writing soft metal boys & sharp emotions

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.

Bucky dropped his duffel, shrugging off his jacket. “I told you I’d be home by eight. It’s nine-thirty. You could’ve at least answered one message.”

You shrugged, stretching so the hem of his shirt rode up your thighs. “Maybe I was busy. Or maybe I just like making you work for it.”

There it was. That bratty tone. The one that always tested how long his patience would last. He crossed the room in three strides, looming over the couch. His metal fingers flexed at his sides. “You’ve been pushing it all week, sweetheart. Ignoring me. Teasing me with pictures you know I can’t open in the field. Now you’re gonna act like I’m the one who’s late?”

You sat up slowly, eyes sparkling with challenge. “What are you gonna do about it, Buck? Spank me? Tie me up? You always say that and then fold when I bat my lashes.”

He stared down at you, jaw tight. The serum made him strong, but nothing tested his control like you in full brat mode. “Keep running that mouth and you’ll find out.”

Instead of backing down, you leaned forward, letting the neckline of the henley dip low enough to show the soft swell of your breasts. “Promises, promises.”

Bucky’s hand shot out, catching your chin. Not hard, but firm enough to tilt your face up. “Bedroom. Now.”

You giggled and slipped past him, hips swaying with deliberate insolence. He followed, already half-hard from the sight of you. By the time he closed the bedroom door, you were perched on the edge of the bed, knees together, looking far too innocent for someone who’d spent the last hour driving him insane.

“Strip,” he ordered.

You tilted your head. “Make me.”

He stepped closer, towering over you. “Don’t test me tonight, doll. I’m not in the mood for games.”

But you were. You tugged the hem of the shirt up just enough to flash your panties, then let it fall again. “Too bad. I am.”

Bucky exhaled sharply through his nose. He reached down and yanked the henley over your head in one swift motion, leaving you bare from the waist up. Your nipples tightened instantly in the cool air. You made a show of crossing your arms over your chest anyway, pouting up at him.

“Brat,” he muttered. His flesh hand cupped your jaw again while the metal one trailed down your sternum, stopping just above where you were covering yourself. “You love pushing me until I snap, don’t you?”

“Maybe I just like what happens when you do.”

He studied you for a long moment, something dark and hungry flickering in his blue eyes. Then he straightened up, unbuckling his belt with deliberate slowness. “Get your tits out. I want to jerk off.”

The words hung in the air, blunt and filthy. Your eyes widened, a flush creeping up your neck, but you didn’t move right away. The brat in you wanted to push one more time.

Bucky arched a brow. “Now, sweetheart. Or I’ll do it myself and you can watch without touching.”

That got you. You uncrossed your arms slowly, letting your breasts spill free. They were perfect—soft, full, nipples already pebbled and begging for attention. You cupped them lightly, pushing them together just to taunt him.

“Better?” you asked sweetly.

“On your knees.”

You slid off the bed, sinking down in front of him. Bucky freed his cock, already thick and heavy, the tip glistening. He wrapped his metal hand around the base and gave himself one slow stroke while his flesh hand tangled in your hair.

“Look at you,” he growled. “Acting like you run the show until I tell you exactly what I want. Keep those pretty tits right there.”

He pumped his fist over his length, eyes locked on your chest. The wet sound of skin on skin filled the room. You shifted on your knees, thighs pressing together, heat pooling between them. Watching him like this, using you as his personal visual, made you ache.

“Touch them,” he commanded. “Play with your tits while I get off.”

You obeyed this time, rolling the sensitive buds between your fingers, pinching just hard enough to make yourself gasp. Bucky’s grip in your hair tightened.

“Fuck, that’s it. Look so good like this. My bratty little girl on her knees, tits out, letting me jerk off all over them if I want.”

His strokes grew faster, rougher. Pre-cum beaded at the tip and he smeared it down his shaft. You leaned forward instinctively, tongue darting out, but he tugged you back by the hair.

“Not yet. You don’t get to taste until you’ve learned to listen.”

You whined, but kept playing with your breasts, squeezing them together, arching your back to present them better. The power shift was intoxicating. One minute you were defying him, the next you were dripping and desperate just from his words and the sight of his hand working that gorgeous cock.

Bucky’s breathing grew ragged. “You gonna behave now? Or do I need to edge myself while you sit there aching?”

“I’ll behave,” you breathed, voice husky. “Please, Buck…”

He smirked, the first real one since he walked in. “Good girl. Finally.”

He let go of your hair and stepped closer, rubbing the slick head of his cock against one nipple, then the other. The sensation made you moan. Then he was stroking again, faster, using your tits as his target.

“Come on them,” you whispered, looking up at him with wide, needy eyes. “I want it.”

That did it. Bucky groaned deep in his chest, muscles tensing as he came hard. Thick ropes of cum painted your breasts, dripping down the curves, catching on your nipples. He milked every drop, breathing hard.

For a moment, the only sound was your mingled breathing. Then he hauled you up, kissing you fiercely, not caring about the mess between you. His hands roamed down your body, shoving your panties aside to find you soaked.

“Bed,” he rasped against your mouth. “We’re not done. You’ve got a lot of making up to do.”

You laughed breathlessly as he tossed you onto the mattress. “Yes, Sergeant.”

He climbed over you, metal arm bracing beside your head while his flesh hand spread your thighs. “Keep calling me that and I might let you come more than once tonight.”

What followed was a blur of heat and surrender. Bucky ate you out like a man starved, tongue and fingers working you until you were shaking, then flipped you over and fucked you deep and slow from behind. Every thrust pushed your cum-smeared tits into the sheets. He pulled your hair, smacked your ass when you tried to rush him, and whispered filthy praise in your ear.

“You love being my brat, don’t you? Love making me take control.”

“Yes—fuck—yes, Bucky!”

He came again inside you this time, holding you tight as you clenched around him. Afterward, he cleaned you up gently with a warm cloth, pulling you against his chest.

“Next time you wanna brat out,” he murmured, kissing your temple, “just say so. I’ll remind you who’s in charge quicker.”

You smiled sleepily, tracing the scars where metal met skin. “Where’s the fun in that?”

"Doll."

"Hm?"

"You have my keys."

"I know."

"...Can I have them back?"

You can't help the grin that stretches across your face. "No."

He sets the boot aside and leans back against the couch, folding his arms over his chest. "You're being incredibly suspicious."

"I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."

"Really? Because you've been whispering with Natasha all week, Sam keeps smirking every time I walk into a room, Steve suddenly finds every excuse in the world to get me out of the apartment..." He tilts his head, amusement already tugging at the corners of his mouth despite himself. "Even Alpine had a ribbon tied around her neck this morning."

You fail miserably at hiding your smile.

"So there is something."

"There might be."

"You gonna tell me?"

"Nope."

Instead, you step between his knees, cup his face, and kiss him until he forgets whatever argument he was trying to make. By the time you pull away, his expression has softened into that fond, hopeless smile that always appears whenever you successfully distract him.

"Just trust me," you whisper. "Be ready by four. Wear the navy suit."

"The expensive one?"

"The expensive one."

His eyebrows rise. "Now I'm even more concerned."

---

By the time four o'clock arrives, Bucky is convinced the entire team is conspiring against him.

Sam arrives to pick him up because, apparently, his fiancée is still refusing to return his car keys, and Steve somehow ends up in the passenger seat despite insisting he "just happened to be nearby." Neither of them will answer a single question.

"Where are we going?"

"You'll see."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting."

"I've been tortured by professionals with better poker faces than you two."

Sam snorts so hard he nearly misses a turn.

"You're both terrible liars."

"And yet," Steve says far too calmly, "you're still coming with us."

Bucky sighs dramatically and settles back into his seat, crossing his arms.

"I don't like surprises."

Steve glances at him through the rearview mirror, his smile turning gentler.

"I know."

---

Meanwhile, you're fairly certain you're going to throw up before your own wedding.

Not because you're second-guessing anything—God, no. If anything, you've never been more certain of a decision in your life.

You're nervous because you desperately want him to understand.

The ceremony isn't being held in one of the sleek venues every wedding magazine recommended. Instead, it's tucked inside a restored historic building in Brooklyn with polished hardwood floors worn smooth by decades of dancing, exposed brick walls, warm amber chandeliers, and tall windows that let the late afternoon sunlight spill across the room like liquid gold.

Everything feels timeless.

It feels like him.

Months ago, while the two of you were lazily watching an old black-and-white movie curled up on the couch, Bucky had gone unusually quiet during the wedding scene. His thumb absentmindedly traced circles against your hand before he smiled at the television with an expression that looked almost painful.

"My ma always imagined my wedding looking like this," he'd said softly. "Simple. Everybody packed together. Music. Flowers. Nothing fancy."

The conversation hadn't lasted more than a minute before he'd brushed it off, but you never forgot it.

So while he'd assumed the two of you were planning a small courthouse ceremony followed by dinner with the team, you'd quietly spent months piecing together something entirely different.

You searched antique shops until you found lace that looked like it belonged in the 1940s. A seamstress helped recreate a dress inspired by photographs from the era, complete with delicate illusion sleeves and a sweetheart neckline hidden beneath intricate embroidery. You borrowed vintage pearl earrings from an elderly shop owner who teared up when you explained why you wanted them, and your hair stylist spent nearly two hours pinning soft victory rolls and loose curls into place.

When you'd finally looked at yourself in the mirror that afternoon, it hadn't felt like you were wearing a costume.

It had felt like you were carrying a piece of his history with you.

Not because you wanted to recreate the past.

Because you wanted him to know that every part of it, the joyful parts as much as the painful ones, still deserved to be remembered.

---

Steve leads Bucky through the old building without offering a single explanation, and his confusion only grows as they approach a pair of tall wooden doors.

"It's awfully quiet."

Steve hums.

"You know what's happening."

"I might."

"You're enjoying this."

"A little."

Bucky rolls his eyes.

"I hate all of you."

"No, you don't."

"...No."

Before he can ask another question, the doors slowly swing open.

Soft music spills into the hallway, warm and crackling from an old record player tucked into the corner of the room. Fresh white roses line the aisle, candles flicker against the brick walls, and every single one of the people who matter most to him is already standing inside.

Natasha.

Sam.

Steve.

Wanda.

Bruce.

Clint and Laura.

Even Tony.

Their smiles tell him everything before his eyes finally find you.

Time simply... stops.

You're standing at the end of the aisle with your bouquet gathered carefully in your hands, sunlight catching every tiny detail of your dress. The delicate lace sleeves. The fitted bodice. The gloves. The pearls. Your lipstick is the soft rosy shade he'd only ever seen in faded family photographs, and your hair—

God.

Your hair.

He hasn't seen victory rolls outside of museums and old photographs in nearly eighty years.

For one impossible heartbeat, it feels as though every version of his life has collided into the same moment.

Brooklyn.

The war.

Everything he lost.

Everything he found.

Everything standing in front of him now.

His breathing catches so sharply that Steve instinctively reaches for his shoulder.

"You alright?"

Bucky barely hears him.

"No..."

His voice cracks.

"No."

Across the room, your smile falters.

"You don't like it?"

His head snaps toward you.

"What?"

"The dress."

He lets out the smallest, most disbelieving laugh as tears immediately begin filling his eyes.

"Honey..."

He shakes his head over and over, completely overwhelmed.

"I've spent so long trying not to miss that part of my life because it hurt too much."

His voice grows quieter.

"And somehow... somehow you found a way to give it back to me without bringing any of the pain with it."

He walks toward you before anyone can stop him, closing the distance in long, hurried strides until he's cupping your face between trembling hands.

"You look like every dream I thought I'd buried."

Your own tears finally spill over.

"I wanted you to have one day that belonged to every version of you," you whisper.

"The little boy from Brooklyn."

"The young man who danced before the war."

"The soldier."

"The Avenger."

"The man I fell in love with."

"They all deserved to make it here."

That's what finally breaks him.

Not because of the dress.

Not because of the music.

But because for the first time in nearly a century, someone looked at every chapter of his life and chose to celebrate them instead of pretending they never happened.

His forehead falls against yours as quiet tears slip freely down his cheeks, and you simply hold him, surrounded by the family he'd found in this lifetime.

Natasha eventually clears her throat from somewhere behind him.

"If the groom is finished crying, we'd actually like to witness the wedding."

Bucky laughs through his tears, wiping at his face with the heel of his hand.

"I wasn't crying."

"You absolutely were."

"It was dignified crying."

"It was snotty crying," Sam corrects.

"It was romantic."

"It was disgusting."

The room erupts into laughter, the tension dissolving instantly as Bucky reaches for your hand, intertwining your fingers with his.

He doesn't let go for the rest of the evening.

Not through the vows.

Not while exchanging rings.

Not during your first dance beneath warm string lights as old records skip softly in the background.

Hours later, with your head resting against his shoulder and his arms wrapped securely around your waist, he presses a slow kiss against your temple before looking down at the lace covering your sleeve one more time.

"You know what my favorite part of today is?" he asks quietly.

You smile. "The music?"

"You."

"The flowers?"

"You."

"The dress?"

He gently shakes his head.

"No."

His thumb brushes over your wedding band.

"My favorite part is that when I looked at you standing at the end of that aisle..." His voice softens until it's barely more than a whisper. "...for the first time in almost a hundred years, my past didn't make me sad."

His forehead rests against yours as the record spins quietly behind you.

The evening starts like every other gathering at Sam's apartment. You arrive twenty minutes late because you'd spent the afternoon helping another friend carry furniture into a third-floor apartment before stopping to grab coffee for someone who'd texted you on the way over. By the time you walk through the door, your arms are full of drinks and grocery bags, your feet ache, and all you can think about is curling up in bed once this is over.

No one thanks you.

Instead, someone glances at the clock.

"Finally."

Another rolls their eyes. "We thought you weren't coming."

You laugh awkwardly, apologizing out of habit as you hand everyone the things they'd asked you to bring. The conversation moves on almost immediately, and so do you. You help set the table, refill empty drinks before anyone asks, and clean dishes as people continue talking around the kitchen island. It feels familiar enough that you don't question it.

Not until, a couple of hours later, you quietly mention that you're going to head home.

"I think I'm gonna call it a night," you say with an apologetic smile. "It's been a long week."

The room goes strangely quiet.

"Already?" someone asks.

"You literally just got here."

"I've just been really tired."

Another friend snorts. "You always leave early lately."

You blink. "I... don't think I do."

"Honestly," someone else chimes in, "you've been kind of selfish recently."

The word lands with enough force to steal the air from your lungs.

Selfish.

You stare at them, waiting for someone to laugh or tell you they're kidding, but no one does. Instead, more voices begin piling on, each one somehow making the knot in your chest tighter.

"You've been saying no to things."

"You've seemed distant."

"We never ask you for much."

"You've been making everything about yourself lately."

Your mouth opens, but nothing comes out.

Because all you can think about is every single thing you've done for them over the past few months. The weekends you gave up. The errands you ran. The countless times you dropped everything because someone else needed you.

All of it disappears the moment you admit you're exhausted.

Across the room, Bucky has been watching the entire conversation unfold in silence. At first, he'd assumed someone would catch themselves. That one of your friends would realize how unfair they sounded and backtrack before any real damage was done.

Instead, he watches you shrink a little more with every sentence.

Your shoulders curl inward. Your smile disappears. Then, somehow, despite everything they're saying, you whisper the words that finally push him over the edge.

"I'm sorry."

The apartment falls silent when Bucky speaks.

"No."

His voice isn't loud, but it cuts through every other sound in the room.

"No, we're not doing this."

Every head turns toward him as he pushes away from the kitchen counter, his blue eyes sweeping across the room before settling briefly on you. The hurt written across your face makes something twist painfully in his chest.

"You're calling her selfish?"

No one answers.

Sam shifts uncomfortably. "Buck..."

"No." He shakes his head. "I want somebody to explain it to me."

His gaze moves deliberately from one person to the next.

"Who picked me up after missions because I couldn't drive?"

Silence.

"Who spent fourteen hours sitting in the hospital with Clint when everyone else went home?"

Still nothing.

"Who remembers every birthday, organizes every dinner, checks on all of you when you're struggling, and somehow always knows exactly what everyone needs before they ask?"

His voice never rises, but it doesn't have to.

"It's always been her."

No one argues.

"She gives every single one of you her time, her energy, and every piece of herself she has to spare. Then the first time she says she's tired..." He lets out a humorless laugh. "Suddenly she's selfish?"

The weight of his words settles over the apartment like concrete.

For the first time all night, everyone actually looks at you.

Really looks.

They notice how tightly you're gripping your sleeves. How your eyes have filled with tears. How exhausted you actually look.

Bucky doesn't wait for anyone to respond.

Instead, he crosses the room until he's standing directly in front of you, every trace of frustration melting into something heartbreakingly gentle.

"C'mere, sweetheart."

The endearment is all it takes.

The moment his arms open, every wall you've spent months holding together collapses. You step into his embrace without thinking, and the first sob tears itself from your chest before you've even buried your face against him.

His arms wrap around you immediately, one hand cradling the back of your head while the other rubs slow, steady circles across your back.

"I'm sorry," you cry, the words muffled against his shirt.

He pulls back just enough to look at you, his brow knitting together in confusion.

"What are you apologizing for?"

"I don't know," you admit through broken breaths. "I just... I tried so hard."

"I know you did."

"I wanted everyone to be happy."

His heart breaks right there.

"I know."

"I don't understand what I did wrong."

His thumb brushes beneath your eye, catching another tear before it can fall.

"You didn't do anything wrong." His voice is impossibly soft. "You just reminded people that you're a person instead of someone they can keep taking from."

You stare at him.

"They got so used to you always giving," he continues, "that the first time you needed something back, they mistook it for selfishness."

A shaky laugh escapes you, though it sounds more like another sob.

"I feel so stupid."

"No." He shakes his head immediately. "I think you love people with everything you've got. I think you're the kind of person who would happily carry everyone else's burdens if it meant they smiled a little easier. But somewhere along the way, they stopped appreciating what you were giving because they started expecting it."

Fresh tears spill down your cheeks.

"I just wanted someone to notice."

"I do."

He doesn't hesitate.

"I notice every single thing you do."

You look up at him, eyes wide.

"I notice the way you text everyone to make sure they got home safely. I notice you remembering how Sam takes his coffee, how you always pack extra snacks because Nat forgets to eat, how you ask Steve about therapy when everyone else assumes he's fine. I notice how you quietly clean up after everyone leaves without asking for help."

His hand cups your cheek.

"But I also notice the things nobody else seems to."

His forehead rests gently against yours.

"I notice when you're forcing a smile because you don't want anyone worrying about you. I notice when you're running on empty. I notice the way you keep saying you're okay even when you're barely holding yourself together."

Your breathing stutters.

"I wanted one person to see me," you whisper.

A sad smile tugs at his lips.

"You've had one all along."

He presses a lingering kiss against your forehead before wrapping you back into his arms.

"You don't have to earn love by exhausting yourself. You don't have to prove your worth by giving away every piece of who you are."

His embrace tightens just a little more.

"And as long as I'm here, you'll never have to wonder whether someone appreciates you."

Around the room, no one says a word.

Because while they had spent months taking you for granted, Bucky had spent those same months seeing every quiet sacrifice, every hidden exhaustion, and every small act of love you never expected anyone to notice.

You try to brush it off, because it can’t be time yet, it’s too soon, you’ve got weeks, you’ve got plans, but then it hits again, harder, sharper, a deep, pulling ache that makes your knees buckle.

Bucky catches you before you can even think about falling.

“Okay,” he breathes, voice steady even as his hands tighten around you. “Okay, that’s not nothing.”

The next ten minutes are a blur of movement. He gets you into the car, one hand braced behind your head so you don’t hit the doorframe, the other gripping yours like he’s afraid you’ll slip away if he lets go. Your hospital bag gets tossed in the backseat, your phone forgotten on the kitchen counter, and then he’s behind the wheel, engine roaring to life.

He's too calm.

It’s the kind of calm that comes from years of training, from missions where panic gets people killed. His breathing is even, his voice low and controlled as he glances between the road and you, counting the seconds between your contractions like it’s second nature.

“Breathe with me,” he murmurs, squeezing your hand. “In through your nose, slow. I’ve got you. You’re doing good.”

But underneath it, buried deep where he hopes you won’t notice, is fear.

Real, gut-deep fear.

Because you’re not supposed to be screaming in pain ten minutes into the drive. You’re not supposed to be gripping the seat so hard your knuckles go white. You’re not supposed to be gasping out, “Bucky, something’s wrong—this is too fast—”

And then your water breaks.

It soaks through your leggings, warm and sudden, and Bucky’s head snaps toward you so fast it’s almost violent.

“Okay,” he says again, but this time it’s tighter. Thinner. “Okay, that’s—okay.”

He presses harder on the gas.

The hospital is still fifteen minutes away when you cry out, a broken, desperate sound that rips straight through him.

“I need to push.”

The words hit him like a gunshot.

For a second he freezes.

Because he knows what that means. He’s been through enough emergency scenarios, enough battlefield triage, enough late-night briefings with medical teams to recognize it instantly.

There is no way you’re making it to the hospital.

“Shit,” he breathes, already scanning the road. His grip on the steering wheel tightens, vibranium fingers digging into the leather hard enough to crease it. “Shit, okay, okay—hang on, baby, just—”

Another contraction hits you, and your entire body curls forward with a sob.

That’s it.

He swerves the car onto the shoulder without hesitation, gravel crunching under the tires as he slams it into park. He’s out of the driver’s seat before the engine even fully dies, sprinting around to your side, yanking the door open.

“Look at me,” he says, dropping to his knees beside you, his hands cradling your face. His voice is firm now, commanding in a way you’ve only heard on missions. “Hey. You stay with me, okay? I’ve got you.”

You’re crying, shaking, terrified, and he hates it.

He hates that you’re in pain. Hates that this isn’t safe and controlled and planned the way it was supposed to be. Hates that he can’t take it from you, can’t carry it the way he’s carried everything else.

But there’s no time for that.

Another contraction hits, and you scream.

He’s all instinct now, controlled precious of a soldier in combat. He helps you shift, supporting your back, guiding your breathing, murmuring constant reassurances even as his heart pounds so hard he can feel it in his throat.

“You’re okay,” he keeps saying, over and over, like he can make it true just by repeating it. “You’re okay, I’ve got you, you’re doing so good—”

You cling to him, nails digging into his shirt, your forehead pressed to his shoulder as your body takes over.

“Bucky, I can’t—” you sob.

“You can,” he cuts in immediately, voice fierce. “You can, you are. You hear me? You’re doing it right now.”

His metal hand braces your thigh, steady and unyielding, while his other hand grips yours, grounding you through every wave of pain.

He talks you through it.

Every breath. Every push.

His voice is the only thing keeping you tethered until you both hear the cry.

Tiny, unmistakeable and entirely mad at life.

Everything stops.

For a moment, the world goes completely, utterly silent.

Bucky’s hands tremble as he lifts your baby, his breath catching hard in his chest. There’s blood, there’s chaos, there’s the distant sound of cars rushing past—but none of it matters.

Because your baby is crying.

Because you’re here.

Because you both made it.

“Hey,” he whispers, voice breaking in a way you’ve never heard before. “Hey, I’ve got you… I’ve got you…”

He places the baby against your chest with hands that are suddenly so, so gentle, like you’re both made of glass, then he looks at you.

Really looks at you.

Your tear-streaked face, your exhausted smile, the way you’re already reaching for your baby like nothing else in the world exists.

His throat tightens.

“You did that,” he says softly, brushing your hair back with shaking fingers. “You—God, you did that, sweetheart.”

His forehead presses against yours, eyes slipping shut for just a second.

Relief crashes over him so hard it almost knocks the breath out of his lungs.

He laughs then, hysterically, as he cups the back of your head, holding you both close.

“We gotta work on your timing,g” he murmurs, voice thick with emotion. “Couldn’t wait for the hospital, huh?”

But his hand never stops trembling.

And neither does the way he keeps looking at you, like he almost lost everything.

Once. Twice. Three times.

You try to ignore it. You really do. But something in your chest tightens, that familiar pull—like a string tied straight from your ribcage to Bucky.

You glance down

Bucky 🖤 miss you.

Your lips twitch despite yourself. It’s innocent enough. Harmless.

You type back quickly beneath the table.

miss you too. behave.

You barely have time to set your phone down before it buzzes again.

You hesitate this time.

Natasha’s still talking. No one’s looking at you.

You check.

can’t.

Another message comes in immediately after.

thinking about you.

Heat blooms low in your stomach.

You shift in your seat, pressing your thighs together just slightly, trying to ground yourself. You don’t respond this time. You shouldn’t encourage him.

Your phone buzzes again anyway, this time with an image, that has you doing everything you can not to choke on your drink.

Bucky is sitting on the edge of your shared bed, shirt nowhere in sight, dog tags resting against his bare chest. His hair is a little messy, like he’s been running his hands through it. His thighs are spread just enough, sweatpants slung low on his hips, one large hand wrapped loosely around himself.

Not fully, ust enough to make your mouth go dry.

Just enough to make it very, very clear what he’s doing.

You snap your phone facedown against the table so fast it almost makes a sound.

“Everything okay?” Wanda asks softly, tilting her head.

“Yeah,” you say quickly, voice a little too high. “Just—uh—work thing.”

Natasha narrows her eyes at you, suspicious, but doesn’t push. Thankfully.

Your phone buzzes again.

You ignore it.

It buzzes again.

And again.

You swallow hard, trying to focus on the conversation, but your mind is gone. Completely gone. All you can think about is the image burned into your brain—his hand, the way his muscles flexed, the implication of what he was doing while you sat here pretending to be normal.

You cave.

You flip your phone back over, shielding it slightly with your hand.

wish it was your hand instead.

Your breath stutters.

Another message follows.

or your mouth.

You nearly choke.

“Drink,” Maria says, shoving your glass toward you with a raised brow. “You look like you are dying.”

“I’m fine,” you manage, grabbing the drink and taking a long sip just to give yourself something to do.

Your phone buzzes again.

You shouldn’t look, but you do. This time there's an even worse picture

His head is tipped back, eyes half-lidded, lips parted. His hand is higher now, grip tighter, veins standing out along his forearm. His other hand is braced on the mattress beside him, fingers digging into the sheets like he’s holding himself together.

Your thighs press together hard this time.

You can feel the heat pooling between them, can feel how soaked you’re getting just from looking at him.

you like this, doll?

You don’t respond.

You can’t.

Your fingers hover over the keyboard, trembling slightly, but nothing comes out.

bet you’re squirming right now.

You shift again in your seat, biting your lip.

He knows you too well.

come home soon.

Your heart pounds.

You lock your phone this time, shoving it into your bag like it’s burned you.

“Alright,” you say abruptly, pushing your chair back. “I—uh—I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. I should head out.”

Natasha smirks immediately. “Early morning, huh?”

You don’t dignify that with a response.

You say your goodbyes as quickly as possible, ignoring the knowing looks, ignoring the way your entire body feels like it’s buzzing under your skin.

The drive home is torture.

Every red light feels too long. Every second drags. Your mind replays every message, every image, every word.

By the time you get to your apartment, your patience is gone.

You shove the door open, kicking it shut behind you.

“Bucky—”

He’s in the kitchen, fully dressed and calm as if its any other day.

Leaning against the counter like he’s been there all evening, flipping through something on his phone.

He looks up at you, brows lifting slightly in mild surprise.

“Hey,” he says, voice casual. “You’re back early.”

You stare at him.

Your brain short-circuits.

“What—” you start, then stop, gesturing vaguely at him. “What are you doing?”

He frowns, pushing off the counter. “What do you mean?”

“You—” You take a step toward him, incredulous. “You were just—”

“Just what?” he asks, completely innocent.

Your jaw drops.

“You were sending me—” you lower your voice, glancing around like someone might hear, “—pictures. And texts. And now you’re just—standing here?”

Bucky blinks at you like he has absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.

“Pictures?” he repeats slowly.

You stare at him.

He’s serious.

Or at least, he looks serious.

Your frustration spikes.

“You know what I’m talking about,” you snap, heat flooding your face. “You’ve been torturing me for the last hour and now you’re acting like—”

Before you can finish, he steps closer.

Close enough that your words falter.

Close enough that you can feel the heat radiating off him.

“Was I?” he murmurs, voice dropping just enough to send a shiver down your spine.

Your breath catches.

His hand comes up, fingers brushing lightly along your jaw, tilting your face up toward his.

“You seemed fine,” he continues softly. “Out with your friends. Having fun.”

You swallow hard.

“You know I wasn’t fine,” you whisper.

His lips twitch with a hinr of smugness that confirm his intentions.

“Yeah,” he admits quietly. “I figured.”

Your hands ball into fists at your sides.

“You’re unbelievable.”

“Mm.” He leans in slightly, nose brushing yours. “And you’re soaked, aren’t you?”

You inhale sharply while his smirk deepens.

“Been thinking about me this whole time,” he murmurs, voice low and rough now, all pretense gone. “Sitting there, trying to act normal while I had you falling apart.”

Your knees feel weak.

“Bucky—”

“Tell me I’m wrong,” he challenges softly.

You can’t.

Because he isn’t.

He knows it.

His hand slides down, fingers brushing your hip, your waist, before settling at your thigh—squeezing just enough to make your breath hitch.

“Next time,” he says, voice dark with promise, “you answer me.”

You shiver.

“Or I’ll make it worse.”

And somehow, that hurts more.

“You’re not even going to say anything?” you ask, your voice echoing slightly in the apartment. The city hums outside, indifferent, while you stand in the middle of your living room feeling like everything is tilting.

Bucky stands near the window, his back to you. His broad shoulders are stiff, muscles drawn tight beneath his shirt. His metal hand flexes once at his side, the faint whir of it filling the silence where his voice should be.

“I don’t have anything nice to say right now,” he mutters.

The words land harder than if he’d shouted.

You blink, taken aback. “Since when do you care about that? Just—just say it.”

He exhales slowly, like he’s trying to bleed the anger out of himself before it can touch you. That’s the thing about Bucky, he’s always trying to protect you. Even from himself.

But tonight, it feels like he’s protecting himself from you.

“That’s the problem,” he says quietly. “If I say it, I can’t take it back.”

You swallow. Your chest feels tight, like there’s not enough air in the room. “So instead you just shut me out?”

His jaw ticks. You see it in the reflection of the window before he turns around, and when he does, his eyes are dark, stormy in a way that makes your stomach twist.

“I’m not shutting you out,” he says, a little sharper now. “I’m trying not to hurt you.”

“Well, congratulations,” you snap, the frustration finally spilling over. “You’re doing a great job anyway.”

That does it.

You see it the second it happens, the way something cracks in his expression, something raw and unguarded slipping through the careful control he clings to.

“Do you think I don’t know that?” he asks, his voice low but suddenly rough. “You think I don’t hear myself every time I pull away like this?”

“Then don’t,” you say, your voice softer now, almost pleading. “Bucky, I can’t fix something if you won’t even tell me what’s wrong.”

His gaze drops to the floor, and for a moment, he looks smaller. Physicaclly he isn't, he’s still overwhelming in every way, but there’s something in the way he folds in on himself, like he’s carrying a weight you can’t see.

“It’s not something you can fix,” he says.

“That’s not your call to make.”

“It is when II’m the one who’s broken.”

The words hit you like a slap.

“Don’t do that,” you whisper, shaking your head. “Don’t turn this into—into that. This isn’t about your past, or Hydra, or anything like that. This is about us.”

“It’s always about that,” he shoots back, the frustration finally breaking through. His voice raises to an octave you haven't heard from him. “You think it just… stops? That I can flip a switch and be the guy you deserve?”

“I don’t want anyone else,” you say firmly. “I want you. All of you.”

He laughs then, but there’s no humor in it. It’s hollow. Bitter.

“Yeah?” he says. “Even the parts that push you away? The parts that think maybe you’d be better off without me?”

Your throat tightens. “That’s not your decision to make, Bucky.”

“Maybe it should be.”

Silence crashes down between you.

That’s the closest he’s ever come to saying it outright. To putting words to the fear that’s always been lurking under the surface—that one day, he’ll decide he’s too much for you and walk away before you can leave him first.

Your hands tremble at your sides. “You don’t get to decide that for me,” you say, your voice breaking despite your best effort. “Do you have any idea how unfair that is?”

His expression shifts the second he hears the crack in your voice, the hurt he’s been trying so hard to avoid causing.

“I know,” he says immediately, stepping forward. “I know, I’m—”

“No,” you cut him off, backing up a step. “You don’t get to do that either. You don’t get to shut down and then come back like nothing happened.”

His face falls, guilt flooding his features. “I’m not trying to—”

“You are,” you insist, tears stinging your eyes now. “You push me away, Bucky. Every time things get hard, you just disappear. And I’m left standing here trying to figure out what I did wrong.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he says quickly, almost desperately. “This isn’t on you.”

“Then stop making it feel like it is.”

That lands.

You can see it in the way his shoulders drop, the fight draining out of him all at once. He runs a hand through his hair, pacing once like he’s trying to outrun his own thoughts before finally stopping in front of you.

“I don’t know how to fight like this,” he admits, his voice quieter now. “Where I don’t lose control. Where I don’t say something I regret.”

You take a shaky breath. “Then learn. With me.”

His eyes flick up to yours, uncertain.

“I’m not asking for perfect,” you continue, softer now. “I’m asking for honest. Even if it’s messy. Even if it hurts a little. Just don’t leave me in the dark.”

For a long moment, he just looks at you.

Then, slowly, he nods.

“I was scared,” he says, the words rough, like they’re being dragged out of him. “When you said you might take that job. The one across the country.”

Your breath catches. “Bucky—”

“I know you haven’t decided yet,” he rushes on, “but all I could think about was you leaving. And me not being enough to make you stay.”

Your heart aches.

“That’s what this is about?” you ask gently.

He nods once, his gaze dropping again. “I didn’t want to say it out loud. Made it too real.”

You step closer this time, closing the distance he created earlier. “You don’t get to decide what I choose,” you say softly. “But you do get to be part of the conversation.”

His eyes lift to yours, vulnerable in a way that makes your chest tighten.

“I don’t want to lose you,” he admits.

You reach for his hands and squeeze. “Then stop pushing me away when you’re scared.”

He exhales, tension finally easing out of him as his grip tightens around yours.

“I’m trying,” he says.

“I know,” you whisper. “Just… try with me. Not against me.”

This time, when the silence settles between you, it isn’t sharp.

It’s heavy, yes, but softer. Something you can both carry.

At first, it’s subtle. Your head tipping against his shoulder, your breath evening out as you tuck yourself closer. He assumes you’re tired, that you need grounding, something solid to hold onto after everything. So he lets you. Always lets you.

But then your nose presses into the crook of his neck.

And you inhale.

Slow. Deep. Like you’re trying to memorize him.

Bucky stills.

“Doll,” he murmurs, voice low, a little rough around the edges, “you good?”

You hum in response, barely coherent, fingers curling into the fabric of his jacket. “Yeah. Just… stay.”

He doesn’t move for the rest of the flight.

---

It escalates from there.

Not all at once. Not in a way that feels strange at first. It becomes a habit, something natural, something instinctive. You gravitate toward him in every room, every hallway, every quiet moment between missions.

But it’s not just closeness.

It’s him.

His scent—clean soap, something faintly earthy and woodsy, a trace of gun oil that never quite leaves his skin no matter how hard he scrubs it away. There’s warmth there, too. Something unmistakably him. Grounding. Safe. Addictive in a way you don’t even try to fight.

You start seeking it out without thinking.

In the kitchen, you’ll slip behind him, arms wrapping around his waist, face pressing between his shoulder blades. He’ll pause mid-sentence, metal fingers tightening slightly on the counter as he feels you breathe him in.

“You’re doing it again,” he says once, not unkindly.

You don’t even bother denying it. “You smell good.”

A beat.

Then, softer, quieter, almost shy despite the words, “You always do.”

He exhales slowly, like he’s trying to process that.

“Yeah?” he asks.

You nod against him, already nuzzling closer.

He doesn’t push you away.

---

On missions, it gets worse.

Or better, depending on who you ask.

After fights, after close calls, after the kind of moments that leave your hands shaking and your chest tight, you seek him out before anything else.

You’ll grab his vest, drag him down just enough to press your face into his neck, inhaling like you’ve been starved of it.

“Easy, sweetheart,” he murmurs, one arm coming around you automatically, metal hand hovering at your back before settling carefully against your spine. “We’re okay. You’re okay.”

You don’t answer.

You just breathe him in again.

And again.

Like if you stop, something terrible might happen.

At first, the others pretend not to notice.

Then they stop pretending.

---

Movie night is when it really becomes a problem.

Or not, again, depending on who you ask.

The Thunderbolts are scattered across the living room, the lights dim, some action movie playing on the screen that no one is really paying attention to. Popcorn’s half gone, someone’s arguing about plot holes, and Bucky is seated on the couch, broad and solid as ever.

You are, quite literally, in his shirt.

Not wearing it.

In it.

You’d started the night curled against his side, but at some point, you’d tugged his shirt open just enough to slide your arm inside, pressing your cheek flat against his chest. One of your legs is thrown over his thigh, your fingers loosely hooked into his waistband, keeping yourself anchored.

Your face is buried against his skin.

Breathing him in.

Completely oblivious to everything else.

“Are you even watching the movie?” Yelena asks from across the room, one brow raised.

You don’t respond.

Bucky glances down at you, lips twitching despite himself. “She hasn’t seen a single second.”

“I’m comfortable,” you mumble, voice muffled against him.

John snorts. “Comfortable? She looks like she’s trying to fuse with you.”

“Wouldn’t blame her,” Alexei adds, grinning.

Bucky shoots them a look, but there’s no real heat behind it. His hand comes up instead, brushing gently through your hair, smoothing it back from your face. You lean into the touch immediately, pressing closer.

“Hey,” he murmurs, softer now, just for you. “You good?”

You nod against him, inhaling again, slower this time. “You smell like home.”

It hits him harder than he expects.

His chest tightens, something warm and unfamiliar settling deep in his ribs.

“Yeah?” he asks quietly.

You hum. “Yeah. Makes everything feel… quiet.”

For a moment, he just looks at you.

Then his arm tightens around your shoulders, pulling you impossibly closer, if that’s even possible.

“C’mere,” he murmurs, even tthough you’re already there. “Stay as long as you want.”

You don’t need to be told twice.

---

It’s late when the movie ends, the others filtering out one by one until it’s just the two of you left in the dim glow of the television. You haven’t moved an inch.

Bucky glances down at you, a soft huff of amusement leaving him. “You planning on getting up anytime soon?”

“No,” you answer immediately.

He huffs again, but there’s fondness in it. “Figured.”

You shift slightly, tilting your head just enough to press your nose back against his neck, inhaling deeply.

He stills for a second then relaxes.

“Y’know,” he says after a moment, voice low, thoughtful, “I don’t mind it.”

You blink up at him. “You don’t?”

“Nah.” His thumb brushes lazily along your arm. “If that’s what you need, doll… you got it.”

Your chest warms at that, something soft and heavy settling there.

“You’re stuck with me, then,” you tease lightly.

His lips curve into a small, almost shy smile.

“Yeah,” he murmurs, tightening his hold on you just a fraction more. “I think I’m okay with that.”

You nuzzle back into him, breathing him in like you always do.

“Inquiring minds want to know,” he murmurs, voice rough and gravelly, “how you feel about me setting you up on this thing… and watching.”

His metal fingers drag slowly down your bare thigh, cool and unyielding, and the contrast makes you shiver.

“While I take care of myself.”

Heat floods your cheeks instantly.

The Sybian sits in the center of the room like some obscene throne—sleek, black, already prepped, the thick ridged attachment glistening under the light. You had joked about something like this once, half-laughing into his chest after a long mission, safe in the idea that it would never actually happen.

But Bucky remembers everything.

And now he is looking at you like this has been sitting in his head for weeks.

“I… I don’t know,” you whisper, even as your body betrays you completely—your nipples tightening, slick already pooling between your thighs.

He notices. He always notices.

“Liar,” he says softly, stepping closer.

His hand cups your jaw, thumb brushing your lower lip, and the way his gaze drops to your mouth makes your breath hitch.

“You are soaked just thinking about it.” His voice lowers, gentler but no less certain. “Tell me the truth, doll. You want this?”

You nod before you can stop yourself.

“Yes.”

His smile turns sharp. Satisfied. Predatory.

“Good girl.”

He helps you onto the machine, guiding you carefully as you straddle it, your knees sinking into the padded base. The thick length presses against your entrance and you gasp as you slowly sink down, stretching around it inch by inch until it fills you completely.

Your hands grip the front handle immediately, thighs trembling as the vibrations bloom inside you, soft at first, teasing every sensitive nerve.

Bucky circles you slowly, like he is taking his time memorizing the sight.

“Fuck,” he breathes under his breath, already palming himself through his sweats. “Look at you. So pretty like this. All spread open for me.”

The remote clicks.

The vibration deepens.

It rolls through you in a slow, heavy pulse that makes your hips jerk without permission, a broken moan slipping from your lips before you can stop it.

“That’s it,” he encourages, pushing his sweats down just enough for his cock to spring free, thick and already leading. “Ride it for me, baby. Let me see how good it makes you feel.”

You start moving, tentative at first, but the ridges catch perfectly inside you, dragging over that spot every time you shift, whi;lle the external vibration presses insistently against your clit.

Your head tips back, a soft whimper falling from your lips as your body starts chasing it without hesitation.

Bucky strokes himself in time with you, slow, deliberate pulls, his grip tightening with every movement you make. Pre-cum beads at the tip, sliding down his fingers, but he does not look away from you. Not once.

“Goddamn,” he groans. “You are dripping all over it. Soaking the damn thing.”

Your hips stutter, then pick up, chasing the pressure.

“You like knowing I am watching?” he presses, stepping closer. “Like knowing I am getting off on how desperate you look?”

“Yes—fuck, Bucky—”

Your words dissolve into a moan when the speed kicks up again, the vibration turning relentless. Your thighs start to shake, your movements losing any rhythm as your body just chases whatever feels best.

He is close enough now that you can feel his heat, smell the faint salt of his skin, the metallic edge of his arm as it reaches out and pinches your nipple just hard enough to make you cry out.

The combination sends you spiraling.

“Look at me,” he orders.

Your eyes snap to his immediately.

His pupils are blown wide, chest rising and falling faster now, his hand moving quicker over his cock. The wet sound of it mixes with the buzz of the machine and your broken noises, filling the room with something filthy and overwhelming.

“I have thought about this,” he admits, voice strained. “Coming home and finding you like this. All mine. Falling apart while I stroke myself stupid watching you.”

Your hips stutter harder, chasing the edge that is already right there.

“You gonna come for me, doll?” he murmurs. “Gonna let me see it?”

You nod frantically, words gone, breath gone, everything narrowing down to that tight, coiled pressure.

Your whole body seizes as the orgasm crashes through you, sharp and overwhelming, thighs clamping as you come hard around the machine, a broken cry tearing from your throat as your vision flashes white.

You barely register anything else except the feeling.

The pulsing. The clenching. The way it keeps going.

“That’s my girl—fuck—” Bucky groans, his strokes turning messy, desperate. His metal hand braces on your shoulder, grounding you as you shake through it, and then he is coming too, thick ropes spilling over his fist, across his stomach, his breathing wrecked as he rides it out with you.

The machine slows gradually, but does not stop.

Soft pulses linger, keeping your body twitching as you slump forward, barely holding yourself up, breath coming in shallow gasps.

Bucky kneels in front of you almost immediately, hands coming up to cup your face, pulling you into a deep, grounding kiss. You taste yourself in the way your moans spill into his mouth, the way he swallows every sound like he needs it.

When he pulls back, his forehead rests against yours.

You are still shaking when you manage, voice hoarse and breathless,

“How do I feel about it?”

A weak laugh slips out of you.

“I think… I think I want you to do it again.”

His grin is wicked. Pleased. Already planning.

“Oh, doll,” he murmurs.

His hand reaches for the remote again.