Skittle's Sanctuary

You barely made it to the couch before you collapsed, groaning as you buried your face in the cushion. You only lifted your head to breathe and check your phone when it went off. A smile touched your lips when you sat that Bucky texted you. 

No matter how rough the days were, your boyfriend was a bright spot.

“Barely heard from you today, sweetheart. You okay?”

Your heart sank when you scrolled through the chat. You usually sent him memes or gifs that you knew would make him laugh, along with sweet messages to let him know you were thinking of him. Today you hardly sent a thing with everything going on.

It was touching that he noticed something was off.

“Rough day. Sorry I worried you.”

You curled up with a yawn, the phone resting beside you.

“Just resting my eyes,” you mumbled.

You weren’t sure how much time had passed when the familiar rumble of a motorcycle engine cut through the quiet of your apartment, making you sit up slowly. Your heart fluttered, not needing to look out the window because you knew exactly who was there. One of your favorite people.

Bucky.

Your Bucky.

The sudden knock at the door sounded impatient as you stood up and stretched. You almost laughed when the knock continued, louder and more persistent. Maybe it was time to give him a key.

You barely got the door open before Bucky pushed his way inside, forcing you to step back as he kicked the door shut without taking his eyes off you. Your breath rushed out of your lungs when you looked him over. The sight of him in a leather jacket always did something to you.

But the crease between his brows pushed the excitement away. 

“Bucky?” you asked.

A small sound left your mouth when he wrapped an arm around your waist and pulled you against him. His other hand came up to cradle the back of your head, his hold protective and tender. It felt like your feet weren’t on the ground. 

“I’m here,” he answered, his voice rough and low. “I’ve got you.”

You felt his heart beat against you steadily, grounding you as your fingers curled in his jacket. The scent of leather and cologne filled your nostrils as you took a deep breath. Your eyes burned suddenly when he held you tighter, almost like he was giving you permission to fall apart if you wanted to. It wasn’t just a hug.

It was exactly what you needed without realizing it.

“I’ve got you,” he said again, his lips touching your temple.

You didn’t break down, but you did sniffle.

“Today sucked,” you said, proud of yourself for not pouting.

It sounded ridiculous. Bucky had lived through years of torture, brainwashing and more. You hadn’t experienced even a tenth of the pain he endured and you were whining about-

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said sincerely, rubbing your back soothingly. He never invalidated your feelings. “I’ll listen if you wanna talk about it, or I can punch something or someone if it makes you feel better.”

You let out a watery laugh. “No punching,” you said, pulling back far enough to look at him. “Did you really speed all the way here because I said I had a rough day? I know you sped.”

“I may have.” The small smile on his face made you smile. “You tell me something like that and you think I won’t drop everything to get to you?”

Your heart skipped a beat. No other boyfriend dropped whatever they were doing to get to you in the past. But Bucky always managed to find ways to put you first. The male species could learn a thing or two from him.

“You were probably busy,” you guessed.

“Doesn’t matter. Nothing’s more important than you.”

Your eyes burned again, but you blinked the tears away. “Thank you.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled. “You don’t have to thank me for showing up,” he said, grasping your chin carefully. “Can I do one more thing?”

His mouth found yours before you finished nodding.

It wasn’t a rushed or hungry kiss. It was something warm and impossibly gentle, like the grip on your chin, a kind of kiss that resonated in your core. He deepened it, like he needed a reminder that you were real and safe as he comforted you. 

It felt like love.

His forehead rested against yours when he broke the kiss. “Did that help at all?” he asked, his breath ghosting your lips and thumb stroking your chin.

“More than you know,” you murmured, leaning into him. 

“Good.” He pressed another soft kiss to the corner of your mouth. “Did you eat?”

Your silence answered that question.

He sighed, not waiting for permission as he walked you backward toward your couch. “I’m ordering your favorite,” he said, pulling you onto his lap once he took a seat. His jacket was still on. “And I’m gonna hold you until it gets here, feed you if you let me, and do whatever you want for the rest of the night.”

You settled into him, your body truly relaxing this time. “Even watch a bad romcom?” you asked, still in awe of how much he wanted to take care of you.

He rested his chin on your shoulder. “If that’s what helps.”

“Getting a hug and kiss from you did wonders,” you said honestly.

Knowing that someone saw you made a world of difference. 

“Wonders, huh? Didn’t know I was that powerful,” he teased, taking out his phone to order.

You giggled and titled your head a bit. “You didn’t tell me about your day.”

“I got to see you,” he said, smiling gently. “So it’s a good day.”

And being in Bucky’s arms made your day much better.

I know a hug and kiss from Bucky would help me, okay? Love and thanks for reading! ❤️

The first thing you noticed, before you had even opened your eyes, was that the mattress beneath you felt wrong. It was firmer than yours, angled differently, and the pillow smelled like cedar and gun oil instead of the vanilla candle you kept burning on your nightstand. You lay there for a long moment trying to piece together why your body felt heavier than it should, why your shoulder ached in a way it never had before, and why, when you finally cracked one eye open, the ceiling above you was unfamiliar in a way that made your stomach drop. This was not your room. The realization crawled through you slowly, the way cold water spreads through fabric, and you pushed yourself upright with a suddenness that made the world tilt. That was when you caught sight of your own hand braced against the sheets, except it was not your hand at all. It was broader, scarred across the knuckles, and where your left arm should have been there was instead a gleaming column of vibranium plates that shifted and clicked as you flexed the fingers in confusion.

You screamed. It came out lower than you expected, rough and unfamiliar, and the sound of your own voice startled you so badly that you scrambled backward off the bed and landed hard on the floor in a tangle of limbs that did not feel like they belonged to you, because they did not. You caught your reflection in the dark screen of a turned-off television mounted on the wall and nearly screamed again, because staring back at you was not your face. It was Bucky's face, pale and wide-eyed and looking every bit as horrified as you felt, and it took several seconds of frantic, disbelieving staring before the truth of the situation settled into your bones with all the grace of a falling piano. You were in Bucky's body. You were in Bucky's room, in Bucky's bed, wearing Bucky's face, and somewhere in this tower your own body was presumably waking up with someone else's consciousness rattling around inside it.

Down the hall, in your room, Bucky was having a considerably worse morning. He had woken up warm and soft and smaller than he was used to, which alone might not have alarmed him on a groggy morning, except that his hair was suddenly long enough to fall into his face in a way that felt distinctly wrong, and his hands, when he lifted them to rub the sleep from his eyes, were not his hands. They were smaller, softer, unscarred, and both of them were flesh, which struck him as so deeply strange that he sat bolt upright and stared at them for a full ten seconds before his brain caught up to what his eyes were telling him. He looked down at himself, taking in the oversized band shirt you always slept in, the unfamiliar shape of a body that was not his own, and felt a wave of nauseated vertigo roll through him so intensely that he had to grip the edge of the mattress to keep from toppling over. He knew immediately, with the kind of instinctive certainty that came from a life spent adapting to impossible things, exactly whose body he was in, and the knowledge did nothing to make the moment any less disorienting.

"Oh, no," he said, and the voice that came out was yours, bright and startled and nothing like the low rasp he usually spoke in, which made the whole situation feel about ten times more surreal. He scrambled out of bed, nearly tripping over the hem of the shirt because your legs were shorter than his and his brain had not yet recalibrated to the new proportions, and made his way toward the door on legs that felt borrowed, because they were.

You met in the hallway between your two rooms, both of you frozen in matching expressions of horror, staring at each other with a kind of dawning, mutual dread. Bucky, standing in your body in your oversized sleep shirt with your hair a wild mess around your face, looked at you, standing in his body in nothing but the sweatpants he usually slept in, and for a moment neither of you said anything at all, because there did not seem to be words sufficient to the occasion.

"Please tell me I'm dreaming," you said, and the sound of Bucky's voice coming out of your mouth again made you flinch, because it was deep and rough and utterly bizarre to hear yourself produce.

"If you're dreamin', so am I, and that don't seem likely," Bucky said back, and hearing your own voice say his words, his careful old-fashioned phrasing, was almost worse than hearing his voice come out of you. He dragged a hand through your hair, a gesture so purely his own that it looked strange performed with your fingers, and let out a breath that trembled at the edges. "This is your doing, isn't it. Your powers did this."

"How is this automatically my fault," you said, though even as the words left your mouth you knew, with a sinking certainty, that it probably was. Your abilities had never been predictable things. They had announced themselves eighteen months ago in a burst of energy that had knocked out three city blocks and had been misbehaving in small, unpredictable ways ever since, flaring during nightmares, sparking when you were startled, and apparently now, evidently, swapping your consciousness into your boyfriend's body while you slept. "Okay. Okay, it might be my fault. But I didn't do it on purpose, I don't even know how I did it, and also can we please not stand in the hallway discussing this while you're wearing my face and I'm wearing yours, because Sam already thinks we're weird and this is not going to help."

As if summoned by his own name, Sam Wilson chose that exact moment to round the corner from the kitchen with a mug of coffee in hand, took one look at the two of you standing there in matching states of dishevelment and panic, and stopped so abruptly that coffee sloshed over the rim of his mug and onto his knuckles. He hissed at the heat, set the mug down on the nearest surface without looking, and pointed a finger back and forth between the two of you with the slow, deliberate motion of a man trying to make sense of something his eyes refused to accept.

"Why is Barnes standing there in his pajamas talking like he just walked out of a soap opera," Sam said, gesturing at you, "and why do you," he continued, gesturing now at Bucky, standing there in your shirt with your face doing an expression Sam had genuinely never seen it make before, "look like somebody just told you the sky was falling."

"It's a long story," you said, and your voice, Bucky's voice, came out clipped and irritated in a way that made Sam's eyebrows climb even higher.

"That's the thing," Bucky cut in, using your voice, and gesturing helplessly between the two of you, "he's me. I'm—she's me. I'm her. We switched, Sam, we woke up like this, and I don't know how to explain it any better than that."

Sam stared at the two of you for a long moment, his expression cycling rapidly through confusion, disbelief, and something that looked dangerously close to delight, before he pulled out his phone and started typing without so much as blinking. "Wanda," he said, more to himself than to either of you, "you are gonna want to see this."

Within twenty minutes the common floor of the tower had assembled into something resembling an emergency briefing, though the mood was considerably less tense than most of the briefings that usually took place in that room. Steve stood near the window with his arms crossed, doing an admirable job of keeping a straight face while looking back and forth between you and Bucky. Natasha had claimed the armchair in the corner and was watching the proceedings with the quiet, focused amusement of someone who fully intended to remember every detail for future use. Wanda sat cross-legged on the couch with her hands hovering an inch above the coffee table, red light curling faintly around her fingers as she studied the two of you with genuine scientific interest rather than mockery, which you appreciated more than you could say. Sam had not stopped grinning since he walked in, and had already, to your considerable irritation, taken several photographs on his phone before Steve told him to knock it off.

"Okay," Wanda said, drawing the attention of the room back to her as she let the crimson light fade from her fingertips, "so it is not a spell, and it is not an external interference. Whatever this is, it originates from inside you." She looked at you, sitting stiffly on the edge of the couch in Bucky's body, still visibly unnerved by the extra height and the metal arm you kept accidentally knocking into things. "Your ability reacts to emotional states, yes? Stress, fear, strong feeling."

"Usually, yeah," you admitted, flexing the metal fingers experimentally and wincing at the faint whir of servos that responded, a sound that felt deeply invasive to be hearing from your own hand. "It flares when I'm upset. It's never done anything like this before, though. Usually it just breaks windows or sets off the fire alarm."

"You've been more anxious lately," Bucky said quietly, from where he sat beside you, and it struck you as strange and a little tender to hear him voice that observation using your mouth, your inflection, though the concern underneath it was entirely his own. "About us. About whether you're settlin' in here alright, whether the team really wants you around, whether I'm gonna get spooked and pull away like I do sometimes. You've been carryin' that around for weeks and not sayin' anything."

The room went very quiet, and you felt your face, or rather his face, heat with an embarrassment that had nowhere to hide, because apparently even body-swapped and disoriented, Bucky Barnes was still entirely capable of reading you like an open book and saying so out loud in front of everyone you knew.

"That is not the point right now," you said, aiming for firm and landing somewhere closer to strangled.

"It's exactly the point," Wanda said gently, though there was a knowing softness in her expression that told you she understood precisely how mortifying this conversation was for you. "Powers that respond to emotion often manifest their most dramatic effects during sleep, when the conscious mind isn't there to suppress them. Whatever you were feeling last night, it was strong enough to reach across the hall and pull the two of you together instead of just breaking something."

"Well, that's romantic in a deeply inconvenient way," Natasha said from her armchair, not bothering to hide her amusement, and Sam let out a laugh that he quickly turned into a cough when Steve shot him a look.

"So how do we fix it," Bucky asked, cutting through the commentary with the steady practicality that had kept him alive through decades of far worse situations than this one. "She just needs to calm down, and it reverses itself?"

"In theory," Wanda said, though the caveat in her tone was not lost on any of you. "Emotional-trigger abilities tend to be symmetrical. If distress caused the swap, then resolving that distress should, eventually, cause it to reverse. I cannot promise a timeline. It could be hours. It could be days."

"Days," you repeated, the word coming out flatter and more horrified than you intended, and beside you Bucky went very still in a way you recognized even through the unfamiliar shape of his own face on your body, the particular stillness that meant he was doing everything in his power not to laugh.

"This isn't funny," you told him.

"No, it's not," he agreed, and then immediately ruined the sentiment by grinning, an expression that looked deeply strange stretched across your features, all wrong in the eyes and too wide at the corners, because it was his smile trying to exist on a face that had never learned to make it. "Sorry. It's just—you're really tall right now, and you look real unhappy about it."

"I am extremely unhappy about it," you said, "your center of gravity is completely different from mine, I nearly walked into a wall on the way down here, and this arm keeps twitching whenever I get startled, which, given the morning I've had, has been constantly."

"Yeah, that happens," Bucky said, glancing down at your much smaller, much softer hands with an expression of genuine bemusement. "I keep forgettin' I don't have the arm right now. Tried to catch myself on the doorframe back there and just about ate concrete because I reached for stability that wasn't there."

"You're shorter than I expected it to feel," you admitted, studying him, studying yourself, from across the couch, and there was something surreal and oddly intimate about watching your own face express an emotion that was unmistakably Bucky's, the crooked half-smile he wore when he found something charming despite himself.

"You're heavier than I expected," he shot back, and you swatted at his arm before you both remembered, in the same instant, that the touch landed strangely because neither of you was quite where you expected to be inside your own skin, and the moment dissolved into a fit of laughter that neither of you could entirely explain, except that it felt better than the panic had, and that counted for something.

The rest of the morning unfolded as an extended lesson in the particular chaos of occupying someone else's body while a team of superheroes tried, with varying degrees of helpfulness, to figure out how to reverse the situation. Bucky discovered, with visible dismay, that navigating your body meant navigating reflexes he had never had to think about before, a lower center of balance, a different length of stride, hands that did not carry seventy years of muscle memory built around a metal prosthetic. He knocked over a glass of orange juice within the first hour simply by reaching for it the way he always reached for things, with the confident, weighted certainty of a man who knew exactly how strong his grip needed to be, only to discover that your grip strength was nowhere near what he was used to compensating for.

"This is genuinely humbling," he muttered, mopping up the spill with a dish towel while Sam watched from the kitchen island with poorly concealed delight, "I've fought off a small army with this arm and I can't pour a glass of juice without makin' a mess."

"To be fair, that's not your arm right now," Sam pointed out.

"I'm aware, Sam, thank you," Bucky said, in a tone that was unmistakably his own despite emerging from your mouth, dry and a little put-upon, and Sam laughed so hard he had to set his coffee down again.

Across the room, you were discovering your own set of complications, chief among them the sheer, unrelenting awareness of the metal arm attached to your shoulder, which whirred faintly whenever you moved it and which responded to your thoughts with a fraction of a delay that felt deeply unnerving. You had watched Bucky use that arm a hundred times, had marveled at the easy, practiced grace with which he wielded it, and had never once considered what it might actually feel like to have a machine grafted onto your nervous system, responding to signals your body had never learned to send. You knocked a mug clean off the counter within your first ten minutes of trying to make coffee, catching it half a second too late with reflexes that were faster than yours had ever been but calibrated to a different set of instincts entirely.

"You get used to it," Bucky told you, coming up beside you to help gather the pieces of the broken mug, and there was something gentle in the observation, an old, worn patience that had clearly been earned the hard way. "Took me the better part of a year after Wakanda before I stopped breakin' things. You're doin' better than I did, honestly."

"I highly doubt that," you said, but the comment settled something warm in your chest anyway, and you found yourself looking at him, at yourself, with a fresh kind of appreciation for everything he carried around every single day without complaint.

Steve wandered through around midmorning with the particular expression of a man determined to be supportive while also visibly fighting laughter at every turn, and made the mistake of asking Bucky, still occupying your body, whether he wanted to spar later, a habit so deeply ingrained between the two of them that the question came out before Steve had fully processed who he was talking to.

"Steve, I'm real flattered you think this body could take you in a spar," Bucky said, gesturing down at himself, at your frame, considerably smaller and considerably less enhanced than his own, "but I think you'd break somethin' that ain't mine to break."

"Right," Steve said, looking faintly embarrassed. "Sorry. Force of habit."

"S'okay," Bucky said, and then, because he could not help himself, added, "Though I gotta say, findin' out what her cardio's like on the treadmill this mornin' was an experience. I ran two miles and about died. You've got stamina for days but your legs give out way before your lungs do, doll, you know that?"

"I did not need a full report on my physical fitness," you called from across the room, though you were laughing despite yourself, because there was something endearing about the fact that even trapped in your body, disoriented and off-balance, Bucky had apparently spent part of his morning testing out what your workout routine felt like from the inside.

By early afternoon, Wanda had set up a small monitoring station in the common room, mostly out of scientific curiosity and partly, she admitted, because she found the entire situation genuinely charming and wanted an excuse to keep an eye on it. She had you both sit across from each other at the kitchen table while she studied the faint shimmer of energy that occasionally sparked around your borrowed hands, a visible tell, she explained, of your powers still actively holding the swap in place.

"It's stable," she said, tilting her head as she studied the two of you, "which is good news, in the sense that neither of you is in danger, and bad news, in the sense that it means whatever emotional knot caused this hasn't come undone yet."

"So we just have to talk it out," you said, and felt Bucky's gaze land on you from across the table, steady and searching in a way that made your chest feel tight even filtered through the strange, secondhand experience of watching your own face hold an expression you knew to be entirely his.

"Guess so," Bucky said quietly, and Wanda, with the tact of someone who had clearly decided this was not a conversation she needed to witness, rose from her chair and excused herself from the room without being asked twice.

You ended up on the small balcony off the common floor as the afternoon light softened toward evening, the city stretched out gold and hazy below the tower, and for a long moment neither of you spoke, both still faintly unsettled by the strangeness of watching your own gestures performed by someone else, your own voice carrying words you had not chosen.

"I didn't mean for you to find out like this," you finally said, wrapping Bucky's arms around yourself, a gesture that felt oddly comforting even secondhand, "the stuff about being anxious. I didn't want to make it your problem."

"It's not a problem," Bucky said gently, turning to look at you, "it's just somethin' you're feelin', and I'd rather know about it than have you carry it around alone until it short-circuits your powers and swaps us into each other's bodies." A faint, crooked smile tugged at the corner of your mouth as he said it, an expression that looked so purely like him despite being worn on your face that it made something in your chest ache with fondness. "I know I've got my own baggage about pullin' away when things get too steady, too good. Old habits. I'm workin' on it. But I need you to know that you bein' here, with all of us, with me, isn't somethin' I'm gonna spook over. You don't have to walk on eggshells wonderin' if I'm gonna bolt."

"I know that, logically," you admitted, and it was strange to hear Bucky's low, rough voice say something so vulnerable, though the words were entirely your own, carried across through borrowed vocal cords. "It's just hard to shut the worry off sometimes. Especially with everything that happened this year, the team splitting, you being on the run, all of it. It still feels new, being here, being with you. I keep waiting for the ground to shift again."

"Yeah," Bucky said quietly, "I get that better than almost anybody could." He reached out, his hand, currently yours, small and unscarred, and closed it gently around your borrowed metal fingers, the same gesture you had both performed a hundred times before in your correct bodies, and it landed strange and familiar all at once. "But I ain't goin' anywhere. Not unless you get sick of me first."

"Not likely," you said, and the words came out steadier than you expected, and something in the air between you seemed to loosen, a knot you had not realized you were still holding onto finally beginning to slip free.

You felt it before you saw it, a warm, prickling rush that started at the base of your spine and rolled outward, and Bucky must have felt it too, because his grip on your hand tightened and his eyes, wide and startled in a face that was currently yours, went bright with a familiar shimmer of gold light that had absolutely nothing to do with the sunset. The world tilted, briefly and gently this time, nothing like the disorienting lurch of that morning, and when your vision settled you were looking up instead of across, and the hand wrapped around yours was broad and scarred and metal, and the voice that came out of your own mouth when you gasped was unmistakably, wonderfully, your own.

"Oh, thank god," you said, staring down at your own hands, flesh and blood and entirely familiar, and then up at Bucky, back in his own body, tall and solid and grinning at you with an expression of such open relief that you laughed out loud.

"There she is," Bucky said, reaching up to brush a strand of hair back from your face with his real hand, warm and steady in a way that felt like coming home after a very long, very strange day. "Was startin' to get used to bein' shorter, not gonna lie."

"You complained about it for six straight hours," you reminded him, though you were still laughing, giddy with relief and the simple, uncomplicated joy of being back in your own skin.

"A man's allowed to complain," Bucky said, tugging you gently into his side, and you went willingly, tucking yourself against the solid, familiar warmth of him, feeling the low rumble of his laugh against your ear. "For what it's worth, I meant every word I said out there, even if it came out of your mouth instead of mine. You don't gotta be scared this is gonna fall apart."

"I know," you said, and found, for the first time all day, that you actually believed it.

The two of you made your way back inside just as Sam was rounding the corner with his phone raised for what was very obviously going to be another round of photographic evidence, and he stopped short at the sight of you, back in your correct bodies, tucked into each other's side with matching expressions of exhausted relief.

"Aw, you're back to normal," Sam said, sounding almost disappointed. "I had a whole album goin'."

"Delete it," Bucky and you said, in unison, and the perfect synchronization of it startled a laugh out of both of you, loud and easy, the kind of laugh that came only after a day spent thoroughly, thoroughly weird.

"Absolutely not," Sam said, already backing away toward the elevator, phone clutched protectively to his chest. "This is goin' in the group chat. Steve! You gotta see this, they're back to normal and Barnes still looks personally offended about the whole thing!"

Wanda's voice drifted from the kitchen, warm with amusement. "I told you it would resolve itself. Emotional-trigger abilities. Very predictable, once you understand the pattern."

"Predictable," you repeated, shaking your head as you let Bucky steer you toward the couch, both of you dropping onto it with the particular heaviness of two people who had spent an entire day fighting their own nervous systems for control of unfamiliar bodies. "I woke up as my boyfriend this morning. Nothing about today was predictable."

"Fair point," Bucky murmured, tucking you against his chest, his arm, the real one, settling warm and heavy around your shoulders in a way that felt like the single most normal thing that had happened all day. "Though I will say, for the record, you make a much better version of me than I made of you."

"You were a decent me," you said, tilting your head back to look up at him. "A little dramatic about the running, though."

"Two miles, doll. On legs I've never had before. I think I earned some drama," Bucky said, and pressed a kiss to the top of your head, easy and warm and entirely his, in a body that was, thankfully, entirely his own again.

Chairs scraped sharply against the floor as at least two people reacted a fraction too late to hide it. Sam’s shoulders came up, wings twitching reflexively before he forced them still. Clint’s hand moved, then stopped, hovering uselessly near a weapon that wasn’t there. Natasha went perfectly still, eyes narrowing as she recalibrated in real time.

Tony swore.

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a sharp, incredulous sound pulled from him before he could stop himself.

Steve’s heart hammered once, hard, then steadied. Training kicked in, the familiar rhythm of threat assessment taking over.

Nyx had bypassed every layer of security.

Every door. Every checkpoint. Every protocol.

She hadn’t come through the entrance.

She hadn’t come through anything.

Tony was staring at her like she’d personally insulted his entire worldview.

“How,” he demanded, taking a step forward before stopping himself, “do you know what the inside of this room looks like?”

Nyx turned her head slowly toward him, eyes bright with interest.

“Sometimes,” she said lightly, “I don’t get paid in cash.”

Her voice carried easily in the room, soft but precise, cutting cleanly through the tension like a blade through fabric.

“Sometimes,” she continued, “information is worth far more.”

Tony’s jaw clenched. “You’re saying you hacked–”

“No,” Nyx interrupted gently, and that somehow made it worse. “I’m saying people talk.”

Steve watched Tony’s expression shift – disbelief giving way to irritation, then to something colder and more unsettled. The Tower was his domain. His fortress. The idea that someone had walked its blueprints into Nyx’s hands as currency sat badly with him, Steve could tell.

Nyx let her gaze drift away from Tony, slow and deliberate, taking in the room.

Steve felt it immediately – the way her attention moved, the way it weighed. She didn’t rush. She didn’t scan the way soldiers scanned. She evaluated.

Sam, standing near the table, posture alert but restrained. Clint, leaning against the wall, eyes sharp and calculating. Natasha, composed as ever, a closed book even to someone like Nyx – or at least trying to be. Tony, vibrating with barely contained offense.

And then…

Steve.

Her gaze lingered there a fraction longer than on the others.

Not lingering like hunger. Like recognition.

Steve met her eyes steadily, refusing to look away.

The room was silent enough that he could hear the faint hum of systems in the walls, the distant whir of something mechanical deep within the Tower. Familiar sounds, suddenly fragile.

Nyx smiled.

Not small. Not polite.

Wide enough to be unmistakable.

The kind of smile that didn’t ask permission.

The kind that suggested she was enjoying herself immensely.

“You look uncomfortable,” she observed, glancing between them. “That’s a good sign.”

No one laughed.

Steve felt a flare of irritation at the way she seemed to feed on the unease, the way her smile widened as if she could taste it.

“You weren’t invited in like this,” Steve said.

Nyx tilted her head slightly. “And yet.”

Tony crossed his arms, expression dark. “You don’t just appear inside Avengers Tower.”

“I do,” Nyx replied mildly. “You’re looking at it.”

Steve resisted the urge to grind his teeth.

She took a step forward then, unhurried, boots barely making a sound on the floor. Steve tracked the movement automatically, body angling without conscious thought, positioning himself just enough to be between her and the rest of the team.

Nyx noticed.

Of course she did.

Her eyes flicked down, then back up, something like amusement dancing there.

“Relax,” she said softly. “If I wanted to hurt anyone, this would be a very different conversation.”

Steve didn’t respond.

He didn’t believe her – not entirely – but he believed something else just as strongly: she wasn’t lying. Not right now.

Nyx stopped near the table, close enough that Steve could make out the finer details he’d missed in the bar. The faint shadows beneath her eyes. The calm set of her mouth. The way she stood balanced, grounded, as if every muscle knew exactly where it was meant to be.

She inhaled slowly, then exhaled, like someone settling in.

“Hm,” she murmured. “You brought everyone.”

“That was the condition,” Steve said.

Nyx’s gaze flicked to him. “And?”

“And we’re here to give you an answer.”

Her smile softened – not kinder, just more intent. “Before that.”

She turned, pivoting smoothly, and walked a slow circle around the table, her fingers trailing just above its surface without touching. Steve’s skin prickled, instincts screaming at the casual breach of personal space, at the way she treated the room like it belonged to her.

She stopped near Natasha.

“You’re calmer than the others,” Nyx said. “You’ve been here before.”

Natasha didn’t blink. “So have you.”

Nyx’s lips curved. “True.”

She moved on, stopping near Clint.

“You’re measuring exits,” she noted. “Good habit.”

Clint’s mouth twitched. “I like knowing my options.”

Nyx nodded approvingly. “Smart.”

Then Sam.

“You’re worried about collateral,” Nyx said. “About consequences.”

Sam held her gaze. “Someone has to be.”

Her smile didn’t fade. “Indeed.”

Finally, she stopped in front of Tony.

“And you,” she said, head tilting again, that familiar angle. “You’re offended.”

Tony scoffed. “You think?”

Nyx’s eyes gleamed. “You built a fortress and assumed it made you untouchable.”

“I built a system,” Tony snapped. “And you violated it.”

“Yes,” Nyx agreed. “That’s why you’re upset.”

Steve saw Tony’s hands curl into fists at his sides.

“And you did it to make a point,” Tony said.

Nyx considered that. “Partly.”

“Partly,” Tony repeated flatly.

Nyx turned away from him and faced the group again, arms folding loosely across her chest.

“And partly,” she said, voice light, “because I enjoy it.”

The words landed like a stone dropped into still water.

Steve felt a chill trace down his spine.

She smiled again – open, pleased, unapologetic.

“Sometimes,” Nyx continued, “I do things because they’re efficient. Sometimes because they’re necessary. And sometimes…”

Her eyes flicked back to Tony, then to Steve.

“…because they amuse me enormously.”

Steve felt the tension spike in the room, sharp and electric.

“You think this is funny?” Steve said.

Nyx’s gaze met his immediately. “Don’t you?”

Steve frowned. “No.”

She studied him for a long moment, the smile fading just enough to reveal something beneath it – something thoughtful.

“No,” she echoed softly. “You wouldn’t.”

The way she said it – not mocking, not dismissive – unsettled him more than if she’d laughed.

She straightened, posture shifting subtly. The amusement didn’t vanish, but it receded, like a tide pulling back to reveal sharper edges beneath.

“All right,” Nyx said. “I came here to hear your answer.”

She paused deliberately.

“So,” she said, eyes sweeping the room once more, “are you all ready to live with it?”

Silence answered her.

Steve felt the weight of the moment press into his chest, heavy and unavoidable. This was it – the line drawn cleanly in front of them. Not later. Not after more discussion. Now.

He looked around the room, meeting each of their eyes in turn.

They had talked. Argued. Weighed. Revisited old wounds and newer doubts. There had been no shouting, no dramatic declarations – just the slow, painful process of coming to terms with a choice none of them wanted to make.

Steve turned back to Nyx.

“We are,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed slightly, searching his face.

“All of you?” she pressed.

Steve nodded. “All of us.”

For a moment, the room held its breath.

Then Nyx smiled again – smaller this time. Sharper. Satisfied.

“Good,” she said.

Tony exhaled sharply. “That’s it? You just take his word for it?”

Nyx glanced at him. “Do you disagree?”

Tony hesitated – just a fraction.

Nyx caught it.

Her gaze snapped back to him, laser-focused. “Do you?”

Tony clenched his jaw. Steve held his breath.

Then Tony sighed, long and resigned. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

Nyx’s smile returned in full.

“There,” she said lightly. “Consensus.”

Steve felt something shift – not relief, exactly, but inevitability settling into place.

Nyx stepped back, creating space again, reclaiming distance as easily as she’d crossed it.

“Now,” she said, “we can talk.”

Steve squared his shoulders. “About the target.”

“Yes,” Nyx replied. “About his habits. His protections. His tells.”

She paused, eyes flicking to the ceiling briefly, as if she could see through layers of reinforced structure and glass.

“And about your leak.”

The room went cold.

Tony stiffened. Natasha’s gaze sharpened. Sam inhaled slowly through his nose.

Steve felt his jaw tighten. “You said you’d listen.”

“I am,” Nyx said calmly. “But this is part of it.”

She looked back at Steve, expression serious now, the amusement gone entirely.

“If someone in this building is feeding him information,” she said, “I need to know who.”

Steve met her gaze. “So do we.”

Nyx inclined her head. “Good. Then we’re aligned.”

She took a step back, the faintest ripple in the air marking the shift of her weight.

“I’ll need access,” she added. “Not unrestricted. I’m not suicidal. But enough to observe.”

Tony bristled immediately. “Absolutely not.”

Nyx didn’t look at him. “That wasn’t a request.”

Steve raised a hand. “We’ll discuss parameters.”

Nyx smiled faintly. “Of course you will.”

She glanced around the room one last time, imprinting it – Steve was certain of it now – into memory.

“I’ll be back,” she said. “Sooner than you think.”

And then she was gone.

No flash. No sound.

Just absence.

The space she’d occupied felt wrong without her, like a note cut short.

Steve exhaled slowly, tension finally bleeding out of his shoulders.

Tony stared at the empty space, then dragged both hands through his hair. “I hate her.”

Sam snorted softly. “You admire her.”

Tony shot him a look. “I can do both.”

Natasha spoke quietly. “She’s serious.”

Steve nodded. “Yes.”

Bucky, who hadn’t said a word the entire time, finally did.

“She enjoyed that,” he said.

Steve closed his eyes briefly.

“Yes,” he agreed. “She did.”

And that, more than anything else, told him exactly how dangerous Nyx truly was.

For a few seconds after Nyx disappeared, no one spoke.

The briefing room felt… wrong. Too empty. As if something had been removed that shouldn’t have been there in the first place – or worse, as if something had passed through and left a residue behind. Steve was acutely aware of the space where she’d stood, of the exact patch of floor his eyes kept drifting back to without his permission.

Clint broke the silence.

“Okay,” he said, pushing off the wall at last, voice deliberately casual. “So. Small problem.”

Steve didn’t look away from the empty air. “Go on.”

Clint gestured vaguely at the room. “We still don’t have a way to contact her.”

That landed harder than Steve expected.

Tony let out a short, incredulous laugh. “You’re kidding me.”

“Nope,” Clint said. “No number. No signal. No ‘call me if things go sideways.’ Nothing.”

Sam frowned. “She said she’d come back.”

“And I believe her,” Clint replied. “That’s not the point. The point is we’re completely at her mercy when it comes to timing.”

Steve felt something cold settle in his stomach.

Because Clint was right – and because Steve hadn’t fully articulated the thought yet, not even to himself. He’d been too focused on the shock of her appearance, on the way she’d walked through their defenses like they were a suggestion, on the unsettling ease with which she’d taken control of the room.

But now that the adrenaline was ebbing, the realization sharpened into something uncomfortable and sharp-edged.

They couldn’t summon her.

They couldn’t prepare for her arrival.

They couldn’t even be sure where she would appear next time.

Steve’s jaw tightened.

Tony paced once, then stopped abruptly. “I don’t like this,” he said, unnecessary but sincere. “I really don’t like this.”

“You didn’t like the first part either,” Sam said dryly.

“That was different,” Tony snapped. “That was my pride. This is my sanity.”

Natasha tilted her head slightly. “You’re used to controlling variables.”

Tony shot her a look. “We all are.”

Steve remained silent, but his mind was racing now, mapping out scenarios without his consent.

Nyx reappearing in the middle of the gym. In a hallway. In someone’s quarters. In a secure meeting that wasn’t supposed to have anyone else present.

The idea made his skin crawl.

It wasn’t fear, exactly. Not in the way fear made his heart race or his hands shake. It was something more rigid. More personal.

Control.

Steve Rogers was very good at operating in chaos – but only when he understood its boundaries. He needed to know where the edges were, where the lines could be drawn. Even the battlefield had rules. Even the most unpredictable enemy still obeyed physics, logistics, some version of cause and effect.

Nyx didn’t.

Or worse – she did, but on a set of rules Steve couldn’t see.

And he hated that.

“She said she doesn’t need a contact method,” Sam said, thoughtful. “Which means she’s already decided she can reach us whenever she wants.”

Steve exhaled slowly through his nose. “And that we can’t reach her when we need to.”

Bucky shifted beside the table, metal fingers flexing once before going still. “That’s deliberate.”

Steve glanced at him. “You think.”

“She wants control of the engagement,” Bucky said. “Same as in the bar. Same as here.”

Tony stopped pacing and looked at him sharply. “You’re saying she’s conditioning us.”

Bucky shrugged slightly. “Or testing how much we can tolerate.”

Steve felt a flash of irritation – not at Bucky, but at the fact that this made sense.

Natasha crossed her arms. “It also keeps her safe. If there’s a leak, a fixed channel would expose her.”

“Yes,” Steve said automatically – then paused.

Because that was the rational explanation.

And yet, it didn’t erase the feeling in his chest.

The tightness. The frustration. The deeply ingrained dislike of not knowing.

Clint watched Steve closely, head tilted slightly. “You really don’t like this.”

Steve stiffened. “I don’t have to like it.”

“That wasn’t what I said,” Clint replied.

Steve realized then that he’d clenched his fists at his sides. He forced his fingers to relax, one by one.

“I don’t like unknown variables,” Steve said finally. “Especially ones that can walk into a secure room without warning.”

Tony let out a sharp breath. “Welcome to my nightmare.”

Sam leaned forward slightly. “But she’s not doing this randomly.”

Steve looked at him. “You’re sure?”

Sam nodded. “She’s precise. Everything she’s done so far has been intentional. She didn’t show up early or late. She didn’t interrupt. She waited until exactly 15:30.”

That was true.

Steve hadn’t missed it. Hadn’t missed the way the clock had ticked over to the exact minute before Nyx had appeared, as if time itself had been a cue she was responding to.

“She wants us aware,” Sam continued. “Aware that she’s out there. Watching. But not panicking.”

Steve frowned. “You think this is supposed to reassure us?”

“No,” Sam said. “I think it’s supposed to train us.”

The word hit harder than Steve liked.

Train.

As if they were the ones being brought into line.

Natasha spoke quietly. “She’s establishing boundaries.”

Steve turned to her. “By making herself unpredictable?”

“By making herself uncontrollable,” Natasha corrected. “There’s a difference.”

Steve ran a hand over the back of his neck, feeling the familiar ache there. “That’s not a boundary. That’s a power play.”

Natasha didn’t deny it.

“It is,” she said. “But it’s also honest. She told us upfront she wouldn’t operate on our terms.”

Steve’s jaw tightened. He knew that. He’d agreed to it.

That didn’t mean his instincts weren’t rebelling against every inch of it.

Tony blew out a breath. “So what, we just sit here and wait for her to pop back in like some kind of homicidal Mary Poppins?”

Bucky snorted quietly before he could stop himself.

Steve almost smiled – almost.

Clint pushed off the wall again, hands on his hips. “We should at least establish internal protocols.”

Steve looked at him. “For what?”

“For when she reappears,” Clint said. “Where she’s allowed. Where she’s not. What happens if she crosses a line.”

Steve hesitated.

“Because,” Clint added, voice serious now, “we don’t want to be improvising the next time she decides to ‘amuse herself.’”

That last phrase made Steve’s stomach twist.

Nyx’s smile, wide and unapologetic, flashed through his mind again.

And sometimes, I do things just because it amuses me enormously.

Steve hated how easily that memory surfaced.

“All right,” Steve said. “We set ground rules. Even if she doesn’t follow them, we need to.”

Tony nodded immediately. “Thank you. I feel better already.”

Steve turned slightly, addressing the room. “First rule: no one is ever alone with her unless they choose to be.”

Natasha inclined her head. “Agreed.”

“Second,” Steve continued, “if she appears unexpectedly, no one reacts aggressively unless she does first.”

Tony grimaced. “That’s going to be harder than it sounds.”

Steve shot him a look. “That’s why it’s a rule.”

Tony held up his hands. “Fair.”

“Third,” Steve said, “we don’t chase her if she leaves. No tracking attempts without discussion.”

Tony opened his mouth.

Steve raised a hand.

Tony closed it again, scowling.

Clint nodded. “That’s smart. She’d notice.”

Steve swallowed. “And fourth–”

He paused.

Because this one was harder to articulate.

“We accept,” he said carefully, “that we don’t control when or how she shows up.”

The words tasted bitter.

Sam studied him. “That’s the part you hate.”

Steve met his gaze. “Yes.”

No deflection. No justification.

Just truth.

“I don’t like not knowing where the threat is,” Steve said quietly. “Or when it’s going to reappear. I don’t like not being able to protect the people around me because I don’t have enough information.”

The admission sat heavy in the room.

Bucky shifted closer, not touching, but near enough that Steve felt the familiar presence at his side.

“She’s not the threat,” Bucky said softly.

Steve closed his eyes for a brief moment.

“No,” he agreed. “She’s the variable.”

Natasha watched him closely. “You’re worried she’ll show up when you’re not ready.”

Steve opened his eyes. “I’m worried she’ll show up when someone else isn’t.”

The room was quiet again – but not stagnant. Thoughtful.

Tony rubbed his temples. “I don’t like being outplayed.”

“Neither do I,” Steve said.

Sam exhaled slowly. “But we invited this.”

Steve nodded once. “We did.”

And that was the part he couldn’t escape.

They had opened the door.

Nyx hadn’t forced her way in.

She had simply stepped through – on her terms.

Clint broke the silence again, softer this time. “For what it’s worth… I don’t think she’ll abuse it.”

Steve glanced at him. “Why?”

Clint shrugged. “Because she could’ve done a lot worse already. Showing up here like that? That was a flex. Not an attack.”

Tony grimaced. “I really hate that you’re right.”

Steve leaned back against the table, shoulders heavy. “That doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with it.”

“No,” Sam said. “It just means we live with it.”

Steve looked around the room – at the people he trusted with his life, with the world, with choices that left scars whether they acted or not.

Nyx had demanded certainty.

Not obedience. Not trust.

Certainty.

And now, with no way to call her, no way to summon her, no way to predict her movements, Steve understood exactly why.

Because certainty didn’t come from control.

It came from commitment.

He hated that.

Hated the way it sat in his chest, uncomfortable and unavoidable.

Steve straightened slowly, resolve settling back into place – not because he felt calm, but because he didn’t have the luxury of uncertainty anymore.

“She’ll come back,” he said.

Tony arched an eyebrow. “You sound sure.”

Steve wasn’t sure how he knew.

But he did.

“Yes,” Steve said quietly. “She will.”

And until she did, he was going to have to live with the thing he despised most…

The unknown.

The waiting.

The awareness that somewhere, just out of sight, Nyx was watching… and deciding when it would amuse her to step back into their lives.

The training room smelled like rubber mats and disinfectant, steel and sweat layered beneath it all. It was a familiar scent, grounding in a way few places were. Steve had always liked it here – the simplicity of it. Clear rules. Clear consequences. You hit, you miss, you adjust.

No gray areas.

Which was probably why he’d brought Bucky here instead of trying to have this conversation anywhere else.

They moved through warm-up drills in silence at first. Steve rolled his shoulders, feeling the pull and release of muscle, the steady rhythm of breath settling back into his body. Bucky mirrored him across the mat, movements smooth, economical. The metal arm caught the overhead lights as he rotated it, recalibrating joints and grip with absent precision.

They sparred lightly at first – testing range, speed, balance. Nothing aggressive. Just enough contact to keep their bodies honest.

Steve blocked a strike, countered, stepped back. Bucky pivoted, adjusted, smirked faintly when Steve overcommitted by half an inch.

“You’re thinking too much,” Bucky said.

Steve huffed. “That obvious?”

“Yeah,” Bucky replied. “You always do that when your head’s somewhere else.”

They reset, circled again. Steve let instinct take over for a few exchanges, letting the familiar language of movement pull him out of his thoughts. It helped – a little. Enough that when he spoke again, it didn’t come out tangled.

“Back at the bar,” Steve said, parrying a jab, “the dart.”

Bucky’s brow lifted slightly. He didn’t slow. “What about it?”

“The way she handled it,” Steve continued. “The throw. The control. The way it looked like it just… appeared in her hand.”

Bucky stepped in close, forced Steve back a step, then disengaged. “You didn’t see her draw it.”

“No,” Steve admitted. “And I usually notice things like that.”

Bucky nodded, expression thoughtful now. “She didn’t pull it out of nowhere. She was just faster than you expected.”

Steve grimaced. “That’s not reassuring.”

Bucky snorted and threw another punch, lighter this time, almost lazy. “It’s not supposed to be.”

They broke apart again, breathing steady.

“She’s trained,” Bucky went on. “Not flashy. Not sloppy. That juggling thing?” He lifted his metal hand and mimicked the motion loosely, a dart spinning between fingers that weren’t there. “That’s muscle memory. Repetition. Someone drilled that into her until it stopped being conscious.”

Steve watched him closely. “So not showing off.”

“No,” Bucky said. “Showing comfort.”

That sat heavy in Steve’s chest.

They resumed, movements slower now, more conversational than combative. Steve blocked, countered, stepped aside.

“And what about… her?” Steve asked carefully. “The way she is.”

Bucky gave him a look – not sharp, not defensive. Curious.

“Meaning?”

Steve hesitated just long enough to give himself away.

Bucky caught it immediately.

“Oh,” he said, and then barked a short laugh. “Oh. You’re doing that thing.”

Steve frowned. “What thing?”

“The one where you circle around a question because you don’t like how it sounds out loud,” Bucky replied. He lunged suddenly, forcing Steve to block hard. “Just ask.”

Steve exhaled and stepped back, lowering his guard slightly. “I’m trying to figure out how you feel about her.”

Bucky blinked.

Then he laughed – actually laughed – a rough, surprised sound that echoed faintly off the walls.

“You’re kidding me,” he said.

Steve straightened. “I’m not.”

Bucky shook his head, still half-smiling. “You think this is about that?”

Steve frowned deeper. “About what?”

Bucky stopped moving entirely, hands dropping to his sides. He looked at Steve like he was genuinely amused now, not offended, not defensive.

“You’re wondering if she… what, caught my eye?” Bucky said. “If I’m distracted because I think she’s attractive?”

Steve didn’t answer.

That was answer enough.

Bucky stared at him for a second, then snorted again. “Wow. Seriously?”

Steve bristled slightly. “It’s not an unreasonable question.”

Bucky stepped closer, not aggressive, just direct. “It kind of is.”

Steve held his ground. “You said she was pretty.”

Bucky tilted his head. “Yeah. And?”

“And–”

“And that’s it,” Bucky cut in, still smiling. “That’s literally it.”

Steve opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Bucky shook his head, amusement softening into something warmer. “Just because I can acknowledge someone’s good-looking doesn’t mean my brain shuts off.”

“I didn’t say–”

“You didn’t have to,” Bucky interrupted gently. “I know what you’re asking.”

Steve’s shoulders tightened. “Then what am I asking?”

Bucky’s expression shifted then – not defensive, not joking. Honest.

“You’re asking if I’m vulnerable to her,” Bucky said. “If someone like her gets under my skin because I recognize parts of myself in her.”

Steve didn’t deny it.

Bucky studied him for a moment, then shrugged slightly. “Maybe I do recognize something.”

Steve’s chest tightened.

“But that doesn’t mean I want to be near her,” Bucky continued. “And it sure as hell doesn’t mean I trust her.”

Steve searched his face. “You’re sure?”

Bucky nodded. “I can see what she is. I can appreciate the control, the discipline. I can even admit she’s… easy to look at.”

He smirked faintly. “Doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

Steve exhaled, tension easing a fraction.

“She’s dangerous,” Steve said quietly.

Bucky’s smile faded. “Yeah. She is.”

“And you’re not… tempted?” Steve asked. “Not curious?”

Bucky considered that, gaze drifting briefly toward the far wall before returning to Steve.

“I’m curious,” he admitted. “In the way you’re curious about a loaded gun someone left on the table.”

Steve grimaced. “That’s not comforting.”

“It’s realistic,” Bucky said. “She’s interesting. She’s not safe. Those two things coexist.”

Steve nodded slowly.

Bucky rolled his shoulders, metal arm whirring softly. “But don’t get it twisted. I’m here for you. For the team. For stopping a guy who deserves to be stopped.”

He stepped back into stance, eyes sharpening. “Not because I think she’s fascinating.”

Steve felt something loosen in his chest – not relief exactly, but reassurance.

“Okay,” Steve said.

Bucky smirked. “Also,” he added, “if you’re worried about anyone getting distracted, you might want to look in a mirror.”

Steve froze.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Bucky lunged again, faster this time, forcing Steve to react. “You’re the one she keeps poking,” Bucky said between strikes. “You’re the one she’s testing.”

Steve blocked hard, muscles burning. “That’s not the same thing.”

Bucky grinned. “Didn’t say it was.”

They traded a few sharper blows then – not angry, not aggressive, just enough intensity to bleed off the last of the tension. Steve felt himself settle fully into his body again, thoughts aligning with movement.

Finally, they broke apart, both breathing a little harder now.

Bucky wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “Relax,” he said. “I’m not going to lose my head over a pretty assassin.”

Steve nodded. “Good.”

Bucky tilted his head. “You, on the other hand…”

Steve groaned. “Don’t start.”

Bucky laughed again, softer this time. “Hey. Just saying. You hate not knowing where she is. You hate not being in control. That’s what’s messing with you.”

Steve didn’t argue.

Because Bucky was right.

He looked down at his hands, flexing his fingers slowly. “I don’t like her,” he said.

Bucky shrugged. “You don’t have to.”

Steve lifted his gaze again. “But I have to deal with her.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agreed. “We both do.”

They stood there for a moment, the hum of the room settling back into familiarity.

Steve squared his shoulders, resolve firming again.

“Come on,” he said. “One more round.”

Bucky smirked. “Thought you were done overthinking.”

Steve raised his guard. “I am.”

Bucky lunged.

And for a few precious minutes, Steve let the world narrow to movement and impact – anything to quiet the part of his mind that kept replaying a soft voice, a dart spinning between fingers, and a smile that had been far too aware of how deeply it unsettled him.

The lights in Steve’s quarters were low, dimmed to something closer to evening than night. The city stretched beyond the glass in a scatter of distant gold and white, blurred by height and reflection. He hadn’t turned on the television. He hadn’t put on music. He’d meant to shower, to sleep, to do anything that would signal the end of the day.

Instead, he sat on the edge of the bed, forearms resting on his thighs, hands loosely clasped.

Still.

The conversation with Bucky replayed itself whether he wanted it to or not.

Not the jokes – those had been easy to shrug off, a familiar rhythm between them. It was the part beneath that had lodged itself somewhere uncomfortable. The part where Bucky had stopped smiling and said the thing Steve hadn’t wanted articulated.

You’re wondering if I’m vulnerable to her.

Steve dragged a hand over his face, exhaling slowly.

Bucky hadn’t accused him. Hadn’t mocked him. He’d simply… named it. Or something adjacent to it. Held it up long enough for Steve to see the shape of it clearly – and realize how much he didn’t like what he saw.

Nyx is pretty.

The thought came unbidden, immediate and unwelcome, and Steve felt irritation flare in response – sharp, reflexive, as if he could scare it off by refusing it.

It wasn’t admiration. It wasn’t longing. It wasn’t anything that clean.

It was awareness.

The kind that registered before judgment kicked in. The kind that lingered despite best efforts to categorize and dismiss.

He leaned back slightly, staring at the ceiling, jaw tight.

She was aggravating. That part was easy. Infuriatingly self-assured. Deliberately destabilizing. She enjoyed discomfort – not just creating it, but watching it unfold, like a puzzle she’d set in motion and was now observing with interest. She broke rules not because she had to, but because she wanted to see which ones mattered most.

Steve hated that.

He hated unpredictability. Hated variables he couldn’t account for, couldn’t shield others from. Hated the way she treated boundaries like suggestions instead of lines.

And yet…

There it was again. The uncomfortable and yet.

She wasn’t chaotic.

Not really.

Everything she did had been precise. Timed. Measured. Her arrival at 15:30. The way she’d waited before speaking, before smiling. The way she’d walked the room, taking inventory of each of them like she was committing details to memory for later use.

Especially him.

Steve’s chest tightened slightly at the thought.

He sat up straighter, elbows braced on his knees again, gaze unfocused now, inward.

She had looked at him differently.

Not longer, exactly – though there had been that too – but deeper. Like she wasn’t just assessing his threat level or his role. Like she was trying to understand the mechanism beneath the uniform.

Not Captain America.

Steve Rogers.

It unsettled him how quickly she’d seen things he preferred to keep buried under discipline and duty. How easily she’d named his discomfort in the bar. How accurately she’d identified his hatred of compromise, his resistance to gray.

You’re the one who hates this the most.

He closed his eyes.

She hadn’t said it with contempt. Or mockery.

She’d said it like an observation.

Like something she’d already accepted.

Steve shifted, fingers flexing against his palms. “You don’t know me,” he muttered under his breath, the words barely audible in the quiet room.

But the lie rang hollow.

She knew enough.

Enough to poke where it hurt. Enough to recognize that he was the one who would struggle most with letting her do what she did best – and that he’d do it anyway, because people were suffering and he couldn’t look away from that.

She’d seen that too.

That was the part that bothered him most.

Not that she was beautiful – though she was, in that understated, disarming way that made it harder to file her neatly under enemy or asset. Not even that she was dangerous – Steve understood danger. He lived with it.

It was that she seemed to want to understand him.

Not to manipulate him – at least, not overtly. Not yet. But to dissect him the way he dissected threats. To learn his tells. His limits. His breaking points.

And worse, she seemed entertained by the process.

Steve let out a quiet, humorless breath.

Bucky had been right. Not about attraction – Steve bristled at that framing even now – but about attention.

Nyx had been testing him.

Hadn’t bothered with subtlety. Had pushed, corrected, reframed his words until he was forced to confront what he was actually asking of her. She hadn’t let him hide behind euphemisms or moral language.

She’d demanded ownership.

And somehow, impossibly, she’d made him feel like he was the one being evaluated.

Steve stood abruptly and crossed the room, stopping in front of the window. His reflection stared back at him, faint and fractured by the city lights beyond – broad shoulders, familiar posture, the outline of a man who was supposed to have answers.

He didn’t like how much she’d unsettled that image.

He didn’t like that when he thought about her, it wasn’t just the knife, or the teleportation, or the threat she represented.

It was her voice.

Soft. Controlled. Almost gentle – and therefore infinitely more dangerous than if it had been sharp or cruel. A voice that didn’t need to raise itself to be heard. That assumed attention rather than demanding it.

A voice that had asked him a question he still hadn’t answered honestly.

Do you want him dead because he deserves it… or because you’ve decided you’re allowed to want that?

Steve’s reflection didn’t answer.

He pressed his palm lightly against the glass, grounding himself in the cool solidity of it.

“I don’t like you,” he said quietly, as if she could hear him somewhere out there in the city.

But the words felt thin.

Because liking her had never been the point.

The truth – the one Bucky had nudged him toward and then left him alone with – was more uncomfortable than that.

Nyx fascinated him.

Not in a way he wanted. Not in a way he trusted. But in the way something dangerous and precise fascinated a man who spent his life trying to keep the world from splintering.

She was a contradiction he couldn’t resolve.

A woman who spoke softly and demanded certainty. Who smiled easily and drew lines that could not be crossed. Who killed without apology and still insisted on consent.

Steve closed his eyes and let his forehead rest briefly against the glass.

Tomorrow, she would come back.

Or not.

There was no way to know.

And he hated that the uncertainty gnawed at him – hated that part of him was waiting, alert, listening for a presence that might not announce itself until it was already there.

Nyx wasn’t just a problem to solve.

She was a mirror held up at an angle Steve didn’t recognize – one that reflected not who he wanted to be, but who he was when choices became impossible to avoid.

He straightened slowly, pulling his hand away from the window.

Whatever she thought she saw in him, whatever she was trying to understand, Steve knew one thing with grim clarity; he would not let her define him.

But the fact that he felt the need to promise himself that at all told him just how deeply she’d already gotten under his skin.

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STEVE taglist: @mrsevans90 | @blobfishlol | @phoenix-in-writing | @sassandscribbles | @alyssinwunderland-blog-blog | @pattiemac1 | @fantasyfootballchampion | @theoryxwaller | @thatisamericas-ass | @allthingswickedpodcast | @katarina1224 | @kryptidfiles | @greatenthusiasttidalwave | @vicmc624 | @strangerthing93 | @scarlettbeth | @05-12-05 | @projectcutie | @cap-bot | @peachiestevie | @evilplansandstuff | @kaley0144 | @nicobidd | @i-lie-here-charmed | @doni-tello-shifts | @bennyyion

“Are you fucking kidding me?” you groan aloud, nearly spilling your wine all over your expensive Moroccan rug.

The alarm doesn't stop. It wails with a violent, ear-splitting urgency that vibrates in your teeth. You slam the wine glass down on the counter, your heart kicking into a frantic, panicked rhythm against your ribs. You grab your phone, slide your bare feet into a pair of slip-on Converse sneakers, and bolt for the door. You don't even think to grab a coat, completely forgetting you are only wearing a thin tank top.

Throwing the heavy door open, you're immediately hit by the chaotic din of the hallway. Neighbors are spilling out of their apartments, eyes wide, voices overlapping in confused, sleepy panic. There’s no thick, suffocating smoke rolling down the ceiling, but there is a distinct, pungent odor wafting through the air, burnt plastic and cheap, stale weed.

You push through the milling crowd toward the end of the hallway where the heavy, reinforced fire escape door leads out to the iron stairwell. It’s supposed to be the fastest way out for the fourth floor, bypassing the narrow, claustrophobic central staircase that is already clogged with people from the upper floors.

You reach the heavy metal door, grasping the emergency push-bar. You shove your weight against it, but the mechanism is stubbornly jammed. The ancient hinges groan, resisting your effort. Panic flares hot in your chest as the alarm continues its deafening, relentless assault. You hit the bar again with the heel of your hand, swearing violently under your breath. “Come on, you piece of shit, fucking open!”

“Hey, back up. Let me get it.”

The voice is deep, calm, and immediately recognizable. A large, warm hand clamps down over your bare shoulder, gently but firmly pulling you back. The touch sends a jolt of electricity straight through your system. You stumble slightly, looking up to see Bucky Barnes stepping in front of you.

He looks like he threw his clothes on in a matter of seconds, but somehow he still looks effortlessly magnetic. He’s wearing a battered, heavy leather jacket zipped hastily over a dark grey hoodie, clearly his go-to “emergency” grab, paired with dark jeans. His dark hair is a messy, beautiful tangle falling into his striking, sharp blue eyes. He doesn't look panicked at all; he just looks mildly annoyed at the inconvenience.

Bucky places his hand, his knuckles dusted with faint scars, flat against the door. His other hand grips the heavy iron bar. With a sharp, sudden flex of his broad shoulders beneath the layers of leather and cotton, he shoves. There’s a loud, metallic crack as the rusted latch finally gives way, and the heavy door flies open, letting in a violent rush of crisp, freezing night air.

“Ladies first…” Bucky says, his voice a low, rough rumble over the screeching alarm. He throws you a quick, reassuring smirk that makes your stomach do a completely unhelpful flip.

“Thanks…” you breathe out, stepping past him onto the grated iron platform of the fire escape. The sudden, brutal drop in temperature immediately bites through your thin tank top, raising goosebumps all over your arms. You shiver instantly, crossing your arms over your chest. The city below is alive, a swirling mass of neon lights, honking cabs, and the distant, rapidly approaching wail of fire sirens.

Bucky steps out right behind you, his large frame blocking a bit of the wind. The platform isn't exactly spacious. You’re forced to stand close together, backed against the rough brick wall of the building as a few other neighbors push past, hurrying down the zigzagging iron stairs to the narrow alleyway below.

You stay put on the landing, the cold metal of the railing biting into your lower back. Bucky leans casually against the brickwork beside you, entirely unbothered by the frantic exodus of the rest of the floor. He pulls a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his leather jacket, snapping a Zippo lighter open with his thumb. The flame illuminates the sharp, strong lines of his jaw and the relaxed, easy set of his mouth.

“You're not going down?” you ask, your teeth beginning to chatter slightly as the autumn wind whips around the building.

He takes a slow drag, blowing the smoke out into the chilled air, the plume mixing with his breath. He shakes his head, his blue eyes dropping to meet yours. “Nah. We’re on the fourth floor, Y/n. If the building was actually going up in flames, you'd feel the structural heat by now. Look down there.” He gestures lazily over the railing with his cigarette.

You uncross your arms for a second to peer over. The flashing red and white lights of a massive fire truck are already bouncing off the damp brick walls of the alley. Firefighters are piling out, moving with practiced efficiency, but there’s no frantic shouting, no rushing of heavy water hoses. They look bored.

“It's that little shit, Tyler, from the third floor…” Bucky says, a lazy, amused grin spreading across his face. “The twenty-something kid with the terrible bleach job?”

You snort, leaning back against the wall next to him. “The one who constantly leaves his empty, greasy pizza boxes in the stairwell?”

“That’s the one!” Bucky laughs, the sound deep and rich, settling warmly in your chest despite the freezing temperature. “Fucker bought some bad shit, got paranoid, and tried to hotbox his walk-in closet to hide the smell from his roommate. Dropped his lit joint into a pile of synthetic nylon gym bags. Smoked up the whole damn floor. Fucking idiot.”

You can't help it, you let out a loud, genuine laugh, the tension bleeding out of your shoulders. “Are you serious? God, I thought my night couldn't get any more ridiculous. I was exactly halfway to the sofa with a very necessary, very expensive glass of wine.”

Bucky’s eyes drag over you, slow and deliberate, taking in your messy bun, your thin white tank top, the faded sweatpants, and your bare ankles above your sneakers. There’s a sudden, heavy shift in the air between you, the kind of charged, undeniable electricity that has always simmered beneath the surface during your brief hallway encounters, but amplified tenfold now that you are isolated above the city streets.

He notices you shivering, your shoulders hitched up to your ears. Without a word, he unzips his leather jacket, shrugs it off his broad shoulders, and drapes it heavily over yours. The jacket is massive on you, smelling incredibly of rich leather, expensive cologne, and a faint hint of darkroom chemicals. It’s wonderfully, instantly warm from his body heat.

“Shame to interrupt a good drink…” he murmurs, leaving him in just his dark grey hoodie. His voice drops an octave, rumbling low. “Especially after the week you've had. I saw the layout for the September issue you pushed through. You completely gutted the initial spread and rebuilt it. It’s sharp as hell, Y/n. Visceral. I liked it.”

You stare at him, genuinely shocked, pulling the lapels of his leather jacket tighter around your chest. “You read my editorials? I didn't think big-shot, high-fashion photographers cared about the text formatting or the written features.”

“I care when the text is actually worth reading.” he replies smoothly, stepping just a fraction of an inch closer, holding your gaze intently. “Most of the shit in that magazine is vapid, corporate garbage aimed at selling insecure women overpriced handbags. But you actually give a fuck. You write about the clothes like they’re armor. Like they matter to a person's identity. It's good. Fucking brilliant, actually.”

A flush that has absolutely nothing to do with the freezing wind creeps up your neck and colors your cheeks. You’ve worked your ass off for years to get to this position, battling rampant sexism and corporate greed, and hearing validation from someone whose artistic eye you deeply respect, someone who usually terrifies the industry’s top editors with his uncompromising, brilliant vision, feels incredibly intoxicating.

“Well…” you manage to say, fighting down a proud smile, “coming from the guy who shot the entire Milan campaign in a literal abandoned slaughterhouse just to prove a point about the brutality of fast fashion, I'll take that as a massive compliment.”

Bucky chuckles, tossing his cigarette over the edge and watching the glowing ember fall into the darkness. “It was a statement. And the creative director almost had a fucking aneurysm on set. It was hilarious. I thought the guy was going to actually weep when I brought the fake blood out.”

You spend the next forty-five minutes just talking. It’s remarkably, dangerously easy. The cold air bites at your exposed face, but wrapped in Bucky's heavy leather jacket, with the heat radiating from his large frame beside you, you feel perfectly anchored. You talk about the industry, tearing down the inflated egos of terrible designers, laughing at the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of the fashion world. He is completely unfiltered, swearing casually, his observations sharp, cynical, and ruthlessly funny. You find yourself matching his energy, completely dropping your polished professional mask. You let out your own frustrations about your boss, the agonizing late nights, the constant, draining pressure to be perfect in an industry that profits off imperfection.

It's liberating. Here on this rusted fire escape, suspended above the noisy, chaotic city, stripped of your titles and your pristine outfits, you are just you and Bucky. Two overworked, exhausted people finding a bizarre, unexpected sanctuary in a false alarm. You realize you haven't talked to anyone this easily in months. Maybe years. Every time he looks at you, his blue eyes are heavy with a quiet, intense interest that makes your pulse hammer in your throat.

Down below, the fire truck’s massive diesel engines roar to life, shaking the pavement. The firefighters have cleared the building, evidently dealing with Tyler and his melted nylon bags, and are slowly backing the massive rig out of the narrow street. The flashing red lights click off, plunging the alleyway back into its usual, shadowed dimness.

“Looks like the show's over…” you say, a strange, totally unexpected pang of disappointment tightening your chest. You don't want this bubble to pop. You don't want to go back to being just passing strangers in the hallway.

Bucky looks down at the departing truck, then back at you. His eyes linger on your lips for a fraction of a second longer than is strictly polite before he offers a soft, entirely devastating smile. “Yeah. Suppose we should get back inside before you freeze to death, even with my jacket. I'll let you get back to your wine. Though, honestly, I've got a bottle of rare Kentucky bourbon in my place that easily beats whatever vintage you’re currently drinking.”

You raise an eyebrow, a bold, teasing smirk playing on your mouth. “Is that an invitation, Barnes? Are you trying to get me drunk on a Tuesday?”

“Maybe…” he says softly, turning toward the heavy metal door, his shoulder brushing against yours. “Depends entirely if you can handle your liquor. I don't drink with lightweights.”

He reaches out, his large hand grasping the iron handle of the fire escape door. He pulls.

Nothing happens.

He frowns, his jaw tightening. He grips the handle with both hands, planting his heavy boots firmly on the grated metal floor, and gives it a massive, violent yank. The door rattles loudly in its steel frame, echoing in the quiet night, but it doesn't budge even a fraction of an inch.

The quiet amusement instantly vanishes from Bucky's face. He drops his hands, staring at the thick, unyielding metal.

“What's wrong?” you ask, stepping closer, your heart skipping a nervous beat.

Bucky turns his head, looking over his shoulder at you. The easy, flirtatious energy has completely evaporated, replaced by a grim, deadpan expression that would be terrifying if it wasn't so incredibly hot.

“Some paranoid fucker closed the door behind us.” Bucky says, his voice completely flat.

“Okay, so... just push the bar from this side?” you suggest, your voice pitching up slightly in alarm.

“It's a one-way emergency exit…” Bucky sighs, dragging his hand heavily down his face in deep, profound aggravation. “It only opens from the inside. When the door shuts, the deadbolt drops automatically so people can't use the fire escape to break into the building from the alley.”

You stare at him, the reality of the situation slowly crashing down on you like a bucket of ice water. The freezing air suddenly feels ten times colder. The distant, mocking noise of the city seems to laugh at you.

“Are you... are you fucking kidding me right now?” you ask, your voice trembling between genuine panic and absolute disbelief.

Bucky leans back against the door, crossing his arms over his chest, his grey hoodie pulling tight over his biceps. He lets out a long, heavy breath, a dry, humorless chuckle escaping his lips as he runs a hand through his messy hair.

“Well, shit…” he mutters, looking at you with a mixture of apology and dark, undeniable amusement. “Looks like we’re officially locked out. Good thing you've got my jacket, doll, because it's going to be a long fucking night.”

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For decades, dozens of handlers had come and gone. Different voices. Different faces. Different methods. The Asset adapted because adaptation had been built into him. Loyalty was neither expected nor desired. Attachment represented vulnerability, and vulnerability had no place inside HYDRA.

Which was precisely why the reports had begun accumulating. Nothing dramatic enough to justify immediate intervention on the items separately. Nothing any single technician would have questioned.

Only patterns.

The Asset consistently positioned itself closer to its assigned handler than operational protocol required. Its threat assessment shifted when another operative entered her personal space. Its physiological readings stabilized more rapidly in response to her voice than to any corrective conditioning.

When conflicting commands were issued within fractions of a second, it demonstrated measurable hesitation before ultimately favoring hers.

Each incident, considered alone, was insignificant. Together, they suggested something unacceptable.

A dependency.

The conclusion circulated only among senior personnel. If the Asset required one specific handler to maintain optimal efficiency, then HYDRA had introduced a vulnerability into its most valuable weapon.

One person. One point of failure.

That possibility alone warranted immediate investigation, so the solution was approved before dawn.

No discussion. No consultation. No warning.

For seventy-two hours, the Asset would be assigned to another handler.

The current one would observe.

She would not interfere.

----

DAY 1 – 6:00

The alarm on her tablet beeped at 0600. She reached for it from the bed, blinking against the light of the screen, her fingers finding the familiar shape of the device.

And then she saw it.

The message was brief. Bearing the authorization codes of three senior officers she recognized by name but had never met.

RE: TEMPORARY REASSIGNMENT OF ASSET

Effective 0800 today, Asset 001 will be reassigned to Handler Lukas Voss for a 72-hour operational evaluation period. Current handler is to assume observation duties in Control Room 3. No contact with Asset permitted.

Any deviation will be treated as a breach of protocol.

She read it three times, but the words didn't change. The authorization codes remained. The cold, bureaucratic language offered no explanation, no justification, no recourse.

Fuck.

She dressed in her uniform. Standard-issue black. In the small mirror above her sink, she caught a glimpse of her own reflection. There were shadows under her eyes. The hair could be worse.

She stared at herself for a moment, and ordered herself to keep her face blank. To move through the world like she was made of the same cold steel as the walls around her. Then she turned away and walked out the door.

The corridors were quiet at this hour. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting that same sterile glow that made everything look washed-out and faintly unreal. The air was cold, recycled, tasting of metal and cleaning solution and the particular absence of anything natural.

She walked past the holding cells. Past the training rooms. Past the medical bay where they did things to the Asset that she tried not to think about.

She kept her eyes forward.

Control Room 3 was a narrow space, cramped with monitors and consoles. Three technicians were already there, their faces illuminated by the blue-white glow of the screens. They didn't acknowledge her when she entered. They never did.

She took her station in the corner, the one with the best view of the containment chamber on the other side of the one-way glass.

The Asset was already there.

He had been stripped of his tactical gear, dressed instead in the same dark training uniform he wore between assignments. He was sitting in a thin metal chair in the center of the room, back straight. Hands against his thighs. Gaze forward, fixed on nothing.

There was a small smear of dried blood on his jaw, just under his ear, where a cut had already scabbed, and the blood hadn't been washed away.

The door to the containment chamber opened. A man entered. Lukas Voss, she knew from the file she'd been given. Mid-forties, gray-streaked hair, solid build. His uniform was immaculate. His expression was professional, detached.

He looked at the Asset the way one might look at a piece of equipment.

"Soldat. On your feet."

The Asset obeyed. His movements were smooth, automatic. The same precision he always had.

But she noticed the way his eyes flickered, just for a moment, toward the door the man had come in.

Looking for something.

The man didn't notice. He was already moving on to the next instruction.

"On the floor. Maximum rep push-ups."

The Asset dropped to his hands and knees, his body lowering into the familiar rhythm of the exercise. His hair fell across his face, obscuring his expression. The long strands caught the light as he moved.

After that, the handler began cycling through more complex command sequences, deliberately varying their cadence. Short pauses. Interrupted instructions. Corrections delivered halfway through a movement. The sort of inconsistencies meant to confirm that the conditioning -not familiarity- governed compliance.

He obeyed flawlessly, but there was an emptiness to it she had never seen before. The movements lacked the fluid efficiency she had grown accustomed to. Every action appeared fractionally delayed, as though each command had to force its way through layers of invisible resistance before reaching whatever remained of the man beneath.

A technician frowned at his monitor.

"...Response latency increased."

Another compared the numbers to a previous mission log.

"Point three seconds."

"Within tolerance."

"Yes."

Still, the note was entered into the report.

She watched the secondary monitors, the ones displaying his vitals. Heart rate: 88 BPM. Slightly elevated from his baseline. Respiration: within normal parameters.

Everything looked fine.

Everything looked fine, and yet she felt something cold in her gut, giving a side glance to the technicians. Because she knew, in that moment, how the next seventy-two hours would be.

She knew, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

----

Day 1 - 14:00

By the afternoon, the numbers had started to matter less than what she could see with her own eyes.

Voss ran through the standard protocols efficiently. The kind of handler who trusted data over instinct, who wrote down what he saw instead of asking why he was seeing it.

The orders were followed. The commands were executed. But there was a hesitation now, small enough to miss if you weren't looking for it, and she was always looking for it.

The way his fingers moved a fraction slower on the reload. The way his aim was off by some negligible degree that would mean nothing to anyone who hadn't watched him shoot a thousand times before. The way his gaze kept drifting, just briefly, toward the door of the training room, like his body was checking an exit that had nothing to do with the exercise.

"Reload."

He complied. Late. Not by much. Enough.

"Again. Reload."

This time it landed within range. Voss made a note and moved on, already thinking about the next drill, already forgetting the first one.

Behind her, one of the technicians murmured something about motor latency. Another read a number off a screen. She didn't need to hear it to know what it would say.

She already knew where his heart rate sat with her. She didn't need a monitor to know it wasn't sitting there now.

Day 1 - 22:00

The Asset was returned to his cell.

The night vision cameras showed him sitting on the floor in the corner, his back against the wall. He didn't lie down. He didn't close his eyes. He sat with his hands resting on his knees, staring at the door.

The technicians noted: "Sleep pattern absent. Possible lack of fatigue."

She knew it wasn't lack of fatigue. He was restless.

She watched his face on the monitor, watched the way his eyes remained open, fixed on the door. Watched the way his fingers moved against his knees in small, restless motions, reaching, curling, going still, reaching again. Like they were trying to grasp something they used to hold.

Day 2 - 09:00

Combat training against other assets.

"Engage. Non-lethal neutralization."

He moved, but the word moved felt generous. He was slower than she'd ever seen him, and the others noticed it too. Low-grade serum subjects, dangerous but expendable, usually the kind of opponents he dismantled without much thought. Today they dodged things they shouldn't have been fast enough to dodge. In one exchange, a blow he would have read and avoided in his sleep caught him clean across the cheekbone.

She watched him take it. Watched his jaw lock down around the impact. Watched him make no sound at all, the way he'd been trained not to for longer than she'd been alive.

"Focus," Voss said, flat, already annoyed.

He didn't answer. In the next round his performance climbed, marginally, still well under baseline.

"Performance degraded by 12.7%," someone read aloud. "Cause: indeterminate."

It was somewhere in that round that she looked at him -not at the fight, not at the numbers, but at him- and noticed his hair.

It hung in his face in matted, sweat-dark at the roots and tangled through to the ends, sticking to his temples, his jaw, the corner of his mouth when he turned his head. There were knots in it thick enough to see from across the room, the kind that came from not being washed, not being brushed, not being cared for in even the smallest, most animal way.

The dried blood under his ear from the day before was still there.

No one had told him to wash himself. No one took the effort to clean him, either. It simply hadn't occurred to anyone that it mattered, that the version of him standing in this room was, in every visible way, coming undone, and that no one assigned to watch him even knew to look.

Voss was filling out his tablet, eyes on the numbers, not on the man.

She saw everything.

Day 2 - 11:00

Voss decided a correction was needed.

She watched through the one-way glass as the Soldat was positioned against the wall. No straps needed. Just cold steel and the implicit understanding that resistance wasn't on the table.

He stood with his hands flat against it, fingers spread, feet shoulder-width apart. The position was standard for this kind of correction, the kind that exposed his back, his ribs, the vulnerable stretch of skin between his shoulder blades. He'd been in it before. Many times, with many handlers.

Voss approached with the baton already in hand. Standard-issue, black, unremarkable. The kind the paperwork called corrective, never punitive, as if the distinction meant anything to the body absorbing it.

He didn't hesitate. The first blow landed just below the shoulder blades, sharp and metallic against cold flesh.

The Soldat’s body went taut, and his hands pressed harder into the wall, but no sound came out of his mouth.

The second blow came lower, across the ribs. Then the mirror of it on the other side, with the rhythm of someone who'd done this enough times that it no longer required thought.

She watched the tendons stand out along the Asset’s neck, watched his fingers close against the steel, nails scraping faintly with each impact.

Then, the baton caught the back of his thigh and his knee buckled, just slightly, before he caught himself. Still no sound.

Voss paused to adjust his stance -the same clinical recalibration a man might give a golf swing- then continued.

She made herself keep watching. Every instinct in her wanted to look away, to shut her eyes, to scream at him to stop. She let none of it reach her face. A flinch here would be a confession.

It would hand them exactly the vulnerability they were already circling, on a silver plate. So instead her hands found the edge of the console and gripped it until the metal bit into her palms, until the ache there gave her something to feel that wasn't fury.

She watched the welts rise, dark red against pale skin. Watched his breathing turn ragged, his chest heaving between blows. Watched sweat run down through his hair and drip from the ends of it onto the floor.

The final blow landed near his groin, and this time his breath caught -audibly, just once- before he wrestled it back under control. It was the only sound he'd made in six minutes.

Voss stepped back, and the baton went back into its holster. The correction was complete.

The Soldat stayed against the wall a moment longer, hands still flat, breathing hard, before Voss's voice cut through it.

"At ease."

He straightened slowly. She could see the effort it cost him in the strain of his back, in the way he favored his right side as he turned to face Voss, expression wiped clean of everything that had just happened to it.

Voss was already making notes, not looking at him at all.

"Correction administered." He said it more to the device than to anyone in the room. "Compliance maintained."

Then he left, and the Asset stood alone in the center of the chamber, blood beading along one line of welts where the skin had split, hair plastered to his face, waiting -the way he always waited- for someone to tell him what came next.

Her hands didn't unclench from the console for a long time after the door closed.

Day 2 - 13:00

They left him in a holding room while Voss went to review equipment.

The feed showed him standing in the center of the room, at rest position. Hands loose at his sides. Shoulders back. Eyes forward, fixed on nothing.

He didn't move for forty-seven minutes.

"Partial catatonic state," someone noted, typing without looking up. "No response to environmental stimuli."

She watched his stillness and thought that word was wrong. He wasn't unresponsive. He was waiting. The particular kind of waiting that came from a body that had learned, somewhere beneath conscious thought, that if it held still long enough, the thing it was waiting for might eventually come.

But it wasn't going to come. Not for forty-seven minutes. Not for the rest of that day.

Her hands were flat against the console, pressing down until her fingers ached, because it was the only way she had left to keep them from doing something else.

Day 2 - 23:00

Back in his cell, he still didn't sleep.

But now his gaze had started to move. From the door. To the ventilation grate. Then to the camera in the corner, holding there a beat too long before sliding away again.

"Atypical behavior," the log read. "Search pattern detected. No identifiable target."

She almost laughed, and the sound that almost came out of her wasn't anything close to a laugh at all.

She knew exactly what he was looking for. She'd known since the first minute of the first day, watching him check the door before he even understood, consciously, that she wasn't going to walk through it.

He wasn't scanning the room for threats. He wasn't disoriented. He was doing what he always did when a session ran long, or a mission went sideways. He was looking for the one fixed point that told him it was safe to stop bracing.

He was searching for her.

And she sat there, hands pressed flat against her knees exactly the way his were pressed against his, and gave away nothing.

Because that was the assignment. Observe. Do not interfere.

She had never hated an order more in her life.

Day 3 - 07:00

By the third morning, she no longer needed to check the monitors to know something had broken.

Voss gave the first order of the day in the same flat tone as always, registering nothing different.

"Move."

The Asset moved. But something in the way his legs answered no longer held any of the fluidity she knew. It was like watching him wade through water.

"Stop."

He stopped. A second late.

"Reload."

His fingers closed around the magazine and for one instant -barely an instant- they didn't seem to know what to do. It was so brief that two of the three technicians didn't even look up from their screens. She saw it. She saw the way his knuckles went white before his body remembered the motion for him.

No one logged that one. There was no number for it.

"Engage. Target practice."

He raised the weapon. Fired. Most of the rounds landed where they should, tight, precise, the signature of years carved into muscle. But two pulled wide, drifting off into nothing, as if for a fraction of a second the hand belonged to someone else.

Her nails dug into the edge of the console.

Voss's jaw clenched. He didn't say anything yet, but his silence carried a different weight than it had the last forty-eight hours. He took a step closer.

"Soldat. Focus."

That was when she saw it: the Asset's eyes didn't move toward Voss. They went left, toward the glass, toward the darkness behind which she sat, motionless, holding her breath as if that could make her invisible.

He couldn't see her. She knew he couldn't see her. The glass had been built for exactly that.

He looked anyway.

"Look at me when I speak to you."

The Asset's head turned, slow, heavy, like his neck had to be talked into obeying before the rest of him would follow. His eyes found Voss's face.

The man felt something cold trickle down his spine. He didn't know why

Day 3 - 11:00

Voss spent the late morning going through the file. Not the operational reports - those told him nothing he didn't already know- but the psychological logs, page after page of observations filed by technicians who'd spent years watching the Asset the way other men watched machinery, looking for wear before it became failure.

One phrase kept surfacing. Repeated across dozens of entries, always attributed to the same handler, always followed by a measurable -if minor- improvement in compliance and vitals.

You did good, Soldat.

He read it two times. It struck him as almost embarrassingly simple. Positive reinforcement, the kind you'd use on a dog or a child, dressed up in a soldier's vocabulary so no one had to call it what it was. Still. If it worked, it worked.

That afternoon's session had been poor. Sloppy footwork, a delayed reload, a wide group on the range that made Voss's mouth press into a thin line before he even finished writing it down.

"Your performance was insufficient," he said, flat, clinical. "But within acceptable parameters."

The Asset said nothing. Just stood in the center of the room with his eyes fixed somewhere past Voss's shoulder, at the wall, at nothing.

The man hesitated -just slightly, just enough that she noticed it even through the glass- and then added, in a tone that tried and failed to soften:

"You did good, Soldat."

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then something did.

One second he was standing still, and the next his whole body tensed and his head snapped toward Voss with an expression on his face that had no business existing on someone who'd been conditioned not to have expressions at all.

"Don’t say that again." His voice came out wrong. Rougher. Lower. Not the flat, affectless register he answered orders in.

Voss blinked, perplexed. "Soldat-"

He didn't finish. The Asset closed the distance between them in under a second, and Voss didn't have time to raise his hands before he was slammed back into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster, a metal hand fisted in the front of his uniform, lifting him half onto his toes.

"Don't." The word came out through his teeth. "You don't get to say it-"

Alarms started somewhere behind her, distant and tinny. She heard chairs scraping, heard someone reaching for a radio, heard her own pulse roaring louder than any of it.

Voss clawed at the arm holding him, choking out something that might have been a command and might have just been his name, and the Asset's face did something she'd never seen it do openly in the two years of handling him: it broke, entirely, grief and fury occupying the same features at once, like his body didn't know which one to become.

"Containment team, Room 3-" someone was already saying into a radio, and she was on her feet without remembering standing, hands flat against the glass, every professional instinct in her screaming that this was the tell, this was the thing that would get her killed, and she couldn't make herself care.

He slammed Voss into the wall a second time.

The door burst open. Four men in tactical gear came through it fast. It took all four of them to pull him off. It took a fifth to get the sedative into his neck, and even then he fought it, fought them, fought everything, his eyes never leaving the door the entire time, the same door he'd been watching for three days, the one that never opened the way he needed it to.

He went down slow. Not the clean, immediate drop she'd seen from higher doses. His knees buckled first, one hand still reaching, and he said one more thing, quiet, barely audible over the chaos, not meant for Voss, not meant for the men holding him down, not really meant for anyone who could hear it. But she read his lips.

Please.

Then he went still.

----

Day 3 - 23:00

They'd sent her back to her quarters after the incident. No explanation. Just two words from a senior officer who wouldn't meet her eyes.

An hour later, a stack of paperwork arrived at her door. Routine administrative backlog, officially: requisition forms, equipment logs, nothing that couldn't have waited a week. She understood it for what it actually was the moment she saw the volume of it: something to keep her hands busy and her location accounted for, filed and stamped and traceable.

She did it anyway. There was nothing else to do with the day, and refusing would only have raised the kind of questions she couldn't afford.

It took most of the afternoon and half the evening. By the time she pushed the last form aside, her neck ached, and she still had no idea what had happened to the Asset after they'd carried him out of that room.

She tried to sleep, but it didn't take. She lay there under the covers with her eyes open, listening to the recycled noise of the ventilation system, running through everything she'd seen that morning. His hands on Voss's collar, the sound the wall made, the word please in his lips.

At 22:47, her comm buzzed. Report to Control Room 3.

She was through the corridors before she'd finished reading it twice.

By the time she reached the observation deck, the session had already started. Combat simulation. Multiple targets. She didn't know what they'd done to him in the hours between the sedative and this -no one thought it necessary to tell her.

Voss gave the order from the observation platform, his voice steadier than it had any right to be given the bruise already purpling along his jaw.

"Engage."

The Asset complied. But something about the way his body moved was wrong. Less precise. More aggressive. Not the usual calculated economy of motions, something rawer, something that spent force instead of conserving it.

He took the first two targets down clean. On the third, he misjudged the trajectory -she saw it happen, saw the half-second where his weight landed wrong- and the android's strike caught him in the shoulder. A real hit. It should have stunned him, slowed him.

But he swung at it instead.

The training android slammed into the wall with a crack loud enough that two technicians flinched back from their consoles. He didn't stop there. He hit the fourth target with the same force. Then the fifth, before it had even finished powering up, metal fist driving through its chassis until sparks scattered across the floor.

"Soldat. Stop."

Nothing.

"Soldat! Stop!"

He turned slowly, and for one full second, she was certain he was going to close the distance to Voss the same way he had that morning, and her hand was already moving toward the comm switch, toward some override she didn't have the clearance to use, toward anything-

He stopped.

He stood in the wreckage of the fifth target, chest heaving, both fists still clenched at his sides, and his hair hanging across his face in damp, tangled pieces that stuck to his cheekbones with sweat.

He wasn't angry. She could see that clearly, even through the glass, even with everything in the room built to make her doubt her own reading of him.

He was lost. Standing in the middle of a room full of things he'd just destroyed, and no idea, none at all, of what he was supposed to do now that there was nothing left in front of him to hit.

The technicians noted: Erratic behavior. Increased aggression. Possible psychological instability.

----

Day 3 - 23:40

The message came to her comm with no context. Go to room 3. Now.

She was moving before she finished reading it, and made herself stop two steps later, made herself breathe. By the time she reached the door, her face had settled back into the blank, professional nothing she'd worn for three days straight.

The containment room door opened with a hydraulic hiss.

He was on his knees in the center of the room.

His breathing was too fast. Too shallow. His chest rising and falling in short, ragged pulls that had nothing to do with exertion.

Eight technicians stood around the edges of the room, tablets raised, recording. None of them had moved closer than the doorway in the last ten minutes. None of them were going to.

Voss stood near the wall, arms crossed, jaw tight, the bruise along it darker now than it had been that morning.

She stepped inside.

Her footsteps were quiet, but he heard them anyway, and his head lifted, just a fraction.

She stopped three meters away. The only sounds left were the low whoosh of the ventilation system and the fast, thin rasp of his breathing.

She kept her face blank. Her voice came out the way it always did in public: flat, even, betraying nothing of the last three days' ordeal.

"Asset."

His head came up further, unfocused.

"Eyes on me."

And then it happened.

His gaze sharpened all at once, snapping into focus, locking onto her face, the thing he'd been searching for since the first morning, finally, impossibly, standing in front of him.

Around the room, tablets kept recording. She heard the murmurs start, quiet, clinical, utterly indifferent to what they were actually watching.

"Heart rate dropping."

"Cortisol levels decreasing."

"Pupillary response normalizing."

Someone, quieter than the rest, almost to himself: "He's... regulating."

She didn't look at any of them. She kept her eyes on his, and made herself hold perfectly still while every instinct she had screamed at her to close the three meters between them.

"Stand at attention."

He obeyed before she'd finished the sentence.

No hesitation. No delay. He rose to his feet with a precision that hadn't existed in this room since the message had arrived on her tablet at six in the morning three days ago.

Unsurprisingly, nobody applauded the result, but she felt the room exhale anyway.

Voss said something to the sector director standing in the doorway, low enough that she couldn't hear it, and didn't try to.

Then, someone finally called it: Evaluation period concluded. Asset and handler, dismissed.

----

The door to her quarters finally closed behind them.

He stood in the center, the way he always did, waiting to be told what to do with himself in a space that had no orders. His hands hung at his sides.

His posture was still rigid, still holding the shape of at attention even now, but something had changed: a slight inward curve in his shoulders, like the effort of standing straight had finally started to cost him. His head was bowed just enough that his hair fell forward, hiding most of his face.

What she could see of it wasn't good. Yellow-green bruising along his cheekbone. His hair was beyond disheveled, matted in thick sections, knotted past the point where fingers alone would work it out. Near his temple, something dark had dried it against his skin. She couldn't tell in the low light if it was blood or dirt or both.

She reached up and brushed it back anyway, the evidence that no one looked for him the way she did.

It was heavier than it should have been, greasy with three days of neglect, and her fingers caught almost immediately on a knot behind his ear, but he didn't flinch.

"You should have slept, should have… taken care of yourself," she said quietly, not really expecting an answer.

She didn't get one.

But then he moved.

Slowly. Carefully. His human hand went to the pocket of his tactical pants, the motion hesitant in a way none of his motions ever were, like he wasn't certain he had permission for this.

She watched, not yet understanding.

He drew his hand back out and in his open palm sat a hair tie. Yellow, with a ridiculous little silicone strawberry stuck to the band, one of the ones she only ever wore in the privacy of this room, off duty.

He must have taken it before going to Voss, while she slept. Kept it with him through three days of corrections and sedatives and people watching him come apart.

He held it out to her. Returning it.

His eyes found hers and stayed there, but there was nothing steady in his gaze. It was the look of a child holding out something he wasn't supposed to have taken, watching her face for the exact moment it would tell him whether he was in trouble.

She looked at the hair tie sitting in his palm, at the way his fingers curled loosely around it even as he offered it up, like some part of him didn't want to let it go even now. Watched him watch her, waiting to find out which one it would be. Her throat closed.

She didn't take it.

She closed her hand around his instead -gently, fingers lacing through his around the small, ridiculous item- and stepped in until there was no space left between them, until her forehead came to rest against his chest.

He went utterly still.

Then, slowly, he bowed his head. His nose brushed her temple, the barest contact, and he breathed her in. His hair fell against her cheek, dirty, still carrying the smell of the days they had been apart. She didn't pull away from it.

She pressed her fingers tighter around his instead.

Somewhere beyond the door, the technicians were already compiling their data. Someone was already briefing the higher-ups on what it meant.

Removing her was raised and dismissed within the hour, because of the cost. Months of instability, continued wiping and performing more damage to the brain, versus an asset who already performed exactly as needed with her guidance.

And performance was the only metric that had ever mattered there.

The vulnerability was filed. Flagged for future review. And left, for now, exactly where it was.

Not that he knew you. That was the cruel logic of it all. To Sergeant James Barnes, you were nobody. Nothing but a nurse he'd been introduced to twice, and forgotten both times. A face in a crowd of pretty faces, but by no means the prettiest.

You had stopped being able to feel your own face somewhere around the third song, no longer pretending to smile.

"You gonna dance, or you gonna be a wallflower all night?"

You turned. One of the girls— Doris, or maybe it it was Lilian, you weren't paying attention— was smiling at you with the social grace that women in this time seemed to possess effortlessly. They belonged in a way you never would. You gave her something that was probably a smile.

"I'm alright watching."

"Watching him, you mean." She followed your gaze to where Bucky stood in his dress uniform, left arm braced against a pillar as he leaned down to murmur something into the ear of a redhead who laughed like he'd hung the moon. "Half the room's watching him. Don't feel bad, sweets. He's real generous with the old charm."

Generous! You laughed to yourself, that was certainly one word for it.

You'd been in 1943 for eleven days. Eleven days since the machine in your lab had done whatever it was that it did. There had been a surge of power, a blinding flash of light and the smell of ozone that still hadn't left your nostrils. You had woken up staring at a strange sky, in an alley between two buildings you didn't recognize.

Eleven days later, you had talked your way into a nursing post with the competence that only came with training from a program that wouldn't exist for another sixty years.

The first time you had seen him, you hadn't been able to move. You almost walked past without a backward glance. The thing that had gotten your attention wasn't how he looked, it was his voice. It hadn't changed. What had changed was how freely he laughed

It was all you could think of as you lay on a narrow rented bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking: He's here. He's alive and whole and here, and he has no idea who I am.

You'd thought seeing this version of him would be a comfort.

You'd been so stupid.

So there you were, contemplating your existence, a woman out of your own time. And you realized that the thing nobody told you about time travel was that it was mostly waiting.

You had managed to track down a physicist— a nervous, but brilliant scientist who was well ahead of his time and happened to work for Stark Industries and liked to carry out experiments in his basement.

When you'd described the machine, he had gone very pale and very quiet and then become very interested. He offered to help you. He thought it would take weeks. He speculated a great many things, and every one of them required you to stay close to the war effort, close to the base, close— by fate or by accident— to Bucky-freaking-Barnes.

You should have quit, but you needed the money and a place to stay. So you saw him. Constantly. At the mess, in the corridors, at these godforsaken dances the other nurses dragged you to. And every time, the same knife went in.

Because Bucky Barnes flirted with everyone.

You watched him do it like a case study you had a vested interest in. I'm a way, you did.

He flirted with Lilian and Doris and Elizabeth, with Marian and Margaret and even Sandy. He flirted with the girl who sold cigarettes and the middle-aged woman who ran your boarding house who flushed like a school girl every time he tipped his cap.

He flirted with the same energy that other mean breathed— unconsciously, effortlessly and with enthusiasm. With the whole world except you.

With you he was polite. God, the politeness was utterly devastating. Every 'ma'am.' Every 'miss.' Every nod.

Once— and only once— he caught you looking at him for too long across the mess hall and you had noticed a flicker on his face. It wasn't interest, no you knew his expressions well enough, it was something closer to confusion. Almost as though he couldn't quite figure out why this particular nurse kept staring at him like she was drowning.

You'd looked away so fast you'd spilled your coffee.

So here's the thing you could quite wrap your head around. It was the splinter which kept digging it's way deeper. He was still Bucky. Before the fall. Before seventy years of ice and torture. Before his free will had been ripped away. It was still him. The same kind man you loved.

And his man had looked at you and felt nothing.

"You look like you're thinking too hard," Lillian said. "Never a good idea at a dance."

"Sorry." You forced a smile and made yourself relax. "Long shift," you lied with a shrug.

She patted your arm sympathetically and drifted off in the direction of a corporal who had been eyeing her from across the hall. And then you were alone. Again. Listening to Bucky laughing at something across the room, his eyes crinkled and nose scrunched. You had to close your eyes.

In the present, you told yourself, he loves you.

But did he?

This thought was the poison of the past, the reason the past eleven days had hollowed you out and given you reason to doubt. Because you'd met your Bucky broken. You'd met him after— after the Soldier, after the torture, after the long slow work he had done to put himself back together, with therapy and effort and the kind of hard-won stillness that made his rare smiles feel earned. Your Bucky was quiet. He was careful. He loved you the way a man loves the shore after a shipwreck— grateful, fierce, like something he'd been afraid to hope for.

When you thought back, this stillness had always felt like the depth in your relationship. That his quiet devotion was the shape of a man who had survived far too much to be careless with his heart. That when he reached for you in the dark, when he said your name with reverence, when he told you that he loved you, it was the truest thing in him.

Only now you'd seen the before.

Now you'd seen who he was when the world hadn't broken him yet.

And that man— that carefree, radiant, flirtatious man— he wouldn't have looked at you twice. That man had a type, and you were watching him charm her across the dance floor right now, and it most decidedly wasn't you. It was never you.

So what did that make what you had back home?

It was the ugly thought. The one that had been circling your brain in different iterations for the last eleven days.

He's with you because you were there.

Because you'd been kind to him at the worst point of his life.

Because you were willing, and steady, and you'd stayed when staying was hard.

Because a drowning man doesn't check whether the hand pulling him up is the one he'd have chosen.

He grabs what's offered.

You were what was offered. Convenient. Present. Undemanding.

Not chosen. Settled.

You believed it completely, while standing in that dance hall. It sank deep into your bones, like the weight of something you'd always half-known and finally let yourself see.

"You're that nurse."

You startled so badly at his voice that you knocked your purse off the table. Bucky was standing in front of you— right in front of you, close enough that you could smell the pomade and the wool of his uniform. And he was looking at you with that faint, puzzled crease between his brows. He bent down and retrieved your purse without a second thought.

"I— yeah. Sorry. Yes. I'm a nurse."

Brilliant. Very cool. Totally nailed that response. You mentally face palmed yourself.

"You keep looking at me." He said it plainly, without judgement. "All week. At the mess, and now here." He paused, studying your face. "Do I know you? From somewhere? I feel like I oughta, and it's drivin' me half crazy tryna figure it out."

You don't know me yet, was the thought didn't say. You won't know me for another eighty years.

"No," you managed in a flat tone. "You don't know me."

He studied you. And for one horrible, hopeful second you let yourself imagine that something would spark between you. That he would recognize something buried deep inside himself, the one who would one day become the man you loved. That he'd feel it, the way you felt it. The impossible gravity that existed between you.

He didn't. You watched him not feel it. He just gave you a small, courteous, sorry-can't-place-you smile and the last shred of hope shattered in it chest.

"Well," he said. "You alright? You look a little—" he gestured vaguely at all of you, "—pale. Rough night on the ward?"

You laughed dismally. "Something like that."

"You want some air? You look like you want some air."

And there it was. Not attraction. Kindness. The reflexive decency of a good man toward a woman who looked unwell. He'd have offered the same to Doris or Evelyn, to the redhead or the blonde, to anyone really. You knew it, and you took it anyway, because you were weak and you loved him and this was the closest he'd stood to you in eleven days.

Outside, the night was cold and wet and smelled of the harbor. Bucky lit a cigarette, offered you one, seemed unsurprised when you shook your head. For a while neither of you said anything.

"You got somebody?" he asked finally, and your heart lurched dangerously. "Back home, I mean. You got that look. Like half of you is somewhere else."

You laughed and it came out wrecked.

"Yeah," you said. "I've got somebody."

"He treat you right?"

He loves me like a man loves the thing that saved him, you thought. And I don't know anymore if that's the same as loving me for me.

"I don't know," you said honestly. "I used to think so. Now I'm not sure he'd have picked me. If things had been different. If he'd had… options. I think maybe I was just… the one who was there."

Bucky was quiet a moment. When you looked at him he was frowning— not the usual puzzled frown, it was something more thoughtful.

"That's a helluva thing to carry," he said. "You wanna know what I think?"

He looked at you, barely waiting for you to answer before he continued.

"I flirt with every dame in that room. You've seen me, don't pretend you haven't." He gave you a rueful half-smile. "It's easy. Don't cost me a thing. You smile, they smile, everybody has a nice night, nobody gets hurt. It's—" he searched for the right word, "—it's cheap. You understand? It's the cheapest thing I got."

You stared at him.

"You know what's not cheap?" he went on, looking out into the night. "The stuff that costs you something— and that's not the girl you charm across a dance hall. That's the one you'd still want around when there's nothing charming left in you. When you're scared, or sick, or done things you can't take back."

He exhaled smoke. "A fella who's had it easy, he'll flirt with anybody. Don't mean anything. But a fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person—" he shrugged, "—seems to me that's the only kind that counts. The rest's just… noise."

You couldn't breathe.

He didn't know how deeply what he'd said had resonated with you. He couldn't have. He was just a kind man being kind to a sad woman outside a dance hall, offering the accidental wisdom of someone who'd one day live every word of it. But he'd reached across eighty years and removed the splinter from your heart.

A fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person.

That was your Bucky. Not a drowning man grabbing for the nearest hand. A man who had been through the absolute worst the world could do. A man who had every reason to be closed and cold and careful with the little warmth he had left. And instead who spent it, deliberately, expensively, on you.

Not because you were convenient. Because when everything cheap had been burned out of him, you were what remained. You were the thing that counted.

The flirtation you'd been grieving wasn't the love you knew. It never had been. It was the noise. And your Bucky had gone silent with everyone else in the world and still turned, in the dark, toward you.

"Thank you," you whispered.

Bucky looked faintly bewildered. "For what? I didn't do anything."

"You'd be surprised," you said, tears slipping down your cheeks before laughing at the way he was hastily patting his pockets for a handkerchief with the flustered gallantry of a man way out of his depth

And for the first time in eleven days the ache in your chest had somewhere to go.

The scientist sent for you nine days later. You had pulled yourself away from the pub, one last glance at the Sergeant before you scurried away under the cover of darkness.

The machine hummed and the basement reeked of ozone. Suddenly your heart was pounding and you were looking back at the strange world you were leaving. At the war that hadn't broken him fully yet. At the still charming boy who would become, through unspeakable years, the quiet man who loved you.

I'm coming home baby, you told him, across the space-time continuum. I finally understand what I'm coming home to.

With that vow, you stepped into the light.

When you opened your eyes it was day and you were back in your lab, surrounded by your things and there— there was already someone crossing the room toward you at a dead run. Someone with a metal arm and a face raw with grief and terror that lasted twenty days. Someone who caught you and held you like the shore holds the shipwreck.

"You're back," Bucky said into your hair, over and over, wrecked and reaching only for you. "You're back, you're back, you're back."

"I'm back," you said. "I know exactly where I am."

Steve knew that feeling. He knew it so well it was almost another sense.

Outside the narrow windows, the night was a blur of cloud and darkness, the kind of black that made the world feel smaller. The quinjet’s lights washed everyone in a hard, unforgiving glow. It made faces look sharper than they were. It made fatigue look like anger and anger look like something uglier.

Natasha sat opposite Bucky, her spine straight, legs crossed at the ankle like she’d decided to be made of iron for the duration of the flight. Her hands were clean – too clean – resting in her lap with deliberate stillness, like she’d scrubbed away more than grime in the field. Her expression was neutral, almost bored, but Steve had learned that Natasha’s stillness wasn’t calm. It was control. It was restraint with teeth.

Clint leaned back against the cabin wall, head tilted slightly, eyes half-lidded as if he were trying to sleep. Steve could tell he wasn’t. Clint’s bow case sat at his feet, straps undone, everything about it suggesting a routine that had been interrupted. His fingers tapped once against his thigh and then stopped. That tiny motion – the aborted rhythm – was the only tell Steve needed.

Tony stood farther forward, closer to the cockpit, arms folded, shoulders tense beneath the sleek lines of his suit’s underlayer. He’d taken off the armor in pieces the moment they were airborne, as if the metal couldn’t stand to stay on him when it had failed. The arc reactor glow shone faintly through fabric, a cold little circle of light at his chest. His brows were drawn down, eyes fixed on nothing. When he exhaled, it came out through his nose in a sharp, controlled burst.

Sam sat near the ramp, bracing a forearm on the bench, gazing at the closed door as if he could still see through it to the city they’d left behind. His wings were stowed, but there was a restlessness to him, a contained urge to move. He kept rolling one shoulder as if trying to work a knot out of muscle.

Steve sat with his hands on his thighs, gloves off, fingers flexing once and then going still. His knuckles were scraped – nothing serious – but the sting was a reminder, like his body was keeping score.

They’d been so close.

That was what made it worse. Not just that the mission had failed – they’d lived through failures before, swallowed them, learned, moved on. This one… this one had been almost. Almost in their grasp, almost a clean collar, almost the end of a thing that had been rotting under the surface of the city for too long.

The target had a name, an alias that shifted like water. In their files, he was a neat stack of paper and photographs: a man with a forgettable face and expensive suits, the kind of person you’d pass on a sidewalk and never look at twice. In real life, he was a shadow behind a network that swallowed people. Young women, boys barely old enough to look like men, children who disappeared between districts and borders like the world had agreed not to see them.

Steve had seen them tonight.

Not all of them – not enough. But he’d caught glimpses in a warehouse corridor lit by flickering industrial bulbs: a girl with duct tape around her wrists staring at him with eyes too old for her face, a boy who flinched at sudden movement, a row of cages that had once held something living and now held only the smell of fear. He’d heard the muffled cries and felt his own pulse quicken with something that wasn’t adrenaline.

Rage had a temperature. It had weight. It settled in Steve’s chest like hot iron.

They’d breached fast, coordinated, clean. Natasha dropping two guards before they knew she was there. Clint’s arrows pinning weapons to walls, disabling without killing. Sam sweeping the upper catwalks, calling out positions, his voice clipped but steady in Steve’s ear. Tony cutting through a reinforced door with surgical precision, sparing the people behind it from a longer wait.

And Steve – Steve had run straight for the office.

Because that’s what it had become with this man. A pattern. A game. The boss always held himself separate, always had an exit route, always had a contingency. He didn’t get his hands dirty, he didn’t get caught in the chaos. He didn’t run.

He disappeared.

Tonight, they’d built their plan around that. Tony’s surveillance. Natasha’s intel. A net designed to close every gap. Bucky and Steve moving like they’d been made for this – flanking routes, anticipating movement. They’d cornered the man in a steel-framed room that smelled of expensive cologne and cheap cigarettes, paperwork strewn on a desk like the world’s ugliest ledger.

Steve had seen him clearly then. He remembered thinking, absurdly, that the man’s tie was perfectly knotted.

The target’s eyes had met Steve’s, and something cold had flickered there – not fear, not surprise. Calculation. Recognition. As if he’d expected the Avengers to arrive eventually, and this was merely a late appointment.

“Captain,” he’d said, smooth as silk.

Then the lights had gone out.

Not an accident. Not a power failure. Tony had cursed in Steve’s comm, something about an EMP pulse that shouldn’t have been possible in that building without warning. For a second, the world had been a void – only the red emergency strips along the floor, only the sound of boots and breath and the distant panicked shouts of guards.

Steve had lunged forward anyway, guided by instinct more than sight. His hand had brushed fabric – a suit sleeve, slick and expensive – and he’d closed his grip hard enough to feel bone beneath. He’d thought, Got you.

Then something cut through the dark, a blade whispering close to his ribs, not deep enough to injure but enough to warn. Steve had twisted, bringing the shield up, feeling metal catch a glancing strike. The sound had been wrong in the dark – too intimate, too close.

By the time Tony restored partial lighting, the office was empty.

Only the tie clip remained on the floor, still gleaming. A small, ridiculous trophy.

The man had slipped through them again, like he was made of smoke.

Steve’s stomach turned now, remembering the smugness in those eyes. Remembering the sound of that blade in the dark.

Bucky’s voice cut through the cabin, low and rough. “He knew.”

Steve didn’t look at him right away. He stared at his own scraped knuckles, at the dried blood beneath one nail that wasn’t his. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “He knew.”

Bucky’s prosthetic hand flexed once, fingers spreading and closing in a motion too controlled to be accidental. The metal caught the overhead light, bright and clean and unforgiving. “This isn’t just him getting lucky,” Bucky added, and there was an edge in it, something sharpened by the fact that Bucky understood predators in a way Steve wished he didn’t. “He’s got someone. Or something. Feeding him.”

Natasha’s gaze shifted toward them. Her expression didn’t change, but her eyes did – a fraction more focused, a fraction less distant. “He has systems,” she said. “He has money. And he has people who are terrified of him.” She paused, then, very slightly, her mouth tightening. “That’s usually enough.”

Steve heard what she didn’t say: It shouldn’t be.

Clint’s eyes opened more fully. He didn’t speak. He just watched Steve, like he was reading the part of him that wanted to go back, right now, drop from the quinjet into the night and hunt the man down with his bare hands.

Steve forced himself to breathe slowly, in through his nose, out through his mouth. He’d learned, with time, that anger could be useful – it could drive you, keep you moving – but it could also make you sloppy. The man they were chasing thrived on mistakes.

Tony finally turned from the cockpit area, his boots thudding softly on the cabin floor. He didn’t look at Steve first – he looked at the others, scanning faces like he was taking inventory of damage.

“We saved thirty-two,” Tony said, voice flat.

Steve’s throat tightened. Thirty-two was not nothing. Thirty-two was lives. Thirty-two people who would go home, who would get help, who might one day sleep without flinching.

But Steve also saw the other side of it like a second image burned onto his mind: the empty cages, the list Natasha had shown them, the estimated numbers that had made Steve’s stomach drop.

“How many did we miss?” Steve asked, even though he already knew.

Tony’s jaw clenched. “We don’t have an exact–” He stopped, then forced the words out like they were bitter. “Dozens. At least. And if he relocates again, we’ll be chasing smoke for another month.”

Bucky made a sound under his breath, something like disgust without language.

Natasha’s fingers twitched once in her lap and then stilled again. Steve caught it – the brief betrayal of control – and it made his own frustration spike. If Natasha was tired of this, it meant they’d reached a point where even her patience was fraying.

Steve felt it too. Not fatigue, exactly. Something deeper. A weariness that came from fighting the same evil in different faces, over and over, and knowing that the world kept producing more. That there were always people willing to profit from suffering.

He looked at the closed ramp as if he could see through it to the darkness beyond. “We can’t keep doing this,” he said, and the words came out harsher than he intended. “We can’t keep letting him slip away.”

Tony’s eyes flicked to him. “Not for lack of trying, Cap.”

Steve knew that. He knew Tony had been up for thirty-six hours straight, building predictive models and hacking surveillance systems that were never meant to be touched. He knew Clint’s hands had been steady in the field even while his eyes looked older every time they saw another trafficking ring. He knew Sam had flown himself to the edge of exhaustion, pushing his suit to keep up. He knew Natasha had dug into shadows that even she didn’t like to revisit.

That was part of what made it unbearable. They weren’t failing because they weren’t trying hard enough.

They were failing because someone had built this network to survive them.

Steve pressed his palms against his thighs, grounding himself in the pressure. “Then we need to change the game,” he said.

Silence. A collective pause, like the quinjet itself was listening.

Sam exhaled and finally turned from the ramp, looking at the group. His eyes were tired, but there was something firm in them, something that refused to let frustration become despair.

“We need a different approach,” Sam said.

His tone wasn’t dramatic. It was simple. Practical. The kind of statement that sounded obvious until you realized no one had been willing to admit it yet.

Tony arched a brow. “Okay,” he said, voice edged with skepticism. “Do you have one? Because last I checked, we already tried ‘kick in the door’ and ‘kick in the door harder.’”

Sam didn’t smile. “Not like that.”

Steve watched him, studying the set of his shoulders, the way he held himself like he was preparing for pushback. Sam was choosing his words carefully – and that, more than anything, made Steve’s stomach tighten.

Natasha’s eyes narrowed slightly. Clint’s attention sharpened. Even Bucky lifted his head a fraction, as if he’d sensed the same thing Steve had.

Sam glanced between them. “We’ve been playing by rules he understands,” he said. “Predictable. We gather intel, we raid locations, we rescue who we can, and he slips out because he’s got a head start every damn time. We’re fighting his system. And his system is built to survive us.”

Steve felt the truth of it settle like a weight.

Sam continued, “We need someone who doesn’t come at this like us. Someone who can get close. Someone who can move where we can’t.”

Tony’s mouth tightened. “You mean an undercover.”

“Maybe,” Sam said. “Or maybe someone who lives in the gray already. Somebody who knows these kinds of networks from the inside.”

Steve’s pulse ticked up, slow and steady, like a warning bell.

Because he knew where this was going.

Natasha shifted her gaze toward the floor for a second, then back up. Her face remained composed, but there was a flicker of something in her eyes – memory, maybe. Recognition. She’d been in the gray. She’d crawled out. She also knew the cost.

Clint’s fingers curled once, then relaxed.

Bucky’s shoulders went rigid.

Steve leaned forward slightly without meaning to. “No,” he said, and it came out too fast. Too instinctive.

Sam met his eyes. “Hear me out.”

“I’m hearing you,” Steve said, and he could feel heat rising under his skin, anger trying to find a target. “And I’m saying no.”

Tony’s gaze flicked between them, wary now, curiosity sharpening. “What exactly are we saying no to?” he asked.

Sam hesitated – just a fraction – and that hesitation was the last confirmation Steve needed.

Steve’s mind supplied the file before anyone said it out loud. A dossier he’d skimmed once and hated immediately. A name that wasn’t a real name, a shadow with a pattern.

Nyx.

Steve could see the first page of it like it was projected behind his eyes: black-and-white stills pulled from security footage, timestamps, locations, bodies on polished floors. Notes in clinical language that tried to make violence sound like data. A list of confirmed kills and probable kills, each one reduced to a bullet point.

And then the part that had made Steve’s skin crawl the first time he read it – not the number, not the blood, but the detail that felt like a choice.

Knife only.

Up close.

Personal.

No mask.

No shame.

A woman with a young face and eyes that, in the still images, looked almost amused.

Steve’s jaw clenched so hard it ached. He hated how quickly his brain provided the image. He hated that it had stuck.

Sam said quietly, “We could use Nyx.”

The words landed in the cabin like a punch.

For a second, no one spoke. The quinjet hummed around them, steady and indifferent, as if it didn’t care what bargains people made in its belly.

Steve stared at Sam, feeling his heartbeat in his throat. “Absolutely not,” he said.

Natasha didn’t argue – not yet. She just watched Steve with that unnerving stillness, like she was waiting to see whether his refusal was principle or fear.

Tony’s brows rose. “Nyx,” he repeated, tasting the name like he was testing it. “You mean the knife artist with the teleportation problem and the moral allergy to killing kids and puppies?”

Bucky’s gaze snapped toward Tony, sharp.

Tony lifted a hand. “I read the highlights,” he said, defensive but not apologetic. “It’s a hell of a résumé.”

Steve’s hands curled into fists. “She’s a murderer.”

“So is our target,” Sam said, voice tight. “But he’s also a businessman. He’s a network. And he’s still out there because we’re not getting ahead of him.”

Steve felt something shift inside his chest – a pressure, a crack. He didn’t want to consider it. He didn’t want to weigh it like an option. The very idea tasted like compromise, like defeat.

Nyx wasn’t a solution. Nyx was a problem you contained.

And yet, Steve’s mind betrayed him with another flash: the cages. The eyes of the girl with duct tape. The boy flinching. The ledger of lives. Dozens. At least.

He swallowed, his throat tight. The anger didn’t vanish. It just… changed shape. Became something sharper, colder.

“Get me the full file,” Steve heard himself say, and he hated that he said it.

Sam’s shoulders eased a fraction, relief threading through his exhaustion. “Yeah,” Sam said softly. “That’s what I’m saying.”

Steve looked away, fixing his gaze on the cabin wall, on a small scratch in the metal paneling that someone had left there months ago. He focused on it like it was an anchor.

Because if he looked at the others, he might see agreement. He might see resignation. He might see the first steps toward a line he didn’t want to cross.

And if he let himself think too far ahead, he could already imagine the first image the file would show him: a young face, unmasked, eyes dark and bright with something he didn’t understand – something that looked too much like laughter.

Steve’s stomach turned.

He didn’t believe in using monsters to catch monsters.

But the world didn’t care what he believed.

The quinjet flew on through the night, carrying them toward home, toward a briefing room, toward a dossier Steve already knew he would read too closely.

And somewhere out there, in a city full of hidden rooms and locked doors, the man they were chasing was already moving again – smiling, probably, because he’d done it one more time.

Steve closed his eyes for a second, feeling the vibration of the engines through the bench, and tried to prepare himself for the idea that stopping this might require stepping into darkness on purpose.

The briefing room felt colder than the rest of the compound.

Steve knew it wasn’t, not really – the temperature controls were calibrated to be uniform throughout the Tower – but something about this room always sharpened the air. Maybe it was the lighting: too bright, too even, designed to erase shadows rather than soften them. Maybe it was the table, a long slab of dark composite material that reflected faces back at themselves in muted distortion. Or maybe it was simply what happened here. Decisions. Compromises. Lines redrawn in careful language.

They filed in one by one after stripping off the last of their gear.

Steve had taken his time removing his suit, methodical in a way that bordered on ritual. Unfastening straps. Rolling his shoulders. Letting the weight lift from him piece by piece. It helped him separate the mission from what came next – helped him remember that this was supposed to be the part where they thought, not fought.

It didn’t help much.

Bucky arrived just after him, freshly showered, hair still damp at the ends. He wore a plain black T-shirt and jeans, the fabric pulled taut across his shoulders like his body hadn’t quite relaxed yet. His metal arm was uncovered, fingers flexing occasionally as if it were still recalibrating to stillness.

Natasha entered with a tablet tucked under one arm, her hair pulled back, face scrubbed clean of makeup and blood alike. She looked unremarkable in the way only highly trained people ever did – deliberately neutral, deliberately unreadable.

Clint slipped into a chair near the wall instead of the table, boots hooked around the rung of the chair, arms crossed. He’d swapped tactical black for a worn gray hoodie, the sleeves pushed up. His eyes tracked everything.

Tony came in last, coffee mug in hand, the scent sharp and bitter as he set it down. He hadn’t bothered changing out of his underlayer entirely – dark shirt, slacks, a visible sign that his mind had never really left the mission.

Sam took the seat beside Steve, close enough that Steve could feel the warmth of him, solid and present.

The door sealed with a soft click.

For a moment, no one spoke.

Steve stood at the head of the table, hands resting on the back of a chair he hadn’t sat in yet. He looked at the blank screen on the wall, the inactive interface, and felt a familiar tightening in his chest. This was the part where they named the thing they didn’t want to name.

“All right,” Tony said eventually, breaking the silence with practiced ease. “Since we’ve officially crossed the line from ‘bad idea’ to ‘actively considering the bad idea,’ let’s get our facts straight.”

Steve shot him a look. Tony met it evenly, then shrugged.

Natasha stepped forward without comment and connected her tablet to the system. The screen flickered, then came alive.

A single word appeared at the top, stark white against black.

NYX

Steve felt it again – that low, instinctive resistance, like his body recognized the name as a warning before his mind caught up.

Below it, a photograph resolved into focus.

The room shifted.

It wasn’t dramatic. No one gasped. No one leaned back. But something in the collective posture of the team changed – shoulders stiffening, attention narrowing.

Steve stared at the image.

Nyx was facing the camera, not head-on but angled slightly, as if she’d been aware of the lens and chosen not to confront it directly. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders, dark and thick, catching the light in a way that softened the edges of her face. Her features were composed – not tense, not aggressive. Calm.

Too calm.

Her eyes were dark, large, fixed on something just beyond the frame. They weren’t empty. They weren’t cold. If anything, they looked… engaged. As if she were present in the moment, fully and deliberately.

Steve felt his jaw tighten.

She looked young.

Not in the way some people looked artificially youthful – smoothed by filters, sharpened by angles – but genuinely, unsettlingly young. Barely older than the recruits he’d trained before the war. Barely older than the soldiers he’d watched die.

“Jesus,” Tony muttered under his breath. “She looks like she should be in grad school.”

Clint shifted in his chair. “Or art school.”

Natasha didn’t react. Her gaze was fixed on the image, assessing, cataloguing. “This is one of the clearer stills,” she said. “Most of the footage we have is worse.”

The screen changed.

Video this time. Grainy. Security footage from a parking garage. The timestamp blinked in the corner. Nyx stepped into frame like she belonged there – unhurried, unmasked, a knife already in her hand.

Steve felt his shoulders tense.

The kill was fast. Efficient. Close.

Too close.

The blade flashed once, twice. The man crumpled, blood darkening the concrete. Nyx stepped back, avoiding the spill with practiced ease. For half a second, her mouth curved – not a smile exactly, but something adjacent to it. Satisfaction, maybe. Or relief.

Steve swallowed hard.

“Pause,” he said before he realized he was speaking.

The video froze.

The expression lingered on the screen, caught in the stillness of a single frame.

Steve stared at it, his reflection faintly superimposed over her face. He didn’t like how easily his eyes tracked the line of her jaw, the curve of her mouth. He didn’t like that he could imagine her expression shifting, softening, hardening.

“She looks like she’s enjoying it,” Sam said quietly.

“That’s what it looks like,” Tony agreed. “Which, from a PR standpoint, is… not great.”

Natasha shook her head once. “Don’t project,” she said. “We don’t know what she’s feeling.”

Steve exhaled slowly through his nose. “What we know,” he said, grounding himself in facts, “is that she chooses this. The method. The proximity.”

Natasha nodded and tapped the tablet again.

The screen filled with text.

Known Parameters:

– Primary weapon: bladed (confirmed knife use only) – No firearms – No explosives – No disguises or facial concealment – Targets selected based on contract; refusal clauses documented – Absolute refusals: minors, animals

Steve’s mouth tightened at the last line.

“That’s the part that bothers me most,” he said before he could stop himself.

Tony glanced at him. “The no-kids thing?”

“The idea that she draws a line,” Steve said. “As if that makes the rest acceptable.”

Sam shifted beside him but didn’t interrupt.

Natasha’s expression remained neutral. “Every operative has a line,” she said carefully. “Even us.”

Steve looked at her then. Really looked.

Natasha met his gaze without flinching.

“That doesn’t mean we like where it’s drawn,” she added.

The screen shifted again. More images. Different locations. Different angles. Always the same constants: the knife, the lack of concealment, the ease with which Nyx moved through the frame.

And always that unsettling composure.

“She never runs,” Clint observed. “Not after. She just… leaves.”

“Teleportation,” Tony said, tapping a control and pulling up a schematic overlay. “That’s the fun part.”

Fun.

Steve clenched his fists.

Tony continued anyway. “Short-range, line-of-sight or close approximation. We can’t track it, can’t replicate it. No residual tech signature. No energy spike we can reliably isolate. It’s either biological, extradimensional, or some really advanced tech she’s not sharing.”

Bucky had been silent.

Steve had noticed immediately. Bucky wasn’t studying the data the way Natasha was, or watching for patterns like Clint. He was watching the screen like he was trying to reconcile something that didn’t fit.

Another image appeared – a close-up, this time. Nyx looking directly at the camera.

Steve felt it hit him like a physical thing.

She didn’t look dangerous in the way HYDRA assets had looked dangerous. There was no blankness, no deadened stare. Her eyes were alive. Curious.

Human.

Bucky leaned forward a fraction.

His voice was barely more than breath when he spoke.

“She’s… pretty.”

The word slipped out without intention, without volume. It wasn’t meant for the room.

Steve heard it anyway.

The rest of the team didn’t. Tony was mid-sentence. Natasha was scrolling. Clint was frowning at a data point. Sam was watching the screen, jaw set.

Steve’s attention snapped to Bucky instinctively.

Bucky didn’t look at him. His eyes were still fixed on the image, brow faintly furrowed, like he was surprised by his own thought.

Steve turned back to the screen, heart pounding harder than it should have.

Yes, he thought grimly. She is.

That was the problem.

It wasn’t just that Nyx was young – and she was, alarmingly so, no more than twenty-five if Steve had to guess. It was that her beauty complicated things. It disrupted the neat moral categories Steve wanted to place her in.

It was easier to hate a monster when it looked like one.

Easier to condemn someone when their face didn’t invite empathy.

Steve felt irritation coil in his chest, sharp and unwelcome. At her. At himself. At the part of him that noticed the softness of her features even as he catalogued the violence attached to them.

He didn’t miss the irony.

“She’s been active for at least six years,” Natasha said. “Which means she started young. We don’t have confirmed origins. No childhood records. No known affiliations before her first contract.”

“Someone trained her,” Steve said.

“Yes,” Natasha agreed. “And someone taught her to survive.”

The screen shifted again, this time to a map. Points lit up across cities, countries, continents.

“She moves freely,” Sam said. “Borders don’t slow her down.”

“No,” Tony said. “Physics doesn’t seem to either.”

Steve folded his arms across his chest, feeling the weight of the shield resting nearby even though it wasn’t strapped to his arm. “So what happens,” he said, “when we invite someone like this into our operation?”

Tony shrugged slightly. “Best case? She helps us get to our guy. Worst case? She kills him and disappears before we can blink.”

“And the people around him?” Steve pressed. “The ones we’re trying to protect?”

Natasha’s gaze flicked to him. “Her record shows no collateral damage,” she said. “That’s rare.”

“That’s not the same as harmless,” Steve shot back.

“No,” Natasha agreed again. “It’s not.”

Silence settled over the room, heavier this time.

Steve looked at Nyx’s frozen image one more time.

He didn’t see a savior.

He saw a woman who had learned to live in violence without letting it consume her – or at least without letting it show. He saw a person who stepped into the dark willingly and came back out unchanged, or pretending to be.

He didn’t trust that.

Didn’t trust her principles. Didn’t trust her restraint. Didn’t trust the calm in her eyes.

The image of the cages rose unbidden in his mind. The ledger. The numbers.

Steve closed his eyes briefly, then opened them.

“We review everything,” he said finally. “Every scrap of footage. Every refusal. Every anomaly. If we’re even going to consider this, I want to know exactly who we’re dealing with.”

Tony gave a low whistle. “That’s not a no.”

Steve met his gaze steadily. “It’s not a yes.”

Sam nodded once, accepting the compromise for what it was.

Bucky leaned back in his chair, expression unreadable, eyes flicking once more to the screen before he looked away.

Nyx’s image remained, silent and still, watching them from the wall.

Steve felt a chill run through him – not fear, exactly, but something close to anticipation. The kind that came before a battle you weren’t sure you wanted to fight.

He had the sinking sense that this woman – this pretty, dangerous, unrepentant unknown – was already changing the shape of the war they were in. And they hadn’t even met her yet.

For a long moment, no one moved.

The screen remained lit, Nyx’s face suspended in artificial stillness – the curve of her mouth caught halfway between amusement and indifference, eyes dark and unreadable. The room’s lighting reflected faintly across the glass, layering their silhouettes over her image, as if they were already intruding into her space.

Steve felt the silence settle into his bones.

It wasn’t the productive quiet of thought crystallizing into strategy. It was heavier than that. Uncertain. Charged. The kind of pause where everyone was thinking the same thing and no one wanted to be the first to say it out loud.

He shifted his weight slightly, boots whispering against the polished floor. His gaze stayed on the screen, though his eyes had begun to blur around the edges of her face. He focused instead on details – the way the light caught in her hair, the faint tension in her jaw, the stillness that suggested control rather than ease.

That smile.

Steve didn’t like it.

It wasn’t wide. It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t even obvious. But it lingered in his mind like a question that didn’t want an answer.

Finally, he broke the silence.

“Do we have anything on her past?” he asked.

His voice sounded louder than he’d intended in the closed room.

Natasha’s fingers paused mid-swipe on the tablet. Tony’s mug hovered just short of his mouth. Sam leaned back a fraction, arms crossing loosely over his chest. Clint tilted his head, attention sharpening.

Natasha shook her head slowly. “Nothing verified.”

Steve frowned. “No birth records? No family ties? No early sightings?”

She tapped once, pulling up a dense block of text – redacted fields stacked one after the other like a wall.

“Her first confirmed appearance is six years ago,” Natasha said. “Not suspected. Confirmed. Before that, there’s nothing we can prove belongs to the same person. No consistent aliases. No childhood records that survive cross-referencing.”

Steve felt a cold knot tighten in his chest. “That’s not normal.”

“No,” Tony said, finally taking a sip of his coffee. “It’s impressive.”

Steve shot him a look.

Tony lifted a shoulder. “I’m not saying I like it. I’m saying someone either erased her very thoroughly, or she was never on the grid to begin with.”

Sam frowned. “Everyone’s on the grid.”

“Not if you’re born somewhere the grid barely exists,” Tony countered. “Or if you’re taught how to stay off it from the start.”

Steve’s jaw clenched.

He turned slightly, addressing the room rather than the screen now. “FRIDAY,” he said, keeping his tone even. “Do we have any indication of origin? Accent patterns? Linguistic markers? Movement habits? Anything that points to a country or region?”

There was a brief pause – the kind that reminded Steve just how much processing happened behind the calm of the AI’s voice.

“I’m afraid not, Captain,” FRIDAY replied. “Available audio samples are insufficient for reliable accent analysis. Visual data does not correlate with any specific regional biometric patterns at a statistically significant level.”

Steve frowned deeper. “Nothing at all?”

“No,” FRIDAY said. “I cannot determine her country of origin.”

The words landed harder than Steve expected.

He turned back to the screen, staring at Nyx’s face with renewed unease. Even the smallest detail – a trace of an accent, a familiar gesture – would have grounded her in reality. Would have made her make sense.

Instead, she felt like an absence. A shape carved out of missing information.

Clint let out a low breath. “So we don’t know where she’s from,” he said. “We don’t know who trained her. We don’t know who she answers to.”

“She doesn’t answer to anyone,” Tony said. “That’s kind of her whole thing.”

“That’s not comforting,” Clint shot back.

“No,” Tony agreed quietly. “It’s not.”

Steve rubbed a hand over his face, feeling the drag of fatigue beneath his skin. The day pressed down on him now – the mission, the failure, the images that refused to fade. He lowered his hand and looked at Nyx again.

“You don’t just come out of nowhere like this,” he said, more to himself than anyone else. “People don’t become this… precise without a reason.”

Natasha studied the screen, her expression unreadable. “Whatever her origin,” she said, “she learned early that visibility was a liability. That anonymity was survival.”

Steve glanced at her. “And you think that excuses it?”

“I think it explains it,” Natasha replied. “Those aren’t the same thing.”

Steve didn’t argue – not because he agreed, but because the distinction felt thin and dangerous, and he didn’t trust himself not to cross it.

Another stretch of silence followed.

This one felt different.

Heavier still.

Clint straightened slightly in his chair, boots dropping to the floor. “Okay,” he said. “So here’s the million-dollar question.”

Everyone looked at him.

“What are we actually doing?” Clint asked. “Because staring at her face isn’t getting our guy out of hiding.”

Steve felt the weight of that settle into his chest.

Clint wasn’t being flippant. He was being practical – the kind of practicality born of too many battles and too many nights watching the same evil slip away.

Sam nodded slowly. “He’s right. We need to decide.”

Tony set his mug down carefully. “The options as I see them,” he said, ticking them off with his fingers, “are: one, we keep doing what we’re doing and hope he eventually screws up. Two, we expand our net and risk tipping him off even more. Or three–”

He stopped.

Steve knew why.

“–we bring in outside help,” Tony finished.

The words sat there, bare and undeniable.

Steve folded his arms across his chest, feeling the tension coil tighter. “Outside help that kills for money.”

“Outside help that knows how people like him think,” Sam countered. “That knows how these networks hide.”

Steve shook his head. “We don’t even know if she’d take the job.”

Natasha’s lips curved slightly. Not a smile – something sharper. “She would.”

Steve looked at her. “You’re sure.”

“She takes contracts that interest her,” Natasha said. “This would.”

Steve didn’t like how easily she said it.

Bucky shifted beside the table, his chair scraping softly as he leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. He hadn’t spoken since his earlier murmur – and Steve was acutely aware of that. Aware of the way Bucky’s eyes had followed Nyx’s image with a kind of wary focus, as if he were seeing something familiar and unsettling in equal measure.

“Even if she agrees,” Steve said, forcing his attention back to the issue at hand, “we’re talking about trusting someone who operates completely outside any system we understand. Someone who doesn’t answer to law, or morality, or–”

“–to us,” Sam finished quietly.

Steve’s mouth tightened. “Yes.”

Another pause.

This one stretched.

Steve felt the unspoken truth hovering between them, heavy and unavoidable: they were running out of options.

Tony broke the silence first. “Look,” he said, rubbing a hand through his hair. “I hate this. For the record. I really, truly hate this. But if there’s one thing our mystery friend has going for her, it’s that she doesn’t leave trails.”

Steve looked up sharply.

Tony continued, “Our guy? He’s slipping away because he’s always a step ahead. Someone’s tipping him off. Someone knows when we move.”

The room seemed to contract around the words.

Natasha’s gaze sharpened. Clint’s jaw tightened. Sam straightened fully.

Steve felt a cold line trace down his spine.

“You think there’s a leak,” Steve said.

“I think there’s been a leak,” Tony replied. “For a while now.”

Natasha nodded slowly. “The pattern fits,” she said. “Too many clean escapes. Too many perfectly timed disappearances.”

Steve’s thoughts raced, unpleasant possibilities stacking on top of each other. “You’re saying someone inside–”

“I’m saying we don’t know who,” Tony interrupted. “Which means we can’t widen the circle.”

Sam let out a slow breath. “Which means if we do this, if we even consider it–”

“It stays in this room,” Clint said firmly.

Steve looked around at them.

At Sam, steady and exhausted and trying to hold the line between right and necessary.

At Clint, who’d seen too much and trusted too few.

At Natasha, whose past gave her more insight into this choice than Steve liked to think about.

At Tony, whose skepticism was tempered by the kind of brilliance that saw patterns others missed.

At Bucky, silent, guarded, his gaze flicking once more to the screen before settling somewhere distant.

The responsibility pressed down on Steve’s shoulders, familiar and heavy.

He turned back to Nyx’s image.

She stared out at them, frozen in a moment that wasn’t really hers anymore. A smile caught between frames. A woman without a past, without a country, without a name that meant anything beyond the shadows she worked in.

“She doesn’t play by anyone’s rules,” Steve said quietly.

“No,” Natasha agreed. “Which means she’s harder to predict.”

Steve swallowed. “And harder to control.”

“Yes.”

The word echoed.

Steve exhaled slowly, feeling the weight of the choice settle into place. He didn’t like it. Didn’t trust it. Didn’t trust her.

But he trusted the alternative even less.

“All right,” he said at last.

Every eye in the room turned to him.

“If we do this,” Steve continued, voice steady but tight, “we do it carefully. No official channels. No digital trail beyond what we absolutely need. No one outside this room knows we even considered it.”

Tony nodded immediately. “I can sandbox everything. Offline systems only. Air-gapped.”

Natasha inclined her head. “I’ll handle contact,” she said. “If we decide to proceed.”

Steve hesitated – just a fraction – then nodded.

“And we don’t give her everything,” Steve added. “We give her just enough. We don’t trust her with names. Or locations we can’t afford to burn.”

Sam met his gaze. “And if she refuses?”

Steve looked back at Nyx’s face.

At the calm. The confidence. The unsettling ease.

“Then we keep fighting,” he said. “The hard way.”

Silence fell again – but this time, it felt different.

Resolved.

The decision wasn’t spoken aloud in so many words, but it settled into the room all the same, heavy and irreversible.

They were going to step into the gray.

Steve stared at the screen for a moment longer, then nodded once.

“Turn it off,” he said.

The image vanished.

The room felt colder without it – emptier, somehow – as if something had already slipped away.

Steve straightened, shoulders squared, the familiar weight of command settling into place.

Whatever Nyx was, whatever she had been before she became this ghost with a knife and a smile, she was about to walk into their war.

And Steve had the sinking feeling that nothing about it would be clean.

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You'd been assigned to him, more or less. Some liaison arrangement, a name on a form. You were supposed to help him with the practical things – the phone, the money, the hundred small humiliations of a world that assumed he already knew. And on the first day you'd taken one look at the list they'd given you, the tidy little curriculum for reassembling Captain America, and you'd folded it in half and dropped it in the trash and said, “Okay. Forget all that. What do you actually want to know?”

He'd stared at you.

Nobody had asked him that.

Not once.

Not what do you need to be able to do but what do you want.

He hadn't had an answer ready. So you'd made him one. You'd started small – coffee, the good kind, from the place on the corner that you swore by and he came to swear by too. Music, but not the important music, not the canon they kept trying to hand him; you played him ridiculous things, songs about nothing, and laughed when he frowned, and slowly, slowly, the frown had learned to be a smile again.

You were the one who made the century small enough to hold.

And here was the thing Steve knew about himself, the thing he did not say out loud, the thing that lived underneath his gratitude like rebar under concrete: he had studied you.

He didn't think of it that way, not usually. But it was what he'd done. In those first raw months, when the whole world was noise, you had been the one clear signal, and he had turned the full force of his attention on you the way he'd once turned it on a map before a drop. He'd learned you. Your moods, your tells, the particular quality your silence took on when you were happy versus when you were hiding something. The way you took your coffee. The two friends you'd cut out of your life and the reasons. The exact register of your laugh when it was real and the slightly higher one you used when you were being polite.

He told himself it was love. Attention like that – surely that was love.

He didn't examine, too closely, the part of him that had always been most at peace when he knew a thing well enough to move it.

Two years. Then three. Somewhere in there the assignment had quietly dissolved and left behind the realest thing in his life. You were his best friend. That word was true and he leaned on it. Best friend. He said it to himself like a boundary. Like a wall he was keeping up.

He was very good at keeping up walls right until the moment he decided to take one down.

Here was the thing Steve did not know, in all his careful study, for all his reconnaissance.

You were in love with him.

You had been for longer than you'd admit to yourself, and much longer than you'd ever admit to him. It had come on the way these things do – not a lightning strike but a slow tide, a rising, until one day you'd looked at him laughing in your kitchen over some song you'd played to torment him and realized the water was already at your throat.

You never told him. Of course you never told him.

You had your reasons, and they were the mirror image of his, though neither of you would ever know it. You were his best friend. You were the person who'd caught him when he fell out of the sky and into the wrong life, and you were not going to be the one who made it weird, who wanted more, who looked at Captain America – at Steve, your Steve, who left his socks on your radiator and argued with you about films – and dared to think mine.

So you held it.

You got good at holding it.

You dated other people, sometimes, in a distracted half-hearted way, and none of it took, and you told yourself that was just how it was for you, that you were picky, that you'd never met the right anyone.

You had. That was the joke of it. You'd met him and made his coffee for three years and never told him and never would.

Steve missed all of it.

He missed it because he wasn't looking for it – because in his model of you, the one he'd built so carefully, you were the sun and he was the man grateful for the warmth, and the sun didn't want, the sun just shone. He had never once let himself imagine that the way you touched his arm when you laughed might be the same thing that lived in him, held just as still, just as hidden.

But here was where the missing got complicated. Here was where a decent man's blindness started to shade into something else.

Because Steve, not knowing you loved him, still could not stand the men who tried to love you.

There'd been a few, over the years. A colleague of yours who'd asked you to dinner. A man from your building. Someone you'd met at a wedding and lit up about for a week. And every single time, without ever once raising his voice, without ever doing a single thing you could point to, Steve had found himself in the middle of it.

Nothing so crude as forbidding. He'd never. He was your friend; he only wanted you happy – he told himself this constantly, and the telling had the slightly overworked quality of a man reinforcing a floor he suspects won't hold weight.

But he'd ask questions. Gentle ones.

The colleague – did he seem like he really listened to you, or did he just wait for his turn to talk? The man from the building – didn't it seem a little convenient, how fast he was moving? The wedding one – and here Steve had been at his best, his most careful – Steve had simply been around, more than usual, that whole week. Present. Attentive. Making your apartment the warmest place you could be, so that the pull of somewhere colder and newer never quite caught.

He'd tell himself he was protecting you. Looking out for you. That was what a friend did.

He never let himself finish the other sentence. The one that went: and if I keep you close enough, keep the warmth turned up high enough, no one else ever gets a real hold on you.

He never finished it. But he ran the strategy all the same, the way a body breathes without being told. A man who had spent a war learning that you don't win by attacking – you win by controlling the ground, by patience, by making sure that when the moment comes, it comes on terrain you've already shaped.

He was playing a long game. He'd have been horrified to hear it called that. He'd have believed, sincerely, hand on heart, that he was just being a good friend.

That was what made it work. On you. On himself.

It came out on a night that was like a hundred other nights, which was why it caught you both off guard.

Rain. Your apartment. The second bottle of wine, opened with the specific recklessness of two people who have nowhere to be in the morning. Some film playing that neither of you was watching. You were sprawled on the couch with your feet tucked under his thigh, the way you'd been sitting for years, a closeness so worn-in that neither of you flinched at it anymore.

He was watching your profile in the blue light of the screen. He did that more than you knew.

You'd been talking about a man. A recent one – a date, two dates, a third that had ended at your door with a question you'd answered by saying goodnight and stepping inside alone. You were telling it as a funny story. You were good at that, turning the ache of your own life into something you could laugh at from a safe distance.

“–and I could tell he thought that was it, you know,” you were saying.

“Like, third date, obviously. He had the whole face on. And I just–”

You made a small helpless gesture with your wine glass.

"I couldn't.”

“Because you didn't want to,” Steve said. Carefully. Reading you.

“Because I never do.”

You said it lightly, but something had shifted under it, some floor giving way, and you'd had exactly enough wine to keep walking out onto it.

“That's the– okay. Don't make it a thing.”

“I won't make it a thing.”

“I mean it, Steve.”

“I know you mean it.”

You looked at him for a long moment, and he held very still, the way he'd learned to, and then you laughed – the higher laugh, the covering one – and said it.

“I've never actually had sex. With anyone. Full stop.”

You waved the glass again, a whole life dismissed in a gesture.

“There. The world's oldest– whatever. It just never happened. And now it's this whole–”

“You're not old,” he said, automatically, and it came out rougher than he meant.

“–thing in my head,” you finished, ignoring him, because you needed to get to the end of it now that you'd started. “And I don't want you to think it's because I'm– God, some blushing innocent girl. I'm not. I know what I like. I've had a lot of time to figure out what I like.”

You said it with a flash of something almost defiant, and he watched your mouth make the words and felt the room tilt.

“I just never let anyone– that far. That's all. It stopped being about the thing and started being about who gets to–”

You stopped.

You looked into your wine.

“Who gets to be the one,” you finished, quiet now. “And nobody ever was.”

Steve did not move.

Outside, the rain kept on. The film murmured to itself, unwatched. Your feet were still tucked warm under his thigh and he was aware of every point of contact between you like a man aware of a live wire.

He should have said something kind and friendly and safe. He had a whole vocabulary for that. That's nothing to be embarrassed about. The right person will come along. You deserve someone who understands what a gift that is.

He didn't say any of it.

Because something had happened in him in the space of your last three sentences, something fast and total and quiet as a door closing, and it had rearranged him from the inside, and when he opened his mouth he honestly did not know what was going to come out.

Who gets to be the one.

And nobody ever was.

Here was what happened inside Steve Rogers in that moment, and this was the truth of him, the part he'd spend a long time not admitting even after he'd admitted everything else.

His first feeling was not tenderness.

Tenderness came. It came a half-second later and it was real, an ache at the thought of you carrying this, at the flash of defiance you'd needed to defend yourself against a hurt no one had even landed yet.

But the first thing – the very first thing, the thing that arrived before he could dress it in anything better – was mine.

Not a word.

Faster than a word.

A kind of heat that went through his whole body and closed a fist around something at the base of him.

The knowledge, sudden and absolute, that there was a first, still, out there in your future – a man, some man, some faceless deserving man who'd get to be the one – and that Steve wanted, with a violence that frightened him, for that man not to exist.

He didn't want you to have a first who wasn't him.

He examined the thought, in the fractional silence, the way you'd turn a strange coin in your fingers. He was good at examining his own thoughts; the war had made him honest, at least in the privacy of his skull.

And what he found, under the tenderness, under the years of best-friend and the sun doesn't want, was this: he didn't just want to be your first.

He wanted to be your last.

That was the shape of it.

Not a night.

Not a favor.

Not some noble one-time kindness to spare you a lesser man.

He wanted to be the one and stay the one, wanted to close the door behind him and have there be no more afters, wanted – the word came to him plainly, and he didn't flinch from it the way he should have – to keep you.

A quieter man might have been ashamed.

Steve was ashamed, distantly, the way you register weather through a window.

But mostly, God help him, mostly he was clear. Clearer than he'd been in three years. All that careful holding-still, all those walls, all the times he'd told himself the sun didn't want – it fell away, and what was left was appetite with a strategy attached, and the strategy came to him already half-built, because some part of him had been building it for a long, long time.

He couldn't just tell you. He knew that in the same breath. If he told you now – best friend, wine, rain, your feet warm under his thigh – you'd panic. You'd rebuild the wall between you before he finished the sentence. He knew you. He knew you the way he knew the load of a shield in his hand, and he knew that the direct assault would lose.

So he wouldn't make the direct assault.

He'd do what he was good at. He'd shape the ground.

He looked at you, and he let none of it show – not the heat, not the mine, not the plan already assembling itself behind his steady friendly eyes – and when he spoke his voice was gentle, and warm, and exactly, precisely the voice of a man who wanted nothing for himself.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Look at me.”

You did.

“You didn't do anything wrong,” he told you. “Waiting for someone who's the one. That's not a thing that's wrong with you.”

He let a beat pass.

Let it land.

Then, easy, almost offhand, planting the first seed so lightly you'd never feel the soil move, “Honestly? I think it says you've got better sense than everyone I know. You held out for it to matter. Most people would kill to have done that.”

Something eased in your face. He watched it ease. He'd known it would.

“You think?” you said.

“I know,” he said.

And he smiled at you – the good smile, the one you'd rebuilt out of a broken century, the one you trusted absolutely – and he tucked the blanket a little more snugly over your feet where they rested against him, a small warm gesture of a man taking care of his friend, and inside the calm cathedral of himself Steve Rogers began, quietly and without any hurry at all, to plan how he was going to become the one.

He had time.

That was the beauty of it.

He was patient; the war had taught him patience, and love had taught him more.

He'd move slow. He'd move so slow you'd never see it as moving. He'd make himself the warmest place in your whole cold new world, warmer than any man who ever asked you to dinner, so that when the moment came – and he'd know the moment, he'd make the moment – it would feel to you like the most natural thing in the world.

Like your own idea.

Like coming home.

He'd give you a first you didn't have to be brave for.

And once he was your first – once you'd let him that far, further than you'd ever let anyone – well…

He didn't let himself finish that one either. But the shape of it sat warm and certain in his chest as the rain came down, and your feet were tucked against him, and the film played on, unwatched, telling its little story to no one.

First, he thought, watching your profile in the blue light.

And last.

You had no idea. You leaned your head back against the arm of the couch and let his kindness settle over you like the blanket, grateful, unguarded, feeling – for the first time all night – completely safe.

You were, of course, exactly the opposite of safe.

You'd never been more thoroughly in someone's sights in your life.

But it felt like being loved. It felt, from the inside, precisely like being loved.

That was the whole trouble with Steve Rogers.

It always did.

He didn't move for three weeks.

That was the part no one would have believed of him, if anyone had been watching – and no one was, that was rather the point.

Three weeks of nothing.

Three weeks of being, in every visible particular, exactly the friend he'd always been.

But underneath, he was watering what he'd planted.

He did it so gently you'd never have called it anything. He simply returned to the thing, now and then, from oblique angles.

A film you watched together where a couple waited years for each other, and Steve, offhand, eyes on the screen, “See, that's the thing people don't get. Waiting for the right one isn't weakness. It's the opposite.”

He didn't look at you when he said it.

He didn't have to.

He felt you go still beside him, felt the words go in and find the soil he'd already turned.

A week later, a friend of yours got engaged, and you were happy for her and a little raw underneath, and Steve was there for that too – present, warm, and somewhere in the evening he said, easy as anything,

“You know what I've always thought about you? You're not waiting because you're scared. You're waiting because you know what it should feel like. That's rare. Most people just settle.”

You know what it should feel like.

He watched the sentence do its work over the following days.

He was patient.

He'd learned in a war that the ground does most of the fighting for you, if you shape it right and wait.

And you – you didn't know you were being shaped.

You only knew that lately, when the old ache came, the one about being the last of your friends to have never, Steve's voice was there in your head to meet it. Not making you feel broken. Making you feel chosen by your own restraint.

Turning the wound into something almost like pride.

You didn't notice that the voice comforting you and the ache it comforted had started coming from the same place.

That was the craft of it. He didn't just want to be your first. He wanted you to arrive at him feeling like it was the wisest thing you'd ever done.

He chose the night the way he'd once chosen drop zones.

He didn't force it.

He waited for the conditions and let them assemble, and when they did – a Friday, rain again because the rain was on his side, a week where you'd been tired and worn thin and had said, twice, that you just wanted to be somewhere that felt safe – he simply made sure the somewhere was him.

He cooked.

He didn't usually cook; he made a point of it now, and made a point of it looking effortless, so that you'd arrive at his door and be met with warmth and food and low light and the particular gravity of a room that has been made ready for you without ever announcing that it has.

You didn't notice the candle.

You noticed you felt better the second you were through the door, and you didn't ask why, because that was what his apartment always did to you, and you'd never once wondered whether that was an accident.

It was not an accident. It had never been an accident.

You ate. You drank a little – not much; he watched that too, careful, because he did not want a version of this you could tell yourself later hadn't been real.

He wanted you clear.

He wanted you to choose it. The choosing was the whole prize.

And he let the evening soften into the shape it always took, you curled into the corner of his couch, him near, the rain, the low light, the safety he'd built for you brick by brick over three years and you'd never once seen the trowel.

He waited until you brought it up yourself.

He'd known you would. He'd shaped the whole night so you would. And you did – sideways, the way you always came at the tender things, some joke about the engaged friend, about being the last one standing, and the laugh you used to armor it.

He didn't laugh with you this time.

He let a silence open instead. And into the silence, gently, like setting something down that he'd been carrying a long way, Steve said:

“Can I tell you something I've been thinking?”

He'd rehearsed it.

Of course he'd rehearsed it.

He'd rehearsed it in the shower and on his runs and lying awake, editing, the way he'd rehearsed the last one, except this time he'd learned from watching you for three weeks exactly which words would land and which would spook you, and he'd built the speech to your specifications without you ever knowing you'd given them.

But he delivered it like a man thinking out loud.

That was the art.

Nothing rehearsed.

Just a friend, arriving in real time at a hard, honest thing.

He started with you. Always start with them; make it about them.

He said he hated that you carried this like a weight. That someone had made it a wound. That you were the least broken person he knew and it killed him a little that you didn't see it.

He watched your face soften and open.

Then he moved – one careful step, so smooth it didn't feel like a step at all.

He said the thing he was about to say, he was only saying because he was your friend. That he needed you to hear it that way. No expectations. Nothing owed. Nothing changed. He needed to say that part first, he said, because otherwise he'd lose his nerve.

Nothing changed.

The oldest lie in his arsenal, and he laid it down first, deliberately, because a lie told up front lowers the guard against everything after it.

And then – gentle, reluctant, a man dragging the words up against his own modesty, a performance so good he half-believed it himself – he offered.

He said he didn't want your first to be someone who'd be careless with it. Someone who'd take a thing that mattered and not understand that it mattered.

He said the word he'd built the whole campaign on, the one he'd planted in you three weeks ago and watered ever since – someone who makes it matter – and he watched it land in the exact soil he'd prepared, watched you recognize your own comfort in his mouth, watched it feel to you like being understood.

He said, if you ever wanted – if it would take the weight off – it could be him.

Because he was your friend.

Because he'd be gentle.

Because he'd take care of you, and make it good, and never once make you feel like the thing that man had made you feel.

He ran the whole thing so warm, so selfless, so entirely about you, that the want underneath it never showed – the mine, the first and last, the fist that had closed at the base of him three weeks ago and never once let go.

He kept all of that behind his steady friendly eyes, where he kept everything, and he let you see only the kindness.

And then he stopped.

And he let the silence do the last of the work.

He'd learned, in a war, that you don't take the ground. You make the ground so untenable that the other side walks into your arms believing it was their idea.

He watched your face. He read every flicker of it. He'd been reading it for three years.

He saw the moment you decided.

He saw it before you knew it yourself.

“Okay,” you said.

Quiet. Barely more than breath.

But he heard it land in the room like a struck bell, and something in his chest surged so hard he had to hold his face still against it.

“Yeah?” he said.

Soft.

Careful.

Give it back to them gently, let them feel it was freely given.

“Yeah.”

You laughed a little, shaky, and it wasn't the armored laugh, it was a real one, undefended, and it went through him like sunlight through the wrong century.

“God. Yeah. I– with you. It should be– of course it should be you. Who else would I–”

Who else.

He'd built that, too.

The whole architecture of who else. Three years of being the warmest place in your world so that when the question came there'd be no other answer in the room.

It had worked. It had all worked. He should have felt like a man who'd won.

He did feel that. He felt it low and hot and certain.

But he felt, too – and this surprised him, this he hadn't planned for – a swell of something enormous and unbearably tender, because you'd said of course it should be you with your whole open face, and for one vertiginous second he forgot the campaign entirely and was just a man in love who'd been told yes.

That was the strange thing about Steve Rogers.

Even the manipulation ran on something real.

Especially the manipulation.

He reached over.

He took your hand – didn't pull you, didn't move toward the bedroom, didn't do a single thing to break the spell by making it suddenly, crudely, about the act.

He'd thought about this part, too.

He was not going to rush you. Rushing you was for lesser men, the careless ones, the ones he'd spent three years defining himself against.

He was going to hold you right here, on this threshold, in the warm ruin of your yes, and he was going to let it be enormous.

Because if the first thing after your yes was a scramble toward a bedroom, some part of you might flinch, might feel it become transactional, might wake up.

He wasn't going to let you wake up.

So he just held your hand.

And looked at you.

And let the moment stretch until it was almost too much to bear, until the whole air of the room had changed, gone thick and slow and charged, until you could feel your own heartbeat in your throat.

“We don't have to do anything right now,” he said, low.

And you'd have sworn – you did swear, to yourself, in that moment – that it was the kindest thing anyone had ever said to you.

You didn't hear the other thing in it.

The patience of a man who'd waited three weeks and could wait one more hour, because he knew that making you wait now, holding you here trembling on the edge of it, was going to make everything after so much more completely his.

“I know,” you said. “I just– can we just–”

“Yeah,” he said. “We can.”

And he settled back, and drew you in against his side, and you let yourself be drawn, your yes still ringing in the air between you like the note after a bell, unspent, everything still ahead of you, nothing crossed yet.

His heart was slamming.

Yours was too.

Neither of you moved toward the door that both of you were now, unmistakably, going to walk through.

He looked down at the top of your head, tucked against him, trusting, chosen, caught.

First, he thought, and this time he let himself finish it, slow, savoring it, the whole long game folding shut around you like a hand.

And last.

The rain came down. The candle he was sure you hadn't noticed burned lower. And Steve Rogers held you on the threshold he'd spent three weeks building you toward, and did not, for one more perfect suspended minute, move.

It wasn't that night. That was the first thing that surprised you.

You'd said yes on his couch, in the warm ruin of the rain, and some part of you had braced for the rest of it to happen then and there – for him to lead you to his bed while the yes was still ringing.

He didn't.

He held you on the threshold and let it be enormous and then, when the candle had burned low and the hour had gone soft, he'd walked you to the door and kissed your forehead and said goodnight.

You'd lain awake most of that night not knowing whether to be relieved or bereft.

What you didn't understand – what you wouldn't understand for a long time – was that the waiting was also his.

That a man who has spent three weeks and one careful evening bringing you exactly here does not squander it on a single unplanned night.

He wanted it chosen.

He wanted you to walk toward it in daylight, awake, sober, with days to change your mind and no wine to blame – because a yes you could take back and didn't was worth infinitely more to him than a yes he'd caught you in.

So the days passed.

Four of them.

And they were strange, luminous, unbearable days.

Because now it was between you.

He'd hand you a coffee and your fingers would brush and you'd both go quiet a half-second too long.

He'd text you something stupid and you'd read it eleven times.

The whole architecture of your friendship, three years of it, had been picked up and set down one degree to the left, and everything looked the same and nothing was.

Now it lived in every ordinary thing.

He'd hand you a coffee and your fingers would brush and you'd both go quiet a half-second too long. He'd text you something stupid and you'd read it eleven times. The whole architecture of your friendship, three years of it, had been picked up and set down one degree to the left, and everything looked the same and nothing was.

And this was the part that undid you – he talked to you about it. Like it was ordinary. Like it was allowed.

“I don't want it to be weird,” he said, on the phone, on the second night, his voice low in your ear in the dark.

“I want you to actually think about it. What you want. How you want it. If you change your mind at any point, even walking in the door, even after– you tell me and it stops. I mean that.”

“I know you mean it” you said, and you did, and that was somehow the most dangerous part of all.

“And if you don't change your mind,” he went on, careful, “then– Friday? Your place?”

Your place.

He'd chosen that too, though you didn't clock it.

Your bed. Your room. Somewhere you'd feel safe, somewhere that was yours – so that when he took it, it would feel like being kept rather than taken.

“Friday,” you said. “My place.”

You heard him breathe out, slow, on the other end of the line. You thought it was nerves.

It was a man watching the last piece of a very long game slide quietly into place.

“Friday,” he agreed. “I'll bring dinner. We don't have to rush anything. We've got all the time in the world.”

He said that a lot, that week. All the time in the world. You thought it was reassurance.

It was a promise.

You just didn't know yet what he was promising.

On Thursday, you were off all evening, and he clocked it inside four minutes.

That was the trouble with being known by Steve Rogers. Three years of a man studying your face the way other people study scripture, and there was nowhere left in you to hide a mood. You'd arrived at his door on the third day with takeout and a smile that didn't reach anywhere, and you'd been fine, determinedly fine, aggressively fine, all through dinner.

He let you be fine for an hour and a half. He was patient like that.

Then he put down his fork and said, “Okay. What is it.”

“What's what?”

“You've laughed at three things tonight and you didn't mean any of them.”

You looked at him. He looked back, unmoving, with that terrible mild patience of his, the one that had gotten more out of you over three years than any interrogation ever could.

“It's nothing.”

“It's not nothing. You've been chewing on something since you got here.” He tilted his head. “Is it Friday?”

And there it was, said out loud, in his kitchen, over cold noodles. Friday. The word had been sitting between you for three days like a lit fuse and neither of you had touched it.

“No,” you said.

Then, “Sort of.”

Then, because his eyebrows had gone up a quarter inch and that was somehow worse than any question, “It's stupid. Steve, it's genuinely stupid, can we not–”

“You're allowed to change your mind.” He said it fast, and something in his voice had gone very slightly wrong at the edges. “I meant that. Any point. You don't have to have a reason, you just say the word and it's–”

“That's not it either.”

He waited.

God, he was good at waiting.

He'd sit there all night.

He'd sit there for a week.

And the silence he made was never cold or expectant, it was warm and patient and completely unbearable, and it pulled things out of you the way heat pulls water.

You cracked in about nine seconds.

“How many people have you slept with?”

Steve blinked.

Whatever he'd been braced for, it hadn't been that. You watched him actually recalibrate – watched the careful machine of him stop, reverse, and start again in an entirely different direction.

“...Why?”

“Forget it–”

“No. Hey.” He leaned forward. “No, I'm not– I'm not dodging. I'm asking why, because I want to answer the actual question and I don't know what it is yet.”

You put your hands over your face.

“Because you've done this,” you said, into your palms. “That's the– okay, look. You've had women. Obviously you've had women, you're–” a helpless gesture at all of him, “–that, and it's been three years, and you're not a monk, and I never asked because it wasn't my business, and now it's Friday and it is my business, sort of, and I keep–”

You stopped.

“You keep what,” he said quietly.

“I keep thinking about them.” Your voice had gone small. “Whoever they were. That they knew what they were doing. That they were– that you have something to compare me to and I've got nothing, I've got nothing, I don't know how to do a single part of this and you're going to be so–”

“Don't say bored.”

“I was going to say disappointed.”

Something crossed his face that you couldn't read.

He got up. Came around the table. Crouched down beside your chair so that he was lower than you, looking up, which was a thing he did sometimes and which you'd never once been able to withstand.

“Okay,” he said. “Ask me properly. I'll answer anything. Straight.”

So you did, because you'd already humiliated yourself and there was nothing left to protect.

“How many?”

“Few.” He said it without flinching. “Since the ice– three. One that lasted about eight months, back at the start. Two that didn't last at all.” A pause. “Before the ice, none. For the record. I was a hundred and ten pounds and nobody was interested, and then there was a war on.”

“Eight months.”

“Eight months.”

“Did you love her?”

He considered it. He didn't rush to say no, which somehow you respected and hated in equal measure.

“I wanted to,” he said finally.

“I tried pretty hard. She was kind, and she deserved better than a man who was – ” He stopped. Restarted. “I wasn't really there. She said that, actually. At the end. She said it was like living with someone who was waiting for a phone call.”

You didn't understand, then, what he was telling you.

You would, later. On a grey morning, in the clear light, with all the pieces laid out. You'd count backwards and realize that the eight months had ended about two years ago, right about the time a man had looked up in this kitchen and noticed the shape of your hands, and you'd understand exactly what phone call he'd been waiting for.

But that was later. Right then you just sat there feeling worse.

“Great,” you said. “So there's an eight-month person. Who presumably knew how to–”

“Hey.”

“–and I'm going to be lying there like a–”

“Hey.” His hands closed over yours in your lap. “Look at me. You want the straight answer? Here's the straight answer. I can't remember her face without trying.”

You went quiet.

“That's not me being cruel about her,” he said. “She was a good person and she didn't do anything wrong. It's just true. I've had three, and I couldn't tell you one specific thing about a single one of those nights, and I've been sitting in this apartment for three days now unable to think about anything except–”

He stopped.

Very suddenly. Like a man who has walked to the exact edge of a cliff at speed and put his heel down just in time.

The kitchen was very quiet.

“Except what?” you asked.

Here was what was happening inside Steve Rogers at that moment, and it was not what you thought.

He was cornered. Genuinely cornered, for the first time in three years of careful navigation – and by his own hand, which was the galling part.

Because he'd built this whole thing on a lie of omission.

I'm doing this for you. No expectations. Nothing changes.

He'd told you it was a kindness, and the trouble with telling someone it's a kindness is that it makes them the charity case, and now you were sitting in his kitchen with your hands shaking under his, believing you were a favor he was doing, believing there were better women in his past that you'd be measured against.

And he could fix it.

Instantly.

One sentence would fix it, and the sentence was I have wanted you for two years and there has never been anyone else in the room, not once, not ever, they were all just places I was standing while I waited for you.

He couldn't say it.

Not yet.

Not three days out, not with the whole thing balanced this delicately, not when saying it now might spook you into calling Friday off – because he knew you, he knew what you did when something got too big, you ran, you laughed it off and rebuilt the wall and he'd have to spend another year getting back to here.

So he did the thing he was best at.

He told you the truth – as much of it as he could afford, and not one word more. He gave you the edge of it and let you believe the edge was the whole.

“Except you,” he said.

Your breath caught.

“That's– Steve–”

“Three days,” he said, low. “I haven't slept much. I keep–”

He shook his head, and the frustration in it was completely real, which was what made it work.

“You think you've got nothing to offer. You think you're gonna disappoint me. I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to tell you that I've been half out of my mind since Friday got put on the table and it's got nothing to do with being helpful.”

“But you said–”

“I know what I said.”

You stared at him.

He held your gaze and let you look, and he let just enough of it show – not all of it, never all of it, but enough. Enough that something in your chest turned over hard.

“I don't understand,” you said.

“I know.” He squeezed your hands. “You don't have to yet.”

And then he moved you off it – deftly, warmly, the way he moved you off everything.

“Here's the part I do want you to hear,” he said, “because it's the part that's actually true and I need you to stop carrying it. Ready?”

You nodded.

“There's nothing to be good at.”

“That's not–”

“There isn't.” He said it with total conviction.

“That's a thing people made up to sell you something. Nobody's grading it. There's no technique that matters more than–” he searched for it, “– than the person actually wanting to be there. That's it. That's the whole thing. And the idea that you'd need to perform for me, that you'd be lying there worried you're not–”

He broke off, and something flashed across his face that you'd never seen before, something with a great deal of heat in it.

“That's not going to be a problem,” he said. “I promise you that's not going to be a problem.”

“You can't know that.”

“I can,” he said. “I do.”

And there was such flat, absolute, unarguable certainty in it – the certainty of a man who has run this scenario in his head several hundred times and knows precisely how it goes – that you felt the ground shift under you.

“Okay,” you said faintly.

“And for what it's worth.” He got up, sat back down in his own chair, and reached over to steal a piece of your food, so casual, so ordinary, so completely deliberate. “The comparison thing works both ways.”

“What does that mean?”

He shrugged, eyes on his plate.

“Means they're not the ones who spent three years learning what your face does,” he said. “So I'd say I'm at something of an advantage.”

You laughed. It surprised you, coming out.

He smiled at his plate, and let you laugh, and did not look up – because if you'd seen his face in that moment, all the careful work would have been for nothing.

Three years learning what your face does.

He'd told you the truth. He kept doing that, all week, in small unbearable increments – offering you the actual shape of it in pieces you weren't yet able to assemble, so that later, when you finally could, you would understand that he had never once lied.

Only ever waited for you to catch up.

“Friday,” you said.

“Friday,” he agreed.

And he thought, watching you go back to your food with your shoulders finally loose and every day after that, if I've done this right.

Friday came the way you'd been half-dreading and half-dying for it to come.

He arrived with food and you barely ate it. You both knew you wouldn't, really; the dinner was a courtesy, a soft place to land the first hour, a way to let your nerves burn down to embers before anything else.

He was good at that.

He was good at making you feel like there was no clock, even as he watched the evening move exactly where he'd meant it to.

He kissed you standing, in the middle of your living room, with the rain going on the windows and the dinner neither of you had eaten gone cold behind you.

He took your face in both hands to do it.

That was the thing that undid you first – not the kiss, the hands.

The way he framed your jaw between them, thumbs along your cheekbones, tilting you up like something he'd been given permission to hold at last.

Careful.

Almost formal.

As if after three years of not being allowed, he intended to do this properly.

The kiss was soft.

Softer than you'd expected from a man that size. He kissed you like he had all night – because he did, because he'd made sure of it – slow closed-mouth presses that asked and asked and never once pushed. His breath was warm on your upper lip. His thumb moved once against your cheek.

You'd waited three years for this. Three years of standing in kitchens and doorways and not letting yourself, and now it was happening and it was gentle, and something in you went molten and impatient all at once.

So you bit him.

Not hard. Just caught his lower lip between your teeth and pulled, a small deliberate provocation, more instinct than plan.

Steve made a sound like he'd been struck.

And the careful thing broke.

It happened fast. His hands left your face and found you properly – one at your waist, one at the small of your back – and he moved you, three steps, no effort at all, until your shoulders met the wall.

Not hard.

He'd never put you into a wall hard. But the ease of it, the sheer thoughtless strength of being relocated by a man who could do it without straining, punched a moan straight out of you before you'd decided to make one.

Because you felt him then. All of him, all at once. The whole solid front of him pressed flush against you from chest to hip, and it was so much – so much more real than anything you’d ever conjured alone in the dark – that your knees genuinely went. You could feel the thick, heavy line of his cock already hard against your stomach, straining against his jeans, and the heat of it made your mouth go dry.

“Fuck,” he breathed against your mouth, voice rough. “‘M sorry. Been waiting three years to feel you like this. Sorry, too much?”

“Don't you dare apologize.”

He laughed, wrecked, and kissed you again, and this time it wasn't soft at all.

It went hot in the space of a breath.

His mouth opened over yours and yours opened under his and it stopped being careful entirely – teeth catching, tongues sliding, the graceless wet urgency of two people who have waited far too long for a thing and have suddenly stopped being polite about it

He kissed you like he was trying to get through you. You kissed him back like you'd been drowning.

His hands didn’t stay still. One kept its grip at your waist, fingers spanning half your ribcage, holding you exactly where he wanted you against the wall. The other went into your hair and held – cradling your skull, tilting your head where he needed it, giving him the angle he wanted so he could fuck his tongue into your mouth deeper.

You couldn't breathe properly.

Neither could he.

Between kisses there were these ragged half-seconds where you both just gasped into each other's mouths, foreheads pressed, and then one of you would go back in like it hurt not to.

And then he slid his thigh between yours.

You didn’t even register it happening. One second there was space and the next there was the hard, thick muscle of his leg pressed up tight between your thighs, taking your weight, holding you up when your legs had stopped bothering. The seam of your jeans dragged right against your clit with every tiny shift, and you were already so wet the fabric felt soaked through.

You made a sound into his mouth. He swallowed it.

“There it is,” he murmured, rough, dragging his mouth along your jaw. “There’s that sound. God, you have no idea– three years I’ve wondered what you’d sound like when you finally stopped holding back. Three years I’ve thought about getting my hands on you and finding out.”

He didn't finish it. He bit the side of your throat instead, open-mouthed and greedy, and you keened.

He’d meant it to be slower.

That was the thing. He’d planned this – of course he’d planned this, he’d been planning it for months, every careful conversation, every soft offer to “make sure it was someone who actually gave a damn” – and in the plan this part was fifteen minutes of taking the edge off your nerves before he moved you toward the bedroom and began, slowly, methodically, the careful hours of work he’d mapped out in his head.

He was managing it. Just about. His control was fraying but it was holding.

And then he felt you move.

He went absolutely still.

Not stopped-kissing still.

Something deeper.

A stillness that started somewhere behind his sternum and spread outward, because his body had just registered a piece of information his mind was three full seconds behind on.

You were rocking against his thigh.

Small. Slow. An unhurried little roll of your hips, back and forward, grinding your cunt against the hard muscle of his leg, seeking the pressure of him, entirely without instruction – and when he made himself pull back an inch to look at you, he understood in one glance that you had no idea you were doing it.

None. Not a shred of awareness.

Your eyes were half open and gone somewhere far away. Your mouth was red and swollen and slack from him, still parted, still chasing. Both your hands were buried in his hair, fisted tight enough to sting. And your hips just kept going, small helpless movements, riding the muscle of his thigh with the unthinking single-mindedness of a body that had stopped consulting anybody about what it wanted.

You weren't performing. You weren't trying to be anything. You weren't even present enough to be embarrassed.

Steve stared at you.

Something enormous turned over in his chest.

Because here was the thing he had never allowed himself to properly imagine, not in three years, not in a single one of the shameful careful fantasies he'd built and dismantled in the dark: that you might want him like this.

Not sweetly. Not gratefully. Not as a favor accepted from a good friend.

Like an appetite. Like a woman with a body that knew exactly what it was after and had gotten tired of waiting.

She's not innocent, he thought, dazed. God help me. She’s just never been touched. And she wants it. She wants me.

And he almost let it happen.

He came so close. Every animal part of him wanted to press his thigh up harder and hold you there and watch you come apart against him in your own hallway – and for one long second his hand actually moved to your hip to help, fingers digging in, guiding the roll of your body so the seam of your jeans dragged tighter over your clit.

Then he stopped.

Because he'd promised himself something four days ago, lying awake, rehearsing.

Not against a wall. Not in a hallway with her shoes still on.

Not the first time.

He had spent three years getting here and he was not going to spend the first thing you ever felt from another person on a rushed ten minutes in a corridor. He wanted you on a bed. He wanted hours. He wanted to watch your face when he finally pushed inside you.

So he took his thigh away.

The sound you made was awful.

A high, thin, wrecked little whine, muffled against his throat, so entirely undone and so completely unlike anything you’d ever let him hear that it nearly finished him where he stood. Your hips kept moving anyway, chasing the pressure that was no longer there, cunt clenching around nothing.

“I know,” he breathed. “I know. I know, sweetheart– you were right there, weren’t you? I felt it. You were gonna come on my leg like that.”

“Steve–” You were shaking. Your hips were still moving, mindless. “Please, I was– I was almost–”

“I know you were.” His voice was barely holding together. His hands slid down, gripped the backs of your thighs hard enough to leave marks. “That’s exactly why I’m not letting you. Not here. Not like this. I’ve waited too fucking long to take you against a wall for the first time.”

And he picked you up.

Just lifted you, straight off the floor, as effortlessly as picking up a coat – and your legs went around him on pure instinct and your arms went around his neck and the sound you made this time was different, because the position had put you flush against him, directly against the thick, hard length of his cock, nothing between you now but two layers of ruined clothing.

You ground down on him without deciding to. Hard. The ridge of him dragged right against your clit through the fabric and a broken sound punched out of both of you at the same time.

He staggered half a step.

“Baby.”

“I can't– I can't stop–”

“Then don’t.” He got his mouth back on yours, kissing you as he walked, taking the whole weight of you on one forearm so the other hand could hold your face. “Don’t stop. Rub yourself on me all you want. Just don’t come. Not yet. Give me one more minute, that’s all I’m asking–”

You whimpered into his mouth and rolled your hips anyway, shameless, grinding your soaked cunt against the hard line of him with every step, and he laughed, breathless and ruined, and kept walking.

The hallway was three metres long. It took a while.

Your shirt went first – he’d got it halfway off you against the wall and you finished it, dragging it over your head, throwing it somewhere that turned out to be the kitchen. His went next, and it was you who did that too, both hands under the hem and shoving, desperate for skin. He had to set you down for two seconds to get it over his head and you both made frustrated noises about the two seconds of separation.

One of your shoes came off in the corridor. The other one you kicked at the bedroom door and it hit the frame and bounced.

He got you up again. You got your legs back around him. He walked you the last few feet with your mouth on his throat and his hands full of your ass and his belt half undone by fingers that had no business being that clumsy. You could feel how hard he was, the thick shape of him trapped against your stomach, and every step made you grind harder against it.

By the time you made it to the bed, most of it was gone. The rest went in a graceless heap somewhere between the door and the mattress – jeans, underwear, the last of your clothes – neither of you looking, neither of you caring, both of you making sounds into each other’s mouths that would have mortified you in daylight.

And then there was nothing left, and he was carrying you bare against him, skin on skin down the whole length of you. You felt the heavy, hot weight of his cock trapped between your bodies, the head of it already slick against your stomach, and you both stopped dead at the shock of it.

He held you there. Breathing hard. Forehead against yours. His hands were shaking where they gripped the backs of your thighs.

“Okay,” he managed, voice wrecked. “Okay. Look at me.”

“Okay,” you agreed. Neither of you moved. You could feel how wet you were against him, the slick heat of your cunt pressed right against the underside of his cock.

He turned to lay you down on the bed.

And stopped.

You felt it happen – felt the whole enormous frame of him go rigid, felt the change in his breathing – and you lifted your head from his shoulder to see what he was looking at.

Oh, God.

The nightstand. Half-tucked behind the lamp, where you'd meant it to live out of sight and had entirely, catastrophically forgotten it would be visible from this angle, held in these arms, naked, tonight of all nights.

Small. Yellow. Absurd.

A little rubber duck, except for the shield painted on its chest, and the tiny painted mask, and the unmistakable, ridiculous, unmissable A on its forehead.

“Oh my God.” You said it into his shoulder. “Oh my God. Steve. That's not– okay, that is not–”

“Whose is that.” Quiet. Not cold. Quiet.

“A friend gave it to me.” The words came out in a rush, muffled, desperate. “As a joke, it was a birthday thing, everyone laughed, she thought it was hilarious– because of you, obviously, because I never shut up about–”

You stopped.

You’d said too much and not nearly enough, and you were naked, wrapped around him, held off the ground by a man whose bare skin was pressed to every inch of yours – the thick, hot length of his cock trapped between your bodies, the head of it already slick against your stomach – and the horror of it and the heat of it hit you at the exact same moment and came out of you as a sound that was not a word at all.

Because you were still at the very edge. He’d taken you to the brink in your own hallway and left you there, and your whole body was still humming and furious about it, cunt still throbbing and empty, and now this – his arms, his chest, the shameful little yellow thing on the nightstand, the sheer overload of it…

You moaned. Right against his throat. Helpless. Your hips rolled once, involuntary, dragging your wetness along the underside of his cock.

He felt it. Every part of him felt it.

“A joke,” he said.

“Steve–”

“And you used it?”

The question dropped into the dark and stopped everything.

You could have lied. He felt you decide not to. He felt the truth come up through you, hot and honest, and you lifted your chin the smallest fraction – that flash of defiance that told him you were not, whatever else, some blushing innocent – and you said it.

“Yes.”

One word.

It went through him like a struck match through paper.

Because there it was – the thing he’d told himself he was too decent to feel. You’d taken him – this ridiculous painted duck-version of him, this joke, this stand-in – and in the privacy of this room, alone, in the dark, you’d spread your legs and pressed that little yellow body between them and come with his face in your head. Every other man who’d ever asked you to dinner had been turned away at the door, and the only version of anyone you had ever let into this bed had been him.

Even as a joke. Even in rubber. It had been him.

The possessiveness that took him then wasn’t a thought. It was tidal. It closed over the last of his careful decency and pulled it under without a sound.

He didn’t touch the duck. He’d get to it. He’d get to it in his own time, and the knowledge of that sat in him warm and patient and certain.

“Okay,” he said, very softly, and you heard the change in him – the way his voice dropped into something darker, rougher, almost hungry – and your breath caught. “Okay, baby. So you’ve been using me to get yourself off. For how long?”

You didn’t answer. You couldn’t.

He laid you down.

And then he stopped, and looked at you, and didn't touch you at all.

You’d have squirmed under it if you’d had the coordination left. He was kneeling over you, braced on one arm, completely naked, cock heavy and flushed against his stomach, and he was just… looking. Taking his time about it. His eyes moving over you slowly, thoroughly, from your face down the length of your body and back up again, lingering on your breasts, the soft curve of your stomach, the wet shine between your thighs, like a man reading something he’d been told about for years and had never been allowed to see.

“Steve–”

“Give me a second.” His voice was unrecognisable – low, rough, almost reverent. “Three years I’ve imagined what you’d look like under me. Give me one second to actually see it.”

So you lay there and let him look, and watched what it did to his face, and it was almost worse than being touched. His cock twitched visibly against his stomach. A bead of precome welled at the tip and slid down the underside.

Then he took his time – which, after the hallway, after being carried, after being left shaking on the very edge of it, was almost cruel.

He touched you like a man with nowhere else in the world to be. Slow palms up the outsides of your thighs, spreading them wider. Along your ribs, thumbs spread wide so they brushed the undersides of your breasts. His mouth at your throat, your collarbone, the soft give beneath – unhurried, methodical, learning you by hand and by inches while you writhed underneath him and made sounds you’d have been mortified by in daylight. Every time his fingers drifted close to where you needed them most he pulled them away again, stroking the crease of your thigh instead, feeling how wet you’d already gotten just from being looked at.

You told him, at least three times, that you were going to lose your mind.

“I know,” he murmured, into your skin, entirely unmoved. “I know. Almost. I’ve waited three years to get my hands on you. I’m not rushing the first time I get to touch you like this.”

“You left me–”

“I did.” Not sorry. Not remotely sorry. His mouth moved lower, open and wet against the soft skin just above your navel. “I wanted the first time you came for me to be right here. In this bed. With my fingers inside you and my mouth on you so I could watch every second of it.”

“That’s–” You had to stop and breathe when his tongue dipped into your navel. “That’s a horrible thing to do to someone.”

You felt it more than heard it – the warm huff of air, the curve of his mouth.

“Probably,” he agreed. “But I’ve been hard for you since the second I walked through your door, and I’ve been thinking about this exact moment for months. You’re going to have to live with it.”

And you understood, dimly, through the fog – the way you understand a thing you won't be able to name until much later – that he was enjoying this. Not the way a man enjoys being generous. The way a man enjoys having something exactly where he wants it, after a very long wait.

And then he touched you properly, and you stopped being able to form sentences.

The first thing was the shock of how different it was.

That was what nobody had ever told you. You knew your own body – you’d had years alone in this room with nothing but time and a joke made of rubber, you weren’t some blank page – but you had never once considered that another person’s hand would feel like an entirely different category of thing.

You couldn’t predict it. That was the difference. You didn’t know what was coming next, or how long it would last, or when it would change, and your body couldn’t brace for any of it – so every single thing he did landed unguarded, straight through, nothing between you and the sensation at all.

His fingers slid through the soaking folds of you, parting them, and the sound was obscenely wet. You made a noise like you’d been hurt. His head came up instantly.

“Okay?”

“Don't stop. Don't you dare stop–”

“Not stopping.” His mouth came back to your jaw, voice rough against your skin. “Not stopping, sweetheart. Just checking. Fuck, you’re soaked. Is this all for me? Or is some of it left over from thinking about that little yellow duck while you touched yourself?”

It didn't take long. It couldn't have.

You’d been strung tight since the hallway, since before the hallway, since a Tuesday in his kitchen four days ago – and he knew it, and he used it. He read every twitch of you, every hitch of your breath, adjusting to each one, cataloguing in that ruthless observant way of his exactly what made you shake and exactly what made you sob.

Three years of watching your face for the smallest tells, put to this.

Two thick fingers circled your entrance, gathering slick, then pressed inside you in one slow, steady push. The stretch made your back arch off the bed. He curled them immediately, searching, and when he found the spot that made your whole body jolt he made a low, satisfied sound against your throat that you would think about for weeks afterward.

“There,” he said, voice dark with triumph. “There it is. That’s the place you’ve been rubbing that little duck against, isn’t it? Right here.”

“Steve–”

“I know. I’ve got it now.” Something had come into his voice that hadn’t been there before. Something certain. Something almost proprietary. “I’ve got you. I’m not going to lose it again.”

He didn’t. He held that exact angle, merciless, and worked his fingers inside you in slow, deep strokes while his thumb found your clit and rubbed firm, steady circles. It built in you fast and hot and impossible, and you had a moment of genuine panic – of I can’t, it’s too much, this is too much with someone watching – and he felt even that, because of course he did.

“Yes you can.” His forehead against your temple. His breath ragged now too; he wasn’t unaffected at all, he was breathing like he’d been running, hips shifting restlessly against the mattress so his cock dragged against your thigh. “Yes, you can. You’re going to come on my fingers exactly like this. Let me see it. Please– sweetheart, let me see what you look like when you finally let go for me–”

Then he kissed you.

And that was what finished you: his mouth over yours, swallowing every sound you made, taking them straight out of you as they came – as if he’d decided that if he couldn’t have the rest of you yet, he’d have those.

You broke apart underneath him.

He watched every second of it.

Your cunt clenched hard around his fingers in rhythmic pulses, so tight he groaned into your mouth. Slick flooded his hand. Your thighs shook violently on either side of his wrist. He kept working you through it, slower now but relentless, dragging every last tremor out of you while he watched.

He’d kept his face inches from yours the whole time for exactly that reason. He wanted the front-row seat and he took it, and he watched you come apart under his hand with an expression you had never seen on him in three years and would not be able to describe afterward – something between reverence and hunger and a kind of naked disbelief.

Three years, he was thinking. Three years and it looks like that.

It was better than the fantasy. It was so much better than the fantasy that the fantasy seemed insulting in hindsight – thin, polite, invented by a man who hadn't known anything.

When it finally released you, you were boneless. Shaking. Your hand had fisted so hard in the sheet that it took a moment to unclench. You could feel how wet his fingers still were inside you, the slow, filthy slide of them as he gently eased the intensity.

He pressed his mouth to your temple and held you through the aftershocks, murmuring things against your skin.

“There,” he said. There was wonder in it. And something much darker underneath. “There you are. That’s what you look like when you come for me. Fuck, baby. I’ve been imagining that for so long and it still wasn’t enough.”

You couldn’t speak. You couldn’t do anything but breathe.

“Okay?” he asked, voice softer now, though his fingers were still buried inside you, still moving in the slowest, laziest strokes, like he couldn’t bring himself to pull them out yet.

You managed a nod.

He kissed you again – softly this time, almost sweetly, at odds with everything – and when he drew back his eyes had gone very dark. He slowly withdrew his fingers, watched the way your body tried to clench around the emptiness, then brought them up between you so you could both see how they glistened.

“That’s one,” he murmured, and licked them clean without looking away from your face.

Something in the way he said it made your stomach drop.

He moved to shift you – hands at your hips, turning you, guiding you up onto your knees to face the mirror in the corner, beginning the thing he'd been building toward for three years–

And you caught his wrist.

He stopped instantly. Every part of him stopped. His eyes came to yours in the dark, alert, already scanning your face for the thing he'd promised he'd watch for. “Hey. Hey– we can stop, if you want to stop–”

“No.” Your fingers stayed closed around his wrist. You could barely get all the way around it. “No, I just–”

You were steadier now. That was the thing. The edge had come off; the desperate humming urgency that had run you since the hallway had finally, mercifully quieted, and in its place was something calmer and far more dangerous: you could think again. You could look at him.

And you had been wanting to touch him for three years.

You had to make yourself say it. It came out smaller than you'd meant.

“Can I touch you first?”

Steve went completely still.

And here was what you did not know, and could not have known, and would not understand until much later.

That question was not in the plan.

He'd planned everything. Every hour of the last four days, every word of the three weeks before them, three years of shaped ground and patient warmth and doors quietly closed on other men. He had run this night in his head so many times he could have recited it. He knew what he'd do, and how slowly, and in what order, and what he'd say when you got frightened, and how he'd make it painless, and exactly how he intended to ruin you for anyone who ever came after.

In none of it – not once, not in a single version – had it occurred to him that you might want to touch him.

He'd never imagined being on the receiving end. That wasn't a thing that happened to him. He was the one who gave; that was the whole architecture of him, the shield, the plan, the man who takes care of it. Nobody took care of Steve Rogers. Nobody had reached for him in seventy years and meant it.

“You–” His voice came out strange. “You want to?”

“Is that okay?”

He made a sound. It wasn't a word. He nodded, once, jerkily, like a man agreeing to something whose terms he hadn't understood.

So you touched him.

You weren’t an expert. You had no idea what you were doing and you didn’t pretend otherwise – you just put your hands on him, at last, after three years of not, after three years of that constant low ache of proximity, and you let yourself learn him.

His chest first. Flat palms, spread wide, the ridiculous solidity of him under your hands. The heat of his skin. The way the muscle jumped the second you made contact. You felt his breath go wrong immediately – a sharp, broken inhale that he tried and failed to hide.

Then slower. The line of his collarbone. The old pale seam of a scar under his ribs that you’d never seen and had no story for. The heavy shift of muscle in his shoulder when he swallowed. You mapped him the way you’d wanted to for years and never once let yourself, and every place you touched, something in him jumped. His cock, still hard and heavy between you, twitched against your stomach when your thumbs brushed over his nipples.

“Okay,” he breathed. “Okay– fuck–”

He was trembling. This enormous man, trembling under your hands like it hurt.

You put your mouth on him – his sternum, the hollow at the base of his throat, the place where his pulse was going wild – and he made a low broken sound and his hand came up to the back of your head. Not guiding. Just holding on, the way you hold onto something in weather. His fingers flexed in your hair every time your tongue dragged over his skin.

“You’re allowed,” you murmured against his throat, because you could feel how still he was making himself, how hard he was working to simply let this happen. “Steve. You’re allowed to want it. You’re allowed to feel it.”

“I don’t–” He stopped. Started again, wrecked. “I’m not used to– nobody’s– it’s been so fucking long since anyone–”

“I know.”

You didn’t, entirely.

But you felt it: the way a man goes rigid when someone is kind to him in a way he has no defense against. You’d spent three years watching him take care of everyone in his orbit. It had never once occurred to you either, until this moment, how long it had been since anyone had touched Steve Rogers just because they wanted to.

You went lower.

Your mouth traced the center line of his chest, then the hard ridges of his stomach. Your hands followed, sliding down the deep V of muscle that led straight to where he was thick and flushed and leaking against his own skin. When your fingers finally wrapped around him – tentative, learning the weight and the heat and the way he pulsed in your grip – he made a sound that was almost a sob.

He let you. For a while, he let you – and he was so unguarded about it, so vocal, so entirely undone by having hands on him after seventy years of nobody, that it went to your head like wine. Every sound he made was involuntary. Every one of them was because of you. His hips gave tiny, aborted thrusts into your fist, like he couldn’t stop them. Precome slicked your fingers. His thighs were shaking.

For now you weren’t the one being managed. He was in your hands, and he was coming apart, and you were the one doing it.

Then his hand closed around your wrist, hard.

“Stop.” Ragged. Urgent. “Stop, you have to– sweetheart, stop.”

You froze. “Did I–”

“No. God, no.” He was breathing like he’d run somewhere. His eyes were shut, his jaw locked, his whole body strung tight as a wire. His cock throbbed hot and heavy in your grip, so hard it looked almost painful. “You didn’t do anything wrong. That’s the– that’s exactly the problem. You keep going and I’m going to come in your hand like a fucking teenager and that is not how tonight is supposed to go.”

It took him a moment to get himself back. You watched him do it: the long haul of a man dragging his own control into place by main force, one breath at a time. His hand was still locked around your wrist, keeping you from stroking him again.

When he opened his eyes they were black.

“Not like that,” he said, low. “Not tonight. Tonight you get all of it. Every inch. I’m not finishing anywhere except inside you.”

“Steve–”

“Do you have any idea,” he said, and his voice had gone rough and strange, almost shaking, “how many times I’ve thought about this? How many times I’ve jerked off thinking about finally getting to push inside you and feel you take me? How many times I’ve had to stop myself from just showing up at your door and begging?”

He stopped himself. Visibly. The end of that sentence sat between you, enormous, unsaid – but the damage was already done. You could see it in his face: the raw, hungry truth he hadn’t meant to let out.

He exhaled hard through his nose, then reached up and cupped your face with both hands, thumbs stroking your cheekbones like he needed the contact to stay grounded.

“Later,” he said, quieter, but no less intense. “You can touch me as much as you want later. You can take me apart if that’s what you need. But not tonight. Tonight I need to be the one who does it. I need to be the one who takes care of you. Can you give me that?”

Later.

You'd think about it a great deal, afterward – about how many things that man had put in the box marked later, and how long the box had been full, and what it must have cost him to carry it around for three years, smiling at you over coffee.

He kissed you then, hard, and turned you.

Gentle hands on your hips, guiding, until you were kneeling up on the bed facing the tall mirror in the corner – the full-length one, the one you saw yourself in every ordinary morning, that had never once seen anything like this.

You saw yourself in it. Bare, kneeling, undone. Cheeks flushed, mouth swollen, thighs already shiny with how wet you still were.

And then you saw him rise up behind you, broad and solid, and settle in close, chest to your back, and meet your eyes in the glass.

His breath was still short. You could hear it – could feel it uneven against your shoulder, not yet recovered from what your hands had done to him – and there was something enormously satisfying about that. About having put it there. His cock, still hard and heavy, rested against the small of your back, leaving a wet smear of precome on your skin every time either of you shifted.

“I want you to see,” he murmured, low, against your ear. “I want you watching. I want you to see who’s finally touching you. Who’s going to be the first one inside you.”

He didn’t finish the thought out loud. He didn’t have to. It was already the truest thing in the room.

Then he reached over to the nightstand.

You knew what he was doing before his hand closed on it. You’d known since the way he’d looked at the little yellow duck and set it down and made you wait – and knowing didn’t help at all.

“Steve.” Your voice came out thin. “Steve, no, that’s– that’s not–”

“Mmmh-hmm.”

He picked it up.

It sat in his palm, small and yellow and absolutely ridiculous, and he turned it over once with his thumb the way he had the first time, and the sound you made was half a laugh and half a sob and entirely disbelief.

He pressed a slow, open-mouthed kiss to the side of your throat.

“No,” he said, warm and wrecked and almost amused. “No, we’re not wasting this. You used me. You put this little thing between your legs in the dark and thought about my hands, my mouth, my cock. Now I get to use it on you while you watch.”

“That’s not– it’s not the same thing–”

“It’s exactly the same thing.” His mouth moved to the shell of your ear, voice dropping even lower. “You were in this bed, in this room, in the dark, with this. Thinking about me. Coming with my name in your head.”

A pause, deliberate, cruel.

“Weren’t you?”

You didn’t answer. Your reflection in the mirror looked wrecked already – eyes wide, lips parted, chest rising too fast.

“Sweetheart.” Softer. Absolutely relentless. “Were you thinking about me when you used it?”

“…Yes.”

“Yeah,” he breathed, and there was something in it that was not amusement at all – something dark and hungry and deeply satisfied. “Yeah. Well. Now you don’t have to pretend. Now it’s actually me.”

“Steve, I can’t– I just– I just came, I can’t–”

“You can.”

Total certainty. No room in it anywhere. He was already settling the little yellow duck into place, low and sure, pressing the curved head of it right against your still-swollen clit, exactly where you’d set it yourself all those nights – and the sheer indignity of that, of him knowing precisely where, of him being right, burned through you hot and shameful and somehow made everything tighter.

“You will,” he said against your ear. “Trust me.”

And he thumbed it to life.

The sound was absurd. A small ridiculous hum in the dark, comic, the sort of noise that should have made you both laugh – and for exactly half a second it did, you felt the laugh start in your chest–

And then it landed.

On nerves still raw and singing from what he’d done to you ten minutes ago. Everything oversensitised, everything already wrung out, and your whole body went rigid and then bowed backward against his chest with a sound that had nothing funny in it at all. The vibration was sharp, focused, merciless against your clit. Your thighs jerked. A fresh rush of wetness slicked the insides of them.

The comedy burned clean out of the room.

“Steve–”

“I know.” Rough, against your nape. “Too much?”

“I don’t– I don’t know–”

“Then we’ll find out.”

His other hand came up to your throat.

Not squeezing. Never that – he’d have died first. Just there: a warm broad span across the front of your neck, no real pressure at all, only enough to keep your head level and your chin up and your eyes forward.

Only enough to keep you facing the glass.

That was the whole purpose of it, and you understood the purpose about a second after it was too late to object. You couldn’t look away. You couldn’t drop your head, couldn’t turn into his shoulder, couldn’t hide your face the way every instinct in you was screaming to – because that hand was there, patient and immovable, and it held you exactly where he wanted you.

“Watch,” he said against your nape, voice low and rough. “Look at yourself. Look at what you look like when I’ve got you like this.”

“I can’t–”

“You can.” His mouth moved down: the curve of your neck, the point of your shoulder, unhurried, worshipful, taking his time about it while the little yellow vibrator kept humming steadily against your clit. “You can, and you’re going to. That’s the whole point of tonight. I want you to see every second of it. I want you to watch yourself come apart for me.”

So you watched.

And that was the thing that undid you – not the hum, not his hands, not even the shameful little object he was holding against you. It was the mirror.

You saw your own face, flushed and open-mouthed. You saw the way your breasts moved with every shaky breath. You saw his big hand spanning your throat, his other hand working the vibrator in slow, deliberate circles that made your hips twitch helplessly. You saw how wet you were, the shine of it on your inner thighs, the way your body kept trying to rock into the vibration even though it was already too much.

You watched yourself.

Kneeling up, bare, held. Flushed all the way down to your chest. Your mouth open, your eyes glassy, your whole face wearing an expression you had never once seen on it – not in all the years of getting ready in front of this exact mirror, not ever.

You didn’t recognise her. That was the vertigo of it. There was a woman in your bedroom mirror who wanted things and was getting them, and you’d never met her.

Then you looked past her, at him.

Steve, over your shoulder. Eyes half-shut, jaw tight, the muscle in it working hard. And on his face – plain as anything in the low grey light – years of discipline coming apart in real time.

You had never seen him without it. Not once. Not in three years of coffee and films and rain on the windows. He was the most controlled human being you’d ever met and you were watching the control fail, live, in your own bedroom, because of you.

He caught you looking. His eyes came up and met yours in the glass and held.

“There,” he said quietly, voice rough. “Now you see.”

“Steve–”

“That’s what you do to me.” His hand shifted at your throat, the barest adjustment, keeping your chin up so you couldn’t look away. “Three years of that. Every time you laughed at me. Every time you sat on my couch with your feet under my leg. Every time you leaned in too close and I had to pretend I wasn’t hard. You want to know what it looked like underneath?” His mouth found your shoulder, open and hot. “That’s what it looked like. That’s what I’ve been holding back.”

You made a sound you couldn’t control – high, broken, helpless.

“There she is,” he murmured, watching it happen in the mirror with dark, hungry eyes. “Look. Look at her. Look at what you look like when I’ve got a vibrator on your clit and my cock against your ass.”

And you watched him hold you like something he’d won and couldn’t quite believe he’d won.

That was the other thing in his face – under the hunger, under the fraying discipline – a kind of stunned disbelief, as though some part of him were still standing in a kitchen three years ago watching your hands around a mug, certain this would never in a hundred lifetimes be his.

It made your chest hurt. It made everything worse. It made you want to give him absolutely anything.

Time did something strange after that.

You lost the thread of it entirely. There was only the relentless little hum of the duck against your oversensitive clit, and the rain on the windows, and his mouth moving over your shoulder, and the two of you in the glass – and every so often his voice at your ear, low and steady and coming apart at the edges, telling you exactly what he could see.

“You’re dripping. Look at that. You’re making a mess of my cock and I haven’t even been inside you yet.”

Your moans were small and helpless and you couldn’t stop them and he drank each one like it was owed to him.

Then he moved.

Not into you. Not yet. He shifted his hips and settled the thick, heavy length of himself against you instead – flush, close, unbearably present – sliding the whole of him between your slick folds without pushing in. The sound that came out of both of you at the contact was the same sound, torn from two throats at once.

He’d meant it to be a moment. Just a moment, just a taste, just enough to take the edge off the pressure that had been building in him for three weeks and three years.

It was not a moment. It went on and on.

Because the first slow drag of him against you told him something he hadn’t been prepared for, and it undid what was left of his composure in one clean stroke.

You were soaked.

Wet through, slick and hot and ready, everything he’d done to you gathered there waiting for him – and he felt it coat him as he moved, felt himself glide through the thick evidence of exactly how much you wanted this. His forehead dropped hard to your shoulder and he made a sound like he’d been punched in the gut.

“Oh– fuck, sweetheart.”

Wrecked. Barely a voice at all.

“You feel that?” He rocked again, slow, deliberate, dragging the entire thick length of his cock through the heat of you, the head of him catching on your clit with every pass, the underside of him sliding through your folds until he was shiny with you. “You feel what you’re doing to me? God. God, you’re so wet. I didn’t know you’d be this wet. I didn’t know you’d feel like this.”

He couldn’t finish the thought. His breath had gone to pieces.

He’d imagined this. That was the thing that was killing him. He had imagined this, in the dark, for years, in a shame he’d never confessed to anyone – and every single version he’d built had been a pale, polite, dishonest little thing next to the reality of you slick and shaking and arching back into him.

Because you were. That was the other thing. You weren’t just letting it happen.

You were meeting him.

He felt it the second time he moved – your hips tilting back, chasing the thick drag of him, your body seeking the friction on its own without any instruction from the wreck of your mind. Small greedy movements. Rolling up into him so that every slow thrust of his hips dragged the head of his cock right over your clit and the vibrator at the same time.

“There you go,” he breathed, and there was something dangerously close to awe in it. “There you go. Look at you. You’re– fuck, you’re riding it. You’re actually fucking yourself on my cock and you haven’t even taken me yet.”

“Steve–”

“Say it.” His voice cracked. “Say it while you watch yourself do it.”

“I want–” Your voice broke on it. The hum was still going, still relentless against your clit, and the thick slide of him through your folds was making everything tighten again already, and you could barely get the words out. “I want it. Please. Please, I want you inside me–”

The sound he made then was not a word.

And you felt him.

That was what none of your quiet nights alone had ever, ever come close to – the fact of another body, alive and undone, reacting to you.

You felt him shiver.

You felt the great controlled bulk of him – this man built to withstand things that killed other men – actually shudder against your back when you rolled your hips a certain way. You felt his arms tighten convulsively around you. You felt the tremor run the whole length of him like something coming loose.

You felt his breath, hot and broken and far too fast at your ear, catching every time you moved.

You felt his heart going like a hammer against your shoulder blade.

And you felt him twitch against you — an involuntary jerk of his cock, hard and hot and slick where he was pressed to you, a thing his body did entirely without his permission — and that was the moment it stopped being something being done to you and became something you were doing to him.

The power of it went through you like a drug.

“Oh,” you breathed, stunned, watching his face in the mirror as another full-body shiver ran through him. “Oh, you–”

“Don’t.” His voice was barely holding. “Don’t say it. If you say it I’m gonna come all over your back before I even get inside you–”

You said it anyway. You leaned back into him and turned your face and said it right against his jaw, eyes still locked on his reflection.

“You’re shaking.”

He swore.

Actually swore, a low ruined syllable against your throat, and his hips snapped forward once, hard, uncontrolled – dragging the entire thick length of his cock through your soaked folds, right over the exact place the little humming duck was working your clit – and you both cried out.

He caught himself instantly. Went still. Breathed hard against your neck.

“Fuck– sorry, I didn’t mean–”

“Do it again.”

He froze.

“Do it again,” you said, voice shaking but clear.

And the sound he made – half a groan, half a broken laugh, entirely destroyed – was the sound of the last strut going out of a structure that had held for three years.

He did it again.

He moved against you slow and deep and endless, the thick, heavy length of him gliding through the slick heat of you, the head of his cock catching on your clit with every pass, the underside of him coated in how wet you were. Neither of you could keep quiet anymore. His breath came ragged and open-mouthed against your neck, punctuated by low, helpless grunts he wasn’t managing to swallow – small sounds of effort, of restraint, of a man holding back something that badly wanted to be let go. Your own noises had stopped being anything you could control: high and broken and continuous, rising every time the thick drag of him lined up just right with the vibrator.

The slide of it had gone effortless. Slick and hot and perfect. Every pass of him gathered more of your wetness until the sound of it was unmistakable under the hum – the wet, filthy noise of his cock sliding through you – and it made you burn scarlet and it made you want it more.

“Listen to that,” he said hoarsely against your ear. “Listen. That’s you. That’s how fucking wet you are for me.”

“I know–”

“That’s how much you want me.” His arms had gone tight, all of him strung, the muscle standing out in his forearm where it braced across your chest. “Three years and I never– I didn’t know. I didn’t know you’d feel this good. I didn’t know you’d be this ready.”

He broke off. Rocked into you again, harder, the thick head of him catching deliberately on your entrance this time without pushing in.

“Steve.” You were shaking. “Steve, I can’t– you have to–”

“I know.”

“Please– inside me, please–”

“I know, baby.” He was panting now, openly, past hiding it. “I know. Me too. Look at me– look at me in the glass– Christ, look at us–”

You looked.

And what you saw in the mirror finished you: the two of you moving together in the low grey light, his eyes wild and blown and locked on yours in the reflection, his jaw clenched, his whole enormous frame trembling with the effort of holding at the edge for you – and you understood, with a lurch, that he was as far gone as you were. That the patient man, the careful man, the man who had planned every second of this, was hanging on by a thread thinner than yours.

“Steve,” you whispered. “Now.”

His breath stopped.

“You’re sure–”

“Now. I want you inside me. Now.”

And then–

Both of you gasped at once. The same breath, torn out of two throats. That first give, that first fraction, that first impossible inch of him finding you – the blunt, thick head of his cock pressing against your entrance and then slowly, carefully, beginning to stretch you open. The surprise of it, the sheer overwhelming fact of it after all this waiting, after three years, after four days, after a joke made of rubber that had somehow led here–

You froze. He felt you freeze.

He went utterly still behind you, buried his groan in your shoulder, and got his mouth to your ear.

“Just the tip, baby.” Rough. Ragged. Barely holding. The words slurred as if he were drunk. “'S just the tip. 'S okay. 'S okay, I've got you, look– look at us– 's just the tip, we've got all the time in the world.”

He kept you there a long time.

That was the thing you’d remember, after – not the ache, because there was almost no ache, only a deep, stretching fullness that bordered on too much – but the patience. The way he held the two of you suspended at that first impossible fraction and refused, absolutely refused, to hurry through it. A lesser man would have taken the yes and pushed deeper. Steve held it in his hands like something that might break if he breathed wrong, and he breathed carefully, and he waited.

Every time your body tensed around the newness of him – that instinctive clench, the ancient bracing of a self that had guarded this for years – he stilled. Completely. Went to stone behind you, his whole enormous frame locked around the effort of not moving another millimetre, and got his mouth to your ear, and gave you something else to feel instead.

The hum, low and shameless, where his hand held the little yellow duck tight against your clit.

The mirror, and the two of you inside it, lit silver-grey by the rain-light: your face flushed and open, his face wrecked and focused, the place where his body disappeared into yours.

His other hand at your throat – no pressure, never pressure, only warmth, only the wordless instruction of it: watch. Turning your face gently back to the glass whenever your head tried to fall, whenever your eyes threatened to close and hide from how much you were feeling.

He had redirected everything. That was the craft of it and the tenderness of it, and by now the two were the same thing. He had taken every scrap of your attention and moved it somewhere else – to the absurd little song of the toy, to the sight of yourselves, to the slow worshipful drag of his mouth along the top of your shoulder – so that when he pressed a fraction deeper, the smallest rock of his hips, the barest give of another thick inch, there was no room left anywhere in you for fear. Only more.

You never felt the stretch as anything but more.

He worked you open by inches and the inches took forever and forever was the whole point, the whole gift. Tiny movements. A rock forward, a pause held so long you thought you’d die of it, his groan buried hot in your nape, another fraction of him sinking into the tight heat of you, another pause, another. He read your breath the way he’d once read a battlefield – every catch of it, every shiver, every place your body softened or resisted – and he answered each one, adjusting, coaxing, never taking more than you’d give and always, somehow, making you want to give more.

“There you are,” he breathed once, when a long slow press drew a sound out of you that you’d never made before – high, broken, almost disbelieving. “There. Just like that. Feel how you’re taking me. I’ve got you.”

And he did. That was the thing. However this had begun – however carefully he’d shaped the ground beneath your feet for three years to bring you exactly here – right now, in the dark, with the rain on the glass, you had never in your life felt so completely, so unbearably held.

Somewhere in that endless slow undoing you felt it start to build.

You felt it gather at the base of you, low and hot and coiling – the relentless hum against your clit and the thick, stretching fullness of him and the sight of his face behind you in the mirror all winding tighter and tighter, a tension with nowhere to go, climbing past anything you’d ever managed alone in this room with a joke made of rubber. Because it had never been like this alone. Alone there had been sensation. This was him. This was three years of wanting given a body and a weight and a mouth at your ear, and it was too much, and it was not enough, and it kept climbing.

“That’s it.” His voice had gone thick, watching your face come apart in the mirror, drinking the sight of it. “That’s it– look at you– look at us– don’t look away, stay with me, let it happen–”

You came like that.

Held on the very threshold of him, the little humming thing pressed hard against your clit and only the first thick inches of his cock inside you, and it broke – it broke over you in a long bright wave that took the room with it. Your body clenched sweet and helpless and rhythmic around him, and the tight, pulsing heat of your orgasm dragged him the rest of the way home while you were still shaking, still gone, still lost in it.

So that by the time you surfaced, gasping, boneless, blinking at the two of you in the glass, he was fully seated. All of him. Buried to the hilt, his hips flush against your ass, exactly where an hour ago you’d have sworn you couldn’t take him – and you hadn’t felt a single second of the final stretch as anything but coming apart.

He held still inside you then. Every thick inch. Both of you trembling, his chest heaving against your back, his heart slamming so hard you could feel it through your own spine. You could feel the heavy pulse of him deep inside you, the way your body kept fluttering and clenching around the new fullness.

“There,” he said, wrecked, against your ear. His arms had come around you, holding you upright, holding you together. “There. All of me. See? Told you.” A rough, reverent kiss pressed to your temple, your cheekbone, the corner of your jaw. “Didn’t hurt at all. Not for a second. I wouldn’t let it. You’re perfect. You’re taking me so fucking perfectly.”

It hadn’t hurt. He’d made certain of that. He’d redirected every ounce of you so thoroughly, so deliberately, that the thing you’d carried for years as a kind of wound had passed while you were looking somewhere else entirely – and now it was simply done, gone, dissolved, replaced by the impossible fullness of him and the singing wreck of your own body, and you understood dimly that he had planned even this, this mercy, this sleight of hand, and could not for the life of you find it in yourself to mind.

Then he drew back – slow, so slow, dragging every nerve in you awake as the thick length of him slid almost all the way out – and gave you the first real stroke.

And the world went white at the edges.

Because this was different. This wasn’t the careful inching-open, the patient claiming of ground. This was him – the whole heavy length and deliberate drag and deep certainty of him filling you completely – and the sound you made didn’t even sound like your own voice, some low broken thing torn up from a part of you that had never spoken before.

He did it again. Still slow, but full now, complete, unhurried and total, burying himself to the hilt with every stroke. His forehead dropped hard to your shoulder at the feel of it, his breath shuddering out of him in broken bursts. You felt his control fraying with every deep unhurried pull, felt the discipline of three years coming loose thread by thread, and it was the single most intoxicating thing you’d ever witnessed – this vast, contained, careful man beginning, at last, to lose himself inside you.

And then, with a low rough sound of decision, he threw the duck away.

You barely registered the small absurd clatter of it hitting the floor somewhere across the room – because his hand, the one that had held it, came straight back to you, bare now, his own thick fingers finding exactly where the toy had been. And it was so much better. So much warmer, so much surer, so much more him. He rubbed firm, knowing circles over your swollen clit while he fucked you in long, deep strokes, and the dual sensation made you sob aloud and sag back against his chest.

“Don’t need it,” he muttered, half to you and half to himself, hips rolling, fingers working you with a knowledge of your body he had no right to and had somehow earned anyway. “Don’t need the fucking toy. It’s me. It’s just me now. Just us. Only ever gonna be me inside you after this–”

And you shattered again.

Just from that. Just from him – his hand and his mouth and the deep, slow, relentless certainty of his cock filling you over and over – a third orgasm, harder than the two firsts, folding you forward over the strong braced line of his arm while he held you up through all of it and worked you through every wave. He watched every last second of it in the glass with dark, greedy, disbelieving eyes, like a man who could not quite believe the thing he was seeing was real and was his.

And in the middle of it – past the roar of your own blood, past the last shred of anything guarding you, barely conscious of your own mouth moving…

“I love you,” you whispered.

It just fell out of you. You weren’t even certain you’d said it aloud. It slipped free the way breath slips free, involuntary, unbidden, the truest thing in you rising to the surface in the one moment every wall you owned was down at once.

Steve went absolutely still.

You felt it – the whole of him, stopping. His fingers on your clit. His hips. His breath. For one endless suspended second the only sound in the entire world was the rain against the glass and the ragged double-time of your own heart, and the thick pulse of him buried deep inside you.

And then something broke in him that had never broken before.

Not the strategist – that was already gone, dissolved somewhere back at the nightstand the moment you’d said yes. This was deeper. This was the last thing, the thing underneath all the other things, the belief he had quietly built his entire careful campaign on top of and never once examined in the light: the sun does not want. The sun simply shines. I am the man who gets to stand in the warmth, and I will ask for nothing, and reach for nothing, because reaching was never something I was allowed.

And you had just whispered, half-gone, not even meaning to, that the sun wanted him back.

Three years of holding still. Three years of a man convinced that the very best he could ever hope for was to live near your light and never dare to touch it. Three years of loving you in a silence so complete he’d nearly mistaken it for peace. And you’d said I love you into the dark with your whole body wrapped around his – without deciding to, without performing it, without any reason to say it but that it was simply, helplessly true – which meant it was real. Which meant it had been real for longer than tonight. Which meant that all this time, in some room of your own, behind some wall of your own, you had been holding your breath exactly the way he’d been holding his.

He lost it.

Every last thread of the control he’d carried into this room like armor – gone.

His hand left your throat – gently, gently, always gently, even now – and cupped your jaw instead, and turned you, up and back over your shoulder, until your mouth found his. And he kissed you like a man surfacing from under ice. Deep and desperate and endless. All of it at once, everything, nothing held back. He kissed you like he was trying to breathe you in, like the three years had all been leading to precisely this and he could not bear to have waited even one second longer. His hips started moving again while he kissed you, deeper, less careful, the thick length of him sliding in and out of your still-fluttering cunt with a wet, rhythmic sound that filled the room.

“Say it again,” he breathed against your mouth when he broke for air. Ragged. Wrecked. Not commanding – begging. This man who had strategized his way to your bed, reduced now to a plea. “Please. Say it again. I need– please, sweetheart, say it again.”

Your eyes came open. Wide. You heard it land in the air a full beat too late – heard your own voice replaying I love you into the quiet – and felt the panic surge up hot in your chest, the instinct to snatch it back, to laugh it off, to rebuild in a single second the wall it had taken you three years to hold…

He didn’t let you.

“No,” he murmured, and kissed it away, kissed the fear right off your open face, his hips moving harder now, deeper, the last of his restraint gone and something helpless and overflowing rising in its place. “No, no. Don’t. Don’t take it back. Don’t you dare take it back, I’ve got you–”

“Steve–” your voice cracked, “–I didn’t mean to–”

“Love.” The word broke out of him like it had been waiting three years for permission to exist. “Sweetheart. Look at me– no, not the mirror, not the glass– me. Look at me.” And he turned your face fully to his and held it there, forehead pressed to forehead, both of you coming apart in the dark, his eyes so close they were the only thing in the world. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you. You hear me?”

His voice cracked clean down the middle.

“I’m never letting you go. Not ever. Not after this. You don’t get away from me now– I won’t let you. I’m keeping you.”

And it wasn’t a cage, the way he said it. It wasn’t the possession that had roared through him an hour ago at the sight of a painted rubber duck. That was gone too – burned off, transfigured, remade into something rawer and simpler and completely undefended. It was a man who had lost everything once – every friend, every anchor, an entire world, a whole century swallowed by the ice – waking one more time into a life that finally, impossibly fit, and finding you at the center of it, and refusing, this time, with everything left in him, to let the cold take the thing he loved.

Keeping. Not caging. Not owning. Keeping – the way you keep the one thing you’d walk back into the freezing dark to save. The way you hold on to the single warm thing in a life that has taught you, over and over, how easily warmth is lost.

“Okay,” you gasped, past tears you didn’t fully understand, past the very last of your own unraveling, your hands scrabbling back to find his and lacing tight through his fingers, holding on like the whole world had tilted and he was the only fixed point left. “Okay. I love you. I do– I said it, I meant it, I’ve meant it for so long, I love–”

He kissed the rest of the words out of your mouth.

And the two of you went over the edge together – finally, completely, no threshold left to hold at, no careful inch left to preserve, nothing between you anymore. Not the years. Not the silence. Not the strategy or the shaped ground or the walls you’d each built so high and held so long. All of it gone at once, and only this left standing: him, and you, and the rain on the glass, and the two of you in the mirror moving like a single thing breathing.

He came with a broken, helpless sound against your mouth, burying himself as deep as he could go, pulsing hot and thick inside you while your body clenched around him in long, rhythmic waves. Your fingers stayed locked. Your foreheads stayed pressed together. Both your hearts hammered the same impossible rhythm.

And a ridiculous little yellow duck lay forgotten on the floor across the room, having done, in the end, exactly what it was always secretly for.

Afterward he held you against his chest and would not loosen his arms, and you let him – boneless, wrung clean through, wearing the heavy steady slam of his heart under your cheek like something you had been given and meant to keep.

For a long while neither of you spoke. There was only the rain, and your breathing slowly finding each other's rhythm, and the warmth of him around you like a wall built to keep out cold instead of to keep you in.

“I meant it,” he said at last, into your hair. Quiet now. Sure. No campaign left in his voice, no strategy – just the plain flat truth of a man who has stopped, finally, being careful. “All of it. Every word. The keeping part especially.”

“I know,” you murmured.

You didn't, yet. Not the whole of it – not the three years and the three weeks and the four days, not the film chosen on purpose, not the seeds planted and quietly watered, not the drop zones and the shaped terrain and the long patient war he had waged to bring you to this exact bed. That would come later. Some of it. As much of it as he would ever bring himself to tell you.

But you knew the part that mattered. You had felt it break wide open in him in the precise instant you stopped guarding your own heart – felt the whole vast careful machine of him come apart the second you said three words he'd never once let himself believe he might hear – and you knew, with the certainty of a thing felt rather than reasoned, that whatever else was true about how you'd arrived here, you had not been the only one holding your breath for three long years.

“Stay,” he said. Not a question.

“I live here,” you pointed out, muffled, smiling helplessly against his skin.

You felt his laugh move through his whole chest – low and startled and completely undone, the laugh of a man who has spent so long braced for loss that joy still catches him off guard.

“Then I'm staying,” he said, and pulled the blanket up over the both of you, and drew you in closer against him, and did not, for the rest of that long rain-soft night, let go of you even once.

The rain came down. The duck lay where it had fallen.

And Steve Rogers – who had planned everything, shaped everything, won everything he'd set out to win, and been utterly, helplessly undone anyway by the one thing he had never dared to plan for – fell asleep at last with your heartbeat beneath his hand. Kept, and keeping. And, for the first time since the ice closed over him a lifetime ago, entirely, dangerously, finally home.

You woke before he did, which never happened.

In three years you had never once beaten Steve Rogers awake – he ran at dawn, he'd been built to need less sleep than the rest of the species, he was always up and moving and quietly making coffee by the time you surfaced. But this morning you swam up out of sleep into grey light and rain-washed quiet and found him still under you, still around you, his arm heavy across your waist, his face slack and open and years younger in sleep than you'd ever seen it awake.

You lay very still and looked at him.

And in the clear unhurried light of morning, with your body pleasantly wrecked and your head finally quiet, you started – slowly, the way you turn something over that's been sitting in your hand all along – to think.

About last night. About the four days before it. About the phone call where he'd been so careful, so patient, so ready. About the candle at his place you were fairly sure you hadn't imagined. About the film, weeks ago, and the thing he'd said about waiting not being weakness. About the engaged friend and you know what it should feel like. About how, every single time you'd tried to fall for someone else in three years, you'd somehow ended up back on his couch instead, warm, safe, home, the pull of anywhere colder never quite catching.

About how the only version of anyone you'd ever let into this bed had been a joke made of rubber wearing his face.

The pieces sat there in the morning light. You looked at them.

And here is the thing you understood about yourself, in that moment, that you would maybe never say out loud: you weren't afraid.

You should have been. Some sensible part of you noted, distantly, that a wiser woman might feel a chill right now – might look at the sheer duration of it, the patience, the shaped ground, and feel like something had been done to her rather than with her. That part of you spoke up, dutifully, and then fell silent, because the rest of you had already gone somewhere else entirely.

The rest of you was on fire.

Because three years. Because he'd wanted you for three years and said nothing and built a whole quiet world to keep you in and you'd never seen it, never once, and the not-seeing didn't feel like violation this morning – it felt like being wanted on a scale you had never in your life been wanted. Steve Rogers, who did everything deliberately, who had planned wars, who never in three years did a careless thing – had spent all of it, patiently, deliberately, on you.

The thought went through you low and hot and you had to press your face into his chest to hide what it did to you.

He woke to that. To your mouth against his sternum and your heart going too fast.

“Hey,” he murmured, rough with sleep, his arm tightening. “You're up first. That's new.”

“Steve.” You didn't lift your head. You weren't sure your face could be trusted. “Can I ask you something?”

You felt him go still. Not tense, exactly – alert. The particular stillness of a man who has just registered a change in the weather.

“Yeah,” he said. Carefully.

You lifted your head then and looked at him. And you asked it plainly, watching his eyes, because you already half-knew and you wanted to see him not be able to lie to you.

“Last night. And the four days. And– all of it.” You held his gaze. “How long?”

He didn't pretend not to understand. That was the thing about him; he could shape the ground under you for three years, but he couldn't, when you looked at him straight, actually lie to your face. It was the one thing his whole careful arsenal had no answer for.

Something moved behind his eyes. A long, complicated something.

“...A while,” he said finally.

"Steve."

“A long while.” He looked away, then made himself look back, jaw tight. “Longer than I should've– longer than was fair to you, probably.”

“How long,” you said again. Softer.

And he gave you the truth, but only at the edges, the way a man confesses when confessing fully would cost more than he can pay. “Since about the second year,” he said. “Maybe before. I stopped keeping track on purpose, because keeping track felt like–” He stopped. His hand moved on your hip, absent, restless. “I told myself I didn't want anything. I got real good at telling myself that.”

“And the candle,” you said. “At your place. The other night.”

A pause.

“Yeah,” he admitted, low.

“And the film. The one about the couple who waited.”

His eyes came back to yours, and there was something almost helpless in them now, something caught. “...Yeah.”

“And you told me waiting made me smarter than everyone you knew. Right after my friend got engaged and I was – right when I was feeling it most.” You watched his face. “You knew exactly when to say that.”

He didn't answer. He didn't have to. The not-answering was its own answer, and he let it be, and he watched you take it in with an expression you'd never seen on him before – braced, unguarded, ready for the exact moment your face would change into something that would end this.

Because he thought you were going to be afraid.

He'd shown you the shape of it – half of it, the demandable half – and now he was waiting, the way a man waits under fire, for you to understand what had been done and pull away from him and be right to.

Your face did change.

Just not the way he'd braced for.

“Steve,” you breathed – and he heard it, the thing in your voice, and his eyes sharpened, because it wasn't fear at all, it was the opposite, it was low and warm and stunned and it went straight through him. “You wanted me for two years and never said anything.”

“I–”

“You planned all of it.” You'd come up onto your elbow now, over him, and there was color high in your face and your voice had dropped somewhere new. “Every part. The candle. The film. Last night. You've been – God, you've been steering me, this whole time, for years, and I never–”

“Hey.” He caught your face in his hand, alarmed now, his careful control scrambling back into place, mistaking your voice for the beginning of hurt. “Hey, listen to me, I never– I'd never make you do anything you didn't– you always could've said no, every single time, I'd have stopped, I swear to God I'd have–”

“I know,” you said.

And then you told him the truth, the one that undid him more thoroughly than any of his own confessions, the one that turned the whole morning over on its head.

“That's not– Steve. I'm not upset.”

He went still.

“I should be.” You said it wonderingly, half to yourself, watching your own reaction like it surprised you too. “I know I should be. Some part of me is standing way back there being very sensible about it.” Your hand flattened on his chest, over the hard fast slam of his heart. “But the rest of me just found out that the man I was in love with for three years spent two years quietly rearranging his entire life around keeping me, and never asked me for one single thing, and–”

Your voice caught.

“–and it doesn't scare me,” you said. “It does the opposite. It does completely the opposite.”

You watched it land in him. You watched him understand.

You watched Steve Rogers realize that the thing he'd been most afraid of – that you'd see the whole careful machine of his wanting and be repelled by it – was not going to happen. That you'd seen it, or enough of it, and that it hadn't cooled you at all. That it had lit you up.

His breath went ragged. His hand slid from your jaw into your hair.

“Say that again,” he said – the same words as last night, the same helpless plea, except now there was something dangerous waking under the wonder in his voice, something that had spent three years leashed and had just been told it never needed the leash at all.

“It doesn't scare me,” you whispered, leaning into him, your mouth almost on his. “Knowing you did all that. Knowing how long. Knowing you'd– Steve, knowing you're not going to stop–” You felt the shiver go through you at your own words. “It should. And it doesn't. It just makes me–”

He kissed you before you could finish. Hard, this time. No careful patience in it now, no ground being shaped, no strategy – just a man who had been handed permission for the one thing he'd never let himself have, which was to want you out loud, in daylight, without dressing it as kindness.

“You don't know what you're saying,” he murmured against your mouth, and it was half a warning and half a prayer, his hands already moving, already sure. “Sweetheart. You don't– if I stop pretending it was ever about being good–”

“Then stop pretending,” you said.

And felt the last of the careful, decent, three-years-holding-still Steve Rogers come apart in your hands – not into cruelty, never that, but into something honest and hungry and finally, completely unhidden – and understood, with a thrill that curled all the way down your spine, that you had just told the most patient man alive that he never had to be patient with you again.

Outside, the rain had stopped.

Somewhere on the floor, a small painted duck lay on its side, watching the ceiling, entirely redundant now.

Neither of you got up for a long, long time.

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STEVE taglist:@mrsevans90 | @blobfishlol | @phoenix-in-writing | @sassandscribbles | @alyssinwunderland-blog-blog | @pattiemac1 | @fantasyfootballchampion | @theoryxwaller | @thatisamericas-ass | @allthingswickedpodcast | @katarina1224 | @kryptidfiles | @greatenthusiasttidalwave | @vicmc624 | @strangerthing93 | @scarlettbeth | @05-12-05 | @projectcutie | @cap-bot | @peachiestevie | @evilplansandstuff | @kaley0144 | @nicobidd | @i-lie-here-charmed | @doni-tello-shifts | @bennyyion

It never failed to surprise Bucky just how friendly some of the residents were at the assisted living facility his sister resided at. They always wanted him to stop and chat for a few minutes, especially some of the veterans. The ones from his era were far and few in-between and that bothered him more and more. 

Even though he would be in the building or sometimes just on the grounds near the parking lot, it would sometimes take Bucky 20 minutes to make it from the lobby to Becca’s hall. He gave a polite nod to the receptionist as he passed by her. She made brief eye contact with him as she signed for a package from the UPS driver.

“Oh! Mr. Barnes, Mrs. Proctor isn't in right now,” she relayed. 

Bucky stopped walking. Becca was in her 90’s. She didn't go anywhere very fast so how had he missed her?

“Where is she?”

The receptionist gave a small shrug. “She didn't say, she just signed out and said “with friends”. She left about 30 minutes ago.”

Bucky rolled his eyes, not at the receptionist doing her job, but the fact his sister was still being an annoying little sister even now. “Did she say when she'll be back?”

The young lady shook her head. “I'm sorry.”

Bucky just shook his head and turned around giving her a wave as he left. This was the second time this had happened this week. She was always out with friends. Would it kill her to text him or call? He knew she knew how. She was always sending him memes that her grandchildren sent her. 

“Hey, Jim!” A man's voice called from behind him.

Bucky stopped and turned around. “Hey Nate, how's it going?” 

“Still alive,” Nate said with a small shrug as he shook Bucky’s hand. “My niece is taking me out for lunch, want to join us?” he asked, gesturing to the woman behind his wheelchair.

Bucky paused to think about Becca and her 'out with friends'. “I don't want to be a burden on your day out…” The first time Bucky had met Nate's niece, you, Bucky had thought you were a picture. He nearly beat himself up over that thought too. A picture. Like this was 1930 and his mom was talking to him about cute girls. 

“You won't be a burden, it'll be fun,” you said to reassure him. While you enjoyed visiting with your uncle, it would be nice to have something to look at in the form of Bucky. “We planned on lunch and then maybe the mall. Uncle Nate wants new clothes.”

“Alright, sure, let's go.”

Lunch with you and Nate had been nice. Bucky was much more relaxed than he anticipated he'd be for such a last minute thing. 

“Y'know, Jim, your sister is just the kindest person on the planet. I've been around a long time, I would know.” Nate turned to you. “She gets these cookies from …” he paused trying to recall the name. “David's! She orders them from Davids and they are fantastic. She'll give me a cookie here and there. But she's not kind just because of the cookies, no, she's just a good person. Always talking with folks and making people feel heard. She's just a great lady.”

Bucky listened intently to the praise. He knew his sister was an amazing person, even if he missed most of her accomplishments. 

You watched Bucky as he heard the words your uncle was saying and saw Bucky’s face change slightly. His face got softer; he clearly loved his sister very much. 

A few days later, Bucky tried again. The same receptionist was on duty and he raised an eyebrow as he passed. She gave him a nod; she was too busy to talk to Bucky today, Mr. UPS was back with more packages, Bucky thought he saw a David's Cookies box in the mix. That had to be for Becca. At least Becca could make time in her busy schedule for him today.  

As Bucky was walking up the hall, he saw one of the nurses exiting Becca's room. “Alright, Mrs. Proctor, I'll quit taking up so much of your time today. We can get together later to discuss Goncharov more. Have you seen the extended version?” He asked as he stepped more into the hall. “Oh you haven't? That has got to change. I'll swing by later. Thanks again for the cookie.” He shut the door and nodded at Bucky. "Hello Mr. Barnes, Mrs. Proctor has been looking forward to seeing you.”

Bucky nodded and he turned to stare at the nurse as he walked on. Something felt…off. He knocked on Rebecca's door. “Open up, I know you've got the goods.”

It took a few minutes but finally the door opened, “You're late. You said 2 o clock. I gave those cookies away.”

“Liar,” Bucky said, stepping into the room, and once in the door was shut, gave his sister a hug and a kiss on the top of her head. Becca didn't have a means of cooking, but she could buy the cookies Bucky loved. “Besides it's only” - he checked his watch - “2:25. Tell your neighbors to stop talking when I visit and maybe I'll be on time.”

“You could always get here early so you're on time,” she said and went back to her chair, gesturing for him to join her. “There's a container on the table. Grab a pop from the fridge.”

Bucky grabbed the container off the table and sat near to her. “So what's this I hear about you going out with friends all hours of the night?” He was exaggerating slightly. 

“What I do on my own time is my own business. Who snitched?”

Bucky put the container on his lap and held up his hands. “I'm not revealing my sources.”

Becca tsked. “I bet it's Holly at the desk. She's sweet on you. You should ask her to go out dancing.”

Bucky chuckled and shook his head. “I'm pretty sure she's barely 18. That is not my thing. Besides, I think she's into a delivery driver.”

Becca gave a non-committal noise but seemed a bit surprised. “Was it Ross?”

Bucky shrugged off her question. “I didn't get his name. You got a sweetheart, sis? You going out dancing?”

Becca just scoffed. “Do I look like I could go out dancing? I'd break a hip if I tried.”

He shook his head. “I think you're stronger than what you let on. You've been doing those exercise classes, haven't you?”

“Yeah…”

“We should go out dancing sometime. Be like old times. We go together and then ditch the other once we meet someone.”

Becca just laughed, “I don't think so, Jim.”

“So where are you and this gang of roaming seniors going off to?”

“If you must know, I found a group of people who play pickleball seated. It's fun.”

Bucky frowned. “Why didn't you tell me? I can take you.” 

Becca just gave him a look that was reminiscent of their ma when she was annoyed. “No, thank you. I can go out with friends on my own. I have a life alert and my phone which has you as a contact should I need it. I'm fully capable.”

Bucky looked at the floor, “yes ma'am, alright, message received. You do know that I'm connected to lots of people and can find out information,” he was absolutely trying to rile her up. He wouldn't violate her privacy.

“James Barnes. You will not. I'm not a child.”

“No, but you're still my little sister.”

“You're still a pain in my ass. Do you want to go downstairs and play Phase 10?”

He just nodded “sure, sure, lead the way. You'll be glad to know that Alpine jumped me in the bathroom the other night…”

“Good. Someone else needs to keep you in line. Which is why you need to find someone to marry. Get you a good woman - or man, I don't care - and settle down. I'd like to be someone's aunt before I'm dead. It's taken you long enough as it is.”

Night after night, there were thousands of them. He could count, the way you count candles on a cake. By their hearts.

That's the part he didn't tell people. He heard the beat. Every one of them, a melody under the drums. Sam kept the beat the crowd could hear; he kept the beat underneath it, the wet red metronome of a full house.

The constant throng would drive a younger man insane. It didn't drive him anywhere. Not normally. He wanted that on record. He had stood in rooms louder, more crowded and walked out clean. Every time. Ten thousand times. He'd never once given in to temptation.

Instead he learned to listen… like reading the weather. It happened after rebirth. The first steps, if you will. There was a trick, if you wanted to master it.

It wasn't about the pulse. Not the throat. Not even the specific animal instinct of the girl in row five whose heart was going like she'd run here.

Pressure changes.

The warm front.

You had to let it become the room instead of the meal… and then you could stand in it forever. He taught himself that over centuries, one show at a time, and he was— and he would promise you that— very calm about it.

The song ended. Natasha took the next. He only had about four bars, letting him just be a man with a guitar. And that was the moment he made his biggest mistake. It didn't feel like one. But then, it never does.

He looked down. Simple as that.

She was there. Front row. Same six feet of railing she'd owned since they'd left Cleveland, like she signed a lease on it. Sunshine— printed across her tiny tank top.

The pressure needle skipped a beat.

Because here was the thing about the rest of them— the whole seething pit— they knew. Not with their heads or heart. Something deeper. They came to be near the danger. To press up against it. To feel their own hearts beat faster. That speed was instinct, a body doing what a body should do in a room with something like him. He loved them for it. It was the only honest thing about them.

Hers didn't do that.

She stood in the wall of noise with her face tipped up and all he felt was delight. Nothing more. There was no animal in her leaning back from the edge. Because to her, he was the whole entire show. The best night of her week. She got to see a man she thought was beautiful. Her heart was fast, sure. But it was fast the way a kid's was on a carousel. It was fast because she was happy. She was enthralled.

He wanted you to understand what that did to him. The fear he could drink around; the fear was the weather. But she wasn't afraid. He couldn't read that from her. And it drew him in. She had no idea. She trusted him. She decided, with that whole empty radiant head of hers, that he was safe.

And trust— he could tell you now, so no one could ever say he hid it— trust was the one thing he had never understood.

He was fine. He wanted to be so clear about that. He looked back up, hit his mark, sang the next line right on the beat. Not a single soul of that ten thousand knew. That was control.

$6,423.

The figure printed on the paper slip that had slid out of the ATM when you put in your bank card. You knew it before you'd even put it in. It was what you'd earned that summer, working three separate jobs to pay tuition for college.

You were going to be a nurse. It was a good profession, respectable.

Here's the thing about $6,423: it wasn't exactly a lot of money for a college program. It was, however, a staggering amount for a girl with a banged-up old Corolla and the desire for a taste of forbidden fruit.

That's what they were to you. The Sergeant and the Sires. The Sergeant specifically. You were under his thrall.

You'd done the math. More than once. Then once more with an actual calculator, in case your brain was trying to deceive you.

22 shows. Not all of them— you weren't totally insane. 22 of 41 the band had scheduled. One show per state. You had always wanted to see the country, it would be a great way to explore before the crushing weight of a career became obligatory.

The tickets were the easy part: $58 - $95. General admission for the floor was your best bet and buying at the box office, which you'd already done. The woman at the desk had given you a judgemental look, but you didn't care.

$1731 you'd spent so far.

A tight budget. You estimated $1500 for gas, if you kept your speed to below sixty-five. Your car was the one thing you trusted to do its job and it had a comfortable enough backseat that you could cover the windows and sleep there most nights. Motels offered a shower, a more luxurious night when your car wasn't the safest option.

That probably came to $800. You rounded up to $900 because you were being responsible.

Food was your next consideration. One meal a day was manageable, right? You weren't stupid, it had to be something substantial and diners usually offered affordable meals. You guess around $10/day for 42 days. $420. $500 if you wanted a coffee. You'd pack snacks for the road.

$1000 was for opportunistic recreational activities, leaving you $792 for emergencies.

You made a note. It was plenty of cash. Maybe you'd even indulge in some of the band's merch. A dreamy expression washed over your face as you thought about a shirt with The Sergeant's face looking up at you.

You'd figure it out, because people figure things out. You'd been called resourceful. Your parents had said you could do anything you put your mind to.

Except everyone said don't to this.

Your sister said it with the long-suffering patience of someone who knew she wasn't swaying you. Your office manager frowned, saying he couldn't hold any of your regular shifts. The girl you'd been seeing scoffed and used the word unhealthy more than once.

Your mother hadn't said a single word. She knew there was no point in trying. It'd felt worse than anything anyone else had said.

Because when all was said and done, they weren't wrong. You weren't stupid enough to deny it. Your plan was crazy. You were twenty-four, planning to spend your entire education fund on 42 days, 22 of which you'd be standing in the dark, looking up.

Here's what no one understood. What no one in your life seemed to have a category for. In your 24 years on Earth, you had never— not once— felt like you were standing where you were supposed to be. And then it happened. They had come to town. The Sergeant and The Sires. And for two hours, three nights a week, you stood in darkness, in a sea of people with the bass pounding through your feet, and finally every single atom in your body was pointing in the same direction. Your whole being had been drawn to them. To him. Seeing them perform had stirred something deep inside you. And for the first time in your life, you felt alive.

How were you supposed to weigh the cost of being alive against a nursing program? You weren't confused or naive. You'd just done the math and arrived at a different answer. You knew exactly what it cost, you had the number written on a receipt in the glove-box for your Corolla.

So you got in and turned the key.

Backstage smelled like every other backstage did— cold beer, hot cables, the sugar-rot of a fruit tray nobody touched. He loved it, but it was a smell with no pulse.

He was fine. He'd said that already but he wanted it noted.

Sam got the cooler open before his sweat was even dry, tossing the bottles around like it was a totally normal thing. Because to them it was. Except it wasn't beer he was passing, it was TruBlood. The good stuff, the quality O-neg that Yelena bought by the case because to her a happy band was a well-fed band. Steve caught his one-handed, cracking the cap with his thumb. He downed half in one go, the way he did everything— clean, without ceremony. Sam was talking his ear off, some story about a girl from Louisiana, half-laughing into his own bottle.

"Barnes!" Sam lobbed one at him.

He caught it. Like there was ever any doubt. His hands were the last thing to ever forget what they're for. Even the one that didn't quite belong to him.

It was warm. Yelena had done her duty and filled the cooler with hot water, warming the bottles until they were body temperature. It sat in his cold palm while he listened distractedly to Sam. He laughed in the right places. He twisted the cap. But he didn't drink.

He wanted that on the record too. The bottle was open. He was holding it. Anyone watching would say 'there was a man having his dinner'. But that little compass inside, the one that read the weather, it pointed at something else. Something through the hallway. At a carousel heart, beating at a happy gallop. He heard it. He felt it. It consumed him. The warm glass in his hand felt like a prop. A thing to hold so his hands looked busy. So no one would see what he craved.

Natasha had a way of appearing when she wasn't wanted. Silent. Stealthy. She found him by the instrument cases, doing this thing where she didn't look directly at you. She was doing it now, focusing all her energy on coiling a cable around her arm while her own bottle lay sweating and untouched on a case beside her.

"Good show," she said.

"Good show."

"You went somewhere. During 'Bloodletting.' You went somewhere and came back." She cocked her head, finally looking at him.

He told her he was on the beat the whole time. Which was true. He was! Ask any one of the thousands of humans in the crowd. Not one of them felt him leave.

She wrapped the cable slow. "That's not what I asked."

Across the room Sam called his name, wanting him in on the story, to confirm he remembered the girl from Louisiana. He answered, because he must. To keep the room warm, the atmosphere easy— to keep it to just the four of them, their bottles, a good show and the full house behind them. He didn't need Sam or Steve looking at him the way Natasha did. No one else needed to count, to clock that his bottle was still full.

Here was the part he didn't say out loud. You don't hand someone the stake and the cross. But deep down inside he knew. The girl in the crowd came back. The ray of sunshine in the darkness. She was here right now. Yelena had let her sneak in, like a stray cat.

He set the bottle down on the case. Still full. He told himself it was because he wasn't thirsty.

He was very calm about it.

It happened at night, mostly, in the back of the Corolla, adjustable shades pulled down. When the parking lot had gone quiet and there was nothing left for you to think about… but him.

It always started the same way— with his hands. The part of him that seemed to wreck you. Not his voice… although that was its own kind of problem. His hands… you watched them from six feet away for eight nights. The way they moved over the fingerboard, like they owned it, like the guitar was an extension of himself.

There was that moment in the third song where he’d flatten his palm across the strings to kill the ring. The silence hit low in your gut. You thought about those same hands on your skin. Sliding under your shirt. Callused fingertips tracing your ribs. Then lower, cupping your breasts. Thumbs brushing your nipples until they tightened. For him.

You thought about being alone with him. Somewhere with an actual door. The details of the room didn't matter. You were always looking at him looking at you.

You thought about him being slow. It was the thing you came back to every night, the thing that made your face burn and your thighs press together in the dark. He’d take his time, undress you like he was learning a new instrument, spread you open on the bed and just look, eyes dark and hungry, taking in every inch of your body.

Then those hands would move, sliding up your inner thighs, thumbs parting slick folds, circling your clit with steady, intimate pressure until you were shaking, dripping for him. He’d push two thick fingers inside, curling them just right while his mouth found your nipple, sucking hard enough to make you moan his name.

You imagined him eating you out— slow, filthy licks, tongue fucking into you while he held your hips down, growling against your pussy as you grind on his face. And when he finally pushed inside you, thick, hard and bare, he’d do it inch by inch, eyes locked on yours, watching every reaction as he stretched and filled you completely.

He’d fuck you deep, hips rolling with the rhythm he used on stage, one hand pinning your wrists above your head while the other rubbed your clit until you came clenching around his cock, gasping and soaking the sheets.

You imagined him moaning your name, as he buried himself to the hilt and came, voice rough against your ear, hips jerking as he spilled inside you.

Sometimes you didn’t even get that far. Sometimes it was just the idea of his mouth near your ear, breath hot as he whispered exactly what he was going to do to you. How he was going to ruin you for anyone else.

You’d have to stop, press the heels of your hands into your eyes, and laugh at yourself. A grown-ass woman in a Corolla following a band around the country, soaked and aching over a man who didn’t even know you existed.

You fell asleep like that most nights. Warm, stupid, and happy, thighs still slick with the evidence of how badly you wanted him.

You had no idea what you were asking for.

It happened in St. Louis. Number nine, though by then the cities had already started to blur into one long strip of welcome signs and exhaust fumes. You'd have to check the tickets in the glove-box to be sure which cities you'd passed through. The shows, however, were burned into your brain.

This had been a good week. That's what kept going through your mind afterwards. You were well within budget, the Corolla was behaving and you had the cash to splurge on a motel because your neck had opinions on the backseat of your car.

Eleven minutes was all it took. You had left the room to grab ice from around the corner of the complex. For those eleven minutes you were living the life of luxury.

The door was shut when you came back, but the second you crossed the threshold, you knew something was wrong. The same way you knew when Bucky was going to change keys in the middle of a song.

Your duffel was on the bed open. You walked over, resigned to the inevitable. The envelope gone, your wallet with it, both cards, the debit and the one you kept for real emergencies.

They'd left the tickets. All 22 of them. Untouched… because who would want those?

You cancelled the cards, then sat on the end of the bed, redoing the math. $161. It'd been in your jacket pocket. Three-quarters of a gas tank and 22 tickets. The next show was 300 miles west.

The strange thing was, the most obvious thought never arrived. The one where you gave up. Asked for help. Drove home. You waited for it. All night you waited. But it never came. Not even when you called your sister and swore her to secrecy.

Outside the next venue, you met Trish. You didn't find her, she found you. You had arrived early, since there was no where else you could afford to go. Instead you sat on the cold hard ground to contemplate your woes. You were in your denim jacket, covered in pins from each one of the shows you had under your belt. You were spilling your problems to her before she even introduced herself. She didn't give you the oh honey face. She just nodded, like she'd heard it forty times, because she had.

Cash problems, she said, were easy.

That's when she brought it up. Phrased it as a trade. Something clean. Regulated, even. There was an… agency, a three letter acronym, said too fast for you to catch. It was something you'd reflect on later, the size of the thing you chose not to ask. Trish described it exactly like donating blood, except this paid $200. Apparently everyone who come on tour did it. She rolled up her sleeve and showed you the inside of her elbow.

You looked down at the business card she gave you— GGB Ltd. $200 per unit. One a week was fine. Two was fine if you ate well. You did the math right there on the curb, and you knew everything would be alright.

Yelena found him where he'd put himself, as far from anyone as the room allowed— a chair turned backward, arms crossed over the back, watching the door.

She didn't announce herself. She never did. She crossed the room with an economy of movement only she had— all business— and dropped into a crouch behind a cooler she carried. Not the usual . A smaller one. Black, no logo, the kind you didn't leave lying around for anyone to find.

"You're not drinking," she said. Not a question.

"'m fine."

"Yeah, you said." She popped the latch. "Three cities in a row… you said. You think I don't count the bottles, Barnes? I count everything. It's my job."

He started to answer but she held up a hand without looking at him, and then she took the bottle out.

It wasn't TruBlood. He knew that before she'd even fully extracted it— knew it from the way the smell reached him a half-second ahead of his eyes. A glass bottle, yes, the same shape but unlabeled. Inside it something that wasn't the usual synthetic crap she offered them.

"B-neg," Yelena said, turning it in the low light. "Real. Fresh— not long from the host. Don't ask who, because I don't, and neither should you." She set it on the case in front of him with a small, delicate clink. "You've been walking around like a live wire and it's making the others nervous, even if they're too polite to say. So… eat something real. On me."

He looked at it.

For a moment he didn't move at all. That was the last of his control. The long-suffering habit he spent centuries perfecting. Never once letting it hold him by the collar. He told himself he wasn't going to now. He'd made it this long.

But the bottle sat there and as it caught the light, he could hear it, actually hear the way it whispered to him— a slick warmth that told the story of the person it had once belonged to.

He picked it up.

The screw-on top came away under his thumb effortlessly. He meant to take one sip. He honestly, genuinely meant it— just to taste, to be civilized about it, to prove to himself that he was a man having a drink and not a starving animal salivating at a trough.

The first swig undid it all.

It hit the back of his throat and something in him simply woke… some old animal that had been asleep, pretending to be furniture. After that there was no sipping. The rest vanished in seconds. He didn't decide it. It was gone before decision had entered into the equation, the bottle tipped all the way up, his throat working, the whole rare impossible pint emptied into him like water into parched ground.

He set the bottle down more carefully than he'd done anything else that night.

The room felt different now. He felt different— warm for the first time in decades, lit up, every sense turned suddenly to its sharpest setting. There was a glint in his eyes that hadn't been there before, a brightness that had nothing to do with the overhead bulb. His fangs had come down without permission, more obvious now, and he didn't bother to hide them. He ran his tongue along them slow, cleaning the last of the red from his lips.

Yelena watched him with her arms folded. She didn't look pleased, more like someone confirming a suspicion.

"There he is," she said, a smirk on her lips.

You almost didn't go back. That was the truth of it. A truth you'd never tell anyone, because it sounded insane out loud. There was a woman with an official lanyard who singled you out after the show. She read your name off a list— your name, the one you'd signed in the parking lot for GGB— and for one chilling moment, you'd thought it was about the blood. That someone had found out and you were in trouble.

But she'd just smiled and said someone wanted to say hi, and would you follow her, and your heart had done something complicated and enormous in your chest.

So there you were. Backstage, past security, in a concrete hallway that smelled like stale beer and something smoky. You were wearing the Sunshine shirt— your favorite, one you'd washed so many times the print had started to crack. You'd have worn something sexier if you'd known. But you hadn't, and the shirt was clean, and was the one that felt most like you.

You'd pulled your left sleeve down before she brought you in. Habit now. Nobody's business.

And then he was just— there.

You forgot how to be a person for a second. The honest truth of it. You'd stood six feet from this man for eleven different nights but you'd never once been so close to him. And there was a difference, an enormous difference, that no amount of front-row devotion had prepared you for. On stage he was a shape in the light. Here he was a man, tall and still, close enough to touch, and he was looking directly at you.

"You're the one on the barricade," he said. "Front row. Every night."

He knew. He'd noticed. You made a sound that was supposed to be a word. And wasn't.

His voice did something to you. You'd heard it sing to ten thousand people and you'd thought that was the thing, that was the reason, but this was different— low, unhurried, pitched just for you. It went straight through you like the bass through the floor, settling somewhere behind your sternum. You felt, absurdly, like you already knew him. Like you'd known him a long time. Like all those nights in the dark had been a conversation and this was him finally answering.

"I— yeah," you managed. "That's me. I've been following the tour. Since Cleveland." And then, because your mouth had apparently decided to run without you: "Since before Cleveland, actually, since you played my town, that's— that's how it started, I saw you and I just, I couldn't not, you know?"

You winced. You sounded like exactly what you were. But he didn't laugh at you. He tilted his head a little, the way you'd seen him do on stage between songs, and he listened, like your babbling was worth listening to, and God, you could have died right there and been happy about it.

"Eleven cities," he said. "That's a long way to drive for a band."

"For you," you said, before you could stop yourself. "I mean— the band. Mostly. Kinda. Yeah."

Heat crawled up your neck. It was worth it, because something crossed his face when you said it— something you couldn't read, something that flickered and was gone— he stepped closer, and you didn't step back. You'd never step back. You'd spent your whole savings, slept in a Corolla, sat in a folding chair in a parking lot so you could stand exactly this close. Now that you were here, every atom in your body was doing the thing it only ever did in the pit. Pointing. At him.

"You drove all that way," he said, almost to himself, "and you're not even a little afraid?"

You laughed. It seemed like such a strange thing to say.

"Why would I be afraid of you?"

He smiled, close-lipped. It didn't quite reach the brightness in his eyes.

"No," he said. "Course you're not."

He knew it. That was the thing that stopped his unbeating heart cold. He knew that scent— had known it for weeks, had felt it move through him warm, rare and impossible. B-negative.

Not long from the host, she said. Don't ask me who. And he hadn't. Here was the answer standing in front of him in a washed-soft shirt with the word Sunshine painted across it.

It was her. The blood he'd drunk was hers.

Something in him went extremely quiet and impossibly loud at the same time. A trance, almost— the room narrowed to a single point— her. Everything else felt gray and irrelevant. He'd already tasted her.

It was still in him— her blood— singing, part of him now, and his body had learned the shape of her. And it wanted the rest. Craved it.

He noticed everything. He couldn't stop noticing. The sweat still drying at her hairline from dancing on a packed floor for him. The flush on her cheeks that had bloomed the second he'd stepped closer, nothing to do with the heat and everything to do with him. The line of her throat. The way she held herself, tipped slightly toward him like a plant toward a window, all unguarded warmth pointed straight at the most dangerous thing in the room.

She was beautiful. He let himself see it, which was its own mistake. Not the painted-on beauty of the people who usually made it back here— something better, something free and unfiltered, sweat, a cracked-print shirt and eyes so wide open they hurt to look at.

Under all of it, beneath the shirt, the flush, the babbling and the light, was that sound.

Her heart.

He could hear it the way he heard everything, but this was different, this was loud and strong, that happy carousel-gallop, the healthy, fullest sound in the world, a heart without fear. He could see it, if he let his eyes drop half an inch. The pulse in her neck. The soft flutter under her skin, keeping time, offering.

B-negative moves through her and he had tasted it, he knew what it was, and knowing was so much worse than not.

His fangs came down.

He didn't decide it. There was no deciding left in him. They lengthened against his tongue, sharp, eager and entirely beyond his control. He pressed his lips shut and prayed she couldn't see. She couldn't. She was still talking, still glowing, still asking him something with that open, unafraid face.

Why would I be afraid of you?

And there— right there— some old animal part of her did clock it. Just for a second. A flicker behind her eyes, a small instinctive stutter in that big strong heart, the faintest spike of something that wasn't quite fear, gone almost before it arrived.

It should have shamed him. It didn't. God help him, it did the opposite. That small spike, that tiny honest jolt of a body recognizing a predator— lit him up. It made the craving worse, sharper, unbearable, because now she was afraid and warm and she still wasn't stepping back. The wanting rose up in him like a tide with no shoreline.

He wanted to drink. Plain. Simple. He wanted to close the distance and put his mouth to that flutter in her throat and take what was already partly his, and keep taking. He knew— with a clarity that was almost peaceful— exactly how it would go. How her heart would change its tune. How the light would go out by degrees.

That was what stopped him. Not decency. Not restraint, whatever he'd told himself, whatever he'd told her. Just the certainty— cold and complete— that if he started he would not stop. Could not. There would be no sip. There was never going to be a just a sip with her. He would empty her right there in the concrete hallway with her favorite shirt on and her hands reaching for him. It would be the best thing he had ever felt, and then she would be gone. Forever.

So he held still. He pulled back on the centuries-old instinct inside him and smiled, close-lipped, hiding the teeth.

"No," he said softly. "Course you're not."

It slipped away, along with Eskrine’s final breaths. 

Half a century had changed the cemetery. The trees grew thick, the grass wilder and greener, and graves sat crowded together. 

Steve reaches Sarah’s grave. His father’s sits next to her’s. His own isn’t with theirs. No, he had the high honor of being buried in Arlington. Perhaps, they’ve removed it now. Who’s to say?

Moss dusts the gravestones, and brambles grow around it, untamed and unkept. Steve sets to clearing the foliage. 

“I’m sorry I was gone so long, Ma.” Steve whispers, as he removes a bush curled around the base of the headstone. “I didn’t mean to be away for so long.”

The next words are stuck in his throat. He didn’t know what to say. He could barely make out the contours of the new ache of living himself. Instead, he lays down the bouquet at the base of the stone. He stands there wordlessly for a long time, his fingers running over the smooth stone craving for his mother’s comforting touch. 

When the sky begins to darken, he takes one long look at the grave before taking train back to his foreign Brooklyn apartment. 

The next time he visits, he finds more words. 

Words to say how lonely he feels, to express this strange homesickness when he was already home, the everyday shock and delight of a home changed overnight. 

Later, the darker confessions come out. The futility of sacrifice, his and a thousand other soldiers, the yearning for the peace of his icy tomb, and deep ravine of pain and confusion of thousand unnamed things. 

He truly was alone in this.