You Think You Know?...

He followed every step you took until your hips hit the counter, and groaned when you teasingly swayed your hips making you giggle.

“What?” You chuckled breathlessly at his gentle but firm grip on your waist, always mindful of his strength.

“You sweet, sweet minx.”

Clark noses at the crook of your neck but inhaling your scent only made him harden further.

“Love,” Clark chuckles when you feigned ignorance, humming questioningly at him when you reached for your toothbrush. Only for it to clatter on the counter when he spun you around. Your body grew warm at the smile stretching across his face as his head tilted, looking at you through squinted eyes.

You bit your lip, trying to contain the thrill that ran down your spine. The look on his face may have been pure sweetness on the outside, but the need to feel you have consumed his entire being.

The recent attack in Gotham had forced Bruce to ask for help and kept Clark away from you for days—he’s had his fill of the gloominess that never seemed to fade from that city’s atmosphere so your teasing after days of painful longing for just a glimpse of you had him the tiniest bit frustrated.

You might argue it’s only been four days, but for him it’s four days too long. Four gruesome days of not having you in his arms, separated even in your sleep.

You spin around and toy with the wet curls on the back of his head before cupping it, angling your face to close the gap between you. Finally giving in before you’ve provoked him further—before he ignores the already pooling arousal between your legs.

But Clark didn’t give you the pleasure of feeling his soft lips against yours. Making you gasp as he spun you back around, the motion causing your robe to slowly slide down your shoulders, his lips following the cloth down and up your shoulders. Hooded eyes looking at you through the mirror as his breath grazes your ear, causing you to whine.

“Please…”

His large hand gropes your breast, thumb playing with your pert nipple through your robe. Playfully nipping at your eat before softly pecking the sensitive skin of your neck.

“Hmm, I thought you didn’t want to?” His voice was breathy, lightheaded just from your closeness.

“Clar-k—ah.”

He continued squeezing your breast lovingly—thumbing your nipple through the fabric of your robe when your fingers desperately pulled the strands of his hair.

Clark couldn’t get enough of your scent, even with his face buried in the sensitive skin of your neck, the scent of your arousal pooling between your thighs had a trembling sigh escaping his lips.

You released your bruising grip from his hair, slowly guiding him past the slit of your soft robe to the heat between your thighs. “Oh, honey…” your heat welcomed his thick fingers immediately, clenching around him, afraid he’d pull away—tease you further.

But in Clark’s eyes, you were the tease.

Your reflection rivals the moon that he’s seen up close—your heaving breaths made your robe slip down your shoulders with only his thick hand keeping the fabric from revealing you.

The scent of your arousal had his already ragged breath stuttering in his chest—it didn’t help that he could feel the sweet stickiness between his fingers drip down his wrist and the need to drop to his knees to devour you consumed him.

Yet, he didn’t listen.

Instead, he scissored his digits as he thrusted his fingers making you mewl at the stretch.

“Nggh—Clark….” You throw your head back and Clark took the opportunity to softly kiss your temple. The softness in his touch a contrast to the deep push and pull of his digits.

“I know, honey. I know.”

You braved a look at your reflection and already saw him watching every twitch of pleasure on your face. Watching you was enough for him, and while you share the same sentiment when he’s the one falling apart in your hands, you couldn’t go on feeling empty when you could feel his arousal leak through your robes.

“Need—Clar—please.”

And ever your good boy, his hand bunched up your rode around your waist, smoothly parting your legs with his foot to make room for his throbbing length to nudge its way in between your weeping slit, with the help of his fingers still flush against your clit.

You were about to open your mouth and complain again but the feeling of his fat throbbing tip prodding your hole only forced a groan from your throat. “Good— Cla-rk!”

“Gosh-honey—I-you-golly.” His forehead sought out the warmth of your neck, struggling to keep his brain from melting as he pushed further into you. He failed. Your warm walls squeezed him as he pushed in, gripping and pulling him in like it always does, and he couldn’t help the pathetic sounds that left his throat.

He felt your hand on his waist, thumb rubbing circles on the skin of his hip—as if drawing him out of his brain before he could melt further into it.

Which he did when he felt your fingers flex and his ringing ears cleared up enough to hear your honeyed voice, “Move, honey.”

His hips started moving before he even registered it, slowly, at first, letting out small hiccups of breath against your shoulder before he squeezed the flesh at your hip reverently, pulling far enough back until he missed the warmth of you back and pushing back in.

The groan that left him came from the depths of his chest, the sound causing your needy pussy to clench and leak around his cock further.

His breaths came out in uneven puffs against the sensitive skin of your neck, and with his jaw growing slacker came his mewls in even louder volume. “Mmm- mghh!” You could feel his cock throbbing, “Clark….”

“Hmm?” He asked deliriously, propping his chin on your shoulder and looking at your reflection through lust-lidded eyes. “Need you to go faster, hun..” You pressed your forehead to his temple and saw his gaze fixed on the bounce of your breast—growing more frequent as his thrusts grow deeper and faster.

He felt himself throb at the sight of your scrunched up face against his, “So good f’me, Clarkie…”

His jaw slacks at the feeling of your sloppy kisses from his jaw to the corner of his mouth, almost instinctive when turning his head in your direction—but you don’t let him, not yet. Instead, your fingers dug into his cheeks as you dragged your tongue flat across his cheek to his ear. His hips stuttered, once, twice before a gush of warmth flooded your insides and your wrist is dripping from his squished lips.

You place a tender kiss on his temple and hum when you feel his hips—still twitching and quivering—start to move again. Deeper. Hitting that gummy spot inside you with one particular harsh thrust.

“Go—d! I wanna…have you like this all the time.” He all but slurred out as his hand gripped your hips as he kept pistoning into you from behind, it left your chest stuttering and your hands searching for purchase on the marble against your hips.

His whole face was flushed as you looked at him through the massive bathroom mirror, watching his robe start to slip off his shoulders, the flush on his face spreading down his freckled chest.

Clark nestled his chin in the crook of your neck before wrapping his thick arms around your waist, hips somehow moving faster than before.

He looked at your reflection through hooded lids and his mouth agape, convincing you to shove two fingers, which he immediately started sucking.

“All—ah—th-time?” Your eyes roll to the back of your head when you feel one of his hands squeeze your breast, tweaking your nipples between his fingers.

The globes of your ass pressed flush against his pelvis as he dug himself deeper into you, the sticky mess where your bodies connected squelching obscenely with every pump of his hips.

It didn’t take long before he took his fingers to your neglected clit. He pinched the throbbing bud, causing your fingers to press further into his throat, making him gag and drool further on your hand.

“Alf—da-ffffrickim t’me.” Punctuating his muffled words with each thrust.

And, oh, you wished he would. You wished he’d just take you whenever he felt like it—wished that he’d be just as needy as he was now. Because even as his hands tremble with trepidation—instinct most like—his mind has melted enough that he’d only care for the bruising of your hips against the counter later.

Now, all his usual apprehension vanished into thin air and it’s addictive.

“You can take me whenever you like…” your words came out in broken breaths, feeling drool slip through the corners of your mouth and doing nothing about it. His repeated abuse on your walls pushes out your arousal, creating a white ring at the base of his cock.

The force of his hips against yours shook your fingers out of his mouth, digits trembling against the marble counter as you try to ground yourself. Your drenched fingers making it harder to do so.

He let out an animalistic groan at your words, brain already clouded with visions of him fucking you—waking you from your slumber with his harsh thrusts and wandering touches, maybe even bury his cock in you during your reading time, just warming you from the inside. Clark’s knees almost buckled at the thought.

“Fuck, I will…Thank you, honey—I will,” his sweet voice breathed. “I promise. I—I’ll even spread your legs an—mhng—jus’…suckle on your clit while you nap. You’ll lemme do that—will you? Please?”

Clark’s voice tilted to a needy pitch, temple pressed against yours as his eyes never waver from yours in the mirror. He was tipping from the height of his pleasure, you could tell, and he was taking you with him with every brush of his tip against that sensitive, spongy spot in your cunt.

You look up at the mirror and watch as his form cages you in, back hunching over your bent form while his fingers continue to happily palm your breast and tease your clit between his fingers.

His fingers freeze in time with his hips, sweaty skin molding into your back as he groaned out—the pinch on your clit was what broke you. Your back arched against his chest, nipple grazing the cold marble, and as the white hot pleasure consumed you, traveling from your head down to your fingertips, you felt his thick hot arousal splash in your walls.

He was everywhere in that moment. The cold marble was a stark contrast to the warmth that engulfed you—from the heat that his body exudes across the expanse of your back and his arousal that now traveled down your thighs.

You try to blink the heaviness off your eyes, lashes fluttering rapidly against your wet cheeks, and you were met with the sight of Clark’s eyes already on you. There were still dark, the blues of his eyes a mere rim around his pupils, still bleary but, oh, did they hold so much love.

After everything, he had the gall to look sheepish, to smile shyly—pushing in his dimples—before kissing your flushed cheek. “Thank you…” he breathed, and it only made you laugh harder.

“No need to thank me, honey.” you say, leaning further into his touch.

“Still.”

Ever your stubborn boyfriend, he still thinks that you and your touch was a gift he was oh so lucky to be blessed with—to be surrounded with—like he was a mere man and you were a goddess.

One that he cannot handle being separated from—even if it was only for a few days.

💌 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞: that black cat(antihero)!reader and clark story? yeah it might not see the light of day...

𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬, 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝!

©𝐛𝐮𝐜𝐤𝐬𝐩𝐥𝐮𝐦 — DO NOT translate, steal or post my work anywhere else without my permission.𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐊 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐌𝐀𝐃𝐄 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐀𝐈 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐌𝐀𝐘 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐁𝐄 𝐔𝐒𝐄𝐃 𝐓𝐎 𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐈𝐍 𝐀𝐈 𝐎𝐑 𝐁𝐄 𝐔𝐒𝐄𝐃 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐀𝐈 𝐈𝐍 𝐀𝐍𝐘 𝐂𝐀𝐏𝐀𝐂𝐈𝐓𝐘.

It was Friday night, the day after your cute co-worker had spilled coffee all over your shirt. He had kindly asked you on a date, and you couldn’t help but except while trying to hold back a huge grin.

A quick knock to your front door and you rushed to open it, your make-up perfect, your casual evening dress and heels that clicked—all for Clark. You swung the door open and there he stood, flowers in hand and a grin on his face that could charm anyone's socks off. “Hi!” you exclaim, stepping aside to let him in, the door clicked shut behind him.

He turned to look at you, holding the flowers out. “Hi… you look beautiful,” Clark said, red climbing up his ears. He wore a suit, per usual. It sat on his broad shoulders, a little baggy, like he was ashamed of his size. You took the flowers, a smile lighting up your face. You stuck your nose between the petals, inhaling slowly, looking up at him. “Thank you, how’d you know these were my favorites?”

Clark shoved his hands deep into his pockets, his eyes roaming over you. No hunger was behind it, just curiosity and admiration for you. “Cat told me,” he said. You stifled a laugh thinking about him timidly asking Cat, and knowing Cat, she took him under her wing happily.

“Well, where are we going for dinner?” you ask, thinking maybe he picked a casual pizza place, or maybe burgers. But no. “That new Italian restaurant down the street? That's okay?” Clark reassured holding his arm out, which you clung to. That restaurant was really nice, and people had been raving about how good it was, but you avoided it because it was on the pricey side.

You gave a nod and he smiled, starting to guide you. Clark may be shy but he was no stranger to conversation, he was good at bringing up topics, asking you questions, adding his own two-bits in. He was a very smart, talented writer, and he was well traveled. Making him all the more interesting.

The restaurant was packed, but he pushed through, people naturally parted for him considering he was huge. “Reservation for two under Clark Kent,” he said casually, the woman smiled in acknowledgment and guided you through full tables to an empty one just for you two. Clark pulled the chair out for you before sitting on the opposite side.

What a gentleman.

Dinner was a breeze, you shared dishes and laughter. When it was a serious conversation, his eyes looked into yours with rare attentive intent. You watched his small movements, the way he pushed his glasses up after they’d fallen down his nose, how his fingers fidgeted with a fork or straw. It was different from work, he allowed his eyes to linger and his smiles were warmer.

You dug through your purse when the check was set down, but he snatched it up before you could even see the price. “Clark! I don’t expect you to pay for it all, this place is expensive,” you said, your voice fading off as he got out his own credit card. “I want to, I ruined your shirt!” he insists.

“It’s just a shirt!” Clark shook his head, handing the check off to the server. “A pretty shirt! One with little ruffles, that I can tell makes you feel very pretty. As it should,” he rebutted. It had been your favorite work shirt, but so what?!

“Thank you.” Your cheeks heat at his attention, he’d noticed? That every time you wear it you feel just a bit more confident? You reach a hand across the table and put it over her, he grabs yours, giving it a squeeze. A dorky smile spreads on his face, one that makes his eyes crinkle and his dimples poke out of his cheeks.

Upon walking home, you debated the idea that winter was better than summer, as the Metropolis streets were dark but still too hot to be on. Clark agreed to disagree, that he preferred the winter because it reminded him of home. You believed that summer felt like freedom.

At your door, you felt reluctant to let him go. He lingered too, shifting on his feet like he was just as reluctant to leave. He adjusted his glasses, swallowed hard, making his adams apple bob.

You grin upon realizing he was waiting for permission. You step forward, wrapping your arms around his neck and rising onto your tip toes for a kiss. He meets you halfway, months of silent yearning is packed into this kiss as he presses his lips to yours.

Usually you didn’t let guys in on the first date, but those pathetic puppy eyes were hard to resist.

And you did a lot more than let him in.

On Monday morning, you dropped a coffee off on his desk, your fingers brushing as he passed it on. You smirked while he flushed red.

The memory of him panting and whining underneath you, his beefy shoulders and calloused hands, sticky with sweat, tensing with each roll of your hips was enough to make him shiver thinking about it.

While you had no doubt about Lois’ abilities, this sounded a bit too far-fetched, even for Lois. You couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up, shaking your heard as you glanced away from her and looked across the busy Daily Planet Bullpen. “Well, I’d hate to be the gal that broke Superman’s heart but I’m not interested in him.”

Lois raised an eyebrow, picking up the hint in your voice. “Oh? But you are interested in somebody.”

“Yup, a certain dorky reporter from Kansas,” you murmured, a genuine smile on your face as you spotted him.

Right on cue, Clark came shuffling out of Perry’s office, a stack of papers balanced precariously in his arms.

“Clark!?” Lois squeaked as quietly as she could. “You like Clark?”

“I do,” you replied.

Across the room, Clark’s head snapped towards your direction so fast that his thick glasses slipped down his nose. He stared right at you, wide-eyed and breathless, as if you’d just called his name.

You tilted your head slightly, there was no way he heard that conversation, right? You kept watching to see what he’d do next and the effect was instantaneous. He turned too quickly, attempting to make his escape but ending up crashing, and subsequently falling over, the rubbish bin. The stacks of paper in his hands went flying in all directions. The handful of pens he’d had in his breast pocket slipped free, clattering to the floor beside him.

Lois winced at the sight. “Seriously? You’d choose the guy currently apologising to a piece of office furniture over the guy who could fly you across the world?”

“I would,” you laughed, already standing up to go and help him gather his papers.

II. The Close-Up

You chewed thoughtfully on the bottom of your pencil as you stared at Clark’s side profile, having completely given up being subtle.

Clark was focused on the screen in front of him, typing furiously to meet Perry’s deadline.

“Are you staring at me, or just zoning out in my direction?”

His voice broke the silence, thick with amusement. He didn’t take his eyes off of his monitor, but a soft, dimpled, smile was on his face.

"I'm staring," you admitted honestly, not even trying to deny it.

“O-Okayyy.” He turned to look at you then, and you took the opportunity to lean forward, resting your chin on your hand.

It was as if your brain was hitting a brick wall. It infuriated you to no end, every time you looked at him, you could swear you’ve seen his face somewhere before. But every time you were right on the precipice of figuring out exactly who he reminded you of, a strange mental fog would roll in, making your mind go black just as the pieces were about to connect.

Looking at him now, beneath the obviously oversized clothes and his hunched posture, he was undeniably handsome. You traced the sharp line of his jaw and his deep dimples all the way up to the way his soft, dark, curls fell perfectly across his forehead. and his eyes, even behind the thick, slightly smudged lenses of his glasses, were an impossibly bright blue.

A sudden wave of déjà vu hit you, causing your breath to hitch. You were flashing back to three nights ago, when you were high above the Metropolis skyline, pressed against a chest that was as broad as Clark’s looked, looking up into those exact shade of eyes.

“You just really remind me of someone," you murmured, the pencil dropping from your fingers. "I can’t remember who but it’s right at the tip of my tongue..."

Clark snorted a little too loudly before turning back to his computer monitor.

Awkwardly clearing his throat, his hands came to frantically adjust his glasses, pushing them higher up the bridge of his nose. He slumped a little lower in his chair.

"Uh, probably just some guy from your local store," he stammered, offering a sheepish, crooked grin as he swivelled his monitor toward you. "Hey, do you... what do you think, is this headline too wordy? I’ve rewritten it four times and Perry is going to be so angry if I don't turn it in."

You blinked, the fog settling back over your thoughts as you looked at the screen, the mystery slipping through your fingers once again.

III. The Delivery

It was one of those days where the weight of the deadlines and the grey skies outside brought the mood of the entire bullpen down. You were slumped at your desk, resting your forehead against the cool wood as you let out a dramatic groan.

“If I don’t get out of this office soon, I’m going to lose my mind,” you muttered into the desk.

Clark, who was sat beside you as always, chuckled. “Hungry?”

If there was anybody who could decipher your moods, it was Clark. You hadn’t even realised you were hungry until he had said it.

“Starving,” you whined, turning your head so your cheek was pressed against the wood. “I would honestly give my left leg for a that pastry we had from the little bakery we found.”

Clark paused, his fingers hovering over his keyboard. An incredibly tender look crossed his face, his eyes softening behind his lenses. "Paris, huh? That’s a bit of a trek for a Tuesday lunch break."

"I know, I know," you sighed, sitting up and rubbing your face. "A girl can dream. I'm going to go stare at the vending machine and pray it has something better than stale food.”

"Actually," Clark said, suddenly standing up and smoothing down his shirt. "I need to go grab a coffee from the breakroom anyway. And I think I left some notes in the archive downstairs. Give me fifteen minutes?"

"Take your time," you mumbled, already turning your attention back to your screen.

Exactly fourteen minutes later, a delicious scent hit your nose as Clark placed something down  beside you. You looked up from your screen and blinked.

Sitting on a clean napkin was a pastry. Not just any pastry, it was perfectly golden, flaky to the point of shattering, and dusted with a light layer of powdered sugar. The only time you’d seen a pastry that perfect was on the trip you and Clark took to Paris last year.

You stared at it. Then you looked up at Clark, who was calmly sipping a cup coffee.

"Clark," you whispered, your voice trembling. "What is this?"

"Oh, that?" He rubbed the back of his neck, his cheeks flushing slightly as he looked anywhere but at you. "Uh, funny story. There's this... new bakery just down the road. They import... stuff. I ran down there to get a coffee and they just happened to have a fresh batch from Europe. Crazy coincidence, right?"

You picked it up. It was warm. How could it have been imported and warm? It was like it had been pulled out of an oven twenty minutes ago. Paris was a seven-hour flight away.

“A new bakery,” you repeated slowly as the corner of your lips tugged into a bright smile

“Yeah,” he responded, smiling back at you so wide his dimples appeared.  

You shook your head, slightly confused but not wanting to question as you tucked into your pastry. You let out a soft moan as the food touched your tongue. Behind his coffee mug, Clark took a slow breath, hiding the slight breathlessness in his chest from flying across the Ocean and back just to make you happy.

IV. The Rescue

You were crossing an intersection together, arguing over who was writing the front-page headline, when a driver blew past a red light. Tensing as you braced for impact, you squeezed your eyes shut, knowing there was no way you could move in time.

You barely had time to scream before the world blurred. There was no impact, just a sudden gush of wind that slapped your face and a bizarre sensation of floating.

When your eyes blinked open, you were standing safely on the far curb, tucked securely against Clark’s chest.

Across the intersection, the car sped past, completely oblivious to the fact that they almost flattened the two of you but, somehow, didn’t.

"Wow," Clark stammered instantly, his voice high and nervous as he quickly stepped back, adjusting his glasses with trembling hands. "We... wow... we must have jumped fast. Adrenaline is a crazy thing, huh? Good reflexes."

You didn't answer. You just stared at the empty intersection, then back at Clark, your heart hammering against your ribs. There was no physical way two humans could have leaped that far, that fast.

V. The One Time You Did

It happened late at night on your apartment balcony. Superman had just flown you back to safety after a close call downtown. The adrenaline from the danger was finally fading, leaving you with a weird emptiness as he set you down.

You stepped closer to thank him, reaching out to gently touch his arms, then his hands.

“I’m running out of ways to thank you, Superman.”

“You never have to thank me; I’ll always be there for you.” Superman reached out, his hand gently cupping your face.

And then, everything stopped.

The warmth of his palm felt identical to ones you’d felt before. It was a feeling you’d recognise anywhere. It was like the fog that was clouding your mind for months suddenly disappeared, leaving an overwhelming sense of clarity. Your hand moved up, covering his over your cheek.  

Looking up into his eyes, the realisation washed over you. as his breath hitched, you softly whispered, “Clark...”

It was rare for the Storm Par crew to have days like this. The nature of their profession meant they were often landlocked, miles away from idyllic lounging spots on the shore of salty water. That was what made Scott Miller’s suggestion for the team to hit the beach not seem totally anomalous. Just because Scott was stoic and curt didn’t mean he wasn’t human. The Wranglers were there already, so it was only fair to join them. Human nature was what brought Storm Par to the beach on a day off; it was also why Scott insisted on meeting the team there after he stopped to get somethin’. Only Javi knew what he meant, but he didn’t answer any questioning looks from the rest of the team. So, when Scott Miller’s truck pulled up to where they had set up for the day, no one batted an eye. The moment he got out of the truck and made a beeline for the passenger seat and flung it open, that’s when the shock set in.

Climbing out of the passenger seat with the help of Scott’s steady extended hand was a woman. You were such a tiny thing standing beside Scott once he got your feet onto the floor, looking up at him with a sweet smile. Scott gave you a quick kiss before handing you a bag from the passenger seat. As you adjusted the bag on your shoulder, Scott moved onto the back seat. Right as the back door opened, a tiny voice squealed from the backseat. A smile that Scott Miller never wore on the clock spread across his hardened features as he leaned forward into the back for a short moment before he hauled a small infant out of the truck and onto his hip. The little one was narrowly about to age out of infancy and was especially tiny in Scott’s hold as he planted a smacking kiss on the baby’s chubby cheek while she babbled away.

“Is that my favorite Miller?” Javi called out from the sand, setting his drink down on the lid of a cooler before jogging over. “Scotty finally brought the only reasons I still keep him around!”

“Ha ha,” Scott deadpanned as he adjusted the little bucket hat on his daughter’s head. “I wasn’t gonna leave them at the hotel while you jokers spent the day on the beach.”

“I wasn’t going to let you,” you chimed in with a pleased grin.

It was true, the beach had been your idea anyway. You were the one who had suggested it to Javi the night before when he joined the Millers for dinner. Then, he mentioned it to Kate the next morning when they got breakfast and she had been the one to put the plan into motion. When she then messaged you saying you had to be there, you have Scott a look that told him the beach wasn’t up for a debate. It wasn’t a suggestion. It wasn’t a request. It was happening.

From there, the folks of Storm Par got to watch Scott Miller be a doting husband and father at the beach behind looks of pure disbelief. Their dark sunglasses would typically hide their obvious observation if not for their unmistakable shock. First, the man ensured his wife was comfortable and sufficiently lathered in sunblock before insisting you join Kate and a few Wranglers in the water instead of fretting over him or the baby. Javi hung back with Scott and chatted about baseball of all things, Javi drinking a beer while Scott opted to share a water bottle with the baby.

The whole point of this was for you to get some time to just be a person and enjoy a day at the beach. Scott always sought to do that. It had always been a priority that you got to still be your own person, not just his wife or your daughter’s mother. So, when we saw you unwinding in the shallow waves with some Tornado Wranglers, he lounged with your chunky baby girl in his lap under the shade of an umbrella with Javi not too far off to the side, watching the waves from a beach chair.

He took his time, carefully covering his daughter with infant sunscreen, being mindful to get in between the adorable rolls of fat on her limbs and under her chin. After seeing a baby with bright red toes at the park, Scott always made sure the baby’s feet and toes were protected from the sun too. Scott couldn’t help but coo over her, showering her with little kisses on her giggling face and sweet words reminding her how beautiful she is. Most of the storm chasers watched him, absolutely dumbfounded.

“I know, pretty girl,” Scott hummed when his little Ruthie Jean whined at the feeling of the cool cream on her warm face, taking her little foot to kiss the sole. “But we have to make sure you protected. No sunburns on Daddy’s watch. Your Mama and my Mama would have my head.”

“Dada!” Ruthie whined again, kicking her chunky legs restlessly. “Ow!”

“Ow?” Scott frowned, immediately ripping his hands away and scanning her from head to toe with vigilant eyes. “Am I hurtin’ you, princess? ‘Ow,’ where?”

“Ew!” the little one sputtered out with a sob and a scrunched button nose, but Scott noted there were no tears in her big blue eyes, only frustration as she weakly kicked at his hands.

“Then say ‘Ew,’ please,” he sighed and continued massaging the cream on his daughter’s soft skin. “You scared me. Daddy thought he was hurtin’ you.”

“Ow!” Ruthie giggled through her phony pouts, laughing and kicking her legs again when Scott gasped animatedly with his hands ripped away. 

“No!” Scott groaned playfully, leaning forward to kiss Ruthie Jean’s chubby cheek. “No ‘ow’s. Daddy would never hurt you, baby bug.”

Javi was the only one who didn’t blink an eye. He was the only one who got to see Scott over Zoom meetings from home with a babbling Ruthie Jean in his lap. Out of all the storm chasers, Javi was the only one currently invited to Ruthie’s first birthday party coming up. However, Scott knew that the more time his wife spent with the other storm chasers, the more likely that would change. There were already rumblings of the upcoming event Scott overheard from his wife when she trotted off with Kate and Boone. It was a massive deal, in all fairness; their baby girl was celebrating a year of being the best thing to happen to her parents. Scott had always dreamed of being a dad and you had given him the most perfect child. Ruthie Jean was a healthy baby girl, the apple of her Daddy’s eye, and always got strangers cooing at her. As the person on the field closest to Scott, Javi was more than familiar with the soft dad side of him. The cute babblings and exaggerated smooches he overheard were nothing new to him, but were like looking into another dimension for everyone else. 

Scott, to their disbelief, was the most affectionate and loving father and husband. His dedication to his wife was equally as evident in how often he sought the sight of you out in the water, only content to return his attention to Ruthie when he confirmed Mrs. Miller was happy and safe. They all knew about you, though. He wore his wedding band every day without fail and most of them had seen the small photo he kept tucked in his phone’s clear case. It was of you and Ruthie sporting the brightest smiles the two of you could muster and it always put Scott at ease. The case and photo had been something you had given him at the beginning of the chase season, just a few months ago, and he never went anywhere without it. But that was your Scott, not many people got to see your Scott the way you and Ruthie Jean did.

He stretched out on his back with the little one sitting up on his ribs. With his eyes closed, Scott went between giving Ruthie some teething toys to play with and gnaw on and running his fingers through the dark curls trailing down toward the nape of her neck once she ripped her bucket hat off. She was so adorable in her frilly little pink swimsuit and half of her dark curls tied into two of the sweetest teeny pigtails. Her dimples were deep in her chubby cheeks, and an obvious Miller birthright, so easily attributed to the tall, grumpy MIT graduate. 

“M’mma,” Ruthie babbled after a short while of smacking her drooly little hands on her Daddy’s broad chest. “M’mma. M’mma.”

“Momma’s swimmin’, bug,” Scott hummed with his hand rubbing the baby’s back soothingly. “She’ll come back in a little bit. Just sit with me for a minute.”

“M’mma!” Ruthie whined and reached for Scott’s chin, who then readjusted her to be flat on her tummy on his chest so he could cradle her comfortingly.

“Momma’s having fun right now,” he murmured against her dark curls before kissing her head. “You can relax with Daddy to let her do that. We’re okay here, just us. Right?”

“Dada.” Ruthie hummed, her chubby little hand reaching for Scott’s mouth this time, causing him to grab her tiny wrist to press kisses to her palm.

“See?” Scott chuckled and tucked the baby’s face under his chin when her long, dark eyelashes fluttered with sleepiness. “Just take a nap with me, sugar. Momma will be back by the time you wake up.”

“She’s gorgeous!” A voice yanked Scott out of his peaceful nest of love for his baby girl, peeking out of one eye to see Tyler Owens approach, with Kate following close behind. 

“I’m aware,” Scott replied shortly with his eyes closed again and his hand rubbing Ruthie’s back when he felt her sit back up to coo at Tyler.

“Hey there, darlin’!” Tyler greeted the baby once he crouched down to be closer to her eye level. “My, you are even prettier than your Mama!”

“Momma!” Ruthie Jean cheered with excited claps that picked up when she saw you approach from behind Kate, bouncing her diapered butt up and down on Scott’s chest. “Momma! Momma!”

“She gets all her pretty from her Mama,” Scott added with a grunt as he sat up, hauling Ruthie up with him to greet his wife. “Hey, baby. Fun swim?”

“The water’s beautiful, Scotty!” you cried and took the baby from your husband without a word when the little one reached for you. “You should go for a swim! I think your daughter’s hungry, so she’s keeping me here for a bit.”

“I can wait.” Scott shook his head, helping you sit on an unoccupied beach chair with a hand hovering around you as you held Ruthie against your chest. “We can all go swimming once she’s full. Maybe even after she naps.”

“She won’t get a second of sleep out here, babe.”

“Maybe,” he hummed, rubbing your bare shoulders before draping your thin swimsuit cover-up over your shoulder to give you and Ruthie privacy. “Then, we can take her to dip her toes in the water. She’ll love that. I can wait for my girls.”

While Ruthie got to nurse, Scott fed you some fresh fruit the two of you had brought and made sure you stayed plenty hydrated. He was always looking after both of you, not just Ruthie. It was obvious that his role as a husband was just as important to him as his role as a father, and that made his recent interest in possibly making Ruthie Jean a big sister not sound all too crazy.

The next time Jason saw you, you were in his apartment and he was without his mask. He saw you and quickly aimed his gun at you. 'Easy, hood. It's just me,' you said with a smirk.

'Fucking hell...'

'You guys make it really easy to find your real identities,' you said. He rolled his eyes and turned the lights on.

'Easy for someone like you. So, you want to tell me what exactly you are? You move between shadows like you're apart of them, you can vanish into thin air and your face doesn't show up on security footage,' Jason said as he walked closer.

'That's exactly why I'm here. If we're going to be working together you should at least know the truth about me,' you said as you placed a file on the table of a deceased girl. He took it and looked at it in confusion.

'She looks just like you... Was she your sister?'

'No, she's me,' you said.

'Y/N, huh...? So, why are you legally dead?' he asked.

'Because I am dead, Jason.'

'I'm not following, princess.'

'We're a lot more similar than you realise. The Lazarus pit brought me back...in a way.'

'You were in the pit?' Jason whispered in shock.

'Pieces of me at least,' you muttered. 'Bastard who killed me wanted a cover up, so he called in some...help. The help happened to be some of Ra's al Ghul's men. They threw my butchered pieces into the pit, they didn't really think anything would happen. Somehow I was brought back despite it just being bits and pieces of my body. The rest is just made up of whatever the hell the Lazarus pit is and...death,' you tried to explain without sounding completely insane. 'I don't fully know the story myself. All I know is that I was brutally murdered, shoved in the pit and I came back and murdered a bunch of people before recovering my past and remembering who I was.'

'Sure, of course you get cool powers from the pit. I just get trauma,' Jason teased as you laughed softly. 'So... Who killed you?'

'A friend... Someone I thought was a friend,' you whispered as you looked away. 'What he did to me is...something that no one should ever have to go through. After I remembered everything I vowed to rid the world of those people.'

'He...raped you before killing you?' Jason whispered sadly.

'Yeah... Then chopped my body up and tossed it in a bag,' you whispered as you turned away from Jason. He stepped closer and gently placed his hand on your hip. Your body felt odd, a way he couldn't quite explain. Like he was touching a thousand little electrical molecules.

'I can't imagine what you've had to go through,' he whispered.

'But you can... You went through a similar thing. Beaten to death and left like you're nothing,' you said as his grip tightened. 'You understand my anger...my madness. I'm guessing you also get those terrifying fucking Lazarus pit nightmares?'

'Nearly every fucking night, princess. Is that why you feel so familar? Because we were in the pit?' he whispered. You slowly turned around and looked up at him.

'Probably... There's always been some kind of link between people brought back by the pit. You think the bat family are going to be an issue?' you asked as he smiled and pulled you against him. The way he touched you was gentle and reassuring, it was nice considering you'd had no one touch you for three years.

'We won't let them be an issue... I want you to stop killing. Maime, dismember, torture whatever you want, but we aren't killing. That's my only rule,' Jason said as you looked at him.

'Why don't you want to kill them?'

'Death would be mercy to them,' he said as you moved closer. You had thought he would say something about justice, but knowing he wanted them to suffer only made you more sure of him. You smirked and glanced at his lips. 'If I didn't know any better I would think you want to kiss me.'

'Maybe I do. So what?' you said before he held your face in his hand and kissed you. You held onto his arm and melted into the kiss. You hadn't had any kind of affection or intimacy in so long, let alone with someone that understood your pain.

--

You woke up the next morning in Jason's bed with your head on his chest. You hadn't felt human in a long time, Jason made you feel like that. You stood up and started grabbing your clothes. 'Running off already?' Jason asked. You looked back and looked at him.

'I shouldn't have done this,' you whispered. Jason could see you were panicking and stood up.

'Y/N, you can go if you want but I don't regret any of this. What are you scared of?' he asked. You sighed and sat on the edge of the bed.

'I don't know... I've lived for so long just hunting people and surviving. It's been a long time since I just let myself live or...be touched,' you whispered. Jason looked at you sadly, he knew all too well what it was like to be in your position.

'I understand what it's like, Y/N. It's hard to remember how to be human after being dead for so long. Are you feeling guilty?' he asked as you glanced at him.

'Yes... How did you know?'

'Cause that's how I felt. I felt guilty for being alive, anytime I did something I enjoyed I felt extreme guilty. I wish I could explain why, but it's just something that seems to happen with trauma. Or with being brought back from the dead,' he said as you chuckled softly.

'This is going to sound weird and pathetic...but you're the only thing that's felt real in a long time and I'm scared I'll become obsessed with that feeling and you'll leave,' you whispered.

'Well, how about we just keep each other in check? If you start fawning over my amazing body and face I'll bring you back to reality,' he said as you laughed and shoved him a little. 'And if I start being a cheesy dickhead from a rom com movie you can stab me.'

'Oh, I'll keep you to that. You really think the two of us can actually...exist together without tearing each other apart?'

'Oh we'll definitely tear each other apart, may as well enjoy it while it lasts right?' he said with a smirk. You chuckled and looked at him, you wanted this to last, you really did.

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.

He comes home from a long day of pointless meetings just as Alfred's starting to lay out dinner. If he's surprised to see Dick, Tim, Damian, and Cass all sitting at the table, he doesn't say anything. Your concern deepens the longer he sits in silence as dinner passes. He barely eats any of his meal, doesn't respond unless his name is called twice, and barely has the energy to roll his eyes when Dick makes one too many dumb quips.

Needless to say, you've never seen Bruce quite so run down.

Still, he waits until everyone's finished their meals and retreated into the manor to set his silverware down and push his plate away. You take that as your cue to put your plan into motion. It only takes a few steps to get from your chair to his. Bruce doesn't say anything when you step up behind him, nor does he when you wrap your arms around his shoulders.

"You're tired, aren't you?" you murmur in his ear.

Bruce doesn't respond verbally, but his eyes flutter shut, and his head droops down toward your arm.

"Let's go upstairs." One tug on Bruce's hand has him rising to his feet. Even exhausted, he still manages to stand tall; it's a quality you both hate and admire about him. Nothing ever takes him out for long, but he's always working himself into the ground and running through loops of obsessions that twist his mind into knots. You're usually the one who ends up having to untangle him when it gets to be too much.

Bruce didn't fight you when you led him to the bathroom. He didn't even try to resist when you stripped him down and pushed him toward the eucalyptus-scented bubble bath waiting for him. And he wasn't exactly complaining when you undressed yourself and climbed into the bath after him.

The water is warm, the room is dim, the bubbles rise up to your chest, and Bruce's body acts as a barrier between you and the porcelain tub. It's cozy, but, beyond that, it's grounding for Bruce. The combination of your weight pressing down on him and the calming steam floating through the air has his muscles relaxing for the first time in weeks. As a few minutes go by, you can physically feel him sinking into the tub and into your presence more and more.

Eventually, you turn around in his lap and reach behind him to get a pump of shampoo in your hands. After working it into a lather, you start massaging it into Bruce's scalp. The furrow in his eyebrows slowly fades away, and he's left staring up at you in a daze.

You're able to rinse out the shampoo and work in some conditioner before he pulls you into a kiss. He leads with hunger and desperation, you meet him with tenderness and love, and he melts against you like butter. You've always been his greatest indulgence, the only weakness he gladly lets himself succumb to.

Two big hands slide down the length of your spine before they start kneading and groping at your ass and thighs. The roughness of Bruce's calloused fingers feeling you up sends pleasure shooting through you. Your own hands have long since slipped out of Bruce's damp hair, instead drifting down the sides of his neck to rest on his broad shoulders.

Bruce tries to surge forward, to flip the script on you, but there's no room in your plans for him to try something like this. You press him back against the lip of the tub, and, while he grumbles against your mouth, he doesn't try to take over again.

"Just sit back for me, baby," you murmur, one hand lightly stroking the back of Bruce's neck.

Bruce's lips, however, have already migrated down the side of your neck. Try as you might to muster up resistance, it all fizzles out when his stubble scratches at your collarbone.

"I like being here, though," he counters.

And, really, who are you to deny him? Tonight is for him, to let him relax…a few kisses couldn't hurt anything, right?

Wrong, apparently! Bruce's mouth takes a quick diversion down your sternum, pressing kiss after kiss to your smooth skin before latching onto your right breast like he'd been starving for it. His fingers continue to knead at your thighs while his tongue flicks over your nipple, causing you to shiver. The involuntary movement has you shifting your weight over Bruce's lap, just to feel something hard pressing against your thigh.

"Bruce?"

"Hmm?" he hums around your nipple.

"What's that?"

"Dunno what you're talking about," he mumbles. Despite his words, though, he rolls his hips up against yours.

"You got hard because I was being nice to you?"

Bruce lifts his head up, ice blue eyes sparkling with warmth and hunger, "Sweetheart, your boobs are in my face right now. I'm not a monk."

"Really?" you ask dryly. "I hadn't noticed."

He opts to ignore you words and goes back to littering kisses over as much of your torso as he can reach, grinding his thick cock against your folds all the while. Eventually, you give into him. Your hand reaches down between the two of you, lining hip up so he's gliding against your clit with each motion.

Bruce's hands are back on your ass, guiding you to rock back and forth in time with him. The added friction makes him groan into your chest, and pleasure spikes low in your belly every time the head of his cock nudges up against your clit. The veins pulsing along his cock only add to your pleasure.

It feels silly, grinding against your husband like you're a couple of virgins all over again, but it feels too good to even think about stopping. The water surrounding you sloshes and gets closer and closer to splashing over the edge of the tub the faster you and Bruce grind against each other.

"Can you—" Bruce takes your right hand and guides it up to his hair. You know he's asking you to pull it. To tug on it until he keens. Instead, you card your fingers through his dark hair lovingly, scratching along his scalp gently. Bruce expected violence, always. He keeps himself braced for the worse, so when he feels you caressing him so tenderly…he doesn't expect it. He lets a low moan slip out, just loud enough to hear over the splashing water, and you know you've got him where you want him.

"There you go, Brucey. I love you so much. So much. Let me be sweet to you tonight. It'd make me feel so good." You've learned that sometimes reframing things that Bruce would never ask for as something you want gets him to give in a lot easier. Bruce nods against your chest, and you know that this is one of those nights. "Thank you, honey."

"Mmf…anything you want, Mrs. Wayne," he whispers in between kisses to your neck.

"Remember that later when I force you to sleep."

"Like I said, any—hah—thing you want," he groans, helping you keep your rhythm. Pleasure's pooling low in your gut, and you can feel Bruce's cock twitching against your clit. You're both close, both clinging onto each other desperately as your hips chase any friction they can find.

Bruce cums first, and the sight of his eyes rolling back in his head coupled with the feeling of his cock pulsing against your clit triggers your own orgasm. Your hips stutter against his, and you stifle a moan behind a bitten lip.

The two of you are left panting, chests heaving as water pools around the tub. You can already picture the look Alfred will give you when you tell him about the mess later, but all you're focused on now is getting rinsed off so you can give Bruce the massage he's been in such desperate need of.

The bath drains slowly, but the two of you manage to get rinsed off. You end up having to wash Bruce's hair again because the conditioner sat in his hair for way too long, but neither of you mind the prolonged closeness.

Bruce is surprisingly eager to sprawl out on your shared bed for you. The massage oil you set aside earlier is high quality and mixed with a bit of menthol, soothing away any small aches and pains he's been dealing with. You don't stop until he's pliant and half-asleep under you.

The second you climb off of him, your husband is crawling toward you and collapsing with his head on your chest. He usually insists on holding you, only ever breaking that rule when he's truly exhausted.

It's not like you're complaining, after all. He's safe, loved, and snoozing away as you comb through his clean hair. It's all you could ever ask for. He's all you could ever ask for, and you know you'll never stop showing him how much you love him until he knows that fact, too.

The First Time:           

            Clark was used to the energy of the bullpen, the sound of keyboard keys clicking, phones ringing, murmured curse words when a source fell through, but it was different today. Today it felt frantic and it was loud. Far louder than normal—he could hear multiple heartbeats, faster beats, frantic in their own way, the way that only journalists have when something new, something noteworthy is on the horizon. 

            “Hey, Jimmy,” he says, one hand holding his coffee mug, the travel one that Ma sent him, the image of a Kansas skyline along it, the other looped around the strap of his leather laptop bag, technology and important documents all tucked inside. “What’s going on? Everyone seems to be acting like the biggest story of the century is about to walk in.”

            “New reporter,” he answers, looking up from his computer, from his digital photo editing software. “She’s a transfer from the Gotham Gazette. Their top crime reporter now on Metropolis soil and working for the Daily Planet.”

            “We don’t have a crime department,” Clark says and Jimmy raises his eyebrows once, twice in a strange wiggle move. 

            “We do now,” he replies, gaze drifting over Clark’s shoulder to take in the source of the new sound, the new scent, new heartbeat. New person. “Check it out,” Jimmy whistles, “new girl’s here.” Clark turns around, swallowing hard when he sees you, really wishing he hadn’t listened to Jimmy, that he’d just stayed facing him, taking in the photo of himself as Superman holding a building. He didn’t even know that Jimmy had been there, let alone captured the picture. 

            “Everyone!” Perry calls out, his form beside yours, hands clapping together in a way just loud enough for everyone else, but too loud for Clark. He prefers for people not to do loud claps like that, his super-hearing a bane, a curse more than a gift. “Meet our new reporter, Y/N L/N. She’s our first crime reporter and a transfer from the Gotham Gazette. It means she knows what she’s doing so…give her a warm welcome.” It surprises no one when Perry leaves, but it does surprise them (Clark can hear it; he’s surprised too, honestly) when he shakes your hand, whispering something only Clark can pick up. “Good luck, kid.”

            “Why’d you leave Gotham if you’re a crime reporter?” Lois calls out, her body perched on the edge of her desk, arms crossed, dark hair loose. Clark doesn’t have to see her to know that her eyes are narrowed as she’s watching you as if you’re a story, a potential source. Something to analyze, investigate, decide. 

            “You do realize,” you respond, your eyebrow arching in reply, arms crossing, “that there is such a thing as too much crime, right?” Clark swallows hard again when your pretty (very pretty) eyes scan the room, taking in the bullpen, the entire appearance of the place. You’re dressed in a band shirt tucked into ripped jeans, Doc Martens on your feet and a leather jacket unzipped, a satchel over your shoulder, one that matches his. 

            “You’re a crime reporter,” Jimmy calls out and Clark glances back at him, noticing the way he’s leaning back in his chair, widening his stance, making himself bigger, trying to seem more attractive. His heartrate gives him away—he’s into you. Clark, for some reason, doesn’t like it. 

            (It’s not that he likes you, he can’t. Ma always told him that appearance doesn’t matter, only what’s inside. He’s not crushing on you just because you’re the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen in his entire life. No. Totally not).

            “And a reporter likes a story,” you reply, your expression disdainful as you take in Jimmy. “Gotham has fifteen other crime reporters and everyday we’re writing stories that are clinical, basically no better than police reports. We don’t talk to people; we take the quote-on-quote facts and publish those. I miss the people and Metropolis should have that.”

            “I mean,” Jimmy says again and Clark wishes he would just be quiet, he’s just putting his own foot in his mouth the more he presses, “Metropolis has limited crime so…what are you going to be doing?”

            “Metropolis has very little reported crime. By reported I mean covered by the Daily Planet or any other newspaper outlet. You all seem to have Superman fever and I don’t…so, I’ll be drawing attention to what Superman doesn’t try to get into.” You walk towards the recently cleared desk, the one in front of Clark’s and he swallows hard again. Golly, he’s not going to survive if you’re in front of him every day. He can smell you (not in a creepy way, of course!), a scent of citrus and metal, strange and unique and now he’ll recognize it everywhere. Recognize you anywhere. 

            He never thought that metal could smell so pretty. 

            “H-hi,” he stutters out as he walks to his desk, standing behind it, his name plaque facing out, facing you. He watches as your (impossibly) pretty eyes glance down at his name before flicking back up to him. 

            “Clark Kent,” you say, but the way you say his name makes him think that perhaps you don’t like him. That he’s someone you don’t like. “Superman’s very own PR agent.”

            “Wh-what?” he asks, stuttering, his cheeks flaming, burning. Fevered. “No. N-no, I’m not his…his PR agent…I’m just a reporter.” You roll your eyes, taking your bag off your shoulder, setting it down on the surface of the pressboard top of the desk, a clunk sounding as you pull open the first drawer, dumping a twined package of files into it, slamming it and tossing your bag back over your shoulder. 

            “Uh-huh,” you tell him, the corner of your mouth tugging up into a crooked kind of smile, but not a happy kind. The kind that makes him shrivel inside, something he’s never felt before. “You’re totally just a reporter and that’s why all your interviews with Superman make him out to be the best guy ever.” You begin to walk away, boots making a loud clicking against the polished floor of the bullpen, the kind of floor that is rolled linoleum, sound muffled for the most part against it, yet you seem to have figured out how to get around that, your steps sharp and echoing. 

                         “What’s wrong with Superman?” Lois calls out as you pass her desk. You pause, spinning back around, one hand looped through the belt loops of your jeans, the other holding your bag on your shoulder, a crooked kind of smile, slightly sinister on your face. 

            “I think he’s great,” you tell her, tone flat, deadpan. Clark knows that something else hides beneath the surface. “But I don’t think the damage he causes is worth what he prevents. And no one ever asks him about the damage he causes. That’s all.”

            “You’re the one,” Lois says, her tone rising, growing, pitch rising, “that interviewed Batman, right? Back in Gotham, right and you tore him apart?”

            “That’s me,” you tell her, your expression shifting just a little bit, a bit of sadness shining through, a ghost falling like a shadow across your face. You spin back around, back to the door, the exit and Clark doesn’t want you to go. He likes your loudness, your brashness, the way you’re like no one he’s ever met before (and if he’s being honest, he likes how pretty you are, the kind of pretty that you don’t know about. Like you don’t think you are). 

            “W-where are you going?” he calls out, his voice cracking on the words, squeaking from his nerves and he can feel the red hot flush as it crawls from his chest up his neck, to rest on his cheeks and ears. 

            “What kind of crime reporter would I be if I stayed in a fucking office? I’ll be in on Fridays for edits, but otherwise…” you lift your arms, spreading them wide as you walk backwards out the door. “The story’s out in the real world, PR boy! It ain’t in these office walls.”

            And with a spin, you’re gone, out the door, into a world that is dangerous. Dark. 

            He knows you came from Gotham, he knows you can handle yourself, but you don’t know Metropolis. 

            It couldn’t hurt if Superman happened to do his rounds now and just…checked on you, right?

            No. Of course not. 

            Metropolis is different. It’s not what you’re used to, not the kind of darkness and grime and desperation that lingers in Gotham. It’s brighter, lighter. More full of hope. It’s strange, truthfully, to be in a place that seems light when you know that it can’t just be this hopeful city worshipping a man who damages the city that he saves. 

            You pull your car over, slowing to a stop along the curb, glancing over at your phone where the text from your old friend, Danielle, back in Gotham rests. 

            Danielle: heard they have a gang in the North end. 

            Danielle: old baseball diamond is rumoured to be their hang-out spot.

            You can see the baseball diamond, the chain link fence pulled down by people in places, locks clicked on it in others. A group of people stand in front, cloistered together and exactly what you used to find in Gotham. Enough people that everyone there feels safe enough to give you little bits of information. 

            “Hey!” you call out, stepping out of your Jeep, the Wrangler you worked on, painting it in an ombre of your favourite colours back in Gotham, the shop where you worked during high school.

            “What’s up, ma’am?” one of the boys says, stepping forwards, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched forwards. He’s blocking the rest from view, protecting them. 

            “I’m a reporter,” you say, jogging over to them, bag clutched tight onto your shoulder, “and I got a tip about something around here that…piqued my interest.”

            “And what would that be?” he asks and you narrow your eyes at him, cocking your head, taking in the tattoo on the inside of his wrist, the one that is not a gang mark, not a prison tatt. But a name, lovingly inked onto skin, a reminder. 

            “A gang,” you say and you watch as he stiffens, jaw tightening, his entire body rigid. “Heard they hang around this diamond.”

            “And you think, what? We’re the gang?” he asks, his voice stiff like his posture, deep but the kind of deep that happens when someone lowers their voice. 

            “No,” you say and you can see in the tick of his jaw that he’s surprised. “But I think you know something about them.” His eyes narrow on you, but all you do is arch an eyebrow at him. 

            “We may know something,” he says, “but we don’t talk if nothing’s on the table.”

            “I’m a reporter, not a cop,” you reply, tone wry and he steps forwards, steps closer.

            “Doesn’t mean you can’t offer us something,” he says. 

            “I want to tell the story of the victims. I want to show the other side of the crime, the people affected. I can tell your story,” you tell him and you watch as his lips purse but then he nods, the rest of the people behind him, nodding with him. 

            Until one looks up, taking note of something, something that has her elbowing someone else, until the entire group is looking up. 

            “We gotta go!” one cries. “If he’s here, who knows what’s coming!” You watch as they move, separate paths forged, the boy in front of you hesitating, gaze darting from the thing behind you back to you. 

            “I’ll help,” he tells you, “but not right now. Not if Superman’s here. I don’t want to be around when whatever he’s fighting makes its way here. You have a card?”

            “Uh, yeah,” you tell him, reaching into the pocket of your leather jacket, pulling out the new cards you had made before you left Gotham, ones that say Daily Planet instead of Gotham Gazette. “Here.” He takes it and then he takes off and you turn around, finally seeing the floating figure of Metropolis’ golden boy. 

            “All good?” he calls out, his voice deep and echoing and familiar as it reaches you. In response, you hold up both hands, flipping him off before turning and walking back to your car. 

            “Fuck,” you hiss, kicking at a stray pebble on the sidewalk, the pebble skittering across the ground, twanging off the lamppost. “Fuck!”

            You don’t know if that kid will reach out, you don’t know if this story will come together and all because somefucking hero decided to do…what? Just patrol? Fuck him. 

            At least with Batman, you knew what to expect. This sweet mannered superhero has thrown you for a loop because he’s the only story you can’t quite grasp. 

            What’s his fucking angle?

The Second Time:

            The first thing Clark sees when he steps into the bullpen is you, always you. Whenever you’re in the office, it’s like his gaze is pulled to you, like you’re True North and he’s the pointer of a compass, oriented towards you and only you. 

            Today, he sees you, leaning against Jimmy’s desk, the two of you talking, laughing and why does it feel like something is choking Clark? What’s the explanation for this simmering in his veins, his stomach, that tightness in his throat and the feeling that he wants to rip Jimmy away from you? Jealousy, his brain supplies. 

            You’re jealous of Jimmy Olson. Your own best friend, his brain tells him and honestly, his brain is kind of mean. 

            “Hey, Jimmy,” Clark hears you say, your voice sounding like it’s right beside him with the volume that he’s granted, his super-hearing focused on you and Jimmy alone. “A few days ago, my source got scared away because Superman was there. Do you know why he was? Like does he normally fly around the city?”

            “Oh yeah,” he hears Jimmy say, “Superman does patrols every day. Likes to keep Metropolis safe.”             “I thought he wasn’t concerned with petty crime or drug rings, more like natural disasters and weird Justice League stuff,” you say and Clark hears Jimmy’s shrug more than sees it, can hear the rustle of spare fabric over spaghetti arms. (Gosh, what is he turning into? He’s being negative over his best friend because you might…like him. That’s not…like him. He resolves to not do that again.)

            “Not really,” Jimmy continues, “but Superman is big into protecting those who can’t protect themselves. Maybe…he was, I don’t know, protecting you.”

            “Maybe,” Clark hears you say and then watches as you turn, your gaze landing on him, the intensity in those (unfairly) pretty eyes making his mouth go dry and he swallows on instinct, choking on his own spit. He coughs, the motion and sound both violent, his face in flames, thinking about how you must see him. 

            When he’s done, calmed down, Lois and Jimmy both calling out to ask if he’s okay, he notices that you’re gone. 

            Only the perfume of you lingering in the air, but fading fast.

            “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me,” you say and the woman nods, sitting down onto the bench beside you, her hands folded onto her lap as she sits down. She looks elegant, reserved, closed off, dark hair pulled back, up into a sleek bun, coat drawn tight, closed. You understand, you know the file, the case. Know what she found. Know what her daughter went through. 

            “I must say,” she says, “that I was surprised that the Daily Planet was interested in the story of my daughter.” She cuts a glance at you, dark eyes shrewd, taking in your appearance. It’s the first time you feel self-conscious, but in your line of work, the business look of the other reporters doesn’t cut it. 

            You need sneakers to run, boots to kick. Clothes that bend in the right way like a second skin and not a blocking covering. 

            “I came from Gotham,” you tell her. “Things are done differently there.” She nods, pleased with your answer, or at the very least not offended. You shift on the bench, drawing one leg up, notebook ready, pen poised. “What happened when you found your daughter? What did you feel?”

            “Do you have children?” she asks you, her attention focused on the horizon, the sky. 

            “No, ma’am,” you say and she turns to look at you, dark eyes lined with tears, the water shimmering in the light of the setting sun. 

            “No, I thought not,” she says. “You’re young, why would you? Well…when you have children, they are everything to you. You would kill for them…you would die for them…you want to…wrap them in bubble wrap and protect them from the world…but I found her…bleeding, crying, leg broken…innocence…ripped from her…” she is crying now, tears sliding down her cheeks, slipping down her neck, a dark spot growing on the collar of her jacket where it’s drawn across her throat. 

            “Did you know then who did it?” She looks at you, her eyes haunted, shadowed, a scene playing out behind them, reflecting in the shine of her tears. 

            “No,” she says, voice thick, choked sounding. “No, that came later. That came in the hospital when the doctor…” she draws in a sharp, shaky breath, “when the doctor said that she had been…branded.” You’ve been writing what she’s saying, pen moving against the page, notes neat, organized, until now. The police report said nothing of this. 

            “Branded?” you ask and she blinks, her attention focusing on a sight over your shoulder, one that makes her gaze dart back to you, nose wrinkling in the slightest show of disdain. 

            “You’ll have a hard time,” she whispers, voice still cracking, “getting people to trust you when you don’t trust them, my dear.”

            “What?” you ask her, panic creeping in. You don’t trust people, have handcuffs in your bag in case you get attacked along with pepper spray, but that’s not something you show. That’s not something you know. “But I haven’t—”

            “You have Superman as a guard dog,” she says and you glance over your shoulder, teeth grinding together at the sight of Metropolis’ hero, sitting at a bench not so far away, attention focused on you. 

            “He’s not my—” She stops you with a single wave of her hand, her body rising from the seat and she turns to go, to leave, answers leaving with her. 

            “Someone afraid of people is not right for my daughter’s story,” she says, her gaze focused on the hero now surrounded by people, wanting to take selfies. “Or crime in general. I’m sorry, Reporter, I have no further comments for you.” She turns and walks away, steps heavy, hands held together, fingers interlaced. 

            “Fuck you, Superman,” you hiss, standing, turning and walking towards your car, far away from the golden boywho seems intent on driving you back to Gotham, to the dark and dreary streets where you learned what it meant to be afraid. “Just fuck you.”

            You hope his super hearing picks that up. 

The Third Time:

            Clark listens to your footsteps, the rhythm that you have, the one that is so you, the steady heel down and then the toes, the way you rock onto the toes of the opposite foot. It’s a steady metronome that he’s learned, but not in a creepy way, just in a…completely and totally entuned to you way. Which is normal. Ethical. Totally moral. Right?

            “Clark,” he hears you say and then he sees your arms, hoodie covered extremities pressing down on the edge of his desk, your scent like a wall to the right of him. 

            “Hi,” he says, turning his head, taking in the look of you, hearing your heart slamming against your ribs in an angry beat. What’s wrong? What happened? Why does he want to hurt whoever made you angry? (That feeling is normal, right? Right?!)

            “Get your fucking…little hero off my back! He’s acting like a fucking guard dog and fucking up my stories,” you hiss and he’s taken aback by the amount of curse words you’ve used. Ma always taught him that they weren’t good to use, never nice, yet…he supposes that Gotham has a different kind of education than Smallville.

            “H-he’s j-just concerned about your…your safety,” Clark stutters and he can feel that hated flush on his neck and his cheeks, that pulsing heat that only you bring out and the stuttering that only you bring out because only you, the sailor-mouthed crime reporter, hold the title of making the Man of Steel nervous. 

            “Tell him,” you say, voice low and deep and dark and utterly even, “that if he doesn’t stop, I’ll cut his fucking dick off with kryptonite. Okay?” You push up, standing again, lips pressed so thin that they look like a line, one line and nothing else. 

            And as you walk away, steps angry, heart still slamming that angry adrenaline-fueled rhythm, he wonders why your anger is so…attractive. 

            Maybe he has a problem.

            “How many homes have you been in?” you ask the boy before, his attention focused on the picnic table, fingers digging into the knot of the woodgrain. 

            “Ten,” he says, his tone flat, deadpan. But the kind of deadpan that holds a wealth of pain inside of it, too much for a boy so young. His social worker sits at the next table, having given her permission for the interview to be conducted. 

            “How old are you?” you ask and he looks up with large grey eyes, shadowed and darkened. 

            “Eleven,” he whispers, his voice hoarse but not in a way from dryness, but a way that comes from screaming, from crying. “But I know a girl who’s nine and has been in twelve homes.”

            “And…what are the homes…like?” you ask, brows drawing together as you watch this frail little boy and the way he hunches in on himself, folding himself smaller, trying to make himself invisible. 

            “Not good,” he whispers. “Although one was. But I didn’t stay long. It was full and they needed beds so they…moved me.” His words hold a wealth of pain and you swallow hard, fighting against that growing lump in your throat as you look up and away from the little boy, taking in the appearance of the park, the trees full of green leaves, of life, the sky blue with white, fluffy clouds. Picturesque. 

            Gotham never was like this. 

            “What…what do you mean by…not good?” you ask, careful with your wording, careful to keep reporter bias from the questions asked. 

            “They lock the food up,” he says, blinking fast, rapid movements, trying to clear the tears. Most likely because he’s learned that tears make you weak and being weak is something that you can’t afford. “And they yell, sometimes they hit me. One place had a man who threw things at us if we left our rooms. We weren’t supposed to leave our rooms there.”

            “Okay…has this been…most of your experience?” you ask, but his attention is drawn by something over your shoulder, his face lighting up with an expression of joy and hope. Hope, the thing you’ve seen on most faces here in Metropolis. Something Gotham never had.

            “Superman!” he cries, jumping up from the table. You swing your legs over the picnic bench, watching as he descends, his cape rippling in the breeze behind him. You sigh, gritting your teeth, knowing the interview is over now. 

            But…at least, the kid gets to meet his hero. 

            “Hi, kid,” Clark says (does he really think people don’t know? His voice is the exact same!). “How are you?”

            “Are you working with the reporter lady to catch the bad guys?!” he asks, his voice alight and joyful. Hopeful. And it’s beautiful but as you walk to the social worker, to shake her hand and depart, all you can think about is how hopeful was a recipe for disaster back home. 

            “Maybe,” you hear Clark say, his voice smoother, steadier as Superman than he ever is as Clark Kent. “But she and I don’t exactly talk.”

            “Oh?” you call out, turning around, eyes narrowing on him. “We don’t? Well…do you know where I can find some kryptonite?”

            You never make idle threats after all.

The Fourth Time:

            You can see the man standing on the corner of the street, cast in shadow only, shifting, hands in pockets. His body language reads nervous, on edge. You received a tip that the drug ring you’ve been doing a piece on is moving into new territory tonight so here you are, camped out in the driver’s seat of your car, snacks in a bag on the passenger seat and camera set up on the window, capturing everything too. 

            Capturing this first deal done in a new area is important, not for the deal itself, but following the dealer back to wherever the headquarters is. That’s what you need. Photographic evidence of the entire operation. 

            And it all begins here. 

            “Come on,” you whisper, watching another figure approach the shadowed man, constantly looking over their shoulder, hood drawn up. “Be the buyer.” You need this. Your pieces have been good, often front page, having pulled together a story even with Superman’s interventions, but this…this feels like what you used to do. 

            The finding loose threads and pulling at them until the story unravels before you. Like now. 

            “Yes, yes, yes,” you hiss, watching as the dealer hands something over to the other figure, money passed back. You turn, preparing to grab your bag, follow the dealer at a safe distance, but just as you turn, clipping your camera to the collar of your jacket, a goddamn figure swoops down from the sky. 

            “Hey, guys,” you hear him say, his voice stupid and dumb and far too attractive for his own good. “This isn’t exactly what you should be doing, right? Now, I’m gonna wait here with you guys until the police arrive, okay?”

            “Fuck!” you hiss, the feeling of a door slamming closed and hitting you in the face echoing through your body, your muscles rigid and frozen, adrenaline pumping, but only succeeding in freezing you more. 

            You watch as Clark turns to your car, flipping you a thumbs-up and all you do in response is mouth Fuck. You and flip him the bird before putting your car in gear and driving off. 

            Fucking farm boys.

The One Time You Called Him Out On It:

            No sooner do you step into the alleyway, catching a glimpse of your newest informant, than do you see him run off. And you know, oh you know, that motherfucking Clark is there, over your shoulder with his Kansas farm boy, protection of damsels attitude. 

            “SUPERMAN!” you yell, turning around, stomping your foot like a toddler having a tantrum because that fits you. That’s how you feel right about now. “GET YOUR FUCKING ASS DOWN HERE! UNLESS YOU WANT ME OUTING YOUR IDENTITY TO EVERYONE IN THIS SQUARE MILE!” You watch as he appears from the side, descending down, his stupid, pretty dimpled smile on display. 

            “Hi,” he says, landing softly on the ground, his feet never even making a sound as he walks towards you which is highly unfair because you walk and it’s a stomp no matter what you do. 

            “Don’t you hi me! You know I can handle myself! I grew up in fucking Gotham for Christ’s sake! And not the good side, either! Danger was my fucking playground! So why do you keep following me? At this point, you’re the crime I should be reporting. It’s called stalking!” He tilts his head, eyes wide, face forlorn like a fucking puppy dog and honestlywhere can you complain about his attractiveness because it is so unfair. 

            “I just don’t want…something happening to you,” he whispers, his hands reaching forwards, taking yours in his and you suck in a breath at the contact, at the electricity that fizzles underneath your skin at his touch. 

            “You can’t control that even if you follow me,” you remind him, nostrils still flared, heart hammering harder and harder in your chest, but less and less from anger. And more and more from the way he’s looking at you like you’re everything. 

            “I can try,” he says, his tone lifting up at the end and you step closer, pulling your joined hands up to the side in a shrug, one you’re pulling him into too. 

            “Why?” you ask him, the corner of your mouth tugging up of its own accord, throat thickening because you’re just so tired of everything always being messed up. 

            “Because I like you,” he says, but it’s not spaced out, rather it’s one sentence, all the words running together and you can feel something crack inside of you, anger giving way to knowing, to the same feeling. Because you would be lying if you said that Clark hadn’t crept up on you, sneaking into your heart with his stuttering and blushing and bashful smiles over the top of his computer and the way he always brings you coffee and it’s exactly right. 

            “Clark,” you whisper, your hands squeezing his as he shifts, your back ending up against the wall of the alleyway, his body bracketing you in. 

            “How did you know?” he whispers and you shake your head, lips curving up into a smile of their own accord as you pull your hands from his, reaching up and cupping his face, thumbs on his cheekbones.

            “You don’t really hide it, Clark,” you whisper. “Every time something bad happens, like a natural disaster, you disappear for a surprisingly long bathroom break and then come back after Superman has zoomed off and saved everyone. Your interviews with him read like someone talking to themself and propping themself up, trying to show only the good which is a human fallacy. You read too close to what you were writing and not the closeness of a friend…and your voice. It doesn’t change when you’re Kent or…this.”

            “Why aren’t you a detective?” he asks you, his hands coming to rest on your waist, warm and bright. 

            “I’ll answer that if you can go change. It’s weird talking to you like this,” you whisper and he blinks once, surprised. “I like Clark. I like you when you’re not…performing.”

            “Two minutes, pretty girl,” he whispers.

            “Okay,” you say and he pulls back, flying off and you bend down, your hands on your knees as you suck in a deep breath, oxygen that doesn’t smell like Clark, like sandalwood and evergreen trees, a scent that is far too good and addictive. 

            “Hey!” someone calls out and you lift your head, taking in the appearance of the scared kid with the switchblade, walking towards you. “Give me your money!”

            “Can’t do that, kiddo,” you call out, pushing to a standing, and sighing once, the gesture almost lazy in a way.

            “Hey, lady! Do I look like I’m joking?!” he asks and you shake your head, reaching into your bag for the handcuffs you keep there, pulling them out and letting them dangle off one finger, the metal catching the light. The boy’s scared eyes widen in surprise and he takes a step back. 

            “Do you want me to pull a citizen’s arrest because I will, I just don’t want to, kid,” you call out and he curses under his breath, taking off in the opposite direction, pebbles and gravel skittering off from the force of his footsteps. 

            “You really don’t need a guard, do you?” you hear Clark call out and you turn back, slipping the handcuffs back into your trusted satchel and shake your head, lips pressing together. 

            “No,” you tell him, your heart skipping a beat at the way he looks now, when he’s not performing, just a simple white button up, tucked into black slacks, glasses askew and curls messy. “What kind of crime reporter would I be if I didn’t have a pair of handcuffs? Or two—one’s fuzzy.” You delight in the way his cheeks and neck and ears flush a deep red. 

            “How can I make it up to you?” he asks as he crosses the alley to you, his hands sliding against your waist as if they belong there, were made to fit there. 

            “You can take me out to dinner,” you whisper and then his lips are on yours and isn’t that surprising—Kansas farm boy made a move first. Doesn’t that go against their ethics?

            You don’t particularly care as his lips slide against yours, hands sliding from your waist to your hips, fingers digging into your skin, your one hand on his back, the other twining in his hair. And honestly, the way he uses his tongue, sliding it along yours, stroking yours should be illegal. Its own kind of crime because he’s ruined you for anyone else. 

            “Clark,” you whisper, pulling back, a string of saliva still connecting the two of you to each other, to that kiss that tasted of sugar and coffee and hope. 

            “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” he asks, his blue eyes flaring with desire, hunger. Your resolve is so weakening right now. 

            “We’re gonna have to stop or else we’ll be a crime I have to report,” you whisper and he leans in, trying to kiss you again, his lips chasing yours, but you turn your head, his lips landing on your cheek. 

            “What crime?” he asks, his voice husky in the most delicious way. 

            “Public indecency.” 

Bonus: The One Time He Was the Criminal:

            Clark lifts the lid from off the cookie jar, reaching in and pulling out one of the double chocolate cookies the two of you had spent baking this morning, the world outside dark and rainy and your honeymoon vacation time not yet over even though you were back in Metropolis, settling into your new home. 

            “Clark Kent, thirty-three, was found today, a rainy Tuesday afternoon,” he hears you narrate in the voice you have when you read out articles, “stealing cookies from the cookie jar.”

            “What?” he calls out, turning around, noticing you with your tape recorder (old-fashioned just like him. Golly, he loves you) held aloft, a teasing smirk on your face. 

            “What did he say in his defense. Well, of course, he said ‘wasn’t me’. But this reporter,” you say, your voice lilting up as he shoves the entire cookie into his mouth, chewing as he rounds the kitchen counter, reaching you, stopping just a few feet from you. “But eye witness testimony undisputedly puts him at the scene of the crime as well as the evidence of…” you cough, a laugh squeaking out anyways, “chocolate at the corner of his mouth. This leads to a supposed guilty verdict, but how does he plea?” You hold the recorder out to him, but he shakes his head, removing it from your hand, setting it on the counter, and lifting you up, tossing you over his shoulder, in a way that annoys you because he does it often. 

            It’s just easy for him. 

            “Clark!” you cry, your palm slamming into his back. “Put me down!”

            “Nope,” he says, popping the ‘p’ sound. “Because my plea is that I haven’t had enough sweets.”

            “What? You just ate a whole cookie, what are yo—oh,” he hears you say, hears the change in your heartrate, smells the change in your body and hurries back to the bedroom, slamming the door closed and laying you on the bed, pressing a chocolate-tinged kiss to your lips.

            “What kind of crime am I committing now?” he whispers, his body above yours, your hands digging into his back. 

            “I mean,” you whisper, voice husky in a way he loves so much, “if you don’t do something now, it will be committing a crime and not one you want to find out.” He laughs as he slides down your body, loving the way you look in his clothes, pulling boxers down, off your body, leaving you bare from the waist below. 

            “Golly,” he whispers before lifting your legs onto his shoulders, pressing kisses against your inner thighs, “I love you.”

            “Clark,” you whisper, shifting, arousal growing, your pussy glistening, “get on with it.” And he does. 

            And always and forever, will you be the sweetest thing he’s ever tasted.