smack my ass like a drum

The mattress creaks and the frame knocks into the wall, chipping the paint, denting the wood where the two meet.

Forehead to forehead, sweat accumulating with torrid breaths and aching muscles, Bucky's hips caught to yours. Pressing, slamming, holding down as he clenches his glutes and humps, elongating the pleasure, taunting.

But the light chime of his tags kept ringing. They keep batting across your chest, cold and moist, patting your chin and dragging across your skin when you were right there.

It was just as your legs fell open, knees laying up as his dick dragged in and out, and he willed his noises to stay at a minimum, when the tags flittered to the dip of your neck. Your lips parted, sighing, rolling your eyes as it tap tap tap's and sings against your hot skin. You move, careful not to ruin the precision, pressing the chain against his peck, holding them firm to his chest.

At first, Bucky almost sat up, almost paused to ask if you were okay — pushing at his sternum, brows taut and eyes glassy, whining with every breath. Instead he pushed deeper, metal fingers drawing up your body until they held your jaw, squeezing your cheeks, making you look into his eyes.

"What's the matter?" His breath sticks to your face, bumping his nose to yours. "Pushin' me away? C'mon, speak to me."

You can't. That's the problem. It feels like with each pull and push, each pulse around his cock, and every kiss his tip grants your cervix, he drives all linguistic knowledge out of your brain, spilling it from your lips in garbled nonsense and breathy moans.

A whiney hum spills out as you tighten your lips into a line, keeping your jaw firm. You lean back into the pillow, shutting your eyes trying to find any semblance of words, but his hips keep moving. Slower now, yet still as effective, still holding you rigid and perfectly, and tauntingly precise. Rutting the length of himself inside of you while the fuzz of hair that littered the base kept grazing your clit. It isn't until one hand claws at the meat of his shoulder, and the other, the hand that pushed at the chain, leaving tiny dents in it's wake, fisted at the metal.

It clinks as the tags stay dangling from your palm, bumping to and fro.

"Oh, sweetheart," Bucky soothes, the warm metal of his thumb strokes against your bottom lip, slicked with spit and salty with sweat. "We're they botherin' you?"

You nod quickly, leaving a sharp smile on his face, dipping down to leave gentle kisses against your jaw.

"My smart girl," you keen into the praise, leaning deeper into his hand, letting his voice rasp and vibrate into your skin, leaving more room for him to lick and kiss. "Thought you wanted me to stop."

Ardently, you shake your head, ruffling your hair into the pillow behind you.

"No, no stopping. 'M not gonna stop." And he doesn't. His flesh hand replaces your own around the tags and he slots them between his teeth.

Salt and iron cover his tongue, sweat that had dripped from his down body, and your own that had mixed in as it had laid against your own skin, or tapped annoyingly your neck. It makes a dull sound as they sat firmly between his teeth, braced to the side, just where his molars start and his canines dig into the printed letters of his name.

It shouldn't be hot.

The sight of his mouth full, his teeth bared, carrying something precious with an iron grip of his jaw, made your walls pulse. You almost wanted to swap it out, to reach up and take the tags in your own mouth, enveloped in the debauched taste of century old metal, skin and spit.

But its hedonic. You love how he looks. Skin slick, chest heaving, drool already pooling at the edges of the tags, at the corner of his mouth right where his lips met. Animalistic in a way.

"There we go, there we go," his speech muffled, yet still affirmative and firm as he brings back the pace. Making your head drop back and mouth hang open on a gasp, arching your back. The warmth of his palm glides up your torso, leaving goosebumps as he drags up and down, before pulling your leg up by the thigh to latch onto his waist and holding you firmly at the hip. All while holding himself up on his forearm, vibranium fingers holding the top of your head reassuringly, grazing his thumb on your hairline.

He hums, unable to speak with his mouth full, unable to gather the spit about to fall. Your hands claw at the contorting muscles of his shoulder blades, moving to capture his hair between your fingers.

The tug you force has him stuttering, hips pressing to your own, the hair surrounding his base tickles again, right against your nub.

"Oh—fuck," you breathe out, jaw slack and tight all at once, the light feeling of release easing up your back as your thighs begin to tingle and tremble around his torso. "Bucky… Bucky, please."

The rivulets of spit drop, coating your neck and chin, and he follows them down until his hot, wet breath finds your temple. His chest caves with each inhale, keeping his hips up, holding down the pace that has you throbbing up his shaft, your nails digging into his shoulder and thighs shaking. He can feel the ring around the root of him, creamy and white, mixed in with the dark patch of hair.

The tags tinkle dully, let go from the cell of his teeth to lay wet next to your neck. You pay no mind to the slurping sound of him gathering spit from his lips; only staying in the blissed out haze of Bucky's body atop of yours and his pretty cock slapping in and out of you.

"C'mon, c'mon…" he repeats like a mantra, whispering under his breath, heated on the shell of your ear. "You got it, fuck, you feel so good. Wanna cum—cum inside of you, wanna push it in deep, n'keep fuckin' it in… Please, please, please…"

As your nails print crescents into his skin, your mouth holds a jumble of 'yes's to his shoulder. Balm and torrid to the meat of his shoulder, your body locks and a sweet ache begins to release around the stretch of him. Your lips press to his collarbone, muffling the shudders and whines and gasps that release as he fucks you through it, wet slaps and mumbled grunts chorusing together while you jolt and pulse.

It isn't long until he follows through, finishing deep inside, pressing and holding himself as his cock twitches with each spurt of cum. As if awoken from his daze, he keeps his hips moving.

Splatterings of white coat both of your pelvises and thighs, shuddering with overstimulation, muscles limp from overexertion, eyes half lidded and lips parted and red.

Bucky slowed himself as your jerking lessened and your teeth bared to hiss at the mild pain, and his dick softened. He watched, holding himself up with his knuckles to the pillow, guiding the softer limb to stay inside of your full warmth, uncaring about the mess that now coats his fingers — absentmindedly licking them off like candy residue.

Sighs and soft groans alike leave you both as he slips out. Your nails caress his torso, gliding gently up the red marks you printed on his back, down to the sensitive muscles of his ass, making him twitch and press his hips to yours again with a stifled laugh to your jaw.

"Careful, might get hard again before I can clean you up." He kisses and breathes you in, holding you into his body as your fingers hold their gentle rhythm.

You huff a lazy version of a laugh, nosing against the sweet smell of sweat where his neck meets his shoulder.

"Oh no, how awful," You croak sarcastically. The weakness in your voice makes you both laugh fully, rumbling chests pressed against one another, cheeks tight with smiles, and eyes watching with warm fragments. After a short moment of silence, of lungs catching up, you follow down the column of his neck to where his dog tags laid lopsided on your chest, and hummed. "I liked that thing you did."

"'That thing'?" He pressed, smirking, lowering his voice. "I've got many things goin' for me, sweetheart, be specific."

Another laugh breaks, crinkling your eyes at the corners, playfully pushing at his chest.

"That dog tag thing, you know, putting them in your mouth."

"You liked that?"

You nodded, fervently. "Uh-huh. Very much."

His lips move into a soft smile, catching the slick metal cards between his fingers to bring them up.

"That so?" He teases quietly, dragging them across your bottom lip, leaving the dewy residue to sit, sliding them just between the seam of your lips only to jut it out with a pop. "Maybe next time you can hold them for me?"

With your tongue poking out, you get a taste of the flavour that pooled alongside Bucky's own tongue. Musky and sour, tangy with body heat. And with a soft press on your thigh, you know that you're under a limit.

"Next time meaning five minutes?" You prod, tilting your head innocently. "Haven't even gotten cleaned up and it seems like little Sergeant Barnes is reporting for duty."

With a tut, he holds your chin, shaking his head. "Nuh-uh, fuck that and your smart mouth. Open wide, hold tight."

You obey and bite down as he slots the tags between your teeth, tugging at the chain twice to test out your grip. You scrunch your nose and furrow your brows, playfully pulling back at the chain. The grotesque brackishness of the tester you got grips you fully and drips down your throat.

"'Little Sergeant Barnes'," he repeats, sitting up as far as he could to grab ahold on himself. Sticky, wet and just as hard as before. He strokes himself, groaning as he fists tighter at his ruddy tip, coaxing a pearl of precum. Defiantly, he taps his heaviness on your clit. "Keep that up and making sure every inch of you aches with me the next day, understood?"

A giggle bubbles up before you could force it down. He slaps his cock against your clit again, holding and coating it down and between your lips, still creamy and dripping his own release, bullying your button with his tip. Your whine is muffled between your teeth as you bear them down.

"Understood?" He pushes, voice firmer, harsher, and you nod, heart racing, ribs already quivering. The sounds of your joint bodies squelch louder and louder, as your head lays dizzier and dizzier, but his voice whispers so soft and the way he terrorises and hounds your insides brings stars to the corners of your eyes.

taglist: @devililithh @buck-star @buckyfmd @nikkitabarnes @miraclediviner @barnes-babydoll @kqtholins @wint3rbarnes @swimmingnightcolor @ilovestizzy @chronic-fangirl-222 @ornateglass @bucklesby-barnes @avgdestitute @demiebarnes @sunkissedspell @stanmarvelous @castielscaplan @ladymiseryy @phoenix-in-writing @layaflores @wherewinterblooms @sunday-bug @buckybunni @filthgf @angelryex @megsavengersslut @sassandscribbles @amidnightwish21 @goobers-mcgee @my-fabulousness-has-arrived @angelryex @iloveotters101 @venigrantrogers

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seb taglist: @slutdier @clover1004 @colettebarnes @metal-armed-muse @68ep @herejustforbuckybarnes @quantumbarnes @buckysdecaflove @erina00 @onyx8514

This was probably the worst decision you have ever made.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is bad, this is so bad. 

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

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

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

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

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

Why just have you been so stupid, my god.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sweetheart.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

What answer could you possibly give him? 

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

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

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

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

These hands were your favorite things. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something in your face gives you away. 

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

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

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

He goes very still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your gaze snags on the knife block. 

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

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

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

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

Bucky stops dead.

The whole room seems to stop with him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stops breathing for half a beat and nods slowly. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And centered in that manufactured peace is him. 

James Buchanan Barnes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tips of your fingers brush pearls. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A gift.

From a man you didn’t know.

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

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

You cannot stand it.

Your fingers curl harder.

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

He knows what your heart doesn’t yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

tik—tik—tik—tik—

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

The sound fills the kitchen in poignant, crystalline bursts.

A rain of little impacts.

A beautiful mess.

For a second you don’t even breathe.

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

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

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

His mouth parts.

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

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

It looks like hurt. Pure, unhidden hurt.

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

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

Because it is not rage.

It is not even disappointment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not pretending.”

“Stop.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All you need now is a way out.

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

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

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

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

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

And now all of them are pointed at you.

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

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

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

Bucky pivots.

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

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

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

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

“Guns down.”

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

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

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

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

You run.

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

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

But Bucky is faster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Out.”

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

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

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

Safe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like this.

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

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

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

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

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

And it makes you weaker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, you know what he means.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So all that is left is the simplest truth again.

You really are overwhelmed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The words suspend themselves in the space between you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your throat tightens.

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

The kitchen feels very still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It brings something bleak.

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

You could run from this house.

You could run from his name.

But you are not sure you could run from him.

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”

- Oscar Wilde

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

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

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

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

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

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

You surely are about to taste your own blood on your tongue any second now if you keep biting your lip so hard. But all you do is tighten your grip on those messy, dark hair your fingers are knotted into, and you can’t fight the reflex to shift your hips away an inch so that the embarrassing sob that is growing in your throat won’t make it out.

Though you should have known that that would make him stop. His mouth pauses against your clit, and you squeeze your eyes shut.

His hands remain firmly at your thighs, thumbs soothing those slow and drowsy circles against your skin. But his eyes lift to yours, the usual bright blue of them gone dark and concentrated in the dimness of his bedroom. His gaze is fierce enough to make your breath hitch, but melted into its depths is that softness you know is there just for you.

With his gaze still on yours, he begins to kiss a languid path up your stomach, pausing just beneath your ribs and letting his eyes flutter when worshiping your breasts with his skilled tongue. Your mind and soul are soaring up to his high ceilings.

Your teeth are imprinted upon your bottom lip, and you hope you can continue keeping your breathing as even as possible, though you’re not managing all that well.

His hands move slowly across the skin of your hips, pinning you to the mattress. He doesn’t use all his strength but enough for you to feel stuck in his hold.

He crawls further up your body with that deliberate drag that leaves you shivering and panting. He hovers over you and his bare chest brushes your heaving breasts.

His face is now inches from yours, his stubble grazing your cheek, smelling like vanilla and something like cardamom, and you breathe it in automatically. His pupils are blown as they sear into yours.

“Stop that,” he orders, though his voice is a warm whisper. He reaches up, his thumb catching your bottom lip and tugging it out from between your teeth. He soothes the imprint. “Don't you hide those pretty sounds from me.”

“Bucky, the guards,” you breathe out, your voice trembling, still weak from the way he used his tongue on you. Your face burns. The room feels enormous again, full of listening walls. “Your people. They will hear. They will think—”

Something flits across his expression. It seems to be something proud, even possessive. You could say it looks dangerous, but being the person that you are, and considering the sweet albeit intense person that he is, it turns you the hell on and makes you sigh.

“I don't care what they think. I want them to know.” He leans down, his lips hovering over yours, his breath hot and smelling of you. “I want every man on my payroll to hear the way you sound when I’m the only thing on your mind. I want them to hear who I’m answering to tonight. And every other night from now on.”

With a stunned shake of your head, you stare up at him, a huff of embarrassment trying to bubble up and fall out of your mouth but it fails because his mouth is on yours, kissing you aggressively before he dives back down, not waiting for you to argue. You’re entirely overwhelmed, but damn, not in a bad way at all.

His hands lock you into place, and the way he’s eating you out has you flying straight to heaven with a one-way ticket. He’s being greedy. He’s using his tongue with a blunt, feverish sort of worship that makes your head hit his pillow with a thud.

He’s a businessman, that’s what he told you. But as his mouth works over you with all that bottled-up intensity he carries around all day, you feel the latent power he usually keeps veiled behind a tie. He’s a man who takes what he wants, and right now, what he wants is to hear you break, and you might actually, because god is he good, so incredibly good, you could definitely get used to it. Maybe you already are, but who’s to blame you for it.

The first real moan tears out of you, and you cringe internally at how loud and breathy it sounds, the way it vibrates in the cavernous room, landing in the farthest corners of the high ceilings.

Bucky grunts against you, and it sounds so purely satisfied, it even seems to rumble within your own body. You gasp, trying to suppress another moan, and he only presses harder, licking and sucking and slurping, and it makes you feel like you’re the only meal on his plate.

His thumbs dent the soft give of your hips to make sure you’re pinned the way he wants you, the way he has the best access to all of you. It’s dizzying, it makes your gut lurch in the best possible way, and you feel like a queen and a ruin all at once. He’s gentle, yeah, but it seems to be the gentle kind you would use on a porcelain heirloom right before testing its breaking point.

Your hands don’t know what to do with themselves. Gripping the sheets or pillows, touching yourself—it all doesn’t feel like enough, so you go back to sliding your fingers into his hair and basically watch them disappear in it. You feel powerful and helpless, and oh god you should really keep those noises down or you won’t be able to look at his people anymore.

He is a mountain of a man, intimidating in ways you don’t understand yet, full of secrets; and yet here he is, kneeling for you and eating you out as if that’s all he’s been waiting for his whole life.

Damn, you’re a lucky girl.

He is drinking you in, his mouth molding to you with a suction that feels like he’s trying to draw your very soul to the surface.

It feels as though each individual bristle of his stubble is caressing your inner thigh, and it's abrasive and burning but also so damn good. It makes the gliding heat of his tongue feel so soft and vivid, and it pulls the tension right out of your bones.

He tracks you through his lashes, and you’re careful not to meet his eyes or that dark gaze of his would surely make you come already. But he doesn’t stop documenting you and the way you react to him. He thrives on it, so very much that it doesn’t seem to embarrass him in the slightest.

Then he dives past your entrance, his tongue finding that soft, sharp intake of your breath. And your spine bows upward out of pure blinding pleasure. The sound that leaves you is startled, too loud for your liking and so you try to clamp your hand over your lips.

He catches your wrist.

He’s not harsh with it, but he brings your hand down to the mattress and pins it there decisively. His fingers lace through yours.

“What’d I say,” he warns, voice low, husky.

You swallow, your eyes are fluttering. “Bucky—”

“Make the noise,” he whispers as he kisses along your inner thigh, eyes on you. “All of it.”

His free hand slowly wanders upward and it almost feels possessive how he ascends your heated skin. You glimpse that little hint of something feral, something prehistoric in the trail of his eyes. You’ve seen it before, and as always, it pulls you under completely. His ferocity isn’t some thrashing kind of wild, honestly, he seems perfectly comfortable with his position, as though he’s already done the math but there’s no clear solution and he just has to keep calculating. Has to keep going.

He lunges back and buries his face in your heat, his tongue flat and broad, applying a rhythmic pressure that whites out your vision and has you moaning without thought. It’s thorough and hungry, his mouth drawing you in eagerly, and it feels like he’s trying to pull the very center of you into his throat.

“Bucky—,” you gasp, your fingers tightly clamping around his, knuckles white.

He growls, and it rattles his entire chest, it vibrates against your sensitive skin. He uses his teeth—just a graze, a tiny, sharp nip that sends a scalding current straight to your core. Your hips jerk reflexively, his hands are pinning you open, and you are forced to take every unsparing lap of his tongue.

He shifts his weight, his nose dragging through your wetness as he focuses his attention on the very top of your nub. He works his tongue in a cadence so constant it sends the pressure straight to the back of your skull until the room dissolves behind your eyelids. It feels almost like a breaking point, but hell, you would throw yourself out of those high windows if he were to stop now.

He’s fast and skilled and you’re made to take it.

“Open up,” he commands against your skin, his voice muffled and wet although you couldn’t possible open up more for him.

There is no more warning before he fills you with two fingers, sliding them deep inside you and stretching you while his thumb maintains that dizzying pressure, and the friction burns a hole through your focus. The two sensations fight for room in your head, effectively demolishing whatever was left of your pride and it makes you let out the highest moan. You’re straining upward, seeking the release he’s dangling just out of reach.

He looks up at you, his face flushed, his breathing ragged against your thigh. A stray, damp shimmer glistens on the curve of his lower lip, and he licks it clean. You watch mesmerized and utterly overdrawn. His gaze is stripped of any pretense, it’s dark and appeased and entirely fixed on the way your face is breaking.

"That's it," he coos, watching your chest heave. "Scream for me, sweetheart. I'm not stopping until you do."

He dives back in, his tongue swirling deep inside you before curling back to hook against your clit, and suddenly there is no perspective on anything anymore, and the floors are walls and the walls are floors, and—

And then his phone begins vibrating against the mahogany nightstand. It’s a sharp and intrusive sound and it’s stripping the air of its heat.

Bucky doesn’t seem to care, though. He doesn’t so much as glance over at it. His gaze stays welded to yours, his pupils taking up the beautiful blue. His thumb continues trailing your heat, collecting your slick, and he turns to watch in amazement, as he licks a long stripe up your center, making you choke on your spit.

The vibration of his phone still ringing grates against the wood, loud enough to feel like a physical itch.

Bucky is a man who has built an empire on timing, yet he seems perfectly content to let the world outside the bedroom door spontaneously combust.

The phone dies.

He keeps sucking, you keep moaning.

Then, it begins again, more insistent this time. His phone is pulsing. It seems urgent.

You feel his jaw tighten against you. Feel the shift you’ve come to recognize but never quite know what to do with. The air around him thickens by a single degree. The temperature of him changes, not in heat but in authority. Somewhere beyond these walls, the world is knocking its head against his patience.

“Bucky,” you breathe, the word leaning on the dryness in your throat. Your chest is still heaving, your skin flushed a beautiful pink. You softly pull at his hair to make him look at you, a weak gesture that feels like trying to move a mountain. “You should get that.”

His eyes meet yours. There are galaxies in them and something darker orbiting behind them. He leans in and presses a slow, devastating kiss to the inside of your thigh, all calm and relaxed while the phone continues vibrating angrily.

“It can wait,” he decides, voice an octave lower and threaded with promise as he trails a line of punishingly soft kisses along your skin.

Another buzz, the sound now an impatient thrum that seems to vibrate the very legs of the bed. It feels like a summons, a reminder of the business that pays for the guards and the maids and the high ceilings.

He exhales through his nose and lets out a rumble of annoyance. His thumb strokes a calming line along your hip, as if reassuring you that his irritation belongs elsewhere. He looks like some wild animal being interrupted mid-meal.

“Bucky—,” you start, carefully, your hand sliding to cup his face, feeling the heat of his skin, but he clicks his tongue to interrupt you.

“My girl deserves to get off first,” he hums, not letting his lips off your skin, his stubble a deliberate, intoxicating scrape against your thigh.

And when his tongue drives home, flat and strong against that hyper-sensitized knot of nerves, it doesn’t take long for that jolting pleasure to cloud your vision and bleach the dark corners of his bedroom into a searing, blinding white.

Your spine arches and snaps and leaves you suspended between the silk sheets and the cold air, held down only by his weight.

The embarrassing sob you were trying to hide earlier finally tears free, but it isn’t a sob anymore. It’s a melodic wail that echoes off the shadows-drenched ceiling. It climbs high and rings out with a clarity that makes the idea of guards and business feel like a fever dream from another life.

Your body is trying to crush his fingers in a desperate pulse that feels like a heart beating where it shouldn't.

And Bucky drinks it all in. He keeps his head down, jaw locked against you, refusing to let the moment end. That rough graze of his stubble is brutal but it keeps you somewhat in the room. He is taking the time with the mess he made, leaning into the way you are trembling, his mouth ensuring that every last bit of your control is gone.

By the time your vision starts to clear at the edges, and the room starts to solidify back into reality, you feel hollowed out, as if he’d reached inside and pulled the very soul of you to the surface. You slump into the mattress, your limbs too heavy to even twitch, your lungs burning with the effort of remembering how to breathe.

When you begin to squirm in his hold, Bucky finally pulls back, his expression bluntly victorious. He is breathing hard, his lips stained, his eyes trained on the way your ribs are still hitching with those dying tremors. His hand tightens at your hip.

Then he rises over you in one fast movement, bracing himself above you with his weight carefully balanced. You don’t need any more physical proof that he wants you, considering how hard and ready you can feel him against your leg, with his control barely in check; and it makes your lungs seize up.

Wordlessly, he leans down to pull you into a slow kiss that goes so deep, your thoughts evaporate and your fingers tangle in his hair. He groans against your lips, breathing your name. You feel him twitch against you as he lets his hand slide back between your bodies—when the door rattles with a knock.

Bucky stills with his forehead on yours, eyes still closed, jaw a block of ice. “Boss?” a slightly hesitant voice comes through the door.

His nose presses into the crook of your neck. For a long second, he just breathes you in, a deep, possessive inhalation as if he is trying to pull in all of your scent to survive the coming interruption.

With a low curse that is more a growl than a word, he rolls onto his side and promptly pulls you with him, tucking you into his chest. His body angles slightly toward the door, building an instinctive shield. His arms remain draped over you, his left hand splayed protectively across your back.

“What,” he calls, voice suddenly stripped of warmth. There is a pause on the other side.

“Sorry, boss,” The voice is male. Sounding even more hesitant now. And definitely embarrassed. “But, uh— it’s important. You are needed.”

You want to let out a heavy sigh. But you’ve seen this coming, really.

Bucky closes his eyes briefly and there is something pinched around them. He’s not usually a short-tempered man, at least not with you, but right now he looks ready to snap at the door.

“I’m busy,” he replies flatly, and you believe his voice is only calm for your sake.

Another pause. The poor man outside is probably staring at the door waiting for it to shoot him.

“It’s Sam,” he explains carefully, seemingly afraid to say too much.

You know Sam. Or, you have heard Bucky mention Sam. Sam, the colleague. The one your boyfriend refers to with a mix of irritation and reluctant brotherhood. A pain in the ass, he told you with a half-smile. But loyal. Does good work. One of the few men he trusts to argue with him and live. You had laughed at the way he said it so seriously. He hadn't really laughed with you, but he kissed you stupid afterwards and so you no longer thought of it.

Bucky gives a long exhale.

“Give me five.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hurried footsteps retreat down the corridor.

And Bucky doesn’t make a single attempt to leave your side. He just peppers your neck with tiny kisses.

You try to turn to his face. “Bucky, you should go.”

His eyes meet yours, and the stoicism buckles immediately. Back is the softness.

“You come first,” he hums, and his thumb brushes your cheek. There is something apologetic in the gesture, though he hasn’t done anything wrong.

You smile faintly and let a slow pout form on your lips. “I don’t want to hold you back from work.”

“You’re not,” he reassures you softly, leaning down to kiss you with a lack of the urgency he should probably be feeling right now.

But then he’s shifting away, sitting up on the edge of the bed, and the loss of his heat is a stinging chill. The chandelier light spills over his naked back, over the breadth of his shoulders. Your eyes glide down the tiny pink scars on his left shoulder with a sinking feeling in your stomach—those scars are another mystery he hasn’t let you into yet. But all you want to do is kiss them and hope to make it better, even if just a little.

You watch the way he runs a hand through his hair, reassembling himself piece by piece. By the time he stands, he has edges. He always seems different when he’s no longer touching you.

He pulls on a pair of dark trousers and doesn’t bother with a shirt. The phone is in his hand now. He checks the screen, jaw grinding briefly before he glances back at you. And the hardness that stepped into his eyes softens again, dissolving the moment they meet your face. It’s almost ridiculous, how quickly it happens. Like watching a knife remember it was once a piece of silver meant for candlelight.

You’re still half-sunk into the bed, hair falling around your shoulders, limbs loose, and sheets wound around your naked body. Around you, it smells of cedar, expensive soap, and Bucky himself, which is somehow warmer than both.

“Stay here,” he says gently. “I’ll handle it.”

Handle it.

The words mean spreadsheets and contracts in your mind. Annoying colleagues. Late- night negotiations.

He walks back to his bed to press a tender kiss to your forehead.

You push yourself up slightly on your elbows, the blanket sliding down your side. And you definitely see the way his gaze drifts for an appreciative and unashamed moment before it returns to your eyes. There is a small smile tugging at his mouth, and it’s the one you always get to see when you’re the only audience.

“Make yourself at home while I’m gone, yeah?” he whispers, nodding toward the massive wardrobe along the far wall, keeping his attention on you. “If you get cold, grab a shirt of mine. Top shelf on the left.”

You smile at him, nodding softly.

His eyes move over you slowly, and there is something warmly adoring in them that makes your chest tighten in a strange, bright way. He reaches out to brush his fingers along your jaw. The touch is thorough, absentmindedly tender, soothing out something only he can see.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he adds, voice rougher now. Reluctant. “Didn’t plan on having to step out. Told Sam he better handle his own ass today. Should’ve known better, though.”

“You’re the boss, Bucky,” you ease lightly. “I assume dramatic interruptions are part of the brand.”

His mouth curves.

“Unfortunately.”

He kisses your forehead once more, lingering long enough to make your lashes flutter.

“I’ll make it up to you,” he murmurs sweetly. “Soon as I’m done with this.” His thumb traces your cheek. “I’m coming right back. Gonna give you my full attention.” His eyes darken slightly, voice dipping just enough to send a warm shiver through you. “Cuddle you properly. Maybe take things a little further.”

Your stomach does a small, excited flip. “Maybe?”you tease, leaning into his touch.

He presses his smirk against yours. “Definitely.”

With that, he pulls back and straightens, that sovereign steel slipping back over him piece by piece. It’s almost visible, the way he steps into whatever role the rest of his world knows him for. The man who answers phones about Sam and things that sound suspiciously more complicated than spreadsheets.

At the door, he glances back once more. Same softness, just for you. “Lock it behind me, doll.”

The door opens. His phone lifts to his ear.

His voice changes instantly as he steps into the hallway.

“Get Wilson on the line,” he demands, tone clipped. “Now.” And then the door shuts.

You’re left in the echo of him and his scent in the sheets, his warmth still imprinted on your skin.

You don’t get up immediately to lock the door. He can get just a little too protective sometimes, so you don’t deem it necessary to lock the door when he’s just out taking a call. And you’re sure his guards would be in much worse trouble if they were to enter and see you nakedly spread out in his bed.

So you flop back into the mattress—that certainly was expensive too, due to the way it feels—and stare at the ceiling for a moment.

Then you laugh, incredulously. A quiet little wheeze of disbelief escaping into the big room.

Because really. What on earth.

You roll onto your side, pulling the blanket with you, and glance around the bedroom again like maybe you hallucinated the last two hours. Or the last two months.

The place is obscene.

And not in a tacky-rich, or gold-fountain rich kind of way. This is the quiet kind of wealth. Everything is polished wood and deep colors and furniture that probably has a historical backstory longer than your résumé.

There’s a fireplace bigger than your entire first apartment. A chandelier that looks like it was handcrafted by depressed angels.

And somewhere downstairs, there are actual maids.

Maids.

And guards.

Actual human beings whose job description probably includes phrases like protect the property and stand menacingly near large gates.

Meanwhile, you used to eat instant noodles on a couch that leaned slightly to the left like it had given up on life.

And somehow—how the fuck—you have ended up in the bed of a man who owns more suits than you own pairs of socks. A man who is tall and broad and so absurdly handsome, who steps into those razor-sharp tailored suits as though they were invented solely for him. Who wears that self-confident authority in his voice that makes the people around him straighten without realizing why.

And yet, he was on his knees for you just moments ago.

The thought sends heat creeping up your neck again. But in a giddy way.

You bury your face briefly into the pillow with a muffled groan. Because honestly, how did you pull that.

A man like Bucky should logically be dating a diplomat. Or a CEO. Or some terrifyingly poised woman who drinks champagne for breakfast and owns fifteen languages.

Instead, he found you.

You.

Who once tripped over a grocery store display and apologized to the oranges. And yet he looks at you like you hung the moon with questionable hardware.

You grin into the pillow.

Also—objectively speaking—the man is incredible in bed. Like, it’s crazy.

Biting your lip and staring up at the ceiling, you wonder if the chandelier is as baffled by your luck as you are. It’s like winning the lottery without buying a ticket, and you’re silently pleading with the laws of probability to stay bent in your favor just a little while longer; at least until he realizes you’re a mere mortal and not the goddess he’s treating you as.

It’s weird that a man like him noticed you. Weird that he’s so sharp with the world but so gentle with you. Weird that he lives in this fortress of wealth and power and still tells you to steal his shirts if you’re getting cold.

Your eyes drift toward the wardrobe.

Top shelf on the left, he said.

You imagine one of his massive shirts swallowing you as a whole, and snort softly.

Yeah.

You definitely pulled a mob-boss-looking, suit-wearing, ridiculously attentive gentleman who apparently worships the ground you lie naked on.

Weird. Very weird. But you’re not complaining. You’re just mentally haggling with the universe, offering to never ask for another favor again if it just promises not to reclaim its prize or realize he’s a solid ten and you’re way out of his league.

He told you he runs a company.

You imagine glass walls and long tables and men in suits who nod too quickly while he stands in front of them all in his suit, looking all delicious and hot. You imagine paperwork, meetings, a name etched into metal on an office door. He never corrects you. He only smiles in that small way of his—enigmatic, a little asymmetrical, a little careful, as if the smile is something he built from spare parts and polished until it gleamed.

You’ve been dating for a short time. And considering the mystery he surrounds himself with, you guess it’s going to take a while until you truly get to know him. Until he truly starts telling you how his day has been and what he has been up to—and what taking a call means in his business.

But he kisses as though he’s been starving in a snowstorm. As though warmth is an endangered species and your mouth is the last sanctuary. His hands are large and soothing, and they never wander without purpose. He touches and handles you like the first blossom of a century-plant, something that has spent a hundred years preparing to bloom for a single day. And he looks at you as if you are that miracle. As if you are the only soft thing in a life built of stone.

And so, you tell yourself, you can wait for him to be ready to talk.

You don’t know what he does after midnight. You only know he sometimes steps onto the balcony to take calls. His voice changes there. It drops. He doesn’t smooth over his words and instead lets the corners stay pointy. You just never catch his words. The only thing you can do is admire the way the city lights flicker behind him like they’re afraid of him. Or in awe.

And when he comes back inside, he presses his forehead to yours as if he’s returning from war.

Contemplating, you lie there for a moment longer, staring at the ceiling. Then you sit up.

It’s not cold, the room is perfectly climate-controlled in that rich-people way where seasons are merely decorative suggestions outside the window; but you suddenly want one of his shirts.

Not for warmth, but for him, for the smell of him, for the proof that this is all actually happening and you are actually here with him somewhere out there in this huge mansion, waiting to get his mouth back on you. For the possibility that his detergent—whatever luxury forest-scented nonsense it probably is—might trick your brain into thinking he’s still right there.

You glance toward the wardrobe.

It’s enormous, who would have guessed. Cathedral enormous. Dark wood doors that probably cost more than your childhood bedroom set. It suggests that Bucky owns multiple versions of the same devastatingly expensive suit.

You slide out of bed and pad across the carpet, which is so soft it feels apologetic for touching your feet. Putting on your underwear for comfort, you make your way over to his wardrobe. The doors open without making a single sound.

You step inside and it feels like even the air is filtered for perfection. It’s a humbling difference to your own apartment, where the dresser functions less like furniture and more like a high-stakes game of Tetris, with your favorite sweaters perpetually losing the battle against a jammed bottom drawer, and where finding a matching pair of socks requires the luck of a seasoned treasure hunter.

There are rows of shirts, jackets, trousers. Everything spaced just enough apart to breathe. Everything immaculate. A faint scent of sandalwood and something clean and expensive drifts forward to greet you.

You tilt your head up.

The shirt shelf is ambitious.

You stand on your toes but you don’t reach anything. You reach higher, basically for nothing. Your fingers waggle uselessly in the air, far away from touching anything.

You sigh.

Because obviously, the man built like a six-foot-something war monument thinks a shelf near the ceiling is perfectly reasonable.

You walk out of the wardrobe and glance back toward the bed. Then toward the chair near the window.

His jacket is draped there. It looks like it belongs at the head of a mahogany table, brokering peace or declaring war with a single sharp lapel. And in between there’s the shirt he’s tossed aside as soon as you both entered his room, with an untidiness that feels like a glitch in his otherwise perfect Matrix.

It’s the shirt he didn’t bother to put back on when leaving you here. You grin.

Well.

That works too. Perfectly, even.

You wander over, the carpet not letting any sound free. The chair sits near the tall windows, moonlight cascading across the floor in long silver rectangles. It looks graceful somehow. His jacket catches the light along its seams, and you shiver at the thought of how elegant and powerful it makes him look.

You reach for it, intending to lift it aside and claim the bunched shirt.

But the moment you grab the jacket, something feels off. It’s heavy. Not normal-jacket heavy. Weighted. You frown faintly, adjusting your grip. You pick it up fully, wanting to fold it neatly, when something slips out of it.

There’s a short, dense thud against the floor. It makes you freeze.

The object lands on the dark carpet inches from your toe; a short, metallic punctuation mark in the silence. It drinks in the chandelier’s glow and spits it back out with a cold, silver arrogance. It ignites an unmistakable shimmer that makes the air in the room feel ten degrees colder.

Your brain takes a second to translate the shape.

It’s a gun.

You stare at it.

The word sits adamantly on the floor of your mind and turns the room into a crime scene before anything has even happened. It’s a sharp fracture in the timeline—there is the version of you from five seconds ago, and the version of you staring at a hunk of lethal metal.

This thing is real. Very real. Not movie-real. Not plastic-prop-real. More like heavy-metal-object-that-could-alter-the-entire-direction-of-a Tuesday-real.

Your knees grow weak and you crouch down so very slowly. Who knows, maybe sudden movements can already trigger it. You’ve never seen a real gun. You never expected you would, not like this, at least. This feels pretty surreal.

The jacket still hangs half off the chair behind you. The shirt you wanted is crumpled innocently beneath it, but you’re not grabbing it.

Your attention remains on the gun. You don’t touch it.

It’s not like your heart is racing noticeably, but there is a new tightness in your chest and it’s making you feel as though your thoughts all have quietly stood up at once.

Because. Right. Of course.

You know Bucky runs a company.

You know he’s wealthy enough to own a mansion that probably requires a map and a tour guide.

You know he has guards. Actual guards. You knew all that.

But with this gun sitting there on the carpet, it feels like looking through a new lens that snaps the blurry facts you know of this man into a slightly different focus.

If it’s frightening, you’re not sure, but it’s definitely clarifying.

You sit back on your heels for a moment, staring at it. He carried this in his jacket pocket. Casually. Just around. Like a wallet. Or keys.

Your mind tries to rewind through the past weeks. The way he watches exits. The midnight phone calls. The men who seem oddly respectful around him. The commanding note in his voice when he tells someone to do something.

You bite your lip, a hectic internal editor trying to bridge the gap between the little you know about the man and the metal you’ve found. You tell yourself not to panic, because panicking won’t give you any answers. And there’s no need to panic, because he’s just a man with power, a man who’s a boss and bosses tend to have people who don’t like them.

That’s no reason to use a gun on anyone, but it’s probably just a formality. A piece of insurance stored away like a fire extinguisher you hope to never use. Maybe it’s not meant for violence at all, just for peace of mind.

He’s protective. You’ve seen and felt it. Just last week, he was absolutely livid, after one of his guards stepped out of line with one of his maids, who’s this sweet old woman who had been with his family since his father’s time. He was in such a blind tailspin over it, and your soothing touch was the only thing that was able to pull him back to earth.

He would build a wall around everyone he cares about just to keep the wind from blowing too hard. Perhaps this gun is just part of that wall, a safety he keeps close so he never has to feel helpless. It doesn't have to mean he’s dangerous. It just means he’s prepared. It’s a precaution, a tool, a just in case that will likely collect dust until the end of time.

You try to settle the thought, but it feels like trying to pin a map against your chest in a storm; the harder you flatten your palms against the paper, the more wind tunnels through the gaps, ballooning the center and snatching the corners from your grip. If you manage to squash one section still, the air pockets behind the rest, turning the whole thing into a thrashing thing that fights to fold itself back up or fly away entirely. No matter what you do, no matter how much you lean into it, the wind will always be a second faster. The wind will always have the upper hand, hollowing out the space between your hands and the whole truth you are trying to read.

You just have to believe that the man who touches his girl so carefully is the same man who would only ever use that steel to keep the world at bay.

Your gaze lingers on it.

You don’t know much about guns. Your knowledge is mostly assembled from movies, news articles, and the vague understanding that they belong firmly in the category of things you should probably treat with respect. And it definitely belongs to a world you’ve never really stepped into before.

But apparently, Bucky lives there.

You glance toward the door he disappeared through. This is the guy who permitted you to steal his clothes, who pressed a kiss to your forehead with the softest lips. When he looks at you, it’s with that specific focus, that startled sort of wonder that always makes you feel so over-exposed, but also exponentially adored.

Your chest softens despite yourself. Still.

You eye the gun again, and one thing has become very clear in the last thirty seconds. You might be dating a man you know less about than you thought.

And that realization sits in the room with you now, waiting for you to act on it.

But you don’t know how. You simply keep staring. The chandelier light kisses its metal edges until they gleam faintly, indifferent to the fact that your brain is currently eroding into a new shape.

You swallow, and even that sounds strange in the imposing space, like it wandered too far from home.

Leaving this thing on the floor feels wrong.

And if Bucky comes back and sees it there... You don’t know why, but the thought makes your stomach tighten.

So you reach down, only now seeing that your hands are slightly wavering. Your fingers close around the grip, and the first thing you notice is the weight. It’s heavier than it looks, solid in a way that makes your palm immediately aware that this object was designed with very serious intentions.

You lift it slowly. Nothing happens, obviously. The world doesn’t explode. The chandelier doesn’t shatter. The mansion continues breathing its wealthy breath around you.

But holding it still feels like stepping one inch deeper into a room you didn’t know existed.

You turn it slightly, meaning only to orient it so you can slide it neatly back into the inside pocket of his jacket, but you spot an engraving, small letters carved into the dark handle.

JBB

Your brow furrows. You stare at them for a moment, tracing the edges with your eyes.

The metal around the letters looks softened. Not scratched exactly, but worn in the way objects get when they’ve lived in someone’s hand for a long time. Like a favorite pen. Or a well-loved watch.

If guns can look old, this one does. It’s not antique-old, but familiar-old.

You tilt your head. JBB. You try to assemble a name around the letters. The only name you know for the man currently pacing somewhere in this mansion making serious phone calls is Bucky.

Just Bucky.

You don’t know his last name, you realize suddenly, and you don’t like that.

You know his favorite whiskey. You know the exact shape of the scar on his shoulder. You know the way he presses his nose into your hair when he tries to calm himself down.

But his last name leaves a blank space in your mind. You glance down at the gun again.

JBB.

Maybe it belongs to someone else. Someone with a J. Jake? James? John? Jacob?

Maybe it’s a family thing. Maybe it belonged to his father. Maybe it’s one of those rich-man- heirloom objects that get passed down through generations alongside cufflinks and complicated legacies.

You exhale quietly.

That explanation sounds reasonable enough that you decide to borrow it for the moment.

Very carefully, and with explicit intent, you slide the gun back into the inside pocket of his jacket. The fabric settles around it like it knows exactly where it’s needed.

You smooth the lapel automatically.

There.

No evidence.

Your fingers linger on the jacket for a second longer than you want.

It still smells like him. Clean soap. Dried tobacco. Something stronger beneath it that you can’t put a name to but always recognize immediately as Bucky.

You step back, and suddenly the room feels different. Not threatening, but it does feel larger still.

Because now your brain is busy counting the things you don’t know.

You don’t know his last name.

You don’t really know what his company does.

You don’t know why men knock on his bedroom door looking nervous.

You don’t know why he carries a gun like it’s just another accessory.

You rub your arms lightly, because now there is a faint prickle of awareness crawling along your thoughts and it is spreading throughout your body.

You’ve been dating for six weeks. Is this long enough to demand answers? To justify interrogations? Gosh, you’re not sure. You’re not sure about a lot of things right now, really. You’ve been floating through the beginning part—the sweet, dizzy, honeymoon fog where the only facts that matter are the ones you feel.

But now there’s a small string of sunlight sliding through the fog. A string of curiosity. You turn back toward the bed where your clothes lie in a small, careless pile.

Maybe you’re overthinking this.

Maybe.

Still.

You pull your shirt over your head, the fabric rustling softly in the quiet room. Your jeans follow, and then your fingers reach automatically for the necklace resting on the nightstand.

The pearls catch the light when you lift them. Bucky gave it to you two weeks ago.

It’s delicate. Real pearls, because he just can. Everything about him seems to come with an expensive quality attached.

You remember the way he looked when he gave it to you. Almost shy, which was deeply unfair considering how the man is built.

Saw it and thought of you, he’d said. Think about you all the time, he’d added.

Which had melted approximately seventy percent of your internal structure. You fasten the necklace and touch it lightly now.

Gentleman.

Ridiculously good in bed.

Mysterious.

Possibly carrying engraved guns.

You sigh.

You feel a little guilty. Because what you’re about to do is technically snooping. And snooping is not great. Your mother would absolutely deliver a lecture about boundaries if she could see you right now.

You glance around the massive room again. The desk by the window. The bookshelves. The curated neatness of everything.

You bite your lip. You’re not looking for secrets. You’re just looking for context. A clue. A name.

Something that tells you who Bucky is when he isn’t kissing your forehead and telling you to raid his closet.

Your feet move before your conscience can finish filing complaints.

Your steps make no sound as you move across the carpet, wandering deeper into the room and scanning the shelves and surfaces with a caution that can’t suppress your intrigue.

You don’t need all the answers. Just one or two. So you start with the obvious places.

Drawers.

It feels less intrusive somehow; opening something that was clearly meant to be opened. You move slowly, like a guest in a museum after hours, careful fingers, quiet breath, a mild sense that the walls might be watching.

The first drawer slides out with a wooden noise and even that sounds rich. Inside, there are watches. Several of them, lined neatly in velvet compartments. Dark metal, silver, leather straps. You don’t know brands, but you know enough to guess that each one probably costs more than your car.

You close the drawer.

The next one holds cufflinks. Rows of them. Small polished things that look important and serious and entirely uninterested in your investigation.

And it only goes on this way. You open drawer after drawer, and there is nothing strange. Nothing suspicious. Just the belongings of a very wealthy man who liked things neat.

Your shoulders loosen a little. Maybe you overreacted. Maybe the gun is just a rich man's security thing. The guards downstairs carry them too, probably. It doesn’t automatically mean anything bad.

You open another drawer.

Paperwork. Boring looking things. A passport tucked neatly inside a leather sleeve. You hesitate for half a second before closing it again.

That one definitely feels like crossing a line.

You step away from the wardrobe and wander toward the nightstand instead.

The wood gleams darkly under the chandelier.

You pull open the top drawer.

More ordinary things. Wallets. Sunglasses. A small tray of rings.

Further back in the drawer, you find a small stack of Polaroids. You fish them out, because you recognize the first picture. It’s a picture of Bucky and you from a few weeks ago. You had found an old Polaroid camera and wanted to try it out, practically levering him into the frame while he grumbled about how he wasn’t photogenic which was total bullshit in your eyes. But he isn’t even looking at the camera in the photo. He is looking at you with a fond little half-smile.

Looking at a few others, you realize they are of you. All of them. One is a shot of your back as you walk toward a sunset, another is a blurred profile of you sleeping on his shoulder.

There is a warmth prickling at the back of your neck and you feel something slacken inside your stomach as you slowly lower the photos back where they were.

Nothing about all of this screams crime lord. Your nerves ease another notch.

You almost laugh at yourself. Your brain likes to get dramatic. Bucky is archiving your relationship, he is sweet and protective and tender and just—

As you are about to pull your hand out, your fingers brush against something cold and metallic near the back of the drawer.

You pause.

It’s partially hidden beneath a folded black cloth. Just the faint glint of a chain catching the light.

Curiosity taps gently on your shoulder.

You slide the cloth aside and notice the silver chain. It’s thin and tangled loosely like it’s been dropped there without much thought.

You hook your finger under it and lift. Something heavier at the end slips free. Two small metal plates fall against each other with a quiet clink.

Dog tags.

You blink.

That’s not strange, exactly. Lots of people keep sentimental things. Maybe Bucky served in the military. That would even make him hotter, to be real. But it does feel a little hurtful that he didn’t share this information with you.

You turn the tags over idly, expecting to see a name you don’t recognize. However, though, you do recognize the name that’s neatly spelled out on the metal plate. And it has the air in your lungs turn to stone, refusing to move a single inch.

James Buchanan Barnes.

Your stomach drops in such a harsh way, there is no ending to the fall. Your internal organs are unmoored and everything about you feels dizzy and weightless. It’s like stepping down a staircase that isn’t there. You’re still gripping the metal, but the connection between your brain and your hands has been cut, and now your fingers feel distant and wooden, filled with a needling sensation you know comes right before they start to shake.

And they do shake.

A thin tremor at first, then worse, until the tags begin to chatter against each other. Each sharp nick of the steel feels so biting and loud, broadcasting the exact moment you are losing it.

Your mind flips through memory like rifling a deck of cards too fast.

News headlines.

Conversations overheard in cafés.

Podcasts about organized crime.

New York’s most notorious mob boss.

The man whose name floats through the city like a ghost story told after midnight. James Buchanan Barnes.

JBB.

Heat rushes up the back of your neck while the rest of you goes ice-cold. It feels like standing in two climates at once—your skin clammy, your spine rigid, a cold sweat blooming between your shoulder blades.

Every breath you pull in is labored and metallic, coating your lungs in a film of disbelief that makes your chest ache. You can almost hear the gears of your reality grinding to a convulsive, screeching halt, stripping the teeth right off the life you thought you were living.

Your pulse is a furious SOS tapped out against the underside of your throat; a muddled, thrumming reminder that you are standing in the epicenter of a storm you didn't even know was brewing. You feel thin, translucent, like a sketch of a person that someone could erase with a single, hard look.

Your fingers tighten around the dog tags. No.

No no no.

Your brain scrambles to reject it. Because that’s outrageous.

That man—the one people call dangerous in all kinds of languages, the one whose operations stretch across half the city, the one who apparently runs things so carefully that no one has ever managed to pin a crime on him—

That man is a myth.

A shadow.

A name in newspapers. No photos. No confirmed identity.

Just whispers.

James Buchanan Barnes.

JBB

You stare at the letters again. You recall the way his initials were engraved in the gun.

Your mind scrambles for explanations—wrong tags, coincidence, someone else with the same name—but every attempt at reason breaks apart in your hands.

Bucky. James. Bucky. James.

James Bucky Barnes.

Your eyes drift slowly across the room.

The suits.

The mansion.

The guards.

The midnight phone calls.

The seriousness.

The gun.

Your hands are shaking tremendously. JBB.

James.

Buchanan.

Barnes.

Your mind repeats it over and over again. The math is suddenly very simple.

He kissed your forehead fifteen minutes ago. He told you to steal his shirt if you get cold. He gifted you present after present because he simply could. He spoke your name as if he had ingrained it on his tongue.

He is the most dangerous man in the city.

Something uncomfortably glaring and stinging climbs up the back of your neck, and it’s making you feel watched by a predator you once mistook for a protector.

You’ve heard the stories. Everyone has. Illegal shipments. Rival gangs disappearing overnight. Entire businesses quietly changing ownership after one meeting with Barnes.

And yet there is no evidence. Never evidence. Just the name. James Buchanan Barnes. The general public doesn’t know what he looks like. There are no confirmed photographs. Just rumors.

But you know exactly what he looks like. You know the way his hair falls into his eyes when he’s tired. You know the scars on his body, know his reactions to your lips on them. You know the exact sound he makes when you laugh unexpectedly.

You are standing in the bedroom of the most notorious mob boss in New York. Wearing the pearl necklace he gave you.

Sleeping in his bed.

Dating him.

For fucks sake, he’s been inside you. You came on the most wanted dick in this city.

The walls of his seemingly huge room, so pristine and elegant, now seem to turn from a sanctuary into a beautifully curated cage.

You have been falling for the most dangerous man in the entire city and until two minutes ago, you had absolutely no idea.

Your hand moves to put the dog tags back in their place, but it’s like you’ve switched to autopilot. Your fingers operate with a sense of detachment while your mind is still a mile behind, screaming.

You lower the chain back into the velvet-lined dark with a tremble you can’t shake. You should crush it in your fist, should throw it at the ground and stomp around on it, should spit on it for what this man did—to the world, to you—but all you can do is handle it with a carefulness that is usually reserved for unexploded ordnance.

The metal hits the bottom with a tiny clink. The sound is so small, yet it feels like a heavy iron gate slamming shut between who you were five minutes ago and who you are now.

You slide the drawer shut, the wood-on-wood glide sounding like a long, slow exhale of a secret that’s finally been caught. You do it with agonizing slowness, as if by moving quietly enough, you can trick the universe into rewinding the last sixty seconds, or rather the last months so you could have avoided stumbling into his strong but deceiving arms.

And immediately, your brain begins doing what brains do best when frightened—it rewrites the past with fresh ink.

Everything changes. Everything. You look around the bedroom again. But it’s not the same room anymore. It’s not a beautiful space where you spent evenings laughing and tangled in sheets with a man who handled you like he was scared to hurt you.

Now it’s a room belonging to James Buchanan Barnes. Mob boss. Ruler of the underworld. The man people whisper about like saying his name too loudly might summon him like the devil.

Your stomach is curled into a hard stone, your fingers still numb. And suddenly every memory of the last few weeks starts recoding itself.

You remember the first gift he gave you. Not the pearls. The flowers. Three dozen white lilies delivered to your apartment door a day after your first date.

You’d laughed at the absurdity of it, calling him to tell him that this is too much, way too much, but he had smirked over the phone, so soft and unabashed, only replying that you deserve it, that you deserve way more than that.

At the time it felt romantic. But now your mind shears the memory, leaving the colors bled and the angles wrong. You turn all the memories of him over in the light until the shadows fall differently, until they take on shapes that start to build a picture.

Maybe it wasn’t romance. Maybe it was a strategy. Because that’s what men like him do, right? They buy people. They build golden cages out of small, glittering gestures.

You rub your arms slowly.

Another memory surfaces. The restaurant. The one with the insane skyline view where the waiters treated him like visiting royalty.

You’d joked about it. Do you secretly own this place?

He’d smiled that slow, mysterious smile of his and simply offered you more wine. He had looked so pleased.

Tension coils behind your ribs, but your mind keeps going.

The necklace. The pearls. One month together and he gives you something that probably cost more than your entire wardrobe.

You had protested. He’d looked almost offended. He pouted at you. He looked so adorably soft, so hopeful you would take this gift from him, that you thought it to be sweet.

Maybe a little over-the-top.

But that was just Bucky, is what you thought. A little intense. A little larger than life.

However, now the thought hatches, its spindly legs prickling against your focus.

He wasn’t spoiling you, he was buying you. Buying your affection. Buying your trust. Buying your silence.

Heat floods your face. Shame webs across your heart in a dark lace of regret. You feel so embarrassed. It spreads across your whole chest and even stains the air around you.

Because you fell for it. You idiot fell for it.

Hook, line, and embarrassingly enthusiastic sinker.

You believed the soft way he looked at you. The way his voice dropped when he said your name. The way he kissed you like he had been wandering the desert and you were the first water he’d seen in years.

You believed the way he listened to you ramble about dumb things like your coworkers, your favorite movies, the stupid podcast you liked.

You believed the way he touched you. Gentle and devoted, and it all seemed so loving.

Your throat is tight, turned into parchment, the soft tissue shrinking and hardening until it feels ready to crack. Because all that might have been a performance. A simple performance to fool you.

Of course, he would know how to act. Of course, he would know how to charm someone. Men like that survive on manipulation.

But you don’t understand why it’s you. Why you of all people? You’re not wealthy. Not powerful. Not connected.

Which somehow makes it all the more humiliating because maybe that’s exactly why. You imagine the possibilities, and each one feels worse than the last.

Maybe he needed someone clean. Someone with no ties to his world. Someone who could unknowingly hold something for him. Transport something. Sign something. Test something.

Maybe you were never a girlfriend, but a tool. A pawn. A convenient, smiling civilian. Someone harmless enough that no one would suspect anything.

Your hand flies to your mouth to stifle a sound that hasn’t even formed, but you cannot lock out your mind, and a keener thought pushes through.

What if he didn’t need you for anything practical at all? What if you were just entertainment?

A normal girl to play house with for a few weeks. A soft distraction between grating business meetings and dangerous deals.

Your eyes and cheeks burn at the thought that somewhere behind those soft eyes and tender hands, he might have been laughing at how easily you melted. How quickly you trusted him.

You feel sick. Your stomach heaves in a frantic attempt to purge the very air you breathe. It drags liquid heat up from your gut to your searing cheeks.

Your gaze drifts to the chair by the window. His jacket still hangs there. Inside it, the gun rests quietly.

Your stomach flips again.

Because suddenly it feels impossible that the man who carried that gun tonight was the same man who tucked the blanket around you earlier, who swiped his tongue against your pussy this deliciously and stopped you from hiding your reactions.

It was simply a power play, and god, are you a stupid girl.

You hear his voice in your head again. Stay here. Lock the door.

A shiver runs down your spine. Because now the words sound different. There is none of that protective and caring cadence. All you hear is a command. Containment. Showing you he is the one with the power, he is the one dealing the cards.

Oh, god. What have you gotten yourself into. This is definitely the worst thing yet.

You know you have to get the hell out of here. High-tail it. Let your panic lend wings to your feet to carry you the fuck out of the devil’s quarters.

You absolutely cannot still be in this room when he comes back. Pretending you didn’t notice the gun was one thing. Pretending you didn’t discover who he actually is, is another thing entirely.

The lie would be too large. It would sit between you like a loaded weapon much deeper and more fatal than that damned gun.

Your pulse is a vibrating scream inside your throat, your chest, your whole body, because what happens when he sees that you know?

What does a man like James Buchanan Barnes do with loose ends?

Fear and dread pin your lungs against your ribs and make the hairs on your arms stand up.

You don’t want to find out. You grab your phone from the nightstand with shaking hands. Inside your mind, your thoughts are colliding and yelling at one another, memories reshaping themselves into something darker.

He was so worshipful. So attentive. So careful with you.

And it hurts. It hurts so fucking bad.

He really is the best actor you’ve ever met.

You glance once more around the room. The bed. The wardrobe. The luxury of everything.

Then you head for the door. Because whatever this was, whatever he was, you need to be gone before James Buchanan Barnes comes back.

There is that low, now seemingly threatening rattle vibrating through the wood of the door. Somewhere down the long dark of the hallway, a mess of voices spills out—too muffled to catch the words, just a low drone. Then there’s the sound of footsteps on the marble, over and over, like a pendulum, until it gets softened by the rugs.

It’s eerie how this place just functions. No clanking, no friction. Just the invisible, midnight grinding of a house that knows exactly how to keep itself running while everyone else is dead to the world.

Bucky's house.

No—your mind corrects strictly.

James Buchanan Barnes’s house.

You inhale slowly, steadying yourself, and turn the handle.

The door gives a tiny, smug click, and you step out slowly, looking around to see nobody.

Ahead, the hallway just stretches out forever, all that dark, expensive wood shimmering under these wall lamps that just stare at you, glowing like something waiting for its turn to speak.

It’s wide enough that you expect a massive echo, but the carpet is so thick it just eats your footsteps. It’s unsettling. The whole place feels like it’s sucked in its gut, just holding its breath, waiting to see if you’ll decide to jump through the floor-to-ceiling windows to your right in your desperation to leave this place.

The door closes behind you, and even though it doesn’t really make a sound, you flinch so hard, your little jump through the window plan might be accidental.

Your heart begins to pound harder now that you’ve left the safety—no, the illusion—of the bedroom.

Because this house feels much larger and colder out here. Maybe you should have taken the gun with you. But you don’t know how to use such a thing, because you’re a normal person, and normal people don’t carry those things around like an innocent handbag.

You take a few unsure steps and it feels like you’ve stepped backstage at a theater and suddenly realized the play you were enjoying might actually be a crime scene.

You know the way to the front door.

He walked you through the mansion when you first visited, his hand resting lightly at the small of your back, guiding you through endless rooms and hallways with an easy familiarity that felt charming at the time.

But you know better and realize he was just showing you the cage. But at least you were paying attention. Every turn, every hallway he bragged about is burned into your head. That charming tour just became the only map out of here.

Two hallways down. Past the staircase. Through the long gallery with the ample paintings.

Then the front entrance.

Simple.

Except for the fact that his mansion is apparently populated by a small army.

Maids. Guards. Staff who move through the house like quiet satellites orbiting the gravity of one man.

These were all signs you simply overlooked because he’s handsome. You bite the inside of your cheek out of frustration with yourself. How can one person be so fucking blind.

You start walking.

Your footsteps are soft, but your heartbeat is anything but.

A maid appears at the far end of the corridor just as you round the corner, and everything inside you locks up.

She pauses when she sees you, instantly throwing you a smile that genuinely looks pleasant. She recognizes you. You don’t recognize her. Your stomach turns and turns until it is knotted too tight to even be able to move.

“Miss,” she starts politely. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

You force a smile that you hope doesn’t look like it’s made entirely of nerves and the urge to run down this hall, disappearing out of sight.

“Hi,” you say, keeping your voice light, a little apologetic. “Sorry— I just... I think I need some fresh air. I have a bit of a headache.”

The lie comes out smoother than you expected. Maybe panic is a good acting coach.

The maid’s expression softens immediately. She even looks a little too concerned for you for whatever reason.

“Of course,” she says sweetly, and you actually feel bad for lying to her. Does she know who she’s working for? Does she know who you are supposed to be for the man who is her boss? Maybe you could ask her. Maybe she would shoot you for it, who knows. Maybe everyone in this godforsaken building owns a gun, ready to use it. “Would you like me to call the boss—”

“No,” you interrupt quickly, then soften the urgency with a small laugh. “No, it’s fine. He’s busy with work, right? I don’t want to bother him.”

You hate how natural the sentence sounds. How easily you can say work when you now know that word hides a thousand darker things.

The maid nods, but she does seem a little hesitant. “Of course.” Thankfully, she leaves it at that.

With the wish for you to feel better soon, and an awkward thank you from your side, you continue walking.

One corridor.

Then another.

Your mind keeps racing ahead of your body, building plans like emergency scaffolding.

It all suddenly looks so terrifyingly menacing. Especially in the dark. It feels so much like a trap. The lights are down and the shadows feel like they’re actually reaching for you. There’s this dreadful, suffocating weight pressing out from the walls, like the house itself is holding a grudge. Your skin is crawling, and the air feels too thick to actually get into your lungs. It’s stale, as though it’s been sitting in a basement for a hundred years, and now the building has finally stopped pretending to be a home and turned into a giant cave with only dead ends so you will never have a way out and will end up as a rotting corpse in some forgotten corner.

The dark walls feel like they are crowding your shoulders. Those deep red carpets are laid out just a little too perfectly, too insistent on keeping you in the center of the floor. Walking down those corridors feels like being threaded through a needle.

And it’s not that the place is ever actually quiet, it’s just that every sound here is on a leash. There is the clink of glass coming from somewhere deep in the gut of the mansion. The dry, dusty thud of footsteps on rugs that are probably more worth than your life in the eyes of the mob boss. Voices that stay low and thick, never quite hitting the walls. It’s too disciplined. It’s a silence that’s been trained to keep its mouth shut.

He probably won’t notice you slinking out of his home. However, what he will definitely notice, is that you will never see him again, or answer his texts or calls. So that will be a problem.

The man owns a gun, and whatever else he can kill people with. So you can’t go home, is what you think as you descend the wide staircase. When you get out of here, you can’t flee to your apartment.

Because he knows where you live. He picked you up there. Dropped you off there. Walked you to your door like the perfect gentleman.

You almost laugh at the bitter irony.

The most dangerous man in the city knows your address. He played the perfect gentleman just to find out where and how you live.

Which means going home would be like walking back into a trap you’ve just barely escaped.

But you know just who is badass enough to help you out of this situation. Natasha.

Natasha lives across town. Natasha answers calls at ungodly hours. Natasha once helped you move apartments at two in the morning with nothing but her wry commentary and a borrowed truck.

You could stay with her. For a few days, weeks, maybe even longer. You know she won’t mind. She’s just that kind of friend.

You could figure things out from there.

Your hand tightens slightly around your phone as you reach the bottom of the stairs.

You’ll text her once you’re outside.

Not before.

Because paranoia is part of your bloodstream now, and who knows who might glance at your screen, who might casually mention later that they saw you messaging someone.

So you keep walking until the entrance hall opens before you like the lobby of a five-star hotel. It’s extensive, with vast floors and tall ceilings and capacious doors at the far end like the exit to another world, a world you want so desperately to be a part of again.

You wipe your clammy hands on your thighs and try to mentally prepare yourself for this last step.

You cross the obsidian floor toward the doors with what you hope resembles casual determination.

Not too fast. Fast looks guilty. Not too slow. Slow looks hesitant.

You aim for something in between—the walk of a woman with a mild headache and absolutely no catastrophic revelations fluttering around inside her skull.

God, everything about the place seems so much darker now. The darkness even slinks upward into the walls, which are paneled in matte-finished ebony that drinks the light before it can reach the corners. There is no glow, not the one you imagined when you first walked in here, hand in hand with a man you thought you could fall so deeply for and would be safe with. But everything now feels iterative and cold and to feel safe means to leave and never return.

The guards notice you immediately.

Two of them stand beside the colossal front doors, tall shapes in dark suits, shoulders squared in that particular way men stand when their job description includes the possibility of violence. They’ve always been polite to you before. Quietly respectful. The way staff are supposed to be with someone important to the man who owns the house. You only now know the direction this importance takes.

They both straighten slightly when you approach.

“Ma’am,” the left one says with a deep voice that gives nothing away.

You offer another careful smile, layering it with just enough exhaustion to make your earlier excuse believable.

“I’m heading out,” you say, keeping your tone breezy, like this is the most normal thing in the world to do in the middle of the night after spending hours in their boss’s bed. “I have a headache, and don’t want to interrupt Bucky while he’s working.”

Your voice nearly stumbles over the name.

Bucky.

The harmless version.

The one that belongs to the man who kissed you like you mattered. Not the one attached to James Buchanan Barnes.

The guard on the left side of the door glances at the other one. It’s subtle, but you see it. A quick trade of communication.

Then he looks back at you.

“Boss aware you’re leaving, ma’am?”

The way he uses the word boss makes bile rise up your throat. You are actually getting a headache.

You force yourself to keep smiling.

“Oh, he’s busy,” you say lightly, waving a hand as if this entire situation is mildly inconvenient but otherwise harmless. “I would feel bad for bothering him while he’s working. And I could use some fresh air and a little rest. So I thought I would just head home.”

Neither guard moves. The doors remain closed.

You swallow tightly, and it feels like there’s a stone coming down your throat along with it, which makes your limbs feel heavier.

“I will call him,” the second guard offers, already reaching toward the small device clipped at his belt.

“No,” you blurt too quickly.

Both men look at you again, and your pulse tumbles when you feel a subtle shift sliding into place, into the invisible perimeter around this house, the machinery of control that keeps things exactly where James Buchanan Barnes wants them.

Your throat feels dry. Your voice tries to find a hiding place inside the hallway of your throat. You pull yourself together as best you can. “That’s really not necessary,” you add, softer this time, trying to patch over the crack you just made in your own story. “It’s just a headache. I don’t want him to be distracted by that. You can just let him know I left once he is done.”

The first guard studies you more closely now. He doesn’t seem suspicious exactly, but he does seem cautious.

And suddenly the hallway behind you feels very long. Too long. Because if they call him, and he walks in here while you’re standing at the door trying to escape his mansion—

Your thoughts spiral into vile possibilities faster than you can control them.

What does a mob boss do to a girl like you when he realizes she has discovered his identity? Certainly no good things.

Your heart pounds so loudly, it’s a single roar all around your skull. You feel hot, so hot, you could burst into flames.

The second guard lifts the radio slightly, eyes on you. “Sir—”

“Baby?”

The voice comes from behind you and it sounds so soft. Confused.

Your insides startle into a panic so bright, you turn blind for a second.

Your entire body freezes up.

Baby.

A freezing shiver breaks loose at the base of your skull and slides all the way down to your heels.

Baby.

The word traces the line of your back, making every hair stand up.

Baby.

You know you have to react in other ways than fear to your so-called boyfriend, so you turn around slowly, trying to unpin your strained expression.

He’s standing halfway across the hall.

Except, now he looks like a stranger.

While he was gone and taking that business phone call, he had changed into one of his perfectly tailored suits. The charcoal wool is stiff and sits snugly, and it would have ignited a heated flutter in your lower belly just an hour earlier, but now it just makes him look malevolent. He looks terrifying in his elegance. So symmetrical, your lungs are wheezing out of sheer fright.

The sweat on your skin, once warm from him, has now turned into a layer of ice. You look at him and think that no, this man doesn’t love you. All you have been to him is a soft room he stepped into to wash off the smell of whatever he does in that suit.

The business he talked about isn’t spreadsheets and meetings. It’s the way the two guards behind you have gone absolutely still, like dogs waiting for a whistle.

He looks dangerous. You have never associated Bucky with direct danger, only with protecting you from danger. But this is not a boyfriend’s posture, it’s a king’s. Even that softly confused frown he is giving you doesn’t make him seem less threatening. It’s just the look of a man who owns everything he sees and knows what to do with it.

Bucky.

Except now your brain whispers the other name.

James.

Every inch of that expensive tailoring screams that he could have you erased before his morning coffee, and he wouldn’t even get a crease in his trousers.

While you were falling in love, he was just managing a distraction.

Your heart is breaking all over again.

“What are you doing down here?” His voice sounds the same as always, and yet it doesn’t.

The guards immediately straighten although he is talking to you, though you wish he wouldn’t.

“Sir,” one of them starts, but Bucky lifts a hand slightly without even looking at them, silencing whatever explanation they were about to offer.

His eyes are on you. Only you. Concern tightens his face almost immediately.

There is a cold needle threading through your nerves. You feel like a deer that has been eating out of a hunter’s hand, only just now noticing the rifle leaning against the tree.

“I—” Your voice nearly betrays you, cracking halfway through the first syllable. Act. You have to act. You drag in a breath and force your shoulders to loosen, shoving your face into something resembling mild embarrassment rather than existential terror. “I wasn’t feeling well,” you lie, carefully smoothing your tone. “I didn’t want to interrupt you. It seemed pretty important.” You look toward the door, turning your body slightly with it in a gesture of longing. “So I planned on just heading home.”

His brows only pull further together, his expression turning deeper, and it doesn’t make this better at all. “You’re the only important thing, sweetheart. You know that.” His voice is low, but how does he manage to make it sound this gentle? Even soft.

Oh god, he’s coming closer. Of course, he’s coming closer, he’s your boyfriend, pretending to be your boyfriend, pretending to be worried, because his girl allegedly has a headache and wants to leave when he promised earlier to continue pleasing her in bed and asked her to stay and lock the door behind him because he doesn’t expect her to leave in the middle of the night.

But that doesn’t make it any easier for you to handle, doesn’t make your body react less in the horrifying way that this scary man is moving toward you, and he doesn’t know you know what kind of scary he is.

You feel your body fight against itself. You want to swirl around, run, bolt, fly through the door outside into the night, never to be seen again. Or at least not by him and his people. But you can’t. You have to stay, you have to remain planted to the floor. Even taking one step back would be a fatal mistake.

And suddenly he’s right there with all his tallness and built, and he still looks warm, but so much more intimidating.

You feel your insides shrink into themselves, your heart slipping into a corner somewhere deep.

The sheer scale of him in that suit makes your stomach drop. He is not a man, he is an entire system of brutality hidden behind a charming smile and gold cufflinks.

You shiver at the fact that your boyfriend could end a life with a nod of his head, and then come home and press his face into your neck as if his hands were clean.

“You’re not feeling well?” His voice drops into a frequency that is meant to be gentle and soothing, but for you, it just sounds like the rumble of an engine. The furrow in his brow grows shadows on his forehead. His eyes shift between yours so fast and piercing, with such a concentrated focus, scanning for the source of your pain as if he could kill it for you.

His hand comes up instinctively, the same way it always does when he’s worried about you, or when he’s not. It’s just normal for him to touch you. But watching his hand move toward you this time makes your back stiffen and a ring of alarm sounds out in your skull, shrill and poignant.

His fingers brush your cheek.

Your skin crawls of its own accord, and you flinch. You force your reaction to be small, but you can’t suppress it entirely. Your brain blanks, and your heart strikes high.

His hand stills, and so does your heart as it feels like.

Bucky notices everything. You guess it comes in handy with being the most wanted crime boss in the city.

His eyes sharpen slightly, and his concern turns more piercing. He looks at his hand still hovering awkwardly, then at you. His eyes are distraught, hinting at something deeper that just broke in two. And he looks so deeply puzzled.

“Hey,” he lets out, and it sounds a little raspy. You scramble.

“I’m sorry,” you breathe quickly, forcing a small laugh that sounds thin even to your own ears. “I’m just a little dizzy, I think.”

He studies you for a long moment.

The guards are silent now and you feel them watching from behind your back.

The house feels too quiet, too attentive, too alert.

James’ hand lowers slowly, though his gaze doesn’t leave your face.

“You’re pale,” he acknowledges, his voice grainy. He sounds like he is holding his breath.

You shrug weakly. “Yeah, well. Not my best look.”

He’s not smiling, and you start sweating. How did you never notice just how scary this man looks.

He’s thinking. You can see it. Pieces moving behind that stormy gaze. Your heart hammers harder.

Please don’t see it.

Please don’t see that you know.

He exhales slowly, then reaches for your hand, and he doesn’t do it possessively, nor roughly, just tenderly closing his fingers around yours.

“Come with me,” he says quietly, and it could sound like a plea if he weren’t the man that he is.

Your skin is a furnace. You might explode. You force a shaky breath, praying he doesn’t hear the way your heart is trying to kick its way out of your ribs.

“Bucky, I really just—”

“I know,” he cuts in softly, but there is something thick and hunted in the way he talks. “Just a minute.”

He looms over you with his whole presence and those intensely fevered eyes and he sucks the oxygen clean out of your lungs.

He nods toward the hallway behind him.

“My office is right there. We’ll sit down for a second, make sure you’re okay. And if you think I’d let you go home alone with a headache you can think again, doll.”

Doll.

God, you really have been stupid. Doll.

This is not a sweet endearment. This is literal. You are a thing made of porcelain that he is scared of dropping—or since a man like him isn’t scared of anything—you’re a thing he realized he can break.

Your pulse spikes.

Office.

Private.

Closed door.

Every alarm bell in your body begins ringing at once.

In his office, the rules of the outside world—the rules where you are safe—don’t apply. It’s where the blood gets mopped up.

But the guards are watching. The exit is behind them.

They aren’t moving a muscle and stand there like gargoyles, guarding your only hope for escape.

And Bucky—James—is standing right in front of you, his thumb brushing lightly across your knuckles.

“You’re shaking,” he murmurs, concern weaving through his quiet tone.

Well, you’re shaking because you can feel the callouses on his hands, the strength in his grip that suggests he could snap your wrist without his expression changing. He knows you are vibrating with nerves, but he has misdiagnosed the fever.

You force yourself to breathe. To smile. To pretend. Just like he has all these weeks. Just like he does now.

“Just the headache,” you whisper, and it’s tasting like bile.

He studies you for another long second, and for a moment you think he might see the truth. You think the mask is going to be ripped away right here in the hallway.

Then he squeezes your hand gently. “Come on, sweetheart.”

He turns you away from the door that would bring you to safety, moving his hand to the small of your back, and it is the gentlest thing in the world. But that somehow makes it so harrowing, because there is nothing rough in the gesture, nothing that could be called force by anyone watching, nothing but warmth and assurance, leading you into the heart of his house with the grace of a protector, and yet your whole body reads it like a sentence being handed down.

You are now thoroughly trapped, you realize while swallowing down the rising tide of bile. It feels like a master painter adding the final, darkening stroke to a portrait you can no longer step out of.

But there is nothing you can do. You let him steer you away from the door because what else are you supposed to do? Rip away, run, scream? That seems impossible in a house that breathes his name through every vent and doorway. A house where even the air seems employed by him.

The mansion appears to lengthen as you walk through it, as if corridors are being pulled like taffy just to spite you, just to show you how laughably far the front door already is, how absurd it was to think you could simply walk out with a polite excuse and a swallowed scream in your throat, hoping nobody heard it rattling behind your teeth, pretending you were still a girl who had a choice in where she slept tonight.

You try to pay attention. You try to mark the route the way people do in movies when they’re kidnapped or hunted or trying not to fall off the edge of the earth—left at the long console with the black granite top, right at the staggering painting in the gilded frame, straight past the alcove with the antique lamp and the white flowers that smell expensive and funereal at once.

But panic is a vandal and it is paralyzing and it comes in and smashes every useful thought with a chair.

Your heart is beating too hard, your blood too loud, your mind too busy manufacturing horrors to do something practical like remember turns. Foyer, hall, archway, staircase, another hall. No—was it staircase first? Was the office past the library, or past that room with the dark green walls?

Oh god, this is horrible. You're really starting to feel lost and this might be a catastrophic blow to your faith.

You try to pin each detail to the inside of your skull, but they slide off slick as fish, and every second spent trying to memorize the geography of this place only makes you more conscious of the fact that you are being walked farther and farther from the only exit you knew.

Why would he take you this far? The question lets sweat collect at the base of your neck. Why not the room just off the main hall? Why not one of the closer offices? Why not let you leave if you are only dizzy, only pale, only under the weather the way you claimed?

Does he suspect something? Has he already seen it, the wrongness in your face, the recoil you were too slow to hide, the way your voice came out laced too tight? And worse than that, more awful than suspicion because it drips with intention—was there always going to be a moment like this? Had he always been walking you here in one way or another, from the first date, from the first gift, from the first time he looked at you as if you were worth the chase?

Maybe this is what men like him do. Maybe he had a plan long before you ever had a clue. Maybe there has never been a single unarranged second between you, and you were just too lovesick and dazzled to notice the rails under your feet.

His hand stays at your back the entire time, broad and warm, but it makes you want to shove him away from you. When you hesitate, the pressure spikes just enough to remind you which way the door isn't. He is leading you forward and it would have felt gentle, but it doesn’t. No longer.

His thumb-strokes across your back don’t feel comforting at all and more like he is smoothing out a wrinkle in his own sleeve or the way he might polish a piece of silver he has decided to keep.

You suppress a chilling shiver he surely would have felt.

When you glance at him, because some abhorrent part of you still does, still wants to; you find concern in his face and it nearly brings you to the floor. You can’t glimpse any coldness, no strategic thinking whatsoever. At least not the kind you expected to see. His eyes aren’t narrowed and sharpened with discovery, there is no clipped impatience, no telltale crack in the mask.

He looks at you the way he has always looked at you when something seemed off, with his little frown and that determination, as if your problems are things he would like to drag outside and beat to death with his bare hands.

His gaze moves over your face with the same intimate concentration that once made your stomach warm for all the right reasons. It does not help. It makes everything worse.

Because if this is performance, then he is monstrous at it. If this is an act, he’s lived in the skin of it for a lifetime.

A lie shouldn’t feel this solid, shouldn’t have a thumb that knows exactly where your tension hides.

If he is acting, then he deserves a stage and an audience and perhaps a crown.

You can barely stand it, this collision between what you know and what he appears to be. A man can’t look at you like that and still be the most feared name in the city. Except apparently he can. Apparently, men can be two things at once. Apparently, the universe is vulgar enough to make both true.

You pass a maid coming the other way—a small, neat woman in a crisp uniform. She is carrying folded lines in her arms, and Bucky acknowledges her with nothing more than a curt nod, and she responds with a warm little smile aimed at you and the faintest dip of her head—something halfway between greeting and curtsey, so practiced it is almost invisible, but not invisible enough, not to you, not now.

It makes your breath hitch, how he doesn’t swell with importance, or doesn’t put on a show of his control.

He’s so comfortable in his power that he doesn't even need to show it off; he just steers you onward, knowing nobody will do a single thing to stop him.

And your stomach lurches so suddenly it feels as if your bones have missed a step. Because there it is. There, in one small exchange, is the whole persona of him. He is not loud or cartoony with his power, he just has it. It’s real. It doesn’t need to announce itself because everyone in its radius already knows where to bend.

The maid’s smile is kind, almost affectionate, and that somehow shames you more, because it suggests this has been obvious to everyone but you.

They all know what he is. The guards know. The staff knows. The men at the gate, the drivers, the strangers in tailored suits who always nod to him with instant stillness in their spines—they all know.

And you, meanwhile, had been floating around this house in your pretty little ignorance, accepting tea on silver trays, accepting jewelry in velvet boxes, accepting his mouth and his hands and his delicious attention as if you had simply stumbled into the arms of an intense, rich man with old-fashioned manners and a dangerous face completely by accident.

You would like to face palm yourself, but this is a bad moment.

Natasha will definitely do it for you once you get out of here and manage to escape to her apartment.

You had looked at the signs and called them charm. You had looked at vigilance and called it romance. You had looked at fear arranged into etiquette and thought that wow, he really runs this company proficiently.

The embarrassment of it blooms hot under your skin, nearly as painful as the fear. You have been blind. Worse—willingly blind. Blind not by accident but by appetite, by wanting. Love, or whatever this early ferocious thing is, has wrapped a hand-woven scarf around your eyes and led you smiling into a cathedral built from warning signs and decorated with red flags.

And the humiliating part, the part that makes you feel like you could peel yourself out of your own skin from sheer mortification, is that you had even congratulated yourself for being so unbothered by his world.

Look at you, cool girl extraordinaire, dating the beautiful, mysterious executive in his deluxe mansion, pretending not to notice the guards and the driver and the way everyone waited half a beat too long for his approval before moving.

You had thought you were being mature. Sophisticated. Unruffled. Meanwhile, you were essentially a decorative houseplant with a pulse, sitting in the sun of his attention and calling it insight. It would almost be funny if it weren’t your life currently doing a slow and terrible cartwheel off a cliff.

How could you have ever believed that a guy like him would be interested in that naive, silly girl that you are.

Honestly, if you survive this ordeal, you will end up in some corner of your small, meager apartment, bawling your eyes out, and keep living that unlucky life of yours.

He glances at you again as you walk on that burgundy red carpet deeper into the hole that is another hallway, and his hand presses a little more firmly between your shoulder blades. It’s protective rather than possessive to anyone looking in from the outside, but the gesture sends another flare of panic through you anyway.

You wonder if he can feel the fear on you, if it comes off your skin. You wonder if men like him are trained by experience to smell a lie the way dogs smell storms. You wonder whether he is leading you to comfort or containment. Every room you pass seems too opulent to be real with those chandeliers like frozen explosions, rugs plush enough to kill the sound of literally anything, the dark wood twinkling creepily under low gold light, paintings in heavy frames, looming over everything, looking down their painted noses at anyone not born into the frame.

The place no longer looks luxurious so much as fortified. You see the thickness of doors now. The depth of corridors. The strategic sightlines. The subtle placement of people. This house is not merely beautiful. It is defensible. It is a kingdom in disguise.

And you had been letting yourself be loved in it. You stupid girl had let him come way, way too close to you.

But it’s what makes every step hurt more than it should. Because despite everything, despite the gun and the initials and the name on the tags and the avalanche of terror crushing common sense into powder, there is still some small perfidious corner of you that keeps stumbling over the memory of how gentle he was, how attentive, how he watched your face as if your feelings were weather and he meant to learn every season.

You hate that part of yourself right now, and that it even exists in the first place after everything you found out about the man and what knowing him entails.

You want cleaner fear, simpler fear, fear without ache in it. But your fear is contaminated by affection. By memory. By the wrenching possibility that whatever else he is, whatever blood has dried invisibly on his hands, the softness he’s shown you may have been real. And if that is real, then the rest is not easier to understand. It is harder. Infinitely harder. It means the monster did not wear a mask. It means the monster kissed your forehead and tucked blankets around your legs and remembered how you take your coffee. But your brain can’t follow all of that.

Another turn. Another corridor. Another room you cannot catalogue fast enough.

You try again to memorize the path, because panic may be a vandal but desperation is stubborn.

The wall here is paneled more deeply. There is a bronze wolf on a pedestal. A narrow window at the end of the hall. A runner rug patterned in deep red, almost the color of old cherries, almost the color of dried blood if your mind is in the mood to be cruel, which it surely is.

Your thoughts keep darting ahead of you and slam themselves against every worst-case future they can find. If he knows you know, what does that mean? If he does not know you know, what then? Which is safer? Is there a safer version of this at all?

You imagine phones taken gently from your hand. Doors locked with apologetic clicks. Promises made in that low warm voice while your life narrows to the width of his will.

The terrible thing is that none of your imaginings need to be loud to be horrifying. A man like him does not need spectacles. He has infrastructure.

By the time he slows in front of a set of double doors farther inside the mansion than you have ever been allowed, or invited, to go; your nerves are so frayed they feel almost luminous, every sound oppressive, every movement enlarged.

He looks down at you, his face still threaded with worry, and sweeps his hand from your back to your elbow in a gesture so careful it would be beautiful in any other universe. In this one it only makes your chest tighten until breathing feels like work. He leans slightly closer, and his voice drops, intimate as a hand at your throat, though there is nothing harsh in it.

“What’re you thinking about, baby,” he asks quietly, searching your face.

Well, you’re thinking about the front door.

It’s where you left your mind.

Or maybe it was lost in his room already. Maybe it stayed with the gun on his carpet.

And the other, the more rational part of your mind, the one that told you this couldn’t have been true anyway, because you are you and he is him, lingers in every news story you ever half listened to.

You are inside the tormenting, glittering realization that you have not just fallen for a dangerous man, but for the dangerous man, and that all the softness you took as sanctuary may have only been the most exquisite blindfold ever tied.

“Nothing, Bucky,” you reply weakly, trying to ease, but your voice is shaking just that tiny bit, and judging by the uncomfortable twist of his mouth, he caught it.

You’re too lost in your stupidity that you’re hardly present when he opens his wooden office door and ushers you inside, again with the most tender movements.

The office is warmer than the hall, quieter too, and it makes goosebumps rise on your arms and the hairs stand tall at the back of your neck because this room is built to keep any sound inside and secrets fat and sleeping in the walls. Everywhere you look there is dark wood and low amber light and books lined up in stern, handsome rows as if knowledge itself has been drafted into his service.

You feel the world shrink from cathedral to chamber, from public performance to something confined, more dangerous, more indiscreet, because now there are no guards, no maids, no witnesses to help keep either of you inside your assigned role.

There is only him, only you, only that soft snick of the door as he shuts it behind him; and that small, tidy sound feels like it’s happening inside your own chest. You watch his hand leave the brass knob, and the logic in your head just gives up. There’s only a hysterical, messy scramble of thoughts, all of them howling at once and all of them useless.

He turns back to you immediately, all his attention gathering around you with that familiar chilling completeness, and before you can decide whether to stand very still or bolt like a startled animal with nowhere sensible to run, he is guiding you toward the couch near the fireplace with one hand steady at your waist and the other brushing over your arm, then your back again. He’s never forcing or gripping hard, but he’s just not letting go of you and it makes you want to jump against the wall in hopes it’ll crack and you’ll land on the other side because his touch is making you more and more nervous.

He treats you as if he thinks you might faint at any second.

It is infuriating, that gentleness. It feels like a kind of torture that’s impossible to fight because your skin has a longer memory than your head. Your body still knows him first as safety. It still recognizes the heat of his palm and the strength of him, the way he moves as though you’re the center of the room.

And now every instinct is splitting at the seams. All you want to do is run, you want him away from you, you want to be far gone from all of this, you want to scream and scream some more, but the other half of you is remembering how carefully he tucked a blanket over your legs last week when you fell asleep during a movie or the way he has checked you for bruises after literally making love to you with that distressed frown upon his face, scared he’s been too rough with you.

The collision makes you dizzy enough that, absurdly, he may not be wrong. You might actually faint. Just from the sheer vertigo of finding out that the man who kissed you so devotedly has a name the whole city says with a tremble in their voices.

“Sit down for me,” he coaxes, and his voice is low, soft, carrying none of the steel you used to hear when he dealt with his men, and that contrast nearly makes your skin crawl.

You lower yourself onto the couch because your knees are not reliable enough to argue with him. The room seems to have acquired a faint sway, because the blood in your veins feels thin and feverish, and he stays right there, close enough that his thigh nearly brushes yours before he drops into a crouch in front of you.

The sight of this dangerous man folding all that height and breadth down to your level, gaze lifted to your face with plain concern would have melted you an hour ago.

But all it does now is frighten you some more. It feels too intimate, too earnest, too much like care, and care from a man like him is no simple thing. It is not a ribbon. It is a chain in softer clothing.

You swallow hard and that alone almost makes you flinch.

His eyes move over you with increasing worry, taking inventory in little silent increments. Your face is pale, you feel the damp shine of stress at your temples, you can’t keep your fingers still in your lap, and you can’t quite tame the uneven hitch in your breath.

He reaches up and lays the back of his hand against your forehead, then your cheek, his brows knitting tighter, and his mouth presses into a serious line. “You’re sweating,” he murmurs, more to himself than to you, as if he would like to issue orders to your body until it starts behaving properly.

His thumb grazes the curve of your jaw, feather-light, and you have to stop yourself from jerking away too sharply. You have to refrain yourself from slapping his hand away.

He notices even the version of restraint. You guessed, he does. A man like him has to. A man like him would. But it does worsen your situation.

A chill spreads along the base of your neck.

His eyes sharpen, not with suspicion exactly, but with apprehension deepening into something more searching, more troubled. “Talk to me, baby,” he pleads, softer still. “Did something happen? Did I do something?”

You stare at him.

For a moment the question does not make sense, your mind too busy running in circles with sirens in its hair, but you notice the shadow in his face, the hunch, the way his gaze jumps to your mouth, your throat, your posture curled too tight, and it seems bizarre because he honestly looks as though he might dread he pushed you too far, touched you too much, misread your body, took a liberty you weren’t ready for.

The absurdity of that nearly splits your head open because earlier when he—god, when he had his criminal tongue on your pussy—he acted so attentive, he seemed genuinely careful and devastatingly patient, and yet now, knowing what you know, even that lightness now hardens into a new breed of atrocity.

Because if this is him being careful, if this is him holding himself in check, then what does rough look like in a man built the way he is, in a man whose name can make grown men go quiet? What shape does cruelty take when it belongs to someone with this much power and this little need to raise his voice?

“No,” you answer too fast, the word skidding out of you. “No, you didn’t— nothing like that.”

Well, he did do something. A lot, really. Things that would put him in a cell never to be let out.

But he didn’t do anything to you yet. Yet. He might, if you don’t get your shit together.

His shoulders loosen by a fraction, but not enough. Not nearly enough. He still looks wound up. He still looks a little perturbed.

“Are you sure?” he asks, and there is something sincere in his voice, it is disorienting. “Because, honey, you can tell me if I was too much. If I missed something. If I—” He stops, swallows, and the hand at your cheek gentles further, as if he is trying to make himself seem safer. Funny. “I need to know. Need to know if there was ever a moment when you didn’t feel good.”

Something is dipping in the air around you, and everything feels distorted. Your head is hazy and a complete maze, because how is he even doing it this well?

You pull back then, small at first, because having his hands on you for longer will surely drive you insane. You don’t shove him off, or smack his hand away, you simply move out of his palms enough to break the line of his touch, but even that has him looking at you more closely.

You gather your hands together in your lap so he won’t see them tremble and shake your head with a smile that feels stapled on, brittle and thin, and one wrong breath away from snapping in half. “I’m okay,” you say, aiming for sheepish, for embarrassed, for normal. “I just need some sleep, I think. That’s all. It’s probably stupid. I’m probably just a little exhausted and overreacting.”

He doesn’t buy it.

You can tell immediately, and you hate that you can tell, but you notice how his whole face changes in that subtle way his face does when he has decided something is amiss and he is not going to stop until he gets to the bottom of it.

He shifts closer, forearms braced loosely on his thighs, his attention absolute. “Then sleep here,” he deadpans. As if this is simply the answer to all the problems in the world. “You don’t need to go anywhere tonight. 'Specially when you’re not feeling well.”

Your stomach contracts into a hard, cold knot, and it feels like there’s a displacement in your chest. It’s the sensation of a staircase ending one step too soon and you didn’t notice so now you’re hitting air instead of floor with a heart-shaking jolt. It is jarring. It is petrifying, because it means you’re not getting out of here that easily. You might not be getting out of here at all if he continues to look at you like that.

Sleep here.

Stay here.

In his house. In his reach. In the center of the web.

Your pulse stutters so hard it hurts.

“I should go home,” you try, and even to your own ears it sounds small, unconvincing, more instinct than argument.

His frown deepens, utterly baffled by your insistence in the face of what he clearly sees as a solvable problem. “Why?” he asks quietly, and his voice sound a tad hoarse. “If you feel bad, why would I let you leave?”

Your lungs can’t seem to catch any air although it’s all around you.

Why would I let you

He didn’t say why would you leave, no he said why would I let you.

Good god, you really have been a stupid girl. The signs were all in front of you, weren’t they? They were literally speaking to you.

He’s talking in a tender tone, making his voice all soft and gentle, even soothing and so concerned, but that’s just the outside. You never paid attention to what lay underneath, hidden deep inside, because the outside was pretty and alluring enough. And maybe you are imagining it now, the gravelly implications in his tone, maybe your body’s just trying to see and hear things that aren’t there, but perhaps it truly has been there all the time and you were too wrapped in him to notice it.

You stand up quickly.

And you shouldn’t have done that because he will think what the hell you’re doing now, but your body decided and now your body is doing it.

The room sways, your vision going soft at the edges for one humiliating second, and his hands are on you—one at your elbow, one at your waist, and there is no shaking them off.

You flinch despite yourself and he stills as if you have struck him. You know he doesn’t understand your reactions, how could he.

“Hey,” he coos, his voice lowering even further, and there is definitely something thick in his voice. “Easy.”

“I’m fine,” you insist, too breathless, too papery, trying to peel his hands off you without making it look like peeling, which is impossible, because every move feels too fast or too urgent, every instinct either too frightened or too telling. “Really, Bucky, I’m just tired. I’m probably being ridiculous.”

His gaze searches yours with such intensity it feels almost physical. “You’re trying to get away from me.”

The words are quiet, and although there is no anger in them, no threat at all, it has your mouth go dry.

“No,” you answer, and it is not a good lie. “No, Bucky. Of course not. My head’s just really hurting.”

Something in him clicks into a higher gear—not a lack of trust or anything like that, but a kind of piercing, automated focus. Something in his eyes snaps into high definition. All that soft, vague concern is gone, replaced by an attention so bright and infiltrating it feels like being pinned to a board under a microscope.

Carefully, he makes you sit back down on the couch and lands right beside you. You feel the heat of him pressing into your side, though he does give you a bit of space.

His hand comes to your upper arm, stroking once, and you hate your own pulse for noticing how familiar it feels despite it having lost its appeal. “Look at me,” he presses, and it almost sounds like an order. His voice seems serious enough to make you shiver in fear.

You look at him because you have to and refusing would be louder than screaming.

His eyes are so damn blue in this weirdly dim light, clear and intent and lined with such deep worry. He’s definitely denser, his concern losing its fluff, but not its patience. There still is no trace of coldness, no roughness, nothing that is overly intimidating despite the man he is.

Just that same irksome softness, that same look like your distress is something he wants to fix with both hands, with all of himself if necessary.

It rattles you more than if he had come in hard and sharp and monstrous. A monster would be easier. A monster would let your fear stand up straight. But this man looking at you like your pain pains him is a labyrinth with no clean exits.

And it feels foreboding. It has you more on edge. It’s the way the woods go quiet right before something heavy steps out of the brush; a sudden, absolute alignment of intent.

Maybe he knows you know and now he’s waiting for the right moment to pounce. You do your best to keep your fright behind your eyes.

“You can sleep here tonight,” he offers again, gentler now, and it seems as though he believes repetition might soothe you into agreement. “I’ll stay with you. Or I won’t, if you want space. I’ll get you water, food, whatever you need. But I’m not sending you home like this.”

Not sending.

Again that wordless, soft-toned authority.

Again that sense that his care and his control are fused so tightly together they share a bloodstream.

You are running out of room inside your own face. Running out of expressions that can pass for normal. Running out of ways to keep the panic from drawing its blade.

So you do the only thing you can think of, the stupidest thing, the most desperate thing—you lean in and kiss him.

It’s short and small and only meant to reassure, to smooth over, to redirect. Your lips meet his and every cell in your body revolts.

And it’s not at all because he kisses badly, god no. Even startled, even worried, he receives you with immediate tenderness, one hand lifting to cradle your jaw, his mouth warm and careful and heartbreakingly familiar but also so, so foreign, a cold shiver seizes your back.

It is what makes nausea roll through you so suddenly you nearly choke on it. Because this is James Buchanan Barnes.

This is the name on the dog tags, the name on the news, the name people lower their voices around as if it might hear them and turn its head.

This is the most feared man in the city and his mouth is still the same mouth that kissed the corner of your smile with one of his own.

Your stomach turns so sharply you have to concentrate not to pull away in disgust too soon, not to betray yourself with the wrong kind of urgency.

You kiss him once, twice, tasting dread under the memory of want, and every instinct in you screams that you are pressing your lips to a loaded weapon and pretending it is a rose.

When you ease back, you make yourself smile.

It feels gargantuan, the effort of it.

“I’m okay,” you whisper, like that explains anything, like that proves you are only tired and not terrified, only overwhelmed and not trying to survive. “I promise. I can go home like this.”

His thumb brushes under your eye so lightly, and you run your tongue over your lip, trying to get that uncomfortable tingling to go away.

But he still looks unconvinced.

More than unconvinced, actually. Plagued. As if the kiss reassured him of your affection but not your state, and now that mismatch is bothering him in ways he can’t make sense of.

His gaze lingers on your face, then your mouth, then your hands clenched too tightly in your lap. He takes one of them and turns it gently palm-up, his fingers closing around yours. You can feel how much bigger his hand is. You can feel how easily it encloses.

And all at once the room feels narrow as a throat, the walls leaning in, the lamplight too gold, the air too warm, and you are sitting inches from a man who could ruin your life before breakfast and is looking at you like the only thing he wants in this world is to make you feel safe.

“What’s going on, doll?” His voice could even be pleading, just a little bit. It’s definitely croaky. “I— I get the feeling—”

“I told you, Bucky. It’s just a headache.” He sighs to that, but all you can think about is how completely his hand closes over the bones of your own. How easy it would be for those fingers to tighten from comfort into command, from tenderness into something unarguable.

His other palm is at your arm, and your body does this awful arithmetic without your permission, subtracting your strength from his and arriving, every single time, at the same answer—none.

There is none. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

You notice things you never let yourself notice before because before they were part of romance, of safety, of the warm relief of being cared for by someone larger and more grounded than you.

Now those same details come back rearranged into something atrocious. The width of his shoulders. The thickness of his thighs where they bracket the edge of the couch. The controlled way he moves, never wasted, never sloppy, suggesting he has long ago become intimate with force and no longer needs to flaunt it.

Even the gentleness feels frightening because it is so deliberate. You can feel, in every cautious touch, that he is handling you lightly not because he must, but because he chooses to. And choice is a nightmarish thing when done by a man like him. Choice means there are other versions of him. Choice means there are rooms in him you have never seen. Choice means the tenderness is not the whole house, only one lit window.

You sit very still because being still feels safer than moving, and panic has made your limbs feel both too heavy and too ready to misfire. While he studies your face with that immensely worried crease between his brows, your thoughts keep slipping sideways into grotesque little visions of what would happen if he decided to stop being soft.

Not even dramatic visions. That would almost be easier. Nothing so loud as being thrown or shouted at. Your fear is smarter than that now. It imagines quieter things. A wrist caught before you can pull away. A door closed with no visible hurry. Your name said in that low voice while every route out of the room gently, politely disappears.

You hate yourself for thinking it, hate the way your pulse kicks harder with each new image, hate most of all that his touch remains careful through all of it, remains incessantly kind, so that your fear begins to feel almost counterfeit in the face of what he is actually doing, and then the next thought corrects you suddenly—no, not counterfeit. Instinct. Instinct finally dragging itself awake after weeks of sleeping with its face turned to his chest.

He must notice something fresh pass through you, some new tremor or tightening, because his jaw flexes and then he reaches into his pocket for his phone.

He is glancing at the screen and some shutter drops behind his eyes. It doesn’t slam, it just falls shut, as simple as that. Just sliding into place as neatly as a blade returning to its sheath.

He lifts the phone, says a name you don’t catch because your ears are too loud with your heartbeat, and when the person on the other end answers, his voice changes so completely that a chill runs over your skin.

“Bring cold towels to my office. And painkillers. Water too.” That is all.

Simple words. Ordinary words.

But the voice that carries them is stripped clean of softness, and that is what makes your blood curdle. There is no gentle edge worn smooth for your benefit. It is a voice pared down to function, to expectation, to command. Not loud, not theatrical, not cruel in any obvious way, it is just cold the way a simple black stone is cold. Cold the way a locked gate is cold.

There is no room in it for hesitation, no room in it for mishearing, no suggestion that obedience is a favor rather than the natural order of things. Whoever is on the other end responds immediately, and he ends the call without another word, already moving to set the phone aside, already turning back toward you, and your whole body has gone thin with dread because all you can think, stupidly, helplessly, is this is how he speaks when he is not pretending to be gentle.

And if this is his ordinary command voice, then what would he sound like if he knew? If he looked at you and saw recognition staring back, saw the name James Buchanan Barnes fully formed in your eyes, saw that you had found the gun and the initials and the tags and had welded them all together into the truth? Would his voice sharpen? Flatten further?

Would he say your name with that same smooth authority and turn it into a thing that could pin you in place?

The thought is a beaded sweat of ice trailing down the ladder of your back.

You try not to react. You fail a little. He sees the shiver, he sees, because he is James Buchanan Barnes for goodness sake, and immediately his focus softens again as he leans a fraction closer, anguish returning to his face as if the colder version of him never existed at all.

The door catches your eye over his shoulder.

It is simply there. Closed, but not locked, at least not that you can see. Dark wood, brass handle, a square of possibility in a room rapidly losing oxygen.

And once you look at it, you cannot stop.

Your gaze keeps darting back like something hooked. You begin to map the distance with desperate measurements.

If you stood up now—no, not stood, launched—if you shoved him hard enough to buy yourself one puzzled second, maybe two, could you make it? Out the office, into the hall, left or right—God, which one had you come from?—and then what? Down one corridor, past another, through that impassable warren of pragmatic but pristine floors and expensive silence and armed loyalty, praying that your body would remember what your mind failed to memorize?

You picture it anyway. You can’t help it. You picture yourself bolting, slipping on gleaming floors, turning wrong and wrong again, heart exploding in your throat while the mansion multiplies around you like a bad dream, each hallway birthing three more, each staircase leading not to freedom but to another floor full of his money and his people and his reach.

Still, the image won’t leave you. It grows instead, takes on velocity. You imagine the first breath of motion, the clean scary choice of it. The couch under you unweighting. The door handle cold in your palm. The sudden crash of everything becoming honest.

You don’t have a lot of choices here. So maybe fate would take pity on you. Maybe panic would become a compass. Maybe your body would remember a route your mind cannot hold. Maybe the front hall would be merciful and simply appear in front of you, all that dark wood and those massive doors and the guards too startled to stop you before you ripped yourself out into the night. It is preposterous. It is probably impossible. It becomes, nevertheless, the brightest thought in the room. Bright enough to burn.

You are too poised on the edge of movement now, too taut, every nerve drawn tight as wire.

“Baby,” Bucky starts, a little alarmed, and he shifts closer again, one hand lifting instinctively, probably to touch your face, your shoulder, your wrist, some place he thinks he can soothe.

But the sight of that hand coming toward you almost does it. Almost tips you over from imagining escape into choosing it. You can feel your muscles gathering without permission, your body preparing itself in secret, a rabbit under the hawk’s shadow. Run, run, run. For one crazed second you are already halfway gone in your mind—up off the couch, around the table, through the door, don’t think, just move, just run, run, run—

And then his fingers brush your arm, so lightly, so soft, but it breaks something inside you because you want his sweet touch, you want him to hold you, to soothe you, to love you, but you don’t want it to be James Buchanan Barnes, you want it to be Bucky, but he’s no longer Bucky, he won’t ever be anymore, and so you simply react.

You jerk, shoving his hand away before you can stop yourself, not enough to really hurt, but enough that the gesture hangs in the air between you like a shattered glass note.

Your breath is now gone entirely.

There are a few beats where simply nothing happens.

Then his hand drops back.

You stare at him, your own hand hovering stupidly in midair as if all you have to do is snip your finger to turn back the time.

And Bucky—James—just looks at you. For a small moment, he simply looks startled, like a deer in the headlights of your rejection. He looks so tremendously confused, his face totally unglued, but then his eyes shift gears, shift into alarm, shift into a concern so much deeper than before. It seems as if your recoil has unhinged him. As if it has frightened him for an entirely different reason than the one clawing its way through your chest. As if it has confirmed something he’s only lived in a nightmare before.

His features warp into something resembling desperation, his mouth hanging open, his eyes wide and asking, and it is nauseating to watch—the way he’s already cobbling together a version of reality where he isn’t the monster you’re trying to run from.

He is misinterpreting your panic and it makes you sick.

He isn't thinking She knows what I am. His mind is sprinting in the exact opposite direction to protect itself.

He thinks the headache is actually a migraine that has you reacting strangely, or it’s a panic attack, or some hidden trauma he didn’t know about, and he is already frantically building a scenario where he gets to fix it. His mouth stays slightly open, his breath hitching as if he’s about to choke on his own breath. He looks around the empty office with this desperate, wild squint, his eyes darting to the corners of the room as if he expects to find a physical monster standing there—something he can actually put a bullet in to make you stop shaking.

“Alright,” he lets out, and his voice is completely broken, a rough, dry scrape that sounds like it is tearing his throat.

He doesn’t lunge for you or do something big. Instead, he actually hitches his weight backward, trying to make himself smaller, which is harrowing because he is still twice your size and wearing a suit that could be sprinkled with blood in under an hour. His hands stay out in front of him, palms up, fingers twitching with this jittery, helpless energy. He is looking at you with this forlorn begging in his widened eyes, practically pleading with them for you to blame it on the lights, or the noise, or anything else in the world—because the alternative is that he is the thing making you look at him like he’s an executioner.

You might be running out of time to pretend.

“I’m sorry, Bucky, I— I’m so sorry, I don’t—” You don’t even know what explanation you are going to give him now, only that you are suddenly full of the clumsy need to fill the room with words before the room fills with something worse, and so your mouth opens on instinct, on panic, on the miserable little scraps of sanity still fluttering inside you. You hear yourself stammer out some thin, transparent nonsense about feeling strange, about maybe being overwhelmed, about maybe needing air, maybe needing to go home, maybe nothing, because every excuse sounds flimsy the second it leaves you, and every sentence makes your spirit mulch and dissolve into a gray slurry that won’t hold a shape.

And Bucky is still so close and still so beautiful and still so racked with his brows pinched into a severe, pained knot. His eyes are full of shadows, and this is all so bad.

His softness somehow makes all of this worse, not better, because if he were cruel already, if he were cold already, if he gave you even one clean villain’s grin, one sharp look, one thread of honest menace, maybe your fear would have somewhere proper to sit.

But he only examines your features as though it truly physically aches him to see you like this, as though your panic has reached inside him and laid a dirty hand around his heart.

“Don’t apologize, sweetheart,” he starts, and he says it so quietly, with so much care, still, but also with a mounting unease that is just about to reach its peak. “I just wanna know what’s going on. Talk to me, baby. Please. I—” he breaks off with a sigh, his jaw grinding. “If something’s wrong, if something’s going on, then I gotta know.”

You swallow hard in hopes that anything might help soothe the sting behind your eyes. You don’t believe him, not fully anymore, but some humiliating, hopelessly romantic part of you still recognizes the cadence of the man who kissed your forehead this morning, the man who tucked a strand of hair behind your ear with the most tender hands, the man who remembered how you take your tea and which side you prefer to sleep on and the fact that you hate when socks twist inside your shoes.

It is unimaginable, it is desolating how tenderness can survive in the same body as terror, how your heart can continue making a fool of itself even while your mind is setting the whole house on fire.

“Bucky, really, I’m just...” Your voice hitches, the words sticking like thistles in your throat. You look down at his hands and they are so huge and capable, currently flexing with an empty urge to hold you. You know those hands have held weapons. You know they’ve ended lives and carried blood. But right now they are trembling because you won’t let them touch you.

You can feel yourself growing sharper and shakier by the second, every nerve in you pulled too tight, every breath arriving shallow and unhelpful, and still he keeps speaking to you in that quiet and gentle tone, asking whether it was something earlier, whether he pushed too far, whether he missed something, where exactly it hurts. You can’t tell him it’s your heart and not your head that is currently in shambles.

The concern in him seems real. That is the terrible part. It seems real enough to bruise. You shake your head too quickly. You try to smile and feel it crack before it even fully forms. You say you are just tired. You say you do not know. You say you are fine with the kind of desperate brightness you would use when standing on the edge of a roof insisting you are only admiring the view.

His gaze drops to the space you are slowly clearing between you, and his expression hardens. Gears are grinding behind his eyes and suddenly he looks like the man in the hallway, filled with command and so fucking terrifying, your pulse spikes to unhealthy numbers. He doesn’t look at you, he turns his head to look in the direction of the closed door, his posture squared.

“Did someone say something to you?” He asks, his tone dropping into a low, scraping register that makes the hairs on your arms stand up. “In the hall? Before I came out?”

You blink at him in disbelief. Does he think someone threatened you? Does he think one of his own men, or some interloper in his kingdom, stepped out of line with you? The fact that that would cause such an intense reaction in him makes you want to be catapulted straight out of here because this is genuinely just getting all too much. He seems about ready to tear his own house down to find the monster that scared you, completely unaware that he is the one wearing the monster’s skin.

You are about to open your mouth to improvise your way to freedom, when there is a brisk knock on the oak door and it makes your entire body jerk.

Bucky turns toward the noise, but not before you catch the brief, hot flare of irritation that darkens his features. He rises with all his coiled grace and contained force, and for half a second you just stare at his back, seeing even that differently now. He really is a tall man. He is immense. Broad. Space seems to make room for him as he steps to the door. God, what the hell did you walk yourself into. The only thought that gives you a tiny bit of ease is that there surely have to be other girls out there who would have fallen for it all, looking at him.

He cracks the door open. A man stands in the corridor holding a tray balanced with a folded stack of damp, cold towels, a bottle of water, and a blister pack of painkillers. And it’s weird how this would have struck you as absurdly thoughtful just hours before but now it feels sinister. It is purely ominous. It is comfort orchestrated by absolute authority; a display of care that only exists because of total, unquestioning submission.

Bucky, or James, or the most wanted mob boss of all time; thanks him, quickly, absently, not unkind but distracted, his thoughts still hooked to you so visibly that even the man at the door registers the tension.

And that man glances inside just enough to catch sight of you on the couch, sitting there sweating, pale, rigid as a hunted thing.

A manic urge strikes you to scream for help. You want to yell at this stranger to run, to call the precinct, or to simply throw you over his shoulder and get you the hell out of this building. But the impulse dies in your throat. It would be entirely useless. Every single person under this roof operates on his frequency. This man wouldn't take a single order from you even if it would be more of a plea than anything else. All of these people in this damn building listen to his every word. He wouldn’t do a thing to help you.

And before you can even let go of the fantasy, the man immediately drops his eyes again and leaves, because everyone in this house seems trained in the art of not seeing too much.

But you see too much now. That is the problem. That is the irreversible thing.

Because while Bucky’s back is turned, while he takes the tray and shuts the door with his shoulder and crosses toward the sideboard, your gaze begins to snag on the office around you with new eyes, and suddenly nothing is only furniture anymore.

Nothing is only decoration. All the wood in here is dark and expensive, perhaps even that is getting paid to stay silent, and there are details you would once have filed away as masculine and stylish.

But now everything is imposing. Everything reads as evidence.

Like that locked cabinet that is too reinforced to hold unimportant paperwork. There is a map pinned behind glass with inked markings that look less like commerce and more like a tactical grid. A stack of files sits bound with a suspicious kind of neatness. Then there is a heavy antique letter opener glinting on the desk like a civilized version of a threat.

Even the art on the walls seems changed, the frames too severe, the subjects too stern, everything in here curated by a man who does not simply possess things but controls them. He dictates outcomes. He governs people. His office is a single spider web woven from all this darkened wood and his suits, and you are the only thing inside it that is still vibrating, sending signals straight to the center where he stands, and it is making your skin grow cold in patches.

He is opening the water bottle for you.

That tiny, stupid gesture nearly does it—the torturous way he makes this all so normal and so intimate when he says, “Here, baby,” without turning yet, as if this is still salvageable, as if you are merely unwell and he is merely worried and the world has not already split clean down the middle.

Something primitive detonates inside you, and perhaps if it were a conscious thought or a decision or just some other thing in a civilized sense, maybe you wouldn’t do what you are doing, but your body is revolting before your mind can dress the fear in language, and you’re up.

Oh god, you’re up.

You’re off the couch, you’re on your feet, and now there’s no going back, now there’s no sitting down because now you sprang up and now you will run. You will run because the suddenness of your own movement has chosen the path for you.

Without looking back, without another word, your feet move you to the door and they move so fast, the room is moving with you, your vision is filled with streaks. Your hand fumbles blindly before finding the door handle, wrenching it open, and then you are sprinting.

“You love me, you say. You love me, you say. You love me, you say. Then why are you shaking?”

- Richard Siken

A/n: I know this is basically one single scene and I truly don’t know how I managed to make it this long. I always add unnecessary details and emotional spirals wherever possible but I worry that I sit in the emotions for too long sometimes.

So please feel free to let me know if the emotional introspection and all those feelings got to be a little too much at any point because I know I tend to ramble and take a while getting to the point in my writing and it’s getting a little frustrating. Hearing what you guys think would be really helpful 🫶🏻

And if you enjoy my writing and would like to support me, please feel free to consider my ko-fi

You don’t fall for Bucky Barnes all at once.

It happens in pieces. Small, unremarkable things that don’t feel dangerous until they are.

It’s the way mornings unfold into something predictable: the porch, the cold air, the sun barely cresting the horizon. He sits beside you without asking, nudges a mug toward you like it’s muscle memory. No words. Just quiet. Just existing in the same space without needing to fill it.

It’s training, the rhythm you build together, the unspoken communication. The way he smirks when you land a hit, like he’s proud and trying not to be. The way he always offers you a hand up, steady and sure, like he trusts you not to let go.

It’s the evenings too. The way he remembers which plate is your favorite to use. The way he waits for you in the hallway without admitting he was waiting. The way he says your name like it’s something he’s allowed to keep.

None of it feels like a beginning. So you don’t notice when it becomes one.

You go on walks and tell yourself you’re imagining things. That this is what friendship looks like when it’s built on shared danger and early mornings and the quiet understanding of what it means to survive. You tell yourself you’re not special, he’s like this with people he cares about.

You ignore the way your chest tightens anyway.

The feelings settle in slowly, pressing against your ribs until you’re carrying them everywhere. They’re there when you spar, when you debrief, when you sit beside him on the quinjet pretending not to notice how close his knee is to yours. They’re there in the silence, loud and insistent.

You don’t plan to say anything. You could live with it, you think. You could carry this quietly, let it fade, let time do what it always does.

Except it doesn’t fade. It deepens.

The realization comes one afternoon in the training room. You’re on the mat, breathing hard, sweat cooling against your skin. Bucky offers you his hand, metal fingers warm from exertion. You take it without thinking.

He pulls you up, and for half a second, he doesn’t let go.

Neither do you. Your heart stutters, sharp and sudden, and you know, with awful clarity, that this is not something you can outrun.

“Hey,” he says, brow creasing slightly. “You okay?”

You nod and smile, the practiced kind. “Yeah. Just tired.”

He watches you for a moment longer, like he wants to ask something else. Then he lets it go, stepping back like he always does.

That night, you decide to tell him.

Not because you expect anything. You don’t let yourself expect things like that. But because the weight of it is starting to feel unbearable, and you need it out of your chest before it collapses inward. You find him late, sprawled on the couch in the common area, boots kicked off, sleeves rolled up. He looks peaceful in a way that almost stops you in your tracks.

Almost.

“Hey,” you say.

He looks up and smiles. It’s easy and familiar. “Hey. Thought you’d turned in already.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” you shrug.

He shifts, giving you his full attention. That’s always been his problem, when he’s present, he’s present. It makes everything feel more important than it is.

You sit across from him, hands folded neatly in your lap. Calm and controlled.

“So,” you say lightly, like this is nothing. “I think I’ve got a bit of a crush on you.”

The words land softer than the truth. You make them smaller on purpose. Bucky freezes. Just for a second, but you see it. The tension in his shoulders. The flicker of something unreadable crossing his face.

“Oh,” he says quietly.

You rush to fill the silence, smiling again. “It’s fine. I just figured I should say it out loud so it stops rattling around in my head.”

He exhales, slow and heavy, and rubs a hand over his jaw.

“I should’ve been clearer,” he says. “I didn’t realize you— I mean, I didn’t mean to lead you on.”

Your chest caves in.

“Oh,” you repeat, softer this time.

“I’m with Natasha,” he continues. “We’ve been seeing each other. It’s… not something we talk about much.”

The words don’t echo off the walls, they don’t ring in your head, they just… settle.

You nod immediately. Too quickly. “Got it.”

You even laugh, a short and easy sound. “Wow. Okay. That makes a lot of sense actually.”

He looks at you like he’s waiting for something else. Hurt, angry tears. You don’t give him any of it.

“No worries,” you add. “Seriously. I should’ve guessed.”

“That’s not—” he starts, then stops. “I’m sorry.”

You stand, smoothing your hands over your thighs like this conversation has merely wrinkled you. “You don’t have to be. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

The earth splits open beneath your feet and you fight the wobble in your step. You can’t let it show.

“I just needed to say it,” you say lightly. “Now it’s out of my system.”

You turn toward the hallway before he can respond, before the silence can press in too close.

“Hey Rook,” he calls after you.

You pause, the familiar nickname putting your heart in a vice, squeezing it until you can't feel its pulse in your throat. Not here. Not now. With a shaky breath you turn, looking back over your shoulder.

“Yeah?”

He hesitates, something conflicted flickering in his eyes. “You sure you’re okay?”

You smile. The same one you always wear. “Yeah. I’m good, Buck.”

You leave before he can see the way your hands shake.

You make it to your room. That feels important. Like a small victory. Like proof you still have control.

The door clicks shut behind you and for a moment you just stand there, hand still on the handle, listening to the quiet hum of the Tower. Nothing has changed. The world hasn’t tilted. No alarms. No crack in the floor.

You did it, you said it and you survived.

You tell yourself this as you walk to the bed, sit down carefully, hands folded in your lap like you’re waiting for instructions.

It doesn’t hurt yet. That’s the strangest part. Your chest feels hollow, not heavy. Like something has been scooped out cleanly, leaving space where pain should be. You almost laugh at that, at how neat heartbreak looks when you’re still in shock.

He’s with Natasha.

The thought floats by, distant. Manageable almost.

You nod to yourself, once. Logical. It makes sense. Of course he is. She’s brilliant and lethal and beautiful in a way that never doubts itself. You don’t know why you ever thought—

The thought collapses in on itself. Your breath stutters. You press your palm to your chest, confused when it doesn’t help. The room feels smaller. The air thinner. You inhale again, deeper this time, and it still isn’t enough.

I’m fine, you think desperately. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.

Your hands start to shake again. The memories come then, uninvited and merciless. The porch at dawn. Two mugs. His shoulder brushing yours. The way he’d look at you like he was relieved you were there. The way it felt like belonging.

You squeeze your eyes shut.

He didn’t mean it. He didn’t lead you on. You imagined it.

The justifications pile up, frantic and brittle, but they don’t hold. Your throat tightens painfully, like something is clawing its way up from your lungs. You swallow hard, trying to force it back down.

Don’t cry. Don’t make this real.

A sound tears out of you anyway, sharp, broken, barely recognizable as human. You fold forward, elbows braced on your knees, and suddenly the pain hits all at once.

Not gently, not gradually. It erupts.

Your chest caves in, ribs aching like they’re being crushed from the inside. You clutch at your shirt like you can hold yourself together if you grip hard enough. Your breaths come fast and shallow, each one worse than the last.

“Oh—” you choke, the sound dissolving into a sob you can’t stop.

It feels like grief. It feels like panic. It feels like your body realizing before your mind does that something precious is gone. You cry hard and ugly, shoulders shaking, tears soaking into your hands. Your heart hurts in a way you didn’t know was possible, agonizing and relentless, like it’s bruised and splitting open at the same time.

You thought heartbreak was supposed to be poetic. This is violent.

Every memory hurts now. Every almost. Every maybe. You replay the confession over and over, the way his face changed, the regret in his eyes, the way he said her name.

Natasha.

You sob harder, a raw sound ripped from somewhere deep and unguarded. Your stomach twists, nausea rolling through you as the truth finally sinks its claws in. You loved him quietly and carefully. You loved him the way you love something you’re afraid to break.

And it didn’t matter. Your forehead drops to your knees as the pressure in your chest becomes unbearable.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper to no one, voice cracking. “I’m sorry.”

You don’t know who you’re apologizing to. Him? Yourself? The version of you that believed this could end differently? The tears keep coming.

Your body curls inward instinctively, protecting what little is left of you. You rock slightly, breaths hitching, trying and failing to calm down. It feels like drowning, like every inhale drags water into your lungs instead of air. Like you’ll never breathe normally again. You think of the way you smiled at him when you said it was fine.

The lie tastes bitter now. Your chest aches so badly you wonder if this is what dying feels like, not the dramatic kind, but the slow collapse of something vital. Eventually, long after your throat is raw and your eyes burn, the sobs quiet into something smaller. Not peace. Just exhaustion.

You lie back on the bed, staring at the ceiling through blurry vision, tears still slipping silently into your hair. Your heart feels shattered. Not cracked. Not bruised.

Shattered into pieces too small to put back the way they were.

And the cruelest part?

Tomorrow, you’ll wake up and you’ll get dressed. You’ll see him and you’ll act like nothing happened. Because loving him was never the mistake.

Letting yourself believe you could survive it might have been.

At first, the changes are small enough to hide inside routine. You don’t make a decision to distance yourself from Bucky. You don’t wake up one morning and choose absence. You simply… adjust. Like shifting weight off a bruised limb without thinking about it.

The morning after, you wake up earlier than usual. Not because you’re rested, you’re not, but because the thought of the porch, the quiet, the second cup of coffee already waiting makes your chest tighten in a way you don’t have time for.

So you lace up your shoes in the dark and head to the gym instead. The compound is quiet at that hour. Empty. Safe.

You tell yourself it’s better this way. Productive. You run until your lungs burn, until the hollow feeling in your chest turns into something physical you can outrun. When you’re done, you shower, change, and slip out just as the sun starts to rise.

By the time Bucky wanders toward the porch with two mugs like he always does, you’re already gone.

He notices.

Not right away, but after a few days, his eyes linger on the empty chair beside him. The untouched space. He asks Sam once if he’s seen you.

“Early bird lately,” Sam shrugs. “Or night owl. Hard to tell.”

You start switching training slots next. You tell the coordinator you want to work on solo conditioning. That you’re trying to improve endurance, flexibility, reaction time. All reasonable things. All true enough.

You stop showing up to the afternoon sparring sessions too. The first time Bucky walks into the gym and doesn’t find you on the mat, he frowns like something’s out of place. He checks the clock. Checks the sign-up board. Then the door.

You’re already in the locker room by then, towel slung over your shoulder, pulse still racing from the earlier session you scheduled specifically to avoid him.

It works mostly. When you do run into him, you keep it clean. Professional and efficient.

“Morning,” he says one day in the hallway, slowing his pace to fall in beside you.

“Morning,” you reply, eyes forward, steps never breaking rhythm. He waits. You don’t fill the silence.

“You switch training times?” he asks eventually.

“Yeah.”

“That why I haven’t been seeing you?”

You shrug. “Guess so.”

There’s a pause, the kind that used to be comfortable. Now it feels like standing on thin ice.

“Everything okay?” he asks.

You nod once. “All good.”

And you mean it, at least in the way that matters. You’re functioning. You’re showing up. You’re doing your job. That has to count for something.

Coffee disappears next. Not intentionally. Not at first.

You just stop going to the porch. Stop waking up to the smell of it, the quiet ritual of sitting beside him while the world comes alive. You grab something quick from the kitchen later, or skip it entirely. Some mornings you realize hours have passed before you’ve eaten anything at all.

You don’t feel hungry.

You start going to bed later, too. Staying up long after the compound settles, lights dimmed, halls quiet. You sit on your bed or at your desk, staring at nothing, scrolling mindlessly, waiting for exhaustion to pull you under.

Sleep comes thin and shallow when it finally does. Bucky starts catching you in pieces instead of wholes.

In elevators. In briefings. In the corridor outside the armory.

“Hey,” he says one afternoon, glancing at your hands and the way they twitch. “You okay? You look tired.”

“I’m fine,” you answer easily.

You always answer easily. Your conversations shrink down to necessity.

Mission details. Training notes. Yes, sir. Copy that.

You stop teasing him. Stop lingering. Stop looking for him in rooms without realizing you’re doing it.

You stop touching him. That’s the one he notices the most. The way you used to bump his shoulder when you passed. The way you’d grab his sleeve to pull him into a conversation. The way your hand used to linger when he offered to help you up.

Now, you keep space like it’s protocol. One afternoon, after a briefing, he catches up to you near the exit.

“Did I do something?” he asks quietly.

You pause, hand on the door. The honest answer presses against your ribs, sharp and dangerous.

Yes. No. Not really. Not on purpose. You turn to face him, expression neutral. “No.”

He studies your face like he’s searching for a crack.

“You don’t talk to me anymore.”

You tilt your head slightly. “We’re talking right now.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

You offer a small, polite smile. “I’ve just been busy, Buck.”

There it is, the nickname. Casual. Familiar. Harmless. It costs you more than you let show.

He doesn’t push. He never does. He just nods slowly, jaw tight, like he’s filing the moment away for later. You walk away before he can say anything else. Later, alone again, you sit on the edge of your bed and press your palms into your thighs until the feeling settles.

You remind yourself that this is what you wanted.

Distance. Control. Clean lines where something messy used to be. You told him it was nothing. So you make sure it stays that way, even as the quiet stretches longer, and the space between you grows heavy with everything neither of you is saying.

Two weeks pass.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. They pass the way fog does, settling in slowly until the shape of things changes and no one can quite remember when it started.

By the time Bucky sees you again, it’s on the flight deck. The quinjet hums low and constant, engines warming, wind whipping across the open space. The team gathers in practiced efficiency, gear strapped on, weapons checked. It all feels familiar. Routine.

Until you step into view. Bucky’s attention catches immediately, instinctive, automatic, and then stutters. You look the same at first glance. Same uniform. Same stance. Same readiness.

But something is… gone.

You move like someone conserving energy. Not tired, emptied. Your expression is neutral, eyes distant, posture precise. There’s no spark of anticipation, no quiet humor tucked into the corners of your mouth. No subtle awareness of him.

You don’t even look at him when you stop beside the jet.

“Alright,” Steve says, voice cutting through the noise. “Quick rundown. Barnes, you’re point. You’ll have—”

“—me on your six,” you finish flatly, checking your weapon without looking up.

Bucky turns toward you, brow furrowing. You used to glance at him when you said things like that. A shared look. A silent check-in. Now there’s nothing.

Steve nods and continues, assigning positions. When he addresses you directly, you respond instantly.

“Yes, sir.”

The word lands wrong. Bucky’s jaw tightens.

He watches you through the rest of the prep, the way you move through your checks in exact order, every motion deliberate and efficient. There’s no chatter, no offhand comment, no playful complaint about the early hour or the cramped seating.

When Sam cracks a joke, you don’t react.

When Natasha glances your way, assessing, you don’t meet her eyes.

Bucky tries once.

“Hey,” he says, stepping closer, lowering his voice. “You good?”

You don’t look at him.

“All good,” you reply, tone even. “Ready for rollout.”

That’s it. No reassurance. No deflection wrapped in humor. Just a report. He studies your face, searching for something familiar. “You sure? You’ve been—”

“Orders?” you ask, finally lifting your gaze to him.

Your eyes are clear. Calm. Empty. It stops him cold.

He swallows. “We’re wheels up in two.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

The title feels like a wall slamming down between you. He nods stiffly and steps back. Once inside the quinjet, the change becomes impossible to ignore. He watches you as he goes through the ground plan. You sit when told. Stand when told. Move when told.

Bucky speaks, and you respond.

“Cover left here.” “Yes, Sergeant.”

“Hold position there.” “Copy.”

There’s no improvisation anymore. No instinctive flow between you, no wordless understanding. Where you once anticipated his movements, filled gaps before he noticed them, now you wait. For commands. For permission. For direction. It’s flawless. Textbook.

And it terrifies him.

During a lull, he risks another glance your way. You’re seated across from him, hands resting on your knees, eyes fixed somewhere past the interior wall of the jet. You don’t fidget. You don’t sigh. You don’t seem nervous or eager or anything at all.

You look… hollow.

Like someone carved something out of you and smoothed over the edges. He remembers how you used to be, leaning forward, elbows on your knees, energy buzzing just under your skin. How you’d meet his eyes and raise a brow like you were daring him to keep up.

Now there’s nothing to meet.

“Hey,” he says again, quieter this time.

You turn your head immediately. “Yes, Sergeant?”

The words hit harder than any argument could have. His mouth opens. Closes. For a moment, he wants to tell you to stop. To say his name. To look at him like you used to.

Instead, he shakes his head slightly. “Never mind.”

You nod once and turn forward again. Mission first. Orders followed. No unnecessary noise. The jet lifts off, vibrations rattling through the floor, and Bucky grips the edge of his seat like it’s the only solid thing left. Whatever this is, whatever he did, it’s changed you.

And the worst part is how cleanly you’ve cut him out. Not with anger. Not with blame. But with obedience. And as the quinjet disappears into the clouds, Bucky realizes with a sinking certainty that this version of you might be harder to reach than if you’d hated him at all.

The intel falls apart in the first thirty seconds. The door blows, smoke clearing just enough to reveal what should’ve been an empty warehouse floor, except it isn’t. It’s crowded. A baker’s dozen at least, maybe more, armed and already moving.

“Contact—!” Sam shouts, gunfire erupting before the word even finishes.

Chaos swallows everything.

Shots ricochet off steel beams, glass raining down as the team scatters. The neat formation dissolves instantly, replaced by instinct and survival. Bucky fires left, then right, barking orders into the comms, trying to regain control.

“Where the hell did these guys come from?” Natasha snaps.

“Intel was bad,” Steve says. “Adjust and move!”

You’re already moving. Not fluidly. Not with that old unspoken rhythm. Just clean execution.

“Fall back, take cover by—” Bucky starts.

A blast interrupts him. The floor buckles, smoke swallowing the space between you, and suddenly you’re gone.

“—shit,” he snarls. “I lost visual. Where are you?”

Static crackles. “South corridor,” you answer, voice clipped. “Multiple hostiles.”

Then the line cuts. Bucky turns without thinking, plowing through debris and gunfire, but the path collapses in front of him, metal screaming as it drops, sealing the corridor off.

“No, no—” He slams his fist into the barrier. “Damn it!”

On the other side, you fight.

It’s messy. Close quarters. You take one down, then another, adrenaline keeping you upright long past when your body starts screaming. A shot grazes your shoulder. You barely register it. Then a second one hits you center mass, armor catches most of it, but the force throws you back hard. You crash into the wall, breath knocked clean out of you.

You don’t get up fast enough.

Something sharp tears across your side. You gasp, pain blooming hot and wet. Your legs buckle, and suddenly hands are on you, rough and unforgiving.

“Got one!” someone yells.

You try to fight. You really do. But your vision tunnels, ears ringing as you’re dragged backward, boots scraping uselessly against concrete. Blood soaks through your uniform, warmth spreading in a way that makes your stomach twist.

Your comm is dead. So is your strength. On the other side of the collapsed corridor, Bucky hears it. Not words. Not exactly. A sound—sharp, strained, wrong. He bolts back, finds another way in through an upper level scaffolding that doesn't look it could hold itself through a strong wind. He climbs it anyways and takes the near ten feet jump down, its a messy dismount, rolling and crashing into the side of a panel wall.

His head snaps up just in time to see a figure hauling you toward a side exit, your body limp between them. Something in him snaps. He doesn’t think. Doesn’t plan.

He moves.

Metal arm tears through hostiles like a paper, gunfire chasing him as he charges forward, eyes locked on you. He takes one down mid-stride, then another, then tackles the last one dragging you away.

The impact is brutal. Bucky hits the ground hard, ripping the goon off you and slamming him into the concrete until he stops moving.

“Hey—hey—” Bucky drops to his knees beside you, hands shaking as he gathers you in. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

You suck in a breath that sounds more like a choke. Blood stains his gloves immediately.

He presses a hand to your side, panic clawing up his throat. “Stay with me. C’mon, don’t you dare—”

Your eyes flutter open. And for the first time in weeks, you actually look at him.

“Wow,” you murmur, lips twitching faintly. “You always this dramatic… or am I special?”

His chest tightens so hard it hurts. “Jesus, you’re bleeding out and you’re joking?”

“Gotta keep morale up, Sergeant,” you whisper. “Textbook, right?”

There it is. The ghost of a smirk. The cadence.

You. He laughs once, broken and breathless, even as his eyes burn. “You’re gonna be fine. Hear me? Medevac’s on the way.”

You swallow, lashes fluttering. “Knew you’d come.”

The words hit him harder than the explosion.

“Always,” he says fiercely, pulling you closer, like he can hold you together by force alone. “Don’t you ever think otherwise.”

The team converges fast after that. Sam covers the perimeter. Natasha kneels beside you, already working to stabilize the bleeding.

“She’s lost a lot,” Natasha says sharply. “We need evac now.”

The quinjet drops in hot, rotors kicking up debris as they load you onto the stretcher. You’re barely conscious, fingers weakly curling into Bucky’s sleeve as they lift you. He grips your hand, refusing to let go until they force him to.

“Hey,” you mumble as they pull you away. “Don’t… don’t forget coffee tomorrow.”

His throat closes.

“Yeah,” he manages. “Yeah. I won’t.”

The doors seal. The jet lifts. Bucky stands there, chest heaving, hands still slick with your blood, watching until the quinjet disappears into the sky.

For two weeks, you made yourself hollow. And in the middle of chaos, bleeding out in his arms, you came back to him like muscle memory. It scares him more than anything else.

The medbay is too quiet. Machines hum softly, lights dimmed low, like the room itself knows better than to intrude. Bucky walks in to you stuffing clothes in a bag, arms full with books and those tiny chocolate marshmallow candies you like. But you’re already sitting up, IV gone, jacket half on like you were never planning to stay.

“Where are you going?” he asks, voice rough.

You don’t look at him. “I’ve been cleared.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

That finally gets you to lift your eyes. They’re tired. Not red, not angry, just empty. “I can’t do this anymore, Buck.”

He takes a step closer. “Do what?”

You let out a shaky breath, fingers curling into the fabric of your sleeve. “Pretend I’m fine. Pretend I didn’t almost die out there and that I didn't feel like something in me finally snapped.”

He swallows. “I didn’t know it was this bad.”

“I know,” you say quietly. “That’s the problem.” Silence stretches. He waits, like he’s afraid if he speaks you’ll shut down completely.

“I need you to understand why I’m leaving,” you continue. “Because if I don’t say it now, I never will.”

Bucky’s jaw tightens. “Okay.”

You inhale, slow and deliberate, like you’re bracing for impact.

“Because I’m in love with you.” The words land heavy. He doesn’t interrupt.

“And when I thought I was going to die,” you whisper, “all I could think about was you. Your voice. The way you’d grunt ‘good morning’ like it cost you something. That stupid little smirk you got when you beat me in training, and the bigger one when I finally got you back.”

Your throat tightens, but you keep going. “The quiet mornings. You bringing coffee and us just… sitting there, watching the sun come up. Not talking. Just being.”

Bucky’s breathing turns uneven.

“I feel like I can’t breathe right when you’re not around,” you say. “And then when you are, every breath feels stolen—like… it’s not mine to take. And I can’t live like that.”

He opens his mouth. Closes it. You shake your head before he can speak. “Don’t explain. Don’t apologize. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.”

You finally stand, sling your bag over your shoulder.

“I almost died with the blink of an eye,” you say softly. “But loving you like this feels like dying slowly.”

“Rook,” he says, voice breaking.

You pause at the door, hand on the frame, but you don’t turn around. “Don’t make this any harder than it already is, Buck.”

When you leave, the room feels impossibly empty, like all the air went with you.

Bucky keeps his eyes on the floor long after you’re gone.

The medbay smells like antiseptic and ozone, too clean for something that feels this ruined. He tells himself that’s the problem, that he’s projecting. Letting adrenaline and fear distort things into something bigger than they are. That’s what this is. Distortion. He straightens, rolls his shoulders back, like he’s coming out of a mission debrief instead of watching the aftermath of something he refuses to name.

She said she loved you. People say things when they’re scared. When they’ve almost died. When emotions spike and everything feels sharper than it really is.

It doesn’t mean it’s permanent. It doesn’t mean it’s real. He latches onto that thought, turning it over like a worry stone. You were vulnerable. He was familiar. Familiar feels safe. Safe gets mistaken for love all the time.

That’s all this was.

He didn’t lie to you. He didn’t promise anything. He didn’t cross lines, at least not ones he can’t redraw now that he needs to. Training partners get close. Friends share space. Friends sit in silence. Friends bring coffee.

Friends don’t feel like this when you walk away, he tells himself. He exhales slowly, forces the tightness in his chest into something manageable. This is restraint. This is doing the right thing. Letting you go is proof he’s not selfish.

You leaving is… mature. Necessary. Healthy.

That’s when Natasha speaks. “She made the right call.”

Her voice is calm and steady, no sharp edges. She’s standing just inside the doorway, arms folded loosely, posture relaxed like she’s been there awhile. Bucky doesn’t look at her. “She didn’t have to leave.”

Natasha hums softly, thoughtful. “She was hurting. And you couldn’t give her what she wanted.” That lands easier than it should.

“I didn’t want to hurt her,” he says.

“I know,” Natasha replies, stepping closer. “That’s why this would’ve kept getting worse.”

He finally looks up at her. She meets his eyes without flinching.

“She was always going to want more,” Natasha continues gently. “More time. More space in your life. More of you.” A pause. “You don’t have that to give. Not without taking it from somewhere else.”

From me, goes unspoken. Bucky swallows. “She said loving me felt like dying slowly.”

Natasha’s expression softens, not with jealousy, but with sympathy. “Because she stayed when she should’ve left.”

He frowns. “That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?” Natasha counters quietly. “You’re not responsible for someone choosing to love you when you’re already taken.”

Taken. The word anchors him.

“You were honest,” Natasha says. “You didn’t choose her over me. You let her go.”

She reaches out, resting a hand on his arm, warm and grounding. Present. “That’s not cruelty,” she adds. “That’s loyalty.”

Something in his chest loosens at that. Just a little. “She’ll move on,” Natasha continues. “She needs to. And you need stability. Not… intensity.”

His mind flashes, unbidden, to quiet mornings. Coffee cooling between his hands. The way you never rushed him to speak. Natasha squeezes his arm slightly, pulling him back.

“You don’t need someone who makes you question every breath you take,” she says softly. “You need someone who fits into the life you’re already building.”

With her.

“This is better,” she finishes. “For everyone.”

Bucky nods, because it makes sense. Because it’s logical. Because it hurts less when framed that way.

He tells himself the ache in his chest is just residual guilt. That the hollow feeling will fade. That choosing what’s steady over what’s sharp is growth. Natasha stays with him until his breathing evens out. And when she finally leaves, he doesn’t chase the thought of you down again. He lets it sit, labeled resolved. Unaware that denial, when wrapped in reason, is still denial—and that some truths don’t disappear just because they’re inconvenient.

A month passes.

It doesn’t soften anything.

If anything, it sharpens the ache into something constant and precise, like Bucky’s learned exactly where it hurts and keeps pressing there by accident. Every morning he wakes up expecting, just for half a second to hear movement down the hall, a door opening, your footsteps pacing with that familiar rhythm.

Every morning, there’s nothing.

He throws himself into training like it’s penance.

Longer hours. Heavier weights. Sparring until his knuckles split and the med techs yell at him for reopening wounds that never quite heal. He runs until his lungs burn and his vision swims, sleeps in jagged fragments when his body finally forces him to stop.

He’s exhausted. He doesn’t care. Sam tells him to take it easy. Steve watches him with quiet concern. Natasha tries, really tries, to pull him back from the edge.

“You don’t have to punish yourself,” she says one night, leaning against the doorway of the gym as he hammers a punching bag with relentless force.

He doesn’t slow down. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” she says gently. “You’re spiraling.”

The bag swings back and slams into his ribs. He barely flinches.

“I said I’m fine.”

He snaps at everyone now. Short temper. Sharp words. No patience for jokes or small talk. The team tiptoes around him like he’s something volatile, something liable to detonate if touched wrong.

He hates that too. But the nights are worse.

The quiet creeps in, stretches long and merciless. He lies awake staring at the ceiling, replaying memories he didn’t know he’d memorized so well, your voice in the mornings, the weight of you leaning against his shoulder in the quinjet, the way you’d look at him like he was something solid in a world that kept shifting.

The way you laughed.

That’s what breaks him.

It happens in the training room, of all places. He’s mid-combo, frustration coiled tight in his chest, when he hears it, a laugh, light and unmistakable, coming from the corner of his vision.

He whips around so fast the punching bag snaps back and slams into his gut, knocking the breath clean out of him. He doubles over, coughing, heart racing. There’s no one there. Just an empty mat. A rack of weights. Dust motes drifting lazily through the light.

The absence hits him harder than the impact. He sinks down onto the bench, forearms braced on his knees, chest heaving, not from exertion this time, but from something dangerously close to panic.

Because in that split second, before logic kicked in, he felt it. Felt right. Felt like home. And suddenly, painfully, devastatingly, he understands.

He’s been in love with you the whole time. Not in a slow, creeping way. Not something that grew quietly.

It was already there, threaded through every shared morning, every instinctive glance, every moment where he felt steadier just knowing you were nearby. He just labeled it wrong. Filed it away as comfort. As partnership. As something safe that didn’t ask anything of him.

Until you left. Until the quiet became unbearable. The realization crashes over him all at once, heavy and unforgiving, and he presses a fist to his mouth like it might keep the truth from spilling out of him.

“Shit,” he breathes.

Natasha finds him like that later, still in the gym, sweat-damp and hollow-eyed, staring at nothing. She sits beside him without asking. “You wanna talk?”

He shakes his head automatically.

“You miss her,” she says softly.

The words hit too close. Too clean. He laughs once, sharp and humorless. “That obvious?”

She studies him for a long moment. “You’ve been missing her longer than she’s been gone.”

Something in his chest twists.

“She left because of me,” he says, the admission tasting bitter. “Because I didn’t see it. Didn’t choose her when I should’ve.”

Natasha exhales slowly. “Bucky—”

“I love her,” he says, voice breaking despite himself. “And I didn’t even know it until it was too late.”

Silence stretches between them. When Natasha speaks again, her voice is steady, but there’s hurt underneath it. “Then what are we doing?”

He looks at her then. Really looks. And he knows the answer.

“This isn’t fair to you,” he says quietly. “It hasn’t been for a while.”

She nods once, eyes shining but resolute. “No. It hasn’t.”

They don’t fight. They don’t yell. They just… end. Later, Bucky stands alone in his room, the weight of it all settling in at once. You’re gone. Natasha’s gone. The Tower feels emptier than it ever has. For the first time in a long time, there’s no one left to anchor him. The cruelest part yet, he knows exactly who he lost. And exactly how badly he wants you back.

He doesn’t stop looking for you.

At first, it’s methodical. He pulls your old personnel file from the system, flipping through it like something new might appear if he stares long enough. Emergency contacts. Prior residences. Old mission notes. Nothing useful. Everything ends at the Tower.

He calls people he hasn’t spoken to in years. Old mission runners. Old teammates. Friends who owe him favors he never wanted to cash in. He keeps his voice steady, professional.

“Have you heard from her?” “No?” “Okay. Thanks anyway.”

He hangs up and tries again. Days blur together. He sleeps even less. Trains even harder. The ache never dulls, it just changes shape, settles deeper. He checks places he knows you loved. Coffee shops near the Tower. A small bookstore you dragged him into once because “they have the best philosophy section.” Nothing.

Weeks pass. The city feels too big and too empty all at once.

One gray afternoon, he finds himself walking without direction, boots carrying him on instinct alone. He doesn’t realize where he is until the trees open up and Central Park stretches out in front of him—wide and breathing, a rare pocket of quiet in the middle of the noise.

Rain starts falling not long after.

He doesn’t move. He sits on a bench near the path, elbows braced on his knees, watching the grass darken as it drinks in the water. People hurry past with coats pulled tight and umbrellas blooming overhead. The city keeps going.

He stays. Minutes stretch. Maybe hours. His hair is soaked. His jacket heavy with rain. He doesn’t notice when the world grows quieter.

What he notices is the rain stopping. Not all at once—just above him. Bucky frowns and looks up. An umbrella fills his vision.

He blinks, disoriented, then follows the handle down—

—and there you are.

For a second, neither of you move. You look different. Not weaker. Not broken. Just… steadier. Like someone who’s learned how to hold herself upright without leaning on anyone else. Your hair is pulled back, face bare, eyes tired but clear.

“You’re gonna catch a cold,” you say softly.

His breath leaves him all at once.

“Rook,” he whispers, like saying your name too loudly might break the moment. You hesitate, then step around the bench, holding the umbrella so it covers both of you. You don’t sit. You don’t touch him.

“I usually come here when I can’t think straight,” you say after a beat. “Guess great minds think alike.”

His chest tightens. “You used to come here?”

You let out a small, almost embarrassed breath. “Yeah. A lot. Usually after spending time with you.”

He swallows.

“I’d sit right here,” you continue, nodding at the bench, “and overanalyze every conversation. Every look. Trying to figure out if I was imagining things. If I was crazy for thinking there was something there.”

Your voice doesn’t shake. That hurts more than if it had. He stands slowly, like he’s afraid to spook you.

“You weren’t,” he says immediately. “You weren’t crazy.”

Your eyes flick up to his, searching.

“I just didn’t know what to call it,” he admits, voice low and rough. “Didn’t realize what it was until you were gone. Until everything felt wrong without you.”

Rain patters softly against the umbrella.

“I love you,” he says. No hesitation. No qualifiers. “I’ve been in love with you for longer than I understood what that meant. And I’m so damn sorry it took me losing you to see it.”

You look away, jaw tight. “Bucky—”

“I know I don’t get to ask this,” he says quickly, stepping closer, careful not to crowd you. “I know I hurt you. I know I let you believe you had to leave to survive loving me.”

His voice breaks. “But if there’s any part of you that can forgive me, any part at all, I’m begging you to let me try again. To choose you. To do it right this time.”

Silence stretches between you, heavy but not unbearable. Finally, you exhale.

“You almost ruined me,” you say quietly. Not accusing. Just honest.

“I know,” he says. “And I’d spend the rest of my life making sure I never do that again.”

Your grip tightens on the umbrella. “I didn’t leave because I stopped loving you,” you admit. “I left because I couldn’t keep loving you like that.”

His eyes soften, aching. “Then don’t.”

You look back at him then, really look at him.

“Love me where I’m chosen,” you say. “Or not at all.”

His answer is immediate.

“I choose you,” he says. “Every day. Every version of you. If you’ll let me.”

The rain picks up again, heavier now, drumming overhead. You lower the umbrella just enough to step closer.

“Okay,” you whisper.

Bucky lets out a breath that sounds like relief and disbelief tangled together. He doesn’t touch you yet, he waits, like he’s learned something important. When you finally close the distance yourself, resting your forehead against his chest, it feels—

It’s a bold faced lie. Taking you shopping turns him on more than anything else. It’s the way you just go to town with his American Express like you’ve got no other care in the world. Which you don’t. He takes care of everything. And gets off on seeing you buying random shit with his money. Drives in the fact he owns you completely.

“But daddy, we still have shoes left. And lingerie. And then something to eat, maybe?”

You blink up at him cutely, and he’s aware you know exactly what you’re doing. Knows he can’t resist you when you get like this. That’s why you’d dressed up all sweet today too. In this little pink dress with the ribbons, flouncing around the mall like some goddamned Tinkerbell, holding onto his hand before something shiny and exciting inevitably distracts you.

“Fuck shoes,” he growls, “you’ll take hours in there.”

“So what you’re saying is you don’t love me.” You cross your arms over your chest (your completely free arms because God forbid you hold a shopping bag. Not that he’d let you anyways).

“What I’m saying is I’ll book the store out for you tomorrow, and you can come back and not have to deal with people or lines or shit like that.”

You frown, considering it before finally smiling. Going on your tiptoes to press a kiss to his cheek, “Okay fine. But you owe me, because I wanted new shoes today.”

“Sure, princess.” You and him both know who really owes who. And he’d get his end of the deal whenever he so pleased. “One more store and then we’re done for the day.”

You roll your eyes and huff, go through your whole bratty shtick of how “he’s sooo unfair” and how you had a “whole list of things I still need to buy!” He waits for you to be done and sure enough, soon you’re all smiles again.

“Okay, let’s go to Victoria’s Secret!” You announce after he’s finished paying for the latest round of clothes you’ve chosen. You drag him out of the store, but it’s only after a few seconds that you stop and pout, “Why aren’t you holding my hand?”

Rafe wonders if you try to wind him up on purpose. He knows you’re not as much of an airhead as you sometimes pretend to be. Now, he simply stares at you, his hands very clearly full and occupied by the shit ton of Prada and Louis Vuitton shopping bags.

But you just smile sweetly and hold your hand out. In the end, Rafe sighs and shakes his head, offering you his pinkie finger that you happily hold on to.

“You’re a piece of work.”

“You love it.”

You go wild inside the Victoria’s Secret store. Rafe hands all the shopping bags to one of the sales associates as he watches you in your element. Picking out everything pink and glittery, leopard print, rhinestones, lace. He comes up behind you and slips his hand up your skirt, squeezing your bare ass. You giggle, but you know better than to push his hand away.

He nods at a red lacy set on a mannequin, then at the sales associate, “She’ll try that one.”

“Yes, sir.”

The VIP dressing room is dimly lit and spacious. Rafe sprawls out on the velvet sofa, eyes dark as you model one set after another for him. He nods at all the frilly pink shit you try on, the silk negligees that show off your pretty legs, and push up bras that make your tits look fucking insane.

“Can you buy me angel wings, dada? Like the models have in the fashion show?”

“If you’re good.”

His jaw clenches when you come out in a lacy black corset and matching g-string. You give him a twirl and he gets a good look at your cute little ass on full display. His palm itches to spank it.

“This one is soooo cute,” you gush, “I think I’ll wear it to Sarah’s costume party this weekend.”

“You’re not going to any parties dressed in that.”

You roll your eyes, “Obviously I’d wear it with like shorts or a skirt or something. And a cute kitty tail and ears.”

Rafe licks his lips, “Kitty huh?”

You smile cutely, “yes daddy.”

He motions for you to get down on your knees, not really having to say anything because he’s got you trained well enough to understand orders based on a look. He crooks his finger, beckons you closer.

“Crawl.”

You both know how much he gets off on it, the power he has over you. You were a little brat and he spoiled you rotten but in the end, he could make you do anything. Snap his fingers and you’d come running. Spread your legs for him if he so pleased. Crawl over to him like a little kitty cat in a public dressing room because he said so. Because he paid for your life. And he owned you.

He pets your head lazily, stroking your hair while you nuzzle against his hand like a good little pet in your sexy lingerie. Looking up at him through those sexy long lashes. He smirks.

“You wear this to a party and I’ll make sure it’s the last one you ever attend.”

You pout, but he presses his thumb into your mouth to silence you, allows you to suck on it to keep your tantrum at bay.

“You can still get the kitty ears. Wear ‘em in bed for when I come home from work. Maybe we can get you a collar and leash too.”

He makes you stand up, give him a few more twirls before slapping your butt and sending you to try on the next set. It’s the red one he’d chosen, barely conceals anything, just tiny strips of lacy red fabric and a bunch of strings.

Rafe grabs the front of your panties, dragging you into his lap till you’re straddling him. His patience is wearing thin, and you’re being a little tease with how you’re flaunting your cute, sexy body at him. As if he didn’t own you and could have his way with you whenever he pleased.

“Knees.”

It’s all he has to say and then you’re on the floor between his legs. You scowl though, because you’re you and of course you would, “Floor’s uncomfortable.”

“I don’t care. Take it out.”

You do. He’s got you trained well enough. And it’s so hot, your hand wrapping around his dick, expensive manicured fingernails gleaming against the dim lights. He grabs your hair, pushing your head down. You take him like a good girl, as deep as you possibly can. None of that kitten licks shit because you know he’d beat your ass if you tried that right now.

“Good girl,” he mutters, stroking your hair back and making sure you’re looking at him. Watches your lips stretch out on his fat dick as you bob your head and suck him how he likes it, “So cute on your knees.”

It’s definitely Rafe’s favourite part of these shopping trips. You could be as bratty as you wanted but at the end of the day, you’d always be on your knees for him. His property, his pet, and he kept you looking so pretty and expensive. His bratty little girl, all dressed up in head to toe designer, complaining and throwing your cute little tantrums but never once daring to say no to him when he wanted you.

A successful investment.

He finishes down your throat, watching you swallow before pulling you into his lap for a rough, possessive kiss. You’re all submissive and shy now, cuddling into him with nothing left to say.

It never lasted long though.

Sure enough, once his car’s been loaded up with all your shopping and he’s put you in the passenger seat that you finally speak again.

“Daddy, can I have another Birkin please?”

♡ notes/warnings: no major warnings for this one (it's actually really soft) but if daddy kink is not your thing, you'll definitely want to sit this one out!

not proofread. enjoy! x

You should’ve known better than to introduce Bucky to your friends. 

Not because you don’t want him in every part of your life; the two of you are pretty serious now, and if things go well, you’re trying not to get too far ahead of yourself by picturing a house toeing the line of off-grid with a couple acres to spread out across and a ring on your finger. 

But all of that, no matter how fragile right now, is your future. And these friends in particular are…a little stuck in the past. 

There’s other friends you’ve made at work and your hobbies, and you consider a lot of Bucky’s friends to be yours now too. The people you’re introducing him to tonight are college friends, most of whom you’d fallen out with when your life became more 9-to-5’s and dates with Bucky and less drinking, partying, and casual hookups. 

But they’ve made the trip just for you, a pitstop on the way to a weekend bachelorette celebration you declined to attend. You already know you’re going to get shit for it, but after the domesticity of the last couple of years, you’d much rather be at home and in bed with Bucky by eleven, not drinking your weight in booze at some stranger’s cabin. 

“I don’t understand why we have to go.” 

And this is the other issue—that Bucky, for all he tries, is sort of incapable of not speaking whatever’s on his mind. Especially when it comes to things he can tell that you don’t want to do but are doing anyway. 

You conceal your sigh with smile and adjust the collar of his shirt, shifting under his dead weight stare. “This is probably the last time I’ll ever see them, honestly. I just want to leave things on a good note so I don’t have any guilt about it later.” 

Bucky eyes the determined tilt to your mouth for a second before he dips forward to press a resigned kiss to your forehead. He’s less concerned about hiding his sigh than you were. 

“Alright. But if you don’t like it, we’re leaving.” 

“Deal,” you agree. 

It’s one of the things you love most about being with Bucky; most of the time, you don’t even have to talk to get your point across. One look from across the table tonight, and you know he’ll get you out of there, no questions asked. 

It’s trust, more than anything. The kind that puts up with you laying your past to rest so that you can step into your future uninhibited. 

You hold a hand out. “Let’s get this over with.” 

Bucky takes it, no questions asked. 

“Let’s.” 

The drive home from the restaurant is silent. 

You’d expected them to tell embarrassing stories about you, because it was college. Bucky’s already heard most of them from you anyway, even if he smiled and nodded along like he hadn’t, small fragments of a real grin breaking through when he met your eye over another phone shoved in his face at the table. 

You’d even expected to watch him sit through invasive personal questions that you’d have to deflect from for him, like how you met, if he’s deserving of you, what your sex life with him is like. The rabbit hole is abrupt and deep. 

What you hadn’t expected was for them to remember an anecdote from a more-than-a-little-bit-intoxicated game of truth or drink years ago in which you’d admitted your most secret sexual fantasy. 

Explaining to Bucky what daddy kink is was not your initial post-dinner plan for tonight. Especially not when he’s looking at you like he’s never been more confused in his life. 

You hang your coat up while he locks up the front door behind you, eager to change and get to bed and sleep off the entire night, start again in the morning. Maybe this is all just a bad dream. 

But the thud of Bucky’s socked footfalls after he kicks off his boots follows you through the kitchen and up the stairs, through the hallway and into the en suite bathroom. 

The silence also follows as he strips down to his undershirt and pants, leaning against the wall behind you as you brush your teeth. When you spit, he’s still looking at you when you stand up, his frown a fixture since you left the restaurant. 

“I don’t get it.” 

“It doesn’t have to be something that you get,” you say, as gently as you can manage when you’re this exasperated. “It’s just—a thing. A private thing. It’s not a big deal.” 

This makes Bucky’s frown deepen, lines appearing in your forehead as you slip out your ear rings and reach for a makeup wipe.  

“It’s your deal, so it’s my deal.” 

“Well, I’m not really sure I can do any better at explaining it than Urban Dictionary did, honestly.” 

It’s snappier than you mean for it to be, and you feel a little guilty for it as he follows you into the bedroom to the armoire. You’re defensive even if you don’t need to be, used to your friends bringing it up as joke instead of the genuine curiosity in Bucky’s tone. 

“No, I get why other people want it. Why do you like it?” 

Your hands pause where you’ve just pulled open the pajama drawer, unsure if you’ve ever been asked the question. You take a moment to think over your answer, but Bucky’s eyes never once flicker with mischief or judgement, watching you choose your words. “Well. I guess it’s like—it’s several different things, sort of.” 

Bucky grunts for you to continue while he presses a hand to your hip to spin you toward the armoire, unclasping the top of your dress and dragging the zipper down.  

“You’re definitely not anything like my dad, but you are, like—you’re a little older, I guess. And you’re—you protect me. Make me feel safe. You’re bigger than me, and you take the lead on a lot of things when I’m tired or need help with something. Or, you know, when we—” your face heats, and you can practically feel Bucky smirk as your dress drops to the floor. 

He leans in, breath hot on your shoulder as he unhooks your bra. “What else?” 

Your voice lowers, embarrassed to be laid bare in more than just one sense. 

“It’s inherently vulnerable. There’s the fear of rejection and maybe a little bit of embarrassment when I say it at first, but then, when you respond to it, there’s this—relief on the other side. Like me asking you to take care of me and you agreeing to it, but instead of sitting down and having that conversation, you’d know I needed you with just a word. Like our own secret kind of communication.” 

He bends down to pick up your dress, slipping it onto a hanger on the closet door. Then he reaches in, grabs one of his t-shirts, and pulls it over your head. But even once he’s smoothed out the hem at the tops of your thighs, his hands linger on your hips. 

“So it’s not just the name,” he presses. “It’s the fact that you’d be sayin’ it to me.” 

“Bucky,” you laugh lightly, glancing up at him. “Yeah. That’s, like, kind of the entire point.” 

He hums but doesn’t say anything else, and parts from you briefly to change into his own pajamas before joining you in bed. It’s domestic in the way you’ve come to love about your nights together, the comforting lull of lowering the lights, checking your phones, reading a bit of your novel before you get tired enough to turn in. 

But you bypass the reading and phone time for tonight, already exhausted. It seems like Bucky’s on the same page, an arm extended in your direction, his fingers bending to beckon you over as you take your place at his side. 

You exhale, the blanket of darkness and Bucky’s warmth pulling some of the tension from your body. His fingers drift over your shoulder, your arm, and you turn your chin up automatically when you feel him turn his to look down at you on his chest. 

“Will you say it?” 

Your breath catches, heat rising in you again. “Right now?” 

“Yeah,” he rasps. “Wanna see something.” 

“Um. Okay,” you relent eventually. You clear your throat, testing the shape of your mouth around a word you’ve only ever whispered in private. You whisper it now too, like saying it too loud might change his mind. “...Daddy.” 

It’s not life changing. You’re more embarrassed than turned on. You’re ready to play it off with a laugh if he does, quick to forget it in the morning. 

But underneath that, there’s the feeling you were describing to him earlier. The kind of fragile trust that makes you breathless, makes you feel small but not belittled, held but not smothered. Safe. 

Bucky’s eyes dart over your face in the dark, cataloguing things you can’t even begin to define. He must find whatever he’s looking for, because he gives you a small smile moments before he leans in to press his mouth against yours. Soft and sweet and giving away absolutely nothing about his reaction. 

You hadn’t realized how eager you were to see what it would be until now. 

“Is that…it?” you ask. 

“Mm,” Bucky nods, settling his face into your neck and giving a sleepy sigh. “G’night. Make y’breakfast in the morning.” 

“Night,” you return, somewhat at a loss as you settle back into the sheets. “Love you.” 

“Love you more.” 

You stare at the wall for a long time after he falls asleep, unsure if you’re relieved or…something else. 

It’s a relief when your friends finally stop texting you blurry snapshots from inside an AirBnB with vaguely passive aggressive text layered on top, and life returns to normal. 

You’re grateful now more than ever to have what you do with Bucky, a life you hadn’t expected for yourself but now couldn’t picture going without. It makes you feel more inclined to lean into the parts that make you happy, getting up early to drag Bucky to the farmers market just for some extra time together on the weekends, planning things to look forward to around your schedules, inviting over friends of both of yours that are actually pleasant to be around. 

Bucky’s just finished walking them to the door when he finds you in the kitchen, rinsing off the plates to be put in the wash later. He rolls his shoulders the way he does after any social situation that takes a little more of his energy, and you frown in sympathy when he winces at the pull in his shoulder. 

Even still, he seems happy, and that’s just as infectious. 

“Gonna have a shower before it gets too late,” he says. “You need any help?” 

You smile, shaking your head. “It’s mostly finished anyway. Go enjoy your decompressing.” 

He laughs a little at your correct assumption, rounding the island to stand behind you at the sink. Your hands are still submerged in the soapy water when his slide over your hips to pull you close, and you shiver a little when his nose brushes the ticklish hairs at the base of your neck. 

“Say it again?” he murmurs. 

You nearly lose your grip on the dish you’re holding, your eyes springing back open. 

It’s been a few weeks since that night, since the conversation you’d had. You’ve only just managed to wrangle in the mess of your emotions about it, half relief and half disappointment, but in the span of a few seconds, he’s dragged them all right back to the surface. 

You know he can hear it when you swallow, your tongue wetting your lower lip as you drag it between your teeth. 

“Daddy.” 

It’s quiet but it feels loud, taking up too much space as it presses in on you from all angles, ambiguously present. 

You feel Bucky’s chest expand with a long, slow inhale behind you. It makes him feel even bigger than he already does, makes you feel exhilaratingly small against him. His grip on you twitches, infinitesimal but on purpose, before he dips his head to press his lips to your shoulder. 

And then he pulls away. 

“Maybe we’ll do leftovers for dinner tonight,” he says as he heads for the hallway. 

You’re still trying to catch your breath when you call back, weakly, “Sure.” 

Your slick hands clutch the granite until the shower starts upstairs, and you force yourself to shake it off. Not knowing what Bucky thinks of something isn’t a commonality, and the wondering is driving you crazy. You could ask him, but there’s a part of you, that small, vulnerable part, that’s still afraid to push it too far too soon, to have something you’ve always wanted taken away from you before you’ve even really had it yet. 

Bucky returns from his shower thirty minutes later with damp hair and an easy smile, oblivious to the way it takes you more than a little longer to return to normal. 

But ‘oblivious’ and Bucky are oxymorons, and you’re a little scared of whatever he has up his sleeve. 

You’re on edge for days after as your daily routines continue on unchanged, but you have a feeling that’s exactly where he wants you. 

It takes a week of near silence while Bucky’s away on a mission for things to escalate. 

It’s not that the two of you are codependent, necessarily. But you’ve always been a chronic people pleaser introvert and Bucky is Bucky, so you both naturally tend to spend more time together than you do with anyone else. Your routines aren’t just blind domesticity; they keep you both structured, healthy, and knowing each other well enough that one of you can say something when the other begins to slip out of balance. 

So, when you’re apart, things are kind of shit. It’s not terrible, and you know that Bucky’s work is a little (or a lot) different than yours, and requires a different schedule sometimes. 

But it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a pile of laundry steadily building up in the armchair, or that you haven’t been wearing the same pajamas for three days, or that there aren’t boxes of takeout stacked in the trash because you hadn’t felt like cooking if it was only you at home. 

Apparently, Bucky hasn’t been doing much better. 

“This is shit.” 

It’s the first time you’ve heard his voice in almost a week, and you can’t help laughing a little at his displeased grumbling and shared misery. 

“I take it things are going well?” you tease, only because you already know that they are from his text an hour ago forewarning you of his call. You’d been getting ready for bed, but now you’re glad you waited up. 

“Hate bein’ away for so long,” he mutters, bed springs creaking in the background. “Miss your face. Miss your voice.” 

“I miss you too, Buck,” you admit. 

“Miss the way you go all shy on me when you call me what you need.” 

You hiss in a breath, suddenly hot underneath the sheets. “Bucky.” 

“Mm, no. Not that.” 

The sound of both of you breathing settles over the line for a few seconds, hyper aware of the sounds your body makes shifting against the blankets as you kick them off, hoping you’re not too obvious. The springs creak again on his end, pressed against your ear. 

“You gonna say it for me? Been stuck in this damn house for the last six days going crazy, replayin’ it in my head. Wishin’ I was there to hear you say it again.” Bucky groans a little, the way he does when he’s got a palm between his legs. “Lemme hear it, baby. C’mon.” 

“Daddy,” you sigh hesitantly, as if the other guys Bucky’s staying with can somehow hear you through the phone. 

“Good girl,” he murmurs, gravel and oil, low and sweet in your ear. “That’s my good girl.” 

“Daddy.” 

The metallic snick of his zipper catches your attention, and you slip a hand down between your legs like a reflex, unbelieving that this is actually happening but unwilling to say anything that might stop it. 

“Was gonna wait for you to ask for it, make you come to me. Give you time. But—fuck,” Bucky hisses when, presumably, his fist finally wraps around his cock. “Couldn’t wait any longer.” 

Usually you’re all for a bit of dirty talk. Nothing gets Bucky off quicker than a filthy mouth, and you’ve memorized all the right words to use to match him in his efforts. 

Right now though, you find your words caught in the back of your throat, nothing but a whimper slipping through your teeth when your fingers push your underwear aside and meet the slick wetness underneath. Bucky would probably be able to pick up on it even without super hearing. 

“You alone, baby? You touchin’ that sweet cunt while you call me that?” 

“Yeah, daddy,” you breathe, sure that your face has never burned hotter than this moment—but neither has the ache inside of you either. You bite at your lip, teasing your finger just barely inside the way that Bucky does. “S’that okay?” 

“More than okay. Makes me wish I was there to see it, baby. Bet you look like a fuckin’ vision, squirmin’ for me. Stuffing yourself full.”

His voice is still low, careful and protective as he makes sure that no one on his side overhears your conversation. You get it, but you also can’t stop imagining him referring to himself in that way, and the thought breaks a moan free from your chest. 

“Yeah, there she is,” Bucky mutters, the slick noise of his fist quickening in the background. “Enjoy it while you can, ‘cause the second I’m home nobody’s touching that wet fuckin’ cunt but me.” 

“Daddy,” you whine, so caught up in the feeling of your fingers that you don’t even realize it’s the first time you’ve said it louder than a whisper. “M’close. Can I—?” 

The shock of what you thought was going to be an innocent goodnight call turning into one of your deepest fantasies is—yeah. It’s not going to take long to get you there. 

“Listen to you,” Bucky marvels, gratuitous and indulgent as he slips smoothly into his role. “You’ve never once asked me for permission before. One word turns my girl into a sweet little slut, s’that it? Need me to make the decisions, baby?” 

“Please,” you gasp at the dizzying paradox, tears in your eyes and heat brimming in your stomach. “Bucky—” 

“No,” he growls. “You know what my name is. Use it.” 

“Daddy, can I—m’so close, please. Please let me—” 

“Fuck,” he spits, loud against your ear. “Yeah. Give it to me, baby. Lemme hear you come, lemme hear you do it for daddy—” 

The noise you make drowns the rest out, your slack hand dropping the phone to the pillow as you shake and gasp for breath. Your eyes roll back, hand a blur between your thighs, muscles bearing down all at once as if trying to hold onto all of it a little longer. 

You lay awake long after the phone call ends, still shaky and sweating through the sheets, buzzing with Bucky’s promises of coming back to you soon. Rolling over, you tuck your grin into the pillowcase to hide it, but it doesn’t make it any less real. 

You fall asleep right there before you even manage to clean yourself up, your sleep-soft mind wrapped around the tentative newness of the word. 

You’re pretty sure you don’t have to worry about if Bucky likes it or not anymore. 

The day Bucky arrives home, you’re both so exhausted that nothing happens. 

He falls into you like a magnet, dead on his feet in his boots, hours later than planned after an unexpected delay. It takes all his energy to eat and shower and all yours to practically carry him up the stairs and into the bedroom, and by the time you both collapse into a heap in bed, sleep is the only thing on either of your minds. 

You sink careful fingers into his damp hair, his breathing steady and even against your chest. The rest of it can wait. 

You wake at nearly four in the morning, half-conscious and disoriented for a second while your brain catches up with your body. 

The room is still dark, the minty sheen of toothpaste lingering on your tongue. It can’t be more than a few hours since you went to bed, but it doesn’t take you long to figure out what it is that woke you. 

Bucky’s t-shirt you’d worn to sleep in has been pushed upward, barely concealing your chest as his hand splays hot and big on your ribcage. His mouth is on your neck, rolling your skin in between his teeth gently, soothing every little sting with his tongue. Your throat and shoulder feel tender, pleasantly achy, like he might’ve already been at this for a while. 

The heavy press of his cock against your thigh tells you you might be right. 

“Mm. Buck?” you ask, stretching a little as you lean further into his body heat. 

“Was dreamin’ about you,” Bucky rasps against your collarbone, thumb counting your ribs, making sure you’re all there. “Kept worryin’ I’d wake up and you’d be gone, but here you are. So soft. So sweet. Mine.” 

You press up against him when his teeth dig in, fingers slipping into his hair that dried half-curled from the shower. His hand trails lower, rough fingertips treating you like glass before they reach down to grip the inside of your thigh and yank it up and over his hip, spreading you open for him. 

You must’ve been having a pretty good dream too, you think, if the wetness between your legs is anything to go by. You’re already warm; you and Bucky both tend to run hot, but it’d been worth it to be close to him tonight. Your skin sticks subtly to his where you press against each other, smelling of clean sweat and anticipation. 

You gasp as his fingers ease back inward on your thigh, tracing the seam of your underwear. “What was your dream about?” 

“My girl bein’ all needy for me,” he says, rising up a little to smear wet kisses against your jaw. “Askin’ for it. Callin’ me what she wants.” 

His wandering digits find the seam of your cunt over your underwear, two of them running up and down the length of it, grazing your clit and dipping against your entrance while your slick soaks through the material and makes the barrier between you even thinner. 

“Bucky,” you whimper, pushing up into his hand. “Please.” 

He chuckles against your cheek, hot and a little mean as he drags your underwear down. “Not quite what I had in mind, even if I do love hearing’ you beg. I need to fuck it outta you? Or are you gonna be a good girl and give it to me just ‘cause I asked for it?” 

Good girl hits you straight in the chest, a full body shiver unfolding over you while Bucky splays his hand over the wet heat of your cunt possessively, grinding his palm against your clit while he slips one digit inside. 

You moan weakly, trying to get him deeper, and he turns your head back toward him with the hand in your hair when you try to look away. The outline of him against the far window is so big, his body wide and thick where he hovers half above you and holds you down, and you find yourself once again unable to summon any coherency. 

“Uh-uh. Don’t get all shy on me,” he shakes his head, curling a second finger in along with the first. His messy grind gets a little more rhythmic, intentional, stretching you out for his cock. He presses his mouth against your cheek, his forehead against yours. “Can’t hide from me now, baby. Never could.” 

He leans over and kisses you like he might be able to draw it out of you that way, his tongue fucking your mouth the way his fingers are fucking your cunt. You moan around him, sucking on the slick, pointed appendage, feeling delightfully depraved when a string of spit connects you even after he pulls away. 

“Where’s that girl who was cryin’ for me on the phone, huh? Callin’ me daddy like it’s the only damn word left in that pretty head. Y’change your mind?” 

You shake your head frantically, fingers wrapping around a warm, firm bicep to keep grounded. “Need—need you,” you pant. 

“Y’always need me,” Bucky returns easily, the noise of his fingers obscene between your legs. “Gotta be more specific than that.” 

You get lost in it for a moment—he lets you get lost in it—lets you roll your hips against his fingers, lets you ride yourself toward the edge of a sharp, steep release before he rips them out of you altogether, your aching cunt bearing down on nothing, a sob, to your surprise, stuck in your throat. 

Bucky shushes you as he kisses you again, a series of pecks that feel almost patronizing as he strokes a hand over your head. He wipes his fingers off on your thigh, smearing your slick all over it, before he lifts himself from your side to ditch his boxers and flick on the bedside lamp, kicking your legs further apart with his knee. 

“My baby needs some incentive. S’that it?” he asks as he settles in between them, eyeing you shamelessly. 

He slips his hand over your cunt again to wet his fingers, then groans as he wraps them around his cock. He looks achingly hard, and he must be; you have no idea how long he was like this before you woke up. 

Sleepy sex isn’t something new. There are plenty of days you go to bed with a little extra energy to get out, and you’ve lost count of the mornings one of you woke the other up with a hot mouth on your cunt or around his cock until you were awake enough to fuck properly. You’re a big fan of when he blankets you on your hands and knees and he likes when you ride him so he can look at you, but tonight, with him kneeling over you, it feels right. Heightens the dynamic, makes you feel encased. Protected. 

“Y’want my cock?” he asks, nudging his hips forward until the blunt, bare head of his cock presses against your clit. He waits until you’re babbling incoherencies underneath him to lean down and add: “Then say it.” 

 The sob you’d been holding back escapes when you open your mouth, your lips already forming the word before your brain catches up to it. 

“Daddy.” 

Bucky rewards you for it instantly, slipping inside of you with all the ease of someone who knows your body like the back of his hand. The stretch of him is thick and unyielding but his fingers have already soothed any of the ache it would’ve left behind otherwise. 

It’s always intense with Bucky, but this time it’s—you’re shocked at how fragile you suddenly feel, your entire world narrowed to the press of your bodies, to the rhythm of your heartbeats as you struggle to regain your breath. 

Some things don’t change; Bucky’s lips pressed to your forehead, the grit of his teeth as he holds himself back while you adjust. His hand slips down to slide his fingers through yours, dragging your bent arms above your head to hold you completely open for him, close enough that his nose brushes yours when he look to see if you’re okay. 

“Take me so well,” he sighs, sucking your lower lip into his mouth until you whimper. “My sweet girl. Gonna let daddy fuck you?” 

“Daddy,” you say again, louder but just as achingly vulnerable, “please.” 

Bucky grunts as he pulls out and sinks back in, muscles tensing. “Missed this cunt,” he hisses when you tighten around him. “Missed those sweet noises. Just for me.” 

You nod as he does it again, slow, deep pumps of his hips that steal your breath each time you think you might have it back. With his hands laced with yours above your head he’s inescapable, filling you up and holding you down, and your chest feels heavy with something you can’t name. You’re as afraid of it as you are curious, caught between backing away and breaking it wide open. 

Your legs shake on either side of Bucky’s hips while he fucks you, your breathing ragged and your cunt quivering around him. You keep saying it, you think—little fractured murmurs of daddy daddy daddy, things that chip away at Bucky’s tightly wound control more than any type of force ever could. 

You’d thought he wouldn’t like you like this, you realize with a jolt. Figured someone like Bucky would be more attracted to a self sufficient woman who knew what she wanted and went after it, someone he wouldn’t be stuck having to take care of. It’s a belief you’d thought you left behind ages ago in therapy, but it stings now, actively being disproven, ripping you open and knitting you back together again with every stroke of his hips, every utter of your name, every time he wants you just as openly and desperately as you want him no matter the context. 

“Daddy,” you say wetly, clinging to his hands like a lifeline. “Missed you.” 

“M’right here. Not leavin’ again any time soon,” Bucky assures you, rubbing his cheek against yours to catch your tears since he can’t use his fingers. “My perfect little slut deserves to be fucked this good every night. I haven’t been doing my job, baby. Have I? Been away for too damn long.” 

The pace of his hips gets a little stronger, a little faster when you call out for him again in response, like he’s answering you with his body. Exactly what you told him when you first talked about it: like our own secret kind of communication. 

You whine when his question finally registers in your hazy head, and his mouth presses to yours to feel it in his teeth. It’s messy with the rough push and pull of his hips, slick with too much spit and the salt of your tears, but you’ve never tasted anything sweeter. 

“Want you to come with me,” he grunts against your lips. 

“Wanna,” you gasp, your body pushing up toward his thrusts. 

“Yeah? Think I should let you come?” Bucky croons, his fingers twitching in yours. “Gimme a hand, baby. Let me help you. Let me get you there.” 

Reluctantly, you let him take one of his hands so that he can smooth it over the outside of your thigh and then in, deft fingers headed for your clit the way they have dozens of times before. 

It heightens the coil of heat in your belly, makes you feel even more unsteady. Your free hand feels lost, desperate, and you clutch at any part of Bucky you can reach with it—his arm, his shoulder blade, his face. 

He turns to smear a kiss against your palm, his eyes locked on yours. “Right here. Not goin’ anywhere, sweet girl. Never leavin’ you.”  

You can see the shift in him then as he focuses in, his cock pushing into you like the only thing anchoring you to the present, his fingers pushing you closer and higher and hazy. You’d thought when you first mentioned all of this to Bucky that if you ever got to have this it would be hot and memorable, a bucket list item, for sure. You hadn’t thought—

You would never have thought it could be like this. 

“Daddy,” you whisper, scared and safe and untethered, dangling on a precipice unknown and knowing that Bucky’s the only one who could ever catch you on the other side. 

Your eyes water enough to blur, Bucky’s face dropping to rest on top of yours again as his rhythm falters and his hand speeds up on your sensitive clit, the clench of your body around his cock betraying your impending release. 

“Don’t need my permission, baby. You just take it, y’understand? My good girl, my perfect little slut, so sweet f’me when you call me—” 

You finish his thought with a cry, seizing up around him like a vice as you start to come, your Daddy! sharp and swollen and knocking something loose between you. 

He wraps you in his arms the second he’s done working you through it, not an inch of your body uncovered by his trembling limbs and grounding heat as he spills inside of you and fucks it in deep. You clutch at his back, his head, his shoulders and hips, desperate to have him impossibly closer still. 

You’re shaky and oversensitive as he rolls against you through the waves, the hot press of his release like relief, like a claim, like physical evidence you were so desperate for. Since before tonight, maybe since the restaurant, maybe even longer. 

Little by little, the last of the tension you’d worked up together seems to drain out of your bodies, but you don’t separate. Bucky seems just as keen as you are to stay close, to feel the proof. 

You don’t say it again, can’t bring yourself to in the intensity of the silence that follows, but it stays there on the tip of your tongue, waiting. 

+

Time passes in a daze, morning light just barely peeking through the curtains by the time Bucky finally pulls out of your spent, hypersensitive body. 

It feels like he’s reached a hand into your chest and taken your heart with him when he gets up to grab a towel and water, and no matter how much logic you try to swallow, all that comes back up is poorly repressed sobs muffled into the sheet. 

Your forehead is still pressed to your knees when Bucky comes back a minute later, the sound of the water glass hitting the nightstand making you jerk and look up. 

Bucky eyes you closely, your trembling lip and watery eyes, and slips a hand around to the back of your neck with a frown. “Y’okay?” 

“Yeah,” you nod, hiccupping on an inhale. “Just—a lot.” 

“C’mere.” He tosses the towel aside for now and drags you to his chest, all half naked and sticky and sniffling, until he can fold you up against his chest and press your nose to his throat. The kiss at your temple lingers, echoing throughout your body. “You were so fuckin’ good for me, y’know that? Made me so proud. Can’t believe you’re all mine.” 

“Bucky—” you choke, shaking your head. 

“S’that really what you wanna call me right now?” 

His question is patient, soft, and precisely what you needed. 

“Daddy,” you sob, burying your shaking shoulders as far into him as possible. “Daddy.” 

Like a broken record you just keep saying it, but Bucky never interrupts, never laughs, never tells you that you’re done fucking so you should stop calling him that now. He talks, waits, rocks you subtly back and forth until you don’t have any tears left to give, until suddenly you can breathe a little easier again, until you don’t feel like something is missing so much as something has finally been filled. 

He helps you sit up a little, enough to hold the water to your lips and get you to swallow. It’s the kind of cry that feels like it’s cleaned you out from the inside, purging something, but you definitely don’t feel empty. 

“Love you,” you croak when you lean back against him again, throat sore and eyes swollen. 

Bucky smiles, skin crinkling with it in the soft light. “Love you more.” 

You will yourself to appreciate the calm of the silence, but as your brain flickers back online, you can’t help the way the question pushes past your lips. “Does this mean I can’t call you that anymore?” 

Majority of the time, Bucky outright refuses to do anything that makes you scared or uncomfortable. With your reaction to all of this, you wouldn’t blame him if it all just seemed like…too much. 

But Bucky doesn’t flinch or tense up, just watches your fingers as you trace idle patterns over his palm in your lap, patient and thoughtful. 

“Do you want to stop calling me that?” 

“No,” you admit. 

“Then we’ll figure it out. This was the first time for a lot of it. S’intense. Doesn’t mean we can’t try it a little different next time, find something that works for us.” He presses his mouth to the top of your head. “Always wanna give you what you want.” 

“But do you want…?” 

“Baby,” he says, gently removing your fingers so he can press his to the side of your face. “That’s not even a question. I’ve been obsessed with hearin’ you call me that since that first time you said it, right here in this bed. Made me feel like the biggest man in the whole damn world, gettin’ to take care of you.” 

Being able to see his face helps, the clear blue of his eyes, the conviction woven into the lines of his skin. His smile draws a tentative one out of you too, and your cheek falls to his shoulder, tired and finally calm. “Okay. I want to figure it out.” 

“We will. One step at a time, we’ll figure it out.” He noses at your cheek until he can catch your eye again. “Y’with me?” 

Your chest squeezes again, this time with something much lighter than before. It’s trust, you think, more than anything. Love. 

Bucky holds out a hand, and you take it, no questions asked. 

“Let’s.”

.

.

.

Last year, Sam and Joaquin had grabbed dinner in a greasy burger joint with him, and that had been enough, but this year, they were gone on some mission. And with his days now consumed by endless hearings, press briefings, and committee meetings, the date had slipped right past him. He had no texts, no reminders. Just work.

To be specific, he was just looking forward to spending the majority of the workday with you, his damn secretary.

Who he had been in love with for so long it was starting to become a problem.

It was embarrassing, really— how bad it had gotten, how much of you got to him. He had fought in wars, survived Hydra, been broken and rebuilt over and over again and treated like an inanimate object, and yet somehow, you were going to be the death of him.

He just couldn’t resist you.

Not when you tilted your head in focus, biting your lip as you sifted through dense legal documents. Not when you’d gently ask from the doorway, "Congressman, when was the last time you had a real meal?" like you actually cared. You knew he ran himself into the ground, so there was always coffee waiting on his desk— made exactly how he liked it, even when he hadn’t asked.

And god, did he freeze like a pathetic teenage boy every time you touched him.

Not inappropriately—never inappropriately—but it drove him insane all the same.

You’d adjust his tie, fingers brushing his throat, your touch so damn professional it only made things worse. You’d straighten his cuff before a meeting, and suddenly, focusing on anything else was impossible. Worst of all was that night at a charity gala. He’d been so tense, so sick of all the schmoozing and ass-kissing, so you had rested a hand between his shoulder blades to calm him down. "Breathe, sir," you had whispered in his ear. "You’re going to do just fine."

It didn’t help that you were pretty.

Distractingly, devastatingly, fuck-his-life pretty.

He’d been around beautiful women before— he wasn’t blind— but you never carried yourself like beauty mattered. Instead, you valued yourself where you were brilliant. You were so good at your job, so damn capable, it was honestly unfair.

And it killed him that he couldn’t have you.

It killed that every glance, every touch sent his brain into overload. It killed him to sit beside you in meetings, watching you flip through your notes, twirling a pen between your fingers.

When he worked late, you stayed too, typing away at your desk, refusing to let him go through it alone. When he got dragged into a PR mess, you were the one handling the fallout, guiding him through all this bullshit, keeping him from saying fuck this and walking out of Congress altogether.

He thought about those late nights in his office, when your exhaustion crept in, though you’d never admit it. You’d stretch in your chair, groaning as you rubbed your neck, and he had to physically stop himself from offering to do it for you.

And he still regularly thought about that one flight back to D.C., when you had fallen asleep on his shoulder. He had spent the entire damn trip staring out the window, doing everything in his power not to think about how easy it would be to turn his head and press his lips to your hair.

And yet, for all the ways you took care of him, he took care of you, too.

Like how he always made sure you got home safe, insisting on a car service whenever you worked late, even though you told him it was unnecessary. When you shivered in overly air-conditioned meeting rooms, he somehow always ended up draping his jacket over you, pretending he wasn’t using it anyway. 

Like how he always walked on the outside of the sidewalk when you two were heading out together. How he kept extra pens in his pocket because you always lost yours.

Or that time he figured you were late for work because of the rain as you stepped into the office soaking wet. The very next day, a black umbrella just appeared on your desk. There had been no note, no explanation. But you knew. When you thanked him, he only shrugged.

You probably thought it was just him being friendly. Just a good boss.

But fuck, if only you knew.

But you couldn’t know. That was the point!

You were untouchable.

Not just because you worked for him, though that was a big enough problem on its own. It was because you could do better.

Bucky knew about the job offers you’ve received, from private firms, from more lucrative companies. He’d seen them one evening on your desk, stacked neatly in a folder you probably meant to take home. He was wrong for doing it, but he read them. His heart dropped when he saw the salaries were better. The hours were shorter. Any sane person would have taken them. But you…  hadn’t.

And he didn’t know why.

Maybe it was loyalty. Maybe you actually liked this job, despite the long hours, the politics, the absolute mess of it all. 

But lately, he’d been worried.

Because you’d been staring at those offers longer, rubbing at your temples after grueling days on the Hill, looking more and more like you were getting ready to walk away.

And fuck, if it made him selfish, but he didn’t want you to leave.

Because even if he could never have you the way he wanted— never touch you, never kiss you, never pull you into his lap when you stood too close to his desk— at least he could still see you every day.

Talk to you.

Be near you.

And if that was all he could have, then he’d take it.

So no, Bucky didn’t have time to think about his birthday.

Not when he was too busy thinking about work and the bills he had to push through.

And not when, no matter how hard he tried, he kept thinking about you.

—

Today, you were acting… different.

And Bucky had no idea why.

The changes had been subtle, but Bucky was a soldier. He noticed things. 

He noticed the shift in your steps, the tension in your breath. Something about you was… off.

Not bad, just different.

When he walked into his office that morning, there was a coffee waiting on his desk— not unusual, but this time, it came with a little pastry. One that came from the other side of town, from that tiny café he had mentioned in passing, months ago.

Bucky frowned, glancing at you. “What’s this?”

You didn’t even look up from your laptop. “Figured you might want something sweet, sir.”

Yeah, you, he wanted to say, but he kept his mouth shut. Instead, his eyes narrowed. “I– thank you.”

You finally glanced up, and for a second Bucky felt his heart skip a beat.

There was a hint of something— something he couldn't quite pin down. It’s like you knew something, like you were waiting for him to piece something together.

Your lips curled up into an adorably small smile. “You should eat, sir. You have a meeting in fifteen minutes.”

Bucky sighed and mumbled another disgruntled “thank you” before taking a bite, half-distracted as he studied you from across the room.

It was warm.

Did you…?

No, you wouldn’t have gone out of your way to heat it up for him. You had better things to do, a busy schedule today, he had seen it in your calendar himself. And besides, Bucky had perfectly viable hands. He could have just walked to the microwave himself.

—

A few hours later, Bucky came back to his private office after hours of back-to-back grueling, mind-numbing, why-the-fuck-did-he-do-this-to-himself meetings.

By the time he made it back, his brain was more fried than his metal arm had ever been, and he was two seconds away from telling everyone in the building to go fuck themselves.

And then there you were, waiting with a small box in your hands.

Bucky stopped in the doorway. “What is that?” he asked warily.

You blinked back at him. “A present.”

His brow furrowed. “For what?”

You hesitated. Just for a fraction of a second, your fingers tightening around the edges of the box— like you were waiting for him to acknowledge something. You stepped forward and pressed the gift into his hands with a casual shrug. “I saw it and thought of you.”

Bucky’s fingers curled around the box on instinct. He lifted the lid.

It was a leather wrist cuff. Exactly his style, down to the precise shade of black and the subtle silver details.

Bucky stared at it. Then at you. “You just… thought of me?” His voice was rougher than he meant it to be.

You gave another small shrug, “Figured you could use an upgrade, sir.”

Bucky opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Then cleared his throat.

“Thanks,” he said.

You nodded, already turning back to your laptop like this wasn’t a thing. Like you hadn’t just made his heart ache.

What does this mean?

Was it the one-month anniversary of that bill he had pushed through? Was it be nice to your boss day? Was this—

What is it, what is it, what is it???

And why the fuck was his heart beating so goddamn fast?

—

Then, just as Bucky was preparing for the last meeting of the day, you dropped a wrapped package onto his desk.

He just stared at it, slowly looking up at you, brow furrowing.

“Another one?” His voice was almost a whisper.

A secret smile tugged at your lips. “I thought you’d like it.”

Bucky hesitated, before finally reaching for it with his human hand. He unwrapped it carefully, like whatever was inside might shatter if he wasn’t gentle.

A first edition of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Bucky froze, fingers ghosting over the worn leather spine in disbelief.

Because he had mentioned this once. Months ago in a passing comment about an offhanded memory of reading it as a kid, curled up in the Brooklyn Public Library in the 40s. He told you he never owned a copy of it.

And you remembered.

Bucky swallowed hard, his throat suddenly too tight.

“Oh, I—” He stumbled over his words, blinking rapidly. “Thank you. For… everything. I… I didn’t get you anything.”

Your brow furrowed, confused. “Why would you?”

Bucky just stared at you, equally as confused.

Before he could even try to gather his thoughts, his accountant stepped into the doorway, clearing his throat and asking for you.

And just like that, you were gone.

The door clicked shut behind you, leaving Bucky alone in his office.

Then it hit him.

Fuck.

There was only one explanation.

You were going to resign.

You were just trying to be nice because… of course you were. Because you were thoughtful and kind and had never been the type to leave things unfinished.

Buck’s grip tightened around the book.

He should be happy for you, and he was, to an extent. But the thought of not seeing you everyday made him, for lack of a better word, really fucking sad.

—

That night, as Bucky packed up for the day, he let out a long sigh and rubbed a hand down his face. 

“Long day, huh?” You asked

Your voice was sweet and comforting— like honey, like home. He looked up, and there you were, slipping into your coat and putting your laptop away. 

Bucky offered a small, weary smile. “Aren’t they all?”

They were even longer now, knowing you might be handing in your resignation any day now.

You chuckled, slinging your bag over your shoulder. “Well, at least you have that appointment.”

Bucky frowned. “What appointment?”

You gave him an amused look. “The one I scheduled for you.”

Right. That. The appointment that had appeared in his calendar last night. 

Bucky didn’t even question it. You had taken over his schedule months ago, and he had just let you, because it meant he got to see you hover near his desk, flipping through both his physical planner and digital one, tapping a pen against your lip as you said something about his meetings. So if you said he had an appointment, then he had an appointment.

He held the door open for you and turned off the light. 

“Goodnight, sir,” you said, stepping past him, tilting your head up just slightly as you smiled.

He locked the door.

Maybe it was exhaustion. Maybe it was the way you looked at him. Maybe it was the everything about you— but the words slipped out before he could stop them. “Goodnight, sweetheart.”

Fuck.

He hadn’t meant to say that last part. Hadn’t meant to let it slip.

But… he meant it. He meant the affection seeping from this voice. He spent months trying to ignore it.

You blinked, startled, lips parting just slightly. And Bucky—coward that he was—turned on his heel before he could see your reaction.

—

When Bucky arrived at the address of the appointment, he frowned.

A speakeasy?

What the hell kind of meeting was this? Had you seriously scheduled a meeting in a dimly lit bar? He was starting to question your judgment—until he stepped inside and—

“There he is,” Joaquin cheered from the bar. “Took you long enough.”

Sam raised his glass. “Happy birthday, tin can.”

Bucky stopped dead in his tracks, brain scrambled, flipping through the dates in his head. “…It’s my birthday?”

Sam ran a hand down his face. “Jesus Christ.”

Joaquin just grinned. “Yeah, man. Your secretary planned all this. She wanted you to have a good one.”

Bucky’s heart plummeted.

You had done all this?

Oh shit, that's what it was.

The pastry. The wrist cuff. The book. 

Oh, so you weren’t resigning.

You had just remembered his birthday when he hadn’t even remembered himself.

—

The bar was dimly lit, filled with the humming jazz and the clinking of glasses. It wasn’t the kind of place Bucky usually went to, but of course you had picked somewhere like this— quiet. Thoughtful.

Because that’s just how you were.

And fuck, he still couldn’t believe you’d done all this.

He looked at Sam and Joaquin, finally taking in what they were drinking.

“Wait.” He frowned. “Is that non-alc beer?”

Joaquin took a slow sip, unfazed. “Yep.”

Sam leaned back against the bar. “Thought we’d keep it light tonight.”

Bucky’s brow furrowed. “Since when do you two pass up real drinks?”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “Since we wanted to be present on your birthday.”

His grip tightened around his own glass.

Oh.

They knew he couldn’t get drunk. His metabolism burned through alcohol too quickly, making it impossible for him to feel anything from it.

But Sam and Joaquin could, and yet they chose not to. They chose to stay sober. To be here with him, to be with him.

For his birthday.

But Sam just patted him on the shoulder. “Come on, man. No brooding tonight. You’re not alone. We’re here. And she made sure of that.”

Bucky swallowed, glancing down at his drink. “She does nice things for me all the time,” he muttered.

“Yeah,” Joaquin snorted. “This is different, man. You don’t pull strings with Homeland Security and expedite our travel just to be nice.”

Bucky stiffened. “She what?”

“You think we were supposed to be back this early?” Sam shrugged, “She made a few calls, got us cleared faster. Probably took her a couple of days just to get through to the right lines.”

Bucky’s stomach dropped. Oh, fuck.

Sam leaned in, smug as ever. “So. How long have you been in love with her?”

Bucky groaned, rubbing his hands down his face. “I can’t do anything about it.”

Joaquin raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Bucky exhaled sharply. “She’s my secretary. Besides, she doesn’t like me that way.”

Sam scoffed. “Bullshit.”

“She wouldn’t have done all this if she didn’t,” Joaquin pointed out.

Bucky fell silent before jokingly scowling and trying to change the subject.

And he was happy— spending time with friends, surrounded by laughter and stories. He felt loved. He felt wanted.

It was a good night, and when it ended, he knew exactly where he needed to go.

—

Bucky barely remembered getting to your door, barely registered the way his hands shook at his sides, or the fact that his tie was askew, his shirt wrinkled. All he knew was that the night had been good, but now, standing here, face-to-face with your door, he was trying his damn hardest not to cry.

He knocked.

It took a while, but you opened the door.

You looked sleepy, eyes half-lidded and hair messed up from bed, clad in loose cotton pajamas that draped over you.

“Sir?” you murmured, voice thick with sleep.

“You remembered my birthday,” he rasped.

You frowned, tilting your head. “Of course I did.”

His throat tightened.

You said it like a fact, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. You didn’t realise—

Oh, you thought to yourself, did he not remember his own birthday?

His shoulders tensed, his fingers twitched, and he sucked in a sharp breath, trying to push all the overwhelming emotions down, trying to breathe through it.

You offered a gentle smile and stepped aside, opening the door wider. “Do you… want to come in?”

Bucky nodded, stepping inside, but  he didn’t make it more than two steps before his vision blurred.

He tried to swallow it down, tried to keep it together, but the tears came fast.

“You remembered,” he murmured, as you closed the door behind you. “You… I…” he shook his head. “You’re— You’re the reason I didn’t spend tonight alone. You…”

You could only reach over and offer a box of tissues into his hands.

And that was it.

Before he could think, before he could stop himself, he dropped the box and reached for you, pulling you in, wrapping himself around you like he was afraid you’d disappear.

You felt so real. You felt like comfort personified, at least to him.

And you let him break. Let him cling to you, shaking, breath hitching as he buried his face in your shoulder.

You held him through every ragged sob, never pulling away, never letting go.

For five whole minutes, you let him cry into your shoulders.

And when he finally pulled back, eyes wet, cheeks flushed, he blinked at you in horror.

“Oh, shit—that’s unprofessional,” he blurted hoarsely.

But you just shook your head, smiling so softly it made his chest ache. “It’s okay, Bucky.” you whispered.

Not sir. Not Congressman. Not Mr. Barnes.

Just Bucky.

Hearing his name on your lips like that—sweet and gentle—sent him spiraling.

His hands still rested on your waist, his thumbs brushing over your cute cotton pajamas.

His stomach twisted, heat pooling in his stomach, and suddenly he couldn’t stop himself. Suddenly, he had no filter.

You were just so heartbreakingly beautiful, so thoughtful and kind and—god, he had wanted you for so long.

“Fuck,” he muttered, stepping closer. “Fuck.”

Your eyes widened. “Bucky—”

He reached for you, his hands trembling as they cupped your face, his thumbs brushing over your cheekbones like you were the most precious thing in the world

Gently, he tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear, his vibranium lingering just a moment too long.

“Can I kiss you?” His voice cracked, desperate. “Can I—?”

You took a deep breath, struggling to process all this.

God, you wanted to. You wanted to so badly, but—

“It’s against House and Senate ethics rules,” you whispered. “I’m your subordinate.”

Bucky exhaled, pressing his forehead against yours. His grip on your face tightened, just a little for the pressure to feel urgent.

“Resign,” he begged, his voice rough, frantic. Fuck— he had been so afraid of losing you earlier, but now, now he just wanted you to be anyone but his damn secretary. “Take one of those private offers. I know they pay better. I know the hours are easier.”

Your heart pounded. He knew about the offers? About the other jobs, the opportunities waiting for you beyond him?

“B-but I like working for you,” you stammered, your voice barely above a whisper.

Bucky shook his head, his breath warm against your skin. His lips grazed the bridge of your nose, so tender it sent a shiver down your spine.

“How would you like to be mine instead?”

Oh. 

And that was it. That was all it took.

With a desperate whimper, you grabbed him by his loosened tie and yanked him in, crashing your lips against his.

Bucky groaned, a deep, guttural sound as his arms wrapped around you. 

This was a long time coming, and you both knew it.

He pulled you against him like he needed you to breathe, like a man starved.

His lips moved with a hunger you’ve never known before, guiding you back, back, back until your spine met the wall. Until you had nowhere to go except into him.

And you weren’t complaining.

You gasped into his mouth, and he swallowed the sound greedily, his tongue sliding against yours, tilting your chin up, giving himself more, more, more.

His hands were everywhere— skimming down your back, gripping your hips, fingers digging in just enough to make you dizzy. He kissed you like he’d never get the chance again. And you felt his desperation in the way his hands trailed up your ribs, in the way he tangled his fingers in your hair, in the way he kissed you like he never wanted to forget the way you tasted.

You broke apart gasping, foreheads pressed together ​​as if neither of you could bear even an inch of distance.

“I’m giving you my two weeks’ notice,” you whispered sheepishly, cheeks flushed with something a little more than just embarrassment.

Bucky let out a soft laugh, part relief, part disbelief, his lips ghosting over yours, convincing himself that this was real. “Good,” he said.

You giggled quietly as you kissed him again— slower this time, sweeter, a lingering whisper of a touch. “Happy birthday, Bucky.”

If only you knew— you weren’t just his best birthday present. You were his every wish come true.

-end.

Extra notes : I've seen so many people not like Bucky being a congressman, and I get that, but I picture Bucky running for Congress being a lot like Stanley Tucci's character in Conclave lol—he runs not because he wants the job, but because the other candidate running for his district is such an unbearable asshole that he feels morally obligated to step in. Like, "fine, if no one else will do it, I guess it has to be me."

General Bucky taglist:

@hotlinepanda @snflwr-vol6 @ruexj283 @2honeybees @read-just-cant

 @shanksstrawhat @mystictf @globetrotter28 @thebuckybarnesvault@average-vibe

@winchestert101 @mystictf @globetrotter28 @shanksstrawhat @scariusaquarius

@reckless007 @hextech-bros @daydreamgoddess14 @96jnie @pono-pura-vida

@buckyslove1917 @notsostrangerthing @flow33didontsmoke @qvynrand @blackbirdwitch22

@torntaltos @seventeen-x @ren-ni @iilsenewman @slayerofthevampire

@hiphip-horray @jbbucketlist @melotyy @ethereal-witch24 @samfunko

@lilteef @hi172826 @pklol @average-vibe @shanksstrawhat

@shower-me-with-roses @athenabarnes @scarwidow @thriving-n-jiving @dilfsaresohot

But Bucky knew better than to argue with you. Especially when you were sprawled under the umbrella in your swimsuit, sunglasses slipping down your nose, one hand thrown over your forehead like a woman in a tragic period drama.

“Buckyyy,” you said weakly.

He looked over from where he was helping Jamie dig a sandcastle with the yellow shovel. “Yeah, sweetheart?”

“I’m dying.”

Jamie gasped. “Mommy?”

“She’s not dying,” Bucky said calmly.

“I am,” you insisted with a sigh, beads of sweat rolling down your skin that Bucky was really trying not to pay attention to, not while he was building sandcastles with your son. “The sun has chosen me as tribute.”

“Mmm,” Bucky’s mouth twitched into a small smile. “Is that so?”

“Yes,” you frowned, “I need your arm.”

He glanced down at the vibranium arm, then back at you.

Jamie looked between the two of you, very interested. “Daddy’s cold arm?” 

“Daddy’s cold arm,” you confirmed. Jamie knew because when he sprained his ankle last month, Bucky used his arm to “ice” the bruise. 

Bucky huffed a laugh.

Then, without making a big deal out of it, he reached up and detached the arm.

Your eyes widened behind your sunglasses. “Wait. I was joking.”

“No, you weren’t.”

You considered you answer for a second. “I was joking a little.”

“No, you weren’t,” he repeated, because apparently being the love of your life meant that he knew you better than you knew yourself.

He walked over and gently set the vibranium arm beside you on the towel, cooling function already humming faintly through the vibranium.

You immediately wrapped your arm around it.

“Oh my God,” you sighed, pressing your cheek against the cool surface. “I love you.”

Bucky arched an eyebrow and chuckled. “Me or the arm?”

“At this exact moment,” You tilted your head, “I need you to be emotionally secure enough not to ask that.”

Jamie toddled over and patted the arm with both little hands. His eyes went huge. “Cold!”

“Very cold,” you said reverently at his adorable little face, blue eyes not unlike Bucky’s own. 

Jamie turned to Bucky, delighted. “Daddy, mommy has your arm.”

“I know, buddy.”

“You only have one hand now.”

Bucky looked down at himself, then at Jamie. “Yeah. Looks like I’m gonna need help with the castle.”

Oh. Daddy needs me! He seemed to think. 

Jamie straightened like he had just been promoted to general.

You watched the exact second your six-year-old became the most important construction worker on the beach.

“I can help,” Jamie said, very solemnly.

“I was hoping you would.”

Bucky went back to the sandcastle one-handed. To be fair, he could still do most things better than most people with one hand. 

He packed sand with his right palm, dragged the shovel toward him, smoothed down walls with his fingers. But every time one of Jamie’s little structures needed steadying, every time a bucket had to be tipped or a shell had to be placed or the moat needed “more water but not too much water,” he looked to Jamie.

“Can you hold this side for me?”

Jamie rushed in. “I got it, daddy!”

“Good job,” he smiled, “Don’t let it fall.”

Jamie’s little face went slightly pink with concentration. “I won’t.”

You hugged the cold arm closer, your heart melting for an entirely different reason.

Bucky could have done it faster on his own. You knew that. He knew that. But Jamie absolutely did not know that.

To Jamie, his father needed him.

To Jamie, he was not just watching the castle happen. He was making it happen.

He held the bucket while Bucky packed wet sand inside. He pressed both hands against one crooked wall while Bucky reinforced the other side. He selected shells with the concentration of a professional jeweller. He added one piece of seaweed to the top and declared it a flag.

Bucky squinted at it. “Looks like kelp.”

Jamie gave him a look.

“I mean,” Bucky corrected himself immediately. “Strong flag, buddy.”

Jamie nodded. “It means no bad guys.”

“Good rule.”

“And no stepping on mommy.”

Bucky’s eyes flicked to you, curled shamelessly around his detached arm like a sun-drunk cat. “Definitely no stepping on your mom.”

You lifted one hand lazily. “This kingdom has great laws, baby.”

Jamie beamed.

The castle got bigger. As it got bigger, it got stranger. Then, Jamie insisted it had a garage, because Jamie insisted all castles needed garages, and Bucky, being a better father than anyone had any right to be, didn’t argue with the logic.

“For what kind of car?” Bucky asked.

Jamie frowned like the answer was obvious. “A fast one.”

“Right. Of course.”

“A blue one.”

“Blue fast car. Got it.”

“And it flies.”

Bucky paused. “A flying car?”

Jamie nodded.

So Bucky built the garage one handed. 

The left side collapsed twice, and Jamie gasped both times like there had been casualties.

“I need you,” Bucky said seriously. “This wall’s no good without you.”

Jamie dropped to his knees beside him. “I fix it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You hold it, Daddy.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bucky held the wall while Jamie patted wet sand onto the side with tiny, clumsy, determined hands. Half of it stuck, and half of it slid down. But none of it mattered, because Bucky looked at your son like he had just watched him solve cold fusion.

“There,” Jamie said, sitting back on his heels. “I did it!”

Bucky smiled proudly. “You did.”

Jamie looked down at the castle, then back at him. “You needed me.”

Bucky went very still.

It was brief, but you saw that little pause he got sometimes when love hit a wound he forgot he still had.

Then he reached out and brushed sand from Jamie’s cheek with his thumb.

“Yeah,” Bucky said quietly. “I did.”

Jamie accepted that like it was simple. Because to him, it was.

His daddy needed help. He helped. Because of both their efforts, the castle stood.

The world was very easy at six years old.

By the time the tide started creeping closer, the castle had three towers, a moat, one flying-car garage, sixteen shells, a kelp flag, and Jamie’s full emotional investment.

When the first little wave reached the edge of the moat, Jamie gasped. “No!”

Bucky turned immediately. “You want me to move it?”

You lifted your head. “Bucky, you cannot move a sandcastle.”

He looked at you. You looked at him.

He looked back at the castle like he was genuinely considering whether he could get a big enough shovel to move a sandcastle.

“Don’t,” you warned.

Jamie, thankfully, solved the crisis by flinging himself into Bucky’s side.

“It’s okay,” he said, though he sounded heartbroken. “Ocean can have it.”

Bucky wrapped his one arm around him and pulled him close. “That’s generous.”

Jamie sniffed. “But not the garage.”

“No,” Bucky agreed. “That part’s between us and the ocean.”

You laughed into the vibranium arm.

Bucky glanced back at you, sun-flushed, hair messy from the wind, one arm missing and the other full of your son.

He looked perfect.

Eventually Jamie wore himself out completely. He crawled into Bucky’s lap, sandy and buzzing with sleep, mumbling something about blue flying cars against his father’s chest.

Bucky sat under the umbrella with him, broad shoulder curved protectively around Jamie’s small one.

You scooted closer, still holding the detached arm. “Do you want this back?” you asked.

Bucky looked at you, then at Jamie asleep against him, then at the arm tucked against your cheek.

“Keep it,” he said softly. 

You chuckled and kissed his cheek, “It was made for dangerous missions.”

“It’s on one.”

You smiled. “Taking care of me is a dangerous mission?”

“Keeping you comfortable is my life’s work.”

You laughed, and he only smiled wider. Jamie shifted in his sleep, one small hand fisting in Bucky’s sleeveless shirt.

Bucky looked down at him, and there it was again. That disbelief and gratitude all the same.

He had been made into a weapon once.

Now his metal arm was keeping his wife cool, his only hand was holding his sleeping son, and a crooked sandcastle with a flying-car garage was being swallowed by the sea in front of him.

Shuri’s desert-grade cooling system had probably not been built for this.

But it was hard to imagine a better use.

—

There were a few things you could respect Steve Rogers for.

He always seemed to know what was best for the team, he had a good head on his shoulders, and he always tried to find a way to resolve conflict with the least amount of bloodshed possible. He was a respectable man—respectable enough for people like you to follow him into hell.

But there were also plenty of things you disliked about him.

Namely, once he had a plan, he stuck to it whether the people around him agreed or not. Unfortunately for you, his current plan involved you babysitting the world’s most wanted Hydra assassin.

And that was the Winter Soldier.

“What!” you barked in disbelief, throwing your hands in the air. “No! I am not watching him. I’m coming with you—”

Steve was already gearing up—wearing the suit he stole from the Smithsonian and strapping on his shield last.

“No,” he replied, sharp and firm. “Trust me, it’s better if you stay put. If I show up with Buck by my side, it’s not gonna look good.”

Steve motioned towards Bucky, who just stood there looking about as useful and clueless as a bag of bricks.

The kicked puppy look on his face almost made you feel bad for him. Almost. Because if it weren’t for him, and your own stubborn loyalty to Steve, nobody would be in this mess in the first place.

“Look, you’re going to talk to Stark, right? Nat’s with him. Let me come. I can talk to her while you work things out with Stark, and maybe we can figure out a better solution—”

“We shouldn’t even consider talking to Nat. She’s in deep with Tony and the Accords. And besides, I don’t trust—” Steve cut himself off, his lips pressing into a thin line as his eyes flickered between you and Bucky. “Never mind.”

You crossed your arms and narrowed your eyes. “Don’t trust what?”

The tension in the parking garage turned uncomfortable really fast.

No one dared speak or move—it felt like a bunch of kids walking in on Mom and Dad arguing and refusing to pick sides. Even though you already knew what he was going to say, you kept your eyes fixed on Steve with a silent threat for him to continue.

Steve sighed and stepped forward, mentally cursing himself for letting the words slip.

“You Widows—they’re known to be deceptive,” Steve explained as calmly and gently as he could, though it didn’t help.

“I just… can’t risk you talking to Natasha. It’s too dangerous.”

Offended wasn’t even the right word for it.

Everyone in this line of work—including you, especially you — knew about the Black Widows and their reputation. You were a group of young girls broken down and rebuilt into perfect chameleons. Widows were trained to whisper sweet nothings into a victim’s ear, only to hold a blade to their throat, slit it without remorse, and go about the rest of their day as if nothing had happened.

Steve wasn’t wrong, but the hypocrisy of his logic made you feel sour.

He didn’t trust your background, yet in the very same breath, he was willing to leave you entirely alone with Bucky—his best friend, and the only piece of his past he had left. If you were truly so deceptive, so inherently untrustworthy, what was stopping you from turning Bucky over to Stark the second Steve cleared this garage?

You wanted to cry. You had been loyal to Steve, standing by his side while the rest of the team split up and tore at each other’s throats—and this was how he repaid you? By humiliating you in front of everyone?

But you’d die before you let a single tear fall in front of Steve, or anyone else for that matter.

Swallowing the lump in your throat, you tightened your jaw until your teeth hurt and forced your gaze away.

“Fine.”

You were going to protect his precious best friend—not out of submission, but to shove his own prejudice right back down his throat. You would prove to him, definitively, that you could be trusted.

“I’ll watch over him,” you added, trying to keep cool. “I’ll keep my comms open, too—just in case you want to pop in and check if he’s still alive.”

Steve returned your sarcasm with a relieved exhale. “Thank you—”

“Don’t mention it,” you cut him off, waving a hand dismissively as you walked past Bucky—who was standing there looking like a child of divorce. You headed for your motorcycle.

“Are you coming, Barnes?”

Before joining you at the bike, Bucky walked over to Steve with a fond look in his eyes. They shared the same brotherly hug they'd been exchanging since they reunited. Steve mumbled something into his shoulder—probably reassurance that everything was going to be okay—before finally sending him off to you.

You rolled your eyes, slipping your helmet on to block them out.

As everyone else cleared out of the garage, Bucky walked over to your bike. You handed him a helmet, and he started strapping it on.

“Should I drive?” He asked.

You blinked at him, your face going blank despite him not being able to see it.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’ve been hiding in Bucharest for a while,” Bucky explained. “I know some discreet spots where they won’t find us.”

Even though neither of you could see the other’s expression, you couldn’t shake the feeling that Bucky was testing your competence—and on top of everything that had led to this moment, especially that little conversation with Steve, your patience was wearing dangerously thin.

“Barnes, I assure you that whatever spot you’re thinking of, a SWAT team is already sweeping it.” You revved the engine. “Get on.”

Bucky muffled a deep sigh inside his helmet. Based on his stiff posture, you thought he might argue, but he finally conceded, swinging his long leg over the back of the seat.

As you gripped the handlebars, you waited for him to hold on, but nothing happened.

Glancing at your side mirrors, you saw him awkwardly plant his hands at the edge of his seat, leaning back as far away from you as the space would allow.

“I’m gonna need you to hold on,” you ordered without looking back.

Bucky hesitated, not moving an inch.

Annoyed, you killed the revving engine for a second and glared at him over your shoulder. “Do you want to fall off?”

Bucky still didn’t budge. He kept his posture uncomfortably stiff, his eyes boring down at the empty space between his hips and the arch of your back.

“I’ll be fine right here.”

You couldn’t believe the gall of this guy. You had been tasked with something that was supposed to be so simple—tedious, sure, but easy enough—yet he was making your job twice as difficult. You glared at him through your visor, your voice strict even through the muffle of your headgear.

“Steve entrusted me to look after you. If he finds out on the evening news that his most wanted best friend fell off the back of my motorcycle and got captured by the government, then he’s never going to talk to me again. And everyone who is risking their lives for you did it all for nothing because you chose to be stubborn. Now, I am not going to repeat myself. Hold. On. To. Me.”

You couldn’t make out his expression, but slowly and reluctantly, he leaned forward and wrapped his thick arms around your waist.

“Tighter,” you commanded.

From the short time Bucky had known you, he already knew there was no point in arguing.

He let out a sigh into his helmet and wrapped his arms around you just a little tighter than before—but still kept his hold loose and, well… as respectful as he could manage.

“Bucky, I need you to hold me tighter,” you urged again.

It had already been a good five minutes since everyone left—and here you were, stuck with the man who, if caught, could risk your life and your position, all because he refused to hold onto you properly.

To you, this was nothing but a nuisance.

But for Bucky…

Bucky was holding onto every thread and reminder left from the forties of what it meant to be a respectful man. Especially since it had been so long since he’d not only been this close to a woman, but held one.

“Tighter!” you shrieked, patience finally snapping.

“Fuck, you know what? Fine!” he snapped back, adjusting his hips so that his chest was pressed up right against your back, wrapping his strong arms around you tightly enough to make you gasp.

“Is that tight enough for you?”

“Perfect,” you croaked sarcastically.

Without giving him another second to respond, you kicked the bike into gear and finally steered it out of the garage.

You were determined to keep your pride intact. His broad chest was pressed up against your back, trapping your body heat until your leather jacket felt burning hot against your skin. His metal arm was a hard band across your midsection, while his flesh arm gripped you still.

You were so small compared to him. He could easily take over—yet here he was, being your obedient puppy.

“Where are you taking me?” Bucky shouted over the rush of wind as the two of you whipped through the busy streets of Bucharest.

“To an amusement park,” you shouted back. “Don’t you want to ride a roller coaster?”

Bucky let out a tired sigh.

You managed to find sanctuary at an abandoned, overgrown rooftop greenhouse. Located on the very outskirts of Bucharest, it was far enough from the city center to avoid suspicion, but still close enough to keep your comms within range of Steve.

You paced the rooftop, feeling restless as your mind overworked with what Steve and the rest of the team could be doing right now.

Were they already fighting? Would Stark actually listen to reason and put all of this to rest?

Letting out a defeated sigh, you kicked a stray pebble, watching it skid across the concrete of the rooftop.

“This is ridiculous,” you mumbled to yourself. “Stuck on babysitting duty when I should be out there.”

Lifting your head, your eyes locked onto Bucky. He was standing dangerously close to the edge of the roof, peering down at the distant streets below.

“Hey!” you barked, pointing a finger at him like a mother scolding a child. “Step away from the edge! You’re going to fall.”

“I’m just keeping a lookout,” Bucky mumbled, his back still facing you as he refused to step away from the edge.

“You’re just making my job harder than it already is,” you argued, throwing your hands up in exasperation.

You pointed aggressively to the dusty wooden crate tucked against the brick wall.

“Just go sit over there or something.”

Bucky’s brow twitched the same time his patience snapped. He turned around to finally face you, his jaw clenched so tight his molars were crying for help.

“Would you stop talking to me like I’m a child?” he snapped, stepping away from the edge—not because you had ordered him to, but to match your hostile stance as he stalked toward you. “I’m sorry you got stuck with the shitty job of watching over me, but I can handle myself just fine, thanks.”

His defensive outburst made you raise a brow.

“Oh, really? You can handle yourself just fine?” you crossed your arms and scoffed. “Is that why the entire global government is hunting you down right now? Is that why Steve had to throw away his entire reputation just to keep you out of a cage? Because you’ve got it all handled?”

Bucky’s chest heaved, his fingers curling into tight fists at his sides.

The mention of Steve’s sacrifice definitely hit a nerve, you could see the guilt in his eyes.

A part of you wished you hadn’t said it at all, and you were just about ready swallow your pride and apologize, until…

“You’re from the Red Room,” he said, stepping closer. An involuntary shudder went down your spine. “You’ve done terrible things in the past—just as I have. You know exactly what it’s like to have someone like Steve bend over backwards for lowlifes like us.”

You didn’t realize just how close he was standing until his hot breath hit your face, only shortening your temper.

“We don’t ask for the help, yet they do it for us anyway,” Bucky’s voice graveled into a whisper. “Don’t talk down to me like you don’t know what it’s like. When in fact, you’re worse—”

You were already seeing red before he could even finish his sentence.

You quickly unsheathed a pocket knife from your belt and lunged at him, aiming straight for his throat just as a threat to silence him.

“You don’t know a damn thing about me!”

But Bucky was faster.

He brought his metal forearm up just in time to block the blade, making an ugly scraping sound. He twisted his wrist to disarm you, but your grip on the knife was tight. While one arm was held captive by his, you used your other to try and deliver a punch—which he also dodged.

You resorted to your legs, bucking them up to deliver hard kicks to his stomach. He grunted after each hit your leg managed to put out, but his hands moved quickly to grab the collar of your jacket and hurl you backwards to the nearest wall.

You cried out, face scrunching into a wince as your back slammed into hard brick.

The impact made you drop your knife. Bucky pressed his heavy body right against yours, aggressively tucking his legs between your thighs so you couldn’t use the space to swing your knees at him again.

“I can’t believe this is who Steve decided to trust me with,” he hissed in your face.

“Get off of me!” you yelled, squirming beneath his body.

“You drew your knife at me,” Bucky roared back. “Maybe Steve was right. All you Widows have a tendency to break your vows whenever things go even remotely south for you—”

You weren’t going to sit there and take his insults. Gritting your teeth with a brace, you pulled your head back and slammed your forehead directly into his face.

Bucky groaned out in pain, his grip on you loosening as he stumbled back with a hand to his face. Seizing the small window of opportunity, you shoved his chest away and dove towards the floor, reaching for the dropped pocket knife.

Before your fingers could even brush the hilt, his large hands grabbed you from behind and slammed you right back into the brick wall again.

You let out a breathless gasp as your face was forcefully squished up against the brick.

Bucky’s flesh hand came to the back of your head, pushing your skull firmly against the wall to keep your vision pinned away from him. At the same time, his metal hand gathered both your wrists behind your back, locking your two arms prone.

“Let go of me!”

You started to violently squirm and writhe, trying to buck your back against him—to tire him out, but Bucky moved his entire lower body to seal the space. His hips pressed tightly up against your bottom, his chest to your back, pinning you completely helpless as you were left trapped between him and the wall.

“No. I don’t care if you’re Steve’s friend, or if Steve respects you,” Bucky hissed, his breath right at your ear. “If I find my life in danger—after finally being free from Hydra, I’ll kill anyone who gets in my way. Even you.”

Bucky’s chest was heaving against your back.

He was angry.

He hated how much a woman like you could get under his skin with just a few sarcastic words and petty jabs.

One moment he was flustered just holding onto your waist during the bike ride, and now, he had you pinned up against the wall, your life completely in his hands.

You grit your teeth. “Dammit, Barnes—”

“—do you hear me? Hello? Anyone copy?”

You and Bucky froze. His eyes went wide as he leaned his head down toward the earpiece tucked just behind your earlobe where Steve’s voice was emitting. You glared at Bucky through the corner of your eye.

“Steve’s calling for me. I can’t answer it unless you let me go.”

“Status check. Code Blue-Alpha. Repeat, Code Blue-Alpha. Do you copy?”

Bucky was hesitant.

He didn’t want to let you go—afraid that you might actually threaten his life again the second he backed off.

Instead of releasing you, his metal hand kept the tight grip on both your wrists, while his flesh hand finally let your head free. Shifting his body closer, his finger reached around to press the button on your earpiece, activating the channel and allowing you to speak.

“Steve,” you breathed, catching your breath. “I’m here.”

“There you are!” Steve let out a relieved, staticky sigh through the comms. “How are things over there? Are you two alright?”

You and Bucky side eyed each other.

The situation was ridiculous—the two of you were still tangled in each other’s limbs, bodies pressed tight against one another, chests heaving in sync as the adrenaline from the fight slowly began to die down.

“We’re fine,” you lied. “Your boyfriend’s still alive.”

Bucky huffed a disbelieving laugh right against your ear. He didn’t say it out loud, but you could already hear his thoughts. This fucking woman.

Steve wasn’t laughing, however. His voice was serious.

“Listen to me carefully. We just got word that there are traps set up around the highest points of Bucharest. They’re wired to release an airborne toxin—specifically meant to target the biology of a super soldier.”

You watched Bucky’s eyes. His brows furrowed, concentrating on Steve’s voice as his grip on your wrists loosened slightly.

“They’re trying to smoke him out,” you reasoned. “What about the regular civilians? Will it affect them?”

“No. Just us. I’m already wearing a rebreather mask on my end,” Steve continued with a rasp. It sounded like he was running from something. “But Bucky doesn’t have one. You need to keep him inside and be extremely careful.”

There was a cold knot forming in the pit of your stomach.

Steve was thinking about Bucky, and Bucky was thinking about himself, but neither of them knew your full medical history—how could they?

During your time in the Red Room, they had pumped your veins full of a biochemical serum. It wasn’t the exact super soldier formula that created Captain America, but it was a heavily modified variation meant to enhance your physical abilities, speed up your healing, and maximize your strength.

It was what made you into a Widow. And right now, you had no idea if that same chemical footprint was enough to trigger the airborne toxin.

“Steve,” you swallowed hard, your voice shaking with worry. “How is Natasha doing? Is she with you?”

If Natasha was fine, then maybe you would be, too.

Behind you, Bucky must have sensed the sudden spike of panic in your posture. He took a step back and finally released his tight grip on your wrists—relinquishing his hold over your body.

He inhaled a deep breath to steady himself, but stopped midway, choking as if something had gotten stuck in his lungs. His chest hitched. He sniffed the air again, letting out a harsh, hacking cough in return.

“Fuck—” Bucky choked out, his hand flying to his throat.

You spun around, catching the way Bucky stumbled blindly against a wooden crate. Your heart started to race in a panic.

“Steve?” you called into the earpiece, your eyes scanning the rooftop for any signs of the trap he had just mentioned over comms. “Steve, do you copy?”

There was no answer.

The static on the other end had cut out completely. Steve had already ended the line to focus on his own escape—either that, or his comms had been jammed. You tapped the button behind your earlobe again desperately, but there was nothing.

“Steve! Respond!”

Bucky called your name from where he held himself against the crate—a sound that was broken, small, and almost whiny.

“Bucky!” you cried out, abandoning the comm line completely and focusing entirely on the man you were tasked to protect. “Are you okay?”

“Hot,” he winced, letting out a deep groan. “It feels... hot.”

You knelt by his side, the palm of your hand flying to his forehead to check his temperature. Your eyes widened at how warm he had suddenly become. He wasn’t nearly this hot when he had you pressed up against the wall just mere seconds ago.

“Fuck. Did the toxins get to you already? But how! We’re on the outskirts—”

Bucky lazily raised a finger just past your head. You whipped your head around, squinting past the sunlight that pierced the clouds.

There, you saw a hazy, almost pollen like fog beginning to drift from across the rooftop building far from you.

“Shit,” you cursed, wrapping your arm around his waist and positioning his heavy arm over your shoulders to help him up.

“Come on, we’ve gotta hide you somewhere. You’re too weak to run if you get caught.”

You tried lifting him up, but he was too heavy to carry just on your own. You groaned beneath him, using every bit of your strength to try and keep him steady.

While you struggled, Bucky’s breathing grew heavier. His eyes were half lidded and unfocused—he could barely keep them open.

“Stay with me, Bucky,” you murmured against him with a grunt, dragging your feet to get him inside the greenhouse.

It was a glass enclosure, but the walls were muddied with dirt and the plants were overgrown enough to provide decent cover. It wasn’t as indoors as you’d like, but it was the closest place you could take him with your current strength.

Bucky’s eyes fluttered down to you, letting out a heavy sigh.

“I think… I need to sit.”

Suddenly, he felt like he was suffocating in his own clothes. The breeze in Bucharest was cool, but his body felt like it was burning up from the inside. What was even worse was your touch—having your body pressed up against his made him react in ways he never thought he would.

Or at least, not anytime soon.

You stumbled over an overgrown branch, losing your balance and your grip on Bucky.

“Shit—I’m sorry,” you mumbled.

Bucky lay on the ground, adjusting his body so that he was flat on his back. His heart was beating rapidly in his chest, the organ trying to tear its way out. His vision and mind went hazy, and his flesh hand was clammy.

The tension was even worse whenever he looked at you. His pupils would dilate the second his eyes landed on your body, his breath getting stuck in his throat.

You knelt down, trying to get your hands under his arms to haul him back up, but Bucky flinched away with a sharp hiss.

“No,” he rasped. “Don’t… don’t touch me.”

You furrowed your brows. You had no idea what kind of side effects the airborne toxins had been released—Steve hadn’t specified. But right now, you couldn’t afford to stand around and ponder it. You groaned, trying to lift him up one more time, but your body suddenly felt even weaker than before.

Your knees buckled as a strange aroma began to drift into your nose. It was a musky, almost tangy smell filling the deep pockets of your lungs.

“W-what the hell…?”

Bucky’s chest rose and fell heavily from where he lay on the floor, his dark, half lidded eyes meeting yours. “Do you feel it, too?”

Meeting Bucky’s eyes in this state was the worst thing you could have possibly done.

Suddenly, the greenhouse felt smaller—a glass enclosure closing in on the two of you. Your body felt molten, and you wanted nothing more than to strip your clothes off.

Grunting, you began to pull down the zipper of your jacket, and Bucky inhaled sharply.

“Hey—what… what are you doing?”

“It’s hot,” you breathed, your head spinning. “Need to take my jacket off.”

The heat inside your own skin was hurting, but for Bucky, it was absolute torture.

The super soldier serum in his veins processed the toxin at an accelerated rate, making his flesh feel like it was working overtime. His blood was rushing—hot and heavy—pooling lower until he was completely and unapologetically hard under his pants.

He wanted to rip his own clothes off. He just hoped you wouldn’t notice the tent poking between his legs—or maybe a dark part of him did, and he wanted you to offer to take care of it.

Fuck. What was he thinking?

But it wasn’t like you were thinking straight, either. Abandoning your jacket, you were left in just a tank top that clung tightly to your chest, offering Bucky a full view of your tits. You knelt right back down beside him, your hands clumsily reaching for his shoulders to lift him up again.

This was going bad for Bucky.

Too close.

Too close. Too close. Too close.

Bucky caught your scent—a natural floral and feminine smell mixed with an underlying musk of sweat that made his head spin with an overwhelmingly dangerous amount of desire.

“Stop,” Bucky choked out, his voice dropping deep and dangerous.

His right hand shot out, wrapping tightly around your bare wrist, while his metal hand gripped your hip to keep you from leaning any closer.

“Don’t... don’t do this. Get away from me right now.”

“Bucky,” you panted. “I need you to get up for me.”

“I can’t,” he groaned, letting his head fall back against the floor. “I mean it. Move away… or I swear to God, I won’t be able to control myself—”

Your gaze drifted down his body, your eyes widening at the prominent bulge waiting for you between his large, strong legs.

It throbbed and twitched beneath his pants, growing harder and more unbearable by the second.

This position was too compromising—too vulnerable, and far too dangerous for you both.

Bucky had no strength to get up on his own, and you could feel your own body betraying you by the second. You would have to relieve this for him now, or it would be doom for you both.

“Goddammit,” you cursed, bracing yourself mentally.

You moved to cradle Bucky between your thighs, mounting his lap while he was pinned weak to the floor.

His eyelids flew open, and he used all the strength left in his body to lift his head and stare up at you, bewildered and off guard.

“What the hell are you doing—!”

“We need to take care of this,” you muttered, grinding your hips tight and firm against his, making him let out a groan.

“We need to fix your problem before they find us. They set up that trap not too far from this building. There’s a chance they’re already scouting it out. It’s only a matter of time—”

Bucky’s eyes were filled with hungry lust as he stared at the point where your hips were rubbing against his. He was so hard it fucking hurt. He didn’t dare touch you—because if his hands made contact with your waist, with that warm, smooth skin just beneath your tank top that was begging to be licked, he would probably embarrass himself and cum in his pants right then and there.

“Shit—wait. Hold on. I—fuck.”

You reached for his zipper, tugging it down, and the sudden movement made his hips buck up against yours.

“Now’s not the time to talk, Barnes,” you panted, the toxin blurring your thoughts. “We need to take care of this now, or we’ll be in deep trouble. And Steve’ll have my head—”

“Fuck, shit. Wait—! I’ve never…”

You were losing your patience. You stopped your hands, glaring down at him. “Never what, Barnes?”

His face burned an embarrassing shade of red. He refused to look at you, his eyes suddenly far more interested in the overgrown plants next to him than your face.

“I’ve never had… sex,” he admitted quietly, swallowing hard.

Oh.

Oh.

Bucky was a virgin?

“Oh my god,” you whispered.

You felt incredibly foolish straddling him with your hands still hovering over his open zipper.

You felt shameful—you felt like a harlot, throwing yourself onto him and thinking you could resolve this entire crisis just by getting him off with a few strokes. You felt dirty, humiliated, and deeply guilty.

“I’m so sorry,” you stammered, quickly scrambling off his lap.

Your legs felt like jelly—a testament to the toxin fully taking hold of your own system.

“Shit. I’m so sorry, Bucky. I didn’t know. I mean, that doesn’t excuse it, but—”

“No,” Bucky rasped, his hand catching your wrist before you could back away entirely.

His grip on you was so tight and dominant, it felt like a pickaxe slowly chipping away at your remaining resolve.

“Don’t go,” he broke out, his voice a desperate, tortured rasp. “Please. Keep going. It hurts. I need you to relieve it.”

If he had said that to reassure you, you felt anything but. In fact, you felt even guiltier because of how broken and desperate he sounded.

“Bucky, I can’t.”

His brows knitted together tightly, his face twisting unpleasantly—he was upset.

“Why the hell not?”

“Because—”

“Because what!” he barked back, rolling onto his side to give you his full attention. You tried really hard not to look at the outline of his hard cock pressing against his pants. “You threw yourself onto me. You promised Steve you’d take care of me—so you’re going to come back here and finish it.”

“Bucky, I’m not going to be your first!” you yelled out, and that finally stunned him into silence.

Your chest was heaving with a frustration you didn’t even know how to name.

With confusion and a flash of embarrassment taking over his gaze, his fingers finally loosened, releasing your wrist reluctantly.

“I’m sorry,” you said, much softer this time. “I’m sorry. Just… if you need a minute to take care of it yourself, I’ll be over there—” you pointed to the far end of the greenhouse “—I’ll keep watch.”

“And what about you?” he asked, his dark eyes trailing down your body in a way that did absolutely nothing to help your situation. “Don’t you need to take care of yourself, too? You feel it, don’t you? That… primal need.”

You pressed your lips tight and tore your gaze away, not trusting yourself to look at his pained, desperate expression. You couldn’t look at the way his body was open and inviting you back in, or the way his voice went so coarse when he said the word need.

“I’ll be fine.”

You were not fine. And Bucky certainly wasn’t, either.

You tried to keep your concentration focused outside the greenhouse, forcing your hazy eyes to stare through the glass panes to keep watch. But your gaze kept betraying you, drifting right back to the corner to watch Bucky where he sat propped up against a wooden crate, his legs spread wide.

His chest was still rising and falling heavily, his long hair damp with sweat and falling over his darkened eyes.

You had told him to take care of his business, but he hadn’t made a single move since you stepped away from him. Your own urges were becoming impossible to control, too. You found yourself squeezing your thighs tightly together, trying to find any form of friction, any relief from the ache that had been building up ever since the toxin first wafted into your lungs.

It didn’t help that you could feel Bucky’s eyes on you, watching you from behind, tracing your silhouette.

It felt telepathic—as if his silent gaze was speaking directly to your body, knowing you wanted exactly what he was desperately craving too.

No. You couldn’t go to him.

If you walked up to him right now, neither of you would have any control left, and you would both submit to the drug completely.

He was a virgin. You couldn’t take something so precious from him. He had already been through a lifetime of torture and lost autonomy. You wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you took his first time over a stupid, weaponized toxin.

Sex was meant to be reserved for someone special—and you were far from it.

“Bucky,” you finally called out, still refusing to turn around and look at him. “Are you okay back there?”

“…No,” he muttered with a thick rasp. “Come here.”

You sucked in a breath.

Every instinct in your brain was telling you stay exactly where you were, but your body was entirely out of your control now.

Your feet dragged you across the dirty floor until you were standing over him again.

You dropped to your knees in front of him with a sigh. Trying to frame it as purely medical check, you lifted a hand and pressed your palm flat against his forehead to check his temperature once more.

He was still burning up, but the fever felt even worse.

Every hot breath he exhaled hit your exposed collarbones, and the way he was sitting—legs spread wide with you kneeling directly between them—made you feel like a mouse being lured into a trap.

Realizing just how dangerous this proximity was, you swallowed hard and began to pull your hand away. But Bucky didn’t let you. His fingers wrapped tightly around your wrist to hold you back. He let his heavy eyelids flutter shut and slowly leaned his head into your touch, rubbing his stubbled cheek right against your warm, open palm.

“Stay,” Bucky pleaded as he his metal hand came to hold your hip. “Stay here. I need you.”

A breathless groan rumbled warmly into your palm. You froze, your eyes locked onto him as you watched the lethal super soldier—the very man who had pinned you up against the wall just minutes ago—unravel helplessly right in front of you.

As he held you there, you felt an unbearable heat trickle between your legs.

Your cunt pulsed, and you squeezed your thighs tightly together to soothe the desperate ache spreading through your lower body.

The friction was a temporary fix, but the tight grind of your thighs only made you ache for more.

Bucky nuzzled his face deeper into your palm, inhaling your scent like a dying man catching a breath of fresh air.

Then, his parted lips pressed a soft, wet kiss against the center of your hand. And another one. Then another, right against the inner skin of your wrist.

“Bucky… what are you—”

“Please,” Bucky whispered against your skin, looking up at you through his dark, thick lashes.

His eyes were dilated, the blue completely washed out by a lust that made you burn from the inside out.

“I need you.”

“You… You don’t know what you’re saying,” you muttered, shaking your head in a desperate attempt to find your reason.

Bucky held your hand tighter, refusing to give you any chance to escape.

“Please, don’t go. Fuck—I need you so bad, it hurts,” he choked out. “This ache won’t go away until you help me take care of it.”

His eyes never left yours. Under normal circumstances, every confession leaving his lips should have left him feeling deeply ashamed or embarrassed. But right now, he didn’t care. His body was on fire, and your touch was only stroking each and every flame.

“I know I’m a virgin, but I don’t care—and you shouldn’t, either,” Bucky rasped.

His large hand covered yours, forcing your palm down his chest—slick and damp with sweat—until he guided your hand directly over the heavy erection waiting for you beneath his pants.

“I can make you feel so good. I can fix this for both of us. Please.” He begged.

You let out a shudder as his large hand swallowed yours, guiding your palm to slide up and down against the length of his cock. Even through the denim, you could feel him throb and harden rapidly beneath your touch, his breathing turning incredibly shallow and fast.

“It hurts so bad,” he groaned, his eyes unhinged by the toxin. “Doesn’t it hurt you, too?”

You looked down, biting your lip hard at the sight of Bucky’s thick bulge pressing directly against your fingers. He twitched beneath your touch.

There was nothing you wanted more than to finish the job you had started earlier—to finish unzipping his pants, sink right down onto him, and show him exactly what it felt like to be inside a woman for the very first time.

But you couldn’t.

Not like this.

“Bucky, I can’t—” you whispered so softly, it sounded like a whine. “I can’t be your first.”

Bucky trembled a sigh, his head falling back against the wooden crate. But he didn’t let go of your wrist. He began to subtly shift his weight, rocking his hips up in a tilt that forced his thick length to slide right against your captive palm.

“Why not?” he murmured, deep and gravelly. “You don’t think… you don’t think I’d do a good job?”

His question was so innocent, though the very thing he was doing wasn’t. He kept grinding his clothed cock into your hand—seeking pleasure from just your palm—and you felt yourself going insane.

“No, it’s not that,” you tried to pull your hand back, but he held you tight, using your trapped hand for his own pleasure. “Sex is supposed to be something that you save. And your virginity is something you give away to someone special. Not… not a casual teammate—not someone like me—”

Bucky interrupted you with a groan, his hips bucking up higher against your palm. All of your words went in one ear and out the other. The only thing he could process right now was how good your hand felt—and how much better it would feel if he sunk into something tight, wet, and warm.

Like your mouth… or your…

“I don’t care about any of that,” he choked out.

His hips rolled into your palm with a needy jerk.

“I need this. I need you. I’d be more than happy to give it to you. Fuck—I’ll give it to you so good. You’re the one I want. I need you—”

Bucky’s mouth dropped into an o shape, a sharp hiss of breath filling his lungs as his hips bucked uncontrollably. His eyes never left yours as he suddenly started spilling in his pants. A warm, thick liquid began to seep through his jeans, leaving your fingers sticky with his seed and musk.

You couldn’t believe it.

Bucky had just finished right in his pants.

“Bucky…”

His face was unreadable.

His head was tilted back against the crate, his eyes boring into yours through heavy lids and long lashes. He was breathing heavily, trying to catch his breath while letting his cum shamelessly pool in the tight space of his pants.

You figured he’d pull your hand away any second now—that finally releasing all that pent up frustration would make him feel well enough to move to a safer location.

You tried not to point it out to save him from the embarrassment. And most importantly, you tried not to give in to the intense sensation of his warm spunk right beneath your fingertips.

“You should be feeling better now, right? We should keep moving—”

With his grip on your wrist tightening, he hauled you forward until you collapsed back to the ground. Two strong arms wrapped completely around your body, caging you flush against his chest.

Your knees—already so weak—forced you to straddle his lap. Your hands flew to his broad shoulders for balance as you found yourself perched directly over his ruined pants.

“Hey—what are you—!”

Bucky nuzzled his face straight into the crook of your neck, his hot, erratic breaths turning into open mouthed kisses against your skin.

“More,” he begged, the deep vibration of his voice tickling you. “S’not enough. I need more.”

Your breath hitched when his hands started to roam over your body. His fingers tickled beneath the hem of your tank top, the metal fingers cooling your skin and making you gasp out loud from the sudden cold.

No.

I won’t let this happen.

I refuse to be Bucky’s first.

But despite your emotional turmoil, you couldn’t bring yourself to pull away. Not with the way his hands were roaming around your body, claiming every inch of you as his through touch alone. Not with the way he was looking at you, his mouth parted with desperation.

And especially not when he had just let himself spill in his jeans from nothing but your touch and closeness.

“I know you feel it too,” Bucky rasped against your neck. “I know you’re wet down there, begging to be touched. Begging to be filled. I can fix you, baby. Just let me take care of you, please.”

He pulled back slightly, looking up at you with wide puppy blue eyes that made your heart ache and your pussy clench.

“Can I kiss you?”

You searched his gaze, breathless. “You want to kiss me?”

His metal hand left your waist, slowly crawling up your spine until his fingers tangled firmly in the hair at the back of your head, keeping your eyes pinned to his. His pupils were completely blown out, his gaze demanding an answer right now.

You should have said no. You should have pushed his chest, reminded him of the drug, and scrambled away to safety.

He was a virgin, sure. But with the way he was looking at you while holding you tight—you felt like you were going to be ravaged.

But your resolve was already a fragile thing. And with the way he was looking at you, you knew you were in too deep. Your body was hurting—aching for him in the exact same ways he was aching for you. The only way you two could fix it was each other.

You pressed your lips hard against his, and Bucky let out a rough, needy sound into your mouth.

His grip tightened in your hair, pulling you deeper into the kiss.

The fever burned through your veins, and the way his tongue danced with yours only made the fire burn hotter. He was tasting you, broken whimpers tearing from his lips with every slick slide of his tongue. Saliva mixed together, leaving you both completely breathless, your lips and limbs tangled.

You rolled your hips back, grinding yourself deeper against Bucky’s pelvis.

His cock twitched inside his jeans, poking hard against you. You didn’t know how—but he felt even bigger and harder than he had before.

“I can’t take it anymore,” he panted against your mouth. “Fuck, I can’t—I need to feel you. Need to be inside you.”

His hands scrambled down to your waist, his fingers fumbling with the button of your pants. He popped it open with a rough tug—threatening to break the button itself—as his knuckles brushed against your hot skin.

Bucky groaned at the sight.

The lace of your panties was poking through the opening, damp with sweat and your scent. He inhaled deeply, and you wondered just how much his heightened senses were actually taking you in.

When he let out a satisfied sigh, you knew he could smell everything.

“Look at you,” he praised, his eyes tracing the curves of your body. “You’re so beautiful. It makes me want to ruin you.”

You chuckled—a sound that came out raspy and sultry without your intention, making Bucky’s cock twitch beneath you.

“Quite a bold statement for someone who’s never had sex before,” you teased, your hands trailing slowly down his chest.

Bucky’s jaw tightened. He accepted your challenge, gripping the waistband of your unzipped pants and yanking them down your thighs.

The moment your bare skin was exposed to the cool air, Bucky wasted no time traveling his eyes down the expanse of your legs. Catching his bottom lip between his teeth to keep from drooling like a madman, his gaze raked over the inner and outer curves of your thighs. His mouth went dry at the sight of the little wet spot that had collected near your clit.

His large hands slid up your thighs and behind you, squeezing your ass firmly in his rough palms.

“So fucking beautiful,” he growled, his thumb swiping over your clit, smearing your own juice all over the lace.

“Fuck—you’ve been dripping all this time. You need this just as bad as I do, and you’ve been holding back?”

You swallowed hard. “It’s not too late. We don’t have to—oh!”

You cried out once his fingers slipped past the hem of your panties. His fingers dipped between your folds, collecting your arousal with embarrassing wet noises as he tried to rub at your clit.

“No, Bucky… it’s right here—” You grabbed his forearm, guiding him to the right spot, and arched your back with a sharp cry when he started rubbing deep circles against the sensitive bud.

“Oh my god,” you gasped.

This was the pleasure you were looking for—but it wasn’t nearly enough.

There was an empty ache deep inside you that was begging to be filled. But you weren’t going to demand that of him just yet, in case he changed his mind.

A lazy, boyish smile tugged at his lips as he watched you come undone from his fingers.

“Yeah?” he huffed out a breath. “That feel good, baby?”

“Yes—don’t stop, please,” you cried helplessly.

His other hand lifted your tank top up and over your head, quickly unhooking your bra to fully reveal your tits. With a low grunt, he leaned forward, capturing one of your perky nipples into the wet warmth of his mouth.

You moaned loudly, your hand flying to the back of his head and giving his hair a hard, desperate tug. He liked that a lot, moaning against your skin in pleasure.

Bucky’s tongue swirled around your nipple, licking and sucking until you were arching off his lap at his mercy.

He was making a beautiful mess of you, switching between both buds and letting his mouth worship your body. His rough stubble tickled your chest while his fingers continued their clumsy work down below, sliding through your slick folds and rubbing messy circles right against your clit.

The wet, squelching sounds of his fingers moving against your soaking flesh filled the greenhouse—the filth of it only making you wetter and causing the toxin to course even harder.

He suddenly pulled his mouth away from your chest, a string of saliva connecting his lips to your skin, and finally looked up at you.

His lips and chin were slick and shining from giving your breasts such sloppy, adoring kisses.

“I need to be inside you,” he pleaded. “Please… I need to put it in. I need to stuff you so full of me, baby. Please, let me fuck you.”

Your eyes searched Bucky’s.

He looked like an even bigger mess than before. He looked and sounded utterly helpless, his chest rising and falling heavily, his face tight with an expression that made it look like he was physically hurting.

Even though he had just come in his pants moments ago, he needed so much more.

You knew that once you gave in to him completely, there would be no holding back for either of you. He would have to live with the fact that you would be his first.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Bucky slowly slipped his hand out of your panties, bringing his fingers up to his lips and licking the juices clean. “You’re scared, but I’m not. I know what I want, and what I want right now is you.”

Bucky gripped your waist, raising you off his lap and pinning you flat against the ground.

He slipped his large body directly between your legs, his strong thighs forcing yours wide open as he covered your frame with his.

Your hair was messy across the dirt floor, framing your face as you laid beneath him breathless. The toxin was taking over control of your body—every single nerve demanding to be touched by the man between your legs.

You felt like you were in heat, consumed by a fever that only Bucky could cure.

His eyes fell over your body, tracing your tits and stomach, his gaze locking onto the way your panties—already a soaked mess—looked like they were begging to be torn away by his teeth.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, his hands making quick work of your underwear.

With a harsh tug and a sharp tearing sound, the fabric gave away.

“I’m so sorry for what I’m about to do to you.”

Your panties didn’t even make it past your knees before tearing clean off your thighs. You winced slightly.

It was dizzying to think about how you had found the strength to fight Bucky earlier, only to now be reduced to a breathless, aching mess over a piece of torn fabric.

Bucky leaned back on his heels, unbuckling his belt and shoving open his unzipped, stained denim jeans.

The moment he pulled his cock free, it sprang forward then back—the tip slapping against his abdomen.

He was thick, his cock fully engorged and begging to be wrapped in something tight and warm. Pre-cum glistened at the tip, trailing down his shaft and mixing with the creamy white essence from his earlier release.

His eyes were glued to your soaking center, legs spread wide and inviting. His jaw slacked as he lazily pumped himself at the shaft, prepping his cock for your warm embrace.

He claimed he was a virgin, but the way he was looking at you with such a hungry look in his eyes made you think otherwise.

“Bucky,” you breathed, heart racing. “Are you sure you want to do this? With… me?”

Bucky leaned over your body, using his metal elbow to prop himself up while he slapped the tip of his cock against your entrance.

You weren’t sure where he learned that from, but the dirty act left you clenching around nothing.

“The more you ask, the harder it is for me to stay in control,” he gritted through clenched teeth. “I’m just gonna have to stuff you full of my cock just to prove how much I want you.”

You craned your neck, watching Bucky rub his tip up and down your folds—smearing his pre-cum while coating his shaft in your own slick juice.

When he positioned himself right at your opening and poked gently, testing your stretch, your folds immediately parted for him. You were so wet and pliable from the toxin that you were sure he would slip right in without a fight, despite how big he was.

“Just… just enough to get rid of the side effects, okay?” you muttered, though it sounded like you were trying to convince yourself more than him.

Bucky either didn’t hear you, or maybe he did and he just chose to ignore it.

With a clench of his jaw, he slowly pushed his hips forward, his eyes glued to the spot where your cunt wrapped around the head of his cock.

The sensation was delicious. Your body was burning hot, tight, and dangerously wet. He had only sunk the tip in, but it was already the greatest thing he had ever felt in his life. His eyes rolled back as a deep groan tore in his chest.

“Ohhh…”

Despite the toxin making your body more accommodating, you were still tighter than either of you expected.

You were being stretched completely and fully as Bucky kept going, relentlessly sinking his cock all the way inside until his dark, hairy base pressed flush against your folds. He was so big, and a part of you was grateful that he had already come once before this—because right now, his entire body was shaking with an uncontrollable need.

“So goddamn tight,” he cursed, his face twisting that looked almost like pain. “I never… fuck, I never expected pussy to feel this good… Christ.”

He stilled inside you, letting your body adjust to his size. But in reality, he was the one who needed time to adjust to your tightness.

You paced your breathing. Being stretched full by him made you want to scream at him to hurry up and move, to fuck you right into the dirt floor of the greenhouse—but you couldn’t make that kind of demand of a virgin.

Since it was his first time, despite the unfortunate circumstances, you were going to guide him gently.

“Hold me here,” you murmured, taking his hands and guiding them back to your thighs. “Feel me. It’s soft, isn’t it?”

Bucky breathed hard, nodding as he held you.

“When you’re ready, just move your hips nice and slow. Take your time.”

His face fell into a tight scowl, as if displeased with that order.

Every single one of his base instincts was screaming at him to fuck you hard and fast—to claim every surface of your pussy with his cock.

“F—fine,” he reluctantly agreed, his voice strained. He gripped your thighs tightly, spreading you open as he began rocking his hips back and forth.

His eyes were glossy with desire, transfixed by the sight of his cock disappearing in and out of your body.

A thick, creamy white ring was forming around the base of his shaft, staining the unruly dark curls that sat at his pelvis.

Every time he pulled out, he made sure to sink back in even deeper, rolling his hips forward until the tip of his cock kissed your cervix.

Your eyes rolled back, your hands clutching his broad shoulders as he buried himself inside you.

“Fuck… just like that,” you moaned. “Keep going.”

“Does… does that feel good?” He swallowed hard, fingers digging deeper into your thigh.

You nodded fast. “So good—I don’t want you to stop. Please, don’t stop.”

Your breathless plea made him scowl , a frustrated snarl leaving his lips.

“This is torture.” He groaned.

You furrowed your brows, looking at his angry expression in concern. Torture? That wasn’t what sex was supposed to feel like. The last thing you wanted to do was hurt him.

“Bucky,” you said, pressing your hand against his sweating chest. “If this is hurting you, we need to stop right now. Pull out of me—”

You gasped as his metal hand circled tight around your wrist, prying it away from his chest and pinning it over your head. He slammed you back to the floor, his large body shadowing yours as his face hovered.

His dark eyes bored deeply into yours—and you felt like if you so much as looked away, he might take it as a threat.

“No, I can’t—I can’t do slow,” he growled. “The drug in my veins, it’s like it's yelling at me to take what I want. And what I want is to fuck you until you cry.”

Your breath left your lungs as Bucky slammed his hips forward, burying himself inside you.

He pulled out halfway before fucking right back in, a broken gasp leaving your lips as you arched your back against the floor from the pleasure. You hadn’t expected him to fuck you this hard—being a virgin and all—but you couldn’t complain.

You had been craving to be taken like this since the moment the drug first entered your system.

“Oh my god—!” You cried out, tears prickling at the corners of your eyes.

“Ah—fuck, you’re so tight,” Bucky cried out.

He buried his face into the crook of your neck, his breath scalding against your skin as he relentlessly pumped his hips in and out of you, using your vulnerable body like his own personal sex toy.

“It feels too good, fuck, baby. Everything feels too good—I can’t stop,” he moaned.

Your moans blended together into a dirty symphony.

The toxin was amplifying every single touch, his thick shaft stretching you out completely—turning your usually strong and poised body into mush with every thrust.

Your wet walls clenched down on him every time he threatened to pull out, as if sucking him right back in. Bucky was entirely lost, his mind short circuiting from the pleasure.

Every time he buried himself deep, your swollen pussy tightened around him like your body was trying to milk him dry. You whimpered with every single thrust he gave you, your teary eyes meeting his in a lustful haze as you wrapped your legs tight around his hips for support.

“Fuck—my god, don’t do that—” He sucked in a sharp breath. “You’re squeezing me so tight. God—if this is what sex feels like, I never want to stop.”

He tilted his head down, his sweaty strands of hair tickling your hot face as he stared back down at the exact point where his hips got lost with yours.

Every stroke of his cock inside your tight body came with a hot wave of pleasure, amplified by the toxin coursing through your blood.

The sensation was addicting.

Bucky had never felt a pleasure like this before. He’d jerked off a few times in his apartment just to quickly relieve some stress, but that was always by himself.

He was a curious boy back in the forties, but he had never been close to getting any action like this.

To him, this was like a dream come true.

But he needed to go deeper. These regular, sloppy thrusts weren’t enough. He needed to feel more.

With a snarl, he leaned back to grip the backs of your thighs and shoved your knees up towards your chest, folding you into a tight mating press.

Before you could adjust to the new position, he pressed his hips against yours to lock you in place and sank down even deeper than he had before.

Your eyes flew wide, nearly bulging from their sockets as a sharp gasp ripped from your throat. His cock was stretching you at an impossible angle, burying himself so deep you could’ve sworn you saw stars.

Because you were already so sensitive from the toxin, having him bottom out so hard against your cervix made your core shudder uncontrollably, causing your legs to shake. Your head fell back against the floor, your toes curling in the air as your vision went hazy.

“Oh my god!” you cried out in a mix of pain and pleasure. “It’s too much—I can’t… you’re gonna make me cum!”

You felt your walls start to hyperventilate around his length. You knew he felt it, too, because he immediately doubled his pace.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, but it didn’t sound sincere. “Fuck—I’m so sorry. It just feels too good—fuck, I—”

His voice broke into a pained moan the moment your pussy tightened. You came hard around him without warning, your neck arching as a loud moan strained your vocal cords.

Bucky’s entire body tensed, his face twisting in a grimace from how your climax was squeezing him.

The feeling was exquisite, and fuck, he wasn’t going to last another second when he was buried this deep inside of you.

He knew your body was sensitive and overworked, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop moving. His balls had never felt this full, this heavy. He was close, so fucking close, and the more your pussy fluttered around his shaft, the more desperate he became to chase that same release.

“Shit. M’gonna cum,” he cursed, his hips stuttering as he hilted himself deep inside.

His cock twitched—he had never came inside a girl before, but he was determined to do so now.

He was going to make sure he filled you, to stuff your tight hole to the brim with his backed up super soldier seed.

“Gonna cum inside,” he warned, his metal hand sliding beneath your lower back and lifting your hips up to meet his thrusts. “I’m gonna cum inside—fuck, I hope that’s okay. I’m sorry. I can’t—I can’t control myself.”

You couldn’t muster a single coherent word. Only muffles and teary whimpers escaped you, but it didn’t matter what you said while Bucky was in this state. He had no intention of stopping.

His blue eyes were crazed, rolled back so far in his sockets you could see the white. He grit his teeth, meeting your hips with sloppy and wet thrusts. A litany of curses mumbled in broken strings under his breath, until finally…

“Oh my god—I’m cumming. Take it, baby. Take every single drop of me. Don’t let it go to waste. Please, I need this. I need this so fucking bad—”

With a firm grip on your thigh, he pinned you down and pushed his hips against yours.

His tip kissed your cervix, pulsing twice before his body gave way to your tightness. You were being filled by the thick, heavy pumping of his seed. You could feel his cock twitching relentlessly against your walls, determined to flood every inch of your pussy.

He buried his face in your neck, his chest heaving violently as he stuffed you so completely full that your lower belly felt heavy.

“I’m so sorry,” he pleaded brokenly.

Bucky trembled from head to toe, and despite his mumbled apologies, he kept your hips pinned securely so that not a single drop of his release could escape. He was spent, breathing in shaky and ragged gasps against your skin. He didn’t want to pull out yet, still savoring the feeling of your pulsing walls squeezing the very last drops from.

The two of you lay on the floor, tangled and sweaty in each other’s limbs. Once you finally caught your breath, your hands gently caressed his broad back, a comforting gesture that caught even you off guard.

“How… how are you feeling?” you finally mumbled.

Your body tensed as you braced yourself for an answer.

Now that the side effects of the toxin seemed to be wearing off, dread started trickling in.

You were terrified that everything you had just done with Bucky would be something he’d immediately regret. A part of you tried to tell yourself that you didn’t care—that he had despised you before this, and he would simply go back to hating you again.

But after being his first, there was an undeniable connection in the way you felt beneath him.

If he was already starting to feel regret... well, you weren’t sure how you would handle it. Guilt? Probably. The longer he stayed silent, the more the worry gnawed at you.

He eventually huffed a breath, but he didn’t pull away.

“If you’re wondering if I’m going to regret this,” Bucky began, his voice so raspy and tired that it sent a shiver down your spine. “The answer is no.”

You sucked in a breath, expecting a but to follow.

Bucky attempted to lift himself up slightly so he wasn’t crushing you, but he was still so sensitive that the movement made him wince sharply. He couldn’t bring himself to pull out yet, so he collapsed right back against you with a soft huff.

“I wish I could just stay like this,” he muttered, wrapping both arms around you while resting his head against your sweaty chest.

He looked so small and vulnerable in that moment, and it made your heart ache for him.

“Just holding you,” he whispered, hugging you tighter as his voice grew quieter. “Instead of constantly running, fearing for my life, or being taken away. I just want to stay like this. Holding a pretty girl.”

The tension was starting to become too much for you to handle. Your face burned, unsure of how to process the sudden compliment. Trying to break the tension, you huffed a soft laugh and continued to rub your hand up and down his broad back. He seemed to like your touch very much.

“I’m sorry you lost your virginity this way.” you tried to joke.

Bucky chuckled against your chest. “The man I was in the forties probably would’ve done a much better job.”

“Well, this wasn’t bad at all—I’ll tell you that much.”

The two of you lay there, chuckling softly in each other’s arms, until the loud, sudden static of your earpiece made you both jolt.

“Do you copy? Report in.”

You both froze, your hearts beating rapidly for an entirely different reason now.

Bucky cleared his throat as he reluctantly tried lifting himself up. The friction of his slick and semi-hard cock sliding out of you made you let out an involuntary whimper.

“Status update,” Steve pressed, his tone anxious. “Are you two safe, or are you compromised?”

Compromised, sure. But definitely not in the way Steve meant.

Suppressing a giggle, you tapped your earpiece with a bright smile, catching Bucky's eye.

“Glad to hear your comms didn’t break, Steve.”

A relieved sigh came from the other end. “Give me a status report. How are you two? How’s Bucky?”

You watched as Bucky began to pull his clothes back on, his face an embarrassing shade of red as he tried to compose himself. You chuckled softly.

“We’re fine.”

halfway through proofreading this i lowk realized this was slop. i thought i had a good idea and then lost the plot. if you actually liked this please consider leaving a like and hit that subscribe button *epic outro music*

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Better yet, you shouldn't reply at all. You should leave him on read, let that little notification sit there unacknowledged while he spirals for once, wondering if you've finally moved on.

Best option - the one that would require something adjacent to self-respect - you should block his number. Should have done it weeks ago, when you'd seen him out with another girl and your friends had spent the entire cab ride home telling you what you already knew. He's never going to commit. He's never going to change. Block his number.

You'd promised you would.

You hadn't, obviously. Instead, you’ve had Ari Levinson saved as “DO NOT ANSWER” for the past four weeks. Like seeing those words flash across your screen would be enough to override six months of muscle memory and bad decisions.

But it hasn’t helped even once. And it doesn’t help now, at 2:47 in the morning, when your phone buzzes again because your hand moves before your brain can interfere.

I know you're awake | 2:49 AM

Arrogant bastard. He doesn't know anything. Except he does, doesn't he? Knows you like he's mapped you from the inside out. Knows the glow of your screen is already bleeding blue light across your rumpled sheets. Knows you're staring at his text with your heart doing that stupid hummingbird thing it does whenever he reminds you that he's out there, somewhere in the city, thinking about you.

yes. | 2:52 AM

Three dots appear immediately. Disappear. Appear again. He's typing, deleting, retyping. The hesitation should comfort you - evidence that maybe he's nervous too, that maybe this costs him something. But you know Ari well enough to recognize the tactic. He's drawing it out. Making you wait. Building the tension because he knows exactly what those little dots do to your pulse.

Your heart hammers against your ribs and you hate him for it. Hate that your body is already ahead of you, already warm and restless, muscle memory doing the work your dignity should be doing. But six months of Ari has ruined you for anything or anyone else. 

Ruined you for anything that isn't his big hands on your hips holding you exactly where he wants you, his thick cock filling you up so perfectly your eyes roll back, his voice low in your ear talking you through it until you're shaking. Ari Levinson is a lot of bad things. But between your thighs he is devastatingly, infuriatingly good.

Good | 2:53 AM

Been thinking about you. | 2:53 AM

The ease of it makes you want to scream. Been thinking about you. As if that explains the two weeks of silence. As if that justifies showing up in your notifications like he still has the right.

You should ask where he's been. Who he's been with. If she knows he's texting you at three in the fucking morning.

But your thighs clench anyway, because your body doesn't care about your pride. Your body remembers what been thinking about you means in Ari's vocabulary. Remembers the last time he'd said it, three weeks ago when he'd shown up at your apartment after midnight. You'd barely gotten the door open before his mouth was on yours, walking you backward into your apartment with his hands already sliding under your shirt.

“Been thinking about you all fucking day,” he'd growled against your throat, and you'd melted like you always do, let him peel you out of your clothes and fuck you against the kitchen counter.

You'd had bruises on your hips for a week after. Had pressed your fingers into them whenever you needed to remember that you were real to him, that you weren't just imagining the way he looked at you like you were the only person in the room.

yeah? | 2:55 AM

what about? | 2:55 AM

There's a pause. Longer this time. You can picture him so clearly it hurts. Sprawled in his bed, chest bare, all that dark hair dusting across muscle and tapering down his stomach in a trail your tongue knows by memory. The broad sprawl of his shoulders. The thick arms. The heavy muscle of his thighs. The kind of body that makes you feel small in ways you've stopped pretending you don't love. 

And already half-hard just from the anticipation of watching you slowly give in via text message.

You know what about | 3:00 AM

You do know. God help you, you know exactly what he's thinking about and your body has already started making decisions without consulting you.

that's not an answer | 3:00 AM

ari | 3:00 AM

You add his name in a second text, and you realise you’re already chasing. That’s what he does. He texts you first, casts the line, and then sits back and watches you swim toward him every time. 

I'm thinking about the way your thighs shake when you're trying not to cum before I say you can | 3:01 AM

Heat floods through you, pooling low in your belly and spreading outward until your skin feels too hot. Your free hand slides under your waistband without a second thought, fingers slipping through how wet you are and your hips tilt up into your own touch. But all you can think about is how much better he feels. 

you're an asshole | 3:02 AM

I know | 3:03 AM

Let me come over anyway | 3:03 AM

And there it is. The ask that isn't really an ask because you both know how this ends. The presumption that should offend you but doesn't because he's earned it, hasn't he? Six months of this dance, of you saying no and meaning yes, of drawing boundaries and then opening the door anyway when he shows up with that look in his eyes.

You stare at the message until the words start to blur. Your thumb hovers over the keyboard, trembling slightly.

This is the moment. The fork in the road where you prove to yourself, to your friends, to your therapist, to everyone who's watched you self-destruct over Ari fucking Levinson that you're capable of choosing yourself. That you're more than the girl who waits for 3 AM texts. That you deserve someone who doesn't make you feel like a toy he keeps on the shelf until he wants something warm to sink into.

i'm not the one you should be texting at 3am | 3:05 AM

There. Boundaries. Self-respect. All the things you're supposed to have.

Probably not | 3:06 AM

But you're the one I want | 3:06 AM

Four words and you feel them everywhere. The lie tastes bitter even secondhand, transmitted through pixels and cellular data. The one I want. Not the only one - you're not quite delusional enough to believe that. But the one he wants right now. 

Presumably she's asleep, blissfully unaware that her—what? Boyfriend? Situationship? Whatever Ari is to her—is currently sexting his other whatever-the-fuck-you-are. Maybe she's in the bathroom. Maybe she's asleep next to him and he's doing this anyway, getting off on the proximity of the secret. The thought makes you nauseous and aroused in equal measure.

You should say to fuck off. Should tell him to lose your number, block him for real this time, delete the photos from your phone and burn the clothes he's left in your closet. Should pull your hand out from under your waistband and go to sleep. Should feel literally anything other than the dark, sick satisfaction currently unfurling in your chest at the thought of him choosing your bed over hers. 

fine | 3:09 AM

You send it before you can talk yourself out of it. Then you drop your phone face down on the mattress like you can't stand to look at what you've just done. Three seconds later you pick it back up.

One word. All that internal warfare and it comes down to four letters and no punctuation, casual as anything, like your heart isn't hammering against your ribs. Like your fingers aren’t still moving absently between your thighs because your body made the decision before you even sent that text. 

20 minutes | 3:10 AM

Be ready for me | 3:11 AM

The command in those last four words makes your stomach flip. You drop your phone onto the nightstand and stare at the ceiling, your heart still racing, your body already preparing itself.

Twenty minutes to shower, to shave, to make yourself into the version of yourself that he wants. Twenty minutes to pretend you haven't been wanting this every single night for two weeks. Twenty minutes to become the girl who's winning, even though you both know she's losing.

Your phone buzzes twice more, and you grab it so fast you nearly drop it.

Wear that black set | 3:13 AM

You know the one | 3:13 AM

You do know. Of course you know. The lace set he'd bought you a month ago, presented in expensive tissue paper after he'd cancelled dinner plans for the third time. “Let me make it up to you,” he'd murmured, watching you unwrap it with heat in his eyes. 

You'd worn it for him that same night. Had modelled the set while Ari sat on the edge of your bed watching you with dark eyes and that infuriating half smile, turning you with one finger like you were something he'd commissioned. Had ended up on your back with the lace pushed aside and his mouth on your throat while he fucked you slow enough to make you beg for it.

The sick satisfaction blooms darker, spreading wider through your chest like poison ivy.

── ⟢  ₊ 🌙 ˚・🥀 ⊹ 

The knock comes at exactly 3:32 AM. Three sharp raps, confident and unapologetic. The knock of someone who has never once considered that he might not be welcome.

You've been perched awkwardly on the arm of your couch for the last three minutes, fingers worrying the tie of your robe into knots. The black lace sits against your skin like a reminder of every bad decision that's led to this moment, delicate and expensive and utterly wasted on what's about to happen. The set and the silk robe thrown over it feels like costuming, like you’re playing the part of someone in control.

You're not in control. You haven't been since the first time Ari Levinson looked at you like you were something worth ruining himself for.

Padding over to the door, silk robe whispering against your thighs, you take one steadying breath before you open it. And there he is.

He's devastating. That's the only word for it. Big in a way that makes your apartment feel like a dollhouse. Shoulders broad enough to block out the hallway light, and tall enough that you have to tilt your head back to meet his eyes. 

The t-shirt stretched across his chest leaves nothing to the imagination, which is almost funny because your imagination doesn't need the help anymore. You know that body. Know it embarrassingly well. Know exactly how it feels to be underneath it - small, delicate and so deliciously overwhelmed by the sheer size of him. Your thighs press together involuntarily at the thought.

His hair is slightly mussed, falling across his forehead in a way that makes him look softer than he is. And the beard - god the beard - is fuller than the last time you saw him, framing a mouth that knows exactly how to destroy you.

But it's his eyes that do the real damage. Blue enough to drown in, they rake over you with a possessive appreciation that’s entirely unapologetic. 

“Look at you,” Ari rumbles, voice already rough, deeper than usual. His eyes linger where your robe has fallen open just enough to reveal the black lace underneath, tongue flicking out to brush his bottom lip. “You trying to kill me?”

“You told me to wear it.” You lean against the doorframe, trying for casual, but your pulse is hammering visibly in your throat and you know he can see it.

“I did.” He steps inside without waiting for an invitation, and the smile that crosses his face is slow and pleased and entirely too satisfied with itself. His eyes sweep over you once again, like he's taking inventory of something that belongs to him. “And you listened, you’re always such a good girl for me.”

His praise unfurls something warm and pathetic in your chest. You hate how much you want to be his good girl, how desperately you crave the affection he'll give you.

The door clicks shut behind him and suddenly your apartment feels too small, the air too thick. He shrugs his jacket off, tosses it somewhere without looking. Underneath, the sleeves of his t-shirt are pushed to his elbows, revealing his thick forearms, corded with muscle and dusted with dark hair. And attached to those big hands that know exactly how to take you apart. 

You make yourself look back up at his face. It doesn't help. His eyes are already on you, full of heat and already dark.

“Hi,” you say, and it comes out quieter than you meant.

“Hi, baby.” His hand comes up to cup your jaw, thumb brushing your cheekbone with a gentleness that makes your chest ache. His palm spans from your chin to your ear, and you feel small in a way that makes your stomach flip. He could break you so easily. In some ways, he already has. “Missed you.”

The words land like a gut punch. “And whose fault is that?”

“I know.” His thumb traces your bottom lip and your breath catches. “I'm sorry.”

He's not, though. You both know he's not. Sorry would mean changing, would mean choosing you in daylight instead of just in the dark. But then his hand slides into your hair, tilting your head back further, and his mouth hovers just above yours. Waiting. The bastard is waiting for you to close the distance, chase it, prove how much you want him.

“You're an asshole,” you whisper against his lips.

“You said that already.” His breath mingles with yours. “Say it again. I like when you're mean to me.”

You should. Should call him every name you've been saving up for two weeks. Should ask him where he's been, who he's been with, if she knows he's here. Should demand answers or respect or literally anything other than this.

Instead you kiss him.

His hand tightens in your hair the second your lips touch his, taking over immediately, changing the angle to deepen it on his terms. Your mouth opens instinctively when his tongue presses against your bottom lip, and he licks into you like he owns it. You whimper into it and he swallows the sound whole, pulls back just enough to drag his teeth across your bottom lip before coming back deeper. Tasting you. Taking his time. His other hand grips your jaw, holding you steady, and the message is clear - you're not going anywhere, and you both know it.

“Fuck, I missed this,” he groans, punctuating it with another kiss. “Missed those pretty noises you make for me.”

Pulling back just enough to breathe, eyes dark, he swipes his thumb across your swollen bottom lip, dragging it down. Without thinking, your tongue dips out and chases his thumb. He notices. Of course he notices, the corner of his mouth curving as he steps back and drops onto your couch. One arm stretches along the back it, the other rests on his thigh, and his legs spread wide in an easy sprawl.

“Come here, baby.”

He tilts his head at the space between his knees, one finger curling in a single lazy beckon, and your feet are moving before your brain has any say in the matter.

You stop between his thighs and his hands find your hips immediately. Big, warm, and immediately possessive, settling on your hips with a certainty that makes your breath catch. You make the mistake of looking down at him and catching those deadly blue eyes looking back up at you through thick lashes, and your stomach drops straight through the floor. Standing between his spread thighs you feel it acutely, how much larger he is. How solid. His hands nearly span your entire waist and something about that, about being held so easily, makes heat pool low and insistent.

His fingers find the tie of your robe and toy with it, unhurried, knuckles grazing your stomach through the silk.

“This is pretty,” he murmurs, tugging one end of the belt slowly until the bow dissolves. Your robe falls open and his eyes drop, taking in the full view of black lace underneath. “But I like what's underneath better.”

The silk whispers off your shoulders and pools at your feet, leaving you in nothing but scraps of lace while he remains completely, infuriatingly dressed. And that thought alone - the disparity of it - sends heat rushing straight between your thighs. His eyes devour you slowly, like you're something he's very pleased with himself for having.

The thick bulge straining against his jeans suggests he's more than just pleased.

A sharp inhale escapes you when his hand palms your ass, tugging you closer between his spread thighs until his mouth finds your midriff. Warm lips press against your skin in lazy kisses as your hands slide into his hair. His hands smooth up the backs of your thighs to grip your hips, anchoring you in place, and his mouth moves across your skin slow enough to make you dizzy.

“Do me a favour, babygirl,” he rumbles against you, thumb tracing the lace at your hip, light enough to make you shiver. “Give me a little spin, yeah?” The timbre of his voice has dropped somewhere sinful. “Want to see all of you.”

Your face flushes but you obey, turning in the circle of his thighs while his hand guides you. You feel his gaze like a physical touch, lingering on the curve of your ass where the lace cuts high, on the line of your spine, on the backs of your thighs.

“God, I missed this view,” he groans. “Come back here.”

When you complete the turn, both his hands reach for you, gripping your hips and pulling you forward into his lap in one smooth motion that steals your breath. You end up straddling him, thighs spread wide over his, the rough denim of his jeans against your bare skin. His mouth finds yours immediately, greedier this time, more demanding, tongue sliding against yours while his hands roam. Your waist, your back, your ass, mapping you like he's reminding himself of everything he's been missing.

One hand cups your breast, thumb circling your nipple through the lace until it peaks, and then he pinches lightly. You gasp into his mouth, hips grinding forward instinctively. 

“That's it,” he breathes. “Fuckin’ love the sounds you make. Love feeling you respond to me.”

His hips roll up slightly and the pressure against your clit makes your head fall back. He takes advantage immediately, mouth moving to your throat, beard scraping sensitive skin as he kisses and bites his way down to your collarbone.

“Ari—” Your hands fist in his hair, needing something to hold onto.

“I've got you baby.” His hands slide to your hips, guiding you into a rhythm, encouraging you to grind against him. “That's my girl, take what you need. Use me.”

So you do. Hips rolling, chasing the friction, grinding down against the thick ridge of him while his mouth stays greedy on your throat. His hands guide you, encourage you, grip harder when you hit the right angle. The lace between your thighs is soaked through, dragging against denim with every roll of your hips.

“Soaking these pretty panties,” he rasps against your collarbone, like he can feel exactly how wet you are through his jeans. “Love having you like this. Love watching you fall apart. All for me.”

The praise washes over you, warm and devastating. He's always been good at this - making you feel seen, special, like you're the only person in the world who matters. It's intoxicating and dangerous and you can feel yourself getting lost in it, in him.

Your hips are moving faster now, chasing more friction, and he matches your rhythm with slow, controlled rolls of his hips that drag against your clit through your panties and make your eyes flutter shut. Your lips part around a needy little sound you have absolutely no control over, hips stuttering forward greedily as your head tips back.

“Fuck, look at you. So beautiful when you're desperate for it.” His hand slides up to cup your face, thumb pressing against your parted lips and tilting your chin back down until you meet his eyes. They're dark, pupils blown wide, and the heat in them makes your breath stutter. “You have any idea what you do to me babygirl? How fucking crazy you make me?”

You want to believe him. Want to believe that this means something, that you're not just convenient and willing at 3 AM. But the wanting is what breaks you. His hips roll up and pleasure spikes through you sharp. You're so turned on it aches, so close to the edge already, and underneath all of it is the creeping, horrible feeling of wanting this to mean what it doesn't mean.

“My girl.” His mouth brushes yours as he says it, barely a kiss. The hand on your cheek slides into your hair as his hips keep moving. You can feel how hard he is, how much he wants this, wants you, and for a moment it's so easy to believe that wanting and choosing are the same thing.

“You'll always be my girl, won't you? You know that.”

The thing is, you do know. That's the problem. You know it in the way his name in your phone makes your stomach drop. In the way you put on the black lace without hesitating. In the way your body has been his since the first time he touched you and has never quite figured out how to belong to itself again. You know it in your bones.

But knowing you're his and knowing he's yours are two very different things. And only one of them is true.

The first tear slips free before you can stop it and you instinctively try to hide your face in his neck. Seeking his warmth, his scent and the solid size of him, because he has ruined you so thoroughly that even now, even like this, he’s what your body reaches for. He’s the reason you’re crying and he’s who you want to cry into and that’s the most pathetic part of it.

But his hand catches your face before you can, palm curving around your jaw, fingers pressing into your cheeks. Your lips pucker involuntarily into a helpless little pout, fresh tears spilling over his fingers as he forces you to look directly at him. 

“Oh baby,” he coos, soft and devastating and not entirely kind. His hips roll up and you whimper through the pout he’s forcing on your lips, grinding you against his erection in a rhythm that makes your body sing even as your heart splinters “What’s this? What’s going on in that pretty head?”

His thumb swipes at your tears almost lazily, eyes tracking each one with a toxic mix of heat and hunger and satisfaction barely concealed beneath concern. The humiliation and the pleasure coil into something indistinguishable from each other, and the need between your thighs deepens with every tear he collects.

“I cant do this anymore,” you manage, small and pathetic and entirely unconvincing. 

More tears follow, hot and wet against your cheeks. Beneath you he's harder than before, thick and obvious through his jeans, his free hand pressing your hips down into a rhythm you're helpless to resist. The friction drags a moan out of you that breaks halfway into a sob, messy and humiliating, and you're still pouty-lipped and crying in his palm. He watches it happen with those dark, greedy eyes before schooling his expression back into something that looks like concern. 

He tilts his head, blue eyes wide and earnest, and you feel insane. Like you've invented the problem out of thin air. “Where’s this coming from?”

The gentleness of his tone is pure performance. Like he has no idea why you'd be falling apart in his lap. Like he isn’t the architect of every wound he’s now pretending to care about. Like your tears aren’t exactly what he came here for.

“You know where.” You try to pull away but his hand tightens on your cheeks, keeping you seated firmly in his lap, keeping the thick ridge of his cock pressed right against your clit through the soaked lace.

“I really don't, baby.” His thumb swipes another tear. “Talk to me.”

But you can't. Can't articulate the war happening inside you. The way your body is screaming yes while your heart is screaming no. Can't explain that you're furious and desperate and so far gone for him that the anger only makes you want him more.

More tears spill over and you watch his pupils dilate, watch his breath catch.

“We're done,” you finally say, the words muffled and graceless against the pout his fingers are still forcing on your lips. “I mean it this time.”

For a second he just stares at you, and then his expression shifts into something that makes your stomach drop. Not surprised - of course not - just entirely indulgent like you're a child throwing a tantrum.

“Aww, baby.” His voice goes soft, syrupy, as though he's talking you down from something small and silly. “Hey, hey. It's okay, good girl. Let it all out.”

“I'm serious—”

“Shh, I know. I know you are.” His thumb traces your bottom lip as his tongue drags slowly across his own. “You're upset. You've got all these big feelings and nowhere to put them, yeah? Go on baby, show me how much you're feeling right now, cry because it’s over.”

The patronizing tone makes you cry harder, as he keeps you pressed against the hard length of him that proves he's not taking any of this seriously. His eyes track each tear with rapt attention, that small smile playing at his mouth. Your face is still caught in his grip, bottom lip still protruding in that humiliating little pout, wobbling with each wet sob

He uses that grip on your face to pull you forward into his mouth before you can reply. The kiss is messy and wet and salty with your tears, his tongue licking into you like he's tasting the evidence of everything you feel for him, everything you just tried to end. You moan into it despite yourself and he swallows that too, hips rolling up beneath you slow and deliberate, keeping the rhythm, reminding your body what it wants even as your heart tries to want something else.

He pulls back only to drag his mouth across your cheek, your jaw, following the wet trails your tears have left behind. His tongue collects them one by one and the groan that rumbles out of him against your skin makes your thighs clench around his.

“So fucking sweet,” he rasps, mouth moving to find more, greedy. “My pretty little crybaby.”

Once satiated with your tears, his hand finally releases your cheeks and you collapse forward immediately, face buried in the crook of his neck where you wanted to be ten minutes ago. Your arms loop weakly around his broad shoulders, breath ragged and wet, nose pressed into his skin. You're still crying - soft, hiccuping sobs you can't quite get a handle on - yet your hips continue to grind desperately against him because your body has clearly given up on listening to your better judgment.

His other hand slides down between your bodies, palm grazing your stomach, the lace at your hip, and then the soaked fabric between your thighs. The first brush of his fingers against the soaked lace makes you moan into his throat before you can stop yourself, hips bucking helplessly into the contact.

“Ari, I said—I ended it—” But your protest is weak and entirely unconvincing because the rest dissolves into a moan that you muffle desperately against his neck.

“Fuck, baby,” he groans. “You're drenched.” 

His fingers trace the wet fabric, and another wet moan escapes you as he presses against your clit.

“See? Your body knows what it wants even if you're confused up here.” His thumb taps gently at your temple, patronising and tender all at once.

Pushing the lace aside, the first stroke of his thick fingers through your wetness makes you moan into his neck. He hums his approval before sinking two fingers into you in one slow stroke, and your whole body shudders.

“Ari, you're not listening,” you manage between ragged breaths, hips grinding down onto his hand despite every word coming out of your mouth. “I ended it. I told you I—” Another moan chokes off the sentence as he curls his fingers deeper, the heel of his palm grinding against your clit.

“I am listening, babygirl. I hear you,” he soothes, infuriatingly gentle. “You're very upset. Very hurt. And you're handling it by making a big declaration at four in the morning while you're sitting in my lap in that lace I bought you.” He keeps pumping his fingers into you as he talks, and you can barely focus on the words. “While you're soaking my fingers and grinding on my cock.”

Your protests begin dissolve into something more honest - desperate little whines mewled into his neck because that's the only place you can hide. The tears keep falling even as your hips chase his hand, even as your fingers claw at his shoulders, even as every coherent thought you had about ending this burns away to nothing.

“Please, please, please—”

You’re so close, desperately close, trembling on the edge of it when he pulls his fingers free. The sound you make is pathetic and defeated, and goes wilfully ignored. 

Ari brings those same fingers to his mouth, sucking them clean with a moan that vibrates through his chest. 

“Fuck, don't know what's sweeter, baby.” His eyes track between his fingers and your wet cheeks, dark and considering. “You or those pretty tears.”

He sucks them clean one more time like he can't help himself, then reaches down.

The zip of his jeans is the loudest sound in the room. He frees himself, and you can’t help the eager noise that escapes you because god, his cock is so pretty. Thick and hard and flushed dark, the swollen head already glistening. The kind of cock that's ruined your standards permanently.

A drop of precum slides down to streak against your inner thigh before his big hands close around your hips. With an ease that always makes you feel like a doll he's positioning, he drags your soaked pussy along the length of him without pushing in. Just sliding you over him, painting himself in your wet heat while the lace stays bunched to the side and you make needy little sounds against his throat.

The fat head of his cock catches your clit and you gasp, fingers digging into his shoulders.

“Ari,” you whine, a desperate little plea. “Please.”

“Please what, babygirl?” His voice is pure honey, dark and indulgent. “Tell me what you need.”

“Need you to—” Another gasp as he catches your clit again. 

“Use your words, c’mon, know you can do it.” He guides your hips forward again, achingly slow, the thick head of him nudging against your entrance before he pulls you back. Not pushing in, just making sure you know exactly what you're begging for.

“Inside,” you sob against his neck. “Please, I need your cock Ari.”

“Hmm,” he teases, almost thoughtful as he tilts his head. His hands still on your hips, holding you hovering right there, right on the edge of it. “I would, baby. You know I would.” He pauses, and you feel your heart drop into your stomach. His thumb strokes your hip in possessive circles. “But I thought you ended it. Thought you meant it this time.”

Your face snaps up to his, panic and need crashing into each other behind your eyes.

“Ari, please, no—I need you, I need—”

“Aww.” His voice softens, faux-tender, that infuriating little crease appearing between his brows. “Baby, no, I'm just doing what you asked me to do. It’s over, right? We’re done. That's what you said.” He drags you slowly over him again and the head of his cock catches your clit and you sob, fresh tears spilling hot down your cheeks. “Wouldn't want to take advantage.”

“I didn't mean it.” The words tumble out of you in a desperate rush, choked and wet and humiliating. “Ari I didn't mean it, I'm sorry, please, please I'm sorry—” You kiss him before he can answer, messy and needy, lips chasing his, hands fisting in his shirt to keep him close. “Please, I need you, I need it, please don't stop—”

You feel his cock twitch against your folds. Hot and obvious. A pulse of want he can't hide. He hums against your mouth, low and pleased, and you can feel him smiling.

“Shhh,” he breathes against your lips between kisses, voice dropping to something dark and pleased. “Look at you. Crying and begging and apologising. So fucking pretty when you're like this. Gone all dumb for my cock, haven't you?”

He drags you over him again, slow and torturous, the slick head of him catching your clit and making you whine.

“Yes,” The word falls out of you broken and grateful. “Yes, please, Ari—”

“Yeah?” His mouth moves against yours, almost amused. “You want me to take care of you? Even after you tried to end it?” Another devastating drag. “Even after you broke my heart?”

“Please, I'm yours, please—” Your hips are still chasing him, still desperate, every word collapsing into the next.

“Okay, baby. Okay.” His tone is generous now. Magnanimous, like he's bestowing something. “I'll give it to you because that's what I do, isn't it? I take care of my girl.” His hand slides to grip the base of his cock, the other tightening on your hip. “This is why you're mine, crying so pretty for my cock.”

He lines the thick, swollen head of his cock up at your entrance, and guides you down with his hand on your hip. The first inch of him has your eyes rolling back already, stretching you open with that familiar fullness that your body has been craving for two weeks.

“Shit, baby,” he groans, head tipping back briefly. “Tightest little cunt I've ever felt. Made for me, isn't it?”

You try to chase his mouth, desperate to keep kissing him, but your jaw won't cooperate. Instead, it keeps falling slack with every inch you take, lips parting uselessly around the moans pouring out of you. By the time you're fully seated your forehead is resting against his, your mouth hanging open against his lips.

“Dumb already,” he rumbles, watching your face with dark amusement, watching your wet, glassy eyes blink slowly back at him. “What am I going to do with you, baby?” His thumb finds your bottom lip, slipping into your open mouth and pressing down on your tongue. “Suck. Good girl. Keep that mouth occupied.”

You close your lips around his thumb obediently, sucking, eyes fluttering shut around the dual fullness of him in your mouth and inside you. His hips give a small, lazy roll beneath you and you whimper around his fingers.

“Go on, show me how much my little crybaby needed this.”

You find your rhythm slowly, hips rolling, chasing the friction, thighs burning with the effort of it. Ari watches you from beneath heavy lids, enjoying every second of making you work for it - not helping, not even a little. Just watching you ride him like you’re entertainment, thumb still pressed to your tongue, free hand coming up to pop the clasp of your bra like he has all the time in the world.

It falls away and his hand cups your breast immediately, squeezing, thumb dragging over your nipple before pinching it sharply. You whimper around his thumb, drool clinging to his knuckle, trailing down your chin in thin little strings.

He pinches harder and you clench around him hard enough to make him hiss, so he does it again just to feel you grip him. You're close. So desperately close you can feel it shimmering just out of reach, coiling tight in your belly with every roll of your hips. Soft whining sounds escape around his thumb with every breath.

“You getting close, baby? Want to cum?”

You nod frantically, eyes wet and pleading, drool slipping down his hand. A thin string of it pulls from your lips as you try to form the word yes.

“Then beg for it,” he purrs, lazy and mean. “You want it so bad? Let's hear it.”

You try. You really try - tongue working uselessly around his thumb, shaping syllables as best you can. What escapes is something that vaguely resembles please, mangled by saliva and his cruel pressure on your tongue, deliberately obstructing the attempt.

His grin is slow and wolfish. “That supposed to be begging?”

A desperate whine vibrates against his thumb. He presses it deeper in response, just to feel you gag, just to watch your lips stretch wider around him, and your eyes well with fresh tears.

“Nah.” His mouth drags to your throat, teeth grazing your pulse point. “Not good enough, babygirl. All I hear is spit and nonsense.” His free hand drops between your bodies, fingers brushing your clit - just a mean, fleeting touch - and you sob desperately. “Drooling all over my fingers like a needy little thing. Can't even beg right - guess you don't want it that bad, huh?”

A pathetic cry claws its way out of you, half-strangled by the thumb still in your mouth. You shake your head wildly, eyes glassy and wide. So you try harder. Put everything you have left into it, hips still rolling desperately, thighs shaking.

“P-plea'—Ari—please—wan'—wan'—cum—”

Slurred, barely English, mangled around his thumb. But desperate. Unmistakably desperate.

He groans - deep, hungry and satisfied - hips finally snapping up to meet yours. He drags his thumb from your mouth just long enough to hear the broken sob of relief that breaks loose from your lips before his mouth crashes against yours.

“Good girl,” he breathes against your tongue. “Fucking good girl.”

He fucks up into you hard, one big hand gripping the curve of your ass to slam you down to meet every thrust. The other stays between you to circle you clit with perfect pressure. Every snap of his hips hits you so deep you can feel it in your teeth. The sound of it is filthy, slick and wet and rhythmic, your apartment filled with the obscene slap of skin and your broken, mindless cries.

“Fuckin' look at you,” he growls against your jaw. “That’s my fucking girl, riding my cock so pretty.”

You can't answer. Can barely hold yourself upright. His name is the only word left in your mouth—Ari Ari Ari Ari—a desperate, broken loop as he drives into you.

“That's right.” His thumb works your clit faster, mouth dragging across your jaw. “Say it. Whose are you? Whose pussy is this?”

“Ari—” you moan. “Ari, Ari, Ari—”

“Yeah, that's right. Mine, so let me feel my pussy soak my cock.”

You break apart. Your whole body convulses, walls clamping down around him so hard he hisses, the orgasm tearing through you in wave after wave while his hips never stop, never slow. His name is still falling helplessly out of your mouth in a broken chant as he fucks you through it, hips snapping up into you while you sob and shake and clench around him.

“Fuck—fuck, baby, just like that—strangling my cock.”

His rhythm goes sloppier. Hungrier. His hand leaves your clit and his arm wraps around your waist instead, holding you against him, pinning you in place so he can fuck up into you with everything he has left.

“Gonna fill you up, baby. Fill this perfect pussy with my cum.”

You nod helplessly, squeezing around him and he loses it. His hips drive up one last time, burying himself deep, and groans against your skin as he spills inside you. You feel every pulse of it. Every hot, possessive flood while you tremble in his lap, his cock still twitching, his hand still gripping your ass like he can't quite let go.

You come down slowly, in pieces, his arms still locked around you and his cock still buried deep. His mouth moves over your throat, your jaw, your tear-tracked cheeks. Soft, sweet kisses that are a complete contrast to what he just did to you.

“My perfect girl,” he murmurs, voice gentle and warm. “Always so good for me. Always so fucking perfect.”

You can't even respond. Just whimper against his shoulder while his hand strokes up and down your spine, gentling you, his other hand cradling the back of your head. You're floating somewhere between exhaustion and bliss, and he holds you through all of it, patient and warm and impossibly tender. 

Praise pours out of him in a low, constant stream, and you let yourself sink into it, let yourself believe in it, just for a minute.

When he finally pulls out you feel his cum start to slip out of you immediately. Hot and slick, sliding down between your thighs onto the wet head of him still pressed against you. He glances down and tuts, both amused and disapproving.

“Mm, look at the mess you're making.” His thumb catches some of it where it's beading on his cock and brings it back up to your bottom lip, smearing it there, watching your face. Your tongue darts out before you've made any conscious decision about it. He hums, deeply pleased. “You made the mess baby, reckon you ought to help clean it up.”

He guides you off his lap slowly, careful with you, until your knees meet the floor between his spread thighs. You look up at him from there - face wet, lips parted, cum running down the insides of your thighs onto your apartment floor - and the look on his face stops your breath in your chest.

That undone, almost tender expression he never wears anywhere but here. Only ever when he thinks you can't tell, when his guard has slipped, when you've fucked him past the point where he can keep the walls up.

It's the drug. It's always been the drug. It's why you didn't block his number when you said you would. Why you opened the door at 3:32 AM. Why you let him talk you out of ending it without ever actually arguing. Why you'll do the same thing the next time, and the time after that, and the time after that. Because no one else has ever looked at you the way Ari Levinson is looking at you right now.

His thumb traces your bottom lip, possessive yet tender. “Open up, babygirl.”

more mads: honestly, i'm not entirely sure that's what the request meant, but i started listening to "don't smile" to get inspo for the fic and my mind immediately went to dacryphilia and that was it really, so um, sorry if this isn't what you meant anon, but i hope you, and anyone else who read this enjoyed anyway!! if you did, please hit like or, even better, please consider leaving a comment/reblog bc it would genuinely make my whole day. my leo moon means i will literally perish without external validation. i’m tinkerbell coded. love u <33 <33

The afternoon had begun the way many of their quiet days together did—without a plan, without urgency, and with the comfortable kind of laziness that only came when neither of them had a mission waiting for them. Sunlight poured through the tall windows of Bucky’s apartment, warm and golden, stretching across the hardwood floors and illuminating the chaos they had created over the last couple of hours. Drawers had been pulled out and left half-open, the couch had disappeared under stacks of old notebooks and folded shirts, and a few cardboard boxes sat in the middle of the living room like small monuments to the past Bucky had never quite sorted through.

The entire place looked like someone had shaken it upside down and let everything spill out. In the middle of the mess stood Bucky, staring at it all with the same stubborn concentration he usually reserved for planning missions. His metal hand rested against his hip while the other dragged slowly through his hair, leaving it slightly disheveled, then putting on his white cap again and his expression carried the faintly annoyed look of a man who was absolutely certain he was right but had no proof to back it up.

“I swear I still have it.” he said again, his voice firm in the way it always was when he refused to accept defeat.

From where you sat cross-legged on the floor near the coffee table, sorting through a small pile of papers and photographs. There were some photos with his sisters, his parents, Steve and some other guys you assumed were his friends back then. You definitely are keeping the photos showing some chubby baby Bucky. You looked up at him with an amused little smile tugging at the corner of your mouth, definitely already heard that sentence at least five times in the last fifteen minutes.

“You’ve sworn that about three different things already.” you reminded him lightly and chuckle.

“This one’s real,” Bucky insisted immediately, pointing a finger at you like that settled the argument entirely. His brows drew together slightly, stubborn determination settling deeper into his expression. “It’s a notebook. Small. Brown cover. Old.”

You raised an eyebrow. “You’ve just described every notebook that’s ever existed.”

He exhaled a quiet huff through his nose, rubbing the back of his neck before turning away to scan the room again, clearly refusing to accept that the mysterious notebook might actually be gone. His sleeves were rolled up, exposing the sharp line where metal met skin at his shoulder, and there was a faint smear of dust across the front of his white t-shirt from digging through boxes all afternoon.

“I had it before I moved here,” he said, more to himself now than to you, his eyes narrowing as if the memory might appear if he stared hard enough at the clutter. “Had some stuff written in it.”

You tilted your head slightly, curiosity flickering across your face.

“What kind of stuff?”

For a moment Bucky hesitated. It was subtle, just the briefest pause, but you noticed it. His gaze flickered away and he shrugged one shoulder in that casual way he used whenever he was deliberately downplaying something.

“Just… things.”

You didn’t push him. Loving James Buchanan Barnes meant understanding that some parts of him opened slowly, like doors that had rusted shut over decades of silence. If you forced them, he’d only retreat deeper into himself, and you had learned long ago that patience worked far better than pressure. So instead you simply hummed softly and returned your attention to the box in front of you.

“Alright, honey,” you said gently. “Then we keep looking.”

The deep cleaning had started that morning almost by accident. You had woken up tangled together in his bed, Bucky still half asleep with one arm draped lazily across your waist, his breathing slow and warm against the back of your neck. The conversation had drifted the way it often did during those quiet early hours, from nothing to everything, until somehow it landed on the subject of all the things he still had tucked away around the apartment.

Old things. Things he had never quite had the energy to sort through. Pieces of a life that had been scattered across decades and wars and identities he barely recognized anymore. It wasn’t always painful—sometimes it was just strange—but the past lived in small corners of his home. Old photographs he never displayed, war medals tucked in drawers, letters his family had sent him years ago, notebooks from different periods of his life. Digging through them felt less like cleaning and more like uncovering layers of history Bucky had never fully unpacked.

Hours later, the apartment looked like the aftermath of a minor archaeological dig.

Bucky had moved on to the hallway closet now, crouching down to pull out another storage box with the same focused determination he applied to every problem in his life. You could hear him shifting things around in the other room while you knelt beside the dresser in the bedroom, sliding open the lowest drawer and carefully sorting through stacks of papers and folders that had clearly been thrown in there without much thought.

“Anything?” you called out.

“No,” Bucky answered from down the hall, frustration creeping slightly into his voice. “Just more junk.”

You smiled faintly to yourself and continued organizing the drawer, pushing aside old receipts, a few loose photographs, and a thin stack of folded documents. At the very back, tucked behind everything else, your fingers brushed against something solid.

A small wooden box.

You paused for a moment, brushing away the thin layer of dust that coated the lid. It didn’t look particularly special—just dark wood, simple and unmarked, about the size of a paperback book. The kind of thing someone might use to store random keepsakes or old trinkets.

“Buck?” you called again.

“Yeah?”

“I found another box.”

“Open it, love.” he replied absentmindedly.

So you did.

The lid lifted with a quiet creak.

Inside were letters.

Not just a few.

Dozens.

Some folded neatly into careful squares, others slightly wrinkled at the edges like they had been handled too many times. A few were written on notebook paper torn from spiral bindings, others on plain sheets that had been folded and refolded until the creases had softened with age. A few were scribbled on notebook paper, others on random scraps that looked like they had been torn from somewhere nearby. One was written on the back of what looked like an old grocery receipt.

Your name was written at the top of almost every single one.

Your breath caught.

“Oh…”

You hadn’t meant to snoop. Not even remotely. The box hadn’t looked personal—and Bucky himself had told you to open it. But the moment your eyes recognized your name in his handwriting, something in your chest tightened in a way you couldn’t quite explain.

You picked up the first letter slowly, the paper felt worn between your fingers like it had been opened and closed more times than you could count.

“Love?” you called again, your voice softer now.

“Yeah?”

You kept staring at the page.

“Did you… mean for me to read these at some point?”