awake and unafraid

pairing: bucky barnes x girlfriend!reader (fem, second person) word count: ~4.1k rating: general — no warnings, just teeth-rotting fluff warnings: none. brief mentions of bucky's past/nightmares (handled gently), one (1) emotional supersoldier, pet names, kissing, sam wilson over the phone being a menace

summary: four years to the day since a rainy Tuesday and a shared umbrella, Bucky takes you to dinner. He's been carrying something in his pocket for eleven weeks.

a/n: i just think he deserves this. dividers not mine. reblogs are love 💌

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Bucky Barnes had been standing in front of the bathroom mirror for eleven minutes.

You knew because you'd counted, leaning against the doorframe in your slip with your hair half-pinned, watching him fight a knot in his tie like it had personally wronged him. He'd gotten it right on the first try at Sam's sister's wedding. He'd gotten it right the time you both went to that gala neither of you wanted to attend, where he'd spent the whole night with his hand at the small of your back and his mouth near your ear, narrating the room like a nature documentary. That guy's on his fourth shrimp. He thinks nobody's watching. I'm always watching.

Tonight the tie was winning.

"You want help?" you asked.

"No."

"You sure?"

"Mm." He undid it again. Started over. His jaw was doing the thing; that small tight flex under the skin, the one he got when he was thinking too hard about something and pretending he wasn't. "It's crooked."

"It's not crooked."

"It's crooked, doll, I can see it."

"It's a tie, Buck, it's not a—" You pushed off the doorframe and crossed the small tiled space and put your hands over his. He stilled instantly, the way he always did, like your touch was a switch somewhere behind his ribs. "Give it here."

He gave it here.

You worked the silk into shape with the ease of four years' practice, and he let you, chin tipped up, eyes down on your face. Up close he smelled like the cedar soap he bought in bulk because he liked knowing there'd be more, and underneath that, faintly, like the cologne you'd given him last Christmas that he only ever wore for you.

"You shaved," you noted.

"I did."

"Twice?"

"Once." A pause. "Thoroughly."

"Mm-hm." You smoothed the knot flat against his collar and patted it, twice, proprietary. "There. Perfect. As if you weren't going to be the best-looking man in the room anyway."

He huffed; that quiet, unwilling laugh that lived at the back of his throat, the one you'd spent four years learning how to summon. "Low bar. It's Brooklyn."

"It's a very high bar. Brooklyn's full of men in expensive glasses."

"I could take 'em."

"I know you could, honey. That's the problem."

His hands found your waist. Warm palm, cool metal, both familiar. He looked at you a beat too long, and something crossed his face; soft, and scared, and so tender it made your chest ache and then it was gone, tucked away neat as a folded letter.

"You look—" he started.

"I'm not even dressed yet."

"Yeah, well." His thumb moved once against your hip. "I got eyes."

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He wouldn't tell you where you were going.

This, in itself, was suspicious. Bucky Barnes did not do surprises. Bucky Barnes did plans, laid out and stated aloud, exit routes and timelines and we'll leave at seven-fifteen, traffic's bad on Flatbush, because uncertainty had once been a thing that happened to him and he'd decided, somewhere in the long slow years of coming back to himself, that he was done with that. He told you when he was going out. He told you when he'd be back. He texted you photos of the grocery store shelf when the brand of tea you liked was sold out, with the message they got the mango one. yes or no. don't overthink it.

So when you'd asked, three days ago, where are we going Saturday, and he'd said it's a surprise, you'd nearly dropped your mug.

"Just a hint," you tried now, in the back of the car, streetlights sliding gold over the planes of his face.

"No."

"One hint. A syllable."

"Doll."

"Is it a restaurant?”

"You're wearing a dress that costs more than my first car," he said. "Do you think I'm takin' you to a Sbarro."

"You loved that Sbarro."

"I love you. I tolerated that Sbarro." He said it easily, offhand, still looking out the window and then his hand found yours on the seat between you and stayed there, fingers threading through, metal cool against your knuckles. He'd stopped flinching about that maybe two years in. It had taken you a while to notice he'd stopped. It had taken him longer.

"Okay," you said. "Fine. No hints."

"Thank you."

"But if it's that place with the foam—"

"It's not the place with the foam."

"—because I still don't know what I ate at the place with the foam—"

"It was a beet."

"It was air, James."

He laughed. Out loud, this time, head back against the seat, and the driver glanced at the mirror at the sound of it, and you filed the moment away in the enormous private archive you kept of him laughing, which was the only collection you'd ever been serious about.

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It wasn't the place with the foam.

It was a small Italian restaurant on a corner in Carroll Gardens with a green awning and a single hand-lettered sign, twelve tables inside, candles in old wine bottles, the kind of place that had been there since before he was born and would probably outlive everyone in it. The woman at the door was about ninety and she took his face in both hands and said something rapid in Italian and he answered her, haltingly, badly, and she smacked his arm affectionately and led you to a table by the window.

You sat down. You looked at him. "You speak Italian?”

"I speak four words of Italian and three of them are food."

"You've been practicing."

"Rosa's got opinions about my pronunciation." He shook out his napkin like a man buying time. "She's had 'em for six weeks."

"Six weeks," you repeated slowly. "You've been coming here for six weeks?"

"Once a week." He didn't look up. "Wanted to know if the food was good before I brought you. And then—" A shrug, one-shouldered. "Then Rosa started saving me the corner table on Saturdays and it got to be a whole thing, and now I think she believes I'm a widower."

"Bucky."

"I never said I was a widower."

"Did you correct her?"

"I didn't have the vocabulary," he said, deadpan, and you laughed so hard you had to put your hand over your mouth, and across the table his eyes went warm and crinkled at the corners and he watched you like he'd built the whole evening for exactly that sound. Which, you'd realize later, he had.

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Four years ago it had rained.

Not a nice rain, either; the mean kind, the kind that comes sideways in October and turns every umbrella in the tri-state area inside out. You'd been standing under the awning of a bookstore on Court Street with a paper bag going soft in your arms, doing math about how much of your paycheck was in that bag and how much of it was about to become pulp, when a man in a dark jacket had stopped a few feet away and stood there in the downpour with his hands in his pockets, apparently unbothered, like weather was a rumor he'd heard once.

You'd said: you're getting soaked.

He'd said: yeah.

You'd said: do you want to come under here.

And he'd looked at you, a fast careful sweep like he was checking the room for exits and finding, to his own visible confusion, that he didn't need one and then he'd stepped under the awning, three feet of polite distance between you, and said, thanks, in a voice like a door opening in a house nobody had lived in for a long time.

You'd stood there twenty minutes. You'd talked about the bookstore. He'd told you the block used to have a butcher on the corner and a shoe repair two doors down, and when you asked how he knew that, he'd gone very still and said, I read a lot of history, and you'd said, sure, and let him have it. Much later, a hundred nights later, with your head on his chest in the dark; he'd told you the truth, all of it, the whole long unbearable weight of it, and you had listened without moving, and at the end you had said the only thing there was to say, which was: okay. thank you for telling me. I'm still here.

He'd cried, that night. Quietly, the way he did everything. You'd never mentioned it again and neither had he, and something in him had unclenched permanently, like a fist finally set down.

That was four years ago. The awning. The rain. The paper bag, which had in fact disintegrated, all over the sidewalk, and which he had helped you gather up with an expression of such grave concentration that you'd known, in the stupid immediate way you know things at twenty minutes' acquaintance that you were in a great deal of trouble.

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"Okay," you said, halfway through the pasta, "favorite year."

"Of us?"

"Of us."

He thought about it seriously. He thought about everything seriously; it was one of the great pleasures of loving him, watching a question actually get considered instead of batted back.

"Two," he said.

"Two?" You lowered your fork. "Two was the year the boiler broke."

"Two was the year you moved in."

"Oh." Your face went hot. "Right."

"Boiler broke in February and we slept in the living room under every blanket you own, which is eleven, by the way, I counted—"

"You counted my blankets—"

"—and you made me put my feet on you 'cause they were cold." He turned his water glass a quarter turn on the tablecloth. "Nobody'd ever done that. Let me be cold on 'em." A beat. "I dunno. I liked being a guy with a boiler problem. Regular problem. Landlord problem." He glanced up. "You cried about the landlord."

"I did not cry about the landlord."

"You cried a little about the landlord."

"I was tired—"

"You were magnificent," he said. "You yelled at a man in a Mets jacket for nine straight minutes and I have never been more attracted to anybody in my life."

You put your hands over your face. "God."

"S'true."

"Fine. Okay. My turn." You dropped your hands. "Three."

"Three." He raised his eyebrows. "Three was the year I was gone half of it."

"Three was the year you came back and you called from the airport." You watched his face change. "Every time. Every single time, before you even got your bag, so I'd know. You didn't have to do that."

"'Course I did."

"No, you didn't. That's the point." You reached across and put two fingers on the back of his hand, the flesh one, right over the old scar he'd gotten doing something stupid with a garbage disposal in year one. "Anybody can be a person who shows up when it's easy. You kept telling me where you were."

Bucky Barnes looked down at the table for a second. His throat worked.

"Hey," you said.

"I'm fine."

"You're doing the jaw."

"I'm not doing the jaw."

"You're absolutely doing the jaw, you've been doing the jaw since the bathroom—"

"Rosa," he said loudly, turning in his seat, "the lady wants dessert."

"I have not finished my dinner—"

"She wants two desserts."

Rosa said something extremely pleased in Italian. You kicked him gently under the table. He kicked you back, and then hooked his ankle around yours and left it there, and you ate the rest of your dinner tangled together under the tablecloth like teenagers.

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Here is what you did not know.

The ring had been in his sock drawer for eleven weeks, inside a rolled pair of grey socks he never wore, inside a box he'd checked so many times the hinge had loosened. He'd bought it on a Tuesday in a shop in the diamond district where the jeweler had recognized him and been very cool about it, right up until Bucky had said I don't know how to do this and the man had put down his loupe and said nobody does, that's the whole thing, and then spent forty-five minutes with him, patient as a priest.

It was not a big ring. He'd thought about a big ring. He'd stood in front of a case of big rings and understood, with the peculiar clarity that came to him sometimes, that you would wear a big ring beautifully and take it off to do dishes and worry about it on the subway. So a small old thing, a warm gold band with three stones, made sometime in the thirties by hands that were dust now. Something that had already survived the century he'd lost. He'd liked that about it so much he'd had to go stand outside for a minute.

He'd planned it four times.

The first plan was the apartment: candles, your record player, the whole thing. He scrapped it because he'd realized he'd never make it through cooking dinner without telling you. He physically could not keep a thing like that inside himself for four hours in the same room as you; he'd start crying into the risotto.

Second plan was Coney Island, because you loved it in the off-season, the whole grey creaking emptiness of it. Scrapped for weather.

Third plan involved Sam, and a boat, and Sam had said, "Absolutely not, man, she'd have nowhere to run," and Bucky had said, "Why would she need to run," and Sam had said, "Emotionally, Barnes," and that had been the end of the boat.

The fourth plan was the one he was executing tonight, badly, with a ring in his inside jacket pocket and his heart going like a bird in a box, and the only thing keeping him upright was that you had held his hand in the car for nine blocks without being asked.

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"Walk with me," he said outside.

The night had gone cool and clean. You'd argued about the check for form's sake and lost, and Rosa had kissed you both and pressed a bag of amaretti into your hands, and you had not gotten a straight answer about the widower thing.

"Where?"

"Not far."

You took his arm; the left one, always, because early on you'd figured out that he braced for people to avoid it, and you'd made a decision about that and then never varied it once in four years — and you walked. Court Street on a Saturday night: someone's window open with a Yankees game on, a kid on a scooter, two dogs conducting negotiations. He was quiet. Not the bad quiet. The other kind, where he was working up to something.

Three blocks. Four. Then you looked up and the awning was there. Green and white, a little more faded than it had been. The bookstore was closed, dark, the security gate half-down, a hand-lettered sign in the window about a poetry reading on Thursday.

You stopped walking.

"Bucky."

"Yeah."

"You brought me to the awning."

"Yeah."

"Bucky."

"Give me a second," he said, and let go of your arm, and stepped under it.

He stood exactly where he'd stood four years ago. Hands in his pockets. Then out of his pockets. Then in again. He looked at the sidewalk, and at the closed gate, and at you standing two feet away in the streetlight in your good dress with your mouth open, and he took a breath so deep you saw his whole chest move.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. I had this whole—" He gestured vaguely. "I wrote it down. It's in my other jacket. Which is at home. So."

"Buck—"

"No, let me please. Let me." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Four years ago I was standing right here and I didn't want anything. You gotta understand that. I wasn't sad, exactly, I was just done. Like a book somebody'd finished reading and left on a bench. Rain didn't bother me 'cause nothing bothered me. And then a girl under an awning asked me if I wanted to come in out of the wet."

Your eyes had already started stinging. "It was twenty minutes," you said thickly. "It was a very wet twenty minutes."

"It was the first time in seventy years anybody offered me something without needing me to be something first." His voice cracked on something and he stopped and pressed his lips together and got it back. "You didn't want the soldier. You didn't want the story. You wanted to know if I'd read Game of Thrones. And I hadn't. And I went home and bought it."

"You hated it."

"I did not hate it—"

"You said it was 'a lot of sentences about crazy people dressed in theater costumes.'"

"I read it twice," he said, wounded, "and I got you the first edition for your birthday, so you can put that away, honey, you can never use that against me again."

You laughed and it came out mostly as a sob and you pressed the back of your wrist against your mouth. "Okay. Sorry. Go ahead."

He looked at you.

And whatever he'd written down in the other jacket; whatever careful, drafted, edited thing was folded in that pocket across the borough he set it down. You watched him set it down. His shoulders came away from his ears.

"I know what I am," he said quietly. "I know what comes with me. Some nights I wake up and I don't know the room, and you say my name and put your hand flat on my chest and wait, and you've never once looked at me like I'm something that happened to you." He swallowed. "And I keep waiting for the day you get tired. Four years, I've been waiting. And every morning you're just there. Making the coffee wrong."

"I make the coffee fine—"

"You make it like a war crime and I drink it every day," he said, "and I'd drink it for the next fifty years if you'd let me."

And then he got down on one knee, on the wet Brooklyn sidewalk, under the awning of a closed bookstore on Court Street, and got the box out of his inside pocket, and his hands were shaking so badly it took him two tries to open it.

"I don't want to be your boyfriend anymore," Bucky Barnes said. "I want the whole thing. I want the paperwork. I want your name on my mail and my name on your name if you want it and I want to be the guy that's legally obligated to carry your groceries. I want to be old with you and doll, I've been old, I got opinions about who I do it with." He laughed, wetly, terribly. "Marry me. Please. I've had this in my sock drawer for eleven weeks and I'm losing my mind."

The whole street had gone silent, in the way New York occasionally does, as if the city had turned around to look.

You could not speak. You got down on the sidewalk too, ruined dress and all, knees on the concrete in front of him, and you took his face in both hands; the stubbleless jaw, the wet cheek, the man and you said, "Yes."

He stared at you.

"Yes," you said again, "obviously, yes, you idiot, you beautiful idiot, you've been doing the jaw all night, I thought somebody died—"

And he made a sound you had never heard him make before and hauled you into him so hard you both nearly went over sideways into a planter.

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The kiss was terrible. It was the best kiss of your life. It was ninety percent teeth and crying and his hand cradling the back of your skull like something he'd been trusted with, and when you finally broke apart he pressed his forehead to yours and just breathed for a while.

"You gotta let me put it on you," he said eventually, hoarse.

"Right. Yes. Sorry."

"Give me the — the left one, sweetheart, the left—"

"I know which hand it goes on, I'm emotional—"

He slid it on. It fit. It fit perfectly, and you looked at him.

"Bucky."

"Mm."

"How does it fit."

"I measured your finger."

"When."

"You take your rings off in the shower," he said, with dignity, "and I'm a highly trained operative."

"You measured my ring in the bathroom—"

"Eleven weeks ago." He kissed your knuckles, right over the gold, and his mouth was still shaking. "Nearly told you four times. Nearly told you tonight, in the bathroom, when you fixed my tie. You had your hands on me and you said perfect and I almost went down on the tile."

"I would have said yes on the tile."

"Yeah, well." He helped you up off the sidewalk, brushed grit off your knees with absurd gentleness, held you at arm's length and looked at you like the awning was a church. "You deserved a better floor."

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You walked home. Forty minutes, in the wrong shoes, and you didn't care, and he took them off you and carried them the last six blocks like a man carrying the flag.

You called nobody. You wanted the night. But at some point on Union Street his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he looked at the screen and made a face and answered on speaker.

"How'd she do," said Sam Wilson.

"How'd she do?" you said.

"Oh, hey! Congratulations. That's not a question, by the way, I'm not asking. Did he cry?"

"Instantly," you said.

"Called it."

"Sam—" Bucky started.

"No, listen, I need you to know something." Sam's voice went warm and unbearable. "This man has had that ring in a sock for almost three months. He asked me if it was too soon. Four years in, he asked me if it was too soon. And I said, Buck, buddy, my guy, the woman has met your mother's grave, I think you're clear—"

Bucky hung up.

"Buck!"

"He'll call back."

He called back. Bucky declined it and put the phone in his pocket and took your hand again; the left one, now, turning it in the light of a bodega window so the three small stones went hot and gold and you stood there in the middle of the sidewalk while somebody's grocery delivery rattled past.

"It was your idea, wasn't it," you said. "The awning."

"Where else." He shrugged. "That's the corner where it started. Seemed right to do the next part on it."

"You are so much sappier than you let people believe."

"I'll deny it in court."

"I'm going to tell everyone."

"You're gonna tell everyone anyway. You told the whole building when I learned to use the dishwasher." He smiled; the full one, rare as a comet, the one that made him look about twenty-three years old. "Hey. Say it again."

"Say what again?"

"You know what."

You went up on your toes, hands on his lapels, and said it against his mouth. "Yes."

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Later at one in the morning, the good dress over the back of a chair and his tie somewhere near the door and both of you in bed with the window cracked because he liked to hear the street; you lay with your head on his chest and your left hand flat over his heart where he could see it.

"Bucky?"

"Yeah, doll."

"Can I ask you something and you won't get weird."

"No promises."

"Were you scared I'd say no?"

He was quiet for a long moment. His fingers moved slowly through your hair, that absent unthinking rhythm he did in his sleep sometimes.

"No," he said. "That's the thing. That's what took eleven weeks." He shifted, so he could see your face. "I wasn't scared you'd say no. I was scared of how much I wanted you to say yes. Been a long time since I wanted anything that bad. Forgot what it does to a guy."

You turned the ring on your finger. It was warm from your skin already, like it had decided to stay.

"For what it's worth," you said, "I've known since the paper bag."

"Which paper bag."

"The one that fell apart. Under the awning. You picked up every single book like they were surgery, and you didn't say anything dumb, and you didn't ask for my number, and I stood there in the rain thinking, oh no."

"Oh no?"

"Oh no," you confirmed. "Very serious. Four years of oh no."

Bucky Barnes laughed into your hair, long and low and helpless, the sound going right through your ribs into the mattress and pulled you in closer, and kissed the top of your head, and said, into the dark, in the voice of a man who had finally put down something he'd been carrying for a hundred years:

"Fifty more, sweetheart. At least. I'm gonna be insufferable."

"Promise?"

"Yeah," he said. "That's kinda the point of the paperwork."

The next morning you made the coffee wrong. He drank all of it.

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thank you for reading 🤍 reblogs & comments keep me writing. my inbox is open if you want a part two where they call his therapist, sam plans the bachelor party, and rosa finds out he was never a widower.

taglist: open — send an ask to be added

Sebastian Stan as Mihai Gheorghiu

I love my moots who are never online and I haven't heard from them in months

I love my moots who are constantly changing their blog and URL never stays the same

I love my moots who's blog theme and URL haven't changed since the day they made it

I love my moots who are super energetic

I love my moots who are super mellow

I love my moots who I just made and still have so much to learn about them

I love my moots who I've known for so long and we're super comfortable with each other

I love my moots. All my moots.

My brain:

honestly, i could not tell you where the inspiration comes from. much like when i write and get an idea it strikes like a bolt of lightning. i will say that my current theme was born because i just miss myspace and thought the messenger box was funny.

i wouldn’t even say i’m 100% in love with it and i want to adjust the text and add some stuff but my old theme had been up for forever and i was getting sick of it 😅

what if...

you had a size kink about your boss?

Pairing: Congressman Bucky Barnes x Secretary F!Reader Warnings/tags: porn without plot!!; p in v; size kink; belly bulge; praise kink; dirty talk; unprotected sex; creampie; overstimulation; gentle dom Bucky; soft Bucky; aftercare; Word count: 1.7k Notes: i don't know what this is. i just really wanted to write something horny about a belly bulge 🧍‍♂️read the tags, but this is really just pwp, no plot involved, nothing but filth. i wrote it as congressman barnes but let's be honest, it could truly be any post-serum bucky..... i just wanted an excuse to write for my favorite congressman ❤️

Already between your legs, mattress dipping under the sheer mass of him as he braces over you, Congressman Barnes has one thick thigh braced against the sheets as the blunt head of his cock lines up with your entrance. Broad-shouldered, tall enough that even on his knees he still looms over you, from the first day you had walked into his office you had been helplessly impressed by the way his shoulders filled the doorway, how his tailored suits strained across a chest carved from solid muscle, heavy hands swallowing yours when he passed you files. You had spent months stealing glances at the breadth of his back when he leaned over his desk, attraction always present, but never expecting to somehow end up spread open under him, just as you are now, stretched around the tip of his cock, hair spilling across his pillows, nails digging into his shoulders.