become less like ambushes and more like weather—still sudden, still powerful, but no longer catastrophic. A scent, a sound, a patch of light can call one up. Sometimes you text each other in the middle of the workday with fragments: did you remember the red truck in the mountain life had one broken taillight? or I think Bucharest-you stole that robe from the hotel. Sometimes a memory arrives whole when you are together and leaves both of you laughing or aching or red-faced in its wake.

In between, you date.

Real dates. Present-tense ones.

You go to a bookstore in Cobble Hill and accidentally spend two hours arguing about whether people who dog-ear paperbacks can be trusted. You sit in the park eating takeout and watch a wedding party take photos under the arch. You make pasta in your kitchen and burn the garlic because you are too busy kissing against the fridge. You let him meet your friends, who like him immediately and try not to look too smug about it. He tells Sam about you over beers and gets stared at for a full ten seconds before Sam breaks into the kind of grin that means Bucky will never hear the end of this.

And slowly, because slowness is another name for mercy, you get used to the fact of each other.

One night in late July, you fall asleep on Bucky’s couch halfway through a movie. Your head ends up in his lap, your bare feet tucked under his thigh, the credits rolling blue light over the room. He does not move for an hour because the weight of you there feels too precious to disturb.

When you wake, drowsy and disoriented, you blink up at him and smile.

“There you are,” he says before he can stop himself.

The words do something strange to the air.

You sit up slowly, blanket slipping down your shoulders. “What?”

He swallows. “Nothing. I just—”

But then the memory comes, not violent this time. Gentle as smoke.

You see it in each other’s faces as it arrives.

Sleepyhead ’cause all the fucking foxes kept me awake last night

The cabin is barely more than one room and a stubborn prayer.

In that life, winter has a vendetta against you. The land is raw and half-finished around you—trees felled and stacked, fields only partly cleared, the nearest neighbors hours away by horse. Everything aches. Your hands, your backs, your hope.

And still, you build.

By day Bucky swings an axe until his shoulders burn and your tiny patch of earth starts, slowly, to look like something that might feed you come spring. By day you mend, cook, scrub, carry water, keep accounts in a little ledger with cramped neat writing, and somehow still find the energy to laugh when the hen gets loose again and wreaks havoc under the table.

By night you sit by the fire mending his shirts while he carves handles for tools and the baby—your daughter, round-cheeked and solemn—sleeps in a cradle made from wood Bucky planed himself.

It is not easy. God, it is not easy. There are weeks when the roof leaks and the wind gets through the chinks in the walls and your flour goes sour and the loneliness of so much open land makes your chest feel flayed raw. There are days Bucky comes in from the field looking so worn you have to bite the inside of your cheek not to cry.

But there is you. There is him. There is the little sleeping weight of your child and the fire and the bed you built with your own hands.

Sometimes that is enough to make hardship look almost like devotion.

One night in early autumn, the foxes scream outside the cabin so long and loud that neither of you gets any real sleep. By dawn you are cross and bleary-eyed, hair half falling from its braid as you stand over the hearth trying to stir cornmeal mush that refuses to thicken.

“Sleepyhead,” Bucky says softly when he comes up behind you.

You elbow him weakly. “I’ll kill you.”

He laughs into your hair and wraps his arms around your waist anyway, his chin settling on your shoulder. Outside, the new fence leans and the world is still cold and demanding. Inside, his body is warm all along your back.

“We’re doing it,” he murmurs after a while.

You blink at the pot. “Doing what?”

“Building it.” He turns his face into your temple. “A life.”

The words are simple. They hit with the force of revelation.

You tip your head back against his shoulder and close your eyes. In the other room your daughter stirs. The foxes have gone quiet. Morning light pushes pale and stubborn through the little window above the table.

“We are,” you whisper.

He kisses your cheek. “Told you I’d build you something.”

You smile, tired and full to aching. “You built me everything.”

The memory fades with the warm dim glow of Bucky’s living room around you.

You are still on his couch, the television a muted wash of menu screens no one bothered to turn off. For a while neither of you says anything.

Then you reach out and lace your fingers through his.

“That one felt different,” you say.

He nods. “Yeah.”

Not youthful. Not fevered. Not all heat and spark and want. That life had been built plank by plank. Through work. Through weather. Through choosing each other when the choosing was made of practical things—fences, soup, babies, roofs, morning fires.

It lands in him heavier than some of the others. Maybe because recovery has taught him what it means to build anything worth having by hand.

“I liked them,” you say quietly. “That version of us.”

He rubs his thumb over your knuckles. “Me too.”

You glance around his apartment then, at the bookshelf he assembled crooked and fixed himself, at the herb pot on the windowsill, at the loaf of bread cooling under a dish towel on the counter.

“You’re doing it too, you know,” you murmur.

He looks at you. “Doing what?”

“Building a life.”

The thing in his chest, scarred and careful and too often braced for loss, goes very still.

You squeeze his hand. “It’s a good one.”

He kisses you then because there is no other answer big enough.

By August, you keep a toothbrush at his place.

By September, there is a sweater of yours folded over the back of one of his dining chairs, two hair ties on his bathroom sink, a half-used bottle of your fancy conditioner in his shower that he is under strict orders not to touch. None of it is dramatic. None of it is announced. The shape of your presence simply grows until it feels absurd to remember the apartment before it.

The flash that takes you next comes in early October, on a rainy Thursday when you duck with him into a jazz bar in the West Village to escape a downpour.

The room is all amber light and low ceilings and cigarette-scarred booths preserved from another era. A singer in a black dress stands by the piano, crooning into a microphone. Bucky goes still before you even make it to the bar.

You know before the memory hits what it will be.

The note hangs in the air.

Then London rushes in.

late nights in black silk in east london

The war has made everything look dimmer around the edges.

Bucky is young in the way only war can make a man young—old enough to be exhausted by it, young enough to still be surprised by beauty. He is stationed overseas for too long in a city stitched with blackout curtains and ration books and the bruise-colored exhaustion of people trying very hard to act as if life is still ordinary.

Then one wet December night, a fellow soldier drags him down a narrow stairwell off an alley in East London and the whole world changes shape.

The club is hidden beneath a tailor’s shop with no sign out front. Music seeps through the floorboards before the door even opens. Inside, the room glows low and gold around the edges, tables crowded close, voices pitched just above the band. Women in silk and men in uniform and civilians with danger in their smiles. Someone is laughing at the bar like the war has never existed. Someone else is dancing with one shoe off.

And there you are.

You should not stick out. You’re not center stage or demanding attention. You’re leaning one hip against the bar in black silk gloves and a slip dress that gleams when you move, listening to the pianist with your head tilted slightly as if you know a secret about the song.

Bucky sees you and forgets how war works.

Maybe he forgets how breathing works too.

“Careful,” his friend  mutters, following his line of sight. “That one looks expensive.”

Bucky barely hears him.

When you look over and catch him staring, you smile. Not coy. Curious, amused, entirely too direct. Then you lift your glass in a tiny salute.

He is doomed.

Later, after he has found enough courage or foolishness to cross the room, you tell him your brother runs supplies out of the docks and your mother thinks this place is scandalous and your favorite thing in the world is men who look like they’d fall apart if a woman in black silk talked to them too long.

“I am not falling apart,” he says, already half gone.

You laugh, low and delighted. “No? That’s a shame. You’d be awfully handsome doing it.”

You dance with him before midnight. Then again after. The band slows, the room blurs, and you fit against him so easily it feels less like meeting and more like remembering a step he somehow learned before birth.

Outside, the rain has stopped. The alley smells like wet brick and smoke.

“Are you always this easy?” you ask when he walks you to the corner.

“Only in London.”

“Convenient.”

You stop beneath a streetlamp draped in wartime dimming paint. Your lipstick has worn soft at the edges. His gloves are damp. Somewhere far off, a siren starts and then dies.

“I don’t know how long I’m here,” he says, because war steals the illusion of endless time from a man pretty quick.

You look at him with that same level, fearless steadiness you will carry in every life. “Then don’t waste the nights you’ve got.”

So he doesn’t.

He spends every free hour he can find with you in that black silk East London life. Dancing in hidden clubs. Eating chips from newspaper parcels by the river. Kissing in doorways while the city holds its breath between bombings. Falling in love so fast it would look irresponsible to anyone not living under the same shadow.

On his last night before shipping out again, this time to Bucharest, he finds you in the club after closing, curled barefoot on the stage in your black dress with your knees drawn up, humming to yourself while the pianist smokes by the door.

He sits beside you. The stage creaks.

You do not ask him if he is leaving. You already know.

For a long moment you just lean into him shoulder to shoulder, breathing in the dark.

Then you take his hand and lace your fingers with his as if you have always had the right.

“I hate war,” you say flatly.

“Yeah.”

“I hate that it teaches people to love in a hurry.”

He turns to look at you, but your face is tipped toward the empty room. “Maybe,” he says after a while, “it just teaches people not to waste time pretending they don’t.”

That makes you smile a little, though your eyes shine.

When you finally kiss him, it feels like grief and promise all tangled together.

“I’d have found you anyway,” you whisper against his mouth.

He believes you.

Presently, the jazz bar swims back around you in amber and brass.

Your hand is flat over your heart. Bucky is gripping the edge of the bar hard enough his knuckles ache.

“You were terrifying in that one,” he murmurs.

You blink at him. “Terrifying?”

“You had me done in about twelve seconds.”

Your laugh spills out warm and bright enough to make nearby heads turn. “Good.”

He stares at you, at the woman in front of him and the woman in black silk and the impossible thread between them, and something old in him loosens. That London memory is the first one that brushes directly up against the era he remembers in his bones. The first one that lets him feel, without the cold hand of history around its throat, that he once had youth. Flirtation. A version of himself that existed before damage became the loudest fact in the room.

Later, walking you home under a shared umbrella, he tells you more.

Not everything. Not all at once. But more.

About Brooklyn in the forties. About enlisted men and too much bravado and the way the world sharpened at the edges when war started circling. About the years after, in pieces, with pauses long enough to breathe in between. You listen without interrupting except to ask where it hurts. Not where it happened. Where it hurts. The difference matters so much he nearly stops in the middle of the sidewalk.

At your building, rain dripping from the umbrella’s edges, you cup his face and kiss him like he is something to return to, not something to be rescued.

That night he sleeps six straight hours for the first time in weeks.

The last of the big memories comes in November.

By then, the market has become yours together. Saturday mornings are no longer Bucky’s alone. They are yours in the plural, so natural now he sometimes forgets to be startled by it. Coffee for two. Bread for two. Peaches finally back in season for a heartbeat before the weather turns. Your fingers hooked through one of the canvas bag straps while he carries the heavier side.

At the stall with the glass-bottled lemonades and orange sodas, you reach for a bright neon-orange drink at the same time he does.

The glass knocks against his ring finger.

Sunlight slams through him.

Neon orange drinks on the beach

Salt lives in the walls of that house.

Here, you and Bucky live in a little coastal town where everyone knows everybody’s business and no one minds much as long as you bring enough food to the potluck. The house is white clapboard with a porch swing and chipped blue shutters. Sand collects in the doorway no matter how often you sweep. Wind rattles the windows in winter and smells like sunscreen in summer.

You have children in that life. Three of them.

A girl with your laugh and Bucky’s serious eyes. A boy who climbs everything he’s told not to. A baby still soft at the wrists who rides your hip with one fist full of your shirt.

The beach is five minutes from your front door. On hot afternoons you walk there loaded like pack animals—blankets, towels, snacks, toys, a cooler that bumps against Bucky’s leg every other step, the toddler already whining for the ocean before you’ve even crossed the dune grass.

It is a beautiful chaos. Your favorite kind.

The day memory gives you is bright enough to ache.

The sky is clear blue from edge to edge. Your youngest is asleep under the shade tent with one plump foot sticking free of the blanket. Your son is digging a moat around a sandcastle with all the focus of a man handling explosives. Your daughter, solemn with purpose, is handing Bucky shell fragments one by one so he can decorate the towers properly.

“No, Daddy,” she says with immense patience. “That one goes there.”

Bucky, thirty-something and sun-browned and already half buried in sand because the children have no respect for rank, nods gravely. “My mistake.”

You come down from the boardwalk carrying a tray of neon-orange lemonades in plastic cups, ice clinking. Condensation slicks your fingers. The sun catches on the rims of the cups until they glow like tiny lanterns.

Bucky looks up when your shadow falls across the sand.

Even after years, even with sunscreen on your nose and beach hair whipping your cheeks, he looks at you like there has never been anyone else worth the trouble of sight.

“You’re my favorite person,” he says as you hand him a drink.

You arch a brow. “Even over the tiny tyrants?”

“Depends. Are they giving me lemonade?”

Your daughter takes her cup in both hands and squints up at you. “Mama, Daddy made the castle wrong.”

You laugh. “I’m shocked.”

“It was sabotage,” Bucky says.

The children shout over each other. The baby wakes and starts fussing. A gull swoops dangerously low near the pretzel bag. The tide inches closer. Everything is loud and sandy and sticky and imperfect.

It is paradise.

Later, when the children are collapsing in a sugar crash on towels striped green and white, Bucky stretches out beside you and tugs you down until your head rests on his chest. The ocean hisses and folds itself a few yards away.

“You think,” he says after a while, fingers combing absently through your damp hair, “we’ll ever get tired of this?”

You tip your face up. “The beach?”

“This.”

The life. The family. The ordinary miracle of it.

You can feel the answer in him before he says it. In the steady beat under your ear. In the salt-warmed skin of him. In the children making sleepy, disgruntled sounds nearby because even paradise requires snacks and naps and somebody always getting sunscreen in their eye.

“No,” you say softly. “I don’t think so.”

His mouth brushes your forehead. “Good.”

Because in every lifetime, it turns out, what the two of you build is not grandeur.

It is a table. A bed. A road. A cabin. A dance floor. A beach towel in the sun. A thousand tiny places where love gets to put its shoes by the door and stay awhile.

When the memory loosens its grip, you are back at the market with cold glass sweating in your hand.

You are crying.

So is Bucky, though he only realizes it when you reach up and wipe at his cheek with your thumb.

“That one was rude,” you say thickly.

He laughs through the ache in his throat. “Yeah.”

It isn’t the children, not really. Though that got him. It’s the ordinariness of it. The ease. The way love in that life had settled into the bones of things so thoroughly that joy looked almost plain. A beach day. Lemonade. Sand. A family.

A future.

You look at him with tears still bright in your eyes. “Do you ever think maybe that’s why it keeps happening?”

“What?”

“Us.” You glance down at the bottle in your hand, the impossible orange brightness of it. “Not because we’re destined in some giant dramatic way. Maybe just because every time the universe throws us somewhere new, we keep making the same choice.”

The market blurs around the edges.

Bucky takes the bottle from your hand and sets both your drinks down on the stall so he can hold your face in both palms.

“I think,” he says, voice low and unsteady, “that no matter where I find you, you keep teaching me that a life doesn’t have to be extraordinary to matter.”

You inhale sharply.

He goes on because he has spent too much of his existence losing time, losing names, losing chances to say what needed saying. Because he will not waste this one.

“I loved you in a chapel with a plastic sign. In a truck on back roads. In a bed with lace curtains. In a cabin when we had almost nothing. In London when the whole world was on fire. On a beach with kids climbing all over me and sand in places there should never be sand.” Your mouth trembles around a laugh. His thumbs catch the tears on your cheeks. “And every time, it wasn’t because things were perfect. It was because it was you.”

Your hand covers one of his. “Bucky—”

“In this life,” he says, holding your gaze, “I don’t care what fate says. I don’t care what we were before unless it helps me be better to you now. I just…” He exhales, helpless in it. “I just know I am more myself when you’re in the room. And I want to keep choosing that. For however long I get.”

Something breaks open in your face.

Then you are kissing him in the middle of the farmer’s market, November wind cold around your ears and strangers surely staring and lemons probably within a three-yard radius somehow, and Bucky does not care about any of it.

When you finally pull back, you rest your forehead to his and laugh wetly.

“You took forever to say that,” you whisper.

He blinks. “I did?”

“Yes.” You kiss him once, quick and smiling. “It’s okay. I was going to let you.”

That night you come home with him.

Home, because that is what it is now no matter how recently he learned to say it.

The apartment smells like the rosemary chicken you cooked together and the bread he baked that morning and the cold air that followed you in when he opened the door. Your overnight bag sits by the couch. Your laughter is still in the walls from where you nearly dropped the oranges while making cocktails because he kissed your neck and ruined your concentration on purpose.

There are no visions this time.

No past lives pouring through the cracks.

Just the two of you in the warm gold hush of his bedroom, lamplight soft on the sheets, your sweater slipping from one shoulder as you sit on the edge of the mattress and look up at him.

“This is ours,” you say quietly.

He nods. “Yeah.”

You reach for him.

The first time you make love in this life is not a reenactment of any before. There are echoes, maybe. The same reverence. The same hunger braided with tenderness. But this is its own living thing, shaped by who you are now—older in different ways, scarred in different places, more careful and more certain all at once.

He undresses you slowly, like unwrapping something he intends to keep. You do the same for him, kissing each mark on his body as if introducing yourself to every chapter. When your fingers brush the long scars at his shoulder and side, you do not hesitate. You just look at him for permission and then kiss them too.

His throat goes tight.

On the bed, he takes his time. He is afraid this time, rather he wants to feel every second of being chosen with full knowledge. Your skin under his mouth. Your breath hitching when he drags his thumb over your clit. The way you smile against his lips when he says your name like a marvel. He works you open with his hands first, then his mouth, until you are clutching the sheets and half laughing, half sobbing because pleasure in this body, in this life, feels new and familiar all at once.

“Bucky,” you whisper when he comes back up over you, eyes dark and wrecked.

“I’ve got you.”

You nod, hands framing his face. “I know.”

When he pushes into you, slow and careful, your mouths are open against each other. He feels your body welcome him in inch by inch, feels your legs tighten around his hips, feels the tremor that runs through you when he finally settles deep. It is overwhelming in the simplest way. Not because of memory. Because of presence. Because you are here. Because he is too.

He moves. You move with him.

Outside, the city keeps being itself. A siren in the distance. Somebody laughing on the street. Heat clanking faintly through old pipes. Inside, his bedroom narrows to breath and skin and the soft wreck of your voice. You scratch lightly through his hair and murmur yes against his mouth and he nearly comes from the sound alone. He holds himself back long enough to watch the exact moment pleasure overtakes you, the way your eyes go bright and your body arches up into his with a cry he feels all the way to his ribs.

He follows soon after, buried deep, forehead pressed to yours, your names tangled together in the dark.

Afterward you lie under the sheets while the room cools around you. Your head rests on his chest. His hand drifts up and down your bare spine. The curtains are plain cotton, not lace. The sheets are soft gray, not white. The city outside is Brooklyn and not some inn in another century. It does not matter.

You draw lazy circles over his sternum.

“You know,” you murmur sleepily, “I think I liked every version of you.”

His fingers still for a second. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You tilt your chin to look at him. “But this one might be my favorite.”

Emotion catches him so hard it almost hurts.

He bends and kisses your forehead because if he tries to speak right then, he will probably embarrass himself beyond repair.

Months later, when winter gives way to spring and then, at last, to summer again, Saturday morning finds the two of you at the farmer’s market under the same green-striped awnings where everything began.

Bucky has two coffees in a cardboard carrier. You have a bouquet of sunflowers tucked under one arm. The bread guy waves. The peach stand is finally, gloriously in season. The lemon vendor clocks you both and grins like he has been expecting to see how this turns out.

“Need a bag today?” he asks.

You glance at Bucky. Bucky glances at you.

Then, smiling, you both reach for the same lemon on purpose.

No flash comes.

There is no need.

Your fingers lace together instead, easy as breath.

The square is bright with morning. The violinist by the fountain is playing something warm and sweet. Coffee steams between you. Peaches perfume the air. Beside you, your soulmate—your chosen person, your present-tense miracle—squeezes your hand.

And because love, in the end, is often this simple, you walk the market together like you have done it all your life.

Maybe you have.

Maybe you will again.

Either way, the peaches are ripe, the bread is warm, and Bucky Barnes is laughing at something you said with his whole face open to the sun.

It is not a dramatic ending.

It is better.

It is a life.

And every ordinary second of it feels, impossibly, like falling in love again and again.

And there was you.

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

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

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

“Sweetheart, I’ve been called worse.”

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

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

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

“You nearly broke your nose.”

“I was distracted.”

“You were showing off.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve had only shrugged. “You are.”

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

After that, he started appearing everywhere.

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

“We are not in love,” you’d told him.

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

You did not kiss him for another three weeks.

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

He had stopped one step below you and looked up.

You remembered that look for the rest of your life.

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

“I keep trying not to,” he’d said.

“Not to what?”

“Think about you all the time.”

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

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

“See?” he murmured. “In love.”

You kissed him again just to shut him up.

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

And you loved him for it.

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

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

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

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

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

The thing was, you didn’t imagine it.

You saw things. You always had.

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

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

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

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

The way silence sat easily between them.

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

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

What was there to say?

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

And still.

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

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

For a while, life was kind.

Bucky proposed on a rooftop in August.

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

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

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

“You’re making that face,” you said.

“What face?”

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

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

For a second the whole world went still.

“Buck,” you whispered.

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

Your hands were already shaking.

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

He stepped closer.

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

He swallowed.

“Marry me.”

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

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

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

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

It fit.

Of course it fit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll come back,” he said.

“You’d better.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t start any fights without me.”

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

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

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

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

You stood with Steve until the last car vanished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he looked at you.

“I’m going to get him,” he said.

Not I’ll try.

Not if I can.

Just I’m going to get him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

After that, everything became measured by absence.

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

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

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

Years passed. Then more.

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

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

You grew older.

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

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

He was stolen instead.

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

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

And then came the end of everything.

Then came the battle.

Then came the impossible, ragged miracle of winning.

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

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

Originally, Steve had been the one meant to go.

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

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

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

Bucky had looked up. “Somebody does.”

“I mean you.”

A pause.

“I know.”

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

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

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

“You think about it?”

Every day, Bucky almost said. Instead he shrugged.

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

Steve had always known when Bucky was lying to himself.

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

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

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

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

“And what about you?”

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

Bucky looked out at the water again.

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

He thought of Steve, beside him in the dawn.

And something painful and old shifted under his ribs.

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

“I’ll go,” Bucky said.

Sam blinked. “You?”

Steve said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When it settled again, he was standing in Brooklyn.

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

For a long moment Bucky could not move.

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

He went to you.

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

He climbed the stairs like a ghost.

When he knocked, his hand shook.

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

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

You stared at him.

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

“Buck?” you whispered.

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

You made the decision for him.

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

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

He closed his eyes. “I’m here.”

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

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

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

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

You were still looking at him.

“Can I come in?”

“Of course.”

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

“Steve was just here?” he asked.

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

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

You knew.

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

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

He sat because his knees felt unreliable.

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

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

So he told you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You thought you’d come home.”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

“I do love you.”

He stopped breathing.

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

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

“But not like this.”

The word struck clean through him.

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

Bucky swallowed around the sudden ache in his throat.

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

“Yes it is.”

You tilted your head. “Is it?”

“I came back for you.”

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

“That’s not fair.”

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

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

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

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

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

Bucky’s whole body went still.

“That’s not—”

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

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

“I know.”

“That’s all.”

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

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

He did not answer.

You stepped closer.

“Who do you look for first?”

Still he said nothing.

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

Bucky’s throat worked.

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

He took a step back. “Stop.”

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

“That’s not what this is.”

“Then what is it?”

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

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

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

“Oh, Buck.”

The fury went out of him all at once.

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

“I know.”

“I wanted to.”

“I know that too.”

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

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

The room blurred.

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

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

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

“Then learn.”

“With Steve?”

“With Steve.”

He stared at you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You squeezed his hands.

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

For a long moment neither of you moved.

Then Bucky bowed his head.

He wept.

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

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“For what?”

“For all of it.”

You smiled through your tears. “Me too.”

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

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

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

“Tell him,” you said.

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

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

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

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

“I loved you,” he said.

You nodded. “I know.”

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

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

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

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

Then Bucky took one step off the platform.

Steve’s whole body loosened.

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

And suddenly there was no room left to hide.

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

The sun was lowering, laying copper over the water.

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

Bucky huffed a laugh. “Observant.”

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

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

“I saw her,” Bucky said.

Steve’s face changed. “Oh.”

“She was beautiful.”

A silence. Then, “I bet she was.”

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

Steve’s brow furrowed. “Why?”

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

Because she loved me enough to tell the truth.

Because she knew before I did.

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

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

Bucky smiled. Then the smile faded.

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

Steve nodded slowly. “Okay.”

“She said I should be with you.”

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

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

“Buck,” he said very carefully.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

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

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

“I know that too.”

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

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

Steve’s breath caught.

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

Steve looked wrecked.

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

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

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

Steve closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, they were shining.

“You think?” he managed.

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

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

Something inside Bucky, knotted for decades, finally loosened.

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

“You really are an idiot,” Steve murmured.

“Took you long enough to say yes.”

“I didn’t say yes.”

Bucky leaned closer. “Stevie.”

The old nickname undid them both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I had help.”

Steve’s expression softened. “From her?”

Bucky nodded.

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

“So do I.”

---

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

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

There was sunshine, in the end.

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

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

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

Bucky thought about it, then nodded.

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

Outside your room, Bucky stopped.

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

“Yes,” Bucky said softly. “I do.”

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

For one breathless second, you only stared.

Then your mouth parted.

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

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

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

“Oh,” you breathed. “You listened.”

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

“I wanted to thank you,” he said.

You squeezed his fingers. “For what?”

“For not letting me make the wrong choice.”

A gentleness passed over your face.

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

“Don’t loom, Steven. Come here.”

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

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

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

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

“And?”

“And it didn’t feel like losing.”

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

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

“Good,” you murmured. “Good.”

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

You had your sunshine too.

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

“I should let you rest.”

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

Steve laughed.

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

“You look happier,” you said.

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

“I am.”

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

He bent and kissed your forehead.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

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

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

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

“You okay?” Steve asked.

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

“Yeah,” he said, and meant it.

Steve took his hand.

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

Maybe it had taken them too long.

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

But they were here now.

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

He deserved sunshine.

And he had found it.

Ryland Grace:

* Confesses that he still has a red fox plushie that he got as a kid at his apartment (he doesn’t always sleep with it, but it’s always there)

* Whenever he stays the night at your place afterward—because his apartment is a good bit smaller than yours—he brings his fox plushie

* Has accidentally left the fox at your apartment before and almost freaked out a little bit—until you texted him a picture of his fox and your stuffed animal together saying that they’ll keep each other company while you’re both at work

Lars Lindstrom:

* Knowing that you have something that you hold onto while you sleep is incredibly comforting to him

* Because he sleeps holding his baby blanket, and knowing how much you cherish your plushie just like how he cherishes his blanket means the world to him

* Treats it with the most respect and only ever with the gentlest of touches

* One time you came to him upset because a stitch had broken and your plushie was “hurt”, and he very carefully “performed surgery” on it (making sure all the stuffing is back inside and then stitching the hole closed) and you had to try not to practically tackle him in a hug from how much you appreciated him helping

Henry Letham:

* Doesn’t mind, treats it with respect

* On very rare occasions he has drawn it and made it tell a stupid joke (usually only if he knows you’ve been having a really tough time because it makes you smile)

* If you leave him at your apartment to go run a quick errand, he’ll hold it while drawing

* If you ask him about it when you return, he’ll say that it was “so it wouldn’t get lonely” but you know it’s because he missed you

Ken:

* Honestly gets a little bit jealous

* He’s right there!

* But then you tell him that you love it so much because it makes you think of him, and suddenly he doesn’t mind it so much

* Is even more okay with it when you get him a horse plushie of his own

* Loves when you dress up both of your stuffed animals in “matching outfits” (giving them matching ribbons/scarves/etc.), it reminds him of how the two of you try to match outfits every once in a while

Colt Seavers:

* Pokes fun at it lightheartedly at first

* But immediately backtracks when he sees that it hurt your feelings a little bit

* He thinks it’s really sweet and tells you so

* If you work with him on movies you’ll sneak it onto his trailer

* One day you walked into his trailer with coffee for him and found him napping, your stuffed animal held securely in his arms

* You managed to get a picture of it, and when he found it as your phone wallpaper, he pouted about it until you changed it to something that “didn’t lose him any tough guy points” (as if he truly has many to begin with, but you don’t tell him that)

Driver:

* Doesn’t actively comment on it, but thinks it’s sweet

* If it ever falls off the bed, he’ll carefully put it back where it was (either sitting on the bed or into your sleeping arms)

* If you decide to bring it on a drive once (“so it can see the world, too”, as you explained it with a smile) he’ll think it’s precious

* If you don’t think to bring your plushie with you the next time, he’ll ask about whether or not it’ll get lonely while the two of you are gone

* Sometimes you’ll end up bringing it again, and other times you’ll chuckle and tell him that it wants some time alone

More cuteness while I keep writing that Driver fic because it seems headcanon posts do really well ^^

i. WORD OF MOUTH

The city of Metropolis had barely roused from its sleepy state, the skyscrapers painted in colours of pink and orange as the sun lazily peered from its slumber beneath the horizon. 

Clark Kent shared a similar sentiment as the giant ball of gas, his hair mussed and tie not sitting quite right against the crisp white button shirt that took an embarrassing amount of time to iron the creases out of. There was little requirement for him to sleep, aside from maintaining a side of humanity he’d like to keep, but the mental fatigue from the tensions between the US Government and his actions in Jarhanpur had contributed to his flat energy. 

His feet felt like concrete against the stone stairs, one hand on the railing that the paint was peeling off of, his steps echo all the way to the ground floor; where he had every intention to muster the courage to open up his mailbox on the communal postal area for the apartment complex. 

There was never anything bad in there, but when your standard 9 til’ 5 job consists of fact-checking, pitching article ideas and fighting for the hot spot on the front page of the company you worked for…well, the last thing he wanted to do was read. 

Either way, the mailman waits for nobody and it was evident in the papers crammed into mailbox painted with Clark’s door number on it. 

Clark sighs. He got up earlier than usual to do this—and he was sure he’d still be late to work with an extra twenty minutes under his belt. He persists past the procrastination, and slots his mailbox key into the lock; a few envelopes topple out and he bends at the waist to retrieve them from the floor riddled with chewing gum pressed into the material. 

“Oh hey, Clark,” Clark shoots up, the back of his head catching the corner of the small metal door at the abrupt sound of the secondary voice. You—the owner of the groggy voice—wince, “Shit. Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” 

Clark feels his face go pink. You were one of the many residents within the high-rise apartment complex on Clinton Street in midtown Metropolis. Quick-witted, with a generous amount of extrovert which made the perfect concoction in befriending your neighbour Clark Kent upon his first week in his new pad.

You had believed the dark-haired and bad postured journalist to be a little lacking in the social skills forefront when you had first met him. His skin maintaining a healthy flush whenever you stopped by his door with house-warming plants—that he took incredibly seriously in keeping alive—or whenever you bumped into him around the building. 

(Worst time was in the laundry room, where Clark had missed a pair of boxers with hearts printed on them in the dryer. You were the one to find them and return them to their rightful owner that had written his name in sharpie on the tag.) 

Eventually, you just accepted that was who he was. A six foot something pink man. 

It also didn’t help that Clark found you incredibly gorgeous amongst all the other feelings that bubbled in his stomach when he caught some small talk with you. 

You weren’t as much as the girl-next-door, as you were the girl-one-floor-above.  

Unbeknownst to him; you also felt the same way. 

Clark clears his throat, “Don’t apologise. I should have my wits about me.” he says as he rubs the back of his head. 

“I’ll announce myself by a bell, or something next time.” you joke as you step up to the communal mailboxes and find your one with ease. Your mailbox has the correct amount of letters for someone who checks it daily—unlike Clark—and you begin to siphon through them whilst you speak, “Aside from the headache…how are you?” 

Embarrassed! Publicly humiliated! 

“Swell.” Clark settles for, “And you?” 

You sigh, which can’t be good. “I got let go from my job. I say that term loosely—I got fired.” 

“No kidding?” 

“Turns out you shouldn’t shit where you eat.” you grumble, flipping a pamphlet over in your hand, “Power imbalance prevails, I suppose.” you shrug at the thought. 

Clark pulls his lips into a thin line, the pinky flush slowly dissipating from his face from the distracting subject of your workplace drama. It had been common knowledge between three floors in the building that you and your seedy boyfriend who, also, happened to be the manager at the establishment you had been employed in; had since gone your separate ways after you found several of his accounts on a plethora of dating apps—one app, he had a passport for in order to speak to women across the globe. 

Because his cheating needed to be international. 

Things went sour, like really sour. It wasn’t your finest moment, but Clark reassured you through breathing exercises and a firm rub up and down your back that it was completely acceptable to hold an illegal street bonfire with your ex’s belongings as the kindlings to ignite it. 

(He didn’t mention the part where he was lying about it being okay. Or, the amount of bail he paid to get you out of the local police station.) 

Turns out the retaliation from your ex was firing you. The irony. 

Jackass. 

“I’m sorry about that.” Clark stares at your side-profile with empathy in his blue eyes, “Have you found anything?” 

“Nope.” you emphasis the ‘p’ with a pop, finger peeling a brown envelope open, “So, if you hear anything—literally anything—send it my way. I’m down to scrape the barrel to keep up with my rent payment each month.” 

“You have my word.” Clark promises and then you both fall comfortably silent. Which just means, he was going to admire you for a minute. 

After Clark had heard through the grapevine of your split, he had every intentions to build up the courage to ask you out on a date in the near distant future. It had been nine, torturous months of watching you from afar with a man that Clark Kent knew was not up to par with being able to be with a woman like you. That guy dimmed you down in every single way possible, and Clark had to stop attending neighbour-hangouts as he couldn’t bear to watch your radiance shrouded.

Plus, your ex took a real disliking to Clark after he watched your compatibility with him flourish.

So, when the news broke via—as you graciously called her—Old Woman Jenkins who lived in Apartment 3-B with her seven cats and two budgies; it was safe to say Clark was ecstatic for two reasons. 

1.) You were free from the toxicity, and 2.) This gave Clark the opportunity to show you how a real man should love you. 

Only downside was…Clark wasn’t sure when to approach it. He wasn’t emotionally stinted, so he knew that asking you out within a day, or even a week after your split would’ve just been grounds for a restraining order. On the flip side, he didn’t want to catch a rebound case because his feelings ran a lot deeper than a fleeting, emotional distraction.

Therefore, Clark just never asked. You don’t ask, you don’t get your heartbroken or something like that.

He just couldn’t ruin a good thing. 

You eventually speak again when you close your mailbox, eyes trailing down to the newspaper clutched in your neighbour’s hand, “You a front pager again?” you ask with a smile. 

“Oh—Ah, yes,” Clark flips the folded newspaper open to reveal the front page regarding his recent fight with the Hammer of Boravia. He points to the article, “That’s all me.” 

You peer at the print, “Congratulations again, Clark! That’s a huge deal in journalism world.”

“Oh…I—Thank you.” Clark stumbles through his profound gratitude for your praise. The tips of his ears start to turn pink again. 

You nod and adjust the tote bag on your shoulder, “Seriously, it takes balls.” 

“Yes, that’s why I enjoy the job—” he says at the same time as you speak.

“I mean, making that guy look good? I didn’t think that could be possible.” you add earnestly. 

Clark blinks. 

“…” he breathes a laugh, “I—I don’t follow.”

“Superman? I mean, come on. He is an egotistical white knight that faces zero ramifications from his actions. He only gets away with things because he’s handsome.” you wave off the tail-end of your statement in a flippant manner paired with a roll of your eyes, “I can’t stand the guy.”

You think he’s handsome? Clark has to shake the compliment off like water off a duck’s back. Low priority in comparison to the other things you had just off-handedly stated in your brief rant on the man in red and blue. 

There is part of Clark that almost leaps at the opportunity to get a little bad tempered over it, toss his toys out of the pram from the unwarranted criticism. Superman was good! He was good! 

Instead, Clark compartmentalises his hurt feelings and puts his Pulitzer prize-winning star reporter title to good use. 

“What—What makes you say that?” Clark tucks his chin to conceal the pout on his face, masking it as deep interest to the letters in his hands, “He’s got a glowing track record of keeping the streets of Metropolis safe.”

He was really hoping that he didn’t unearth a Boravian supporter out of you.

Or, that you agreed with the statement that had begun to grow arms and legs about his so-called ‘alien entitlement’ to house himself within Earth’s atmosphere. 

You answer in an unwavering tone of resentment. “It’s a personal grudge that’s grown ever since that fight on Clinton Street broke out—before you got here. I had just paid my car off, and whaddya know? Superman and his body made of steel, totals it alongside his own defeat with whatever shithead guy he was fighting against.” you blurt sarcastically, “He owes me a car.” 

“Oh. That isn’t so bad.” is how Clark responds, without a thought behind it. 

To him, it wasn’t so bad. He felt guilty, obviously collateral damage was something he wasn’t so favourable over.

However, this was fixable. 

Clark’s answer threw you for such a loop, that you almost forgot to answer. “Isn’t so bad?” you repeat, “Under what circumstances does that fall under the category of: isn’t so bad?” 

“No—I, I didn’t mean it wasn’t bad. It’s quite terrible actually,” Clark swallows, the heat capturing beneath his collar as he speaks. “In the grand scheme of possibilities that could have happened, at least you weren’t in your car. And—And, on top of that, he saved multiple citizens from becoming a casualty statistic.” 

“My car became a casualty statistic. Superman fucking sucks.” you state sternly. “Nothing can change my mind about that.” 

Clark frowns, “Nothing?” 

“Nothing.” you affirm, “Anyway, I’ve got a job interview in thirty. I’ll see you around?” 

“Yes. See you.” Clark offers a strained smile as you wave him goodbye and disappear round the corner to exit the building.

He lets out a breath he had been holding since you confessed your acquired distaste for Superman. 

Clark’s gaze drops to the newspaper, his fingers curl tightly into the pages as he decided on the spot; he was going to convince you otherwise regarding the personal vendetta against, well…him. 

ii. WEEKLY PAPER

The art of apologies seemed pretty simple, right? 

A heartfelt card, or a bouquet of flowers could go a long way in the tumultuous events that led up to an apology being a necessity to mending a friendship, relationship or family bond. However, the situation with you was a little different to a petty squabble, despite Clark believing it to be petty to hold such a grudge—he saved lives that day! 

For one, you weren’t aware that there was any mending to be done. Your hatred toward Superman had been cemented the day you returned from work, having decided to walk that particular sunny day, only to find your beloved vehicle crumpled. To you, there was no putting bandaids over wounds, and you certainly had zero forgiveness in your heart for the man that patrolled the skies of Metropolis. 

The whole crux of the matter was, Clark Kent was raised on the rule that honesty was the best policy. Honestly, no, he doesn’t recall crushing your car after being tossed across Clinton Street like a rag-doll. He’s sure he’s crushed a few cars in his time in the city, and he knows he would have felt guilty at the time; but it was better to forgive and forget rather than bottle up all your resentful feelings toward someone who was just trying to help. 

Further to this, Clark wanted to take the chance and ask you out on a date. He really did. Time was a healer, and it had been three months—give or take—since your split from the egotistical cheater, meaning it felt like ample enough time to be justified in his intentions. However, if you despised Superman, you unknowingly despised Clark Kent…and that wouldn’t be something that would sit right on his chest. 

That would take away part of his honesty. If he had to continue concealing his identity behind the glasses to appease your objectifications on Superman. 

(At least it was more a personal issue than a shared thought with the less friendly bunch that lived in Metropolis.) 

So, in conclusion, Clark came up with the bright idea to slowly introduce you to the good side of Superman. You know, the one that saves Metropolis and much further, fetches kittens down from trees, gives back to the community. 

He was basically trying to fill your head with Superman shaped stars. 

The best option came to him whilst he sat at his desk in the bullpen of Daily Planet. Knees touching the underside of his desk, his mind had been elsewhere for the better part of the day; as Clark was more or less sulking over the revelation you shared with him that morning. 

How could he change your mind? Clark had learnt that you were strong-minded to an extent from a personal experience with a fellow neighbour, who had a terrible habit of pausing Clark’s laundry in the dryer and dumping his half damp clothes into a hamper just so they could use that one particular machine. (There were ten in total.) 

When Clark expressed his frustrations to you, he hadn’t expected you to begin a psychological warfare against the neighbour in Apartment 1-D. It was safe to say, you won out of sheer resilience. 

He dared not to share the same fate as Apartment 1-D. 

Then, it sort of went off like a lightbulb in his head. Clark Kent created articles in which he interviewed himself, in order to shed a positive light on his actions. Why not bring those interviews to your doorstep under the Daily Planet subscription service? 

It meant you’d receive weekly newspapers from the Planet, delivered to your home with no extra cost aside from the cheap subscription fee to keep journalism alive and kicking.

Clark would pay for it out of his own pocket, of course. 

Not only were you strong-minded, but you were curiouser than a cat and that meant your interest would pique to flip through the pages of the newspaper and, eventually, read all about the good deeds of Superman. 

Not to mention how charming and handsome he was…but you already knew that. 

It was the perfect idea, with the perfect execution! 

That was, until, you had received the third instalment of your new $3.99 subscription to the newspaper company Clark worked for. 

“Morning, Clark.” you quip as you reach your mailbox, sparing the male a glance with a pretty smile that had his heart thump a little harder. “This is the most I’ve seen you in the communal mailbox area.” 

(There was a reason for that.) 

Clark hums, “Best to keep on top of my mail, I think.” 

“You’d be right. The shredders are hungry for junk mail.” you had a tendency to laugh at your own jokes with a cute snort. Something that was cut short when you open your mailbox. “Are you fucking kidding me?” 

“What’s wrong?” Clark asks with his brows pinched.

“I think my ex is tormenting me,” you grouse, “As if I was the one sharing my favourite position on six different dating apps—ugh. He’s signed me up for the Daily Planet subscription when he knows how much I don’t want to read about the brown-nosing of Superman.” you pause, eyes flitting to Clark’s face, “No offence.” 

“None taken.” (A lot taken. All at once.) 

You continue, “I mean—I guess it is a retaliation because I signed his phone number up to receive regular calls for recruitment within Scientology. But, this almost feels worse.” you whine as you toss the newspaper in your tote bag for later shredding. 

“You signed him up to Scientology?” Clark asks and you spare him a shameful glance. He redirects the topic, for your sake. “Is it really so bad, reading about all the things Superman is doing to keep Metropolis afloat?” 

“It’s hard not to hear about it, let alone be subjected to reading it too.” you seethe, “It’s a constant reminder that he wrecked my car, and never had to face the consequences—unlike me. You know, I hate riding the subway? I swear I’m one sticky seat away from contracting a new strain of the plague. He caused that.” 

Clark wants to call you dramatic. 

He goes for, “I hear you.” instead. 

“Do you think you could get this cancelled for me?” you ask as you shut your mailbox, “I want to support you, but, this is like rubbing salt in an open wound.” 

How could Clark say no? He had a firm grasp on boundaries, and part of him felt remorseful over the fact that you believed that his own doings were that of your ex-boyfriend—someone you really didn’t need reminding of. Plus, you were staring at him all glittery-eyed which was part of his weakness that came to you. 

And your means to be overtly theatrical.

Not only that, but Clark led himself to believe he had crossed a big company no-no by inputting your details into the Daily Planet subscription system and, has since spent every day since unlawfully signing you up to the weekly newspapers, convincing himself he was border-lining on identity theft. 

Clark likes you. He likes the idea of keeping his job just a little bit more. 

He exhales. “Yeah. I will sort that for you. No problem.” 

“You’re a life saver. I owe you one, Clark.” (He owes you a car.) “I’ve got to go. I need to get to Hob’s Bay for an interview with Metro Souvenir.” 

“Good luck. They’d be lucky to have you.” Clark enthuses sweetly. 

You blink at his compliment, a smile growing slowly on your face, “Thanks, Clark.” 

“Anytime.” Clark gives you a lopsided smile, forgetting he’s already ten minutes late to work, being so wrapped up in your addictive presence and all—he’s already forgotten the pit in his stomach over you loathing his true identity. “I’ll catch you later.” 

iii. SUPERSHIT 

Similar to the rest of the population on Earth, Clark Kent had a number of things that got under his skin. The obvious, being that of his own fabrication of an alter-ego in an ill-fitting suit that he hid behind in order to keep those around him safe. It was the finest quality of deception, and Clark found it vexing to upkeep. Then there were other issues, such as: the US Government’s reluctance to side with his good intentions in Boravia, Steve Lombard at times, and the smear campaign against him that had recently gained traction online.  

One specific insult within the smear campaign that tested Clark Kent’s abundance of patience; was Supershit. It was juvenile. Completely undermined his efforts in guiding humanity into a better tomorrow. It was…bothersome to a man like Clark Kent. 

His agitation toward the name had only furthered when Steve Lombard had mentioned it in passing toward the end of the day, leading Clark to trudge home under his own personal grey cloud of discontent. 

The mental fatigue of it all weighed his shoulders down and he took to the three flights of stairs in the apartment like a kicked dog. 

“Whew. Bad day?” 

The grey cloud breaks overhead at the sound of your melodic tone. 

Clark looks over his shoulder to see you with a plastic bag in one hand and a newspaper in the other. “Oh, no. Just a rather long one.” he says in partial dishonestly.

“I hear you.” you take a couple of steps up, “Want to come to mine and wallow over some Thai?” 

When Clark hesitates, you answer for him. 

“It’s free,” you lift the warm bag to wiggle it, “Plus, the cashier asked if I was eating for two…so.” 

Clark’s brows raise at your reiteration of an inconsiderate presumption. “Looks like we both were insulted today.” he murmurs, allowing you to pass him on the stairwell to lead him up to the fourth floor.

You both greet Old Woman Jenkins and her three-legged cat with a taste for ankles on the third floor—she was the eyes and ears of the complex—and then you dip into explaining how the Metro Souvenir interview was a complete bust after you openly belittled the small Superman collection in the corner of the store that was made up of 90% Superman bobble-heads. 

Turns out it was the owner’s daughter’s hobby in her past time. 

Keys jingle in your hands as you pull them from the abyss that was your unorganised tote bag and as you open the door to your apartment, Clark stands behind you with a pout; fiddling with the strap of his work briefcase. 

He was putting it down to mental fatigue or lack of direct sunlight which had instilled the glass half empty mentality into him. Clark couldn’t quite shake off the impending doom of a sharp rejection of, not only a possible blossoming of a relationship, but the friendship you two had made along the way when he eventually takes off the glasses and you’re exposed to the man who wrecked your car. 

(For good reason!) 

The thought stays chewing the back of his mind as he sits on the new sofa—a piece of furniture you decided to invest in after your ex’s body warped a dent in his shape on your old couch—in your apartment, and whilst you spread out the lukewarm Thai food in plastic tupperware boxes; across your rickety coffee table. 

The two of you sit closer than necessary for a four-seater sofa with cushions that felt like the equivalent to clouds from cartoons, Clark had forgone his suit jacket and rolled his ironed sleeves of his white button-up shirt up to rest at his elbows. It wasn’t hard to miss that his suit pants were almost bursting at the seams from being taut against his muscular thighs. 

It was hard not to look at him. 

The friendly neighbourhood heathen. Dwarfing doorframes and, sometimes, having to walk sideways into a room due to the broadness of his shoulders; was sitting flush with your own shoulders and occasionally making eyes with you. 

That’s what you translated it as, anyway—even if he had entered a little broodier than usual. 

Clark eventually strikes up a conversation in between eating, “I actually wanted to tell you about a job going at Daily Planet,” he swallows the chewed up food in his mouth, “Sort of a support role.” 

You perk, “Really?” 

“Yeah. You’d be working under Lois Lane. She’s a good friend and great journalist.” Clark informs, mirroring the excitement that lights up on your face. “I can put in a good word, if you’d like?” 

“I mean…I know nothing about journalism, but it’s a learning curve.” you state. 

Clark bites into a spring roll, the aromatic kaffir lime takes over his senses as he nods into the bite, “You can only try.” 

“Thank you, Clark. I seriously owe you double now.” you pluck a spring roll from the tupperware, “You’ll have to think of something.” 

The idea that crosses Clark’s mind is like a balloon being popped with a sharp needle. His blue eyes shoot to your side-profile, happily dissecting your own spring roll to inspect the food inside. He’s suddenly swamped in those warm fuzzy feelings Ma Kent had told him about during his bedtime stories at a young age. 

Clark didn’t want to detract from the slow process of your own heartbreak over your ex-boyfriend. 

Yes, the guy had shattered the innocence on the idea of love, and how to be loved—he used to turn the TV up to drown out your cries. He robbed nine months of your life with poor judgement that his online escapades with other women wouldn’t see the light of day, he had purposely used his position of power to terminate your employment; leaving you without a job, and zero income to pay for the bills that were on a steep incline from inflation. 

Even with all of this taken into consideration, you were taking your time in experiencing your own version of heartbreak. Because, deep down, you had been naively and so incredibly blindly in love. 

That was something Clark didn’t want to overstep on until the time was right. 

But, on the contrary, when was the timing ever right? It had been three months since you split from your boyfriend, and honestly? Clark wanted you. Heart broken, or not.

He just hoped those feelings would be reciprocated. (Nobody sits that close to you without it being intentional, right?) 

It comes out of him with all the confidence he can muster. “You…you could let me take you on a date.” it almost sounds rhetorical in the way he chose to ask. 

It makes you turn your head, eyes wider as if you were a deer that had just been caught in the headlights. Your cheek swollen with pocketed food, the room goes silent enough to hear a pin drop. 

It makes Clark suddenly regret his decision. 

“I’m sorry—” Clark shakes his head, pink from head to toe, “I don’t, I don’t know why I thought that was acceptable. You’re still going through the process of a breakup. That was all rather silly of me—” 

“Clark.” 

Clark hums, “Hm?” 

“Relax, dude.” you lilt, “I’d like that.” 

“You would?” 

You breathe out a laugh, “Yes. That sounds like the perfect I.O.U.” you bump your shoulder shyly with Clark’s and then mumble, “I knew you weren’t a constant shade of pink around me for no reason.” 

“Yes, well. It was for a good reason.” Clark mumbles and tugs at the collar of his shirt to release some heat that had been trapped beneath it. “A pretty reason.” he says with a smile. 

The night shared in Apartment 4-A would’ve ended perfectly there. Clark had found his voice, and in turn, became more openly flirtatious with you as the pair of you cleaned up the leftovers of the takeaway. The touches became more tactile and it made both of your heads a little fuzzy with excitement. 

His dampened mood from Steve Lombard had shifted, Clark quickly finding that you were a version of sunlight that he could metabolise and recharge on. 

The night should’ve ended there—on a high. 

Then the topic of conversation rolls back around to, well, Clark. 

You take a sip from your water bottle before you speak, “So…I hear your buddy is in some type of hot waters with the government.” you spare Clark a glance. 

“You could say that.” Clark pinches his brows at the thought, “He was just trying to save people—” 

“From a tyrannical president?” you interject, “It’s the one time I’ll give it to him.” 

Clark is surprised, and he struggles to hide that on his expression; so you quirk a brow. He clears his throat, “I didn’t expect you to side with him. Seems like you may be one of the very few people who do.” 

You end up shrugging, “His actions to save Jarhanpur override my personal issues with Supershit.” 

Supershit. You just had to use Supershit.

(Sunlight status revoked.)  The atmosphere shifts and you’re blissfully unaware of the nerve you had hit as Clark shifts beside you. All of the impulsive reactions surge forward in Clark, entangling themselves in the warmth he had felt by being within close proximity with you, making his mood sour like milk left in the sun. 

His nostrils flare from frustration. The tips of his ears are an angry shade of red. 

Clark bores a hole into your coffee table. “I think that’s a little unfair to call him that.” he says lowly. 

“You think that because you’re a good person who sees past all the bad stuff, Clark.” you reason without much deliberation over his defence, “Me, on the other hand—” 

“Should give him a chance, perhaps?” Clark retorts bluntly, leaving you to blink in surprise, “He’s misunderstood. He’s doing what he thinks is right, what is good for the citizens of Metropolis.”

“I’m not questioning if he’s good or not.” you argue back, “It’s just a personal gripe.”

Clark stands, “Oh, come on,” he gravels, “Superman is not your enemy. Supershit is not a fair nickname!” 

“Why do you care so much if I like him or not?” your eyes narrow, “You’ve been selling him to me this whole month. What is that all about?” 

OK, maybe your career in journalism would be a steer in the right direction. 

You sigh when Clark fights for an explanation. “He wrecked my car, Clark. I’m allowed to dislike someone that you favour. That’s just life.” 

Clark doesn’t look at you when he speaks, “Yeah.” 

He backs down after that. Not because he wants to, or that your stare has him pinned to the spot. It was down to the reason that, if he projected anymore resistance against your grievances with Superman; he may be on a slippery slope of a bad-tempered confessional in the middle of your living room.

Clark grabs his suit jacket from the back of your sofa, fiddling with it as he sulks, “I think I should leave. Thank you for the food. I’ll…um, I’ll talk to Perry and Lois about the job.” 

“Okay. Thank you.” you look up at him from your seated position, a little confused by the whiplash from the energy shift in the room. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” 

“Yeah. Yeah. Tomorrow.” 

iiii. LOIS LANES’ DIVINE INTERVENTION

So…you don’t hear from Clark for three days—aside from a short text giving you the thumbs up for an interview at Daily Planet.

After the blip of Supershit, Clark took the mental load of keeping his distance from you. His patient was stretched thin from outside opinions and he feared with the hard-to-budge bad taste that Superman left in your mouth; that you would be a target of hot-headed retaliation if you utter the word Supershit in Clark’s presence again.

The safest assumption was that he was busy—he was a Pulitzer prize-winner at the end of the day. It definitely hadn’t been in relation to the immediate debate that came after you used the trending, cancel culture-esque nickname, Supershit, on his nearest and dearest interviewee. 

Even with your feelings now left up in the air with a date being strung over your head with zero confirmation of a date or time, you weren’t one to sit and dwell over a man’s fragile ego—for whatever reason Clark’s ego was made of glass, you were unsure but close to figuring out—and put all your energy and abundance of spare time into perfecting your knowledge about Daily Planet prior to your interview. 

The interview process for the support role beneath Lois Lanes’ expertise as a front-runner journalist for Daily Planet had gone smoother than you could have anticipated. To be quite frank, you had little experience in the journalist field, let alone a degree, but you came prepared with a good amount of charm and some background knowledge on the company.

Founded in 1775, globally renowned for its pursuit of justice, home to some brown-nosing of Superman and the Justice League, and the employer of the curly-haired neighbour you had been crushing on for quite some time. (The last two weren’t verbalised as such. Edited version: enthralling interviews that capture the true essence of the city’s extraterrestrial and meta-humans, and the employer of Clark Kent. Your neighbour. Nothing else.)  

Lois likes you. Perry White isn’t easily convinced. She spends the rest of her shift arguing your case—the Editor-in-Chief calls it favouritism for the only woman who applied for the role. 

Before you leave, you are tail-ending a conversation with Lois. She’s the epitome of a thriving journalist in a trim waistcoat and white tee beneath, a mug of hot coffee with at least, fifteen lumps of sugar stirred into the mix.

“You have to make sure you’re not in favour of one particular person that we write about. You know, like Superman is a good guy, but you can’t show bias. Even if Daily Planet have been hit with some accusations of preference.” Lois says in a monotonous tone. 

You nod along, not wanting to ruin your chances by shit-talking one person that brings the money in for the company. “I mean, everyone seems to like him, right? Clark has been fawning over him for sometime.” you prod at her brain intentionally for an underlying curiosity of your own. 

“Clark sees a lot of himself in Superman,” Lois choice of words make your brow quirk—she’s being careful. “He does a lot of questionable things—Superman, I mean, but he saves a lot of lives. They both live their lives to be good, I guess that’s why Clark is drawn to him.” 

“I guess so.” you pause, “You know he totalled my car in a fight?” 

“Clark?” (No, but you were starting to think otherwise.) 

“Superman.” you correct and Lois looks at you as if it isn’t that big of a deal. A major inconvenience at best. “Yeah, he got into a fight on Clinton Street and was thrown into my car that I had just paid off. I was pretty torn up about it…still sort of am.” 

Lois wracks her wonderful brain, “Clinton Street?” you nod, “Yeah—We covered that story. The meta-human he had been fighting was headed for a nursery a few blocks down, for whatever sick reason. Superman diverted him to Clinton Street and saved about fifty kids. He took some punches over that. Anything to keep the guy away from those kids.” 

You blink, “I didn’t think about it like that.” 

“You have to look at the bigger picture, if you’re going to be apart of this world.” Lois smiles, “Although, it doesn’t take away from the fact that your car got ruined. Did you get another one?” 

“Uh…no.” your mind is elsewhere—you kind of feel like an asshole. You shake it off, “Doesn’t matter, though. I like the commute.” 

“Clark mentioned that you had said that you were one sticky seat away from catching a new strain of the plague.” Lois quips and you shrink with embarrassment, the elevator is so close you could just…make a break for it. 

It makes you laugh nervously, “Yeah. Well, that’s the fun part. The risks. Gets my adrenaline pumping.”

Lois really likes you. She decides. 

“We’re all about adrenaline and risks.” 

“Yeah—Well, thank you for giving me an interview. I’ve gotta head, sort of overstayed my welcome.” you express, thumb gesturing over your shoulder to the elevator, “It was nice meeting you!”

Lois bids you a goodbye, her eyes trained on your frame as you press the golden button umpteen times out of impatience to take your leave. She smiles to herself, turning on her heel as the elevator doors peel open. 

Your eyes are cast downward, brain on autopilot over the realisation that struck the back of your neck like the side of a hand. The visit to Daily Planet for the interview had not only been relatively exciting—because you felt like you gelled well with Lois Lane—but it had been incredibly insightful to the incident relating to your deeply rooted dislike for Superman. 

He was saving kids. How could you resent that? 

Perhaps there was an aspect of selfishness on your behalf. Most times you had broken into a rant about the car tragedy of 2024, people have asked you if you knew the reasoning as to why Superman happened to be on Clinton Street, fighting a meta-human. More times than not, you’d shrug. You didn’t care, it was your car that suffered! 

But, now? Lois Lane had smothered that year-long grudge with the missing pieces of the story. 

“Holy shit. Am I an asshole?” you say out loud to yourself. The elevator slides shut and you stare wide-eyed at the golden doors. 

“Pardon me?” 

You turn your head to see Clark Kent clutching into his briefcase as if you were going to bite. You don’t even bat an eyelid as you say, “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Unavailable.” 

“Well, now, I—I can explain my absence—” 

“Can we just bury our last interaction?” you interject with a sharp tone, “I’m feeling a little forgiving today.” 

“Right. Yes, I was going to apologise for how I left—” Clark’s voice trails off as you deadpan at him. He shakes his head, “—All is said and done. Can I ask why you called yourself an asshole?” 

“It’s a long story.” 

“I have time.” 

You peer up at him, “Weren’t you meant to get off on that floor?” 

“Yes. I suppose I should have.” 

It makes you look him up and down. “…Alright, well, I mean I just had this super insightful conversation with your friend Lois about Superman—” Clark visibly winces, “—And the fight on Clinton Street, that ultimately lost me my car. This whole time, I just…I just didn’t care about the details, just knew I was pissed about my car. Then—Then Lois tells me it was collateral damage over Superman saving a nursery from a rampant meta-human. That sort of makes me the asshole in this story, Clark.” 

“You are upset about it, that doesn’t make you an asshole.” 

“No, but it does!” you exasperate, “Sure, it’s been a huge inconvenience to me, and a lot of money lost. But he was putting himself in harms way to save innocent lives. My car doesn’t even matter in the grand scheme of things.” 

Clark wants to argue the fact that Superman has been saving lives even before the incident on Clinton Street. However, the revelation that you’ve been put on track for is at the precipice of a complete 180 in your opinion of Superman; why stunt that growth? 

He makes a note to thank Lois—who is well aware of his secret—for feeding you the breadcrumbs that led to this.

You know…once he takes elevator back up. 

Clark waits for you to breathe. “So, no hard feelings over Superman?” he asks hopefully. 

“He’s still an asshole for wrecking my car.” you retort, arms crossing over your chest, “But, I suppose that’s sort of the closure I needed. I can’t stay mad at a guy for forfeiting his own life to save fifty little ones.” 

“I can work with that.” Clark says without thinking. The colour pink creeps up his neck when you cock your head to the side inquisitively—because, what did that mean? He gulps some air, “I—Can I still take you on a date?” 

“I don’t know, can you get Superman to apologise to me?” you lilt in an unserious tone, essentially throwing a hook with a fat piece of bait impaled on the end.

The elevator reaches the ground floor. 

“I can try.” Clark absolutely would. Without a shadow of a doubt. 

(Hook, line and sinker.) 

“Then yes.” 

+1 APARTMENT APOLOGIES

You had got the job at Daily Planet. It took all of two days, and the persistence of the tenacious Lois Lane for Perry White to accept somebody without even a scrap of journalistic experience onto the team; for you to get the call to start in a weeks time. 

And how you celebrated your elation was by grabbing a greasy pizza en route to your apartment, and watching reruns of Golden Girls on your sofa.  

It was pure, unadulterated bliss. 

That was, until the hairs on your arms unexpectedly stood on end on the last bite of the cheese-filled crust. 

Immediate from this, there’s a silhouette that captures your attention from your periphery on the fire escape outside your living room window. Heart chasing its own beat, you drop the pizza crust into the cardboard box, your hand slowly reaching to curl round the steel bat you kept beside the sofa; the other one was located in your bedroom. 

You didn’t want to engage, or even look. There’s been enough viewings of horror movies to know that the person that is curious, is the person that gets killed. You even think about sprinting out the front door and banging on Clark’s front door on the floor below.  

When your bare foot touches the wooden floorboards, that’s when you hear a groan from just outside your window. 

Your brows pinch from the familiarity. “Clark?” 

It sounded like him. 

Instinctively, you lift your bat as you stand. This was Metropolis after all. You wouldn’t put it past some extraterrestrial visiting the city to mimic the sounds of your neighbour. But honestly, where would they have gotten the sound of Clark in somewhat pain? 

The large silhouette moves when you speak Clark’s name, and you make it to the window in two swift steps; forcing the window up to let in the billowing winds of the city air and noise pollution into your apartment. 

“Are you fucking kidding me?” 

“Good evening ma’am.” 

You raise your bat, “Superman?” you waver in your impulsivity to strike him across his head, “What the fuck are you doing on my fire escape? You’re—ugh—you’re bleeding!” 

He peels the palm of his hand away from his torso to reveal a much bigger wound, “Just a scratch. I’ll be alright. May I come in?” 

“No! Crazy!” you argue back, “You’ll get your blood all over my new rug.” 

“I’ll pay for it.” 

You scoff, “Oh yeah? Like the car you wrecked—?” you pause to stare at him, the cogs turning in your mind, “Did Clark Kent put you up to this? Are you—Are you two in cahoots or some shit?” 

“He may—” Superman groans when he shifts from one foot to the other, “—Have mentioned something about a disgruntled neighbour.” 

Oh. He took your joke seriously. 

Your fingers shift around the metal bat. “Yeah, that would be me.” you watch as a loose curl flops down onto his forehead, familiarity spreads across your chest, “Look. You can just let me hit you over the head with my bat. Once. Then, all is forgiven.” 

“I’d rather you didn’t.” 

You sigh, “Worth a shot.” 

Superman’s lips quirk into an amused smile, “Please? It will only be for a moment.” 

“…Fine.” you drop the bat down to your side and step back, “Only step on the wooden flooring, and just head to the bathroom. I’ll get you a wet flannel.” 

A red boot swings over the threshold and suddenly, Superman is standing in the middle of your apartment at full stature, bleeding from the wound on his torso. He’s handsome, you’d give him that. In an omnipresent superhero type of way. He gives you a strained friendly smile, his dimples deep whilst his forehead creases from the sharp pain that elicits from the wound site. 

Without further instruction as to where your bathroom was located, Superman makes a beeline down the hallway, breadcrumbs of blood leading you to him after you wet a spare flannel beneath the kitchen sink tap. His familiarity with your apartment only worsens your suspicions. 

You find him dwarfing your toilet with the lid down. He has a handful of toilet paper stuffed against the bleeding gash, lips parting momentarily to exhale intermittently as he applies pressure with the worst gauze replacement to soak up the excess blood. 

Pieces of tissue paper break apart from the saturation of blood and Superman—without thinking—gives you a clumsy smile. Lopsided and without confidence to fuel the curve of his lip. It is sort of vexing for you, coming from a place with purposefully minimal knowledge, these so-called ‘Protectors of Metropolis’ exuded self-righteousness because they needed to have a strong backbone to be a public figure. The man who sat on the lid of your toilet, in a vibrant red and blue suit that clung to his muscular physique presents nothing of the sort. 

You wish you could approach it differently. This rare moment captured in time, where you come face to face with the destructor of your beloved vehicle and you had asked for permission to strike him across the head, rather than just doing it; as you had practiced multiple times in your head. 

He wouldn’t even flinch, you suppose. 

Further to this, if Lois Lane hadn’t intervened with her sharp memory of the Clinton Street incident, then Superman wouldn’t have been able to step foot into your apartment. Then again, you were stood at the threshold of the bathroom questioning his identity altogether. 

“I don’t bite.” The male informs on borderline playful. 

You don’t budge—a prisoner in your own home.

“I’d rather not take any chances.” you quip, tossing him the wet flannel because watching the pieces of tissue paper fuse to his wound was near painful. You observe him for a moment, “Clark sent you here?” 

He hums lowly. 

You continue, “When…did you see him? Usually he catches you at the scene of the crime, so to speak.” you tilt your head when Superman lifts his gaze to look at you, “I didn’t see any fights break out on the news today.” 

“He called in a favour.” Superman responds with faux-innocence, “By phone.” 

“Right, right.” you fall silent to watch him dab at his injury with care. There’s a deep inhale before you speak again, “You guys are close?” 

“You could say that.” he mumbles, “Is there a problem?” 

Your eyes narrow, “Is there a problem to be addressed? Other than the wreckage of my car, but, y’know, you already knew about that coming here. Did he give you my address?” 

“No.” Superman jumps to Clark’s defence because giving a stranger—let alone a so-called enemy—your address without consent was a downright breach of your privacy and safety; let alone dangerous. He then adds, “He wouldn’t do that.” 

“So you just happened to know where I live in a mid-rise apartment complex with eleven floors?” you take a step into the bathroom to goad him, “Is that part of your superpowers? Being a creep?” 

“What—?” he flaps, “No! Nothing like that.”

“A woman alone in her apartment at night and you’re watching her from her fire escape. That’s pretty creepy, Supe.” you point a finger in his direction, essentially pinning him to the spot. 

“I just came to apologise. Okay?” Superman takes a deep inhale in mild panic, “I never intended to destroy your car. But, if you ask me, I’d do it a hundred times over if it meant I saved those kids that day.” 

“Why does it matter if you apologise to me or not? You must have damaged thousands of cars by now.” (Try hundreds of thousands.) 

Superman huffs, “It matters to Clark. He—uh—Forgive me if this isn’t common knowledge, but he likes you. Truly likes you. He sees a future with you, and then you had mentioned that if he were able to have me apologise to you…then perhaps you’d proceed with the date.” 

Oh, boy. 

“I was joking when I said that.” you state, “Can you not tell the difference between a joke and a serious request, Clark?” 

“Clark?” the tips of Superman’s ears go pink. Dead giveaway. 

You throw a hand in his direction. “Oh, come on, Clark. It’s obviously you. You’re Superman. You think I’m dumb enough not to catch on when you’ve been fighting his corner for the past couple of weeks?” 

Superman—or, Clark to you—gawks, “I’m not quite sure what you’re implying here.” 

“What I’m stating is, that you are Superman. You just so happen to be able to interview him every single time and shed a positive light on his actions, you were unbelievably mad after Supershit—” Clark’s eye twitches, “And, what, Superman just so happens to know what apartment I’m staying in without any information handed out? Don’t even get me started on the glasses.” 

“The glasses?” 

“Well, you mentioned once that the glasses were for short-distance reading. You never took them off after reading the letters in your mailbox.” you shrug as you explain your theory, “Plus, you’re not wearing them now so you obviously don’t need them. You just wear them for a whole identity thing.” 

Clark is struck silent. You were good. Like, incredibly observant. 

“Did you get the job at Daily Planet?” when you nod, he proceeds to talk, “Good. We’ll need someone like you.” he pauses, “Are you mad?” 

“No, I’m not mad.” you deflate a little, “I would have been if my theory was wrong and you did happen to hand out my address to some random man without my knowledge.” 

Clark gives a feeble nod, “I’m a little shellshocked that you figured it out.” 

“I’ve never seen you two in the same room, I guess.” your joke makes both Clark and you smile widely at each other. The break of tension allows you to move closer to him as you bend at the waist to look at his injury. You hiss at the sight of it, “That looks sore.” 

“Oh, it isn’t so bad.” Clark gives you a dopey sort of smile when he catches your eye. “I didn’t intend to get hurt on the way here.” 

You nod, taking the sodden flannel from his grasp in order to dab at his torso, “Superman sells me a sob story and bleeds out on my fire escape to get me to like him. That would have been dramatic.” 

“You’re not mad?” Clark asks again for reassurance—his confidence since shaken from the rise of resistance in the Metropolis community in regard to his presence within the city. 

With a shake of your head, you meet his blue eyes again, “No. I mean, we have a lot to talk about. But that’s what first dates are for, right? Getting to know each other?”

“So, the date is still going ahead?” (Gosh. He sounded so insecure.)

“Oh, I’m not sure. Clark Kent might have an issue with it.” you joke, “He called first dibs.” your playful tone soon dissipates along with your smug smile when Clark’s brows pinch and he swallows deeply. His eyes flit to your lips and then back up to your eyes. “Are you about to kiss me?”

“Is that okay?”

“Again, Clark Kent—”

Your repetitive joke is smothered when Clark captures your lips with his own. He cradles the back of your head to keep you in position, his head tilting in one direction to refrain from your noses being pressed together. Your stomach is splattered with a heavy warmth as your fingers curl around the bluish fabric of the suit he wears. The room falls into a blissful silence aside from the occasional smacking of lips when Clark deepens the kiss with a sense of heated desire—the innocent kiss soon turning open-mouthed and desperate. 

The signals of it allow you to climb onto his lap, wet flannel disregarded behind you as you wrap your arms around his neck, pulling yourself closer into his arms that begin to circle your frame. Your hips tilt and press downward and Clark responds with a faint whimper that makes you smile against his lips. 

There’s that sensible part of your brain that screams for this to come to a screeching halt. No first date and you’re practically dry-humping Superman? Of all people? But the way he pathetically whined beneath you; that was all Clark Kent. Your neighbour that you had been crushing on for the better part of a year, even when you had been dating your ex-boyfriend, the poorly-postured, socially inept male had always been in your peripheral. (Turns out he had just been biding his time.) 

You feel him shift beneath you and the memory of an open-wound that your all of a sudden flush against is thrown to the forefront of your mind. It makes you pull back promptly, Clark’s face written with concern—his lips all puffy and wet. 

“Is something wrong?” 

“Your wound, Clark.” You lean back and Clark’s hands hold your weight for you. “It’ll probably need stitches.” 

He frowns, “No, it won’t.” he leans in to press another kiss to your lips with less eagerness than before, “I can heal easily without human intervention.” 

“Are you serious? You just wanted some attention?” you tug at the grown out curls at the nape of his neck and laugh. “You have so much explaining to do.” 

“Of course.” Clark smiles against your lips, quickly making you forget your train of thought as he stands with a grunt with you bundled up in his arms. He speaks between hungry kisses, “But first, I have a destroyed car and a year of apologies to make up for.” 

You giddily laugh as he carries you to your bedroom. 

The flight here had been no problem. No unexpected turbulence in the air, you got through the monster that was the Los Angeles airport with an hour to spare, and there were no crying babies or barking dogs on your flight. You had chosen to fly out a few days later than the rest of your coworkers, tying up a few bits and pieces of paperwork for the most recent case you had worked on.

But now you were regretting your decision to skip out on your Bureau-commissioned jet ride to fly commercial instead. Maybe it was the thrill of the upcoming weekend that had blinded you, but being in an airport didn't seem all that horrible just a mere day ago.

Now you were running on fries from the McDonald's within the terminal and the knowledge that maybe, eventually, you would be getting on a flight to D.C. within the next few hours.

From your left, you hear a low chuckle. Glancing over, you spot the man who had been on your same connecting flight from Los Angeles.

You noticed him almost immediately when boarding, his posture and demeanor screaming military. Even now, his hair was combed too neatly, and his expression was too bright to have spent the same amount of time here as you.

"You and me both," he told you with an amused smile and quirked brow.

"I just can't believe they haven't rerouted us or given us any more updates other than pending weather conditions," you told him, complaining freely now.

Maybe a few hours ago, you would've been more guarded, but after sitting in the same gate for the past day, your words now flowed freely.

"I understand a delay for a rainstorm, but it's been sprinkling since 3 in the morning," the man spoke with a disbelieving tone of voice that made you laugh a bit to yourself.

He looked at you as a wave of laughter consumed your body, soon joining in himself. The situation was absurd, and anyone in your position knew that. You shared a look that could only happen in a circumstance like this, an unspoken connection.

"I think I'd rather just get a car at this point and drive. I just don't think they'll refund my flight if I leave now," you sigh as the man next to you just hummed in agreement.

"Yeah, could've been there already. It's not too long a drive," he thought out loud as you laughed in disbelief again.

The familiar chime of the broadcasting system once again rang, leaving both you and the man sitting to your left looking over at the counter.

"Attention passengers for the 539 flight to Washington D.C., we are now offering a full refund on tickets and a $2000 voucher to those who are willing to give up their seats and find alternate transportation to their destination. For more information, please come talk to a representative for the airline."

People around you buzzed at the new information, but no one moved to get up. You glanced over the man next to you once again, trying to confirm something without saying it out loud.

He whistled at the total of the voucher, looking at you to see your reaction. "2 grand, huh?"

"And reimbursement," you said, nodding your head and jutting out your bottom lip.

Still looking at one another, you could tell the man next to you was having the same thoughts.

"My final stop is D.C., but I have to be there by Friday night," you offered up, hoping he would catch on.

"Same. What is it, only 17 hours on the road, should take 2 or 3ish days give or take," he reasoned.

"Perfect timing for us." You raised your brows at the man.

He smiled back knowingly, reaching to put away his charging cord and pack up his water bottle into his bag. You mirrored his movement, double-checking that you had your credentials tucked away safely.

Rising to your feet, the man next to you did the same as you walked over to the help desk.

"You're not like a creepy serial killer or anything like that, are you?" you questioned with a teasing look.

"Quite opposite, actually," he told you with a grin. "Decorated lieutenant in the Navy."

He smiled widely at this, but you just hummed and narrowed your eyes, looking him up and down. "I'll be the judge of that."

"Wow," he laughed, almost in shock, like he couldn't believe you hadn't swooned or lit up with amazement at his title. "Always so cautious?"

"Always," you affirmed with a shrug of your shoulders, like it was something that was built into you.

Jake's eyes now looked over you, trying to figure out where the certainty of your words had come from.

Before reaching the desk, you turned once more to the man whose name you didn't even know yet to confirm. "So, we're really going to do this?"

He smiled and nodded before speaking, "I've done a lot less for 2000 dollars."

You laughed at this, and his smile seemed to widen, more authentic this time.

"I'm glad we have 3 days on the road, because we'll need to unpack that," you said before turning and heading over to the desk.

જ⁀➴

Jake had snatched the keys from the rental car counter before you could even blink. You think it might have been his sharp smile or jests that distracted you, but as soon as you got settled into the passenger's seat of the car, you fell asleep within the first 15 minutes of the drive.

He opted to not disturb you, not even to turn on the radio. Looking over at your sleeping figure, he made sure to slow down during sharp turns and to keep a good amount of space between him and the cars around him on the freeway, not wanting any sudden stops to disrupt your sleep.

Jake would be lying if he said he hadn't noticed you on the first flight. Your seat was a bit in front of his on the opposite side, and while he was never one to people-watch or eavesdrop, he couldn't help but look as you talked across the aisle with an older woman.

You had a sweet smile on your face and nodded when she talked, and that was all Jake expected. But after 15 minutes of watching both of you, he noticed how engaged you were. You genuinely asked her questions and sat back to listen. He could tell she needed someone to talk to, and you were the perfect candidate.

Not to mention, you were beautiful. The fullness of your cheeks whenever you smiled, the softness of your lips, and your lashes batting every few minutes, had Jake on the edge of his seat, nothing else distracting him, not even the whirling of the loud engines.

Around the 5-hour mark of driving, Jake gently rubbed your shoulder as he pulled into a small diner.

"Ready to eat, Sleeping Beauty?" he asks in a soft voice, not trying to tug fun at you too much. He was happy you were able to fall asleep so easily in front of him after only a few conversations.

You hummed at the touch and words, stretching out a bit in your seat. Jake watched as the t-shirt on your frame tugged up, showing a sliver of your stomach in the process. Between the small huffs and exposed skin, Jake turned away to hide his blush.

It was an odd reaction from him; he was never particularly flustered when seeing some skin, but it was something about the intimacy of it. Watching the relaxed look on your face for the past few hours and seeing how you shifted around next to him made Jake feel like he knew you in a different way, in a way that most people didn't get to see.

"Thanks for not killing me. I was half expecting to wake up in an abandoned cabin in the woods, not Johnny's Roadside Diner." Your voice was quiet, but Jake could see the small smile that graced your face as you looked out at the stop he had chosen.

"What am I going to have to do to win your trust?" he asks, opening the door of the rental car as you did the same.

You hummed, contemplating your answer. But after a few seconds, Jake saw the way your face lit up before speaking, "Buying me a milkshake is a good place to start."

"I'll buy you a whole meal, sweetheart," he tells you with a smile, but you just roll your eyes playfully at him. Jake grabs the door, making you duck under his large frame to enter the small diner.

The host led you towards a small booth near the window. Jake watches as you take in the decor, your eyes lingering on the picture frames hanging on the wall of what looks like the owners and staff over time. Sitting on the bouncy plastic of the booth, you smile softly at the staff as they hand off the menus and leave you alone.

The diner was quiet, other than the low-volume classic rock music coming from a jukebox and the two older men talking lowly at the bar top; it seemed like you and Jake were in your own bubble.

Scanning the menu, you speak unexpectedly. "So, Jake Seresin. Tell me about yourself and your go-to diner meal."

He laughs a bit at this, the question loaded at the front and amusing at the end. Something that Jake figures is normal for you.

"Definitely the Steakhouse Burger with fresh jalapenos," he tells you as you hum. "And I'm a TOPGUN graduate with a Navy Corps Commendation Medal, a Navy Achievement Medal, a National Defense Service Medal–"

Before he could continue, you cut him with a laugh and bright smile. "Whoa. I asked about you, not your medals. Impressive, by the way, just not really what I was looking for."

You tilt your head to the side, looking at Jake, trying to see if he would open up to you.

"Right, sorry." He smiles sheepishly, and a pink dusting appears on his cheeks not long afterwards. "I grew up in Texas," he starts, a little quieter than before. Jake hopes that you take this piece of information and do something good with it, hopes you don't mock him for starting here.

"Texas?" you ask, a smile on your face as he just nods at your question. "Farm boy? No way you're from the city."

He laughs at this, eyes crinkling up at your accurate assessment.

"Yep, born and raised farm boy. Got three older sisters, all still in Texas," Jake offers up as you raise your brows.

"Do you want to move back out when you're older? Or happy with where you're at?" you ask, hoping this might open him up a little more.

He takes a minute, thinking before he gives you an answer. "I like where I'm at now, but maybe I'll move back when I start a family. Don't really get too much of a choice with my job, though," Jake says sincerely. You can almost see the sparkle in his eye as he talks about his future family; it's sweet.

"Family man, then."

"Yes, through and through," he says quickly, a soft smile on his face.

"Yeah, family's important. But, it's hard being away from them," you tell him, breaking eye contact to look down at your nails. "My job takes me away from my loved ones pretty often, too. Maybe not across the globe, like you, but still."

He hadn't said one thing about missing his family or being scared to leave them, but you had picked up on it almost immediately. And you did so by being vulnerable yourself, not putting the spotlight on him.

It freaked him out a bit if he was being honest. But another part of him wondered how you figured it out so easily.

Just as he was about to open his mouth and ask, your waiter appeared at the table ready to take your order. Telling him what you wanted with a polite smile, you handed the menu back to the younger-looking boy and then turned you attention back to Jake.

You watched as his fingers rubbed up against the edge of the table in soothing motions, back and forth. His eyes not quite meeting yours again.

"Do you do that a lot?" you asked him, breaking the tension once more.

At this, Jake looked at you, seeing a small smile on your face. He didn't know what you meant, but knew it wasn't supposed to be malicious. "Do what?"

"Answer questions without really answering them," you said, raising your brows, watching as his face twisted.

"I told you about my family." It was almost defensive in the way he said it, like he had given you information no one else knew about him.

You nodded, trying not to laugh. "You did. And your job and where you're from."

"Those are all normal things to tell someone," he argued back, arms now crossing over his chest.

"Maybe, but that's not what I asked for."

"You want to get to know me, that's me. My family, my job, where I was raised," he pushed back.

You shrugged, leaning back into the booth as Jake seemed to now be on the edge of his seat. "I don't know," you said, head shaking a bit.

"You don't know?" he repeated, eyes narrowing like he was studying you.

You bit down on your bottom lip briefly to contain your smile. "I guess it's just the difference between a biography and a person, y'know?"

For a moment, Jake just stared at you. But this time, his face had relaxed, and his shoulders had dropped, no longer looking to see if you were going to attack. Instead, he was now trying to figure out what to give you.

Most people were satisfied with the call sign, the medals, and the confidence. They liked the polished version. The one who knew exactly what to say and how to say it.

But you didn't seem interested in that at all.

"So, who's Jake?" you asked again, softer this time.

He looked out the window of the diner for a few seconds, eyes tracking the cars that sped past on the nearby road.

"I'm the youngest," he finally spoke. Hands still moving back and forth against the edge of the table, eyes not quite meeting yours yet.

Still, you waited.

"By a lot." A small smile tugged at his mouth at this, like he was recalling a memory.

You hummed, and he finally turned to look at you once again.

"My sisters used to drag me everywhere. Tea parties. School plays. Dance recitals." He shook his head. "They treated me like a doll half the time."

You laughed at his words, and he just smiled at your actions.

"I'm serious," he told you, hands raised like he was being interrogated.

Your laughter continued, head thrown back a bit before you added on, "I can absolutely picture little Jake getting his hair brushed and makeup done."

"That's classified information." His finger pointed out at you at this.

Your grin widened, and Jake found himself smiling too.

"My parents…" He paused, sucking his teeth a bit. "They were good parents. Still are. Worked hard. Expected us to work hard too."

It was quiet again, crackling from the kitchen and the whooshing of the overhead cooling systems in the background.

"There wasn't really room for failure." The words slipped out before he could stop them.

Your expression softened at his admission. "That's a lot to carry when you're a kid."

He shrugged automatically. "It made me who I am."

"Maybe," you said, voice still soft and inviting. Your hand itched against your jeans, wanting to reach out to his from under the table. But you kept it against your denim-clad thigh even as you watched his fingers move tiredly against the table.

The answer seemed to surprise him, though, eyes narrowing a bit as he looked at you. "Maybe?" he repeated.

You nodded.

"Or maybe you would've become a good person anyway," you offered, like it was the easiest thing to say, like it didn't tear open a part of his heart.

Jake didn't know what to say to that. The idea felt foreign. His entire life had been built on earning things: good grades, flight school, his wings, TOPGUN, promotions, respect.

Every milestone was another box checked. Another expectation met.

He wasn't sure he'd ever considered who he was without all of it.

"You know," you said after a moment, "you don't have to be Lieutenant Seresin while you're with me."

Jake snapped out of his stupor at this.

You smiled gently before continuing. "You don't have to anybody's golden boy. I just want to know Jake."

He felt his chest tighten. For the first time since you'd met him in that airport terminal, Jake found himself at a complete loss for words.

And strangely enough, he didn't hate it.

જ⁀➴

"Please tell me we're stopping for the night," you groaned from the passenger's seat. Somewhere between the empty cups of coffee from the diner back in Madison and the annoying voice of the GPS announcing that you had reached Chicago, Jake and you had fallen into a comfortable rhythm.

Maybe it was the aching in your back or the pent-up energy you had from sleeping earlier in the day, but you were itching to get out of the rental car.

Jake laughed as you squirmed in your seat. It had been fun watching you for the past few hours, trying anything and everything to keep yourself entertained.

First, it was a game of I-Spy, but you got over that pretty quickly after Jake had beaten you almost every round. He swore he heard you mumble something about him cheating under your breath. Second, you read the car's safety manual for about five minutes, then put it away, saying you were going to get sick and Jake needed to pull over. His eyes widened at your claim, his mouth opening to ask if you were okay, but you quickly put up a hand to silence him as you huffed in the seat next to him. But most recently, you had been on your phone, doing what, Jake had no idea. But every so often, you gasped silently and jotted something down on a spare napkin from the diner he hadn't even realized you grabbed.

"That's the plan," he told you, eyes glancing over at your sprawled out figure just briefly.

Pulling up to the hotel in the heart of the city, you had practically cheered as Jake put the car in park.

You tugged on your backpack, but before you could grab your carry-on, Jake was hauling it out of the back, claiming it as his own. He had even opened every door from the parking garage to your hotel room, despite both hands being full.

Each time, you laughed and shot him a smile. "Thank you, Jake."

By the time you had reached the hotel room, his cheeks were dusted pink from your careful attention.

You flopped down on your bed face-first. Jake mirrored you, sinking into the desk chair near the entrance of the room.

"It's not even dark yet." Your voice was muffled, face still buried in the white covers.

Trying not to laugh too hard, Jake bit the inside of his cheek.

"Are you tired?" you ask, body rising and twisting to face him. Your hair was now ruffled and your eyes a bit glossy, something that made Jake's heart pound.

"Not really, no," he said honestly.

A smile crept up on your face at this. "Tourist stuff?" you suggested, bottom lip trapped underneath your teeth, trying to contain the grin that would surely light up your face when Jake inevitably agreed.

He raised a brow at your request, but you could see the hidden smile on his face before he confirmed your idea.

"Tourist stuff."

Sure enough, the apples of your cheeks rounded, and you bounced up from your place on the bed.

જ⁀➴

At the Bean, Jake quickly discovered that "tourist stuff" apparently meant being recruited into photographs. You were already approaching a woman holding out an old digital camera before he could protest.

"Would you mind taking our picture?" you asked her sweetly.

The stranger smiled immediately, nodding as you handed off the camera and walked back towards him.

Jake blinked.

Our?

You stepped beside him naturally, like it hadn't required a second thought.

The woman lifted the camera and smiled at the two of you.

Instinctively, Jake moved closer. The picture snapped.

Your hand snuck around his waist before the next one.

By the last click, his arm was draped around your shoulder, big hand landing on your smaller shoulder.

The woman handed your camera back, and you wished her a good day, saying thank you too many times to count.

You immediately started clicking through the photos.

Jake stared at you incredulously.

"What?" You looked up to meet his gaze.

"Nothing," he shrugged, lips pouting a bit.

"No, seriously," you pushed, chin now tilted up to meet his eyes fully.

He shoved his hands into his pockets. "Why'd you want me in them?"

You looked genuinely confused. You could hear the insecurity hidden in his voice, buried but still there.

"Because it's our trip," you offered, voice certain and firm.

He huffed out a laugh. "That's not an answer."

"Sure it is."

His eyes narrowed, still not willing to accept your answer.

"I scrapbook."

Jake snorted at this. "You scrapbook?"

Your brow furrowed, and you gasped dramatically, hand coming up to your chest in mock offense. "Don't sound so surprised."

"I just didn't peg you for a scrapbooker." The way his voice danced, and the grin spread across his face, made you roll your eyes.

"Well, Jake, sometimes people contain multitudes." You picked up your camera again and snapped a picture of him, a grin still painted on his face.

That earned a loud laugh.

"I take pictures everywhere," you told him, the smile on your face softened. "It helps."

Jake's face twisted with confusion at this. "Helps with what?"

You hesitated, shrugging and looking away from him for the second time since meeting. "When work gets bad."

Jake watched you carefully.

You rarely talked about your job beyond vague comments and carefully selected stories. When he had asked questions back at the diner, you had waved them off.

"What do you do with them?" his voice was careful now, no teasing lit in it.

"The pictures?"

He nodded as you looked back up at him.

You glanced back at the screen, clicking through the memories. "Sometimes life gets ugly," the answer came quietly. "And sometimes I need proof that it isn't always like that."

Jake felt something tighten in his chest. He wanted to ask you more, to push you to open up. What type of things were you doing that you needed these reminders? Had anyone hurt you? How could he help you with this pain?

A small smile found your face again after this, but Jake could tell it didn't quite meet your eyes. "This way I can remember the good parts."

The good parts.

His mind drifted to the photograph you had just insisted on taking. To himself, standing beside you. To the smile on your face.

And for a second, Jake couldn't stop thinking about the fact that you'd counted him among them.

જ⁀➴

Drifting around the city for what seemed like forever, you had finally landed in a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant. Bright, neon red lettering read Bellissima across the brick patterning. You grinned at Jake as you tugged him into the small building.

Red checkered tablecloths and wine bottles decorated the interior. Old music played in the background. And at the end of the restaurant, there was a tiny black and white photo booth.

Of course, your eyes found it almost immediately, and you whipped around to look at Jake.

"Oh, my God."

"No."

"Oh, my God."

"Absolutely not."

Five minutes later, he was squeezed into the tiny booth beside you.

"Move over," he half-complained. You were perched up on his lap, one leg thrown over his. The warmth of your body seeped through his denim, making him want to melt into you.

You huffed, pushing up onto his lap even more. "There is literally nowhere to move."

The curtain slid shut as he huffed.

The first flash went off before either of you could prepare, painting a funny and honest picture where Jake was rolling his eyes, and you were scowling at him.

The second click caught Jake and you locking eyes instead of looking at the camera, a small smile on his face, while you bit down on your lip, grinning.

The third featured your hand covering your mouth as you laughed. Jake's smile now overtakes his face, his eyes still trained on you.

The fourth was completely ruined because neither of you stopped laughing in time. Blurry, but still capturing your hands coming up to brace against Jake's chest as his own poked your cheek teasingly.

The machine rattled as you stood outside of it, waiting for a single strip of photos to slide out.

But then, there was another that followed the first. You grabbed both eagerly as Jake laughed. He watched as you studied them, a smile growing on your face.

Without a word, you handed him one.

"For me?" he asked, surprised you had handed one over.

"Obviously," you told him, like it was a no-brainer.

He looked down at the pictures. A stupid little photobooth strip. Four grainy photos. Nothing special.

Except suddenly it felt very special.

"Thanks," he spoke sincerely, eyes still looking at the pictures.

Your smile widened at this, now carefully watching him. "You're welcome."

Jake folded the strip carefully before sliding it into his wallet.

જ⁀➴

Emerging from the steamy bathroom, Jake had a towel draped around his neck and was now changed into an old TOPGUN shirt and loose boxers.

He doesn't know what he expected, but it certainly wasn't this. Jake thought that maybe he'd find you reading a book or scrolling on your phone before bed. Maybe even scrapbooking. But the room was quiet and dark, only his bedside lamp dimly illuminating his surroundings.

For a moment, he thought you'd gone somewhere, maybe out to grab some ice from the machine down the hallway or off wandering around by the pool.

Then he spotted you.

Curled beneath the blankets, fast asleep. Your face was smushed into the soft pillow, mouth open just a bit. It was similar to the scene he had witnessed in the car, but now your entire body was relaxed and sprawled out across the bed. You looked peaceful like this.

And the colorful pajamas you'd changed into looked ridiculously comfortable. The pink fabric loose around your skin made everything about you seem softer.

To top it all off, there were little gel patches beneath your eyes, still in place despite your positioning. It made him chuckle a bit under his breath, and Jake couldn't help the smile that pulled at his mouth.

Cute.

The thought arrived immediately. Dangerously easy for only really knowing you for about one day. He shook his head, trying to shake away the feeling in his chest.

Crossing the room, he lowered himself onto the edge of his own bed. It was soft and cushy, but the sheets were cold when he slipped underneath them. Jake couldn't help but think back to how your arm felt around his waist or the weight of your body on his in the photo booth.

He wasn't sure why you had claimed the bed closest to the door. Jake had tried taking it, but you had claimed you'd sleep better this way. He didn't like the thought of you being the first line of defense if anything happened. Again, he rolled his shoulders, trying to push away those thoughts.

The city glowed beyond the curtains. It was surreal being in Chicago in the first place, but the circumstances made him smile. Walking down the busy streets with you today, hand finding yours if the crowds got too big or too pushy, was something that made Jake's stomach toss.

Traffic hummed somewhere below. He recalled you hailing a cab after dinner. It seemed like second nature to you. He remembers wanting to grab your waist as you stepped out into traffic. But with a raised hand and confident stride, a yellow taxi had pulled up next to you within 10 seconds.

His gaze drifted toward the nightstand. Toward the photo booth strip sticking out of his wallet. A souvenir from a day that shouldn't have mattered, shouldn't have even happened. A woman he should have only known for a delayed flight.

Jake had spent most of his adult life leaving.

Leave home. Leave training. Leave bases. Leave countries.

The people worth missing were always waiting somewhere else.

But sometime between Minneapolis and Chicago, his brain had apparently forgotten the rules.

Because when he thought about tomorrow, he wasn't thinking about Washington.

He was thinking about how many hours were left in the drive.

How many meals.

How many bad gas station coffees.

How many chances he'd have to hear that laugh again.

The realization settled heavily in his chest. Not because he wanted you, no, he couldn't want that. Those thoughts couldn't have a place in his heart. That part had become painfully obvious.

But something else tugged in his brain.

How you'd eventually leave.

And for the first time in a very long time, Jake wasn't sure he wanted to be the one left behind.

You shifted slightly in your sleep. The blankets rustled, then settled again.

A soft inhale and exhale.

Jake leaned back against the headboard and just listened.

For years, his life had been noise. Jet engines. Radio chirping. Big expectations. High pressure. Constant movement.

But here, in a cheap hotel room in Chicago, he just listened to your steady breathing.

Jake felt something he hadn't felt in a very long time.

Peace.

And it scared him a little how badly he didn't want the feeling to end.

જ⁀➴

By the time you left Chicago the next morning, you were feeling significantly more human. You had woken up before Jake, giving yourself time to get ready without disrupting him. By the time you had come out of the bathroom, he was changed out of his pajamas, but his hair was ruffled, and his face was still a little puffy. It was something so small, but it made your heart race.

Walking back to the car, you had now had your morning coffee. Jake had his too, matching cups in your hands. And the world seemed manageable again. Not life-ending like yesterday morning at the airport.

Which was exactly why you held your hand out for the rental car keys.

Jake looked down at your palm. Then back up at you.

"No."

"What do you mean no?" you asked, slightly taken aback by his response.

"No," he repeated, lighter this time, like he was about to laugh.

You scoffed at this. "Why? Because I'm a woman?"

Jake's eyes widened.

"What?" His voice rose to a pitch you had yet to hear. It was almost amusing.

"You heard me," you stated, hand snatching the keys from his grasp in this moment of weakness.

Before you could react, he plucked the keys directly from your hand again.

"No."

He started walking toward the driver's side.

"Jake!" you called out, but he didn't stop. "Why? I feel great. And you did all of the driving yesterday."

He looked over his shoulder. Your face was scrunched up, and your free hand was in a fist by your side. The sight was pretty cute.

Despite this, he decided to tease you even further.

"Because I'm a gentleman."

You barked out a laugh. "A gentleman?"

"That's right," he told you matter-of-factly as you rolled your eyes at him.

"You flirted your way into a free cinnamon roll at breakfast," you said, brows furrowed at the memory of Jake laying it on thick with the barista this morning. He had come back with a wide grin and two forks. You swore the woman shot daggers your way the rest of the morning.

He shrugged at this. "I never said I was a perfect gentleman."

Still, as you settled into the car, you couldn't help but feel a little useless.

"You don't always have to take care of everything, you know. I'm a grown woman."

Jake's grip tightened slightly on the steering wheel as he peeled out of the parking lot. "I know."

The answer came too fast for your liking. Too automatic. Like he had given it no thought at all. Like you couldn't take care of yourself.

You turn toward the window, no real malice in your actions, just the need for space. "Sure."

The car fell quiet.

For a few moments, only tires against pavement filled the space between you.

Finally, Jake sighs. "I wasn't trying to say you couldn't do it."

You shrugged, voice struggling to remain light. "Didn't say you were."

But he could hear it anyway. The frustration. His eyes jumped over to your form. He saw the way your body curled in on itself, hands wrapping around your waist like they would keep you safe.

Jake swallowed. He didn't want you to assume anything. He just wanted you to understand.

"Growing up, my sisters were always getting hurt." His voice was steady in comparison to yours earlier, eyes now trained on the road.

You glance over briefly and see the small grimace on his face as he continues.

"They climbed trees that were too tall. Rode horses without the proper gear. Ran straight into bull pens without thinking."

A small smile tugs at his mouth, like the memory outweighed the feeling of fear.

"And?" you ask, voice still a little small.

"And I got really good at worrying."

The confession hung awkwardly in the air.

It wasn't charming, just honest.

"Oh," you said, chest finally feeling a little lighter. "I guess that's slightly better than sexism."

His eyes flitted over to you again. This time, your knees pointed towards him and your arms were loose at your side.

"Slightly?" Jake scoffed, smiling at you.

"Slightly," you repeated, trying to hold back a laugh.

જ⁀➴

The first few hours passed comfortably. To your surprise, the roads weren't busy, allowing for a peaceful way ahead in your journey.

Quickly into the drive, the radio became your shared entertainment. Every few minutes, you'd switch stations, pausing and listening, then switch again.

After the 5th song, Jake eventually glanced over. "You know you can connect your phone, right?"

You shrugged, like you had known that already. "Where's the fun in that?"

"The fun?" he asked, voice laced with confusion.

"Yeah." You continued scrolling through stations, not offering anything other than the one word. Jake shook his head at your actions, still a smile started to form on his face.

A small gasp was heard as a familiar song started playing. "There."

Jake looked in your direction once again, unimpressed. "You could've listened to that song whenever you wanted," he argued.

"Exactly." You pointed toward the speakers. "But I didn't."

His face twisted at this, ultimately settling in a frown. "I don't get it."

You laughed at his words. Jake's brows were furrowed, eyes trained on the road in front of him. Smiling at the sight, you explained, "When you find a song you love on the radio, it's exciting."

Jake looked like he was trying very hard to understand. "It's the exact same song."

"Jake, no, it's not."

"It literally is," his hand gestured to the radio and then to his phone.

You shook your head. "Nope."

He laughed. "You are ridiculous."

"Maybe," you said, leaning back in your seat. "But it feels more special when you weren't expecting it."

Jake couldn't help but smile at this. There was something oddly endearing about the way you found joy in things most people ignored.

After a few moments of silence, he spoke, "What else?"

You looked over at the man again. Now it was your turn to be confused. "What else what?" you asked, sitting up a bit at the question.

Jake glanced over at you, meeting your gaze, making his smile grow wider. "What else makes you happy like that?"

"Oh." The question surprised you; it was obvious by the way you were now sitting upright, at full attention.

Jake noticed immediately. "What?"

"You've never asked me something like that before," you told him, voice softer like it had been when you were settling down before bed last night. The sound of it made Jake buzz inside.

He shrugged like it wasn't a big deal. Like he asked these types of questions all the time. "I want to know you too."

A swirl of emotions settled in your chest. You were glad Jake couldn't look at you fully right now. Surely you were a mess, making a stupid, surprised face. Still, you looked out the windshield for a moment while thinking, giving yourself a little space to calm the raging pounding of your heart.

Then you smiled at the thought that crossed your mind almost immediately.

"The community stories." Your voice was quiet, and Jake almost didn't pick up what you were saying.

To confirm, Jake glanced over once more. He saw a bashful look on your face, which made him even more intrigued. "The what?"

"You know." Your face brightened a bit more as you explained. "The little stories they do on local news."

Recognition slowly crossed his face. "The feel-good ones?" he asked, voice lifting at the end of his question.

"Yeah, those ones," you confirmed, head nodding.

Jake hummed before continuing. "Those make you happy?"

You laughed a bit at that. "Happy, yes. But, they make me cry."

His eyebrows shot up at the image he was conjuring. You sitting on the couch at the end of the day, sobbing to the news. "Cry?"

"Every single time." The confession was immediate and unapologetic. He could see the way your body relaxed at this, sinking back into your seat with a happy smile.

Jake shook his head, laughing at your words. "You're unbelievable."

"I know." You grinned, biting down on your lip at the ridiculousness of what you had just said. But still, you continued to bare your heart to the man next to you. "There'll be some story about a neighborhood raising money for somebody's medical bills or a little kid helping stray animals or something, and I'll completely lose it."

Jake was openly laughing now. "You're serious."

"Dead serious." You pointed dramatically. "And before you judge me, I strategically watch them before I do my makeup in the morning."

His laughter got even louder, the whole car filling with the noise, the radio long forgotten. "Oh, my God. You schedule your crying?"

"I schedule my happiness," you defended, trying to stay serious. But the smile on your face said otherwise. "Those stories remind me there are good people everywhere."

Jake's grin faded slightly as he saw you turn back to the window, pine tops and leafy trees whirling past you.

"No matter what else is going on, they make me grateful," you told him, voice now soft again, more contained. The quiet was back, only the hum of the dashboard and the small melody of the radio filling the car now.

Jake found himself staring at the road. Thinking. He wanted to push, but he wasn't sure what the right questions were to ask.

Eventually, you nudged his shoulder with your hand. "Your turn."

"My turn?"

You hum at this. "Mhm, what makes you happy?"

The obvious answers came first. Ones that would be rehearsed and polished. Something about flying. About the feeling of completing a hard mission. Words came to mind about how he touched down on the tarmac; the feeling it gave him of being infinitely lighter, stronger.

But after Madison, after Chicago, and after everything you'd shared with him, this answer felt incomplete. Still, he gave it anyway.

"I like finishing a flight."

You smiled knowingly, like you had sensed the war raging within his mind. This time, though, you didn't push; you just laughed. "That tracks."

"It does," he said steadily. But you picked up on the way his breath hitched, like he was trying to get something else out.

Then there was another answer. It was a second thought, a memory he thought he had buried a long time ago. Not something he had told anyone, not even something he had admitted to himself

It wasn't embarrassing, but as the thought formed, his cheeks flushed. "I like hearing birds in the morning."

Your head turned so quickly that your neck would probably be hurting in just a few minutes. "What?"

Jake groaned at this; he could see the smile forming on your face. "See."

"No, no, keep going," you urged, excitement dripping from your words.

He smiled despite himself as he recalled the memory, the feeling. "When I was a kid, my dad used to take me camping."

Your expression softened at this, trying to control yourself at the honesty he was giving you.

"Every summer," he started, eyes stayed on the road. "We'd wake up before sunrise."

You laugh a bit at this. "That sounds awful."

"It was awful," he told you with a smile, words not matching his emotions. "I hated it."

He could practically feel the sleeping bag and cold morning air from those memories. The ache in his muscles from the hikes he had partaken in the days before. The caked feeling of dirt over everything he brought with him, no real way to clean it.

"But every morning there'd be birds everywhere," he wistfully recalled. "Different calls. Different sounds. And eventually I started expecting it."

A small smile appeared on his face at the end of his sentence. You watched carefully as the muscles in his cheeks twitched and the steady rubbing of his thumb on the steering wheel began to come to a halt.

"Now whenever I wake up somewhere and it's completely quiet…" he trailed off, like he was living his words. "I get disappointed."

Your heart squeezed at this confession. Because of course it did. Of all the things he could have said, giving you a half-assed answer about flying, something he gives everyone else, instead, he told you about birds. And somehow it felt more intimate than anything he'd shared so far.

જ⁀➴

Jake climbed back into the driver's seat. You had pulled up to a little gas station to refuel. While Jake pumped the gas, you had booked it into the convenience store.

But as he reached to turn the car back on, he stopped immediately, keys swaying from his fingers.

On the center console, there was a can of Coke Zero, a bag of jalapeño kettle chips, and —

"Herbert's Watermelon Slices?"

You smiled at the goofy look on his face. "Yep."

Jake just stared at you, utterly confused. "How did you know?"

You shrugged, cracking open the can of soda you had gotten for yourself. "I guessed."

"There is absolutely no way," Jake scoffed, his eyes lighting up as he looked at you.

"It was kind of easy," you told him, taking a sip of your drink and putting it down, moving to crack open his can too.

"Easy?"

"Yeah," you nodded. "The burger at the diner, the fruit this morning, the constant waters at every restaurant."

Jake opened his mouth. Then closed it.

"But how'd you get here?" he gestured to the array of snacks between the two of you.

You rolled your eyes at him, like you couldn't believe you were still having this conversation. "I just notice things. Put them together"

"Yeah, I see that now," his eyes narrowed as you just shrugged. "Maybe I should be worried about you being the psycho-killer."

"Hey," you pouted as Jake laughed. "I buy you all these nice things, and this is what I get."

"It's okay, you can be honest, sweetheart," Jake teased as you scoffed.

"I'm never doing anything nice for you again."

Jake burst out laughing at this. He took a swig of the Coke Zero, and you seriously should've looked away. The bobbing of his throat made you squirm in your seat. And the way he licked his lips after was almost criminal.

"I find it flattering," he told you while sending a wink your way.

"Shut up and drive, Seresin."

જ⁀➴

The hotel room had barely settled around the two of you before you were pacing.

Jake watched from his bed as you crossed from one side of the room to the other.

Then back again.

Then again.

"You okay there?"

You stopped immediately.

"No."

His laugh came easily now. "What's wrong?"

"I've been trapped in a car with you for two days," you told him, not thinking much about the words as they left your mouth.

"Wow, rude," he joked, but still you whipped around.

"No, not like that. I mean, like the car," you tried to backtrack, but Jake just chuckled. "I think I'm gonna go for a walk."

At this, Jake sat upright in his place on the bed. "A walk? It's almost dark out."

"You're right," you said, crossing the room to get to where you had slipped off your shoes. Jake sighed at this, glad you were settling down. "I should probably get going then if I want to catch the sunset."

He heard the jingling of your keys and the click of the locks and shot up. "You can't go into a city at night by yourself, it's not safe."

You contemplated this for a moment. Bending down, you tossed Jake his shoes with a smile.

"Well then let's go."

Jake deadpanned you as you paced back and forth by the door. "Seriously?" he asked as you just nodded. "Unbelievable."

But still, he tied his laces and let you lead the way.

The city is busy at this time of day, the sun just about to set on the horizon. Apparently, Jake isn't walking fast enough, because you tug on his hand, lacing your fingers through his as you urge him to hurry. He smiles and isn't sure if it's because of the urgency of your words or the feeling of your smaller, softer hand in his.

Coming to an outlook at a nearby park, Jake and you stand side by side to watch the pinks and oranges of the sky turn into purples and dark blues.

"Go stand by the railing," you tell him, hand dropping from his. His eyes immediately track it, searching for it. But he sees you reach into your jacket pocket for the old camera and just shakes his head.

"Just me?" he asks, brows draw in the middle.

"Yes, just you. Just for me, okay?" you ask, smile on your face as the camera shifts to life in your hands. And when you put it like that, Jake can't help but agree, leaning against the railing without any more complaints.

You raise the camera up to your face, and Jake smiles as the flash goes off, not noticing any of the sweet looks you both are getting from people around you. However, a young girl comes up to you and you nodded vigorously while handing over the camera.

For the second time in two days, you're standing next to Jake for another picture. This time, though, his arm slips over your shoulder like muscle memory, and your hand comes around his waist with a squeeze that makes him jump.

The moment is captured in a blink, Jake looking down at you with a surprised grin while you bury your head into his chest, laughing sweetly.

She comes back up to you both after snapping a few more pictures, handing you back the camera with a blush. Jake almost misses it; the girl is quite shy and only looking at you, but he hears the passing comment as she hands off the camera.

"You guys are such a cute couple."

You laugh at this, not mockingly, but like it actually made you happy to hear the words. Before you could respond, she hurries back to her family with a wave and smile.

Jake just watches you. The crinkling of your eyes and smile lines around your mouth. Every time he looks at you, he finds something else that fascinates him.

"I've never met anyone like you," he admits, the words coming out without him meaning to say anything at all.

But just as he's about to backtrack and explain himself, you smile brightly and repeat the sentiment, "I've never met anyone like you."

You're smiling up at him now, looking at him like you really believe what you've just said. He can't help but glance down at your lips.

As he catches himself, he looks back up at your eyes and sees you do the same to him. But quickly, your eyes meet again and you just laugh.

"Come on, I'm hungry," you say, but there's no real push in your voice. Jake listens anyway and nods.

The park is dark now, only spaced-out lampposts illuminating your way. Still, you walk with confidence, as if you know the city like the back of your hand.

"Are you sure you know where we're going?" Jake asks, voice laced with skepticism.

"Yes, I promise. I had the best veggie sandwich at this little stand just a little bit this way, like 4 cases ago," you tell him, steps not faltering.

"What do you mean case—"

"Here! I told you!" You cut him off as soon as a small food truck comes into view. Sure enough, Sal's Sandwiches stood at the edge of the park. Small picnic tables taken up by families, couples, and groups of friends surrounding the structure.

Scanning the area, you point to a table not too far away from the truck.

"Can you go save that one?" you ask as he follows your finger and nods. "Thanks, Jake."

You split from him, heading towards the line. Jake watches as you go, your head on a swivel for the first few seconds before you settle in line and begin talking with the person in front of you, because, well, of course you do.

Jake chuckles at your behavior, watching as you light up, talking with the people around you. What's especially odd, though, is that when you make your way up to the window of the truck, an older man comes rushing out and scoops you up into a hug.

He can see the way the man fuses over you, but you wave him off, offering another hug. He sees the way some of the other workers poke their heads out to say hi to you as you wave. Soon enough, he's patting you on the back and sending you on your way with a bag and two canned drinks.

As you place the objects down on the table, you start talking immediately, "I got you the Meat Tornado, fresh jalapenos, don't worry. Sal says it's yummy."

"Sal?" Jake asks with an amused look on his face.

"Yeah, come on, try it!" you urge, unwrapping your own sandwich.

As Jake's teeth sink into the fluffy bread and perfectly flavored meat and veggies, he groans. "Oh, my God."

"Right," you laugh, taking a bite of your own sandwich now. Jake has to look away as your eyes roll back into your head with delight.

"I swear this is the best sandwich I've ever had," he tells you, mouth still full. You laugh, hand coming up to cover your mouth.

"Stop, you're gonna make me choke," you say, slapping him lightly on the chest as he laughs.

"Sorry, sorry," he apologizes as you shake your head at him.

You sit for a few moments like that, just eating and enjoying each other's company. That is, until a black beetle finds its way onto the table between you.

You all but throw your sandwich in the air and scream bloody murder when it crawls towards you. Quickly, you rise to your feet and run over to hide behind Jake.

"Seriously?" he asks, throwing a teasing look over your shoulder, but when he sees the fear on your face, he quickly turns back to the bug, swatting it away.

A few moments pass, and you make your way back to your seat. "Sorry, they just freak me out," you explain, but the way your eyes don't meet his makes Jake think this might be something deeper than just an irrational fear.

"No biggie, all got our stuff," he says, giving you an easy out. You just nod at this, hands still placed in your lap and eyes still trained on the ground.

Jake reaches out for your hands, encompassing them with his own. The action finally makes you look up at him, he can see the tears brimming on your lashes.

"Y'know if we were out in the woods right about now, I'd be exactly the same as you are now."

Your brows furrow at his words, but he can see the way they've temporarily distracted you, and that's enough for him to keep going.

"When I was a kid, I ran away from home. I was that age where if I didn't get what I wanted, I just started running."

You laugh softly at his admission. He just slides closer towards you, body fully facing you now.

"This one night, I ran into the woods before dinner started. My mom made chili, and I wanted hot dogs. Not a great night for me. So I took off, and before I knew it, the sun had set, and I was all alone out there. No idea where I was," his voice was careful. Not trying to make you feel like he was patronizing you, but still concerned.

Your breathing slowed down a bit now, chest not heaving as much as it had been a few minutes ago.

"I was out there for what felt like hours. Only tall trees around me, wherever I turned. I didn't know if anyone would find me, if anyone was even looking in the right spot."

Your bottom lip caught between your teeth as a tear slipped down your face. God, so empathic, he thought. Thumb coming up to wipe away wetness and hold your face in his palm.

"But my dad found me, just around dawn. I remember running into his arms and crying all the way home. My sisters and mom fussed over me as soon as we came through the door. She never made chili again," Jake joked.

You laughed, watery but there.

"Yeah, but I, uh," Jake's face twisted, and now it was your turn to squeeze his hand.

He cleared his throat before continuing.

"Two years ago, a buddy of mine and I were flying over these forests on a mission. Everything was going good, we were just reserve, not really doing anything but surveillance and back up," his voice shakes at the memory.

"It's okay," your voice is barely there, but Jake's eyes find yours immediately.

"No, I want to," he tells you as you nod, hand gripping yours even tighter now. "But we were flying one minute, and the next we got separated. An ambush. It was just for a few seconds, but I lost him. The radar lost him. I didn't know where he went. Still don't."

His breathing hitches at the thought, something that still haunts him.

"I don't," he starts, voice weak. "I don't want to go like that. I can't leave my family like that. Not like that."

You nod, a hand coming up to meet the one on your cheek. Jake's eyes find yours, and he smiles, something wobbly, but he tries for you.

"I'm sorry, Jake."

But he just shakes his head. "Not your fault, don't gotta be sorry, sweetheart."

You can see the walls coming back up, protection and shields all taking their place.

"About a year ago, I was out in Iowa, of all places," you huff, a laugh bubbling despite yourself. "And, um, I got stuck in this barn. For a while. And there were these black beetles that would crawl from under the floorboards and gaps in the wood at night."

Jake sees the distress on your face at the recall of the memory.

"And I couldn't move. They crawled all over me, and I couldn't move. It was three days until my team found me. But by then I had all these little bites across my skin, didn't know where I was."

Another tear slipped down your cheek, but this time Jake's hand caught it before it could drip down your chin.

"So I can't do bugs. Those bugs especially."

"That's okay," Jake told you, voice still soft. "Bugs are dumb anyway."

You laugh at this, fully this time. It makes Jake smile. "So dumb. Just like the woods."

Now it's his turn to laugh, eyes finding yours. "So dumb," he repeats.

You share a look, something like recognition, like understanding. You lean in and collapse on Jake's shoulder. Nose finding the softness of his neck and hands wrapping around his broad back. His hand shifts to hold the back of your head, rubbing soothing strokes in your hair. The other finds your lower back, bringing your body even closer into his hold.

જ⁀➴

"There he is!" Javy's voice rang out from across the hotel courtyard.

Jake grinned at the sight of his squad, all done up in dress whites for the event tonight.

"Thought you'd never make it, Bagman," Nat jests as he just rolls his eyes.

"Yeah, where've you been, man?" Rooster asks, hand coming down to clamp on the man's shoulder.

"Roadtrip. My flight got delayed, so we decided to drive from Minneapolis," he shrugged.

"We?" Javy's brows furrowed as he looked to his best friend. The squad all looked towards Jake expectantly.

Like a deer in headlights, Jake froze at the slip. "Yeah, me and this girl I met at the airport."

"Oh, my God. This sounds like plot from a shitty rom-com," Nat laughed as she watched Jake's cheeks heat up.

"Shut up, Phoenix," he swatted his hand in her direction as her laughs grew louder.

"No, no, she's right. Are you guys in love now?" Rooster chuckled as Phoenix continued to cackle next to the tall man.

Jake recalls the end of last night. How you had walked back to the hotel, hand in hand. He remembers the look you gave him after coming out of the bathroom, hair still damp and dripping at the ends. He can still hear the crinkling of his sheets as he moves to make room for you. He swears he can still smell the freshness of your hair and the sweetness of your body lotion as you sank in next to him in the sheets. He knows he'll never forget the feeling of your soft skin under his rough hands, the contrast not lost on him. But the way that you had relaxed further in his hold only reassured him, hand coming to wrap around your body tighter, pulling you closer.

"Holy shit, he is," Javy spoke, mouth hanging open a bit.

"Shut up," he said again quickly.

"Well, where is she?" Bob asks, eyes finding Jake's.

"I don't know, actually. She dropped me off here earlier today, still need the rental car for this weekend," he explained, hand instinctively reaching to find his wallet.

"What about her number? Don't tell me you didn't ask," Phoenix questions, invested fully now despite her jests.

"We were with each other 24/7, I guess I just didn't think about it," Jake's voice is uncharacteristically soft as he talks. His hands dig into his wallet, fingers grasping the photo strip. He holds it out in Javy's direction.

"Damn," he says breathlessly, passing it to Rooster next.

"Are you an idiot, man? Do you see the way she's looking at you here," Bradley huffs, handing the strip to Phoenix.

"Forget her, look at Bagman. He's head over heels," she says, giving the photos to Bob.

"Wow, man. You gotta find her," Bob tells him, eyes wide as he takes in the pictures.

"I don't even know where she's staying. Or even where she lives or what she does for work," Jake groans.

"How did you not talk about this? Didn't you spend, what, like two or three days together?" Phoenix asks, voicing her disbelief.

"We talked about other stuff. Deeper stuff," Jake shrugged.

"Oh, Jesus," Bradley laughs out. "You've got it bad, man."

"Don't you think I know that, Rooster!" Jake groans as the squad laughs at his misery.

"Alright, aviators, it's time to head out," Maverick's voice boomed. The group rose to their feet and made their way out of the hotel. Somewhere in between the shuffle, the photo strip landed back in Jake's hand. He looked down at it once more, eyes finding your smiling face. There was nothing he could do now, well, at least not until after the State Dinner.

જ⁀➴

"Oh gosh, he's dreamy," Penny tells you as she looks at the photos from your trip.

"I know," you sigh, slumping further into yourself as you sit at the table. The form-fitting dress seems too constricting for your dramatics, digging into your ribs as you slouch.

"I could always look him up, y'know. Track him. You said he's in the city, right?" she asks, hand already reaching for her phone.

"No, no, Penny. We can't do that. He didn't ask for my number or anything when I dropped him off. I don't want to push it," you ruminated over the memory. "Maybe I just made it all up. Like it was all in my head."

She cooed at this, hand coming to rub soothing circles on your shoulder.

"I'm sure he felt it too. Maybe he just wasn't thinking," she offers. You groan at the thought.

"He went out this morning. Early, before I got up. Got us pastries and coffee from this place we passed by last night. They were so yummy," you whine as she laughs a bit.

Jake ran his fingers through your hair to wake you this morning. When you opened your eyes, you were met with the sight of a brown paper bag and a goofy smile. It made you flush even now, just thinking about it, thinking about him.

"And he checked the hotel room both nights before bed. The locks and windows. I didn't even get the chance to do it," you tell her with a frown.

"Dream man," she teases.

"You have no idea," you say, ignoring the teasing lit in her voice. "I told him about Iowa."

"Really?" The woman next to you now in shock at your words.

"Not everything, obviously, but I told him. And it felt good. He made me feel safe," you confess as she looks at you with a sad expression.

"Well, come on, let's get a drink in you. Maybe that will help," Penny tells you, beckoning you to follow her to the open bar.

You sigh, but walk with her and eventually order your usual drink.

Sipping on your drink, you spit it out almost immediately as it hits your tongue, a loud voice ringing in your ear.

"It's you!"

You and Penny look at the man next to you in curiosity. He had a handlebar mustache and a big grin on his face. Neither of you recognized him.

"Stay here, please. Just stay," he said, setting his drink down and rushing across the room.

Looking back at Penny, you frown. "What the hell was that about?"

She opens her mouth to respond, but you see a stunned look overcome her face. "Oh, oh!"

"What? You're freaking me out," you question as she begins to jump up and down a bit.

"You never did tell me what you did for work. Policy analyst? Campaign strategist?" a familiar voice says from behind you.

Turning around, you see him. "Jake." You face lights up at the sight of him.

"So am I close?" he teases as you pull him into a hug.

"I can't believe you're here." Your voice is muffled as he pulls you closer into his grasp, your face buried in his neck as his comes down to dip over your shoulder.

"Yeah, I'm here," his tone is tender now, not teasing. You can feel his hands wrap around your waist, fingers almost digging into the silky fabric of your dress.

You pull back just enough to look at his face. Jake's mouth stretches into a goofy grin, eyes not leaving yours.

"FBI agent," you tell him, watching his brows shoot up.

"Wow. Seriously?" he asks as you just nod shyly. "So that's why you had so many serial killer questions for me."

You laugh at this, head thrown back a bit, completely missing the look of adoration Jake throws your way.

Jake laughs against your forehead, still holding you close.

"You have any idea how close I came to having one of my squad members file a missing persons report for a woman whose last name I didn't know?" Jake admits, voice quiet, so only you could hear.

Your eyes widen at this. You feel your heart beating wildly in your chest. "You were looking for me?"

Jake gave you a look as if you had said something so unbelievably obvious. "Sweetheart, I spent the last hour getting roasted by every pilot I know because I couldn't answer a single question about you."

The admission settled warmly in your chest as you looked into his eyes.

For the first time since Minneapolis, neither of you was rushing somewhere. No delayed flight. No rental car. No hotel checkout.

Now, it was just the two of you. The sound of classical music and soft chatter in the background, but you only heard Jake's steady breathing, grounding you in this moment.

"I was looking for you too," you confess quietly.

He was quiet for a minute, not expecting your words. "You were?"

You nod, head dropping into his strong chest as the words spill out of you, "Penny offered to run your name through three different databases."

He barks out a laugh. "That's terrifying."

"That's what I said," you mumble, cheeks flushing a bit at the thought.

"No, that's actually terrifying."

Meeting his eyes again, you can't help but start laughing. Jake joins in, and the sound eases something that had been wound tight since the moment you dropped him off that morning.

For a second, neither of you speaks.

The ballroom buzzes around you. Glasses clink. People talk and laugh. Somewhere across the room, you hear a man loudly telling someone he deserved credit for this reunion.

But all of it fades into the background.

Jake's gaze softens as he looks to you.

"You know what I've been thinking about?"

"What?"

"The radio."

You smiled immediately, face twisting a bit in confusion. "The radio?" you parrot.

"The stupid thing you said," he offered, like it would help you narrow things down.

Your grin widened. "You're gonna have to be more specific."

Jake rolled his eyes, smile still on his face. "About songs."

Recognition flashed across your face, mouth parting as you spoke, "Oh."

"You said it felt more special when you weren't expecting it." Jake glanced down for a moment before looking back up. "I think that's what this was."

The words stole the air from your lungs.

A delayed flight. A cancelled trip. A random seat at a gate in Minneapolis. A road trip that never should have happened.

And somehow, here he was. Here you were.

Jake smiled nervously, something you hadn't seen from him before. It made your tummy turn in the best way possible.

"But I don't really want to leave the rest of it up to chance," he spoke once more.

Your breath caught at his words. "No?"

He shook his head. "No."

Then he reached into the pocket of his dress whites and pulled out the photo booth strip. The edges were already worn, like he had pulled it in and out of his wallet every few minutes.

"I think we should go on a date. You know, a proper one."

You laughed at this; the simple statement seemed so ridiculous and at the same time riveting. "A date?"

"One where we aren't fleeing an airport," he offered. You tracked as his thumb brushed across the photo.

You pretended to mull it over, eyes looking towards the ceiling. "That does sound nice."

"And maybe one where we don't share a rental car for three days first."

"Hm. I don't know. That's become kind of my standard," you deadpanned.

Jake groaned at this. "You're impossible."

"But you're asking anyway," you spoke quietly, hand coming to meet his on the photo strip.

His smile returned immediately. "Yeah."

"Good."

Jake's eyes searched yours, boyish charm now all worn off. You only saw vulnerability and wonder across his face. "Good?"

"Because I'd really like another picture for my scrapbook," you told him with a smile.

The grin that spread across his face was brighter than anything you'd seen from him since Minneapolis.

His hand comes up from your waist and lands on your cheek. You nodded slightly, tongue coming out to wet your lips quickly.

When he kissed you, you felt yourself melt into his touch. Thoughts of missed planes, long stretches of road, and cheap diner food are all gone from your brain.

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

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

Eyes appeared to follow you wherever you went.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You snorted into your coffee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thought alone made you look up.

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

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

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

"How bad is it?" you asked worriedly.

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

Clark suddenly turned and you barely had time to react.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Will you be long?" 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You dropped into your chair and opened the file immediately.

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

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

Your grin finally earned a small laugh from her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And it holds?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's perfect," he said quietly.

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

"And it's finally done."

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

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

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

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

"Shall we prepare for the baby?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back at the Fortress…

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

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

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

"Hi, sweetheart. Everything okay?" 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You're going to need them."

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

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

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

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

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

"We're taking a trip tomorrow."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your lips parted.

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

You took a few steps toward it without deciding to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Welcome back, sir."

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

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

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

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

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

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

You looked at Twelve and smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Noted."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You, on the other hand–"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I trust the math." He nodded firmly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twelve approached. "Sir, your vitals–"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snow shimmered below and the sky was pale, endless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"...Please."

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

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

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

After that, everything blurred again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A quiet breath left him before he continued.

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

His gaze lifted fully to yours at that.

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

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

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

It was clear nothing about it had been accidental.

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

Your brows softened.

“I made it out of my ship.”

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

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

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

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

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

When you turned, there he was, holding a paper bag that’s more bottle than groceries.

Tall. Disheveled. Eyes red and tired in a way that spoke of something more than sleepless nights. His hands shook slightly when he held up a crumpled five-dollar bill.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “Just… just coffee. Black. If you’ve got any left.”

Something about him made you unlock the door. Maybe it was pity. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was the way he said sorry like he’d been saying it his whole life.

You brewed the coffee and handed it over without charging him.

He blinked, surprised.

“You sure?”

You shrugged. “You look like you need it more than I need five bucks.”

He huffed out a laugh—small, raspy, but real.

“Bob,” he said, after a long pause. “My name’s Bob.”

“Nice to meet you, Bob,” you said, wiping the counter. “I’m—”

He cut in gently. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m not great company.”

But you told him anyway. The rain started to pour, and Bob looked worried, so you decided to make conversation.

You tell him about juggling multiple jobs, about your tiny apartment that smells of bleach and loneliness. He listens, then starts to tell you how he’s also in between jobs, in between apartments, barely holding it together. You both laugh at how pitiful it sounds, the sound fragile but warm in the quiet room—and still, neither of you pulls away.

There was something about Bob—not the kind of pull that makes your heart race, but the kind that makes you feel seen. Like someone finally looked up and realized you existed.

Somehow, the rain finally stopped and he walked you home that night. Not because he’s trying anything—he never even hints at it—but because he’s the kind of man who, even with his own demons chewing through him, still wants to make sure you get inside safely.

You don’t see him again for three days. Then, you do.

You see him standing outside a convenience store, holding another bag of groceries, but this time there’s no bottle. He looks jittery, restless—the kind of anxious that lives in your bones. You offer him coffee from the store, and he takes it like it’s a sacred thing. That becomes your routine: coffee, small talk, soft smiles. A fragile friendship built on exhaustion and second chances neither of you believe in yet.

Over time, you see pieces of him—the way he stares at his hands like they’re strangers, how he twitches when sirens echo in the distance, how he apologizes for everything, even when there’s nothing to apologize for. He tells you once, in a quiet moment, that sometimes he feels like something’s inside him. Something terrible, like a storm waiting to break. You don’t understand what he means then, not really, but you tell him he’s not alone.

He told you, eventually, that he was trying to get clean. You didn’t judge him. You just listened.

He told you about the loneliness, the fog, the days he couldn’t remember, the nights he didn’t want to. About the pain of trying to do better and failing again and again.

“I want to stop,” he said once, fingers clenched around his mug. “I really do. But it’s like… every time I try to climb out, something pulls me back in.”

You reached across the counter and covered his hand with yours. “Then we keep climbing,” you said softly. “Together.”

He stared at your hand for a long time. Then, quietly, “You shouldn’t waste that kindness on someone like me.”

And you, with a steady voice you didn’t know you had, replied, “Maybe I’m not wasting it.”

He starts showing up cleaner. Shaved. Wearing an old flannel that smells like detergent instead of whiskey. Sometimes he helps you carry groceries, sometimes he fixes your kitchen light or unclogs the drain. You try not to read into it, but when he smiles now, it feels different. Brighter.

And then one night, after weeks of dancing around it, he shows up at your door in the rain. He’s soaked, trembling—not from withdrawal this time, but from fear. He tells you he’s been sober for thirty days. That he wanted to tell someone who might actually care. You let him in.

The air between you changes that night. He laughs until his shoulders loosen, and when you brush a stray curl from his forehead, he catches your wrist like he can’t believe you’re real. The kiss happens slowly—hesitant, trembling—but when it happens, it feels inevitable. Like every bad thing you’ve survived led here, to this tiny moment of peace.

Later, when you wake up tangled in him, the world feels still for the first time in a long time. His breath is warm against your shoulder, and you think, maybe, this could be the start of something that doesn’t hurt.

Bob Reynolds will always be a man running from himself—but that night, he holds you like maybe he’s found something worth staying for.

-----------------------------------

Days become weeks. Weeks turn into something quieter, steadier—the kind of rhythm you didn’t think possible with someone like Bob Reynolds. He starts coming around more often, still shy about it, still asking “are you sure you don’t mind?” every time he crosses your threshold.

You mind a little—but only because it terrifies you how much you’ve come to depend on him.

Bob’s different now. He’s not all better—you still catch the haunted look in his eyes sometimes when he thinks you aren’t watching—but he’s trying. You see the effort in everything: in how he walks past the liquor aisle without stopping, in the way he fiddles with his hands when cravings hit, in how he repeats your words back to himself when you talk, as if trying to memorize every sound that makes you smile.

Sometimes, when he’s helping you fix something around the apartment, you’ll glance over and see him lost in thought, eyes distant but soft. When you ask, he shrugs. “Just thinking about… how different everything feels now.”

And then he always smiles—that shy, lopsided smile that makes him look younger, gentler—and you forget to breathe for a moment.

He gets a job eventually, at a local repair shop run by an old friend who doesn’t ask too many questions. He comes home with grease under his nails and the faintest glow of pride. He’ll tell you about how he rebuilt an engine or got a radio to work again, and you’ll listen, watching his hands move as he talks—animated, alive. You love his hands. They used to tremble, but now they’re steady, certain

Nights are slow. Intimate in their own quiet way. He’ll fall asleep on the couch beside you while some old movie hums in the background, his head resting against your shoulder, his warmth pressing through the thin fabric of your shirt. When he sleeps, he looks peaceful—like the world finally stopped demanding things from him.

Then one day, you threw up. Then another. And another.

You don’t plan it. You never do.

The morning you realize you’re pregnant starts like any other: gray light spilling through half-drawn curtains, the faint hum of traffic outside, Bob snoring softly beside you. His arm is draped over your waist, heavy but comforting, like an anchor. You lie there for a while, your hand resting against your stomach, trying to convince yourself it’s just nerves or hormones or the universe playing a cruel joke.

But deep down, you already know.

You’ve been nauseous for a week, and the scent of coffee—your morning ritual—makes your stomach twist. You’d brushed it off as stress, but when you finally force yourself to look at the test, those two solid pink lines steal the air from your lungs.

You sink to the floor, the tile cold beneath your legs. Tears come fast—not from sadness, but fear. Fear because everything was finally starting to make sense, and now it’s all about to change again. You’re not ready for this. Bob isn’t ready for this.

You want to be happy. You want to be brave. But your hands won’t stop shaking.

You hide the test under the sink and go about the next day like nothing happened. But the secret sits under your tongue, heavy as lead. Every time he smiles, it twists something inside you. Every time he reaches for your hand, you think, he deserves peace, not another reason to break.

The days stretch. You practice the words in your head a hundred times: Bob, I need to tell you something. Each time you almost say it, fear steals your voice.

One night, he finds you crying in the kitchen, forehead pressed to the cool surface of the counter. He doesn’t ask why at first—he just wraps his arms around you and lets you shake. When you finally speak, it’s a whisper.