from when your Brooklyn broke

Time After Time has been on repeat for forty-seven minutes.

You know this because you’ve checked your phone three times, not to see the time, but to watch the timestamp on the song crawl forward like a confession. Cyndi Lauper has been giving you a lovely serenade for quite some time. You hadn’t heard it in years—not since college, maybe, when you used to play it on cheap headphones while staring out a rain-streaked window, romanticizing your own loneliness like a trophy.

But he sent it to you.

You don’t even remember how it started. A stray comment on a mission debrief many months ago. A joke about vibranium and chafing. A late-night text that was supposed to be about logistics—"Did you see the intel on the Odessa file?"—that spiraled into something else entirely. Something that now lives in your chest like a second heartbeat, something that has grown roots so deep you’re not sure anyone could surgically remove it without killing you.

You’re lying in your bed at your apartment, the sheets tangled around your ankles, one arm thrown over your eyes. The room is dark except for the blue glow of your phone screen. The song swells, that lush, aching synth washing over you like tidewater, and you think… am I allowed to cry?

Because your boredom is bone-deep. This cage—this life of safe houses and sanctioned missions and endless propriety—was once just fine. You chose it. You signed the nondisclosure agreements, took the psych evaluations, swore you could handle the gray areas. And you have. For years, you've been a model operative. Steady hands. Clean conscience. A reputation for being the one who doesn't crack under pressure, who doesn't get attached, who can walk away from anything.

But that was before he started looking at you like you were the only soft thing left in a world made of only the purest things allowed here.

The song builds. That gorgeous, aching crescendo. The lyrics drift through your skull like smoke. Maybe you’re seeing vision. Maybe you’re bad. Or mad. Or wise. Yeah, you think. That’s the question, isn’t it?

Your hand drifts to your thigh. Just below your hip, where the sheet has fallen away. You don’t mean to do it—it’s not a sexual thing, not exactly—it’s just that you’ve been thinking about the word mine so often lately that you swear you can feel it branded into your skin. Like he’s already claimed you. Like your body knows something your brain is still too cowardly to admit. Him writing 'mine' on your upper thigh. Not in a possessive, toxic way but in a way of being that exactly. His. You press your palm flat against the spot, and your eyes sting.

You scroll through your messages with him. You tell yourself it's a terrible idea. You do it anyway.

Bucky: Can't sleep.

You: Same.

Bucky: What's keeping you up?

You: Everything. Nothing. You?

Bucky: The usual.

The usual. You know what that means. The dreams. The memories. The faces of people he can't save, even now, even after all the amends and apologies and years of therapy. You know because he's told you. Because somewhere along the way, you became the person he tells at 2 AM when the weight of his own history gets too heavy to carry alone.

Bucky: Do you ever think about how different things would be if we'd met before?

You: Before?

Bucky: Before everything. Before I was... this.

You remember staring at that message for a long time. Your thumbs hovering over the keyboard. All the things you wanted to say—I like who you are now. I like the person you've chosen to become. I don't want a version of you that hasn't survived the things that made you gentle—but you don’t say them.

You: All the time.

He'd sent a voice message after that. Just a few seconds. When you played it, all you could hear was your name in his voice, the way he was breathing. Slow. Steady. Like he was trying to prove to you that he was still there, still real, still breathing in the same world as you.

You'd saved it. You'd told yourself it was for professional reasons—in case he needed backup, in case something happened and you needed to verify his voice—but you knew the truth. You listened to it when you missed him. Which was always.

Your phone buzzes now, and you nearly drop it.

Bucky: You listening? The song, I mean.

You swallow. Your throat clicks. You press your fingers to your pulse point and feel it rabbiting under your skin, and you think about hedge mazes and ocean rocks and all the ways a person can die without ever touching the thing they want most.

You: Yeah.

Bucky: And?

And what? you think. And I'm drowning. And I've imagined the weight of your metal arm across my ribs approximately six hundred times. And I keep recalling things we never did—messy top lip kisses, how I long for our trysts without ever touching your skin...

You type, "It's good." and delete it.

You type, "Makes me feel sad." and delete that too.

You type, "I think about you every time I hear it, which has been almost fifty times now." and if course, delete it before your thumb even lifts from the screen.

You: Come over.

The three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again. You hold your breath for so long your vision starts to spot.

Bucky: That a good idea?

You laugh, but it comes out wet. You press the heel of your palm to your sternum, like you can physically hold yourself together, like you can keep the cracks from spreading.

You: Probably not.

Bucky: I'll be there in ten.

The complex where you live is quiet at this hour. The kind of quiet that amplifies everything—the hum of the HVAC, the creak of floorboards, the frantic rabbit-thump of your own heart. You get up. Pace to the window. Look out at the dark trees swaying in the breeze. The moon is half-full, hanging low and yellow like a bruised fruit. You press your forehead to the cool glass and try to remember how to breathe like a normal person.

You’re already regretting it. Already rewriting the text in your head, imagining a version of yourself with better judgment, someone who would have typed, "Actually, never mind, I’m fine, forget I said anything", and rolled over and gone to sleep like a normal person. But you’re not normal. You haven’t been normal since the first time he’d brushed past you in a hallway and you’d felt the static jump between you like a live wire, like a warning, like a promise.

You push off from the window and start tidying. It's a nervous habit—straightening the stack of books on your nightstand, smoothing the already-smooth duvet, fluffing a pillow that doesn't need fluffing. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and wince. Dark circles under your eyes. Hair that looks like you've been running your hands through it all night. Lips chapped from biting them.

You run your fingers through your hair, then immediately mess it up again because you don't want to look like you tried. You pull on an oversized sweatshirt—his, technically, though he doesn't know you stole it from the time he came over to watch a movie three weeks ago—and wrap your arms around your knees where you settle back on the bed.

The sweatshirt smells like him. Cedar and gunmetal and something underneath that's just Bucky. You've worn it four times. You've washed it twice, but the smell lingers, or maybe you're imagining it, maybe you've imprinted the memory of him so deeply onto the fabric that you can't tell the difference anymore.

The knock comes soft. Two taps. A pause. One more.

He’s learned to knock like that because you once told him you hate sudden noises. Because he remembers everything. Because he’s a paradox—all sharp edges and brutal history wrapped around a center that’s still, impossibly, gentle.

You stand, feeling your legs unsteady, like you’ve been asleep for a hundred years and are only just learning to walk again. You walk out of your bedroom, walk in your living room and then put your hand on the doorknob. You close your eyes and think that, once again there’s a slip and falling back into the hedge maze. Oh, what a way to die.

You open the door.

Bucky stands in the hallway, backlit by the emergency lights, and you forget how to breathe.

He’s wearing a henley. Gray. Sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and there it is, that difference in flesh and metal, that impossible union of soft and hard that your brain has catalogued like scripture. He’s been letting his hair grow a bit, curling at the nape of his neck. His jaw is shadowed with stubble. His eyes are the color of a winter sky just before snow, and they’re looking at you like you’re the only warm thing in a frozen world.

“Hey,” he says. His voice is low. Rough with sleeplessness. It scrapes along your skin like a physical thing.

“Hey,” you manage. It comes out breathy. Pathetic. You clear your throat.

He shifts his weight. “You okay? Your text sounded…”

“Sad?” you offer.

“Yeah.” He searches your face. “That.”

You step back, letting him in. The door clicks shut behind him, and suddenly the living room feels half its size. He moves like he’s afraid of breaking things—a lifetime of restraint baked into his bones. Then starts walking freely towards your bedroom and sits on the edge of your bed, not quite settling, like he’s ready to bolt.

You stay standing. Lean against the dresser. Put furniture between you like a coward.

“I’ve been thinking,” you say.

He chuckles. “Dangerous.” His wink makes your knees weak.

A laugh escapes you. “You have no idea.”

He watches you. Patient. That’s the thing about Bucky Barnes—he’s learned to wait. Decades of waiting. What’s a few more minutes while you try to find the words for something you can barely admit to yourself?

“The song,” you start. “You sent it for a reason.”

He looks down at his hands—flesh and metal, both still now. “Yeah.”

“What reason?”

He’s quiet for a long moment. Time After Time has ended. Your room is silent except for the sound of two people breathing too carefully, too deliberately, like they’re both afraid of what might happen if they let their guard down.

“I heard it,” he says finally, “and I thought of you. That’s all.”

That’s all. As if that’s not everything. As if that’s not a declaration of war on the walls you’ve both spent months building. As if that’s not the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to you, and he probably doesn’t even realice it.

“James.” His name comes out wrong—too soft, too raw. “I need you to be honest with me.”

His head snaps up. Something flickers behind his eyes. Fear, maybe. Or hope. They look the same on him—a widening of the pupils, a slight parting of the lips, a tension in the shoulders that could go either way.

“I’m always honest with you,” he says. “You’re the only one I can be honest with. Always honest.”

“Are you?”

He flinches. Just a fraction. But you see it. You see everything when it comes to him. You’ve made a study of his micro-expressions, the way his jaw tightens when he’s lying, the way his metal fingers twitch when he’s nervous, the way he looks at the floor when he’s about to say something he’s afraid of.

You push off the dresser. Take a step closer. Then another. Until you’re standing in front of him, close enough to count the scars on his knuckles, close enough to smell the soap he uses—something plain, something military, something that shouldn’t make your knees weak but does.

“What are we doing?” you whisper.

He looks up at you. Swallows. “I don’t know.”

“We text every day. You send me songs at two in the morning. You remember things I've told you—things I've never told anyone else.” Your voice cracks on the last word, and you hate yourself for it, hate how needy you sound, hate that he's seeing you like this. “You look at me like I'm something, and then you leave, and I spend the next three days trying to convince myself it didn't mean anything.”

“It means something,” he says quickly. Too quickly. Like the words are escaping without permission, like they've been trapped behind his teeth for so long that they've finally broken free.

“Then what?”

He stands.

Now there’s no furniture between you. Now there’s just the heat of him, the solid wall of his chest inches from yours, and you have to tilt your head back to hold his gaze. His jaw is tight. His left hand—the vibranium one—curls and uncurls at his side, a nervous tic you’ve learned to read.

“You wanna know what I think about?” he says, voice low. “When I can’t sleep?”

You nod. Because you can’t speak.

“I think about your hands.” He says it like an accusation. “The way you hold your coffee mug. Both hands, like you’re warming them. I think about the sound you make when you laugh—not the polite one you do in briefings, the real one, the one that’s kind of ugly and snorty and makes me feel like I’ve done something right.”

Your eyes sting. You blink rapidly, trying to hold it back.

“I think about what you'd look like in my shirts,” he continues, and now his voice is rougher, scraped raw, like he's pulling each word out of his own chest with a hook. “In my bed. With my name—” He stops. Shakes his head. A muscle jumps in his jaw. “Doesn't matter.”

“It matters,” you echo his own words back at him.

He makes a sound. Something between a laugh and a groan. “Jesus.”

“No,” you say, and you’re crying now, you realize, tears sliding hot and silent down your cheeks. “Not Jesus. Just you. Just me.” A weak smile is plastered in your face.

He reaches up. Slow. So slow. Like he's asking permission with every millimeter, like he's giving you every possible chance to stop him. His flesh hand cups your face, thumb brushing away a tear, and the gentleness of it breaks something inside you. Something you've been holding together with duct tape and denial for months.

“I’ve already done it,” you confess. “In my head. A thousand times.”

“Done what?”

“Everything.” The word comes out shattered. “I've kissed you. I've—God, Bucky, I've imagined what you sound like when you fall apart. I've imagined it so many times I can't tell the difference between fantasy and memory anymore.”

His breath catches. You feel it—the sharp inhale, the way his chest expands against yours.

“I’ve imagined your hands on me. Your mouth. The things you’d say.” You’re sobbing now, ugly and uncontrollable, and you can’t stop. “I’ve imagined waking up next to you. Making you coffee. Arguing about whose turn it is to do the dishes. Normal things. Things I’ll never have because I’m too scared to reach out and take them.”

“Hey,” he says, and his voice is wrecked. “Hey. Stop.”

“I can’t. I’ve been keeping these longings locked in lowercase inside a vault, and I can’t—someone told me there’s no such thing as bad thoughts, only your actions talk, but my actions are screaming, Bucky, every time I look at you, every time I don’t kiss you, every time I let you walk away—And I keep telling myself it’s wrong,” you go on, the words spilling out now, unstoppable. “That we’re colleagues. That we’re just friends. That you’re recovering. That I shouldn’t want you like this because wanting you like this makes me selfish, makes me bad, makes me—”

He kisses you.

It’s not gentle. It’s not tentative. It’s the kiss of a man who’s been holding himself back for so long that the dam has finally cracked, and now he’s drowning too. His metal hand comes up to the back of your neck, cool and sure, and he pulls you into him like you’re the only solid thing in a world that’s been trying to drown him for seventy years.

You make a sound against his mouth. Something desperate. Something that tastes like salt and want and finally.

His lips are softer than you imagined. That’s the first thing you notice. You’d expected them to be rough, chapped, but they’re not—they’re warm and yielding, and he kisses like he’s trying to memorize the shape of your mouth. His flesh hand slides into your hair, tangles there, holds on like you might disappear.

You grab his shirt. Fist the fabric at his chest. Pull him closer, closer, until there’s no space left, until you can feel the steady thump of his heart against your own racing pulse.

When he pulls back, you’re both breathing hard. His forehead rests against yours. His eyes are closed. His lips are reddened, wet, parted.

“I’ve done it too,” he murmurs. “In my head. You and me. A hundred different ways. A thousand.”

“Then why—” You can’t finish. The words stick in your throat.

“Because I’m afraid.” He says it simply. Honestly. Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Because everyone I’ve ever loved gets hurt. Because you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a lifetime of bad things, and I can’t—I can’t fuck this up by wanting it too much, wanting you too much, honey.”

You frame his face with your hands. Feel the stubble, the warmth, the solid realness of him. He’s here. He’s real. He wants you.

“What if,” you say slowly, “the way you hold me is actually what’s holy?”

His eyes open. Search yours.

“What if all those years of suffering, of propriety, of doing what we’re supposed to do—” you continue, “what if it was just keeping us from this? From each other?”

“You don’t believe in those things,” he says, but it’s not a question. He knows you. He knows everything.

“I don’t know what I believe in,” you admit. “But I believe in this. I believe in you.”

Something shifts in his expression. The last wall, maybe. The last lock. The last barrier between the two of you and something that feels terrifyingly close to forever.

He kisses you again. Slower this time. Deeper. His hands find your waist, and he walks you backward until your knees hit the bed, and you go down together in a tangle of limbs and sheets and the sound of your own heartbeat in your ears.

“You sure?” he asks, pulling back just enough to look at you. His pupils are blown. His lips are wet. He looks like a prayer you forgot you were saying.

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” you say.

And when he smiles—really smiles, the kind that reaches his eyes and softens every hard line of his face—you think, "Oh. This is what they meant. This is what all the songs were about".

Later, you lie in the dark with your head on his chest. His metal arm is cool against your bare shoulder. His flesh hand traces lazy patterns on your spine. Time After Time is playing again, because you’d queued it up on a loop, and neither of you has bothered to turn it off.

The sheets are a disaster. Tangled. Twisted. Half on the floor. Your hair is a rat’s nest, and there’s a mark on your collarbone that you’re going to have to explain tomorrow, and you don’t care. You don’t care about any of it.

“Hey,” he says.

“Mm?”

“That thing you said. About the way I hold you being holy.”

You tilt your head up and look at him. The moonlight filters through the blinds, striping his face in silver and shadow. He looks younger like this. Softer. Like the weight of the world isn’t pressing down on him for once.

“I think you’re right,” he says quietly. “I think I’ve been looking for something sacred my whole life. I just didn’t know it had your face.”

You bury your face in his neck. Smile against his skin.

“That’s the cheesiest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“Shut up.”

“Make me.”

He does.

When you come up for air, you’re both laughing—real laughter, the kind that comes from somewhere deep and surprised. His eyes crinkle at the corners and his nose scrunches. He looks happy, and the sight of it makes your chest ache in a completely different way.

“I have a confession,” you say.

His eyebrows lift. “That sounds ominous.”

“I stole your sweatshirt. Three weeks ago, when we had that movie night.”

He blinks. Then he looks down at the floor—the oversized gray sweatshirt, the one that drowns you, the one with the tiny hole in the cuff. His sweatshirt laying there along with your and his clothes.

“I know,” he says.

“You knew?”

“You really think I casually forgot that thing here?” He’s grinning now. Actually grinning. “I wanted something mine here, in your safe space. And then yeah, when I was walking away that night, saw you taking the sweatshirt and simply putting it along with that fluffy blanket you have.”

“Then why didn’t you say anything?”

He shrugs, the movement jostling you gently. “Looked better on you anyway.”

You punch his chest. Lightly. He catches your hand, brings it to his mouth, kisses your knuckles one by one.

“I have a confession too,” he says against your skin.

“What?”

“I’ve been sending you songs for six months. Every single one of them was about you.”

Your heart stutters. “Every single one?”

“Every. Single. One.” He meets your eyes. “I just didn’t know how to say it out loud.”

“Bucky.”

“I know. I’m an idiot.”

“No.” You sit up, propping yourself on your elbow so you can look down at him. “You’re not an idiot. You’re just—” You search for the word. “—careful. And I get it. I do. But you don’t have to be careful with me. I’m not going to break.”

His expression flickers. Something raw and vulnerable surfaces before he can hide it.

“I know,” he says. “That’s what scares me.”

“Scares you?”

“Because if you’re not going to break, then I have no excuse. No reason to keep my distance. No reason not to—” He stops. Swallows.

“Not to what?”

“Not to love you.”

The word hangs in the air between you. Love. You’ve been dancing around it for months, using every synonym, every euphemism, every careful avoidance. But here it is. Naked. Unavoidable.

“Too late,” you whisper.

“What?”

“I already love you. I’ve loved you for a while. I just didn’t want to say it first.”

He stares at you. For a moment, he doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe. Then he pulls you down, rolls you both over until you’re underneath him, and kisses you like he’s trying to pour every unsaid word into your mouth.

When he finally pulls back, his eyes are bright. Wet, maybe. It’s hard to tell in the dark.

“I love you,” he says. Like he’s testing the weight of it. Like he’s amazed it’s true. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

“You’re going to wear it out,” you tease, but you’re crying again, and so is he, and it doesn’t matter because you’re both laughing and crying and kissing and it’s the most beautiful mess you’ve ever been a part of.

You wake to sunlight and the sound of someone moving around your kitchen.

For a disorienting moment, you don't know where you are. The light is wrong—too bright, too golden. Then you feel the ache between your thighs, your body covered by your fluffy blanket and everything comes rushing back.

You turn your head and the space beside you is empty, but the sheets are still warm. You sit up, pull on his sweatshirt—your sweatshirt now, you're never giving it back—and pad barefoot toward the kitchen.

He's standing at your counter, shirtless, hair still sleep-mussed, making coffee with the focus of a man defusing a bomb. His metal arm catches the morning light, the vibranium shimmering like liquid mercury. The scars on his left shoulder—where flesh meets metal—are pale and puckered, and you want to kiss every single one of them.

“Morning,” you say.

He looks up. His eyes soften. “Morning, honey.”

“You made coffee.”

“You said you can't function without it.” He pours a mug, slides it across the counter toward you. “Cream, no sugar.”

You wrap your hands around the mug—both hands, just like he said—and take a sip. It's perfect.

“Thank you,” you say.

He nods. Leans against the counter. Crosses his arms over his chest, and god, the way his muscles shift when he does that should be illegal.

“What?” he asks, catching you staring.

“Nothing.” You take another sip. “Just thinking.”

“About?”

You set the mug down. Walk around the counter until you're standing in front of him. Reach up and push his hair out of his eyes.

“I'm thinking,” you say slowly, “that I don't want this to be a one-time thing.”

His hands find your hips. Settle there like they belong.

“Good,” he says. “Because I was thinking the same thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He ducks his head, presses a kiss to your forehead. “I was thinking I don't want to sleep in my bed alone ever again. I was thinking I want to wake up next to you every morning. I was thinking—” He pulls back, meets your eyes. “—that I'm tired of being afraid.”

“So don't be.”

“It's not that simple, baby.”

“It can be.” You frame his face with your hands. “We can make it simple. We wake up. We make coffee. We go to work. We come home. We fall asleep. Repeat. That's it. That's all it has to be.”

He searches your face. “You really think it's that easy?”

“I think,” you say, “that nothing about us has been easy. And maybe that's why we deserve this. The easy part.”

He's quiet for a long moment. Then he pulls you into his chest, wraps both arms around you—flesh and metal, soft and hard, everything he is and everything he's trying to be—and holds you like you're something precious.

“I love you,” he says into your hair.

“I love you too.”

And somewhere in the distance—or maybe just in your head—the song swells one last time. You think about hedge mazes and ocean rocks and all the ways you almost died before you ever got here. You think about locked vaults and lowercase longings and the sheer, terrifying miracle of being seen.

All those nights you spent dreaming about him writing 'mine' on your upper thigh, your waist, your collarbones… They’re not just in your mind. Not anymore.

You feel him smile against your hair, and you know—with absolute, bone-deep certainty—that you are not guilty of anything except wanting something good. Something real. Something that—finally, impossibly—wants you back.