⊱Juniper Tree⊰

He knew you worked for Senator Brown. You knew he was a Congressman, obviously. You also knew his background and the complexities that came with it. Many people in the political space turned up their noses at him, something you had a similar experience with as you were “only an assistant.” The two of you had joked about it, eventually making your way to the hotel bar and laughing over the amount of hidden toupees currently residing in the ballroom.

In the weeks that followed, you had texted with him, met for coffee twice because he was “in the area”, and had maybe even considered the fact that you were friends with Congressman Barnes. Friends were invaluable to have in D.C., but they were also something to be wary of. Bucky didn’t feel the type to be wary of. 

As you stood halfway frozen in the hallway, his comment began to make sense. He was calling back to your initial hotel conversation, making a joke about biases and stuck-up politicians, but this was not the time. Not that he could have known. 

Senator Brown barked out your name when he noticed you were no longer beside him, surely trying to get you to jot down some thought banging around in his head. You whipped your head to the side, almost missing the affronted expression on Bucky’s face as he registered the tone that your name was spoken in, and shook your arm from his hold. 

“Sorry, Congressman,” you murmured, turning on your heel and making quick strides in Brown’s direction. “I apologize. What can I do for you, Senator?” 

Your boss barely hid a scoff. “You can start by being where I need you to be. And write this down—I do not believe that the House takes the proper—” 

You scrambled to take out your phone and open the notes app. A rookie mistake; you usually had it open the second his meetings ended, but you had been distracted. By Bucky. 

Your heels hurriedly clicking against polished marble, you took a fleeting glance over your shoulder. Bucky remained there, his brow furrowed and his arms crossed over his chest, metal from his hand glinting against the gentle fluorescence of the hall. 

Three days later, he brought it up. 

You thought you’d found a private spot to scarf down your lunch in your allotted fifteen-minute break, but with a sandwich only half finished and your mouth full, the call of your name reminded you that there is never any privacy for you at this job. The sound of Bucky’s voice softened the blow a bit. 

“He always treat you like that?” Bucky asked, swinging his leg over the bench on the other side of the table. He watched as you tried to chew quickly, some of the hardness he’d sat down with melting from his expression. 

You covered your mouth with your hand and swallowed hard. “What?” you finally got out, reaching for your water bottle. 

Bucky raised a brow. “Brown. Does he always yell at you?” 

After a few sips and swallows, you gave up on being able to finish your lunch. You had to plan out your meals very meticulously to finish, and Bucky had already taken up 30 precious seconds. 

“Oh,” you began. You swiped a hand through the air. “It’s fine. He just gets a little intense sometimes. It’s just his personality.” 

“You’ve been working for him for three years.” 

“Right.” 

“The guy should treat you better. He could only keep assistants for a few weeks at a time before you.” 

“How do you know that?” 

Bucky slid your food towards you. “Eat. You looked like you were in a hurry when I got here.” 

You eyed him for a moment. With his hair tucked behind his ears, you could see the tenseness of his jaw and the shadow of his beard dusting above his collar. It was no secret that Bucky was alarmingly handsome in a sea of 60-year-old politicians, but you had never gotten the opportunity to see it at work. You were always too busy, and Bucky’s office was three floors down. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t text you back,” you said, reaching for the fruit in your bag. “I meant to. I’ve just been working late since the meeting on Monday.” 

“It’s alright.” A pause as you continued to eat your food. You had maybe four minutes left. “How late?” 

“Oh, um, I’ve been going home around 10. It’s such a pain in the ass to get a taxi at that time, you wouldn’t believe. Uber isn’t much better, and I definitely can’t walk home in these things,” you joked, motioning to the bandaids strapped behind your heels. “It’s not so bad, though. After about a month of late nights, Brown will go on a “vacation,” and I’ll have a few weeks to reign in the chaos during normal business hours.” 

You were giggling as you spoke, adding air quotes and sarcasm to try to alleviate the irritated look Bucky was sporting. After a few weeks of being around him, you understood that Bucky was quieter than you, but his silence right now was pressing. Your jokes weren’t getting him to talk, so you switched gears. 

Popping a grape in your mouth, you asked, “What are you doing up here, anyway?” 

Bucky let out a breath and tapped his hand on the table. “Honestly? I came to check on you.” 

“To check on me?” 

“After Monday, I wanted to make sure—” 

Your phone started going off, the “Senator Brown” contact making your blood run cold. You brought your watch up and let out a gasp that made Bucky jump. 

“What?” he rushed, standing from the table as you started to pack your things in a panic. He went to help you, but after two brushes of his hands, he realized he was only in the way. 

“My break was over two minutes ago. I have to go right now.” 

“Two minutes? What—y/n, that isn’t—” 

He was here to check on you. Right. That was really sweet. 

Your brain tried to catch up with your panic as you reached over and squeezed his arm gratefully. “I’m really fine, Bucky. It was nice to see you. We should get coffee again.” You were sliding through the double doors and back into the building as you called, “I’ll text you. I promise this time.” 

And you did. In the seven minutes of free time you got around 9 pm, you sent him a quick follow-up text. The bubble went right below his text from two days ago, and you felt a small pinch of guilt for not answering him until now.

You: Free Saturday morning?

He answered you almost instantly.

Bucky: Depends. Are you still at work right now?

You frowned at your phone. 

You: If I am does that mean you won’t get coffee with me?

Bucky: So you are 

You: …maybe 

And then, your seven minutes of silence were up. When Brown’s footsteps could be heard by the door, you tucked your phone into your desk and went to work on the stack of papers he assigned you. He so graciously let you know that he was going home now, and you could leave once you were finished. 

That was perfect. 

It took you an hour and a half, but when you sorted the final paper and checked his schedule for tomorrow for the last time, a sense of relief flooded you. You didn’t even care that it would take another 30 minutes for an Uber to arrive. All you could think about was your shower and your bed and taking these shoes off your feet. 

You gathered your belongings and swiped your phone from the desk, clicking to the rideshare app and somewhat dreading the small talk to come. It would be extremely convenient to have a car, but that wasn’t something in the cards for you. Your tiny apartment had barely any parking, and everything else was within walking distance. 

As you continued to ponder the pros and cons of taking the bus home, a honk from the curb made you jump. You lowered your phone and squinted into the distance of the now barren road. 

“Someone order an Uber?” 

Disbelief was your first emotion, and then shock and then confusion. “Buck—Congressman Barnes?” you asked, correcting yourself when the memory of the building at your back resurfaced. 

“You’re not getting in my car if you’re calling me that,” Bucky replied, leaning down to peer out the passenger-side window. 

“What are you doing here?” you asked him for the second time today.

“I told you, I’m driving for Uber. You called for one?” 

A disbelieving laugh fell from your lips. You shook your phone by your face and leaned down towards the window. “Haven’t even ordered it yet. I’m not supposed to get in the car unless they can put in the code verifying my identity.” 

“Give me a code, then. Here,” he passed you his phone, the background illuminating a small white cat. “Wait, sorry, I have to unlock it.” 

Your next laugh was more of a scoff as he reached through the window to take it back. “Seriously, what are you doing here?” 

Bucky paused, looking you up and down for a moment before his jaw ticked to the side in a smile. “I’m taking you home. You live close, it won’t take very long.” 

“I can’t ask you to do that.” 

“You’re not asking. Now, hurry up and get in. I’ve been in the fire lane for 20 minutes and parking enforcement hates me here.” 

You went to argue again, but Bucky only raised a brow and unlocked the doors. 

Sliding in the car was somewhat of a mess with your bag and your jacket and the file you had meant to finish at home almost suffocating you. Bucky tried to help, grabbing items and waiting for you to buckle in before placing them by your feet. You were flustered from the transition, trying to adjust your skirt and seatbelt as Bucky reached forward to tuck a strand of hair stuck in your lip gloss behind your ear. 

You turned to look at him instantly, but the man only gave you a closed-lip smile and shifted the gear of his car, pulling away from the building of your nightmares. You blinked back towards the dashboard, needing a few more seconds to settle yourself. 

“I really didn’t mean to make you feel guilty,” you stressed to Bucky after he flipped the radio on, low music trickling in. “When I told you about staying late, I mean.” 

Bucky tsked, knocking his head to the side to shoot you a lingering glance. “You didn’t, alright? This is my own problem. I just didn’t feel comfortable with you trying to find a way home so late.” 

“I’ve been doing it for a while and I haven’t died yet,” you attempted to joke. 

Not the best joke, it seemed, with Bucky’s fist clutching the steering wheel a hair tighter, the sound of leather meeting your ears. He shook his head. “Where’s Brown? He doesn’t let you take work home?” 

“Oh, he does sometimes,” you chipperly replied, trying to sound awake and get Bucky un-pissed off. “He just checks my timesheets when we work overtime, so I have to make sure I stay late enough so that he won’t say anything. I still have this to take care of once I get home.”

You tapped the manila file in your lap and looked over to Bucky as he drove. He was wearing jeans and a pullover crewneck, his hair tied back and casual, and even though you’d seen him outside of work before, he looked different this way. Something about the night and him driving you home made him look different. 

Bucky didn’t make a comment about your work or the system you had to avoid criticism from the Senator. Silence lapsed in the car, you lightly drumming your fingers on your thigh as the D.C. night swept past along the car windows. 

“I would like to get coffee Saturday,” Bucky finally said. “If the offer still stands.” 

“Of course it stands.” 

You only briefly caught the half-smile that lit up his face before the light of the streets was lost to a tunnel. 

~~

Coffee was relaxed and enjoyable, as it always was with Bucky. He asked a few more questions about your work, a topic he had previously not touched on. He wanted to know about your coworkers, if the interns ever helped you, how much time you got off, and in turn, you asked him about being a Congressman and if he actually enjoyed it. 

Both answers left the other person less than satisfied. 

“What about you?” Bucky asked, tilting his cup up. “Why have you been an executive assistant for so long?” 

You hummed. “I don’t know, really. My dad was in politics, and he would only really accept my work if I was, too. He’s… not around now, but I feel like I have to stay. I’m good at it.” 

“I believe it. Could be good at a lot of things, though.” 

You shot him a mock glare. “Trying to get rid of me, Congressman?” 

Bucky leaned forward, placing a hand on the small table that only separated you a few inches. He answered you earnestly, but a small amount of humor lightened his eyes, made him look less serious. “Now, why would I want to do that?” 

Your lips parted to quip something back, but then he was raising his hand again, the heat of his skin lingering at the corner of your mouth. He swiped his thumb there, and you were frozen, a replica of when he brushed your hair back a few nights ago, but the car had been a distraction then. You had been flustered and trying to sort out your belongings, so you didn’t think about it for longer than a few seconds. 

“Whipped cream,” he explained, holding you in his gaze for a moment longer than you should have been. Even as the barista from behind the counter was now standing at your table and speaking. 

“Hi! Would the two of you like to try our new coffee cake? Free samples since it’s new.” 

Bucky was the first to look away, tearing his eyes from yours to smile politely at the barista. You shook from your stupor and quickly reached for a napkin, brushing it against your lips even though nothing remained. 

You felt fuzzy, confused. But also nothing was confusing and you were reminded, again, how attractive the Congressman was. How attractive and how definitely off-limits he was. 

It would be so taboo for Bucky to be dating an assistant. 

“What about you, ma’am?” You blinked several times and looked up to read the small ‘coffee cake’ sign lying next to the treats, the barista’s blinding smile expecting and very retail. 

“I’m allergic to cinnamon, but thank you.” 

“Allergic to cinnamon?” Bucky asked as the barista left.

“Yeah, anaphylaxis and everything. I carry an epipen with me, but I’ve only had to use it once when I was 10. Did you know that some bakeries add cinnamon to buttercream birthday cakes?” you chuckled, reorienting yourself to the present. “Are you allergic to anything? Or, I guess you probably aren’t. Isn’t that a serum thing?” 

“Not allergic to anything, but if I had been, it would’ve been wiped out by the serum. We didn’t really have a lot of food variety in the 30s. Could have been allergic to shellfish—didn’t try that until after.” 

You had to pause the cup at your lips. “Oh my god, I forgot you’re like 100 years old.” 

Bucky’s expression morphed into an offended wince. “Alright, I wouldn’t say that. I haven’t exactly lived 100 years.” 

“I was just thinking the other day how you don’t exactly fit in with the rest of Congress, but you so do! Maybe even on the young side,” you teased. 

“Oh yeah?” Bucky egged on, nodding with his brows raised. “You were thinking about me?” 

You knocked your head back in a laugh, holding your stomach with your forearm. “How did I forget this?” 

“You know what? I’m not driving you home anymore.” 

With lingering giggles, you righted yourself in your chair, a smile still clear in your voice. Contrasting his words, Bucky’s smile was just as wide as yours, a slight redness to his cheeks making him look softer. You brought a hand to cover his arm on the table. 

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry, Bucky. You aren’t old. I take it back.” 

“Yeah, you better,” he taunted, though his arm flipped over and he gave your wrist a soft squeeze as he said it. 

~~

Bucky wouldn’t stop touching you. 

You didn’t know if he was doing it consciously or if this was something he commonly did with his friends, but he was going to get you in trouble. 

Outside of work, it was fine—distracting and disorienting, but fine. A brush of his hand helping you into the car, fixing your bag on your shoulder, a hand on your back when you left the coffee shop; over the past few weeks, it had all begun to feel commonplace. 

It could have been frequency that made you more aware of this habit of his, because Bucky had begun picking you up every time you worked late and planned coffee or lunch or even a walk at least once a weekend. So, maybe this was his norm and you were just around him more often—something you enjoyed, but also something that made feelings more difficult. 

Because, again, Congressman Barnes could not be dating an assistant. His credibility among the rest of Congress was already being questioned almost daily, and he did not need the court of public opinion breathing down his neck on top of that. It was a fortunate truth that while the internal part of his job was tricky, most of the public favored him. 

So, as much as your chest hurt and your stomach flipped whenever you were around him, you settled for friendship. A touchy friendship. 

At work, things felt heightened in the worst way possible. 

You couldn’t even understand why he was coming to the top floor so often, seemingly lingering there so he could scare the crap out of you when you’d turn a corner. And then it would be a smile and another hand at your back when he was passing you—a hand that was not necessary. Or he would find you at the tail-end of your lunch break and move your hair away from your eyes, distracting you to the point of no return. 

It was the worst because you were getting distracted, and when you were distracted, you got yelled at. 

Bucky had seen you get yelled at a few times now, each seemingly worse than the last. He kept quiet about it, but you could tell it bothered him. He almost stepped in once—when Brown was irate at the coffee you’d gotten him and chucked it at the wall, you saw Bucky step forward from down the hall. He stopped at the slight shake of your head. 

You were used to the Senator throwing things, and as long as it wasn’t in your direction, it was no harm done. At least, that’s what you thought. 

“You should go to human resources,” Bucky commented one Sunday, the two of you sitting along a lake by the Capitol building. 

You almost snorted. “Right. And what do you think old Mrs. Martha is going to be able to do for me? Brown has been in office for over a decade. If anything, that would just get me fired.” 

Bucky shook his head, expression taut. “There’s gotta be something else then. You don’t deserve all of that.” 

“If we’re talking about not deserving torment, I think I’m the least of our worries here, Sergeant,” you noted, knocking your shoulder against his in an attempted lightness. 

But when you turned to look at him, Bucky was already facing you. “I’m serious, y/n. He’s throwing things at you. I’ve stayed out of it because you told me to, but after today—” 

“Bucky, hey,” you calmed. “I know it seems crazy, but I know how to deal with it. I know he won’t actually do anything.”

“Right now, maybe.” 

You sighed, searching his eyes and trying to discern when this became such an intense conversation. Trying to figure out when the two of you had discussions like this and not just lax coffee hangouts. Against your better judgment, you placed a hand over his thigh and relented. 

“Okay, fine. I’ll work on it, but I’ll be the one working on it, okay? It definitely can’t be you—he would freak out if a representative started ordering him around. Even if you could totally knock him out.” 

Bucky shook his head in disbelief, a smile begrudgingly sneaking onto his face. “I can’t believe you’re joking about this.” 

“You can definitely believe that.” 

“Yeah, I can.” And then you were tugged against his starched, ironed suit, his metal arm holding you close to his chest.

You gasped a little at the initial contact, your heart hammering against your ribs as Bucky simply kept you there. This is dangerous, your brain reminded you, but it was also harmless, if you looked at it the right way. 

“You know, I’m not going to die, Bucky. I’ve dealt with this for years.” 

“Yeah, you keep joking about that,” he gruffly replied, the words a ghost against the top of your head. You hadn’t realized his lips were that close. “If we could keep the death jokes to a minimum, that would be great.” 

You pulled back from him enough to look at his face. “Why? Afraid your only friend will bite it?” 

“Hey, I have other friends.” 

“I haven’t seen ‘em.” 

“Shut up,” he groaned, tugging you back in. “You can meet them as proof. Next weekend.” 

“Okay, sure, Bucky,” you sang out, tapping his chest. “But if we need to reschedule this meeting with your 'friends,’ I would understand.” 

As Bucky went on to refute your insinuations in a grumpy tone, you tried to pretend that this felt like that—just a friendship. 

~~

Approximately four days later, everything went to shit. 

Senator Brown was on a tirade, screaming at everyone and everything in his path. When he got like this, the admin staff usually locked the doors to his office and the entire floor if they could, but today, they weren’t ready for how angry he was. 

It was a bill, or a speech, or maybe even the press catching wind that he was cheating on his wife—it didn’t matter. He was pissed and you were going to have to answer for it. 

You stood in his office with a clear view of the glass wall connecting to the hallway, hands behind your back and fighting off a wince with every curse and insult the Senator threw at you. 

“I hired you to take care of this bullshit! Why the hell am I dealing with this when I’m supposed to have an entire staff? This is fucked!” 

“You’re too worried about going home early, you can’t even assemble a reply to an email correctly! A fucking email!”

“I should’ve fired you weeks ago. When you started fucking off to wherever you take too long for your lunch break and stopped doing your job. I swear to god, this country has—” 

You were only retaining about half of what he said, which was good, considering everything was an attack on you, and your work ethic, and then he even started going in on your clothes and your apartment. It must have been something really bad this time. After he was done yelling, you would check his texts and probably find a couple of mentions of divorce sprinkled in between messages with his lawyers. 

Affairs and divorce were always messy for politicians. 

“Of course, Senator. I will do better. I apologize,” you offered, unsure what you were apologizing for at the present. It wouldn’t matter; he would just start up again about another topic. 

“Damn right you will or I’ll send you out on the streets. Do you know how hard it is to get a job in D.C when a Senator blacklists you?” 

Did you ever. 

When Bucky had asked you why you stayed, you left out that key bit of information. He was still newer to the field and didn’t need to know that Senator Brown held that over your head each time you even hinted at moving on. 

You figured the screaming was almost over. Brown was in his 60s, so he would be getting tired. And it probably would have been over if he hadn’t checked his Apple Watch and read a text that got him fired up once more.

You greatly regretted setting that up for him. 

You braced yourself for further yelling as his face began to turn red, but were alarmed as the Senator reached for the wooden pencil case on his desk and threw it. Pens flew, and you knew he wasn’t aiming for you, but the cup hit a vase on a high bookshelf to your right, which then toppled over and shook loose the framed art hanging above your head. 

You should have moved, but you spotted Bucky in the hall, and he always distracted you. 

The frame shot straight down, smacking you in the head and causing your knees to buckle in surprise. You fell to the ground, feeling dramatic and disoriented as the room silenced and your ears rang. You knew he wouldn’t apologize, but the continued quiet as you pushed yourself up and sat back on your haunches was almost deafening. 

The glass door to the office swung open. 

“What the hell?” A hand was on your elbow. A colder one felt around the top of your head. It was Bucky, obviously it was Bucky, but you were too afraid to look, keeping your gaze locked on Senator Brown. “Hey, you okay?” 

The hand on your head moved down to your jaw, forcing your gaze to Bucky. He searched every inch of your face as you blinked at him, mind blank. “Um, I’m fine.” 

Your brows furrowed, trying to connect the chain of events that led to this. You brought your hand up to replace where Bucky had placed his, the action seemingly spurring him into action. 

“The hell is wrong with you, huh?” Bucky shouted, rising from the floor. “You think it makes you tough to throw things at her?” 

Senator Brown had gone from furious to unsure, probably aware of the physical strength Bucky harbored. But, as was typical with politicians, he would not put anything before his pride. Brown righted his expression and pursed his lips. 

“I wasn’t trying to hit her, Congressman. It was a simple accident. You weren’t even in the room to see it happen.” 

Bucky narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t need to be. You’re screaming at her when you’re not throwing. What kinda grown man does that?” 

“Bucky—” you cautioned, glued to the floor still. 

The senator directed his attention towards you, brows raised accusingly. “Oh, so you’ve been gossiping about me, then?” 

You shrank back, hand lingering where your head ached, but Bucky stepped in front of you, blocking you from Brown’s line of sight. 

“Hey, I’m talking to you,” Bucky seethed, jutting a finger into Brown’s chest. 

Brown’s head sharply turned. “That you are, Congressman. But it seems like my assistant here no longer wants her role, so this conversation is moot.” 

“Wait, I—” 

“Maybe if you spent time picking on someone your own size instead of acting like a coward—” 

“Bucky, don’t—” 

“A coward? A coward? Who’s the one who cannot speak for himself on the board? Tell me, Barnes, is that part of some unresolved trauma from some nondescript decade?” 

“You shut your mouth before I—” 

“Congressman Barnes,” you called, authority that didn’t belong to you heavy in your tone. You were two seconds away from losing your job and being blacklisted, neither of which you could handle. Bucky froze, his anger still held in his shoulders. “Thank you for your concern, as I’m sure you were just passing by when you saw what happened, but I can assure you that it was an accident and I am fine.” 

Bucky looked over his shoulder with furrowed brows, but took a step back and dropped his hands by his sides when he caught your expression—still disheveled, but resolute in your decision. He needed to leave. You needed to save your career. You could… figure everything else out later. Probably. 

You bit into your bottom lip until it hurt. 

Bucky looked at the wall behind your head and then tracked his gaze to the forming lump on your crown. “But—” 

“I am fine,” you repeated slowly. Having risen from the floor before calling his name, you walked to the door and held it open. “We’re very busy. Please excuse us.” 

Bucky licked his lips as he looked to the floor, shaking his head in abject disbelief and following your direction. When he met the entryway, he tilted his head slightly, opening his mouth to say something, but thinking against it. His hand twitched at his side, and then he left, taking long, purposeful strides away from the office. 

You took a deep breath, allowed yourself a moment as the door closed, and then you did something purposeful yourself. Even if it killed you to do so. 

~~

Bucky’s POV

Bucky was losing his mind. 

After leaving Brown’s office, he’d stormed into his own and promptly shut and locked the door. Tugging his tie away from his neck and prying the uncomfortable suit jacket from his shoulders, Bucky then began to pace. He was pissed. He was so beyond pissed. 

It would have been so easy for him to knock that Senator out, and he would have deserved it. Bucky had had to watch for weeks as you were berated and screamed at, and then the line was crossed when he saw him throwing things. You hadn’t let him do anything, and then you hadn’t let him do anything again after you’d been hurt. 

He watched you flinch and cover your face, and even that hadn’t been enough. 

Bucky swiped a hand over his mouth. 

When had you started to matter to him so much? That was a stupid question, and apparently, he was full of stupidity today.

He promised that he’d let you take care of it, and then he went in there and almost killed Senator Brown. A replay of you falling to the ground looped in his mind, and actually Bucky didn’t feel stupid at all. All he felt was rage. 

“Shit,” he breathed out, knocking his head back and falling back into his office chair.

He’d messed up. He wasn’t sure exactly how, but he knew you were not happy with him. What did “taking care of it” even mean? And why were you so dead set on keeping that awful job? Bucky could think of at least a dozen other jobs in D.C. that would not involve you being verbally and physically abused. 

Fuck, he wished he had more pull, but as a Congressman of only a few months, there was little he could do against a Senator. And he had a meeting in five minutes. 

Bucky pulled his phone out and sent you a quick text about talking after work, let out the longest sigh of his life, and then readjusted his tie. 

That had been three days ago. 

You never texted him back. And you left the building far before he could give you a ride home. When he asked your coworkers, they said you were no longer working overtime and left during normal hours. 

Fine. That was good, actually. Only, Bucky never saw you. 

He frequented all of your normal spots, wandered up to the top floor, and even stopped by the coffeeshop two days in a row, and you were nowhere. Avoiding him, obviously, and while he understood (he didn’t), he mostly wanted to put eyes on you. To make sure you were okay. 

Sure, you didn’t have a severe head injury, but it was more than that. 

Bucky brought his turmoil to the barbecue Sam was holding that weekend. The one you were supposed to be at. 

Nursing his fifth beer that wouldn’t do anything, Bucky leaned back against the fence of Sam’s yard and sulked. He’d talked to a few people when he got there, but sulking was on his agenda for the afternoon. 

“What’s up with the stank face?” Sam asked, entering Bucky’s orbit of solitude and despair. “It’s gonna get stuck like that if you keep it up.” 

“I don’t have a stank face,” Bucky argued. 

“Right, right. Well, right now you have more of a pissed off face, but I guess I bring that out in you.” Sam paused and then smacked Bucky in the shoulder. “Come on, man. What’s going on, seriously? Does it have to do with that girl you were supposed to bring?” 

“I don’t want to talk about that.” 

“Oh, you don’t? Then it’s that.” 

Bucky rolled his eyes, knocking back more of his beer as the sizzle of burgers juxtaposed with his somberness. “Alright, fine. It’s that. But it’s stupid. We weren’t even…”

“Dating?” 

“Yeah. That.” 

“You told me you went out for coffee and all that. That you would go on long walks at the lake and canoodle at work.”

“Are you going to take this seriously?” Bucky accused. “‘Cause if you’re not, I’m leaving right now. I’ll leave.” 

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry,” Sam surrendered, raising his hands. “But really, Buck, that all sounds like dating. Tell me why she didn’t come.” 

Bucky clenched his jaw and stared out at the merriment of the barbecue, remembering the scene more vividly than he would have liked. He tried to find an exact moment that would have led to you avoiding him, but he couldn’t pin it down. Maybe it was the entire thing? 

“I think she’s mad at me. I kinda went off on her boss and she told me she wanted to take care of it.” 

“What do you mean ‘went off’? And isn’t she working under a Senator?”

Bucky puffed out a breath. “Yeah, Senator Brown.” Sam let out a low whistle as Bucky continued. “He yells at her. Throws things. I felt like it crossed a line this week, so I guess I kinda stormed in. She threw me out and’s been avoiding me since. We had talked about it before and she said to stay out of it, but, Sam, the guy’s a dick.” 

“And you really like her,” Sam added casually. “And I really like her,” Bucky confirmed. 

Sam paused to contemplate, though Bucky didn’t know what he could possibly offer that Bucky hadn’t already considered. He really, really liked you—more than he figured possible, especially with all of his attempts at dating since his pardon. But then you’d surprised him that night at the hotel, and he’d been hooked. 

He hadn’t even had the chance to tell you.

“Well, two things,” Sam began, leaning on the fence next to Bucky. “Sounds like she knows what she’s doing, so you should have trusted her. But—” Sam cut out as Bucky opened his mouth “—it also sounds like Brown’s a major ass with a lot of power. You don’t know what he might have over her, slimy dude like that.” 

“What, you mean like blackmail?” 

“Maybe, who knows? You just gotta talk to her, man. Work it out.” 

Sam clapped Bucky on the shoulder before wading back into the party in the yard. Bucky, feeling somewhat lighter but also still at peril, kicked off the fence and made his own attempts at being sociable. 

“As soon as I can actually find her,” he grumbled to himself. 

~~

The charity gala had been on your calendar for the past six months, and still, nothing could have prepared you for how much you didn’t want to attend. 

You usually enjoyed events like this. You got to dress up and eat nice food, and Brown always got too drunk to remember that his assistant was even in the building. The first hour felt like work, and then the rest of the night was cosplaying as a rich politician. 

That was not the case for this gala. 

Ever since the ordeal with Bucky, Senator Brown had kept you on a tight leash. Whether that was due to how much he enjoyed intimidating you or his fear that you actually were telling people he was a mean, abusive boss, didn’t matter. All that mattered was that this gala was going to suck and there was nothing you could do about it. 

You had apologized profusely, swore up and down that you didn’t know Congressman Barnes, and practically pledged your life to Brown in every way you knew how. You never left the office, never took a lunch break—you were pretty sure your eyes were permanently dry from how long you stared at a screen all day. 

Making you attend this gala and not leave his side was another ploy to make you atone for your wrongdoings. Maybe the man knew how much you enjoyed these events and was taking advantage of that. 

“Check this,” Senator Brown lazily ordered, draping his coat over your arms. “And meet me back in the dining room. You get to sit right next to me.” 

You offered him a tight smile and felt the ache in your shoulders begin to fester. You were more uptight this week than ever, but that had nothing to do with Bucky Barnes. Nothing. 

It was just this job and your future in D.C. hanging in the balance. 

Obviously. 

You meandered over to the coat check, taking longer than you needed to and dragging your feet along the way. Your phone was buzzing incessantly in your bag—most likely some PR fire you’d need to put out before more people realized Brown was cheating on his wife—and you had absolutely no inclination to drag it out. 

“Just these two,” you offered, pressing the coats into the attendant's hands and taking the ticket in return. 

“Actually, can you add this one to that ticket?” 

As if this night couldn’t get any more uncomfortable. 

You could feel his chest against your back even before you heard him. He shifted his arms out of his sleeves and placed a hand on your shoulder as he leaned towards the counter. Of course he smelled good. Why wouldn’t he?

You fought the urge to roll your eyes in repressed… something and spun on your heel. 

He was just as close as you were expecting and also far too close for comfort. You knocked your head back to catch his gaze, trying to appear unamused and angry. 

“Why would you do that?” you asked. 

Bucky paused for a moment, searching the planes of your face for a beat too long before replying, “No reason to open another ticket. I’ll just leave when you leave.” 

“You mean you’ll leave when Brown leaves, then?” 

The muscle in his jaw jumped. “So, nothing's changed.”

This time, you did roll your eyes. You clutched the coat check number in your hand and began to storm off, not in the headspace to have this conversation at this gala. Bucky, however, did not seem to mind. 

The hand on your arm was soft but firm as you were tugged into a closet and subsequently shoved into a rack of hanging coats. It was too dim to see beyond your hands out in front of you, but Bucky solved that predicament as he entered your space. 

“Did you seriously just throw me into a closet?” you whisper-yelled, all too aware of the staff only feet away. 

“I had no choice,” he replied with the same urgency. “You were stomping off. And I didn’t throw you in here.” 

“I was not stomping off,” you scoffed. 

“You were.” 

“Was not!” 

“I could hear your heels. You were stomping.” 

You groaned, pushing into his chest to try and create distance that wasn’t available. Your back only hit the wall. 

“Fine. What do you want?” 

Bucky froze for a moment. “I… I didn’t actually think you’d stay in here. Or let me talk, if I’m being honest. 

Your jaw fell open, an incredulous laugh slipping out. You’d almost forgotten how endearing he was in just about everything he did. Even as he stood in front of you in a full, three-piece suit, smushing you against a closet wall because he had dragged you in there with no plan, a part of your chest warmed. 

Your phone vibrated in your bag, and that warmth turned to ice. 

“I don’t have time for this,” you determined, wiggling your way towards the door. 

“Wait, hold on. I do have something to say, wait,” Bucky pleaded, metal hand—more gentle than you were sure it was ever used for—encircling your wrist. He tugged you back even closer this time, your face inches from his. “I wanted to say sorry. And… and I want to get it.” 

“Get it?” you parroted, trying extremely hard to ignore the dropping feeling in your gut as he stared into your eyes. 

“I want to get why you stay. Why you let him treat you like that. I want to know so I can… feel okay backing off.” 

All you could get out was, “Why?” 

Bucky’s next words were spoken as he stared down at your lips. “I think you know why.” 

Breaths began to fail you, each exhale more ragged than the last. You had been expecting this, in a way, and that was why you always made excuses. He couldn’t be with you because he was a Congressman. You were only an assistant. You couldn’t date him because you were too busy. He wouldn’t want to date you, anyway. Senator Brown would never be okay with it. 

All of those excuses evaporated within the shared space of the closet, and then you got scared. So, you blurted out what he wanted. 

“He won’t let me quit. He won’t let me work anywhere else.” 

Bucky blinked, a fog clearing from his heated gaze. His head jutted back an inch, and the hand that had somehow found a home on your jaw paused its ascent into your hair. “Won’t let you?” 

“I’d be blacklisted.” 

“He can’t do that.” 

“He can.” 

Bucky opened his mouth to speak again as the air in the closet became breathable and light peeked in from the cracking door. You sprang back from the Congressman, pushing his hand away from your cheek and slamming your back into the wall. It didn’t help much; the fifteen-year-old with the shawl in her hand was already making her own assumptions as you rushed past her and left Bucky to his own devices in the closet. 

Amazing. 

Just amazing. 

You debated moving states, or countries, or entire career paths as you hurried into the dining room of the gala. Not only had you taken too long at the coat check, but you knew you looked completely flushed and out of it. You prayed that Brown was already drinking and wouldn’t catch on. 

Thankfully, your prayers were answered. 

While he was not happy to see you, his raised brow and side-eye deadly as you sat down, he didn’t say anything. And that was how dinner went—quiet and uncomfortable for you, but otherwise par for the course for Senator Brown. 

Bucky was staring at you from across the table. The room was backlit by dull candles and expensive chandeliers, and you could feel his gaze on the side of your face like an unprecedented heat. He often flickered that gaze to Brown, but it would harden, become angry.

There was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone could do. 

You either stuck it out with Brown or tossed your political science degree in the trash can on your way out.

When dinner passed and dessert was served, you eyed the lemon tart mocking you from your plate. Dessert, when your life felt so out of control and confusing, couldn’t hurt, you figured, so you picked up your fork and ignored the knots taking up space in your stomach. 

“Yours looks better.” Senator Brown picked up the lip of your plate and slid his in its place. “Here.” 

“But—” 

“Oh, don’t complain about it. Who complains about chocolate cake?” he peeved, snickering to the men on the other side of the table. He then went on a drunken rant about “good help” and the “youth of today” as you looked down at the cake in front of you. 

Was D.C. even worth it? 

Bucky was staring at you again. He wasn’t directly across from you, a few centerpieces blocking your view, but you could feel it. To avoid him—and your feelings—you ate the cake. Brown and the men sarcastically cheered as you did, alcohol clear in the air at this point, and you took another bite to get them to find some other novelty. 

You took three bites before it started to sink in. 

You vaguely registered that Bucky had pushed out from the table, a clink of silverware preceding the motion. It was too late for him, however, because as your own fork clattered down, you could no longer breathe. 

Your tongue felt ten times too big in your mouth and your throat was glued shut, air tunneling through any openings it could find. You pushed out from the table and stood. The extra space didn’t do anything. You clawed at your throat until your legs became unsteady and failed from the lack of oxygen. 

The table was extremely long, so at some point, you thought you heard Bucky dive over the dinner party rather than continue his trek around to your side. Other sounds filtered past the panic clogging your ears. 

“What’s wrong with her?” 

“I don’t know!” 

“Is she allergic to something? It’s an allergic reaction!” 

“Brown, what is she allergic to?” 

“How should I know?” 

“Well, do something!” 

As you were grappling for your purse, a choked whine fell from your lips. It had been kicked somewhere, pushed out of your grasp, and no one at this damn gala was helping you. Several older women had gone to their knees with worried expressions at your eye line, but they weren’t doing anything. 

“Move.” 

Your head was beginning to spin, and your thoughts were blurring, but you heard Bucky. He came to your side much faster than it felt, moving things around that your blurred vision couldn’t catch. And then, pain. And then relief. 

Your gasping breaths were supported by gentle hands on your face, thumbs brushing along your cheekbones. You grappled at Bucky’s wrists and tried to parse out panic from physical symptoms, but there was so much commotion in the room and your head was still so fuzzy. 

“You’re okay,” Bucky assured you, voice almost too low to catch. Someone was on the phone with 911 in the back. “You can breathe with me. Come on. Don’t—hey—don’t look at them. Look at me.” 

Your chin was pushed forward, and then your forehead connected with his. Ringing persisted in your ears. Your hands were beginning to shake from the epi, your jaw following close behind. 

“I got you, okay?” 

“F-f-feels—” 

“I know,” he hushed. When your breath was somewhat steadier, he tucked your head beneath his chin and began barking out orders. He asked for an ETA on the ambulance, for your jacket, for ten other things you couldn’t register. And then, “You’re a piece of shit, you know that?” 

The chaos of the room went silent. Within your shaking hands clutched in Bucky’s suit jacket, your fingers spasmed out of fear. 

“Excuse me?” Brown scoffed. You were honestly surprised he was still in the room.

“What, throwing things at her wasn’t enough? Had to try and kill her?” 

“B-bucky—” 

“Throwing things at her?” you heard from across the room. “Brown, what is Barnes talking about?” 

“I have no idea,” Brown spat out. He jutted his hand out towards you on the floor. “He never knows what he’s talking about. We’ve established that.” 

“Right,” Bucky deadpanned, pulling you closer to his chest as you gasped for breath. “So what do you call this?” 

“An accident, obviously.” 

Bucky let out a puff of air through his nose, shaking his head in disbelief. Silence blanketed the room once more, and it was clear that he had given up. His hands were glued to the back of your head and your back, and he didn’t have the time or the drive in him to care about Brown right now. 

“I saw you switch the plates.” The quiet voice came from across the table, the young blonde’s face registering in your memory as you peeked out from beyond Bucky’s chest. “She had a card with it, too. It said there was an allergy accommodation.” 

Low murmurs fell over the room. Brown, much to your surprise, looked at a loss for words, his expression betrayed as he stared at the woman across the room. It clicked then, where you knew her from. She was on the front cover of every article you were pressured to get taken down, and the contact photo for the main caller in Brown’s phone. 

“What? No,” Brown refuted, a nervous chuckle escaping him. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, either. She’s barely even a secretary. She’s—” 

The eyes around the room made his words trail off. “Barely even a secretary” was certainly a degrading title for his mistress, and everyone in the room knew it. If you were to look at your phone, you’d have seen that the newest story of their relationship had been blowing up all night. You guessed she was fed up with him denying it. 

Sirens sounded beyond the doors of the ballroom, breaking up the tension at the wide table. Brown used it as his getaway, throwing his napkin down and muttering something about insolence or idiots or something of the sort. You couldn’t really hear anything over Bucky’s low whisper in your ear, followed by his lips against the side of your head. 

~~

After being monitored in the emergency room for approximately six hours, the night shift staff sent you off with a horde of medication to take for the next month and, of course, a new epipen. You trudged out past the waiting room, prepared to wait in the parking lot for an Uber, when a certain man sitting in a chair far too small for him caught your eye. 

He was half asleep, his face held in his metal hand as he nodded off and woke up just as quickly. His suit looked stiff and uncomfortable as he twisted his wrists, dragging the sleeves up to his elbows. He’d discarded the jacket somewhere, probably lost to the world now. And then he spotted you, your dress awkwardly draped over your body in your haphazard attempt to re-dress, your hair completely out of place, and your hands filled with paper bags of medication.

He shot out of the chair, holding everything in your hands in one of his, and assessed you himself. His gaze roved the mess you’d become. He should have made a joke about it, maybe teased you for almost dying, but instead, he ran a hand over your head and dragged you against his chest. 

“Scared the shit out of me,” he murmured into your hair. He pressed another kiss there, reminding you that the first one hadn’t been your imagination. 

“You didn’t have to stay,” you said, clutching his button-up in your hands. 

“‘Course I did.” He leaned you back, hand still woven at the base of your hair, not caring that he was in the middle of the ER waiting room. “You okay?” 

It only took you a moment to make a decision. 

You pressed up, kissing him even though you were in the ER waiting room. Even though you both looked like a mess and you’d almost died and you had no idea if you still had a job. You kissed him and it startled him, the paper bag of medications crunching in his hand, but he kissed you back without hesitation. 

It wasn’t a passionate kiss—not like the breathless, wanting kisses you would share late, share tomorrow—but it was confirming something. Bucky held you and had his lips firmly against yours, his brows furrowed in a way you couldn’t see, and he confirmed everything you’d suspected. 

You figured you wouldn’t need to work if your boyfriend were a Congressman. 

You’re not like the Minutemen, stomping into timelines in those tactical chic jumpsuits, pruning anomalies with the self-satisfaction of people who still think “delete” is a solution. You’re not an auditor—thank God—squinting at branching event charts and muttering about entropy coefficients over cold tea.

No. You’re the needle. The thread. The hand that sews.

Your job is surgical. Your presence is a whisper. Where others correct by erasure, you correct by inclusion. You enter the timeline. You become part of it. You don’t push the dominoes over—you walk by, breathe funny, and trust the air will tip them just right.

There’s no glory in your work. No medals. No mission logs, either. 

Everything you do is redacted—even from you. You carry the residue of other people’s lives under your fingernails, and sometimes forget which memories belong to whom. 

Sometimes you wake up choking on grief that was never yours. You learn to live with that.

It’s the first thing they ask you in training, during the psych filters: Would knowing the future help you grieve less?

No one answers yes. Not honestly.

You understand now why. There’s no solace in foreknowledge, just the burden of it. Knowing that someone dies doesn’t stop you from loving them. It just makes every moment feel like a countdown.

You specialize in delicate convergences: moments in history so precariously balanced that a sneeze in the wrong direction could avalanche into centuries of collapse. Your handlers call them “softpoints.” You call them “the edge of the knife.”

Sometimes you’re a midwife in 1421. Sometimes you’re the barista who smiles just enough to make a physicist reconsider her route to work. Sometimes you’re a corpse at the right place, the right time, to remind a man of the past he keeps trying to forget.

Right now, you're really fucking hungover.

You started having the dream again.

Not a dream, exactly. A memory with the edges worn smooth. At first it came in pieces—clipped sounds, filtered light, the low hum of something old and mechanical beneath your feet. You dismissed it. Just timeline residue. A misplaced echo.

But it kept returning.

Always the same: a red-brick apartment building. New York—no file, no mission tag—in winter. Brooklyn, more specifically, from your view of the bridge. You’re on a stoop. Someone calls your name and you turn just in time to see a shadow disappear around the corner. A laugh rides the wind, low and familiar.

You wake up before you follow. Every time.

Your mouth tastes like floor polish and betrayal. Your eyes open one at a time, not out of coordination, but protest. Your skull seems like it's determined to play a high-stakes game of ping-pong against itself.

You groan.

This is how your days usually start. 

You sit up slowly, bones cracking like old film reels, and assess the carnage around your quarters.

Clothes: on the chair, on the floor, one boot in the sink.

Timepad: blinking faintly on the nightstand, still charged.

Your hair is somewhere between “ungovernable” and “formerly respected.” You run a hand through it and immediately regret that decision. Your reflection in the tiny wall mirror is a damning indictment of last night’s choices. Smudged eyeliner. A smear of something neon-orange near your jawline. You shower quickly — TVA-issued water pressure: inconsistent, ironic. You pull on a button-up and slacks instead — neutral, inoffensive.

You’ll blend into whatever century they throw you into next. For now, you settle for looking like you might belong in the TVA cafeteria line.

By the time you lace your boots (twice — the first attempt ends in a mild panic attack and a missing sock), the hangover’s down to a dull roar. Your breath smells like expired mint gum and broken dreams, so you down two cups of black coffee and chew on one of those flavorless temporal hydration tablets like it might save your soul.

You do your job. Reliably. Unremarkably. The way they like it.

And sometimes you drink enough that for a few hours, you don’t remember how you got here. Or how you’ve always been here.

You toss your timepad into your holster, slap a mediocre patch on your face to cover the worst of the under-eye shadows, and mutter something vaguely threatening at your own reflection.

Time to go.

Three mugs deep into lukewarm cafeteria coffee that tastes like regret and the glue holding office furniture together, you’re hunched over yet another Form G-17 — “Suspected Non-Nexus Deviation: B-Class Branch.” Your fourth this week. You’ve logged more hours categorizing existential anomalies than actually interfering with any, which is particularly unusual, for you anyway. You've been dormant for much longer than you're used to.

The previous G-17s included such branch classics as “cow develops rudimentary consciousness,” “Steve Rogers blinks twice during a televised 2013 speech instead of once,” and “Loki starts a book club.” (Unauthorized self-improvement remains a hot-button issue.)

This one, though—this one’s different.

The case file reads:

CASE FILE: #616-BE0 MISSION CLASS: Softpoint Convergence LOCATION: Siberia, USSR DATE: February 1955 SUMMARY: A low-grade temporal softpoint has been detected. Origin ambiguous. Energy output consistent with pre-convergent instability. Divergent potential is not yet sufficient to trigger a Nexus Event, but the timeline is exhibiting signs of local timeline ‘fraying.’ Mission parameters suggest passive stabilization through presence, not correction. Duration: 3 hours. Environmental hostility high. NOTES: Embed into local context. Observe anomaly behavior. Maintain temporal camouflage. Apply Softpoint Integration Protocol if deviation escalates.

You stare at the file.

Cold, quiet dread coils low in your stomach. Siberia. February. 1955. No glamour in that assignment—just ice and silence and the kind of untraceable damage that leaves timelines limping.

Across from you, Casey is organizing his pen caddy by weight again. You catch a glimpse of the sticky note on his lunchbox: “Please do not eat my croissant. Please.” The second “please” is underlined three times.

You stole that croissant yesterday.

Honestly, he should thank you. It was a little dry.

You turn your eyes back to the file and eye the temperature index: -43°C. S. “Oh good,” you mutter to no one. “Toe amputation weather.”

You stand, suit creaking as you shift, and tug on your tie with practiced resentment. You snap your timepad into place on your wrist. The UI pings with a mild hum — dull orange light, sanctioned and soulless.

Casey looks up.

“Heading out?” he asks, hopeful. He always wants your desk when you’re gone. You have the only chair that doesn’t squeak like a dying goose.

“Yup,” you say. “Brad flagged something ‘mildly interesting.’ We’ll see if it’s another raccoon wasted off shrooms.”

“Or a bear,” Casey offers.

You click your timepad open, keying in the Siberia coordinates. “Or a hallucinating bear.”

Casey nods gravely.

The door opens, temporal energy flaring in its signature burnt-orange halo. You take one last swig of your bad coffee, grimace as it hits your tongue, and mutter, “Let’s go see what broke this time.”

Then you step through.

The light swallows you whole.

And you forget, for a second—just a second—that you were ever anything else.

EARTH-616 | SIBERIA, 1955

The walls groaned when the wind pressed against them. Not urgently. Not like they were in danger of collapse. More like an old man muttering in his sleep.

You didn’t trust the ship, not entirely. It had been retrofitted for temporal operations, but barely—still more icebreaker than chronal vessel. The insulation was patchy in places, and every vent exhaled a little breath of cold that bit at your ankles. If the TVA had a top-shelf of deployment crafts, this wasn’t on it. This was bottom-shelf. Dusty. Dinged up. Probably cursed.

Still. It was warm. Warm enough.

Outside, Siberia stretched like a battlefield already lost. White, endless, blank. Indifferent to watchers, to wanderers, to time itself. It didn’t care that the threads of history bent here. That the TVA had deemed this place a convergence zone—a softpoint where multiple outcomes were forming brittle overlaps. No Nexus spike yet. But something was pulsing.

You leaned back against the wall and let the thermos rest against your chest. The rhythmic thump of the engine hummed through your bones. You liked that. The vibration reminded you that you were still solid. Still here. Still someone with a job to do.

Observe. Do not interfere.

And yet. A flicker on the monitor caught your attention.

Unidentified movement—Quadrant C. Low thermal. Not vehicle. Not patrol. One heat signature. Steady. Moving through the storm.

Human-shaped. Probably.

You didn’t move yet. Just watched. Let it crawl across the display while you listened to the wind.

You checked your timepad again. No nexus flare. No spike. But there was a pulse. Faint, irregular. Like the anomaly was alive.

You didn’t believe in fate. But you believed in gravity. In the way some people pulled history around them like cloaks. This place? It felt pulled.

The door behind you hissed open, then shut again with a metallic shudder—just a shift in cabin pressure, but your body went still anyway. One hand tightened around the cooling thermos; the other hovered near your holster. Not paranoid. Just prepared.

You took a breath. Let it sit in your lungs like steam.

The blip on the monitor moved closer. Still slow. Still steady.

Somewhere out there, in that wide, white nowhere, something was walking toward you.

Before you can focus or fixate on the blip, you hear the bang. It’s not the ship groaning this time. Not the distant thunder of ice shifting. This is close. Inside.

Then the ping.

INTERNAL SECURITY BREACH: SECTOR 7 – SUB-HOLD ACCESS. UNAUTHORIZED MOVEMENT DETECTED.

Of course. Of course it’s the hold.

You didn't run. Running was noise, panic, a rookie move. Instead, you moved swiftly and fluidly, silent as frost.

The corridor narrowed as you descended, metal groaning beneath your boots, the walls sweating condensation from the sudden temperature drop. Ahead, you heard clear sounds of intrusion—boots scraping against metal, something sharp and metallic snapping like bone.

Voices shouted orders in Russian, clipped and urgent.

You pressed against the wall outside the sub-hold entrance, flicking your wrist to pull up the heat signatures on your timepad. Four—no, five—distinct signatures flickered on screen, scattered and frantic, like dropped matchsticks.

Far more than the single blip you'd tracked earlier.

You move anyway.

Quiet. Calculated. Not to neutralize—just to see.

Inside, the hold is chaos: crates overturned, equipment flickering, something sulfuric in the air. A soldier stumbles into your path, disoriented, eyes wrong—like the mind inside doesn’t fit anymore. You sidestep, smooth and practiced, letting him fall without intervention. Another crashes through the smoke and doesn’t even register you.

Your breath clouds the air. The hold smells like ozone and rust and something sharper—like old blood sealed in with frost. And then you see it. 

In the corner of the hold, something hums—low, persistent, and thoroughly annoying. Not a cryo chamber, thank god. You've had enough encounters with frozen bodies this fiscal quarter. 

Instead, it's a pulse field generator—standard TVA gear, uncomfortably grafted onto mid-century Soviet tech. You frown deeply, which is practically your default expression at this point. This thing was supposed to be dormant.

According to the updated log, this thing is officially a Temporal Dissipation Node—a fancy TVA euphemism for a safety valve that bleeds out timeline tension. Supposedly passive, no-contact. The kind of setup they drop into delicate softpoints, relying entirely on subtlety and minimal human interaction.

This node, however, isn't subtle at all. It's malfunctioning, stuttering irregular pulses instead of smooth ones. Perfect. You crouch, eyes narrowing as you spot obvious manual overrides and Soviet tampering. Wonderful. Someone's been messing around inside the casing.

“Great,” you mutter under your breath, tasting bitterness that has nothing to do with your morning coffee. “No wonder they didn’t send backup. Needed someone expendable.”

Before you can fully embrace the gravity of the situation, the far wall explodes inward in a decidedly dramatic fashion—metal screeching, smoke filling the room. You whip around, baton raised instinctively, already calculating how much paperwork this will generate—

—and freeze.

Because someone's standing there. Just standing. Breathing hard, like he ran the whole way here through the ice.

His hair is long and damp at the ends, curling slightly where the frost is starting to melt. His clothes are frayed at the edges—standard-issue Soviet combat gear, only half-zipped, soaked through. There’s snow clinging to the edges of his sleeve. His stance is wide, solid. Familiar in a way that makes your blood run cold.

But it's his eyes that hold you still.

Not the metal arm, titanium and deadly. Not his sharp-edged stance, nor the rifle slung almost forgotten across his back. It's the eyes—pale blue, intensely focused. Clear. Too clear.

Just staring.

Like you’re an answer to a question he hasn’t been able to phrase. Like he’s seen you before and forgot until now.

And maybe—you freeze, stomach folding in on itself—maybe you forgot too.

The Winter Soldier. James Buchanan Barnes.

It’s not recognition, exactly. Not full-blown. But something in you shifts, quiet and tectonic. The sensation of stepping into a half-remembered dream. Or maybe it's the ache you’ve been waking up with lately, the dream you can never hold onto, just shapes and colors and a voice you almost know.

You’ve heard plenty about Bu—the Winter Soldier from hushed whispers in break rooms and blurry security footage in restricted archives. Never once did you picture him looking so… aware. 

At the TVA, he’s quietly regarded as a tragedy. Not a threat, not a glitch—just a sorrow too persistent to be useful. His story, in every version they’ve managed to scrape together, is one long unraveling. Grief braided into duty. Identity shredded and rebuilt, over and over, never the same way twice. He’s the man who keeps losing himself and somehow finding his way back—bloodied, wrong, resilient.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t replicate well. His story’s too heavy to echo cleanly across timelines. The trauma calcifies too early or never forms at all. He fractures, or fades, or dies too soon. The man doesn’t scale. Whatever makes him who he is—the loyalty, the guilt, the staggering, stubborn will to keep trying—it’s never quite transferable.

The few variants that do emerge feel more like flickers than full lives. Glimpses. Reverberations. None of them last long. Some of them are never quite right.

In all your missions, all the cautious mentions of him across different centuries and realities and debriefs and documents, you’ve never actually met any versions of him.

Not directly. Not face-to-face. You’ve seen the aftershocks he leaves behind—cratered timelines, corrupted code, confused agents muttering about ghosts with metal arms. You’ve traced the outlines of his story across so many fractured worlds, each one slightly wrong. The scent of smoke where he should’ve stood. A silhouette in archival footage. A name carved into a resistance wall in a language long dead. But never him. Not until now.

It should be insignificant. It shouldn't matter. There should be no correlation, not even a twinge of paths intertwining.

Except now he’s standing in front of you, and it feels like being struck clean through the chest with something invisible and ancient.

In one smooth movement, he dispatches a soldier—a precise blade across the throat. No wasted motion. No hesitation. Then his eyes sweep the hold again, landing on you and locking in place like he couldn't stand to take his eyes away.

You take in the rest of him.

His face is younger, but that's to be expected. Well, not young, exactly—but preserved, like a man caught mid-sentence and left on pause. Strong jaw, a haunted set to his mouth, cheekbones that look sculpted more by winter than by genes. He looks like he hasn’t shaved in a week and hasn’t cared in far longer. You run a mental calculator, it must've been only about a decade since… the thing.

But it’s the eyes again—flicking over you, sharp and clinical. Blue, frostbitten, edged with something you’d almost call suspicion, if there wasn’t so much… exhaustion in it.

And finally—his silence. Not blank, not confused. Just... watchful. Like he's seen this play out a hundred times already. His head tilts slightly. Just a fraction. Like he’s cataloging the shift in your body language. 

Realization hits you with an unpleasant jolt: he’s uncertain. Of the timeline. Of the mission. Of you.

Whatever brutal conditioning was poured into him hasn’t fully rebooted yet. There’s still too much of the man bleeding through the programming. His breath’s too ragged. His movements, a fraction too slow. His gaze—not vacant, not robotic, but… blinking too hard. Like the world’s coming in too fast, too bright, too much.

Your timepad buzzes insistently, a sharp vibration at your wrist—twenty minutes and some change until convergence. You lower your baton slightly, resigned, and open your mouth.

“Look—”

But your sentence is abruptly cut short as a shadow drops from the walkway above, gun raised. Before you can react, a powerful arm wraps across your mouth, hauling you sharply back against a solid chest. The bullet punches into the floor exactly where your head had been, sparking furiously.

“Quiet,” he rasps. His voice is rough-edged, wind-scoured—hoarse from disuse or screaming into nothing or god knows what else. The metal arm presses lightly against your abdomen. Not pinning. Just… grounding.

You nod. One deliberate motion. A signal that you understand. That you’ll play along.

There’s a beat—one heartbeat, maybe two—before he releases you. The contact disappears like breath off a mirror. Quick. Clean.

Two more figures drop from above—armed, definitely not TVA or Soviet. Fantastic. A third-party complication. Just what this mission needed.

Bucky moves first, a blur of ruthless precision. You watch him take down an attacker effortlessly: elbow, weapon disarm, throat strike. Smooth, clinical, deadly poetry. 

The air shudders again—an ugly crack in the hull overhead. Your timepad screams: fracture line detected. asset instability threshold imminent. Everything’s shaking. You grab his arm and mutter, “We have to move.”

He hesitates—but only for a second.

Then he runs.

You don’t speak as you sprint through the corridor, ducking falling beams and sparking lights. He stays close. Too close. Like he’s guarding your back on instinct. Like he hasn’t figured out yet that you aren’t the one who needs protecting.

You hit a collapsed hallway and double back, darting into a maintenance shaft. The walls here sweat condensation. Bucky’s chest is heaving from exertion, breath coming too fast.

You glance back.

He’s stopped.

He’s leaning a hand against the wall, eyes shut. Not from exhaustion. From something else.

His metal fist clenches tight—so tight the plating groans—and he presses it to his temple like he’s trying to block something out. His whole body shakes, just once. A full-body flinch. Like his brain’s short-circuiting.

“Hey,” you say, softly now. No command. Just presence. “Hey.”

Nothing.

“Bucky.”

It slips out before you can catch it.

And it works.

He startles. Freezes. His eyes snap open—and they find yours instantly.

Something ancient and aching floods his expression. Not anger. Not threat. Just confusion. Recognition. Fear.

Not of you. For you.

His lips part like he’s going to speak—but no sound comes out.

You move toward him. Slowly. Hands up. Nonthreatening.

You reach him slowly, each step cautious, deliberate. His back is against the bulkhead now, shoulders rigid like he’s trying to hold himself together through sheer force of will. You stop just short, close enough to feel the heat radiating off his body.

The lighting flickers, painting sharp angles across his face. For a moment, he looks nothing like a weapon. He just looks... young. Tired. Worn raw from too many ghosts.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” you say quietly. “I swear. I’m not.”

His jaw twitches. His eyes won’t leave yours. That look again—like he knows you. Like he’s trying to dig the truth out of your face with nothing but instinct and desperation.

“I know this place is loud,” you continue, softer still. “I know your head must feel like a war zone right now. But you’re doing fine. Better than fine.”

A sharp breath. His fingers twitch at his side, metal knuckles flexing like he’s fighting the urge to reach for you. Or to run. You’re not sure which would be worse.

And then the timepad on your wrist pulses—a slow, resonant tone. The kind it only makes when a divergence has been successfully reabsorbed. You glance down.

CONVERGENCE REDIRECTED. NEXUS THRESHOLD STABILIZED.

Of course. That’s what this was. The system was waiting for the moment he didn’t break. For the second he chose not to collapse, or kill, or disappear. A single, improbable outcome unfolding exactly as needed.

It was him. He was the pulse.

You let out a shaky exhale. The node in the hold must’ve gone inert—no more timeline bleed, no more irregular pulses. Outside, the storm’s intensity drops by half in minutes. The hull creaks as pressure stabilizes. Everything’s slowing down. Calming.

It’s over.

The right call now would be to leave. Every protocol you’ve ever memorized is screaming at you to disengage, to extract clean, to leave no mark and make no memory.

But.

You’ve already—fuck, you’ve already. The moment he looked at you like that—like you were familiar, like you mattered—it was over. You are so utterly, catastrophically screwed.

“I don’t know what they told you,” you say, and your voice barely clears your throat. It’s quieter now. Gentler. Like you’re afraid of scaring him back into whatever shell he crawled out of. “About this place. About this mission. I don’t even know if you’re going to remember this tomorrow. But I wanted you to know—”

You don’t finish.

Because he speaks.

“Will I see you again?”

The words are soft. Barely voiced. Like he had to haul them out of someplace deep and rusted shut. They land heavy—denser than sound has any right to be. It knocks the breath out of you. 

You blink. “What?”

He steps forward—just one measured step—but it’s enough to change the air between you. Close now. Close enough to see the uneven skin at the corner of his mouth, the wind-chapped crack at his lower lip. Close enough to notice how his left hand shakes, barely-there tremors betraying the tension he’s trying to lock down.

He doesn’t say it again. He doesn’t need to.

You could lie. You could make it easier. There are a dozen lines you’ve used before—smooth, forgettable, safe. But you don’t reach for any of them.

Instead, you smile. It’s lopsided, weary, born of too many years being the one who leaves first. It’s your shield and your surrender, both.

“Only if you start talking more,” you say, a half-hearted tease wrapped in something much more fragile. You flip open your timepad as the breach activates, casting soft gold light against the hallway walls.

The portal hums. Warm. Waiting.

But your heart’s a thunderclap now. Relentless. You’re already tucking away the tilt of his head, the way his gaze softened—not like surrender, but like a question. Like maybe he’d found something in you worth staying awake for.

And you know better—god, do you know better—but your feet don’t move. You hesitate. Just a second. Just enough to feel it. Then you step through.

You don’t look back. You never do.

But the image of his eyes—ice-clear, impossibly human—follows you like a ghost you didn’t mean to keep.

.

You wait for the hammer to fall.

You expect it in the usual ways—a recall order, a message from Oversight, a polite but unambiguous invitation to report to Subsector 8 for disciplinary review. You expect the breach notice, the system ping that says unauthorized designation use or noncompliant field contact, maybe even timeline contamination: agent-induced.

You expect something.

Because you said his name.

Because you looked at him like a person, not a variable. Because you touched him. Not in passing—not incidental. You chose to.

You’ve seen people get demoted for less. Scrubbed out. Timeline reassigned, memory wiped, consigned to desk duty or worse—shunted into the Void or the Nullspace, that softly brutal end-of-line where broken things go to dissolve.

And you—you—let your guard down in the middle of a convergence zone and called the Winter Soldier by his name. That’s not oversight. That’s not mission drift. That’s a lapse.

And yet… nothing happens.

Not a single alarm. No reprimand. No haunting message from Internal Realities. No pulled credentials. No veiled threats in Performance Management.

Instead, your timepad pings three days later with a new assignment.

Business as usual.

You run it back a dozen times, trying to parse the angle—waiting for the catch. It never comes. You go on a mission in Year 3830 where the only threat is a sentient vine and a mild temporal rash. You document a collapsing micro-timeline in 1994 Missouri. You sit through three mandatory debriefs and a cross-departmental cultural sensitivity training that somehow lasts six hours.

Nothing.

Just… more work.

You fall back into the rhythm, the TVA's particular brand of unremarkable eternity. The recycled coffee, the endless corridors, the clipped dialogue, the dozens of agents who all look slightly frayed around the edges in the same way. The paperwork is never-ending, the bureaucracy divine in its pettiness. Time moves strange here—like chewing on tinfoil. Sometimes it gallops. Sometimes it forgets you entirely.

But there’s something different now.

It’s you.

You keep seeing him—in flickers and echoes, half-formed thoughts you don’t realize you’re having until they hit the page. You start reviewing your field notes only to find entire paragraphs written in shorthand about the moment he tilted his head. About the way he said Will I see you again?

You shouldn’t care. You don’t care. It’s just a glitch in your focus. Just… inertia.

Still, you pull up his file. James Buchanan Barnes.

It’s a fractured thing. Not quite whole, like someone took sandpaper to the edges. Parts redacted, others duplicated. A timeline that can’t seem to decide if it wants to be linear. No two missions involving him look the same. There are strange annotations. Personal tags from long-retired analysts. Notations like non-repeatable trauma pattern and event recursion index unstable.

Some entries are missing dates.

You read through anyway. Not for duty. Not even for curiosity, really.

You just want to.

And then, one standard TVA cycle later, it lands. Another assignment. This time the seal is embossed in gold—Causal Preservation Division. Low-risk, softpoint reinforcement. Routine.

You flick through the details:

CASE FILE: #456-TH9 MISSION CLASS: Softpoint Reinforcement LOCATION: British Isles, Kingdom of Latveria Borderlands DATE: JUNE 1602 ASSIGNED COVER: Itinerant Herbalist, non-native, licensed under local superstition codes SUMMARY: Objective is limited to passive timeline stabilization: ensure delivery of a restorative tonic to a six-year-old child suffering from swamp fever. This act preserves a familial survival event critical to a downstream medical lineage. Mission does not intersect with major temporal figures. You are not to interfere with core narrative threads. You are not here for Bucky Barnes.

(But the file doesn't say that last sentence. You just write it down anyway.)

You frown at the file. It feels… small. Intentionally. A clean mission. An easy one, all things expected. No soldiers, no storms. Just a timeline that needs a nudge.

Still, you hesitate.

Not because it’s dangerous. Because it’s not. And because part of you wonders—quiet, insistent—if he’ll be there again. Not as the Winter Soldier. Maybe as something else. Someone else.

The TVA says every mission is randomized.

But it never quite feels like that, does it?

EARTH-456 | BRITISH ISLES, 1602

The first thing you register is the smell. Damp earth. Horse sweat. Pine sap and someone nearby frying something questionably birdlike in lard.

Your boots sink into wet loam as the time door closes behind you with a dull sigh. It’s quiet here, beneath the canopy—just birdsong and the faint crackle of something cooking over a badly constructed fire pit.

You scan the clearing.

They call it a "camp," but it’s more aspirational than functional. A few makeshift tents, some scattered crates stamped with the royal crest—recently liberated, if the smashed locks and missing inventory are any clue.

You move quietly, cloaked in the nondescript garb of a traveling herbalist—dirt under your nails, satchel full of fake tinctures, a few well-placed knives. 

You watch from the shade of the trees as he crouches beside the firepit, running a cloth along the edge of a short dagger. His hair’s tied back, rough and practical. There’s mud up to his knees and blood on his knuckles, dried like old guilt.

He doesn’t see you, not yet.

Later, after setting up a modest stall in the village square (all intentional smoke and drying herbs, designed to blend in more than stand out), you’re told by a fellow field agent to visit the pub.

“The mead’s surprisingly tolerable,” they say, nudging your satchel. “Also, your contact’s not due for another twelve hours, so don’t just sit there and brood. Blend in.”

You go.

The pub is suspended in a towering yew, three stories up a gnarled trunk, accessible only by a ladder that looks like it hates everyone who uses it. The structure groans in the wind but holds, its branches creaking like tired bones. The inside smells of firewood, old ale, and something herbal—probably the same bitterroot tincture you’ve been pretending to peddle all day.

The mead is surprisingly tolerable. You settle into a booth carved into the wall, lit by low-burning lanterns. It’s warm. Quiet. You sip and let yourself feel anonymous.

Right up until the door slams open in that unmistakably theatrical way only someone with a chip on their shoulder and too much presence can manage.

You look up—and still, somehow, you’re not ready.

He’s changed, of course. That’s the constant.

His hair is pulled back in a low tie, streaked with ash and caught with a bit of red cloth. He wears a leather cloak patched with scavenged velvet. The left arm, impossibly, is still metal—but shaped like something out of myth. Not sleek. Not sterile. Forged. Etched in old runes that flicker faintly in the lantern light.

A blacksmith’s nightmare. A knight's inheritance.

And then there’s the way he moves—like someone used to silence, used to watching the world from its edge and only stepping in when absolutely necessary. He doesn’t walk so much as arrive, and the moment he does, the tavern seems smaller. Quieter.

His eyes—those same pale, searching eyes—find yours almost immediately.

He pauses, mid-step. The look on his face isn’t surprise. It’s that ache of recognition, buried too deep to name. Like catching your reflection in a mirror that doesn’t quite match.

He walks toward you without invitation. Controlled. Coiled. Not hostile. Just inevitable.

“My lady, you shouldn’t be out this late,” he says, voice worn at the edges, smoke-scoured and rough from a life that’s clearly involved too many cold nights and too few comforts. “Not alone.”

You take a slow sip, meet his gaze. “It’s always late here. And rarely alone.”

He studies you. Not just your face, but your posture, your stillness. The way you speak like you’ve been somewhere else too long to fully belong here.

Something flickers in his expression. Not memory. But something adjacent.

He lowers himself into the seat across from you without asking. He’s still damp at the collar—rain, or sweat, or both. He’s got a scar running from his jaw to the hollow of his throat, clean and straight like a blade meant to silence. But his voice doesn’t shake.

“Have we met?”

You offer a small, unreadable smile. “I don’t believe so.”

But he keeps looking. You can feel him doing it—mapping the angles of your face against some invisible sketch, something etched into his bones that refuses to fade.

“You look lost.”

“Just passing through.”

His mouth pulls tight at the corner, like that answer doesn’t satisfy. You can tell he doesn’t believe you—but he doesn’t press.

He nods toward a table in the back, where a small crew drinks from shared mugs and watches the door. They wear scraps of stolen uniforms and carry themselves with the weight of people who’ve stopped pretending they’ll live long lives.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says again.

You glance at them. “Neither should you.”

His silence is telling. It confirms what you already guessed.

He’s part of something. A resistance, sure, but not just that. He’s the center of it. The calm in the chaos. The one who moves supply through enemy lines and burns bridges behind him. His coat bears a crest he’s tried to remove—once royal, now repurposed. His fingers twitch when he’s still too long, and there’s something reverent in how the others look at him when they think he’s not paying attention.

This version of him is no less dangerous. But more visible, somehow. More known. To these people, he’s a savior. To himself, probably a liability.

Always the same story: a man pressed into myth by the weight of his own regrets.

And still, he looks at you with that same protective wariness. Like something in him knows you don’t quite belong here—and wants to guard you anyway.

“Come on,” he says quietly. “I’ll walk you home.”

The words strike you harder than they should. Like something remembered from a dream that felt real long after you woke.

The night outside is so still you can hear the wind whispering between the boughs.

He pauses under the lantern hanging from a bent branch. Looks at you, shadow-draped and silent.

“Why are you here?”

You should lie. You want to lie.

But instead, you say it softly. “Because I said I would be.”

He blinks. The words hit something deep. Maybe he doesn’t understand them. But he feels them.

You step closer. Just close enough to reach up, cup his jaw gently, feel the sharp edge of his breath catch in his throat. And then you kiss him.

The moment your lips touch his, the rest of the world blanks. Not gone—just irrelevant. The pub, the low burn of lanterns, the sound of rain tapping against the wooden slats—it all slips away. All that remains is this.

His mouth is warm, unexpectedly so, and still. Cautious. As if he’s holding still for a test he doesn’t know the answer to.

You’re the one who moves first. Just slightly. Just enough to let it mean something.

And gods—it does.

It means everything you haven’t said aloud. Every hour you spent since Siberia rewatching that moment when he looked at you like he knew you. Every line of his file you traced with your eyes long after you were supposed to close it. Every anomaly he left in his wake, the hollow prints he pressed into timelines like fingerprints you couldn’t scrub clean.

You’d told yourself it was curiosity. Professional interest. A harmless fixation. Just trying to cover your own ass in the event that the TVA catches up to you, foolish, foolish girl. But now you know better.

Because kissing him feels like gravity finally catching up to you.

He doesn’t pull away.

His hand twitches—just once—like he might lift it, might anchor you there with the metal one, or with the other, the one that remembers touch. But he doesn’t. He just breathes against your mouth like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Like no one’s kissed him like this in years.

Like no one’s ever kissed him like they remembered him.

The kiss is brief. You make yourself pull back before it deepens, before it turns into something hungrier, something you won’t be able to file away as incidental.

But you linger close.

He sends you off with a kiss to your forehead.

You complete the mission in silence.

The child is easy to find—just as the file described. Freckled nose, limp in his mother’s arms, fever-bright. You hand over the tonic with a reassuring word and a warm enough smile to pass for human. The woman weeps when the boy stirs minutes later, the color already returning to his cheeks.

And just like that—it’s done.

Softpoint reinforced. Future intact.

The door opens in a grove just outside the village, where moss curls over tree roots like sleeping hands. Golden light hums at the edges of the breach. You don’t look back. You’ve learned your lesson there.

But as you step through, the last thing you hear—carried faintly on the wind—is his voice.

“I never got your name,” he says into a room that’s not as empty as he thinks it is. Not yet.

.

You try to stay detached. Try to mark each version of him like a data point—distinct and catalogued, filed neatly beneath coordinates and context. But it never works. The lines blur.

There’s the one with the scar over his brow and the wild dog stare, who watches your hands like they’re a threat and touches you like they’re a prayer.

The one in 2049 who doesn’t speak until the third encounter but holds out his hand like he’s known you forever. The one who plays cello in a city that shouldn't exist, who smiles only for children and flinches at thunder. The one who dies before you can reach him. You stay by his body anyway, until the timeline resets.

Each time, it’s different.

Each time, it’s him.

You start to think: maybe he’s not a variable. Maybe he’s the constant. The fixed point the multiverse can’t help but echo. A gravitational pull in human form—tethered to something your soul must have signed onto long before the TVA ever handed you a timepad.

You wonder if the multiverse is trying to teach you something. Or if it’s punishing you instead—showing you every version of the thing you can’t quite keep. Like a lesson in longing, rerun on loop.

You try not to hope. But the hope comes anyway. It always does. Soft and bright, a bruise you press on just to feel.

Then you get your next assignment.

The file is clean. Neat. Sanitized in that way TVA summaries always are—euphemisms in place of grief, percentages instead of people. But you read between the lines. The divergence happened on the train. Or rather, didn’t.

You read it twice. Three times. It doesn’t change.

This Bucky Barnes didn’t fall. The train held. The mission succeeded. Captain Carter rescued him and helped dismantle the remains of Hydra’s European cell before the war even ended. He was never captured. Never reprogrammed. Never dragged through a Hydra chamber like something to be melted down and reforged.

You try to imagine him without the weight.

You picture Bucky Barnes smiling easily, untethered to the guilt of fifty years of carnage he never chose. A man who still cracks his knuckles but not because they ache with remembered pain. One who walks into sunlight without flinching.

You wonder what that would be like.

So you go.

Of course you go.

You always do.

EARTH-838 | LONDON, 1944

You’ve never liked the long assignments.

Short ones are surgical—get in, disrupt or observe, slip out before the timeline notices the echo of your footsteps. This one, though, is different. Your mission folder is three times thicker than usual. Paper-clipped pages in brittle brown envelopes. Dossiers printed on carbon-smudged letterhead. Photographs tucked inside, blurred by time and memory.

You’re embedded with the 107th, slotted in as a specialist from Intelligence, the kind who shows up with forged credentials and a quiet knack for being in the right place just before things go wrong. Your cover holds. Mostly. They think you’re here to coordinate logistics for Hydra base strikes. They’re not entirely wrong.

The first time you see him again, he’s making a sarcastic remark about British rations and butterless toast. He’s not in uniform—just a pressed shirt with rolled sleeves and a cigarette dangling loosely between two fingers, a smear of grease on his wrist. He laughs when Howard Stark tosses a wrench and almost breaks a window.

It’s different sound from what you've heard over the years.

But then Bucky Barnes notices you.

Not all at once. Not like in the stories people tell themselves after the fact—love at first glance, magnetic fate, sparks across a battlefield. No, it starts in pieces. A glance held a beat too long during mission briefings. A muttered thank you when you slip him a replacement knife requisition that definitely wasn’t cleared. The way he starts lingering near your tent in the evenings, offering lazy conversation while the others clean weapons or sleep.

“You always write that fast?” he asks once, elbow braced on the flap of the entrance like it’s casual, like he didn’t cross half the camp just to talk to you.

You don’t look up. “Only when I’m trying to drown out poorly played harmonica.”

He grins. “Hey, Dugan’s doing his best.”

You snort. “His best sounds like a wounded mule.”

He laughs again, quieter this time. You feel it settle between your ribs like a warm coin. It’s nothing. Just noise. You tell yourself that.

Weeks pass like that. Quiet orbit. You take longer walks to the mess hall because he always times his exit to meet you halfway. He asks questions—about where you're from (a place you name off a pre-approved list), what brought you to London (the war, obviously), if you believe in fate.

You lie when you can. You dodge when you must.

But not everything you say is false. You like coffee too bitter and books too sad. You write letters you never send. You don’t sleep well. You’ve lost people.

He listens. He remembers. He starts showing up with extra coffee. Offers to walk you back to your quarters even though it’s technically against regulations. You start lingering in his doorway.

He never pushes.

And you hate it—how much you want him to.

The first time he touches you, it's an accident. Your fingers brush as he passes you a pen. Your skin sparks. It’s stupid, how much you feel it.

He notices.

"You ever get that sense," he says one night in the empty mess, voices low, "that you’ve known someone longer than you’re supposed to?"

Your breath catches.

You laugh it off. "I get that about my dentist."

He grins. But his eyes stay on yours too long.

You’re not supposed to fall in this one. 

But God, it’s so easy. So familiar.

Bucky tells you about his family. His sister. The stoop of his childhood apartment and how he used to sneak Steve a flask when the nurses weren’t looking. He draws out your laugh like it’s a map, like he's been trying to find it for years.

And all the while, you feel it coming. 

One night, two months in, he walks you back and you don’t stop at your door. You let the silence linger. The city is dark and rain-slicked, war planes humming overhead like ghosts.

"You’re not like anyone I’ve met before," he says, leaning against the wall.

You smile sadly. "You’ve said that to a lot of girls, Sergeant."

"Yeah," he murmurs, voice suddenly quieter. "But none of them felt like déjà vu."

You almost kiss him. But not yet.

The war ends not with silence, but with song.

London spills into the streets like a wound unstitched—men and women dancing in front of blown-out buildings, children painting flags onto brick walls, sailors kissing strangers with the urgency of borrowed time. The city doesn’t sleep. Neither do you.

You’ve stayed longer than planned.

Your official timeline expired a couple of hours ago. But your timepad’s been blinking quietly in your coat pocket since sundown, like a secret you’re not quite ready to confess. For long-term infiltrations, the TVA grants a small window of flexibility—two to three extra hours, soft margin. Enough to wrap up loose ends. Enough to say goodbye without saying it.

Bucky doesn’t know. He’s too busy laughing—really laughing—face lit by the amber glow of the pub sign behind him, arm draped lazily around your shoulders. He’s had two pints and a victory cigar, and you’ve never seen him look so alive. 

He’s in his shirtsleeves again, collar open at the throat, hair mussed from the wind. He smells like tobacco and soap and something citrusy he must’ve stolen from Stark’s ration stash. His hand grazes your shoulder as you step outside the crowded pub and into the cool night air. He’s warm, even in the London chill. Always warm.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says, suddenly serious, voice low in your ear.

You turn, startled by the shift. “About?”

He runs a hand through his hair, eyes flicking to the cobblestone street, then back to you. The revelers blur behind you—drunk joy and blurred music, a world gone soft at the edges.

“You could come with me,” he says. "To New York. Brooklyn."

Your stomach drops.

“We’ve got peace now. There’s gonna be rebuilding. A hell of a lot of it. I know it’s chaos but… I don’t know. I thought maybe…” He trails off, then forces a laugh, too bright. “Forget it. It’s dumb.”

You step in close. The timepad at your hip vibrates again—EXIT NODE ACTIVE. TEMPORAL STABILITY REACHED. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. You ignore it.

“Say it,” you whisper.

“I’ll get a job,” Bucky says.

His Brooklyn accent is thick with hope, slipping out between the cracks like sunlight through boarded windows. His voice is rough and low, but urgent—like if he stops speaking for even a second, this moment might collapse under the weight of everything it’s not allowed to be.

“You’re so… so fucking smart it gets me dizzy sometimes. I watch you in a room and—Christ, I’ve seen tacticians, I’ve seen war heroes—but no one moves the way you do.”

He’s closer now, just a breath away, like proximity might be enough to anchor you to this place.

“I’ll get us a place of our own. A tiny walk-up with drafty windows and floors that creak every time you step wrong. The kind of place where no one knows our names, but we’ll learn the neighbors’. I’ll fix the heater when it breaks. I’ll learn to make your coffee the way you like it—two sugars, not too sweet, extra hot. I’ll write it down if I have to. You won’t even have to ask.”

He swallows, his voice breaking just a little.

“I’ll make pancakes on Sundays, even if I suck at it. I’ll burn the first batch every damn week and pretend I meant to. We’ll fight about the dishes and who left the radio on. I’ll learn to fold the sheets the right way, your way. I’ll leave notes on the fridge. I’ll rub your feet when you’ve had a long day, even if you pretend you don’t want me to.”

His eyes are wet now, but he doesn’t blink them away. He wants you to see.

“I’ll build a life where you can rest,” he says, so softly it barely carries over the celebration in the street. “No secrets. No war. Just mornings and bad coffee and a bed we don’t have to leave unless we want to.”

His hand lifts, hovering like he wants to touch you but doesn’t dare. He’s unraveling. And he’s never been more sure of anything.

“You walk around like you don’t belong to anyone,” he whispers. “But you belong somewhere. You belong with someone who sees you.”

His eyes search yours, bright and raw.

“Darling,” he breathes, “I just want—”

You don’t speak. You want to. You want to say yes so badly your teeth ache with it.

Instead, your hand reaches for him—cups his cheek, thumb brushing the scrape of stubble there. You lean in before you can stop yourself.

The kiss is molten.

Not soft, not chaste. It’s everything you aren’t supposed to want: greedy, aching, desperate. It tastes like smoke and honey and war’s aftermath. You can feel the imprint of his hands at your waist, grounding you, like he already knows you’re slipping.

You gasp against his mouth when he deepens the kiss, his hand moving to cradle the back of your neck like he’s afraid you’ll vanish if he lets go. And you—you clutch at his coat, fingers fisting in the fabric like it’s the only solid thing left in the world. The city roars around you—drunken songs, laughter, heels on cobblestone—but none of it touches this moment. It belongs to you. To him.

He kisses like he’s starved for something he can’t name.

Like every version of himself has been waiting for this.

Somehow, you make it back to his quarters—barely remembering how. The door slams shut behind you and he’s on you again, mouth warm and insistent, hands trembling now as they trace your jaw, your hips, the shape of your spine like he’s mapping it to memory. You let him. You want to be remembered.

“Tell me this is real,” he murmurs against your throat, breath hot. “Tell me I’m not dreaming you.”

You tip your forehead against his, eyes fluttering closed. “You’re not dreaming.”

You pull his shirt free from his waistband, palms skimming over bare skin, warm and ridged with scars you recognize from dossiers—scars you’ve imagined tracing with your mouth, with your hands, in every universe that told you not to.

Bucky's mouth finds the edge of your jaw, your collarbone, the hollow of your throat. Each kiss feels like a confession, like an apology, like a promise. "You're so fucking pretty," he moans into your skin, moving and moving and moving, until you feel his thigh part yours, giving you just the right amount of friction to drive you crazy.

Your shirt's off in turn, and all at once, he drifts down to your tits, cupping them with both palms and burying his face in them. For a moment, your brain short-circuits—he's groaning, tender kisses against your nipples and sucking, nipping at the swell of your breasts. "You taste so good, darling. God, I can taste you all day."

You pull on his hair—hard. "Bucky, please. Give me more."

"Ask and you shall receive."

You're rewarded with a beautiful view of him shedding the rest of his clothes off. You can't—won't—look away. It never ceases to amaze you, how pretty his cock is. You lick your lips as he gives it a stroke, slow and soft and positively ready for you.

Then Bucky leans forward, capturing your lips again with a certainty that makes your heart near burst out of your chest. 

Your hand wraps around the base of his cock and you smile when he wrenches his head back, eyes shut in almost agony. Bucking against your hand, like he can't get enough of it. He says your name, and despite yourself, you grin before pulling yourself away from his kiss to lower your head, tongue swiping out to taste what leaks from him at the tip.

"Oh, god," His hands come to twist around your hair, the pull making your eyes water with something delicious, something filled with need. You keep going deeper, until he hits the back of your throat and you both moan. "You're so good to me. So, so good."

He's babbling now, as your lips stay wrapped around your cock and you're pressing the flat of your tongue against his veins, a hand stabilizing you underneath. "Sweetheart, you're perfect. I'm going to—oh, yes, right there—god, I'm gonna marry you. We're never gonna stop doing this. I'm never gonna get enough of you."

You take him there, all the way up, until he's almost to the edge and he has to ground his hands against your cheeks and pull you off. He looks down at you with that goddamned earnest look that makes you fall in love with him in the first place. "Not—not like this. I want to be inside you."

Of course, of course. "Of course, James."

He pushes you onto your back, and you can't help the giddy feeling in your chest, seeing how much of a mess you've made of him. His cock's shining with your spit and saliva, your wetness all over him. When Bucky sees where you're looking, he licks his lips. A preliminary swipe against your folds when you, very intentionally, thrust forward against his hips impatiently.

"So eager."

You glare at him, lips curling even as he takes both of your thighs until he's slotted between them. "There's no need to be a tease—Oh."

He sinks in, inch by agonizing inch, and you're moaning, jaw dropping as his cock disappears inside of you. You're so full. You've never been this full before and it makes you pant, sighing breathlessly, and when his thumb finds your clit, you whine and clench around him. Both of you moan in harmony.

His pace speeds up from there, hard and fast, and it's intensified by the way he looks at you. Eyes dissecting you carefully, trying to remember every expression, every second, every move that makes you keen further into his touch. 

"Look at me, baby, please," Bucky growls and you do. "Look at me when you make me come."

You can't look away, feeling the stars gather up behind your eyes as your own orgasm catches up to you—fuck, it's nothing compared to how his release feels inside of you, the warmth, the way he feels so strong under your fingertips. His chest vibrating, mouth falling open in a prolonged, beautiful groan. He pushes himself deeper inside of you, until you feel his release slipping out of you onto the mattress.

You press a kiss to his forehead and let yourself fall asleep like that—him inside of you, tangled up in him.

The light is different when you wake up in the morning.

Soft, pale, almost shy. It seeps through the parted curtains like it doesn’t want to intrude, spilling over the uneven floorboards and up the rumpled edge of the blanket half-draped across your hip.

His arm is still around you. Heavy in sleep. Warm. Bucky Barnes is still asleep.

You don’t kiss him goodbye.

Instead, you whisper something he won’t hear. “I wish we had more time.”

And then you activate the timepad.

.

Time passes strangely in the TVA.

There are clocks, yes. Digital ones on walls, analog ones in desks, internal ones ticking behind your eyes. But none of them matter. Days don’t pile up here—they just... repeat, under different names. Tuesday is a fiction. Sunday doesn’t exist. Lunch breaks happen when the lights flicker just right, and sleep is what you do when your body gives out mid-report.

You stopped counting after the first month. You stopped pretending to count after the second.

Instead, you worked.

Harder than anyone. Longer than anyone. You took missions no one else wanted—scrubbing nexus events off apocalyptic wastelands, ghosting through centuries where empires rose and fell before you’d even finished breakfast. You volunteered for side branches, anomaly audits, recursive sync loops. Anything to keep moving.

It didn’t go unnoticed.

A plaque went up in the Hall of Merit. "Agent of the Month." Your name, etched in fake gold. Mobius clapped you on the shoulder with a proud little smile. Brad brought you the worst celebratory cupcake you’ve ever tasted. (Vanilla. Dry. Sprinkles like gravel.)

You smiled. You always smile.

You don’t let yourself say what you’re really thinking.

That all of it—all the assignments, all the accolades, all the long nights pinning divergent strands back into place—is just inertia. Just mass multiplied by pain. Because you know what happens when you stop moving.

And you’ve tried. God, you’ve tried.

You dodge his branches when you can. You pass them off to junior agents, citing temporal redundancy. You tell yourself it’s not cowardice if it’s protocol. You let yourself believe it, for a while.

Until the file lands on your desk.

CASE FILE: #2149-BE0 MISSION CLASS: Collapse Softpoint Reinforcement LOCATION: Earth-2149 — Brooklyn, United States / Geneva, Switzerland DATE: April 2018 (Post-Outbreak +1 Day) ASSIGNED COVER: Civilian logistics runner, no official alignment, false survivor credentials SUMMARY: Objective is to reinforce critical softpoint during global collapse event: ensure Scott Lang, Peter Parker, and T’Challa successfully board Wakandan quinjet. This evacuation preserves three downstream nexus threads essential to limited multiversal salvage. Do not interfere beyond softpoint parameters. Infected superhumans active.

You stare at it for a long time. You could say no. You should say no.

But your hand moves anyway. Signs the form. Accepts the mission.

No backup. No reassignment.

Just you.

EARTH-2149 | BROOKLYN, 2018 (+1 DAY POST-OUTBREAK)

Out of all the missions you've had so far, you think you hate this one the most. Which is saying something. Zombie apocalypse timelines are the worst.

The air reeks of ash and ozone. You’re used to strange skies by now, but this one feels wrong in your bones. The light doesn’t fall the way it should—too sharp at the edges, like the sun’s been split into shards and you’re walking through the aftermath.

You arrived forty hours ago. Standard infiltration and alignment. The assignment brief was brutal in its simplicity.

Bucky doesn’t make it out of this timeline. He dies at Camp Lehigh. He buys them time.

And you’re supposed to let that happen.

Your first glimpse of him isn’t cinematic. No slow reveal, no stirring strings. Just a sliver of profile through the cracked door of an old deli, combat boots pacing, rifle slung over his back, the metal arm glinting dull and scratched. He’s talking to Parker—low and firm, the kind of voice meant to ground someone younger, more fragile.

When you step into the light, he turns toward you like he was already waiting. Eyes blue, shadowed. Jaw set. And there it is again—that look. Recognition.

Your breath stutters. You don’t say anything. You just nod, like you’ve been here all along. Like you’re meant to be here. 

You don’t know if you can watch him die.

Not when you’ve held versions of him in your arms, heard him laugh half-asleep beside a campfire, watched his hands shake after battle and pretended not to notice.

Peter introduces you. A name you chose at random from a TVA list. He doesn’t flinch when Bucky says it aloud. But something shifts behind his eyes—quiet and soft and gone before it settles.

You get through the introductions. Kurt, smiling nervously. Sharon, bloody but unbowed. Okoye nods once at you, sharp and appraising. Happy makes a joke that doesn’t quite land.

For the next two weeks, you stay with them.

You don't mean to get close to Bucky in this one. (You mean it this time. Seriously.) For the first couple of days, you try your best to stay away. You do your best to focus on the mission and he's… he's just another person in the crowd. You think that would make it easier, when he—when he eventually—You can't even say it.

But it happens one morning, anyway—fog pooling low across the park, the air thick with that awful, metallic smell of rot. You’re both on perimeter watch, standing on opposite ends of a shattered greenhouse. He catches you glancing toward the skyline, what’s left of it, jagged teeth against the pale pink sky.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” he says, voice low, scratchy from disuse.

You blink from your thoughts. “In a doomed, post-apocalyptic sort of way.”

He huffs a laugh. Almost smiles. “I was gonna say the same.”

Silence settles between you, but it’s a companionable thing. Not awkward. Not forced.

You speak first this time. “You always this poetic?”

“Only when I’m tired. Or scared.”

You glance at him. “Which is it now?”

He doesn’t answer right away. Just shifts his weight, runs a hand through his hair, and says, “Both.”

You don’t touch. You don’t need to. It’s all there in the space between you—heavy with implication. Unspoken, but not unfelt.

You sleep on opposite ends of the same room. He never touches you. Never asks. But some nights you wake up to find his jacket draped over your legs. Once, during a particularly bad storm, he nudged a cracked thermos of lukewarm coffee toward you without a word.

He doesn’t have to say anything. You feel it.

All of it.

And the worst part—the most unbearable—is knowing it’s temporary. You feel the convergence approaching like a bruise beneath your ribs. Two days now, maybe three, before you lose him again. Before he dies. Before you vanish back into the timeline like a ghost leaving no fingerprints.

You try not to show it. You smile when Peter cracks a joke. You run drills with Sharon. You help Kurt fix a busted radio, even though it’s hopeless.

But every time you look at Bucky, your heart tightens in your chest like it’s trying to keep him there.

And then it's here.

The journey to Camp Lehigh was fucking gut-wrenching.

You've lost practically everyone—Sharon, Hope, Kurt, Happy, Okoye. It sits in you like a shard of ice. Not grief—there’s no time for grief. Just weight. Just the bitter gravity of survival. The quinjet is prepped and waiting. The remaining survivors—Peter, T’Challa, Lang’s floating head in a jar—are already climbing aboard. You’ve done everything the mission brief demanded. You met the moment. You held the line.

You’ve done everything the mission brief said—down to the minute, the location, the final headcount. And you… you’re standing beside Bucky.

And still, you’re standing beside him.

Bucky’s chest rises and falls with the kind of steadiness that makes you ache. His metal arm glints in the firelight, streaked with ash and blood, fingers twitching in a rhythm you can’t decipher. There’s soot on his cheek, a rip in his sleeve, and when he turns to you, there’s something too clear in his eyes. Not fear. Not even pain.

Resolve.

You taste it in the back of your throat: the copper of a timeline ending.

“We have to go,” you say softly, not to him, not really. Just to the air.

Bucky doesn’t move.

He turns his head slightly, enough for you to see the hard line of his jaw. The wear around his eyes. There’s something about this version of him—familiar, but not calloused like the others. Still earnest enough to believe in sacrifice. Still sharp enough to choose it without flinching.

You hate that.

“I’ll hold her off,” he says, and you feel something break, neat and irreversible, in your chest.

“No,” you breathe. Too fast, too raw.

His brow furrows. “Someone has to. You said it yourself—if we don’t get the jet off the ground, we lose everything.”

“That doesn’t mean it has to be you.”

He smiles, and it’s that same damn smile that’s followed you across time. The one that says it’s already decided.

“I think it always was.”

You want to scream. You want to tell him he’s not disposable, not fated, not just a name on some cosmic itinerary that keeps getting torn out and rewritten. You want to confess that you’ve met him over and over, and every time he’s left a bruise somewhere deeper.

But the timepad at your hip begins to beep.

MISSION END: T-MINUS 2 MINUTES

You ignore it.

“You’ll make it,” he says gently, like a goodbye.

“No, I won’t,” you whisper. “Not really.”

There’s shouting near the quinjet ramp. Peter calling your name. Bruce waving you over. The others are loading in. You should be there. The moment is closing. The window is narrowing.

You don’t move.

Instead, you step forward and press your hand to his cheek. Your skin is cold from the wind, but he leans into it anyway. His eyes flutter closed for half a second—just long enough for you to memorize it.

Then you kiss him.

It’s not gentle. It’s desperate. Greedy. A kiss that says remember me. Your hands fist in his jacket. His mouth moves against yours like it’s something he’s missed without knowing. You drink in every inch of him—the scrape of stubble, the roughness of his palms against your back, the low sound he makes when you pull away.

“I’ll find you again,” you say. It's a promise.

He nods once. His hand lingers at your waist for a breath longer than it should. Then he turns back towards Wanda.

You watch him go. You always watch him go.

The quinjet door hisses shut behind you. The engines roar to life. The pad at your side flashes, like some sick, fucking joke—

Mission Successful. Extraction in Progress.

You don’t look back at the ground. You’ve learned that much, at least. Looking back doesn’t stop the bleeding. But when the jet lifts, when the trees blur below and you can’t see him anymore—

You swear something rips loose in you.

And this time, you don’t think it will grow back.

.

You’ve seen him in snow.

In bloodied ice, in rusted Soviet hulls, in the shadow of burning quinjets and crumbling castles. You’ve seen him with death behind his eyes and guilt threaded into every line of his face. You’ve seen him careful, methodical. Kind in all the ways no one notices—quiet in a world that demands noise. Someone who doesn’t ask for gentleness, but gives it anyway.

And now you’ve seen him in the dark, too. In 1602, under soot-smudged moons and flickering gaslights, a knife twirling between clever fingers. He hadn’t known you—not really. Not as the woman who’d held his gaze in a cryo chamber. Not as the silhouette slipping into the quinjet before he turned to face the Scarlet Witch. But he’d looked at you like he wanted to.

The thread stays taut between you, no matter the timeline.

So when you get the assignment to go—

It doesn’t land with ceremony. No formal debrief. Just a flicker on your desk monitor, a soft chime that cuts through the static hum of the TVA’s perpetual fluorescent haze. You almost miss it. You almost ignore it. Because everything still hurts.

The kind of hurt that doesn't pulse—it seeps. It rots. You move like you’re wearing someone else’s body, like your own bones are too loud. You haven’t been sleeping—not really. 

You open the file with a numb hand. Just procedure, you tell yourself. Just another timeline. Until you see the numbers.

CASE FILE: #616-SV1 MISSION CLASS: Passive Observation LOCATION: Bucharest, Romania DATE: March 2016  ASSIGNED COVER: Independent tenant, upper flat SUMMARY: Subject Barnes, James B., presumed alive and in civilian hiding following HYDRA data exposure and the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. Timeline approaching critical inflection. Target is not actively breaching; no temporal instability present. Assignment is preventative: monitor for signs of deviation or catalyst behavior.

Do not engage. No interference unless softpoint destabilization occurs.

You let out a sound that might be a laugh. Or a sob. It’s hard to tell.

There’s a reason TVA protocol avoids revisiting timelines. Too risky. Too messy. History isn’t built for recursion. But this—this is a spiral. A closed loop. Like something unfinished trying to write its own end.

And now you’ve been assigned to watch him again.

After all this time. After what you felt splinter through you like glass.

You should tell someone. Flag the conflict of interest. Recuse yourself. 

You don’t.

You close the file and begin packing for Bucharest.

EARTH-616 | BUCHAREST, 2016

You land in Bucharest in the dead quiet of early morning, the sky still purpled with sleep. 

The city feels brittle—like something trying very hard not to splinter. Your cover’s thin again: traveling contractor, repair work, nothing that draws attention. You rent a room across from a narrow building with stained windows and a faulty streetlamp that flickers at 2 a.m. every night like clockwork.

And you wait.

The first time you see him again, he’s carrying plums.

You’re leaning on a railing, nursing coffee that’s more soot than bean, watching the street in that not-watching way you’ve perfected over decades. And there he is. Gray hoodie, boots worn to the stitching, a canvas bag slung across one shoulder.

He walks like someone trying to be smaller. Eyes down. Shoulders rounded. Every muscle still taut beneath the fabric, but pulled inward. Controlled.

You almost don’t recognize him like this. Then he glances up. Brief. Casual.

But it slams into you anyway.

Because there it is—that flicker. That impossible, unplaceable pull. Like gravity, but sideways. Like someone whispering your name in a language you forgot how to speak.

He doesn’t stop. Doesn’t linger. But you feel it. That taut little wire between your ribs goes taut again, humming faint and low.

You’ve seen him across centuries, across madness and ruins and impossible skies. And now, here he is, just... buying fruit. 

You observe him for seven days. No contact. No breach.

Each morning, he walks the same path. Plums one day. Bread the next. He pauses at the corner every time—checks the shadows, the mirrors. Still sharp. Still trained. But dulled at the edges like he’s trying not to be. Like he’s tired of being a weapon, and doesn’t quite know how to be anything else.

He never takes the same route home.

You map them all anyway.

There’s a rhythm to his caution. It’s not paranoia. It’s preservation. You know the difference. You’ve watched enough shattered timelines to recognize when someone’s not trying to escape the world—just survive it.

And through it all, you pretend not to ache.

You keep the timepad dim, tucked under your coat like a second heart. The updates are clean. No deviations. No instability. He’s not a threat. Not a spark.

Just a man. Still whole, somehow. Still holding.

But you find yourself watching anyway. Not for fractures or fault lines—but for the quiet, ordinary proof that he’s still him. The way he double-checks his change at the fruit stall. The soft apology he gives a stray dog he nearly bumps with his boot. The habit of pausing in the stairwell, just long enough to listen for another pair of footsteps behind him. You memorize all of it like it’s going to disappear.

You don’t. Of course you don’t.

Until the night you lose him.

It’s raining. Thin, indecisive drops that fall more like static than water. You’re two streets behind, just enough distance to not spook him, when someone yells, and a car backfires, and you look away for a single goddamn second.

And he’s gone.

You circle three blocks. Then six. Nothing. It’s half an hour later when you feel the grip.

Quick, precise. A hand closes over your arm and pulls you sideways—into a narrow alley between buildings that still wear their war damage like it happened yesterday. The wall hits your spine. The air knocks out of you. And then he’s there.

Close. Too close.

Hood down. Eyes sharp. Rain slicking through his hair.

You don’t move. Don’t breathe.

Because he’s looking at you like he’s been waiting.

“You’ve been following me,” he says, voice low, rough. No heat in it. Just truth.

Your mouth opens. Closes.

He tilts his head, studying your face like he’s comparing it to something half-forgotten. Then he says, quiet, like a memory. “Siberia. 1955.”

The words gut you.

“I remember,” he says. “You said my name.”

His name. That night. The way he shook—like his own mind was something turning against him. The tremor in his breath. The metal arm pressed tight to his temple, like he could hold back whatever wave was cresting inside. And then your voice, just a whisper: Bucky.

And it worked.

He startled like the sound reached deeper than his programming. Like it found something still human.

You don’t mean to—but you reach up, slowly, and press your hand over his where it still grips your coat. His fingers tighten for a second. Then release.

You look at him. Really look.

The rain has soaked through everything, and he’s shivering. Not from cold. From memory. His breath ghosts in the narrow space between you, and his eyes—God, his eyes—don’t look like a stranger’s.

It looks like home.

He takes a step back and mutters, “Come on.”

You follow him through back alleys and slick cobblestone streets to a squat building with iron balconies and doors that stick. His apartment is a few flights up, small and clean in the way that feels practiced—surfaces scrubbed, not decorated. A cot, a kettle, a folded stack of shirts too neatly pressed. No photos. No noise.

He doesn’t speak at first. Just watches you watch the space, like he’s trying to guess what you’ll say.

“Not what you expected?” he asks eventually, voice rough.

You shake your head. “No. It’s exactly what I expected.”

He scoffs. Sits on the edge of the cot, elbows on knees. “How do you know me?”

And you could lie. You could stall. But you’re tired of running out of time.

But you’re tired of running out of time. Siberia. The hold. The pulse. The kiss in 1602. The quinjet, the gaslight, the plague-soaked rooftops and the boy who lived because you were there. The mission you botched. The rules you broke. The dozens of timelines where he didn’t make it. The handful where he almost did. The way it was always him. And when you finally stop—when the words have left you empty and open and raw—he doesn’t flinch.

He exhales, long and deliberate. His fingers twitch against his knee. Then he looks at you—really looks, and you can feel the moment shift.

“When I saw you again,” he says, voice quieter now, but steadier, “on the street… it wasn’t like remembering something. It was like finishing something.”

You blink. “Finishing?”

He nods, slowly. “Yeah. Like… you know when you’ve had a song stuck in your head for days? Not the lyrics—just the feeling of it. The rhythm. The echo. And then one day it comes on the radio, and your chest just—unlocks. Like something you didn’t know was broken gets put back together.”

He glances down at his hands, then back at you.

“That’s what it felt like. Seeing you.”

You stay silent, afraid to interrupt the thread he's following.

“At first I thought I was losing it,” he admits. “Some hallucination leftover from Hydra. A ghost memory I couldn’t place. But then you moved, and—Jesus—I knew it wasn’t just in my head. The way you looked at me. Like you knew me. Like you weren’t afraid of me.”

His jaw clenches, not from anger, but from something deeper. Held longer.

“I’ve seen that look before,” he says. “Fear. Disgust. Pity, sometimes. I’m used to people stepping back. Or pretending they don’t see me. But you… you didn’t flinch. Not even in the alley. You looked at me like I was—” He falters, and then tries again. “Like I was real. Like I had a name worth saying.”

Your chest aches.

He laughs, a short, unsteady breath. “God, and hearing you say it again—Bucky—like it was the first time all over. I don’t know why that hit so hard. But it did. It felt like… like I’d been underwater for years, and suddenly someone opened a window.”

You don’t say anything.

You’re still trying to breathe around the weight of him.

“I don’t remember everything,” he says. “Not clearly. Flashes, maybe. Cold metal. Smoke. That light—on your face, in that hallway. But I remember how I felt. I remember peace. For like… five seconds. It was the only thing that made sense.”

His gaze flickers to your lips, then back to your eyes.

“I think I’ve been looking for that feeling ever since.”

You don't answer—not with words. There's nothing left to say that would hold the weight this moment needs. So instead, you cross the small stretch of floor between you, slow and deliberate, and sink to your knees in front of him.

Your hand finds his, trembling with some emotion neither of you dares to name, and he lets out a sound—half-breath, half-confession—as your fingers thread together.

“Okay?” you murmur.

He nods, once. But it's not enough. His hands rise, hesitant, then hungry—one brushing the curve of your cheek, the other settling at your waist like he’s still afraid you might vanish. Like if he touches you too hard, you’ll be another dream, another phantom gone by morning.

And then he kisses you.

It starts soft, reverent—his lips just ghosting yours, like he's asking permission. But the second you respond, the second you lean in and kiss him back with everything you’ve carried through centuries of almosts, it shatters something in both of you.

He surges forward.

Kisses you again, deeper this time. More desperate.

Your back hits the wall with a muted thump, and suddenly his hands are everywhere—one splayed across your lower back, the other cradling your jaw. He kisses you like he’s starved for it, like he’s trying to map your mouth, your breath, the corners of your teeth. Like he's trying to memorize you from the inside out.

And then—God—he breaks away just enough to kiss the line of your jaw. The soft spot beneath your ear. Your temple. Your forehead.

“You’re real,” he breathes against your skin, almost like a prayer. “You’re here.”

His lips trail lower, find the bend of your knee as you hitch your leg around his waist. He presses a kiss there too, slow and aching, like it means something. Like everything means something.

You’re both breathing hard now, hands roaming, hearts pounding in rhythm too fast to be calm, too synchronized to be coincidence. He kisses your collarbone. The corner of your mouth. The space beneath your eye, where something like grief still lingers.

He's so gentle. Gentle all the way through until he manages to shove you to the bed, kissing his way down the column of your throat and then it shifts. His hands find their way inside your jeans and he gasps, shakily. "You're so wet, fuck—you're so wet. For me?"

You nod, breathless.

It's another slow dance, as he rolls your jeans off, only to quickly find his way back like he can't stand to be parted from you. His fingers find your entrance, the rough pads of them swiftly finding your entrance and spreading the heat, the wetness around, like he's playing with his meal. 

Then Bucky brings his mouth, that beautiful, beautiful mouth, to your cunt to replace his fingers and you swear you may have just died. He's so—he's so passionate, devouring you with a hunger until your spine's arching off the bed, your hands tangling in his soft brown hair. He doesn't stop licking and sucking.

"Bucky, please—oh god, please, don't stop."

You get closer and closer to the edge, hips rutting against his jaw. You feel everything so, so deeply. The way his stubble leaves goosebumps in its wake, his hands digging into your thighs to keep you in place—and then, he slides a finger back inside you as he hums, satisfied with the moans he's wrenched out of you.

It's like coming home. Your orgasm's like a strike of lightning, crying out as you release, close to tears as he laps up the rest of your orgasm.

When he finally stands to start taking off his clothes, you've been reduced to nothing more than a boneless heap on his bed. Your knees are wobbling slightly, but you force yourself to get up anyway, helping him shed the rest. "I'm–here. Let me help."

Bucky smiles. Softly.

"You're so sweet. You're too good for me." 

You think you lose another shred of your sanity.

The look in your eyes lights something up in him. He joins you back on the bed and you can feel him, the weight of him, and it's all so familiar. He rests heavy on your thigh and your heart feels like it's about to come out of your chest.

"Bucky, please."

His cock slips inside of you, with a gasp and a groan, and suddenly, Bucky's locking his hands with yours. "Promise me you'll stay."

It's almost overwhelming, but he keeps you grounded. There's just so much of him. There's his teeth on your neck, the burn of his stubble on your collarbones, the way he sucks off marks against your skin and looms over you, like he never wants you to leave him again. His strength is addicting, the way he pushes you so close to breaking. 

He says your name again. "Promise me."

You tell yourself—you're never letting him go again. You wrap your arms around him like something fierce, kissing him as he thrusts deeply, hitting the spot that makes stars light up behind your eyes. "Bucky—fuck—I—"

Your name falls from his lips with a groan. "Sweetheart, I'm—"

"Me too," You nod, whining when his pace quickens and it—you don't mean to, but it makes you clench around him. "Let go for me. It's okay."

Bucky looks at you, his grip around your hands tightening, and suddenly, it's a rolling wave of pleasure, over and over and over until you're trembling. You can feel him, his warmth, so fucking much of it, it's addicting. He's still groaning, hips thrusting, like he's trying to carve a home out of you.

You’re not sure how long you stay like that—twined together in the stillness, forehead pressed to his, breath shared in the hush of a room that suddenly feels too charged, too fragile to last.

You don’t want to break it. But you have to.

“Bucky,” you whisper, your voice threading through the quiet like a thread pulled taut. “They’re going to try to take me away.”

His eyes snap open. “What?”

You rest your hand against his chest, feel the beat of his heart stutter beneath your palm. “The TVA. They monitor softpoint drift. I’ve pushed too many lines. Stayed too long. This—” You gesture softly between you, “—this isn’t sanctioned.”

He stares at you like he wants to argue. But he doesn’t. Because he knows you’re not wrong.

“Let them try,” he mutters, jaw tight. His hands tighten where they rest on your waist, grounding. Possessive in the way a storm anchors to the sea. “I won’t let them.”

You smile—sad, crooked, fond. “You might not get a choice. But I will. I always find a way back.”

He swallows hard. “You promise?”

You nod. Press your lips to his again—gentle this time, slow and deliberate, like sealing a vow with your breath. Then you whisper against his mouth:

“I’ll come back. I always come back.”

His eyes close for half a second. And when they open again, they’re full of something wild. Unspoken. Undeniable.

“Next time,” you say, voice shaking with certainty, “next time I’ll stay.”

THE NULL SECTOR | TVA DETENTION LOOP C-9

You broke protocol. 

Not for the mission. Not for the stabilization of a softpoint. For him. For a man with a haunted gaze and a heartbeat you should never have memorized.

And the TVA caught up to you.

They always do.

They didn’t drag you out of the field. There was no team of Minutemen, no sirens or threat display. Just a pulse through your timepad, a freeze-frame of motion—and then static. You never even got to say goodbye. Just watched as his apartment in Bucharest faded from view. The world around you disassembled. You didn’t fall through time; it collapsed around you.

And then: nothing.

But nothing wasn’t quiet.

Nothing was the absence of coordinates. A place with no variance, no measurement, no entropy. A sealed chamber of cognitive suspension—standard punishment for agents who breach emotional integrity clauses.

They called it “nullspace” in the manual. But that word doesn’t tell the whole story.

Sometimes you remembered his voice. Sometimes you forgot your own. Time didn’t move here. Not in any way that mattered. You floated in it—bodiless, unraveling, stitched together by a thousand what-ifs that all ended in silence. At first, you tried to count days. Then heartbeats. Then regrets.

You stopped when you couldn’t tell which were yours and which belonged to the lives you’d watched but never lived.

You thought of his hand on your back. His voice rasping low when he asked you to stay. The way his eyes crinkled when he smiled—not every Bucky, but that Bucky. The one who knew without knowing. The one who held out hope like it was a knife and an offering both.

Maybe they’d left you there forever.

But something changed.

When the light shifts again, it’s not like waking.

It’s like surfacing—like clawing your way out of a dream that was also a coffin. You blink against it, vision blurred and lungs tight with the phantom taste of ozone.

The TVA fell, you realize. Or maybe it evolved. The pruning stopped. The sacred timeline shattered. The multiverse stretched open like a wound and you—like so many others—were set loose without fanfare.

Just a blinking cursor on a timepad.

You’re on a bench. Clean metal. White walls. No restraints. Just a single timepad laid neatly on the seat beside you, like it’s been waiting.

You reach for it cautiously. No alerts. No directives. No timeline embedded. The screen flashes once and then settles.

“Welcome back, Agent.”

“Status: Cleared.”

“Assignment Log: Vacated.”

You sit in the silence that follows, your fingers trembling.

“You are free to go.”

They’ve never said that before.

There's no debrief. No memory wipe. No analyst knocking at your door to escort you back to a cubicle and a world of recycled coffee and unread reports. Just… release.

It doesn’t feel real. Then you notice the neatly packaged case file.

When you wrench it open, your eyes gaze upon a few simple words. Your name. Not your alias. Not your designation. Your name. Next to a birthplace.

Earth-616. Brooklyn.

And suddenly that dream… that dream you've always had isn’t a metaphor. It isn’t psychic bleed or misaligned memory. It’s real.

The stoop. The red-brick building. The muffled laughter on the wind. It wasn’t timeline residue.

It was home.

You see it all now: the way the sun hit the side of that building in the dream—your building. The stairs you must’ve climbed a thousand times before the TVA unmade you. The shadow rounding the corner wasn’t just any figure. It was him. That version of him. Bucky Barnes in his sergeant uniform, calling for you before you could catch up.

And you never did. Until now.

The words fall into your chest like stones. Every suppressed instinct, every redacted name, every unexplainable ache when Bucky looked at you like you were someone he’d loved in a dream—all of it clicks into place.

You were never a ghost in the machine. You were a person. You were his.

You stare back at the screen of your timepad. At the quiet, singular prompt at the bottom:

“INPUT COORDINATES.”

Your breath shakes.

For the first time in your life, there’s no mission waiting. No protocol. No watchers behind two-way glass. Just the choice you were never allowed to make.

You don’t hesitate.

EARTH-616 | BROOKLYN, 2026

You're not sure when you first fell in love with him. Maybe it was the 1940s, maybe it was in 1602, maybe it was earlier than language and names. 

But you’ve always been sure about how he looks in silhouette—how his shoulders hunch slightly when he’s thinking, how his hands twitch when he’s fighting the urge to reach for something he knows he’s not allowed to want.

And maybe that’s why you keep searching for him in the in-betweens. 

In lives that never finished writing themselves, in branch timelines that evaporated before they touched soil. You comb through the TVA archives like a woman possessed—not for intel, not even for closure, but for slivers. A timestamp where his name is scribbled in the corner. A blurry photo of someone with his gait. An anonymous field report that ends with, “target disappeared into snow.”

Everywhere, he disappears. And still, you follow.

You love Bucky Barnes the way fire loves oxygen: recklessly, instinctively. Not just for who he is now, but for every life he never got to live. 

For the kid in Brooklyn who dragged Steve out of alley fights, for the soldier who fell off a train and was turned into a ghost, for the man who woke up decades later in Wakanda with a name that felt too big for his mouth. You love him for the quiet moments the world didn’t see—chopping wood in the forest, feeding stray cats on apartment balconies, the way his thumb brushes over his dog tags when he thinks no one’s watching.

Bucky, who made you laugh over terrible coffee in a mess hall in 1943. The one who handed you a damp handkerchief in a zombie-scarred train depot, saying nothing as you wiped blood off your hands. The one in 1602 who watched you from beneath a soot-black hood, eyes squinting through torchlight, and still let you pass.

You remember something he once said—maybe it was in 1955, maybe in 2016, maybe in a fever dream. “People like us… we don’t get soft landings.” And you think that’s the tragedy of it. 

He has always been built to break. And you—you keep getting assigned to the wreckage.

There’s a concept you came across once, while embedded in a minor deviation out of Seoul, 1957. Not part of the assignment—just a detail on a bookstore receipt someone left behind.

In-yun. Fate through friction. The belief that even a passing graze between strangers means your souls have already brushed, thousands of times before.

It’s nonsense, by TVA standards. Sentiment dressed up as spiritual determinism. No measurable coefficient. No supporting data. But you haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

You’ve crossed paths with James Buchanan Barnes in more than a hundred timelines. You’ve logged the hours, cataloged the events, archived the footage. On paper, it’s coincidence. Strategic convergence. The mathematics of softpoints aligning with the gravitational pull of significant individuals. He is, after all, a heavily-indexed Variable.

But paper doesn’t account for the way he looks at you—each time new, each time the same. Like he recognizes your silence before you speak. Like your presence reads to him not as anomaly, but inevitability.

He's not supposed to remember you. He can’t. And still, he always sees you.

That’s the part that undoes you.

You ache because in every timeline, you find him. In every universe, you lose him.

But you think—no, you know—if you had to live and comb through thousands more universes just to stand in front of him again, in the year 2026, you’d do it. You’d do it a thousand more.

Because even if all he says is, “Took you long enough,” you’d still believe it was worth the wait.

EARTH-616 | BROOKLYN, 2026

The year is 2026. This Earth breathes uneasily in peacetime. Stark’s foundation has pivoted to disaster relief and neural rehabilitation tech. Wakanda opens its fourth embassy—this one in Seoul. Post-Blip survivor benefits have just passed preliminary legislation in three states. And James Buchanan Barnes—former assassin, occasional Avenger—has just won his election for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Redistricting helped. So did the veterans’ vote. So did the way he looked people in the eye when he told them he remembered what it was like to be used, to be weaponized, to be hollowed out and told to smile for the cameras. But mostly, it was him. The myth re-forged as man.

You find him at the VA in Brooklyn. Technically off-duty, technically supposed to be celebrating. But of course he’s here. Rolling up shirt sleeves to take constituent questions. Translating bureaucratic-speak into something that feels like compassion. He looks like a U.S. History textbook illustration—white dress shirt, tie slightly loosened, blazer draped over the back of a chair. 

And somehow still the same soul you’ve met in a hundred different guises. The same gravity. The same ache. Like no matter the universe, he’s always trying to make something right.

You step into the lobby, boot heels echoing on tile, and the gravity of him pulls you forward before you’ve fully decided to be brave.

He’s facing away, head slightly bowed in conversation with a nurse, his hair still too long for Washington norms, tucked neatly behind his ears. The sight of him hits low in your stomach—familiar and wild, as always. The sound of his laugh, rare and rumbling, sends a tremor through your ribs.

“Excuse me,” you say, steadying your voice like it’s just another assignment. “I’m a deeply concerned constituent, and I’d like to register a complaint about your policies.”

He turns.

And the moment lands like gravity reasserting itself.

His eyes go wide. Then narrow. Then go soft in that way only you’ve ever seen—like he’s witnessing a miracle he doesn’t trust yet. He doesn’t say your name. Doesn’t need to.

You only just open your mouth to say something else when he’s already in front of you. And then—

He kisses you.

Not tentative. Not questioning. Just real. Like this has always been the ending he was holding out for. His hand cups the back of your neck like he thinks you might vanish again if he doesn’t keep contact. You let yourself press into it—mouth to mouth, memory to body. The weight of the years falling off both your shoulders.

You pull back, breathless. Smiling.

“You came back,” he says, wonder tucked beneath the rasp of his voice. “You came back.”

Your hands are on his chest now, smoothing fabric just to touch him, to confirm he’s real. “Took me long enough,” you echo, and his smile breaks wide and unguarded, rare and all for you.

Then he stills, just a little.

“You staying?” he asks.

You don’t hesitate.

“Yes.”

The sounds of laughter, children shrieking, splashing and chatter filled your ears the moment you stepped out of the showers; body framed in the red hot, one-piece bathing suit you were always required to wear while on duty.

  With lips slightly pursed, a fresh layer of chapstick—spf 30, always—coating them, you surveyed the crowd that would be your responsibility in just a couple of seconds.

  The vultures—ahem, mothers and married women, interested in anyone but who they were due to go home to, were spread out on their towels and chairs. Basking in the sun with futile hopes of obtaining a tan. Mrs.Abernathy was already looking pink, you knew she’d be complaining about the burn for the remainder of the pool day.

  Small children occupied the shallow kiddie pool, floaties bobbed around in the waves their excitement created. In the larger pool, adults tried to relax while ignoring the noise that came with preteens and teenagers gathering. It was loud and obnoxious.

  Just the way you liked it.

  You raised your whistle to your lips and blew as you moved towards the lifeguard’s post, hips swaying with a confidence that befell you the moment you clocked in. Almost like magic.

  “Don’t even think about it, Curtis.” You warned the culprit, stopping him just as he prepared for a running start, no doubt ready to cannonball right next to poor, unsuspecting Mr. Williams.

  You smirked as Curtis deflated and wandered off, muttering under his breath.

  “Oh, thank goodness!” Heather cried out as she climbed down from her post, high ponytail swinging, “You have perfect timing, I need to reapply some sunscreen to my legs, I’m starting to look like a lobster.”

  With a finger on the temple of your sunnies, you lowered them on the bridge of your nose to look her over, pushing them back into place with a brilliant flash of your teeth, “You look good to me.”

  She laughed, swatting your arm, “Stop it—there’s no trouble today, we almost had a drowning this morning though, kid flipped over in his floatie and couldn’t get back up. But other than that, it’s pretty chill.”

  You hummed, pleased as your eyes scanned the crowd again.

  “Oh, and your number one fan is already here.” Heather teased and you groaned right before you locked eyes with him.

  Your lenses were dark. To anyone it should have been difficult to notice your attention was on them. And yet, Eddie Munson stared you dead in the eye from where he and his ragtag group of pale goblins—aside from Ronnie and Jeff, you liked them, Ronnie was spunky and Jeff was funny and nice and also black—huddled over a table and under umbrellas. 

  After Jeff had tagged along with his family once—he gave you some fruit his family had packed, he was so sweet—he and his friends, Eddie included, had made frequent appearances, though they weren’t always happy to be at the pool. Heather mentioned to you once, or anytime she got more than five minutes to talk to you, that Gareth had been the one he sacrificed to approach her. Started a casual conversation that continued to circle around to openly wondering out loud about what your schedule on the lifeguard tower could be. She took great pleasure in pretending to be oblivious before she wanted him to go away. 

  Now, you saw them just about all the time. Why Eddie Munson really wanted to loiter around at the community pool, you had no idea. You had incorrectly, apparently, assumed it would be out of his comfort zone.

  All his friends sat inwards, speaking heatedly about something but not Eddie. He sat with his back against the table top, arms spread out over it and legs manspread over his section of the bench. His chapped lips were pulled up into an almost sinister like smirk.

  You had a sneaking suspicion Eddie wanted to seem annoying, menacing, or even intimidating—and he once was to you. You used to avoid him in hallways, despite the butterflies that fluttered around in your tummy, because the guy was so abrasive. Constantly making fun of people he didn’t like, being ridiculously loud when he realized others didn’t like him, either, and he’d taken to occasionally picking on your group of friends—a couple of science nerds, c’mon dude—so you’d just tried to steer clear.

  Until you got this gig.

  There was something about seeing the local metal head and dealer— usually so imposing with his cool layered clothes, sharp jewelry and ripped jeans—swap out his personality for a pair of black swimming trunks and sandals, exposing his lanky frame, incredibly pale skin and even paler feet. Forgoing his armor, so to speak. Even his tattoos looked kinda funny, randomly placed and spread apart. His normally wild mane was flat, and the ends were wet so you knew he’d been in the water, but if the hair hadn't been a giveaway, his red rimmed eyes would have. You could tell the difference between chlorine and weed eyes from a mile away. 

  Eddie Munson didn’t look remotely intimidating to you. In fact, he reminded you of an anchovy. How long had he been just a guy and not some big, obnoxious overly-opinionated-to-the-point-of-being-mean ogre like you built him up in your head? Sometimes, you wondered what revelations he might be having about you as well. Made you kinda glad your little crush on him was gone.

  You tried not to laugh as you broke eye contact to return your attention to Heather who was also biting back a smile. 

  “I’ll have you know he looked pissed to be here up until the moment you walked out. Good luck!” She sang as she twirled around and hurried away.

  You’d barely managed to get settled in your seat when you realized he and his friends had left their possessions at their table in favor of occupying the area of the pool closest to you.

  “No way! I’m not doing that!” You heard Gareth hiss. It was so funny to see them awkwardly just standing there in the water, like they were waiting for the okay to go home. 

  “Causing trouble, Munson?” You asked, trying not to look at him. Eddie had quickly dunked himself underwater, and emerged wiping his hair out of his face and running his fingers through it. The way he was doing it reminded you of how they did it in Baywatch, albeit a bad attempt because his wet hair kind of melded together and his fingers got caught in it so he had to yank. It was obvious he was trying to show off and flex. Distantly, you wondered if his rib cage showing a little could be considered a six-pack.

  “Just trying to soak up the last couple minutes of fun, since you’re on duty, Killjoy.” He shot right back at you without missing a beat, teeth gleaming in the sun as he grinned, “Don’t you have kids to keep from running by the pool or something, or are you just planning on harassing innocent, little ol’ me all day?”

  “He wanted me to pretend to drown him earlier so that you might actually have to care about him for a couple of seconds while you do mouth-to-mouth.” Gareth confessed with a straight face that went momentarily terrified as Eddie whirled around, face set in a sneer and furious.

  “Dude, why the fuck would you tell her that—” And then he was back on you, “He’s lying to mess with your head, I wouldn’t want to kiss you to save my life.”

  “That’s good, because I wouldn’t kiss you—it’s not a kiss, by the way—to save your life, either. That’s a death I would have had to call.” You remarked, twisting the cap of your water bottle off to take a swig as his friends let out a chorus of Oooh!s. 

  You tried to pretend not to notice how Eddie seemed to stare up at you, the way he stared up at you, corner of his lip twitching into a smile as he accepted defeat without a rebuttal. For a second, you thought he might have been impressed, maybe even a little proud of you, and then he quickly ducked under water, until he was chin level and nervously glancing around. 

"One of these days, you two are just gonna have to get a room." Ronnie laughed, tossing her silky black hair over her shoulder.

  You felt your face get warm and chose to blame it on the heat instead of the fact that (one) Eddie Munson had popped a woody to you and (two) you definitely still had a crush on him.

  What a cruel summer this was gonna be.