DisneyCW

He hadn’t moved. Not really. Not in any meaningful way. His body had settled into the chair beside your bed with the same heaviness as the grief clawing through his chest. The posture of a man keeping vigil—not for a miracle, not for hope, but for permission. For breath. For proof that the worst had not already come to pass.

Your vitals had trended upward, but cautiously. Hesitant. Like your body was negotiating its way back toward the surface, one breath at a time. He’d watched the numbers climb. Had memorized the pattern of your pulse, the sluggish rise of your lungs. Not like a soldier analyzing a threat. Like a drowning man learning the shape of a lifeline.

He’d stopped blinking after hour ten. Couldn’t risk missing something.

The machines blinked and beeped in time with the tiny metronome of your life. A mechanical lullaby. He hated them. Hated that he needed them. Hated that every sound felt like a verdict.

He hadn’t left your side. Not for food. Not for water. He didn’t sleep. Didn’t really speak. The only movement he allowed was the flex of his vibranium fingers against the mattress, brushing your wrist when your hand lay close enough. Just to feel you. Just to prove you hadn’t turned cold.

Someone had tried to care over the course of the past two days, once. John, maybe. A water bottle. A granola bar. Left neatly on the chair in the corner like Bucky was some feral thing that might be coaxed into eating if no one looked at him too long. He hadn’t touched them. Couldn’t. His body didn’t register hunger anymore. Not while you were still trapped somewhere he couldn’t reach.

And the doctor, he was trying. Bucky would give him that much.

The man’s hands were steady. His tools precise. His voice gentle in a way that had nothing to do with pity. He moved through the room with the kind of patience usually reserved for open flame or grieving dogs. Like he understood the risk. Like he knew exactly how easily Bucky could break something that didn’t deserve it.

But even he was starting to crack.

“Barnes,” the doctor said now, adjusting a new IV bag, this one tinted the color of amber and dusk. Slower drip. “You need to move. Stretch. Eat something.”

Bucky didn’t turn. Didn’t blink. Just kept his eyes on the slight curve of your ribcage where it rose, then fell. Counted again. One, two, three…

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.”

The voice was more tired than sharp now. Less clinical, more human. Like the man had decided it was worth trying, even if he got nothing but silence in return.

“You’ve been in the same position for twelve hours. That arm of yours may be vibranium, but the rest of you’s still flesh and blood. You’re locking up.”

Bucky’s jaw ticked. His throat felt like it was full of gravel. “Not really.”

A pause. Then the soft clink of metal on metal as the IV vial clicked into place.

The doctor exhaled. “She’s stable. There’s no sign of cardiac distress. And she’s not going to wake up in the next five minutes.”

“She might.”

“And if she does,” the man said, gently, “I’ll be here. You’ll be the first to know. You’ll be back in that chair before she knows she was alone.”

Still, Bucky didn’t move.

“I’m sure she wouldn’t want you to rot in a chair.”

That landed.

The words didn’t hit like a punch. They hit like something quieter, something worse. Like guilt pressed into the hollows of his bones. Because of course you wouldn’t. You’d tease him for it, probably. Nudge your foot against his, call him dramatic, ask when the last time he slept was. But your eyes would soften. Your fingers would reach for his.

He could already see it. Hear it. And it was that, that finally pulled him upright.

The motion was sluggish. Weighted. The muscles in his legs screamed like they hadn’t moved in years. He didn’t remember sitting down in the first place.

He stretched once. Just enough to hear something crack in his lower back. The pain was dull, but grounding.

The doctor didn’t say anything else. Just stepped aside, letting Bucky pass without another plea.

He paused in the doorway.

“I’ll be gone ten minutes.”

The doctor’s reply was low. Certain.

“I’ll call you the second she so much as twitches.”

The hallway hit like a punch.

Too bright. Too white. Too clean.

Bucky squinted as he stepped into it, eyes burning from the shift in light, the harsh fluorescence striping the floor like surgical tape. His shoulders hunched automatically, spine curling slightly in on itself, like the walls were too narrow. Like the quiet itself might snap.

His left hand stayed curled, hovering near his ribs—tight, half-clenched. Not from pain. Not from injury. From instinct. From the way his body had learned to brace around things it didn’t know how to hold.

This wasn’t just grief. Not anymore.

This was grief wearing new skin. Fear carved into something more intimate.

He couldn’t stop thinking about it—couldn’t stop tracing back every moment, every silence, every goddamn detail that should’ve screamed at him and didn’t. Eight weeks. Eight fucking weeks. Through briefings. Through missions. Through nights where you’d fallen asleep half-curled into him, your fingers unconsciously resting just above your pelvis like your body already knew what your mouth wouldn’t say.

He still didn’t know how he’d missed it. 

He was trained to detect the minute. Micro-expressions. Breath patterns. A stagger in a step. He could spot a tell from a mile off. Could read body language like Morse. And yet this of all things, you’d hidden it from him so completely that it made his throat tighten with something far worse than anger.

He didn’t know what scared him more: the possibility that maybe you hadn’t known, or that you had.

His feet moved of their own accord, dragging him through the Tower like a shadow without purpose. No real destination. Just inertia. The need to move before the silence ate him alive.

He reached the kitchen before he realized that was where he’d been going.

It was too clean. Too quiet. Stainless steel countertops gleaming like bone under surgical light. He stood at the threshold for a long beat, staring at the fridge, the sink, the stack of unopened water bottles by the wall. The idea of food made his stomach twist. The thought of chewing, swallowing, breathing, felt absurd.

He took a step back.

Then his ears pricked.

A theme song, overacted and sickeningly catchy, filtered in through the far side of the floor. Something dramatic. Overly lit. Voices rising and falling in practiced drama. Probably another doomed marriage and a fake fight in a bridal shop. The kind of television that felt like being lobotomized slowly with a plastic spoon.

Bucky sighed—long, low—and followed the sound.

The lounge was exactly as he expected: half-lit chaos, a blanket half-draped over the floor, a busted remote wedged between two couch cushions, and snack wrappers forming a loose perimeter around a single, surviving water bottle. The air smelled like cheap sugar and stale skin balm.

Yelena was spread diagonally across the couch, all limbs and bruises and indifference. Her braid was halfway undone. Her face was peppered in healing scabs and yellowed bruises like war paint. Her left arm was in a sling. Her expression didn’t flicker when he entered.

“If you say one word about my taste in television,” she said, not looking up, “I will use the last of my upper body strength to throw you out of that window.”

He leaned against the doorframe, arms folding automatically. His voice rasped. “Pretty sure that’s Walker’s favorite window.”

“Even better.”

Silence stretched. Not awkward. Not empty. Just weighted.

She looked at him then. Really looked. One brow ticked up just barely.

“How is she?”

He swallowed. The question landed like a blade. Not because of what it was, but because of how she asked it. No fluff. No hope. Just truth, asked gently.

“She’s…holding on.”

Yelena turned off the TV with a flick of the remote. Static silence took its place.

He crossed the room and sat opposite her, careful to leave space between them. Close enough to talk. Not close enough to fall apart.

Yelena shifted upright, knees tucking under her, good arm slung over the back of the couch. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the stitches in her brow.

“No change?”

“She’s still stable. Breathing on her own now.”

She nodded slowly. “That’s something.”

He nodded too, but it was hollow. Mechanical. Like an echo of emotion he wasn’t sure he still had access to. 

He didn’t know what comfort was supposed to feel like anymore, and maybe he’d never really known. Not outside the tiny, quiet moments he stole when the world wasn’t looking. The curve of your spine when you slept. Your voice in the morning before coffee. The small, human nothings he’d convinced himself were enough.

His hand scrubbed over his jaw, slow. Deliberate. Then it dragged down his face—like maybe if he pulled hard enough, he could get it off. Peel the grief away with skin. It didn’t work, of course. 

He looked at Yelena for a long time before he spoke again. Looked at her like she might hold an answer he didn’t know how to name. Because if you had told anyone, if you’d shared even a sliver of the truth with someone, it would’ve been her. 

Not just because she was your typical partner in the field, but because you trusted her. The kind of trust that wasn’t performative or professional or born of trauma. It was earned. Forged in fire. The two of you had moved like pieces of the same machine, wordless, effortless. A kind of bond he hadn’t dared interrupt, let alone question.

Sisters. That’s what Yelena called you once, when she was half-asleep and bleeding and pissed off and didn’t want to go to the med bay.

So if you had told anyone, it would’ve been her. If anyone knew… if anyone had seen something—

“She, uh… She tell you anything?” he asked quietly.

He hated how uncertain it sounded. How thin.

Yelena raised an eyebrow. “About?”

He hesitated. “Before the mission. Did she seem… off?”

Yelena gave him a look. Flat. Blunt. “She was about to walk into an extraction site with me. We’d just gotten off a sixteen-hour flight and neither of us had eaten anything but trail mix without a wink of sleep. Sure, yeah, she was off. So was I.”

“Not like that.”

Bucky’s voice cracked a little on the tail end. His gaze stayed fixed on the far wall, but his hand twitched. That betrayed him.

Yelena narrowed her eyes slightly. Her body stilled. She studied him now, properly. Like she was peeling back something that hadn’t quite fit since he walked in.

He cleared his throat, but it didn’t help. His voice was rough when he tried again.

“Did she say anything… about being sick? Not feeling well?”

And there it was.

The silence shifted. Tilted. Not the kind that filled a room. The kind that pressed against it. Dense and dangerous. It made the space feel smaller somehow, like the walls were leaning in.

Yelena looked down at the bandage on her arm. Picked at the tape. Didn’t answer right away.

“You’re not asking what you really want to ask,” she said.

His chest felt like it had been hollowed out and packed with salt.

“No,” he admitted. “I’m not.”

She didn’t offer comfort. Didn’t look at him with pity. Just sat there for a moment, shoulders tense and jaw tight, trying to find the right words and clearly hating every second of it.

“There was a moment before everything went to hell,” she said, finally. “She stumbled—caught herself, but it looked wrong. Not like a trip. Like… something hit deep. She put a hand to her side. Right here—” She gestured across her abdomen. “Like she was trying to cover it.”

Bucky’s gut turned.

“I asked if she was hit. She said no. But her face—”

Yelena frowned, her brows pulling tight. She was still staring at the spot on her own abdomen where she’d gestured. Her good hand hovered there, fingers flexing like she was trying to summon a memory, something small she hadn’t wanted to let herself look too closely at until now.

“Her face said otherwise. Not pain. Not even fear. Just… panic.”

Bucky said nothing. Didn’t need to.

Yelena’s eyes flicked up to him, and something shifted behind them. A beat passed. Another.

Then: “Wait.”

He met her gaze.

“Did you not know?”

The question hung in the air like smoke.

Bucky blinked, slow. He felt it hit like a punch, despite already knowing the answer himself. It was the kind of question that didn’t need to be asked, only confirmed. Like grief knocking twice just to make sure it really hurt.

Yelena leaned forward, her expression sharper now, not incredulous, just trying to piece together something she thought she already understood. Her stare was forensic. Dissecting. Like he was a puzzle missing pieces she’d thought were obvious.

“You didn’t know,” she repeated, quieter this time.

He let out a breath through his nose, the corner of his mouth tightening—not with humor. Just restraint. “No.”

And that was the worst part, wasn’t it? That he could say it like that, flat and final. Like it was just a fact instead of something that had cored him out.

Yelena’s brow furrowed. “But I thought—I mean… you live with her. You’ve been together for what, four years?” Her hands flailed for a second, then dropped uselessly to her sides. “You do her laundry. You finish her sentences. You know when she’s in pain without even looking at her. And you didn’t notice she was…” She grimaced, rolled her eyes a little like the word physically pained her. “Pregnant?”

He didn’t flinch. Just let out a short breath that didn’t quite qualify as a laugh. “Yeah, well. Turns out knowing her better than anyone doesn’t mean I get to know when she’s…” His jaw tightened. He glanced away for half a second, like the words might knock the wind out of him if he looked it in the eye. “...carrying my kid.”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was heavy. Sobering. Like the air between them had been dragged through wet cement.

Yelena let it sit a beat longer than she had to, then dragged a hand over her face, groaning into her palm. “Fucking hell.”

“Yeah.”

He didn’t look at her. Couldn’t. Because if he saw even a flicker of pity, something in him might fracture past the point of return. But Yelena wasn’t the type to pity. She was sharp where others softened. She watched people like she was measuring how they broke.

And he could feel it, her weighing him now. Calculating the depth of the wound he wasn’t bleeding visibly from.

After a moment: “So you two ever talk about it?”

His mind stuttered. Not at the question, but at how fast his body wanted to say yes. To conjure up something that looked like preparedness. Like this wasn’t a detonation that had left shrapnel buried in his chest.

“What?” he asked, but it wasn’t confusion. Just delay.

Yelena shrugged, more careful with her injured arm. “You know. Having a kid. Wanting one. Or is this more of a surprise than it looks?”

His eyes tracked a scuff on the floor like it might offer absolution. Something to tether to. Some scratch in the surface that made more sense than any of this.

“Last year,” he said slowly, “we talked about adopting one day. One of those half-hypothetical conversations, middle of the night, post-mission adrenaline still burning out. Neither of us said it outright, but…”

But he’d thought about it. Not obsessively. Not in detail. But enough to picture a softer kind of life. A quieter kitchen. Her hands guiding small ones through flour or paint or some messy, human thing. Enough to imagine something more than just survival.

“But it wasn’t off the table?”

He nodded once. “No. Not off the table.”

“And you—” she tilted her head—“thought you couldn’t…”

He gave a low, humorless laugh. The kind that didn’t even try to sound amused. “Didn’t think. Knew. Ran tests. Talked to a doctor off-record. After everything Hydra did, it wasn’t a mystery. They weren’t building soldiers with families in mind.”

His throat tightened. Not at the thought of it, but at how matter-of-fact it was. Like his own mutilation had been itemized on a lab sheet somewhere. Blood type. Bone density. Fertility: unnecessary.

Yelena winced. “Yeah. I figured.”

“So no. It wasn’t a plan. We didn’t think this was even a thing that could happen.” His voice thinned, like it was unraveling from somewhere below his ribs. “We never even talked about this as a possibility.”

That silence returned. Not sharp. Just… encompassing. Like he was slowly being pulled underwater again.

“I think she wanted to tell you,” Yelena said after a moment. “Not just because you deserved to know. But because she wanted you to know. I think she was just… scared.”

Scared.

He’d fought entire wars with less fear than what curled in his chest now.

He stared at the wall. “Of what?”

Yelena pursed her lips. She shifted her weight, glanced down, then back up like the words didn’t come easy. Her jaw worked once, twice, chewing through something she didn’t quite want to say. Not out loud. Not to him. But she said it anyway, voice low.

“Of it not being real. Of what it’d do to you.” A pause. “Of what it might mean if you lost it before it was even yours.”

The quiet that followed made something twist in Bucky’s chest. Not painfully. Just sharply. Like a rusted screw threading deeper.

He sat with it. Let the ache crawl around his ribs like it belonged there. Like it always had. You’d been trying to protect him. That much was obvious now. And he hated it. Hated that you thought he was fragile enough to splinter at the weight of a truth like this, or worse—that he might’ve tried to talk you out of it, out of this, if you had told him.

Maybe he would’ve. Maybe that was the worst part. He’d never wanted to cage you, never wanted to be the reason you sat out a mission or stepped back from something you believed in. But this hadn’t just been another secret. And it had been growing in your chest for weeks while he stood too close to see it.

He couldn’t even pretend it was some one-time accident. Some consequence of a moment that caught the two of you off-guard. Because it hadn’t been like that. It was never like that. You and Bucky had been together too long for carelessness to be novel. You knew each other’s rhythms. You'd learned, over the years, when to reach for restraint, and when not to. And lately...

Lately, things had shifted. Between missions. Between silences. Between the lines of things you hadn’t said. You’d both been coming apart at the edges, held together only by shared exhaustion and the kind of intimacy that blurred lines more easily than it should have. You still touched like the world might end before morning, like maybe if you pressed close enough you could keep it from doing so.

You hadn’t been careful. Not out of recklessness. Not out of neglect. But out of want. Out of love, maybe, twisted and quiet as it sometimes was. Out of that bruised, aching desperation to just feel something good for a moment longer.

He raked his fingers through his hair, exhaled through his teeth, leaned forward with his elbows braced on his knees again. The silence stretched. It wasn’t peaceful. It was just long enough to make everything echo. His thoughts. His regrets. The moment everything had shifted.

And then—unexpectedly, involuntarily—his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Not anything close to joy. But a flicker of dark amusement, bitter at the edges, slipping free like muscle memory.

He huffed once, a dry, humorless chuckle under his breath. His head tipped slightly, like he couldn’t quite believe the words even as he said them.

“We certainly weren’t careful.”

Yelena raised an eyebrow. “I don’t need details.”

“I’m not giving you any.” A beat. “Just… it was about eight weeks ago. After that snowstorm in Tallinn. We were stuck in that awful safehouse with the wood stove and the window that wouldn’t close.”

Yelena groaned. “Oh my God.”

He smirked faintly again, the first flicker of something close to life behind his eyes since he’d entered the lounge. “She made tea from the emergency rations. Burned it. Still drank it. We didn’t sleep much that night.”

“Stop talking.”

“I’m just saying, that might’ve been it.”

Yelena picked up a throw pillow and lightly tossed it at him with her good arm. It hit his shoulder, bounced to the floor.

“Don’t look so smug.”

“I’m not smug,” he said, quieter now. “I’m…” He trailed off, jaw tightening again.

There wasn’t a word for it. Not really. It wasn’t guilt, not exactly. And it wasn’t grief, maybe not anymore. Just a breathless pressure building behind the breastbone, a sinking realization that the past couldn’t be undone, and the future was now something sharp and breakable resting in a hospital bed he wasn’t allowed to touch.

Yelena didn’t press.

He raked his fingers through his hair, exhaled through his teeth, leaned forward with his elbows braced on his knees again. The posture was muscle memory now. He’d taken it in war rooms. In funerals. In places where grief didn’t look like tears, it looked like waiting.

“I just keep thinking,” he said, slowly, “about how I could’ve stopped her. If I’d known. If I’d even guessed. If she’d told me. She wouldn’t have gone into that op.”

“She would’ve.”

His head snapped up. Yelena was looking at him with something blunt and honest in her expression.

“She would’ve gone, Bucky. Maybe not for every mission. But that one? With me? Even with as simple as it was supposed to be.” She shook her head. “She wouldn’t have let me go in alone. Not even if you begged.”

He clenched his jaw, but didn’t argue. Couldn’t. Because she was right. You’d always run toward fire if it meant someone else didn’t burn.

“She made a choice,” Yelena added. “Might not have been the right one. Might not be one you like. But it was hers.”

“I get that,” he said. “Doesn’t mean it didn’t break something.”

Yelena looked at him. Long. Quiet.

Then: “She loves you, you know.”

His mouth pressed into a line.

“She loves you in that ugly, gut-deep way,” Yelena said. “The kind that makes you do stupid shit and keep secrets and hold everything too close because letting go feels like dying.”

“I know.”

She leaned back against the couch, sighing. “So what now?”

He didn’t answer right away. He stared at the floor, at his boots, at the ghost of his reflection in the dark glass of the powered-down TV.

Before he could open his mouth to speak again, a voice shattered the quiet.

“BARNES!”

It tore through the tower like a detonated charge—sharp, raw, wrong. John’s voice. Already too loud. Already too late. Not an alert. Not a call for backup. It was the kind of sound a man only made when something had gone to hell.

Bucky was moving before the echo had even finished. His body surged upward, heart already slamming against his ribs. The couch scraped behind him, forgotten. Yelena’s voice called after him, maybe. He didn’t hear her. Didn’t hear anything but the echo of that voice and the rush of blood in his ears. He didn’t ask what happened. He didn’t need to.

Something in him already knew.

The Tower blurred past in streaks of white and steel. Every hallway looked the same and he hated how he knew this route too well. Hated how his boots skidded on polished tile as he rounded the first corner too tight, one shoulder glancing off the wall like a ricochet. He caught himself and pushed harder. John’s boots were pounding up the corridor behind him, but Bucky didn’t wait for him to catch up. Didn’t wait for context. The dread in his chest had already cemented into certainty.

There was no version of reality where John Walker shouted his name like that and it wasn’t about you.

He hit the last hallway in a dead sprint, lungs burning. The medbay door was open. There were too many bodies moving inside—shadows crossing past glass, beeping monitors screaming their mechanical chorus. The sound was too fast. Too high-pitched.

Something was wrong.

He slammed a palm into the control panel and threw his weight into the door. It hissed open with a reluctant groan, and he was through before it finished retracting, shoulder nearly ripping the frame off the hinge.

And then he saw you.

Not unconscious.

Not still.

Not peaceful.

You were awake, but it wasn’t right. Your body was twisted upright, jerking as you fought the weight of everything wrapped around you, your hands clawing for purchase against the mattress as your chest heaved. Your leg was still caught in the brace, gauze peeking from beneath the sheets. Sweat slicked your skin. You looked like you were suffocating in your own body. Eyes wide, rimmed red, searching the room with a terror so raw it made something inside him break.

The doctor was there, trying to calm you, one hand bracing your shoulder, murmuring something useless. “You’re okay—just breathe—deep breaths, now—”

But you weren’t listening. You weren’t looking at him.

Your eyes were wide and wild, darting toward the door like they were searching for something, someone.

Bucky’s body moved on instinct, all thought stripped down to the bare need to get to you. In three long strides, he was there, by your side, dropping to his knees like he’d been shot.

“Hey,” he rasped, voice tearing out of him, low and cracked. “Hey, hey—baby—”

He reached for you, hands shaking, cradling your face without thinking. His left hand brushed the sweat from your forehead, careful not to catch the edge of the gauze, while the other steadied beneath your jaw. You flinched, just barely, and then your eyes locked with his.

“Bucky?” The sound of your voice scraped across the air like broken glass. Small. Shattered.

His breath hitched. His hands trembled harder. “Yeah,” he got out. “Yeah, it’s me. I’m here. I’m here, sweetheart.”

Your chest jerked again on the inhale—too sharp, too shallow—and your hand reached out, searching. He caught it instantly. Threaded his fingers through yours like it was the only thing keeping him from splintering. Pressed it to his chest. His heartbeat was wild. Disjointed. Loud enough that he was sure you could feel it against your palm.

The doctor’s presence receded. A rustle. A door. Bucky didn’t turn to watch him leave.

You were alive.

Awake.

And fuck, you looked so scared.

Your face was pinched tight, lip trembling, as if the effort of being conscious, of feeling, had finally caught up. He saw it crack behind your expression first. The kind of grief that didn’t make a sound, didn’t wail or scream. It leaked out. As if you didn’t think you were allowed.

His thumb brushed over your cheek, careful of the bruises. His voice cracked again. “You’re okay. You’re safe.”

You nodded, barely. A twitch more than a motion, like the muscles beneath your skin weren’t fully yours yet.

And then you started to cry.

Not the kind of sobbing that tore open the room. No gasps or wails. Just the slow, quiet kind. The kind that leaked out of the corners of your eyes before you could stop it, trailing down temples and into the fabric of the pillow like it didn’t want to be noticed. Like you didn’t want him to notice. You turned your face just slightly, almost instinctively, like the shame had arrived before the grief even had time to settle.

But he didn’t let you.

He shifted forward, the mattress dipping with the weight of him leaning in. His hand found yours again and lifted it to his mouth, thumb sliding across your knuckles before his lips pressed against them. Not romantic. Not desperate. Something quieter. Like grounding wire. Like prayer.

“Don’t do that,” he whispered, voice worn to the threadbare edge. “Don’t hide from me now.”

You shook your head weakly, a raw little hitch in your throat. “I’m sorry—”

“No.”

He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t clench his jaw. But the word had weight behind it now, gravel scraped up from the deepest part of him and shoved out into the space between you. Firm. Final.

“No, sweetheart,” he said again, lower. “Don’t. You don’t have to apologize.”

There was nothing to apologize for. Nothing you could say that would absolve him of the guilt digging like rot beneath his ribs. He should’ve known. Should’ve seen. He hadn’t. And now you were here, crying through bruises and a trembling chest, flinching every time you breathed too deep. And somehow still trying to make him feel better.

You coughed suddenly—sharp and wet, torn from your lungs like broken glass—and he felt the jolt of it like a current to his spine. Your hand flew weakly to your side, fingers curling over your ribs.

He bolted upright, eyes scanning fast. The water bottle, John’s, still sitting untouched at the edge of the tray. He grabbed it in one motion, fingers slick with condensation, and twisted off the cap with a sharp snap.

“Here,” he said, hand slipping beneath your chin as he brought it to your lips. “Slow. Sip.”

Your mouth opened obediently, even as your eyes stayed fixed on him. You drank in small, trembling swallows, each one broken by a pause, a hitch, like your throat hadn’t quite remembered how to work yet.

He watched the whole thing. Didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. Tracked the way your fingers twitched against the blanket, the way your gaze never strayed, like you weren’t entirely convinced he wasn’t just a hallucination pulled from the worst place your brain could go to keep itself calm.

And when you eased back, breath rasping but less jagged now, he didn’t let go. His hand stayed wrapped around yours, thumb moving in slow, steady arcs across your skin like it was the only thing keeping you both tethered to this version of reality.

You exhaled shakily, voice hoarse and small: “You’re really here?”

He swallowed once, hard. “Yeah. ’Course I am.”

There was something in your eyes then—dilated, dazed, but clearer than before. A little softer. Still exhausted, but not vacant. Something heavy, though. Something that clung to your lashes like the tears had left a residue behind. Guilt, maybe. Or grief. Or the bitter, awful cocktail of both.

Bucky could barely look at it.

He reached up again, hand ghosting over your skin, knuckles brushing softly down the side of your temple, just shy of the dressing. You still felt warm. Still felt too breakable. Like your bones hadn’t quite reassembled themselves yet. Like if he pressed too hard, you’d come undone.

His voice barely carried. “I thought I was gonna lose you.”

It cracked halfway through, split open at the edges.

“I thought I already had.”

Your fingers twitched in his, then curled, faint but sure. A tiny squeeze. 

“I didn’t mean to—” you tried again.

“Shh.” He didn’t let you finish. Didn’t need you to. He bent lower, forehead pressing against yours with the barest touch. His breath was warm at your hairline. “It’s okay.”

The silence that followed wasn’t hollow anymore. It wasn’t panic or pain or grief. It was heavy, yes. But full. Saturated with everything neither of you had words for yet. The kind of silence that followed survival. That dragged behind it the reality that you were still here, but not without cost.

He could feel the shift in you before he saw it. Your hand never left his, but your eyes drifted somewhere past him, toward the far wall, toward the static haze that came in the aftermath. That place in the brain where the adrenaline ebbed, and all that remained was the cold cut of clarity. The damage assessment. The inventory of pain.

Your voice—faint, frayed, clinical—cut through the quiet.

“What’s the damage?”

He didn’t answer at first.

He couldn’t.

His eyes stayed on your face like they were the only thing still anchoring him, searching, scanning, cataloguing every microexpression, every flicker of pain or panic or vacancy that might mean you were slipping again. But you weren’t. You were still. Too still. Awake and alert in the way that wasn’t relief but calculation. That familiar, awful quiet of someone waiting to absorb bad news before it could punch them off the edge of the world.

Bucky swallowed hard. His throat was dry, like it had been scraped raw by the last two days.

“You want the short list,” he said, voice low, “or the one that makes me wanna tear the drywall off every room in this goddamn building?”

Your mouth twitched, barely. Just a ghost of movement. Not even a smile, really. But something lived in it. Something human. And in this room, right now, that felt like a fucking miracle.

“Short,” you whispered, voice sanded down to nothing.

He nodded, jaw working.

“Skull fracture. Minor.” He kept his voice steady, clinical, even when it cost him. “Caused your brain to swell. They’re monitoring it.”

You nodded once. Like it wasn’t news. Like you’d already suspected.

“Concussion,” he added. “A bad one.”

Another nod.

“Three fractured ribs. Bruising’s still showing up. And your leg…” His voice caught. The next words scraped out of him like gravel. “The tibia’s shattered. They had to pin it—metal plates, screws, the whole thing. There was muscle tearing up your thigh. Some tendons nearly severed.” He exhaled hard, jaw clenched. “Surgery went fine. But… you lost a lot of blood. They said it missed an artery by half an inch.”

You didn’t flinch. Just blinked slowly, lashes heavy. But he saw it. The way your gaze drifted upward, toward the ceiling, like it might help you count it all up, like if you lined the injuries up one by one, they’d feel smaller. Less catastrophic. He knew that ritual. He’d done it a hundred times. Probably more.

He kept going, quieter now. “They think you’ll walk again. No permanent damage. But it’s gonna take time. Therapy. A lot of it.”

You didn’t speak.

You just breathed, shallow and uneven, your hand still wrapped weakly in his.

And then, after a long pause, you asked: “Anything else?”

That was the one that hit him.

He didn’t let go of your hand. Just tightened his grip slightly, like the contact might hold the words in his chest a little longer. He didn’t want to say it. Didn’t want to be the one to say it. But the longer he held it, the worse it twisted.

His chest tightened. Something old and brutal stirred beneath his ribs.

“There’s…” He hesitated. “There is something else.”

The words dragged, clumsy and raw-edged in his mouth. He didn’t want to hurt you with them. But not saying them felt worse. Felt like lying.

“The doctors—when they ran tests. There was something they saw. And I figured…”

He trailed off. Let it hang there, unspoken. Let the weight of it settle. Let it be.

“I figured if it’s true,” he said, softer now, “then maybe there’s something you need to tell me.”

Your breath hitched.

And that was it.

You didn’t even have to say a word, he felt it. The shift. The slow crumpling of your expression, like something inside you had finally, finally given way. Not a crack. Not a collapse. Just the quiet undoing of someone who’d held something too tightly for too long.

You looked away, jaw trembling, your fingers squeezing his with what little strength they had left.

And then your eyes went glassy. Again. Not like earlier, this time it was different. This time it was surrender. The kind that didn’t come with peace. Just exhaustion. And shame.

Bucky leaned in, closer now. Closer than before. Closer than breathing.

He already knew. Of course he knew. He felt it, like some part of him had already absorbed the truth from the doctor without needing to hear it from you. Like it had been living in his bones since the second he saw you on that hospital bed, trying to claw your way out of your own panic.

Still, he needed the words. Needed them like he needed air.

His voice broke open around them. “Is there something you wanna tell me?”

You gave the faintest nod.

But it wasn’t enough. Not now. Not after this. Not after everything that had nearly gone unsaid for too long.

“Hey,” he said, quick, his hand rising to your cheek again as you tried to turn away, fingers brushing away the heat, the dampness, the tremor in your jaw. “Sweetheart, don’t—don’t do that. Look at me, please.”

Your eyes flicked back to his. Dazed. Gutted.

“Can you use your words for me?” His voice cracked at the end, and he hated that it did. Hated how fucking wrecked he sounded. But it was real. All of it was real.

You didn’t answer. Not right away. Just stared at him like you didn’t know how to say it out loud. Like it would hurt worse to give it breath.

So he leaned in more. Close enough that his forehead nearly brushed yours. Close enough to feel your breath stutter against his skin.

“Please,” he whispered. “I need to hear you say it.”

There was a beat, one long, unbearable second, and then your lips parted, dry and trembling.

“I’m… I’m pregnant.”

He closed his eyes.

It hit like the floor vanished beneath him again. Like the bottom dropped out of everything he’d been standing on and left him suspended in a place that was neither sky nor ground, just air and weight and the crushing realization of something true. Not a guess. Not a scan. Not a test. Not a stray look from the doctor that he'd pretended not to understand. This was different. This was you.

You had said it. And somehow that made it real in a way nothing else had. Because it wasn’t just a result of a test anymore. It wasn’t a what-if buried beneath bruises and lab results. It was something inside you, and you were still here, and you had said it.

When he opened his eyes again, they burned. Wet at the corners. Not from crying, at least, not yet. But from the pressure behind his ribs, the kind that didn’t let up, the kind that twisted inward like grief that hadn’t decided whether it was going to be joy or devastation yet. 

His gaze found you again, and it struck him—not for the first time, but harder now—that you were everything at once. A miracle. A mistake. A what-if. A why-now. A please, not like this. You were pain and tenderness and a future he never let himself imagine, all balled up in the ruined body of someone he couldn’t bear to lose.

“How long?” he asked, and his voice didn’t sound like his own. It was scraped raw, like it had been dragged over gravel. He hated the sound of it. Hated that it felt like something he’d earned.

You blinked, and the tears started falling again—no gasping, no shaking, just falling, like the moment had finally reached its limit. You didn’t try to stop them. You never did with him. And somehow that made it worse.

“I found out the day before you left,” you said, and your voice cracked halfway through the sentence like it didn’t want to carry the weight of it either.

He blinked, brow knitting. “My mission?”

You nodded. “You came home late. With takeout. You remember?”

He did. Of course he did. Chinese, half cold. You’d eaten at the counter and then curled on the couch in one of his sweatshirts, face unreadable, eyes tired. He remembered thinking it was strange how quiet you were, how long it took you to answer when he asked about your day. But he’d been in his own head, too. Getting ready to leave again. Trying not to show how much it gutted him to keep doing that.

You kept talking, and he couldn’t stop watching you. Couldn’t look away even if he wanted to.

“I hadn’t been feeling right the past few weeks. Sick in the mornings. Off in the field. I thought it was just… nerves. Burnout. But something felt wrong. Or right—I didn’t know.” You gave a breathy, broken laugh, and it punched right through him.

You looked at him, finally. Really looked. And it nearly leveled him.

“I bought a test. Took it that night. Then two more. I—I just needed to be sure.”

His hand moved without thinking, brushing your hair back again even though it didn’t need to be. He just needed to touch you. Needed to prove you were still warm beneath his fingers. 

You swallowed hard, voice barely audible now. “I was gonna tell you. I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t.” It came out soft. Not an accusation. Just grief. Just ache.

“I was scared.”

He didn’t even nod, just sat there, still as a statue, except for the way his hands trembled where they touched you. You reached up, your fingers barely grazing the center of his chest like you weren’t sure if you were allowed to. Like maybe he’d pull away.

He didn’t.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen,” you said. “We talked about adoption. About maybe someday. But you were so sure it couldn’t—after everything. After Hydra.”

Bucky’s breath hitched. And it wasn’t even just knowing from a doctor that he was sterile. It was just because it felt right. That there’d be consequences for what they’d done to him. For what he’d survived. It made sense that something had been taken. That something had been broken so badly it couldn’t come back.

And now you were telling him maybe it hadn’t been. That something had come back. That something had grown anyway, in spite of all of it. In spite of him. He didn’t know how to handle that.

You looked at him, voice small. “That’s why I thought maybe it wasn’t real. Or wouldn’t stick. Or it’d be gone before I even told you and then I’d have to watch your heart break all over again and it’d be my fault—”

“Stop.” His voice cracked, rougher now as he leaned in and cradled your jaw in one hand, thumb brushing the edge of your cheekbone. “Don’t do that. Don’t apologize. You hear me?”

You did, but it didn’t stop your face from twisting, eyes glassing up again, bottom lip trembling.

“I didn’t know if it was good news or bad,” you whispered. “Didn’t know if you’d feel… trapped. Or broken. Or—fuck, I don’t know—like it was a mistake. It’s been a long time since we talked about kids. I just—I didn’t want to ruin it.”

Your voice fractured under the weight of it, and the tears came again. This time openly. No attempt to hide them.

“I didn’t want to lose the version of us we already had just because something changed.”

And god, didn’t that cut him straight through.

Because he remembered all of it. Every version of you. The good years. The ugly ones. The grief you both carried like it was stitched into your skin. And somehow, through all of it, you’d stayed. You’d loved him without asking for anything back he wasn’t ready to give.

And now here you were, thinking this would be what ruined it. Thinking you would be the thing that made him run.

But Bucky had spent half his life running. From handlers. From shadows. From himself. And you were the only thing he’d ever run toward.

“Sweetheart,” he breathed, the word cracking in his mouth like it didn’t quite know how to exist there. “No.”

You looked at him like you’d been expecting the end of something. Like you were already mourning it. Like this was the part where he recoiled, went cold, started folding in on himself like he always did when the world got too loud. And Christ, hadn’t he earned that kind of reaction? Hadn’t he spent years teaching people not to expect softness from him?

But not you. Never you.

“I’m sorry, I thought you’d be angry.”

“Stop.” He didn’t raise his voice, but something in it shifted—firmer now, less frayed, like he had to build a wall around the wreckage or it’d all come loose again. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

“But—”

“No.” His hands were already moving before he finished saying it, catching your face like you were something fragile and burning. His thumbs swept beneath your eyes, brushing away the tears as fast as they came, but it was a losing battle. Not because you were falling apart, but because he was. Because you’d been alone, carrying something too heavy for one person, and somehow you were still here.

“You were scared,” he said, voice low and rough. “And you were right to be. You’ve been through more than anyone should ever have to carry. And then you found this out—” His breath hitched. “And you were…alone.”

That was the part that gutted him.

Not the secrecy. Not even the fear. But the fact that you’d carried it without him. That he hadn’t seen it. That he hadn’t been there.

“You didn’t ruin anything,” he said, slower now, like the words were costing him. “You are everything.”

You flinched at that. Like it hurt more than it helped. And maybe it did. Maybe it was too much to hear right now. Maybe it sounded like blind devotion when all you could feel was your own broken edges.

“I didn’t know if you were ready—”

“I’m not,” he said, and it surprised even him how quickly the words came out. “Not really.”

His eyes stayed locked on yours. There was no shame in the confession. No edge of defense. Just the raw, open thing that sat under his ribs now. “I didn’t think it was even possible.”

You opened your mouth, some instinct to explain, maybe. To shrink yourself down. To protect him from it.

But he stopped you with a gentle touch, thumb against your lips. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want this. Doesn’t mean I don’t want you.”

His hand slipped to the side of your neck, the pad of his thumb resting over the fluttering pulse beneath your skin. Still beating. Still alive.

“That I wouldn’t have held you through every second of the fear,” he murmured, “every second of the unknown.”

You blinked like the words were too much. Like they didn’t fit inside your chest.

“I would’ve gone to every appointment,” he said, quieter now. “Bought every fucking prenatal vitamin they had. Picked fights with whole teams if it meant keeping you grounded, if it meant keeping you safe.”

That made you laugh, but it broke halfway through, tipping into a sob. You turned your face toward his hand like you didn’t want him to see it. He let you. He didn’t push.

“Bucky—”

“I would’ve stayed,” he said, leaning in. His lips found your temple, then your forehead, the bridge of your nose, every patch of skin he could find that wasn’t bruised or bloodied. He kissed you like he was trying to rebuild you from the outside in.

“I will stay.”

It came out steady. Sure. Not a promise, because promises were things that broke under pressure, and you didn’t need something fragile right now. You needed something that would hold.

“Whatever happens next,” he said, “I’m not letting you go through it alone.”

You didn’t answer. Not at first.

Your gaze dropped, eyes unfocused, like the words were caught somewhere in your throat and you had to chase them down. He watched the tension ripple through your shoulders, the way your fingers tightened in the blanket. The silence stretched, but not uncomfortably. Not for him. He’d wait as long as it took.

Finally, your voice came, low and raw:  “…Did the doctors say anything about…” A pause. A thick swallow. “About the baby?”

The word sounded strange coming from you. Soft. Uncertain. Like it still didn’t feel real. Or like you were afraid saying it too loud would shatter it.

Bucky exhaled slowly, nodding once. “Yeah.”

Your eyes locked onto his like they were trying to read between the lines, like maybe you’d only believe the truth if you found it buried behind the seams of his expression. You didn’t blink. Neither did he.

His thumb moved over your knuckles in slow, steady sweeps. His other hand, the cold one, stayed braced against your waist, careful not to press too hard against the bruised ribs beneath. He hadn’t realized he was holding you like that until you shifted and his grip tightened automatically. Like letting go would mean starting over. Like the second he loosened his fingers, the nightmare would start again.

“They’re being careful,” he said, quieter now. Not soft, just real. “Real careful. You took a hit to the ribs. Abdomen too. Enough to scare them. But your oxygen’s been steady since you got here. Monitors haven’t spiked. No more signs of internal bleeding.”

You nodded, just barely. But the panic was still flickering behind your eyes like a match that wouldn’t go out.

“They want to do an ultrasound once your vitals stabilize. Maybe tonight since you’re awake now.”

Your breath hitched at that, shallow, shaky. And he saw the shift immediately. The fear latching on. That kind of fear didn’t announce itself. It crept in behind the words. Behind the hope.

“But,” he said, firm enough to make you meet his eyes again. “No one’s said anything bad. You hear me? Nothing.”

You nodded again, slower this time. Still watching him. Like you needed to be sure he wasn’t just saying it to keep you from unraveling. Like you didn’t quite believe you deserved that kind of reassurance.

Your grip on his hand tightened. He let you crush his fingers.

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” you whispered. “That it… that they might not—”

“Don’t.” It came out sharper than he meant, cutting through the room like a snap of frost. You startled, just a little, but he was already softening, already leaning down, brushing his lips to the back of your hand.

“We’re not going there,” he said, voice rasped now. “We’re not grieving something that’s still here. Not when you’re alive. Not when they’re alive.”

You swallowed hard. Another tear slipped down your cheek. He watched it fall like it had weight. Like it mattered.

“I didn’t even know I wanted this,” you said. “Not really. Not now.”

Bucky’s hand found your face again, thumb catching that tear before it could disappear into the bandages. Your skin was warm. Too warm. But it grounded him.

“It’s okay if you didn’t,” he murmured. “It’s okay if you still don’t know what the hell to do with it. We’ve been crawling through the wreckage of wars and redacted missions for a long fucking time. This world’s never offered us softness without strings.”

You blinked at him, raw and blinking through the blur.

“But you know what?” he said, quieter now. Like the words were meant just for you.

“There’s never been anything more worth the chaos.”

You looked like he’d hit something in you. Something deep. Something you didn’t have the breath to argue with.

“And if this job makes it harder,” he added, “I’ll leave it.”

You stiffened, but he didn’t falter.

“I’ll walk. Burn the whole goddamn thing down if I have to. I don’t care what Val thinks. I don’t care what she threatens. You and this kid come first.”

Your face shifted, a flicker of disbelief bleeding in, like you wanted to argue, or maybe just needed to hear it again, slower this time. But he didn’t repeat himself. He didn’t need to.

Because he meant it.

“I’ll get us a place no one knows,” he said, his voice low, steady, dangerous in its conviction. “Back roads. Quiet. A garden if you want one. A porch swing. You wanna disappear? I’ll make us ghosts.”

Your lip quivered. You tried to push yourself up again and flinched. His hands were already there, bracing your back, cradling your shoulder, fingers spreading to support everything the rest of the world had shattered. 

“Hey—no, don’t push it,” he murmured. “I’ve got you. Just stay with me.”

Your voice rasped against the stillness. “I am with you.”

It broke something in him. Clean.

Then your hand started to move, trembling and slow, dragging upward across his chest. He felt it like a brand. Your fingers curled around the fabric near his collar like you were searching for something to tether yourself to. Something to make this real.

He recognized the look in your eyes before you even moved.

That hunger. That urgency. That quiet desperation that came after surviving something you didn’t think you would. You were looking at him like maybe he was the only thing keeping the ground under you. 

“Hey—” he started, already moving to stop you, already thinking of your ribs, your head, your leg—thinking too much.

But you didn’t let him finish. You shut him up the only way that worked.

You kissed him.

It was shaky. Salt-slicked. Your lips trembled against his, but you didn’t stop. Not even when you let out a quiet sound in your throat and pulled him closer by the front of his shirt. Not even when your tears mixed with his on the seam of your mouths.

It was the kind of kiss that tasted like everything you were both still afraid to say. Like panic and relief. Like I love you and I thought I’d never get to again.

And Bucky gave into it like a drowning man breaking through the surface. He let the whole weight of it hit him, your lips, your hands, your body half-limp but still fighting to reach him.

He kissed you deeper, one hand cradling the side of your face, the other braced beneath your back, adjusting you just enough to take the pressure off your injuries without breaking the moment. Your tears soaked his cheek, his fell into your hair.

You broke the kiss slowly, like it cost you something to let it go. You didn’t lean back far. Just enough to speak. Your breathing was uneven, and your lashes were clumped with tears, and your voice cracked open like a wound.

“You’re sure?” Your fingers were still balled into his shirt like a lifeline. Like if you let go, the whole world would tilt sideways again. “You’re really sure you want this?”

He didn’t even blink.

“I want you,” he said, and his voice didn’t shake, it burned. “I want every version of you. The soft parts, the sharp ones. The days you don’t talk. The nights you curl away from me and think I don’t notice. I want every mile that brought you here—even the ones you had to crawl through.”

You stared at him, eyes shining like you weren’t sure how to hold that kind of devotion.

“I want this life if it means having it with you,” he continued, slower now. “Whatever it looks like. Whatever comes with it. The bleeding, the fear, the joy. The baby. All of it.”

Your lips parted, but no sound came.

You looked so small in that bed. So fucking fragile. But still you didn’t stop reaching.

“I don’t know how to do this,” you whispered, and it was like watching someone confess to murder—like it cost you something to admit you were scared.

“I don’t either,” he murmured, brushing his lips along the curve of your cheek, then your jaw, then the shell of your ear. Each kiss a soft defiance. “But we learn. Together.”

Your nod was almost imperceptible. But he felt it. Forehead brushing his. Your body still trembling faintly from the fever, the shock, the aftermath of pain.

And then, for just a heartbeat, everything fell away.

There was no Valentina. No Black Site rendezvous. No tower briefings or encrypted channels or ghosts whispering orders from the grave. No guilt. No war. No Winter Soldier.

Just you.

The woman he had followed into hell a dozen times over.

The woman who had looked at his jagged edges and stayed.

The woman carrying his child.

The thought split through him again like a tectonic shift. He could feel it echo down to the soles of his feet. Like the floor of his world had cracked open and there was something alive growing in the center of it.

He was going to be a father.

The words didn’t feel real, not in the way other men said it. Not with joy or expectation or the giddy relief of an unburdened life. For Bucky Barnes, the thought came like a wound. Beautiful. Terrifying. Unthinkable. It carved through his ribcage with the same precision the Hydra medics once used to break him apart.

He was going to be a father.

He blinked hard. Swallowed against it. His body didn’t know how to carry that kind of truth. The part of him that had been made in a lab, broken in the field, and frozen between wars didn’t have the language for it.

How the fuck could a man like him build a life? What business did he have holding anything that soft?

He’d only ever been taught how to destroy.

But now you were lying in his arms, bruised and bleeding and still loving him. Still holding him like he could be something good. Something safe.

There was life inside you.

His blood. Your breath. Some fragile flicker of possibility already blooming beneath your skin. And you hadn’t told him because you thought he’d see it as a mistake. Because the world had made you believe this love came with a limit. A ceiling. A finish line you were always going to lose.

But Bucky wasn’t going to let it take this from you.

From them.

From him.

Not again.

He looked at you, really looked, and saw everything he needed to see. The way your lip trembled from the effort of staying upright. The bruises peeking beneath your collarbone. The scrapes along your knuckles. The tears still drying on your cheeks.

And all he could think was: I will give you peace even if it kills me.

Not just safety. Not just freedom.

Peace.

The kind of quiet that doesn’t come with a perimeter check. The kind of rest you don’t have to earn.

He’d give you the garden. The porch swing. A patch of earth without mines buried underneath it. Somewhere you could breathe.

Somewhere your child could grow up without hearing gunfire in the distance.

He kissed you again, slower this time, reverent, the way some people kiss rosaries or grave markers or names carved into stone. The vow wasn’t spoken, but it lived in the seam of his mouth.

And when you sighed against him—spine curving, fingers loosening, your body finally softening under his hands—he held you like you were the only thing on this side of the world that still made sense.

He was going to be a father.

And he was going to earn it.

It had been two months since the mission.

Sixty-one days since the world went sideways, since breath turned sharp in your throat and your body became something unrecognizable beneath you. Not broken all at once, but piece by piece. Trap. Shrapnel. The sound of your own voice ricocheting back into your skull as Yelena tried to keep you conscious. A dull roar behind your eyes. Pressure blooming behind your ribs until your vision narrowed to flickering static and the sickly-sweet taste of copper.

Sixty-one days since you’d hit the ground and thought that this might be it. That you’d die before ever telling Bucky. Not just that you were pregnant, but that you’d known. That you’d kept it. Carried it. Chosen silence.

Recovery hadn’t been kind. It was violent in its own way. Slow, humiliating, full of bruises that bloomed days after the worst of it, as if your cells couldn’t keep up with the trauma. You tibia had shattered clean through, bad enough that they warned you the pins might leave nerve damage. The ligament in your shoulder had to be stapled back to bone. Your ribs cracked every time you so much as rolled over wrong. And still, beneath all of it, something impossibly small and undefeated kept hanging on.

You spent the first three weeks flat on your back with wires in your veins and compression cuffs hissing against your legs. You couldn’t sit up without the room pitching. Couldn’t look at your own body without flinching. The swelling in your leg made it hard to see where skin ended and pain began. Physical therapy came next, slow, ritualistic, and absolutely maddening. You learned how to walk again with a leg that didn’t want to bear your weight. Learned how to trust your body again when it had let you down.

But the worst part wasn’t the pain.

It was the stillness.

It was waiting.

Every hour that passed without something going wrong felt like a miracle. Every flutter, every change in pressure, every pang of nausea sent lightning up your spine. You memorized your pulse. Learned how to breathe through the tightness. Tried not to spiral when the nurses adjusted the fetal monitor too slowly.

And Bucky didn’t leave. 

Not once. Not for rounds, not for food, not even when the doctors gave up on asking. He carved out a place beside your bed like it was his own personal foxhole—boots still on, dog tags twisted around one wrist like a tether, a half-eaten protein bar slowly fossilizing on the windowsill. He slept when your vitals stabilized and only then, slumped sideways in the chair with his arm stretched across the mattress like it was a tripwire. If anything had tried to take you, it would’ve had to go through him first.

You’d asked him once to maybe go home for the night. Just to sleep. Just to rest. You’d tried to phrase it like concern, not a plea. And he’d looked at you like you’d just asked him to leave you behind on a battlefield. His jaw had gone tight. He hadn’t answered.

You didn’t ask again.

The doctors stopped enforcing visiting hours after day three despite Bucky never following them in the first place. They knew a losing battle when they saw one. One of the surgeons muttered something about “liability” and “risk assessment” and then waved a hand like absolution. And after a week of watching Bucky drag his jacket over his lap and pass out upright in that cursed chair, John and Ava showed up with a cot they’d stolen from one of the lower floors. They didn’t ask for permission. Just wheeled it in under cover of night, Ava smuggling in a clean blanket under her coat while John sweet-talked the nurse on duty.

And for once, Bucky hadn’t argued.

He didn’t use it at first. Just stared at it like it was a trick. But eventually, somewhere around week two, he gave in. Lay down beside your bed in silence, metal arm tucked beneath his head, body curled on his side facing you like he couldn’t risk not seeing. Like if he blinked, you might vanish.

He kept track of every single thing. How many steps it took to get from the bed to the sink. What time your meds were due. Which nurse was too rough with your IV. He packed a drawer full of electrolyte packs and nausea bands and ginger chews, refilled it when it ran low. He built a little fortress around your recovery and dared the world to breach it. You woke up once to find him reading the fetal development section of the Mayo Clinic handbook, his brow furrowed like he was decoding a bomb schematic.

And he touched you constantly. Not possessively, but reverently. Like he was making sure you were still real. His hand on your calf when you stretched. His palm cupped over your wrist when your oxygen dipped. The barest graze of metal fingers along your belly during the night, like he was afraid the baby might disappear if he didn’t keep them both grounded.

Even now, when the worst of it was technically behind you, he stayed close. Never looming. Never smothering. Just… there. A quiet presence, always just outside your peripheral vision. 

You were trying—really trying—not to let it make you weak. Not to slip into dependence. You weren’t fragile. You’d survived worse. But surviving wasn’t the same as healing. And healing meant you had to accept help. Which, to be honest, was never your strong suit. Still, you let him carry the things that hurt too much to hold. Let him kneel beside you when the pain gripped hard and fast, just so you had something steady to lean against. And he never flinched. Not once.

The day you were finally discharged, the air felt different. Brighter. Like it had cracked open into color again. No beeping monitors. No antiseptic sting in your nose. No hospital gown sticking to your back. Just you, dressed in soft clothes that didn’t feel like armor, your crutches under one arm, and Bucky’s hand firm on the small of your back as he walked beside you.

They didn’t send you home. Not all the way. You and Bucky had your own place. But this wasn’t that. This was the Tower. Your floor. A team necessity, they said. Close monitoring. Short travel time for follow-ups. But you knew what it really was: the closest thing to freedom the doctors would allow for the time being, and the only thing that let Bucky sleep at night.

The elevator ride up was almost sacred. Neither of you spoke. The soft hiss of the doors. The low hum of the lift. The shuffle of your weight shifting as you leaned too hard on your good leg. Bucky’s breathing, slow and deliberate beside you, like he was counting every second between here and the finish line.

You’d thought you’d go straight to the couch. Sink down. Sleep. Let your bones settle into something that wasn’t plastic or sterile or mechanical. Something that might remember comfort.

Instead, the moment the door opened—

“SURPRISE!”

You nearly went down again.

Not from pain this time. From shock.

Your body tensed before you could stop it, heart jumping into your throat, and your hands gripped the crutches too hard. The noise hit you first—loud, jarring, echoing down the hallway like gunfire. People clapping, someone cheering too loud. You blinked, stunned, and your vision went white again for half a second, panic-flash, pain memory. 

But you didn’t fall, because Bucky was already there, arm locking gently around your waist like he’d been waiting for it, like his body knew yours better than muscle memory ever could. You sagged into him with a strangled breath, eyes wide, chest heaving.

The room was a goddamn disaster.

Not in the catastrophic, world-ending way you'd gotten used to, but in the glittery, half-hearted chaos of people who meant well and had absolutely no business wielding craft supplies.

Streamers drooped from the ceiling like wounded bats, sagging under their own weight. Someone had clearly gone rogue with tape, probably John, if the duct-taped corners and crooked lines were anything to go by. A few were knotted in the light fixtures. One end trailed down the side of the TV, obscuring the remote sensor with a deflated puff of metallic purple.

Balloons littered the space like confetti after a storm. One floated lazily by, a silvery orb emblazoned with HAPPY RETIREMENT—the word RE aggressively scribbled out in thick Sharpie strokes, like someone had started to give up halfway through and then decided to lean in. Another was aggressively pink, with IT’S A GIRL? scrawled in sharp, trembling font, the question mark oversized and tilted.

Your eyes caught on a banner.

Far wall. Hung at a steep diagonal, taped within an inch of its life, like no one trusted it to stay put. The handwriting changed halfway through, first bold block letters, then loopy cursive, then all-caps at the end. CONGRATULATIONS ON THE SURVIVAL + BABY. The word baby had been outlined in glitter. Red glitter. Like blood. Or someone had run out of regular craft supplies and improvised.

There was a cake on the coffee table. Chocolate, judging by the rich, almost-too-sweet scent filling the air, thick enough to cut through the lingering echo of antiseptic that still lived behind your sinuses. The frosting had been roughly smoothed, fingerprints visible in some of the swirls, and tiny plastic dinosaurs stood like sentinels across the top, sunk haphazardly into the icing. One wore a party hat made of a folded gum wrapper. Another had sprinkles stuck to its snout like it’d been face-first in the cake before being posed.

You blinked.

Once.

Twice.

Yelena leaned against the counter, arms crossed like she hadn’t just detonated your nervous system. The sling was gone now, her shoulder bare except for the collar of her tank top, the angry stitches that had once laced her bicep now faded into raised, ruddy scars. She looked better. Less breakable. Still bruised around the edges but standing easy, her weight shifted to one hip like she didn’t have a care in the world. 

“Ha! You should see your face,” she said, a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth, sharp with satisfaction and something almost fond underneath.

“Oh my god,” you said, breath catching. Your eyes couldn’t stop scanning the room. “Is this real?”

It didn’t feel real. Your brain was still trying to catch up, still lagging behind your body like it hadn’t gotten the memo that you’d made it, that you were alive, upright, and standing in the middle of something that looked suspiciously like joy.

“It better be,” Alexei called from across the room, sprawled across the couch like a bear in hibernation, already forking an offensive amount of cake into his mouth.

You blinked again. Ava leaned against the dining table, phone in one hand, a Solo cup in the other, her boot resting on the edge of a toppled party hat like she’d claimed it in a fight. 

“You popped ten,” she said without glancing up.

“They were defective,” Alexei replied, mouth full, utterly unapologetic.

John was suddenly there too, stepping in from the hallway like he’d been waiting for the exact right moment, his hand landing on your shoulder so gently it almost didn’t register. “Welcome back to the land of the ambulatory,” he said, softer than you expected, like maybe he didn’t trust his voice to do more.

You opened your mouth. Closed it. Tried to laugh. Maybe you even did laugh, but it got strangled somewhere in your throat. Your chest started to tighten, then kept tightening, like something invisible had wound a rope around your ribs and was slowly, slowly pulling.

You blinked, hard. It didn’t help.

That stupid-ass banner swam in your vision again—CONGRATULATIONS ON THE SURVIVAL + BABY—and something in you just… gave out.

Not all at once.

First, it was just your throat getting hot. Your face prickling. That subtle shift from I’m fine to something’s not right, and your brain trying to shove it back down like you could muscle through it.

Then came the ache behind your eyes.

Then your jaw clenched, hard enough to make your teeth hurt.

Then—fuck. Fuck.

You felt your face twist without your permission. You gasped for a breath and it hitched mid-way, came out sharp and wet.

The tears were already coming before you could stop them.

You barely had time to register it before Bucky’s hands found your elbows.

“Hey—hey. You alright?” Bucky’s voice was there instantly, soft but alert. “Look at me, baby. You okay?”

You shook your head, or tried to. It came out more like a twitch. Your throat squeezed again, another sob clawing its way out before you could bite it down.

“Shit, are you crying?” Yelena’s voice came from somewhere far off, clipped with concern.

“Oh god,” Ava murmured. “Should we leave?”

Everyone froze.

You could feel it in the air, the tension. The hesitation. Chairs scraping softly. Footsteps faltering. No one sure if they should come closer or back away.

Except Bucky.

He was steady. Still.

One hand stayed at your elbow, the other sliding to your back, his palm warm even through the fabric of your shirt. You leaned into it instinctively, breath stuttering, trying and failing to get your body under control. You felt wrecked, suddenly. Unglued.

And not in pain. Not physically.

But like your skin didn’t quite fit anymore. Like you were vibrating out of yourself. Like you’d been holding your breath for two months and your body had finally remembered how to exhale and the force of it was shattering.

“No—no, wait,” you gasped, words tripping over each other as you half-laughed, half-sobbed, your hands flailing up like that could somehow press it all back in. “Don’t leave. Please don’t—I’m not—I just—fuck, I love it. I love all of it. I’m just—God, I’m so hormonal or something—”

The shift was immediate. You could feel the tension melt out of the room like someone had opened a valve.

“Oh thank god,” Ava whispered.

“Jesus,” John muttered behind you, dragging a hand down his face.

Yelena was the first to move, always the first after Bucky, stepping in with a crumpled napkin and dabbing at your cheek with a gentleness that almost made it worse. “Could’ve warned us, mama,” she said, though her voice had softened. “Thought we broke you.”

“I’m okay,” you managed, voice raw and hoarse. “I’m okay. I didn’t mean to—fuck, I didn’t mean to freak everyone out.”

You wiped at your face with the heels of your hands, even though it did absolutely nothing to stop the tears. The laugh that bubbled up was breathless and wrecked, and it tore through you like you were made of paper.

Alexei cleared his throat like he was preparing to deliver a eulogy. “Ah. Pregnant women. So emotional. Like swans in war time.”

There was a beat of silence. Then John elbowed him. Hard.

You laughed again, this time with your whole chest. Ugly and hiccupped and soaked in snot and saltwater, but real. You bent forward a little, still gripping Bucky’s hand like it was the only solid thing in the room, and pressed your other palm to your face.

And that was when you realized just how much tension you’d been living in. How your shoulders had never really dropped, even after discharge. How your lungs still tried to ration oxygen like survival was on a timer. Like you might blink and wake up alone again. Bleeding again.

But you weren’t.

You were here. In your quarters, albeit temporary. On your feet. In a room full of dangerous, ridiculous, stubborn people who gave a shit. Who made cake. Who put tiny party hats on plastic dinosaurs.

Bucky squeezed your hand once, firm and steady.

You squeezed back, twice.

“I’m okay,” you whispered again.

A soft shuffle sounded to your right, followed by the quiet scuff of boots—too careful to be casual, too deliberate to be anyone but someone who didn’t quite know how to interrupt. You glanced up through your lashes, still blinking away the last of the tears.

Bob.

He loomed there like he didn’t mean to be looming at all, holding out a plastic cup filled with something gold and cold. His grip was gentle. Hesitant. Like he’d been coached on exactly how to hand it to you and was terrified of getting it wrong.

“Apple juice,” he said, voice pitched low and uncertain. “Not from concentrate. And non-alcoholic.” A beat passed. Then: “Bucky threatened me.”

A sound scraped up from your throat, half-snort, half-sob, and caught hard on the edges. “Of course he did.”

Bob nodded solemnly, leaning in like he was about to share state secrets. “He also threw out half the fridge. Said he couldn’t take any chances with—” he lifted his hands, miming air quotes, “‘poison.’ The yogurt’s gone. So’s the mustard.”

Behind you, you could practically feel Bucky’s glare stare the back of your skull.

“Hydrogenated oils,” he muttered under his breath like a man reading a list of war crimes.

You took the juice from Bob with both hands, careful and slow, your fingers still trembling faintly with the aftershocks. The cup was cold. Real. Tangible in a way your body still wasn’t. You glanced up at Bucky.

He hadn’t moved. Still hovering within reach, close but not crowding anymore, like a tether that refused to snap. He looked calmer now that the sobs had stopped, but you could still see it in him, humming beneath the surface: the tension, the vigilance, the raw instinct to intervene. Always alert. Always tuned to you.

“I’m really okay,” you said softly.

“I know,” he replied, just as quiet. Then, even lower, as if the words themselves could break under the weight of them: “I’ve got you.”

And somehow, impossibly, you believed him.

You took a sip of the juice. Crisp. Tart. The sweetness bloomed across your tongue and grounded you fast, snapping the fog in your brain like a cable pulled taut. You exhaled shakily, chest hitching as Bob gave your arm a single awkward pat, then peeled off to find cake like his job was done.

And then, as if someone had flipped a switch, the party moved on.

Not in a callous way, but in the way teams like yours always had: forward momentum as coping mechanism. You weren’t ready to be touched or questioned, not really, and they knew it without asking. So they moved around you instead, a choreography of casual care, plates swapped out, snacks replenished, John intercepting Alexei mid-toast when his speech about survival veered into a deeply confusing metaphor about Soviet winter training and womb strength.

It was chaos.

It was perfect.

You tried to help once. Reached for a bowl of popcorn. Your fingers barely brushed the rim before a shadow passed behind you, a heat at your back that was all too familiar.

“Uh-uh.”

Bucky’s voice landed low in your ear. His hand closed over yours, gently but with zero room for debate. He plucked the bowl away like you were handing him a live grenade. “Sit your ass down.”

You huffed. “I’m not useless.”

“Never said you were.” He pressed a kiss to the top of your head—brief, warm, unbearably soft—and guided you back toward the armchair like you were something breakable. Like he still saw the bruises beneath the surface, even when you pretended they were gone.

“I could’ve carried the popcorn,” you mumbled.

He set the bowl down in your lap anyway. “And you did. Now sit.”

You rolled your eyes. But you didn’t move again.

He crouched in front of you, arms resting on his knees, eyes scanning your face like he was memorizing it all over again. “Any pain?”

“Only when I laugh too hard.”

Bucky huffed, a slight smile tugging at his face. “So we’ll keep Alexei quiet.”

You snorted. A little too hard. Winced. He caught the twitch in your expression and didn’t call you on it, just let it settle between you.

Your hand drifted to the edge of his sleeve, fingers brushing the worn fabric. “You doing okay?”

He blinked, almost like he hadn’t expected the question. “Me?”

You nodded. “It’s been a lot.”

He exhaled slowly, the sound more muscle memory than breath. One hand came up to your knee, thumb tracing absent circles against the cotton of your leggings. “It’s you who’s been through hell, sweetheart. Not me.”

You didn’t correct him.

Because you both knew the truth.

He had been through it too, just in the long, drawn-out way. In the days and nights where your room stank of antiseptic and machines screamed your vitals while your body fought like hell to hold onto life. In the waiting. In the helplessness. In every second where your breath had gone too quiet and his pulse had raced in panic. In the blood that had been on his hands when he hadn’t even been the one to bleed.

But he didn’t say any of that. Didn’t need to.

He just stayed there at your feet, a silent constant, until someone cranked the music too loud and Bob was convinced to sing karaoke using a salt shaker as a microphone.

You were still laughing when Yelena emerged from behind the cluttered dining table, tissue paper rustling like a warning. Her grin was already wicked, mischief and pride stitched into every step. She dragged a crumpled black gift bag across the counter with the same fanfare someone might use to unveil a cursed artifact.

“It’s not much,” she said. “Just… stupid team shit.”

You blinked at the bag. The tissue paper looked mauled, red and silver and mangled to hell, like Alexei had fought it to the death and lost.

You glanced at Bucky, who raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Then, carefully, you reached inside.

Your fingers brushed cotton. Soft. Small.

You pulled it out slowly, breath catching halfway through.

A onesie.

Pitch black. Newborn sized. The sleeves barely bigger than your palm.

Across the front, stenciled in bold, blocky white letters:

THUNDERBABY.

You stared at it for a beat, your mouth falling open.

It was absurd. Ridiculous. Completely over the top.

The onesie’s bold stencil lettering looked like someone had typed “military chic” into a baby shower Pinterest board and clicked print before thinking twice. The cotton was soft, clearly new, the tag still creased from being rushed out of packaging.

And it was perfect.

A sharp laugh broke out of your chest before you could stop it—sudden, breathless, too full of feeling to be graceful. It bounced off the kitchen tiles, rang loud against the cabinets, startled Bob enough to make his head pop up from behind the fridge like a meerkat on high alert. But the laugh twisted mid-breath, snagged somewhere deep, and turned sideways.

Your throat closed.

The burn behind your eyes came fast.

You pressed the onesie to your chest, clutching it with both hands like it might steady you. The fabric was so small. So impossibly small. It hit all at once, the absurd name across the front, the idea of your baby wearing something that had John Walker’s terrible sense of humor stitched into the seams, the fact that they’d thought to do this at all.

That they’d thought of you.

That they’d seen you. Known. Given a damn.

You didn’t sob. It wasn’t loud or dramatic like before. Just a quiet, wrecking ache that rolled over your ribcage like a wave and left your eyes glassy, your breath caught halfway between laughter and something far too big to name.

Bucky found yours without hesitation, like he always did. His palm was rough, warm, grounding. He didn’t say a word. Just curled his fingers through yours and anchored you there.

His thumb brushed over the back of your hand, once. Twice. Slow and steady like he could map your heartbeat through skin and know it was still his to protect.

You leaned into him without thinking, your shoulder pressing to his, the onesie still clenched tight in your lap. He didn’t move away. Didn’t speak.

Didn’t need to.

“You like it?” Yelena’s voice cut gently into the quiet. Not smug. Not teasing this time. Just soft. Hopeful.

You nodded, voice catching. “It’s perfect.”

Behind the couch, John made a strangled noise that was somewhere between a snort and a half-swallowed chuckle. “I told you it should’ve had night-vision goggles on it.”

“Oh my god,” Ava muttered, voice flat with practiced tolerance.

“Tiny ones,” John added, undeterred. “For tactical situations.”

Yelena didn’t even spare him a glance. She bumped your shoulder with hers and said, “I had to beg the vendor to overnight it. Told him it was for an emergency tactical op baby situation.”

That pulled another laugh from you—wet, shaky, a little hoarse, but real.

You looked down again at the onesie, fingers smoothing over the bold white letters. It still felt a little unreal. But not in the foggy, detached way it had before.

No. This felt different.

For the first time since waking up in that medbay with your body broken and your mind drowning in what-if’s, it didn’t feel like everything was falling apart.

It felt like maybe, just maybe, you were allowed to want this.

This messy, ridiculous, duct-taped-together chaos of a team. This baby. This life.

And Bucky’s hand still held tight to yours, his grip unwavering. Like he wasn’t going anywhere. Like there wasn’t a force on earth strong enough to pull him loose.

You weren’t sure you could’ve pried him off even if you tried.

Not that you ever would.

You still remembered the moment Bucky told Valentina he was stepping back from the field.

He hadn’t asked.

He hadn’t negotiated or framed it like a compromise. There was no pacing. No restless silence. No edge-of-brooding self-doubt. He didn’t chew his cheek or weigh the risks out loud. He just said it. Quiet and even and absolute. The kind of quiet that made people stop talking.

“I’ll take the ops desk,” he said. “And I’m not leaving the Tower again. Not while she’s pregnant.”

Val had opened her mouth—probably to mock him, snarl something about duty or loyalty or pulling his clearance—but he didn’t give her the chance. He turned and walked away, back straight, steps even. Never looked back.

It should’ve been harder. The transition. You’d expected it to be. And in some ways, it was.

The field clung to him. It lived in his shoulders, coiled tight in his spine like he hadn’t figured out how to stop expecting gunfire around every corner. Even when his badge started reading Senior Liaison, even when his hands were on a comm panel instead of a rifle, Bucky still moved like a man who hadn’t learned how to stand down.

But then he’d hear your footsteps outside his office.

Just a shift of your weight, a soft scuff of your heel on the polished floor, the gentle cadence of your breathing with one hand cradling your swollen belly, and he’d melt.

You’d watch it happen in real time. His whole body softened. The tension bled from his shoulders. He’d drop whatever he was holding and rise immediately, meeting you halfway down the corridor like you might vanish if he let you go too long unseen.

You’d never seen him like that before.

Not even after the mission where he thought you’d died. Not even the day you told him you were pregnant.

This was different. It wasn’t just fear, it was something deeper, more instinctual. It lived behind his eyes, crept into the lines of his jaw every time you winced from the weight of your belly, every time your breath hitched or you forgot to eat or someone startled you with too loud a laugh.

And hovering didn’t even begin to cover it.

There was a solid month where you caught him on the Tower’s med floor, interviewing pediatric trauma nurses like he was building a task force. He spent hours Googling prenatal CPR protocols. He downloaded emergency birth apps on three different burner phones. He made a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet. For vitamins.

You weren’t allowed to take the stairs after week twenty. Not once. As if gravity itself had suddenly become hostile.

If you so much as tilted toward a cabinet shelf, he was already at your side—shadow-quick, impossibly steady, murmuring, “I’ve got it, sweetheart. Sit down.”

Once, you teased him. Something light. Something sitcom-worthy. You made a crack about helicopter dads and crib bumpers and babyproofing a hallway. He didn’t laugh.

He just looked at you. Really looked at you. Eyes serious. Steady.

“I used to be a weapon,” he said. “I can’t undo that. But I can control what comes near you now.”

And that was it. End of discussion.

So you let him be scared. You let him take the fear and turn it into something solid, something done. You let him carry your water bottle like it was a bomb about to go off. You let him turn down half the lighting in the Tower because the flickering fluorescents gave you migraines. You let him sleep sitting up for three straight weeks because lying down made you nauseous and he didn’t want you waking up alone. You let him research and talk through baby gates in a hypothetical house you didn’t even live in yet, because just in case.

Because when Bucky Barnes loved something, he loved it like a soldier. With his whole body. With his teeth and his spine and the parts of himself that once tore through cities without mercy. That fire didn’t die when he turned soft.

He just aimed it differently.

And he showed up.

To every appointment.

Every single one. Even the ones you waved off as routine. Even the ones you rescheduled three times because of backup in the parking garage. Even the one that was just a quick form signed for a prenatal massage. He was there. On time. Usually early. Holding your coat like it was his only job. Memorizing the parking level like it was a mission grid.

He sat beside you in every waiting room, his knee bouncing under one palm, his metal hand loosely wrapped around yours like he could will the world quiet just by being present enough.

And when they called your name?

He stood. Always.

He asked more questions than you did. Half the time, you were just trying to remember what snacks you still liked. He was already ten tabs deep in medical journals.

What were the signs of placental abruption? Could it happen without warning? What were the safest sleeping positions during the third trimester? Was the fetal heart rate slightly elevated at your last visit—and was that a concern? What kind of magnesium dosage was too high?

During your first intake appointment, the OB actually stopped mid-sentence. Her eyebrows climbed a full inch.

“Are you in medicine?” she asked, pen pausing on the clipboard.

Bucky didn’t blink.

“No,” he said. Deadpan.

You bit the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing.

The doctor blinked. Paused. Then nodded slowly like she was deciding whether or not to question it further.

He had nightmares a few times during those nine months.

More than a few.

You never asked how many. You already knew he wouldn’t give you the real number.

Sometimes you’d wake to the sound of the bathroom fan running—soft, constant, a hum trying too hard to be innocuous. You’d find him curled on the tile floor, bare feet braced against the cold, elbows on his knees, metal hand cradling his forehead like it could hold the weight of whatever he was still seeing behind his eyes.

Other nights, it was pacing. Back and forth, barefoot in the hallway, dog tags swinging low in one hand like they might tether him back to the now if he just held on tightly enough. Sometimes you’d hear him muttering under his breath, trying to piece together a memory that wasn’t real. Trying to rewrite the ending before it devoured him.

They weren’t always about you anymore.

Sometimes, they were about the baby.

About tiny shoes lying crumpled and blood-soaked on a street he couldn’t name. About an empty crib across a gulf he couldn’t cross fast enough. About a scream that echoed long after he woke, still ringing in his ears even as his throat burned from yelling back.

About his hands not catching. Not saving. Failing.

You never tried to talk him out of the fear. You just found him every time, half-asleep and unsteady yourself, the weight of your belly making movement awkward. But you went anyway. Sat beside him on the cool tile or leaned against the wall at his side, your knee pressed to his, your hand sliding into his with quiet insistence.

You didn’t try to fix it. Just whispered steady truths, even through the hitch in your own breath.

You’re not alone. You don’t have to be perfect. You are already everything this child could ever need, because you never stop trying.

He listened. Most of the time, he believed you.

But he was still Bucky. Still the man who’d survived by never letting his guard drop. He didn’t know how to rest when it came to protecting something he loved. Not completely. Not yet.

So he channeled it.

The nursery became a mission. A full-scale, classified operation.

You found him one evening in the Tower’s common room, hunched over the coffee table with a schematic of HVAC systems spread out like a battle map, a measuring tape looped across his shoulder like a combat sling. There were three different notebooks open beside him and a laser level clamped to the back of a kitchen chair.

When you asked—tentatively—what exactly he was doing, he simply said, “Checking airflow safety metrics for crib placement.”

Apparently, he’d consulted John for help picking a paint color. Claimed John seemed like “a guy who’s spent time around boring domestic shit.” That conversation turned into a two-hour debate about whether beige promoted calming baby vibes or if navy was more tactical and timeless.

They compromised, under duress, on sage green. Yelena had stormed into the room mid-argument, called both of them idiots, and texted you a Pinterest board titled Nurseries That Don’t Suck. It had a surprisingly solid aesthetic.

Yelena also offered to babysit.

The first time, she was still breathing heavily from sparring with Alexei, hair plastered to her temple and one knuckle split open, saying she’d “punch any baby fear in the face.”

The second time, she was quieter. Sat beside the half-assembled stroller on the living room floor and muttered that she’d go get certified in infant CPR if you wanted. Added something under her breath about how American training is always shit anyway.

Ava was, unsurprisingly, more practical.

She sent a spreadsheet. Three, actually.

One with registry suggestions categorized by safety ratings. One tracking gear by function, size, and transportability. And one, ominously titled, EMERGENCY INFANT KITS. Inside it was a fully color-coded chart detailing tactical go-bags, and emergency exits.

Bob, sweet Bob, never made a fuss about it.

But the gifts started showing up anyway. Quietly. Without fanfare. A woven basket of baby booties left just outside your door one morning, none of them hand-knit by him, clearly, but chosen with care. A stack of parenting books with sticky notes marking sections he’d vetted, some with underlines, one flagged skip chapter 6, chapter 7 is better. And once, inexplicably, a bottle of the exact brand of stretch mark cream you’d mentioned once during a team debrief.

You never figured out how he got it. You didn’t ask.

Alexei, of course, took a more… declarative approach.

He marched in one afternoon, arms crossed over his chest like he was preparing to be knighted. “I have seen death,” he intoned gravely. “I have seen birth. I have wrestled a bear. I will be the protector of this tiny warrior!”

No one argued. He said it with such conviction that even Bucky, stone-faced and skeptical, just blinked at him and nodded once.

John, however, did elbow him in the ribs and mutter, “Maybe let’s get through one diaper change before we start bestowing titles.”

Still, no one took the godfather badge away from Alexei.

Not even Bucky.

But no matter the chaos—no matter the cracked jokes, the unsolicited opinions, or the never-ending shipments of baby wipes in bulk—Bucky was the constant.

The anchor.

The steady presence who never flinched, even when everything else cracked at the seams.

He was the one who held your hair back through the morning sickness, rubbed your lower back through the bone-deep fatigue, and massaged your swollen ankles with a kind of reverence that made your chest ache. He kissed your temple when you doubted yourself. Brushed your tears away when you spiraled. Touched your stomach like it was something holy.

Whispered to it at night like she was already listening.

And maybe… maybe she was.

Because by the time you felt that first real kick—sharp, certain, impossible to ignore—Bucky was already there.

He was always there.

Kneeling in front of you, both hands splayed across your belly, eyes wide with something too big to name. Like the whole sky had split open and poured straight into his chest. He didn’t speak for a moment. Just let his forehead rest against your skin, the soft rise and fall of your breath catching on the weight of it.

Then, barely above a whisper:

“Hi, sweetheart. I’m your dad. And I love you already.”

The baby came in early spring.

A girl. Loud and furious. All lungs and fists and the softest downy dark hair you’d ever seen.

She wailed the moment the cold air hit her, but Bucky didn’t move.

Didn’t breathe.

He just stared, stunned silent as they laid her against your chest. His metal hand hovered inches above her back, trembling, like he wasn’t sure if touching her would make her vanish. Like maybe he’d break her just by getting too close.

You reached up—shaky, exhausted—and wrapped your fingers around his.

Guided his hand gently down, resting it against the tiny curve of her spine.

And that was the moment he broke.

Not loudly. Not with sobs or gasping breaths.

Just a quiet shattering.

Tears sliding, unchecked, down his cheeks as he leaned down and pressed his face into your hair. His voice was a wreck, low and raw as he whispered thank you over and over again like a prayer he wasn’t sure he deserved to say out loud.

The Tower didn’t last long after that.

You’d both known it wouldn’t.

Even before the due date. Before the sleepless nights. Before the lullabies and growth charts and sleepy 3 a.m. feedings when the world narrowed down to nothing but her. You wanted something quieter. Softer. A place that didn’t smell like reinforced steel and hand sanitizer. A place that couldn’t be burned down around you.

And somehow in between team rotations and budget scraps and whispered promises made in the middle of briefings, Bucky found it.

A cottage.

Small, tucked between thick evergreens near a lake you couldn’t pronounce, where the sky always looked just a little bigger. The porch creaked. The chimney leaned. There was no cell service unless you stood on a specific mossy rock out back. Wild thyme and honeysuckle climbed the windowsills like they’d been waiting for you.

When he handed you the keys, he didn’t say much. Just:

“This okay?”

Your throat had gone tight. Because it wasn’t okay. Not even close.

It was perfect.

And now the cottage felt broken in. Familiar. Like it had always known you were coming.

The nursery smelled like lavender and laundry soap. The rocking chair clicked softly if you leaned too far back. The floorboards moaned every time someone stepped too hard, and the kitchen faucet always dripped when it rained. But none of that mattered.

Because Bucky hadn’t taken his eyes off her for more than ten minutes since the day you brought her home.

She was four months old now. Teething. Vocal. Stubborn as hell.

You’d caught her chewing on his dog tags that morning, smacking them against her gums with the solemn determination of a tiny war general.

Bucky looked completely horrified.

And proud.

“Sweetheart,” he’d whispered, lifting her gently off his chest with practiced ease. “You’re gonna give me a heart attack.”

She giggled. Loud. Right into his neck.

You swore you saw his entire spine melt on the spot.

Some nights, when the house finally quieted—when dishes were done and lullabies had faded and the sky outside had gone inky and wide—he would hold you like the world might try to take you both if he let go.

One arm around your waist. The other cradling your hand, always, thumb brushing lazy circles.

Sometimes he’d press his lips to your shoulder and just breathe there, like he still didn’t quite believe this was real. Like maybe it would vanish if he blinked too long.

“She’s got your stubbornness,” he’d murmur into your skin.

“She’s got your eyes,” you’d whisper back.

And then—after a beat, long and heavy and breakable—he’d ask, in that soft, careful voice he only ever used when the lights were off:

“Do you think she’ll be proud of me someday?”

It undid you every time.

You’d turn to face him, fingers catching gently on his jaw, pulling him in like gravity. And you’d say it with everything in you. No hesitation. No doubt.

“She already is.”

Because how could she not be?

Bucky Barnes had walked through hell and clawed his way back with his heart intact. He’d unlearned everything Hydra tried to build him from. He’d fought for softness without forgetting how to be steel. He’d made a promise in a blood-soaked medbay and never once faltered.

And now, he was here.

You watched him from the doorway, one hand resting on the frame, breath caught behind your ribs.

He sat in the nursery’s dim glow, her tiny body curled against his chest. One of her fists gripped his finger like she’d decided it belonged to her now. He was swaying gently, humming something low beneath his breath, maybe a lullaby. Maybe just her name.

His hair was pulled back, messy. His sweatshirt had a dried stain on the collar that might’ve been from formula or spit-up or both. And he looked, God, he looked wrecked.

Wrecked by love.

Completely undone by it.

He was a father.

And not just that.

He was hers.

And you were his.

And somehow—against every odd, against every scar, every nightmare, every time you both thought you wouldn’t make it—this wasn’t the end of the story.

This was the beginning of everything.

He hadn’t moved. Not really. Not in any meaningful way. His body had settled into the chair beside your bed with the same heaviness as the grief clawing through his chest. The posture of a man keeping vigil—not for a miracle, not for hope, but for permission. For breath. For proof that the worst had not already come to pass.

Your vitals had trended upward, but cautiously. Hesitant. Like your body was negotiating its way back toward the surface, one breath at a time. He’d watched the numbers climb. Had memorized the pattern of your pulse, the sluggish rise of your lungs. Not like a soldier analyzing a threat. Like a drowning man learning the shape of a lifeline.

He’d stopped blinking after hour ten. Couldn’t risk missing something.

The machines blinked and beeped in time with the tiny metronome of your life. A mechanical lullaby. He hated them. Hated that he needed them. Hated that every sound felt like a verdict.

He hadn’t left your side. Not for food. Not for water. He didn’t sleep. Didn’t really speak. The only movement he allowed was the flex of his vibranium fingers against the mattress, brushing your wrist when your hand lay close enough. Just to feel you. Just to prove you hadn’t turned cold.

Someone had tried to care over the course of the past two days, once. John, maybe. A water bottle. A granola bar. Left neatly on the chair in the corner like Bucky was some feral thing that might be coaxed into eating if no one looked at him too long. He hadn’t touched them. Couldn’t. His body didn’t register hunger anymore. Not while you were still trapped somewhere he couldn’t reach.

And the doctor, he was trying. Bucky would give him that much.

The man’s hands were steady. His tools precise. His voice gentle in a way that had nothing to do with pity. He moved through the room with the kind of patience usually reserved for open flame or grieving dogs. Like he understood the risk. Like he knew exactly how easily Bucky could break something that didn’t deserve it.

But even he was starting to crack.

“Barnes,” the doctor said now, adjusting a new IV bag, this one tinted the color of amber and dusk. Slower drip. “You need to move. Stretch. Eat something.”

Bucky didn’t turn. Didn’t blink. Just kept his eyes on the slight curve of your ribcage where it rose, then fell. Counted again. One, two, three…

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.”

The voice was more tired than sharp now. Less clinical, more human. Like the man had decided it was worth trying, even if he got nothing but silence in return.

“You’ve been in the same position for twelve hours. That arm of yours may be vibranium, but the rest of you’s still flesh and blood. You’re locking up.”

Bucky’s jaw ticked. His throat felt like it was full of gravel. “Not really.”

A pause. Then the soft clink of metal on metal as the IV vial clicked into place.

The doctor exhaled. “She’s stable. There’s no sign of cardiac distress. And she’s not going to wake up in the next five minutes.”

“She might.”

“And if she does,” the man said, gently, “I’ll be here. You’ll be the first to know. You’ll be back in that chair before she knows she was alone.”

Still, Bucky didn’t move.

“I’m sure she wouldn’t want you to rot in a chair.”

That landed.

The words didn’t hit like a punch. They hit like something quieter, something worse. Like guilt pressed into the hollows of his bones. Because of course you wouldn’t. You’d tease him for it, probably. Nudge your foot against his, call him dramatic, ask when the last time he slept was. But your eyes would soften. Your fingers would reach for his.

He could already see it. Hear it. And it was that, that finally pulled him upright.

The motion was sluggish. Weighted. The muscles in his legs screamed like they hadn’t moved in years. He didn’t remember sitting down in the first place.

He stretched once. Just enough to hear something crack in his lower back. The pain was dull, but grounding.

The doctor didn’t say anything else. Just stepped aside, letting Bucky pass without another plea.

He paused in the doorway.

“I’ll be gone ten minutes.”

The doctor’s reply was low. Certain.

“I’ll call you the second she so much as twitches.”

The hallway hit like a punch.

Too bright. Too white. Too clean.

Bucky squinted as he stepped into it, eyes burning from the shift in light, the harsh fluorescence striping the floor like surgical tape. His shoulders hunched automatically, spine curling slightly in on itself, like the walls were too narrow. Like the quiet itself might snap.

His left hand stayed curled, hovering near his ribs—tight, half-clenched. Not from pain. Not from injury. From instinct. From the way his body had learned to brace around things it didn’t know how to hold.

This wasn’t just grief. Not anymore.

This was grief wearing new skin. Fear carved into something more intimate.

He couldn’t stop thinking about it—couldn’t stop tracing back every moment, every silence, every goddamn detail that should’ve screamed at him and didn’t. Eight weeks. Eight fucking weeks. Through briefings. Through missions. Through nights where you’d fallen asleep half-curled into him, your fingers unconsciously resting just above your pelvis like your body already knew what your mouth wouldn’t say.

He still didn’t know how he’d missed it. 

He was trained to detect the minute. Micro-expressions. Breath patterns. A stagger in a step. He could spot a tell from a mile off. Could read body language like Morse. And yet this of all things, you’d hidden it from him so completely that it made his throat tighten with something far worse than anger.

He didn’t know what scared him more: the possibility that maybe you hadn’t known, or that you had.

His feet moved of their own accord, dragging him through the Tower like a shadow without purpose. No real destination. Just inertia. The need to move before the silence ate him alive.

He reached the kitchen before he realized that was where he’d been going.

It was too clean. Too quiet. Stainless steel countertops gleaming like bone under surgical light. He stood at the threshold for a long beat, staring at the fridge, the sink, the stack of unopened water bottles by the wall. The idea of food made his stomach twist. The thought of chewing, swallowing, breathing, felt absurd.

He took a step back.

Then his ears pricked.

A theme song, overacted and sickeningly catchy, filtered in through the far side of the floor. Something dramatic. Overly lit. Voices rising and falling in practiced drama. Probably another doomed marriage and a fake fight in a bridal shop. The kind of television that felt like being lobotomized slowly with a plastic spoon.

Bucky sighed—long, low—and followed the sound.

The lounge was exactly as he expected: half-lit chaos, a blanket half-draped over the floor, a busted remote wedged between two couch cushions, and snack wrappers forming a loose perimeter around a single, surviving water bottle. The air smelled like cheap sugar and stale skin balm.

Yelena was spread diagonally across the couch, all limbs and bruises and indifference. Her braid was halfway undone. Her face was peppered in healing scabs and yellowed bruises like war paint. Her left arm was in a sling. Her expression didn’t flicker when he entered.

“If you say one word about my taste in television,” she said, not looking up, “I will use the last of my upper body strength to throw you out of that window.”

He leaned against the doorframe, arms folding automatically. His voice rasped. “Pretty sure that’s Walker’s favorite window.”

“Even better.”

Silence stretched. Not awkward. Not empty. Just weighted.

She looked at him then. Really looked. One brow ticked up just barely.

“How is she?”

He swallowed. The question landed like a blade. Not because of what it was, but because of how she asked it. No fluff. No hope. Just truth, asked gently.

“She’s…holding on.”

Yelena turned off the TV with a flick of the remote. Static silence took its place.

He crossed the room and sat opposite her, careful to leave space between them. Close enough to talk. Not close enough to fall apart.

Yelena shifted upright, knees tucking under her, good arm slung over the back of the couch. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the stitches in her brow.

“No change?”

“She’s still stable. Breathing on her own now.”

She nodded slowly. “That’s something.”

He nodded too, but it was hollow. Mechanical. Like an echo of emotion he wasn’t sure he still had access to. 

He didn’t know what comfort was supposed to feel like anymore, and maybe he’d never really known. Not outside the tiny, quiet moments he stole when the world wasn’t looking. The curve of your spine when you slept. Your voice in the morning before coffee. The small, human nothings he’d convinced himself were enough.

His hand scrubbed over his jaw, slow. Deliberate. Then it dragged down his face—like maybe if he pulled hard enough, he could get it off. Peel the grief away with skin. It didn’t work, of course. 

He looked at Yelena for a long time before he spoke again. Looked at her like she might hold an answer he didn’t know how to name. Because if you had told anyone, if you’d shared even a sliver of the truth with someone, it would’ve been her. 

Not just because she was your typical partner in the field, but because you trusted her. The kind of trust that wasn’t performative or professional or born of trauma. It was earned. Forged in fire. The two of you had moved like pieces of the same machine, wordless, effortless. A kind of bond he hadn’t dared interrupt, let alone question.

Sisters. That’s what Yelena called you once, when she was half-asleep and bleeding and pissed off and didn’t want to go to the med bay.

So if you had told anyone, it would’ve been her. If anyone knew… if anyone had seen something—

“She, uh… She tell you anything?” he asked quietly.

He hated how uncertain it sounded. How thin.

Yelena raised an eyebrow. “About?”

He hesitated. “Before the mission. Did she seem… off?”

Yelena gave him a look. Flat. Blunt. “She was about to walk into an extraction site with me. We’d just gotten off a sixteen-hour flight and neither of us had eaten anything but trail mix without a wink of sleep. Sure, yeah, she was off. So was I.”

“Not like that.”

Bucky’s voice cracked a little on the tail end. His gaze stayed fixed on the far wall, but his hand twitched. That betrayed him.

Yelena narrowed her eyes slightly. Her body stilled. She studied him now, properly. Like she was peeling back something that hadn’t quite fit since he walked in.

He cleared his throat, but it didn’t help. His voice was rough when he tried again.

“Did she say anything… about being sick? Not feeling well?”

And there it was.

The silence shifted. Tilted. Not the kind that filled a room. The kind that pressed against it. Dense and dangerous. It made the space feel smaller somehow, like the walls were leaning in.

Yelena looked down at the bandage on her arm. Picked at the tape. Didn’t answer right away.

“You’re not asking what you really want to ask,” she said.

His chest felt like it had been hollowed out and packed with salt.

“No,” he admitted. “I’m not.”

She didn’t offer comfort. Didn’t look at him with pity. Just sat there for a moment, shoulders tense and jaw tight, trying to find the right words and clearly hating every second of it.

“There was a moment before everything went to hell,” she said, finally. “She stumbled—caught herself, but it looked wrong. Not like a trip. Like… something hit deep. She put a hand to her side. Right here—” She gestured across her abdomen. “Like she was trying to cover it.”

Bucky’s gut turned.

“I asked if she was hit. She said no. But her face—”

Yelena frowned, her brows pulling tight. She was still staring at the spot on her own abdomen where she’d gestured. Her good hand hovered there, fingers flexing like she was trying to summon a memory, something small she hadn’t wanted to let herself look too closely at until now.

“Her face said otherwise. Not pain. Not even fear. Just… panic.”

Bucky said nothing. Didn’t need to.

Yelena’s eyes flicked up to him, and something shifted behind them. A beat passed. Another.

Then: “Wait.”

He met her gaze.

“Did you not know?”

The question hung in the air like smoke.

Bucky blinked, slow. He felt it hit like a punch, despite already knowing the answer himself. It was the kind of question that didn’t need to be asked, only confirmed. Like grief knocking twice just to make sure it really hurt.

Yelena leaned forward, her expression sharper now, not incredulous, just trying to piece together something she thought she already understood. Her stare was forensic. Dissecting. Like he was a puzzle missing pieces she’d thought were obvious.

“You didn’t know,” she repeated, quieter this time.

He let out a breath through his nose, the corner of his mouth tightening—not with humor. Just restraint. “No.”

And that was the worst part, wasn’t it? That he could say it like that, flat and final. Like it was just a fact instead of something that had cored him out.

Yelena’s brow furrowed. “But I thought—I mean… you live with her. You’ve been together for what, four years?” Her hands flailed for a second, then dropped uselessly to her sides. “You do her laundry. You finish her sentences. You know when she’s in pain without even looking at her. And you didn’t notice she was…” She grimaced, rolled her eyes a little like the word physically pained her. “Pregnant?”

He didn’t flinch. Just let out a short breath that didn’t quite qualify as a laugh. “Yeah, well. Turns out knowing her better than anyone doesn’t mean I get to know when she’s…” His jaw tightened. He glanced away for half a second, like the words might knock the wind out of him if he looked it in the eye. “...carrying my kid.”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was heavy. Sobering. Like the air between them had been dragged through wet cement.

Yelena let it sit a beat longer than she had to, then dragged a hand over her face, groaning into her palm. “Fucking hell.”

“Yeah.”

He didn’t look at her. Couldn’t. Because if he saw even a flicker of pity, something in him might fracture past the point of return. But Yelena wasn’t the type to pity. She was sharp where others softened. She watched people like she was measuring how they broke.

And he could feel it, her weighing him now. Calculating the depth of the wound he wasn’t bleeding visibly from.

After a moment: “So you two ever talk about it?”

His mind stuttered. Not at the question, but at how fast his body wanted to say yes. To conjure up something that looked like preparedness. Like this wasn’t a detonation that had left shrapnel buried in his chest.

“What?” he asked, but it wasn’t confusion. Just delay.

Yelena shrugged, more careful with her injured arm. “You know. Having a kid. Wanting one. Or is this more of a surprise than it looks?”

His eyes tracked a scuff on the floor like it might offer absolution. Something to tether to. Some scratch in the surface that made more sense than any of this.

“Last year,” he said slowly, “we talked about adopting one day. One of those half-hypothetical conversations, middle of the night, post-mission adrenaline still burning out. Neither of us said it outright, but…”

But he’d thought about it. Not obsessively. Not in detail. But enough to picture a softer kind of life. A quieter kitchen. Her hands guiding small ones through flour or paint or some messy, human thing. Enough to imagine something more than just survival.

“But it wasn’t off the table?”

He nodded once. “No. Not off the table.”

“And you—” she tilted her head—“thought you couldn’t…”

He gave a low, humorless laugh. The kind that didn’t even try to sound amused. “Didn’t think. Knew. Ran tests. Talked to a doctor off-record. After everything Hydra did, it wasn’t a mystery. They weren’t building soldiers with families in mind.”

His throat tightened. Not at the thought of it, but at how matter-of-fact it was. Like his own mutilation had been itemized on a lab sheet somewhere. Blood type. Bone density. Fertility: unnecessary.

Yelena winced. “Yeah. I figured.”

“So no. It wasn’t a plan. We didn’t think this was even a thing that could happen.” His voice thinned, like it was unraveling from somewhere below his ribs. “We never even talked about this as a possibility.”

That silence returned. Not sharp. Just… encompassing. Like he was slowly being pulled underwater again.

“I think she wanted to tell you,” Yelena said after a moment. “Not just because you deserved to know. But because she wanted you to know. I think she was just… scared.”

Scared.

He’d fought entire wars with less fear than what curled in his chest now.

He stared at the wall. “Of what?”

Yelena pursed her lips. She shifted her weight, glanced down, then back up like the words didn’t come easy. Her jaw worked once, twice, chewing through something she didn’t quite want to say. Not out loud. Not to him. But she said it anyway, voice low.

“Of it not being real. Of what it’d do to you.” A pause. “Of what it might mean if you lost it before it was even yours.”

The quiet that followed made something twist in Bucky’s chest. Not painfully. Just sharply. Like a rusted screw threading deeper.

He sat with it. Let the ache crawl around his ribs like it belonged there. Like it always had. You’d been trying to protect him. That much was obvious now. And he hated it. Hated that you thought he was fragile enough to splinter at the weight of a truth like this, or worse—that he might’ve tried to talk you out of it, out of this, if you had told him.

Maybe he would’ve. Maybe that was the worst part. He’d never wanted to cage you, never wanted to be the reason you sat out a mission or stepped back from something you believed in. But this hadn’t just been another secret. And it had been growing in your chest for weeks while he stood too close to see it.

He couldn’t even pretend it was some one-time accident. Some consequence of a moment that caught the two of you off-guard. Because it hadn’t been like that. It was never like that. You and Bucky had been together too long for carelessness to be novel. You knew each other’s rhythms. You'd learned, over the years, when to reach for restraint, and when not to. And lately...

Lately, things had shifted. Between missions. Between silences. Between the lines of things you hadn’t said. You’d both been coming apart at the edges, held together only by shared exhaustion and the kind of intimacy that blurred lines more easily than it should have. You still touched like the world might end before morning, like maybe if you pressed close enough you could keep it from doing so.

You hadn’t been careful. Not out of recklessness. Not out of neglect. But out of want. Out of love, maybe, twisted and quiet as it sometimes was. Out of that bruised, aching desperation to just feel something good for a moment longer.

He raked his fingers through his hair, exhaled through his teeth, leaned forward with his elbows braced on his knees again. The silence stretched. It wasn’t peaceful. It was just long enough to make everything echo. His thoughts. His regrets. The moment everything had shifted.

And then—unexpectedly, involuntarily—his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Not anything close to joy. But a flicker of dark amusement, bitter at the edges, slipping free like muscle memory.

He huffed once, a dry, humorless chuckle under his breath. His head tipped slightly, like he couldn’t quite believe the words even as he said them.

“We certainly weren’t careful.”

Yelena raised an eyebrow. “I don’t need details.”

“I’m not giving you any.” A beat. “Just… it was about eight weeks ago. After that snowstorm in Tallinn. We were stuck in that awful safehouse with the wood stove and the window that wouldn’t close.”

Yelena groaned. “Oh my God.”

He smirked faintly again, the first flicker of something close to life behind his eyes since he’d entered the lounge. “She made tea from the emergency rations. Burned it. Still drank it. We didn’t sleep much that night.”

“Stop talking.”

“I’m just saying, that might’ve been it.”

Yelena picked up a throw pillow and lightly tossed it at him with her good arm. It hit his shoulder, bounced to the floor.

“Don’t look so smug.”

“I’m not smug,” he said, quieter now. “I’m…” He trailed off, jaw tightening again.

There wasn’t a word for it. Not really. It wasn’t guilt, not exactly. And it wasn’t grief, maybe not anymore. Just a breathless pressure building behind the breastbone, a sinking realization that the past couldn’t be undone, and the future was now something sharp and breakable resting in a hospital bed he wasn’t allowed to touch.

Yelena didn’t press.

He raked his fingers through his hair, exhaled through his teeth, leaned forward with his elbows braced on his knees again. The posture was muscle memory now. He’d taken it in war rooms. In funerals. In places where grief didn’t look like tears, it looked like waiting.

“I just keep thinking,” he said, slowly, “about how I could’ve stopped her. If I’d known. If I’d even guessed. If she’d told me. She wouldn’t have gone into that op.”

“She would’ve.”

His head snapped up. Yelena was looking at him with something blunt and honest in her expression.

“She would’ve gone, Bucky. Maybe not for every mission. But that one? With me? Even with as simple as it was supposed to be.” She shook her head. “She wouldn’t have let me go in alone. Not even if you begged.”

He clenched his jaw, but didn’t argue. Couldn’t. Because she was right. You’d always run toward fire if it meant someone else didn’t burn.

“She made a choice,” Yelena added. “Might not have been the right one. Might not be one you like. But it was hers.”

“I get that,” he said. “Doesn’t mean it didn’t break something.”

Yelena looked at him. Long. Quiet.

Then: “She loves you, you know.”

His mouth pressed into a line.

“She loves you in that ugly, gut-deep way,” Yelena said. “The kind that makes you do stupid shit and keep secrets and hold everything too close because letting go feels like dying.”

“I know.”

She leaned back against the couch, sighing. “So what now?”

He didn’t answer right away. He stared at the floor, at his boots, at the ghost of his reflection in the dark glass of the powered-down TV.

Before he could open his mouth to speak again, a voice shattered the quiet.

“BARNES!”

It tore through the tower like a detonated charge—sharp, raw, wrong. John’s voice. Already too loud. Already too late. Not an alert. Not a call for backup. It was the kind of sound a man only made when something had gone to hell.

Bucky was moving before the echo had even finished. His body surged upward, heart already slamming against his ribs. The couch scraped behind him, forgotten. Yelena’s voice called after him, maybe. He didn’t hear her. Didn’t hear anything but the echo of that voice and the rush of blood in his ears. He didn’t ask what happened. He didn’t need to.

Something in him already knew.

The Tower blurred past in streaks of white and steel. Every hallway looked the same and he hated how he knew this route too well. Hated how his boots skidded on polished tile as he rounded the first corner too tight, one shoulder glancing off the wall like a ricochet. He caught himself and pushed harder. John’s boots were pounding up the corridor behind him, but Bucky didn’t wait for him to catch up. Didn’t wait for context. The dread in his chest had already cemented into certainty.

There was no version of reality where John Walker shouted his name like that and it wasn’t about you.

He hit the last hallway in a dead sprint, lungs burning. The medbay door was open. There were too many bodies moving inside—shadows crossing past glass, beeping monitors screaming their mechanical chorus. The sound was too fast. Too high-pitched.

Something was wrong.

He slammed a palm into the control panel and threw his weight into the door. It hissed open with a reluctant groan, and he was through before it finished retracting, shoulder nearly ripping the frame off the hinge.

And then he saw you.

Not unconscious.

Not still.

Not peaceful.

You were awake, but it wasn’t right. Your body was twisted upright, jerking as you fought the weight of everything wrapped around you, your hands clawing for purchase against the mattress as your chest heaved. Your leg was still caught in the brace, gauze peeking from beneath the sheets. Sweat slicked your skin. You looked like you were suffocating in your own body. Eyes wide, rimmed red, searching the room with a terror so raw it made something inside him break.

The doctor was there, trying to calm you, one hand bracing your shoulder, murmuring something useless. “You’re okay—just breathe—deep breaths, now—”

But you weren’t listening. You weren’t looking at him.

Your eyes were wide and wild, darting toward the door like they were searching for something, someone.

Bucky’s body moved on instinct, all thought stripped down to the bare need to get to you. In three long strides, he was there, by your side, dropping to his knees like he’d been shot.

“Hey,” he rasped, voice tearing out of him, low and cracked. “Hey, hey—baby—”

He reached for you, hands shaking, cradling your face without thinking. His left hand brushed the sweat from your forehead, careful not to catch the edge of the gauze, while the other steadied beneath your jaw. You flinched, just barely, and then your eyes locked with his.

“Bucky?” The sound of your voice scraped across the air like broken glass. Small. Shattered.

His breath hitched. His hands trembled harder. “Yeah,” he got out. “Yeah, it’s me. I’m here. I’m here, sweetheart.”

Your chest jerked again on the inhale—too sharp, too shallow—and your hand reached out, searching. He caught it instantly. Threaded his fingers through yours like it was the only thing keeping him from splintering. Pressed it to his chest. His heartbeat was wild. Disjointed. Loud enough that he was sure you could feel it against your palm.

The doctor’s presence receded. A rustle. A door. Bucky didn’t turn to watch him leave.

You were alive.

Awake.

And fuck, you looked so scared.

Your face was pinched tight, lip trembling, as if the effort of being conscious, of feeling, had finally caught up. He saw it crack behind your expression first. The kind of grief that didn’t make a sound, didn’t wail or scream. It leaked out. As if you didn’t think you were allowed.

His thumb brushed over your cheek, careful of the bruises. His voice cracked again. “You’re okay. You’re safe.”

You nodded, barely. A twitch more than a motion, like the muscles beneath your skin weren’t fully yours yet.

And then you started to cry.

Not the kind of sobbing that tore open the room. No gasps or wails. Just the slow, quiet kind. The kind that leaked out of the corners of your eyes before you could stop it, trailing down temples and into the fabric of the pillow like it didn’t want to be noticed. Like you didn’t want him to notice. You turned your face just slightly, almost instinctively, like the shame had arrived before the grief even had time to settle.

But he didn’t let you.

He shifted forward, the mattress dipping with the weight of him leaning in. His hand found yours again and lifted it to his mouth, thumb sliding across your knuckles before his lips pressed against them. Not romantic. Not desperate. Something quieter. Like grounding wire. Like prayer.

“Don’t do that,” he whispered, voice worn to the threadbare edge. “Don’t hide from me now.”

You shook your head weakly, a raw little hitch in your throat. “I’m sorry—”

“No.”

He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t clench his jaw. But the word had weight behind it now, gravel scraped up from the deepest part of him and shoved out into the space between you. Firm. Final.

“No, sweetheart,” he said again, lower. “Don’t. You don’t have to apologize.”

There was nothing to apologize for. Nothing you could say that would absolve him of the guilt digging like rot beneath his ribs. He should’ve known. Should’ve seen. He hadn’t. And now you were here, crying through bruises and a trembling chest, flinching every time you breathed too deep. And somehow still trying to make him feel better.

You coughed suddenly—sharp and wet, torn from your lungs like broken glass—and he felt the jolt of it like a current to his spine. Your hand flew weakly to your side, fingers curling over your ribs.

He bolted upright, eyes scanning fast. The water bottle, John’s, still sitting untouched at the edge of the tray. He grabbed it in one motion, fingers slick with condensation, and twisted off the cap with a sharp snap.

“Here,” he said, hand slipping beneath your chin as he brought it to your lips. “Slow. Sip.”

Your mouth opened obediently, even as your eyes stayed fixed on him. You drank in small, trembling swallows, each one broken by a pause, a hitch, like your throat hadn’t quite remembered how to work yet.

He watched the whole thing. Didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. Tracked the way your fingers twitched against the blanket, the way your gaze never strayed, like you weren’t entirely convinced he wasn’t just a hallucination pulled from the worst place your brain could go to keep itself calm.

And when you eased back, breath rasping but less jagged now, he didn’t let go. His hand stayed wrapped around yours, thumb moving in slow, steady arcs across your skin like it was the only thing keeping you both tethered to this version of reality.

You exhaled shakily, voice hoarse and small: “You’re really here?”

He swallowed once, hard. “Yeah. ’Course I am.”

There was something in your eyes then—dilated, dazed, but clearer than before. A little softer. Still exhausted, but not vacant. Something heavy, though. Something that clung to your lashes like the tears had left a residue behind. Guilt, maybe. Or grief. Or the bitter, awful cocktail of both.

Bucky could barely look at it.

He reached up again, hand ghosting over your skin, knuckles brushing softly down the side of your temple, just shy of the dressing. You still felt warm. Still felt too breakable. Like your bones hadn’t quite reassembled themselves yet. Like if he pressed too hard, you’d come undone.

His voice barely carried. “I thought I was gonna lose you.”

It cracked halfway through, split open at the edges.

“I thought I already had.”

Your fingers twitched in his, then curled, faint but sure. A tiny squeeze. 

“I didn’t mean to—” you tried again.

“Shh.” He didn’t let you finish. Didn’t need you to. He bent lower, forehead pressing against yours with the barest touch. His breath was warm at your hairline. “It’s okay.”

The silence that followed wasn’t hollow anymore. It wasn’t panic or pain or grief. It was heavy, yes. But full. Saturated with everything neither of you had words for yet. The kind of silence that followed survival. That dragged behind it the reality that you were still here, but not without cost.

He could feel the shift in you before he saw it. Your hand never left his, but your eyes drifted somewhere past him, toward the far wall, toward the static haze that came in the aftermath. That place in the brain where the adrenaline ebbed, and all that remained was the cold cut of clarity. The damage assessment. The inventory of pain.

Your voice—faint, frayed, clinical—cut through the quiet.

“What’s the damage?”

He didn’t answer at first.

He couldn’t.

His eyes stayed on your face like they were the only thing still anchoring him, searching, scanning, cataloguing every microexpression, every flicker of pain or panic or vacancy that might mean you were slipping again. But you weren’t. You were still. Too still. Awake and alert in the way that wasn’t relief but calculation. That familiar, awful quiet of someone waiting to absorb bad news before it could punch them off the edge of the world.

Bucky swallowed hard. His throat was dry, like it had been scraped raw by the last two days.

“You want the short list,” he said, voice low, “or the one that makes me wanna tear the drywall off every room in this goddamn building?”

Your mouth twitched, barely. Just a ghost of movement. Not even a smile, really. But something lived in it. Something human. And in this room, right now, that felt like a fucking miracle.

“Short,” you whispered, voice sanded down to nothing.

He nodded, jaw working.

“Skull fracture. Minor.” He kept his voice steady, clinical, even when it cost him. “Caused your brain to swell. They’re monitoring it.”

You nodded once. Like it wasn’t news. Like you’d already suspected.

“Concussion,” he added. “A bad one.”

Another nod.

“Three fractured ribs. Bruising’s still showing up. And your leg…” His voice caught. The next words scraped out of him like gravel. “The tibia’s shattered. They had to pin it—metal plates, screws, the whole thing. There was muscle tearing up your thigh. Some tendons nearly severed.” He exhaled hard, jaw clenched. “Surgery went fine. But… you lost a lot of blood. They said it missed an artery by half an inch.”

You didn’t flinch. Just blinked slowly, lashes heavy. But he saw it. The way your gaze drifted upward, toward the ceiling, like it might help you count it all up, like if you lined the injuries up one by one, they’d feel smaller. Less catastrophic. He knew that ritual. He’d done it a hundred times. Probably more.

He kept going, quieter now. “They think you’ll walk again. No permanent damage. But it’s gonna take time. Therapy. A lot of it.”

You didn’t speak.

You just breathed, shallow and uneven, your hand still wrapped weakly in his.

And then, after a long pause, you asked: “Anything else?”

That was the one that hit him.

He didn’t let go of your hand. Just tightened his grip slightly, like the contact might hold the words in his chest a little longer. He didn’t want to say it. Didn’t want to be the one to say it. But the longer he held it, the worse it twisted.

His chest tightened. Something old and brutal stirred beneath his ribs.

“There’s…” He hesitated. “There is something else.”

The words dragged, clumsy and raw-edged in his mouth. He didn’t want to hurt you with them. But not saying them felt worse. Felt like lying.

“The doctors—when they ran tests. There was something they saw. And I figured…”

He trailed off. Let it hang there, unspoken. Let the weight of it settle. Let it be.

“I figured if it’s true,” he said, softer now, “then maybe there’s something you need to tell me.”

Your breath hitched.

And that was it.

You didn’t even have to say a word, he felt it. The shift. The slow crumpling of your expression, like something inside you had finally, finally given way. Not a crack. Not a collapse. Just the quiet undoing of someone who’d held something too tightly for too long.

You looked away, jaw trembling, your fingers squeezing his with what little strength they had left.

And then your eyes went glassy. Again. Not like earlier, this time it was different. This time it was surrender. The kind that didn’t come with peace. Just exhaustion. And shame.

Bucky leaned in, closer now. Closer than before. Closer than breathing.

He already knew. Of course he knew. He felt it, like some part of him had already absorbed the truth from the doctor without needing to hear it from you. Like it had been living in his bones since the second he saw you on that hospital bed, trying to claw your way out of your own panic.

Still, he needed the words. Needed them like he needed air.

His voice broke open around them. “Is there something you wanna tell me?”

You gave the faintest nod.

But it wasn’t enough. Not now. Not after this. Not after everything that had nearly gone unsaid for too long.

“Hey,” he said, quick, his hand rising to your cheek again as you tried to turn away, fingers brushing away the heat, the dampness, the tremor in your jaw. “Sweetheart, don’t—don’t do that. Look at me, please.”

Your eyes flicked back to his. Dazed. Gutted.

“Can you use your words for me?” His voice cracked at the end, and he hated that it did. Hated how fucking wrecked he sounded. But it was real. All of it was real.

You didn’t answer. Not right away. Just stared at him like you didn’t know how to say it out loud. Like it would hurt worse to give it breath.

So he leaned in more. Close enough that his forehead nearly brushed yours. Close enough to feel your breath stutter against his skin.

“Please,” he whispered. “I need to hear you say it.”

There was a beat, one long, unbearable second, and then your lips parted, dry and trembling.

“I’m… I’m pregnant.”

He closed his eyes.

It hit like the floor vanished beneath him again. Like the bottom dropped out of everything he’d been standing on and left him suspended in a place that was neither sky nor ground, just air and weight and the crushing realization of something true. Not a guess. Not a scan. Not a test. Not a stray look from the doctor that he'd pretended not to understand. This was different. This was you.

You had said it. And somehow that made it real in a way nothing else had. Because it wasn’t just a result of a test anymore. It wasn’t a what-if buried beneath bruises and lab results. It was something inside you, and you were still here, and you had said it.

When he opened his eyes again, they burned. Wet at the corners. Not from crying, at least, not yet. But from the pressure behind his ribs, the kind that didn’t let up, the kind that twisted inward like grief that hadn’t decided whether it was going to be joy or devastation yet. 

His gaze found you again, and it struck him—not for the first time, but harder now—that you were everything at once. A miracle. A mistake. A what-if. A why-now. A please, not like this. You were pain and tenderness and a future he never let himself imagine, all balled up in the ruined body of someone he couldn’t bear to lose.

“How long?” he asked, and his voice didn’t sound like his own. It was scraped raw, like it had been dragged over gravel. He hated the sound of it. Hated that it felt like something he’d earned.

You blinked, and the tears started falling again—no gasping, no shaking, just falling, like the moment had finally reached its limit. You didn’t try to stop them. You never did with him. And somehow that made it worse.

“I found out the day before you left,” you said, and your voice cracked halfway through the sentence like it didn’t want to carry the weight of it either.

He blinked, brow knitting. “My mission?”

You nodded. “You came home late. With takeout. You remember?”

He did. Of course he did. Chinese, half cold. You’d eaten at the counter and then curled on the couch in one of his sweatshirts, face unreadable, eyes tired. He remembered thinking it was strange how quiet you were, how long it took you to answer when he asked about your day. But he’d been in his own head, too. Getting ready to leave again. Trying not to show how much it gutted him to keep doing that.

You kept talking, and he couldn’t stop watching you. Couldn’t look away even if he wanted to.

“I hadn’t been feeling right the past few weeks. Sick in the mornings. Off in the field. I thought it was just… nerves. Burnout. But something felt wrong. Or right—I didn’t know.” You gave a breathy, broken laugh, and it punched right through him.

You looked at him, finally. Really looked. And it nearly leveled him.

“I bought a test. Took it that night. Then two more. I—I just needed to be sure.”

His hand moved without thinking, brushing your hair back again even though it didn’t need to be. He just needed to touch you. Needed to prove you were still warm beneath his fingers. 

You swallowed hard, voice barely audible now. “I was gonna tell you. I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t.” It came out soft. Not an accusation. Just grief. Just ache.

“I was scared.”

He didn’t even nod, just sat there, still as a statue, except for the way his hands trembled where they touched you. You reached up, your fingers barely grazing the center of his chest like you weren’t sure if you were allowed to. Like maybe he’d pull away.

He didn’t.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen,” you said. “We talked about adoption. About maybe someday. But you were so sure it couldn’t—after everything. After Hydra.”

Bucky’s breath hitched. And it wasn’t even just knowing from a doctor that he was sterile. It was just because it felt right. That there’d be consequences for what they’d done to him. For what he’d survived. It made sense that something had been taken. That something had been broken so badly it couldn’t come back.

And now you were telling him maybe it hadn’t been. That something had come back. That something had grown anyway, in spite of all of it. In spite of him. He didn’t know how to handle that.

You looked at him, voice small. “That’s why I thought maybe it wasn’t real. Or wouldn’t stick. Or it’d be gone before I even told you and then I’d have to watch your heart break all over again and it’d be my fault—”

“Stop.” His voice cracked, rougher now as he leaned in and cradled your jaw in one hand, thumb brushing the edge of your cheekbone. “Don’t do that. Don’t apologize. You hear me?”

You did, but it didn’t stop your face from twisting, eyes glassing up again, bottom lip trembling.

“I didn’t know if it was good news or bad,” you whispered. “Didn’t know if you’d feel… trapped. Or broken. Or—fuck, I don’t know—like it was a mistake. It’s been a long time since we talked about kids. I just—I didn’t want to ruin it.”

Your voice fractured under the weight of it, and the tears came again. This time openly. No attempt to hide them.

“I didn’t want to lose the version of us we already had just because something changed.”

And god, didn’t that cut him straight through.

Because he remembered all of it. Every version of you. The good years. The ugly ones. The grief you both carried like it was stitched into your skin. And somehow, through all of it, you’d stayed. You’d loved him without asking for anything back he wasn’t ready to give.

And now here you were, thinking this would be what ruined it. Thinking you would be the thing that made him run.

But Bucky had spent half his life running. From handlers. From shadows. From himself. And you were the only thing he’d ever run toward.

“Sweetheart,” he breathed, the word cracking in his mouth like it didn’t quite know how to exist there. “No.”

You looked at him like you’d been expecting the end of something. Like you were already mourning it. Like this was the part where he recoiled, went cold, started folding in on himself like he always did when the world got too loud. And Christ, hadn’t he earned that kind of reaction? Hadn’t he spent years teaching people not to expect softness from him?

But not you. Never you.

“I’m sorry, I thought you’d be angry.”

“Stop.” He didn’t raise his voice, but something in it shifted—firmer now, less frayed, like he had to build a wall around the wreckage or it’d all come loose again. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

“But—”

“No.” His hands were already moving before he finished saying it, catching your face like you were something fragile and burning. His thumbs swept beneath your eyes, brushing away the tears as fast as they came, but it was a losing battle. Not because you were falling apart, but because he was. Because you’d been alone, carrying something too heavy for one person, and somehow you were still here.

“You were scared,” he said, voice low and rough. “And you were right to be. You’ve been through more than anyone should ever have to carry. And then you found this out—” His breath hitched. “And you were…alone.”

That was the part that gutted him.

Not the secrecy. Not even the fear. But the fact that you’d carried it without him. That he hadn’t seen it. That he hadn’t been there.

“You didn’t ruin anything,” he said, slower now, like the words were costing him. “You are everything.”

You flinched at that. Like it hurt more than it helped. And maybe it did. Maybe it was too much to hear right now. Maybe it sounded like blind devotion when all you could feel was your own broken edges.

“I didn’t know if you were ready—”

“I’m not,” he said, and it surprised even him how quickly the words came out. “Not really.”

His eyes stayed locked on yours. There was no shame in the confession. No edge of defense. Just the raw, open thing that sat under his ribs now. “I didn’t think it was even possible.”

You opened your mouth, some instinct to explain, maybe. To shrink yourself down. To protect him from it.

But he stopped you with a gentle touch, thumb against your lips. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want this. Doesn’t mean I don’t want you.”

His hand slipped to the side of your neck, the pad of his thumb resting over the fluttering pulse beneath your skin. Still beating. Still alive.

“That I wouldn’t have held you through every second of the fear,” he murmured, “every second of the unknown.”

You blinked like the words were too much. Like they didn’t fit inside your chest.

“I would’ve gone to every appointment,” he said, quieter now. “Bought every fucking prenatal vitamin they had. Picked fights with whole teams if it meant keeping you grounded, if it meant keeping you safe.”

That made you laugh, but it broke halfway through, tipping into a sob. You turned your face toward his hand like you didn’t want him to see it. He let you. He didn’t push.

“Bucky—”

“I would’ve stayed,” he said, leaning in. His lips found your temple, then your forehead, the bridge of your nose, every patch of skin he could find that wasn’t bruised or bloodied. He kissed you like he was trying to rebuild you from the outside in.

“I will stay.”

It came out steady. Sure. Not a promise, because promises were things that broke under pressure, and you didn’t need something fragile right now. You needed something that would hold.

“Whatever happens next,” he said, “I’m not letting you go through it alone.”

You didn’t answer. Not at first.

Your gaze dropped, eyes unfocused, like the words were caught somewhere in your throat and you had to chase them down. He watched the tension ripple through your shoulders, the way your fingers tightened in the blanket. The silence stretched, but not uncomfortably. Not for him. He’d wait as long as it took.

Finally, your voice came, low and raw:  “…Did the doctors say anything about…” A pause. A thick swallow. “About the baby?”

The word sounded strange coming from you. Soft. Uncertain. Like it still didn’t feel real. Or like you were afraid saying it too loud would shatter it.

Bucky exhaled slowly, nodding once. “Yeah.”

Your eyes locked onto his like they were trying to read between the lines, like maybe you’d only believe the truth if you found it buried behind the seams of his expression. You didn’t blink. Neither did he.

His thumb moved over your knuckles in slow, steady sweeps. His other hand, the cold one, stayed braced against your waist, careful not to press too hard against the bruised ribs beneath. He hadn’t realized he was holding you like that until you shifted and his grip tightened automatically. Like letting go would mean starting over. Like the second he loosened his fingers, the nightmare would start again.

“They’re being careful,” he said, quieter now. Not soft, just real. “Real careful. You took a hit to the ribs. Abdomen too. Enough to scare them. But your oxygen’s been steady since you got here. Monitors haven’t spiked. No more signs of internal bleeding.”

You nodded, just barely. But the panic was still flickering behind your eyes like a match that wouldn’t go out.

“They want to do an ultrasound once your vitals stabilize. Maybe tonight since you’re awake now.”

Your breath hitched at that, shallow, shaky. And he saw the shift immediately. The fear latching on. That kind of fear didn’t announce itself. It crept in behind the words. Behind the hope.

“But,” he said, firm enough to make you meet his eyes again. “No one’s said anything bad. You hear me? Nothing.”

You nodded again, slower this time. Still watching him. Like you needed to be sure he wasn’t just saying it to keep you from unraveling. Like you didn’t quite believe you deserved that kind of reassurance.

Your grip on his hand tightened. He let you crush his fingers.

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” you whispered. “That it… that they might not—”

“Don’t.” It came out sharper than he meant, cutting through the room like a snap of frost. You startled, just a little, but he was already softening, already leaning down, brushing his lips to the back of your hand.

“We’re not going there,” he said, voice rasped now. “We’re not grieving something that’s still here. Not when you’re alive. Not when they’re alive.”

You swallowed hard. Another tear slipped down your cheek. He watched it fall like it had weight. Like it mattered.

“I didn’t even know I wanted this,” you said. “Not really. Not now.”

Bucky’s hand found your face again, thumb catching that tear before it could disappear into the bandages. Your skin was warm. Too warm. But it grounded him.

“It’s okay if you didn’t,” he murmured. “It’s okay if you still don’t know what the hell to do with it. We’ve been crawling through the wreckage of wars and redacted missions for a long fucking time. This world’s never offered us softness without strings.”

You blinked at him, raw and blinking through the blur.

“But you know what?” he said, quieter now. Like the words were meant just for you.

“There’s never been anything more worth the chaos.”

You looked like he’d hit something in you. Something deep. Something you didn’t have the breath to argue with.

“And if this job makes it harder,” he added, “I’ll leave it.”

You stiffened, but he didn’t falter.

“I’ll walk. Burn the whole goddamn thing down if I have to. I don’t care what Val thinks. I don’t care what she threatens. You and this kid come first.”

Your face shifted, a flicker of disbelief bleeding in, like you wanted to argue, or maybe just needed to hear it again, slower this time. But he didn’t repeat himself. He didn’t need to.

Because he meant it.

“I’ll get us a place no one knows,” he said, his voice low, steady, dangerous in its conviction. “Back roads. Quiet. A garden if you want one. A porch swing. You wanna disappear? I’ll make us ghosts.”

Your lip quivered. You tried to push yourself up again and flinched. His hands were already there, bracing your back, cradling your shoulder, fingers spreading to support everything the rest of the world had shattered. 

“Hey—no, don’t push it,” he murmured. “I’ve got you. Just stay with me.”

Your voice rasped against the stillness. “I am with you.”

It broke something in him. Clean.

Then your hand started to move, trembling and slow, dragging upward across his chest. He felt it like a brand. Your fingers curled around the fabric near his collar like you were searching for something to tether yourself to. Something to make this real.

He recognized the look in your eyes before you even moved.

That hunger. That urgency. That quiet desperation that came after surviving something you didn’t think you would. You were looking at him like maybe he was the only thing keeping the ground under you. 

“Hey—” he started, already moving to stop you, already thinking of your ribs, your head, your leg—thinking too much.

But you didn’t let him finish. You shut him up the only way that worked.

You kissed him.

It was shaky. Salt-slicked. Your lips trembled against his, but you didn’t stop. Not even when you let out a quiet sound in your throat and pulled him closer by the front of his shirt. Not even when your tears mixed with his on the seam of your mouths.

It was the kind of kiss that tasted like everything you were both still afraid to say. Like panic and relief. Like I love you and I thought I’d never get to again.

And Bucky gave into it like a drowning man breaking through the surface. He let the whole weight of it hit him, your lips, your hands, your body half-limp but still fighting to reach him.

He kissed you deeper, one hand cradling the side of your face, the other braced beneath your back, adjusting you just enough to take the pressure off your injuries without breaking the moment. Your tears soaked his cheek, his fell into your hair.

You broke the kiss slowly, like it cost you something to let it go. You didn’t lean back far. Just enough to speak. Your breathing was uneven, and your lashes were clumped with tears, and your voice cracked open like a wound.

“You’re sure?” Your fingers were still balled into his shirt like a lifeline. Like if you let go, the whole world would tilt sideways again. “You’re really sure you want this?”

He didn’t even blink.

“I want you,” he said, and his voice didn’t shake, it burned. “I want every version of you. The soft parts, the sharp ones. The days you don’t talk. The nights you curl away from me and think I don’t notice. I want every mile that brought you here—even the ones you had to crawl through.”

You stared at him, eyes shining like you weren’t sure how to hold that kind of devotion.

“I want this life if it means having it with you,” he continued, slower now. “Whatever it looks like. Whatever comes with it. The bleeding, the fear, the joy. The baby. All of it.”

Your lips parted, but no sound came.

You looked so small in that bed. So fucking fragile. But still you didn’t stop reaching.

“I don’t know how to do this,” you whispered, and it was like watching someone confess to murder—like it cost you something to admit you were scared.

“I don’t either,” he murmured, brushing his lips along the curve of your cheek, then your jaw, then the shell of your ear. Each kiss a soft defiance. “But we learn. Together.”

Your nod was almost imperceptible. But he felt it. Forehead brushing his. Your body still trembling faintly from the fever, the shock, the aftermath of pain.

And then, for just a heartbeat, everything fell away.

There was no Valentina. No Black Site rendezvous. No tower briefings or encrypted channels or ghosts whispering orders from the grave. No guilt. No war. No Winter Soldier.

Just you.

The woman he had followed into hell a dozen times over.

The woman who had looked at his jagged edges and stayed.

The woman carrying his child.

The thought split through him again like a tectonic shift. He could feel it echo down to the soles of his feet. Like the floor of his world had cracked open and there was something alive growing in the center of it.

He was going to be a father.

The words didn’t feel real, not in the way other men said it. Not with joy or expectation or the giddy relief of an unburdened life. For Bucky Barnes, the thought came like a wound. Beautiful. Terrifying. Unthinkable. It carved through his ribcage with the same precision the Hydra medics once used to break him apart.

He was going to be a father.

He blinked hard. Swallowed against it. His body didn’t know how to carry that kind of truth. The part of him that had been made in a lab, broken in the field, and frozen between wars didn’t have the language for it.

How the fuck could a man like him build a life? What business did he have holding anything that soft?

He’d only ever been taught how to destroy.

But now you were lying in his arms, bruised and bleeding and still loving him. Still holding him like he could be something good. Something safe.

There was life inside you.

His blood. Your breath. Some fragile flicker of possibility already blooming beneath your skin. And you hadn’t told him because you thought he’d see it as a mistake. Because the world had made you believe this love came with a limit. A ceiling. A finish line you were always going to lose.

But Bucky wasn’t going to let it take this from you.

From them.

From him.

Not again.

He looked at you, really looked, and saw everything he needed to see. The way your lip trembled from the effort of staying upright. The bruises peeking beneath your collarbone. The scrapes along your knuckles. The tears still drying on your cheeks.

And all he could think was: I will give you peace even if it kills me.

Not just safety. Not just freedom.

Peace.

The kind of quiet that doesn’t come with a perimeter check. The kind of rest you don’t have to earn.

He’d give you the garden. The porch swing. A patch of earth without mines buried underneath it. Somewhere you could breathe.

Somewhere your child could grow up without hearing gunfire in the distance.

He kissed you again, slower this time, reverent, the way some people kiss rosaries or grave markers or names carved into stone. The vow wasn’t spoken, but it lived in the seam of his mouth.

And when you sighed against him—spine curving, fingers loosening, your body finally softening under his hands—he held you like you were the only thing on this side of the world that still made sense.

He was going to be a father.

And he was going to earn it.

It had been two months since the mission.

Sixty-one days since the world went sideways, since breath turned sharp in your throat and your body became something unrecognizable beneath you. Not broken all at once, but piece by piece. Trap. Shrapnel. The sound of your own voice ricocheting back into your skull as Yelena tried to keep you conscious. A dull roar behind your eyes. Pressure blooming behind your ribs until your vision narrowed to flickering static and the sickly-sweet taste of copper.

Sixty-one days since you’d hit the ground and thought that this might be it. That you’d die before ever telling Bucky. Not just that you were pregnant, but that you’d known. That you’d kept it. Carried it. Chosen silence.

Recovery hadn’t been kind. It was violent in its own way. Slow, humiliating, full of bruises that bloomed days after the worst of it, as if your cells couldn’t keep up with the trauma. You tibia had shattered clean through, bad enough that they warned you the pins might leave nerve damage. The ligament in your shoulder had to be stapled back to bone. Your ribs cracked every time you so much as rolled over wrong. And still, beneath all of it, something impossibly small and undefeated kept hanging on.

You spent the first three weeks flat on your back with wires in your veins and compression cuffs hissing against your legs. You couldn’t sit up without the room pitching. Couldn’t look at your own body without flinching. The swelling in your leg made it hard to see where skin ended and pain began. Physical therapy came next, slow, ritualistic, and absolutely maddening. You learned how to walk again with a leg that didn’t want to bear your weight. Learned how to trust your body again when it had let you down.

But the worst part wasn’t the pain.

It was the stillness.

It was waiting.

Every hour that passed without something going wrong felt like a miracle. Every flutter, every change in pressure, every pang of nausea sent lightning up your spine. You memorized your pulse. Learned how to breathe through the tightness. Tried not to spiral when the nurses adjusted the fetal monitor too slowly.

And Bucky didn’t leave. 

Not once. Not for rounds, not for food, not even when the doctors gave up on asking. He carved out a place beside your bed like it was his own personal foxhole—boots still on, dog tags twisted around one wrist like a tether, a half-eaten protein bar slowly fossilizing on the windowsill. He slept when your vitals stabilized and only then, slumped sideways in the chair with his arm stretched across the mattress like it was a tripwire. If anything had tried to take you, it would’ve had to go through him first.

You’d asked him once to maybe go home for the night. Just to sleep. Just to rest. You’d tried to phrase it like concern, not a plea. And he’d looked at you like you’d just asked him to leave you behind on a battlefield. His jaw had gone tight. He hadn’t answered.

You didn’t ask again.

The doctors stopped enforcing visiting hours after day three despite Bucky never following them in the first place. They knew a losing battle when they saw one. One of the surgeons muttered something about “liability” and “risk assessment” and then waved a hand like absolution. And after a week of watching Bucky drag his jacket over his lap and pass out upright in that cursed chair, John and Ava showed up with a cot they’d stolen from one of the lower floors. They didn’t ask for permission. Just wheeled it in under cover of night, Ava smuggling in a clean blanket under her coat while John sweet-talked the nurse on duty.

And for once, Bucky hadn’t argued.

He didn’t use it at first. Just stared at it like it was a trick. But eventually, somewhere around week two, he gave in. Lay down beside your bed in silence, metal arm tucked beneath his head, body curled on his side facing you like he couldn’t risk not seeing. Like if he blinked, you might vanish.

He kept track of every single thing. How many steps it took to get from the bed to the sink. What time your meds were due. Which nurse was too rough with your IV. He packed a drawer full of electrolyte packs and nausea bands and ginger chews, refilled it when it ran low. He built a little fortress around your recovery and dared the world to breach it. You woke up once to find him reading the fetal development section of the Mayo Clinic handbook, his brow furrowed like he was decoding a bomb schematic.

And he touched you constantly. Not possessively, but reverently. Like he was making sure you were still real. His hand on your calf when you stretched. His palm cupped over your wrist when your oxygen dipped. The barest graze of metal fingers along your belly during the night, like he was afraid the baby might disappear if he didn’t keep them both grounded.

Even now, when the worst of it was technically behind you, he stayed close. Never looming. Never smothering. Just… there. A quiet presence, always just outside your peripheral vision. 

You were trying—really trying—not to let it make you weak. Not to slip into dependence. You weren’t fragile. You’d survived worse. But surviving wasn’t the same as healing. And healing meant you had to accept help. Which, to be honest, was never your strong suit. Still, you let him carry the things that hurt too much to hold. Let him kneel beside you when the pain gripped hard and fast, just so you had something steady to lean against. And he never flinched. Not once.

The day you were finally discharged, the air felt different. Brighter. Like it had cracked open into color again. No beeping monitors. No antiseptic sting in your nose. No hospital gown sticking to your back. Just you, dressed in soft clothes that didn’t feel like armor, your crutches under one arm, and Bucky’s hand firm on the small of your back as he walked beside you.

They didn’t send you home. Not all the way. You and Bucky had your own place. But this wasn’t that. This was the Tower. Your floor. A team necessity, they said. Close monitoring. Short travel time for follow-ups. But you knew what it really was: the closest thing to freedom the doctors would allow for the time being, and the only thing that let Bucky sleep at night.

The elevator ride up was almost sacred. Neither of you spoke. The soft hiss of the doors. The low hum of the lift. The shuffle of your weight shifting as you leaned too hard on your good leg. Bucky’s breathing, slow and deliberate beside you, like he was counting every second between here and the finish line.

You’d thought you’d go straight to the couch. Sink down. Sleep. Let your bones settle into something that wasn’t plastic or sterile or mechanical. Something that might remember comfort.

Instead, the moment the door opened—

“SURPRISE!”

You nearly went down again.

Not from pain this time. From shock.

Your body tensed before you could stop it, heart jumping into your throat, and your hands gripped the crutches too hard. The noise hit you first—loud, jarring, echoing down the hallway like gunfire. People clapping, someone cheering too loud. You blinked, stunned, and your vision went white again for half a second, panic-flash, pain memory. 

But you didn’t fall, because Bucky was already there, arm locking gently around your waist like he’d been waiting for it, like his body knew yours better than muscle memory ever could. You sagged into him with a strangled breath, eyes wide, chest heaving.

The room was a goddamn disaster.

Not in the catastrophic, world-ending way you'd gotten used to, but in the glittery, half-hearted chaos of people who meant well and had absolutely no business wielding craft supplies.

Streamers drooped from the ceiling like wounded bats, sagging under their own weight. Someone had clearly gone rogue with tape, probably John, if the duct-taped corners and crooked lines were anything to go by. A few were knotted in the light fixtures. One end trailed down the side of the TV, obscuring the remote sensor with a deflated puff of metallic purple.

Balloons littered the space like confetti after a storm. One floated lazily by, a silvery orb emblazoned with HAPPY RETIREMENT—the word RE aggressively scribbled out in thick Sharpie strokes, like someone had started to give up halfway through and then decided to lean in. Another was aggressively pink, with IT’S A GIRL? scrawled in sharp, trembling font, the question mark oversized and tilted.

Your eyes caught on a banner.

Far wall. Hung at a steep diagonal, taped within an inch of its life, like no one trusted it to stay put. The handwriting changed halfway through, first bold block letters, then loopy cursive, then all-caps at the end. CONGRATULATIONS ON THE SURVIVAL + BABY. The word baby had been outlined in glitter. Red glitter. Like blood. Or someone had run out of regular craft supplies and improvised.

There was a cake on the coffee table. Chocolate, judging by the rich, almost-too-sweet scent filling the air, thick enough to cut through the lingering echo of antiseptic that still lived behind your sinuses. The frosting had been roughly smoothed, fingerprints visible in some of the swirls, and tiny plastic dinosaurs stood like sentinels across the top, sunk haphazardly into the icing. One wore a party hat made of a folded gum wrapper. Another had sprinkles stuck to its snout like it’d been face-first in the cake before being posed.

You blinked.

Once.

Twice.

Yelena leaned against the counter, arms crossed like she hadn’t just detonated your nervous system. The sling was gone now, her shoulder bare except for the collar of her tank top, the angry stitches that had once laced her bicep now faded into raised, ruddy scars. She looked better. Less breakable. Still bruised around the edges but standing easy, her weight shifted to one hip like she didn’t have a care in the world. 

“Ha! You should see your face,” she said, a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth, sharp with satisfaction and something almost fond underneath.

“Oh my god,” you said, breath catching. Your eyes couldn’t stop scanning the room. “Is this real?”

It didn’t feel real. Your brain was still trying to catch up, still lagging behind your body like it hadn’t gotten the memo that you’d made it, that you were alive, upright, and standing in the middle of something that looked suspiciously like joy.

“It better be,” Alexei called from across the room, sprawled across the couch like a bear in hibernation, already forking an offensive amount of cake into his mouth.

You blinked again. Ava leaned against the dining table, phone in one hand, a Solo cup in the other, her boot resting on the edge of a toppled party hat like she’d claimed it in a fight. 

“You popped ten,” she said without glancing up.

“They were defective,” Alexei replied, mouth full, utterly unapologetic.

John was suddenly there too, stepping in from the hallway like he’d been waiting for the exact right moment, his hand landing on your shoulder so gently it almost didn’t register. “Welcome back to the land of the ambulatory,” he said, softer than you expected, like maybe he didn’t trust his voice to do more.

You opened your mouth. Closed it. Tried to laugh. Maybe you even did laugh, but it got strangled somewhere in your throat. Your chest started to tighten, then kept tightening, like something invisible had wound a rope around your ribs and was slowly, slowly pulling.

You blinked, hard. It didn’t help.

That stupid-ass banner swam in your vision again—CONGRATULATIONS ON THE SURVIVAL + BABY—and something in you just… gave out.

Not all at once.

First, it was just your throat getting hot. Your face prickling. That subtle shift from I’m fine to something’s not right, and your brain trying to shove it back down like you could muscle through it.

Then came the ache behind your eyes.

Then your jaw clenched, hard enough to make your teeth hurt.

Then—fuck. Fuck.

You felt your face twist without your permission. You gasped for a breath and it hitched mid-way, came out sharp and wet.

The tears were already coming before you could stop them.

You barely had time to register it before Bucky’s hands found your elbows.

“Hey—hey. You alright?” Bucky’s voice was there instantly, soft but alert. “Look at me, baby. You okay?”

You shook your head, or tried to. It came out more like a twitch. Your throat squeezed again, another sob clawing its way out before you could bite it down.

“Shit, are you crying?” Yelena’s voice came from somewhere far off, clipped with concern.

“Oh god,” Ava murmured. “Should we leave?”

Everyone froze.

You could feel it in the air, the tension. The hesitation. Chairs scraping softly. Footsteps faltering. No one sure if they should come closer or back away.

Except Bucky.

He was steady. Still.

One hand stayed at your elbow, the other sliding to your back, his palm warm even through the fabric of your shirt. You leaned into it instinctively, breath stuttering, trying and failing to get your body under control. You felt wrecked, suddenly. Unglued.

And not in pain. Not physically.

But like your skin didn’t quite fit anymore. Like you were vibrating out of yourself. Like you’d been holding your breath for two months and your body had finally remembered how to exhale and the force of it was shattering.

“No—no, wait,” you gasped, words tripping over each other as you half-laughed, half-sobbed, your hands flailing up like that could somehow press it all back in. “Don’t leave. Please don’t—I’m not—I just—fuck, I love it. I love all of it. I’m just—God, I’m so hormonal or something—”

The shift was immediate. You could feel the tension melt out of the room like someone had opened a valve.

“Oh thank god,” Ava whispered.

“Jesus,” John muttered behind you, dragging a hand down his face.

Yelena was the first to move, always the first after Bucky, stepping in with a crumpled napkin and dabbing at your cheek with a gentleness that almost made it worse. “Could’ve warned us, mama,” she said, though her voice had softened. “Thought we broke you.”

“I’m okay,” you managed, voice raw and hoarse. “I’m okay. I didn’t mean to—fuck, I didn’t mean to freak everyone out.”

You wiped at your face with the heels of your hands, even though it did absolutely nothing to stop the tears. The laugh that bubbled up was breathless and wrecked, and it tore through you like you were made of paper.

Alexei cleared his throat like he was preparing to deliver a eulogy. “Ah. Pregnant women. So emotional. Like swans in war time.”

There was a beat of silence. Then John elbowed him. Hard.

You laughed again, this time with your whole chest. Ugly and hiccupped and soaked in snot and saltwater, but real. You bent forward a little, still gripping Bucky’s hand like it was the only solid thing in the room, and pressed your other palm to your face.

And that was when you realized just how much tension you’d been living in. How your shoulders had never really dropped, even after discharge. How your lungs still tried to ration oxygen like survival was on a timer. Like you might blink and wake up alone again. Bleeding again.

But you weren’t.

You were here. In your quarters, albeit temporary. On your feet. In a room full of dangerous, ridiculous, stubborn people who gave a shit. Who made cake. Who put tiny party hats on plastic dinosaurs.

Bucky squeezed your hand once, firm and steady.

You squeezed back, twice.

“I’m okay,” you whispered again.

A soft shuffle sounded to your right, followed by the quiet scuff of boots—too careful to be casual, too deliberate to be anyone but someone who didn’t quite know how to interrupt. You glanced up through your lashes, still blinking away the last of the tears.

Bob.

He loomed there like he didn’t mean to be looming at all, holding out a plastic cup filled with something gold and cold. His grip was gentle. Hesitant. Like he’d been coached on exactly how to hand it to you and was terrified of getting it wrong.

“Apple juice,” he said, voice pitched low and uncertain. “Not from concentrate. And non-alcoholic.” A beat passed. Then: “Bucky threatened me.”

A sound scraped up from your throat, half-snort, half-sob, and caught hard on the edges. “Of course he did.”

Bob nodded solemnly, leaning in like he was about to share state secrets. “He also threw out half the fridge. Said he couldn’t take any chances with—” he lifted his hands, miming air quotes, “‘poison.’ The yogurt’s gone. So’s the mustard.”

Behind you, you could practically feel Bucky’s glare stare the back of your skull.

“Hydrogenated oils,” he muttered under his breath like a man reading a list of war crimes.

You took the juice from Bob with both hands, careful and slow, your fingers still trembling faintly with the aftershocks. The cup was cold. Real. Tangible in a way your body still wasn’t. You glanced up at Bucky.

He hadn’t moved. Still hovering within reach, close but not crowding anymore, like a tether that refused to snap. He looked calmer now that the sobs had stopped, but you could still see it in him, humming beneath the surface: the tension, the vigilance, the raw instinct to intervene. Always alert. Always tuned to you.

“I’m really okay,” you said softly.

“I know,” he replied, just as quiet. Then, even lower, as if the words themselves could break under the weight of them: “I’ve got you.”

And somehow, impossibly, you believed him.

You took a sip of the juice. Crisp. Tart. The sweetness bloomed across your tongue and grounded you fast, snapping the fog in your brain like a cable pulled taut. You exhaled shakily, chest hitching as Bob gave your arm a single awkward pat, then peeled off to find cake like his job was done.

And then, as if someone had flipped a switch, the party moved on.

Not in a callous way, but in the way teams like yours always had: forward momentum as coping mechanism. You weren’t ready to be touched or questioned, not really, and they knew it without asking. So they moved around you instead, a choreography of casual care, plates swapped out, snacks replenished, John intercepting Alexei mid-toast when his speech about survival veered into a deeply confusing metaphor about Soviet winter training and womb strength.

It was chaos.

It was perfect.

You tried to help once. Reached for a bowl of popcorn. Your fingers barely brushed the rim before a shadow passed behind you, a heat at your back that was all too familiar.

“Uh-uh.”

Bucky’s voice landed low in your ear. His hand closed over yours, gently but with zero room for debate. He plucked the bowl away like you were handing him a live grenade. “Sit your ass down.”

You huffed. “I’m not useless.”

“Never said you were.” He pressed a kiss to the top of your head—brief, warm, unbearably soft—and guided you back toward the armchair like you were something breakable. Like he still saw the bruises beneath the surface, even when you pretended they were gone.

“I could’ve carried the popcorn,” you mumbled.

He set the bowl down in your lap anyway. “And you did. Now sit.”

You rolled your eyes. But you didn’t move again.

He crouched in front of you, arms resting on his knees, eyes scanning your face like he was memorizing it all over again. “Any pain?”

“Only when I laugh too hard.”

Bucky huffed, a slight smile tugging at his face. “So we’ll keep Alexei quiet.”

You snorted. A little too hard. Winced. He caught the twitch in your expression and didn’t call you on it, just let it settle between you.

Your hand drifted to the edge of his sleeve, fingers brushing the worn fabric. “You doing okay?”

He blinked, almost like he hadn’t expected the question. “Me?”

You nodded. “It’s been a lot.”

He exhaled slowly, the sound more muscle memory than breath. One hand came up to your knee, thumb tracing absent circles against the cotton of your leggings. “It’s you who’s been through hell, sweetheart. Not me.”

You didn’t correct him.

Because you both knew the truth.

He had been through it too, just in the long, drawn-out way. In the days and nights where your room stank of antiseptic and machines screamed your vitals while your body fought like hell to hold onto life. In the waiting. In the helplessness. In every second where your breath had gone too quiet and his pulse had raced in panic. In the blood that had been on his hands when he hadn’t even been the one to bleed.

But he didn’t say any of that. Didn’t need to.

He just stayed there at your feet, a silent constant, until someone cranked the music too loud and Bob was convinced to sing karaoke using a salt shaker as a microphone.

You were still laughing when Yelena emerged from behind the cluttered dining table, tissue paper rustling like a warning. Her grin was already wicked, mischief and pride stitched into every step. She dragged a crumpled black gift bag across the counter with the same fanfare someone might use to unveil a cursed artifact.

“It’s not much,” she said. “Just… stupid team shit.”

You blinked at the bag. The tissue paper looked mauled, red and silver and mangled to hell, like Alexei had fought it to the death and lost.

You glanced at Bucky, who raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Then, carefully, you reached inside.

Your fingers brushed cotton. Soft. Small.

You pulled it out slowly, breath catching halfway through.

A onesie.

Pitch black. Newborn sized. The sleeves barely bigger than your palm.

Across the front, stenciled in bold, blocky white letters:

THUNDERBABY.

You stared at it for a beat, your mouth falling open.

It was absurd. Ridiculous. Completely over the top.

The onesie’s bold stencil lettering looked like someone had typed “military chic” into a baby shower Pinterest board and clicked print before thinking twice. The cotton was soft, clearly new, the tag still creased from being rushed out of packaging.

And it was perfect.

A sharp laugh broke out of your chest before you could stop it—sudden, breathless, too full of feeling to be graceful. It bounced off the kitchen tiles, rang loud against the cabinets, startled Bob enough to make his head pop up from behind the fridge like a meerkat on high alert. But the laugh twisted mid-breath, snagged somewhere deep, and turned sideways.

Your throat closed.

The burn behind your eyes came fast.

You pressed the onesie to your chest, clutching it with both hands like it might steady you. The fabric was so small. So impossibly small. It hit all at once, the absurd name across the front, the idea of your baby wearing something that had John Walker’s terrible sense of humor stitched into the seams, the fact that they’d thought to do this at all.

That they’d thought of you.

That they’d seen you. Known. Given a damn.

You didn’t sob. It wasn’t loud or dramatic like before. Just a quiet, wrecking ache that rolled over your ribcage like a wave and left your eyes glassy, your breath caught halfway between laughter and something far too big to name.

Bucky found yours without hesitation, like he always did. His palm was rough, warm, grounding. He didn’t say a word. Just curled his fingers through yours and anchored you there.

His thumb brushed over the back of your hand, once. Twice. Slow and steady like he could map your heartbeat through skin and know it was still his to protect.

You leaned into him without thinking, your shoulder pressing to his, the onesie still clenched tight in your lap. He didn’t move away. Didn’t speak.

Didn’t need to.

“You like it?” Yelena’s voice cut gently into the quiet. Not smug. Not teasing this time. Just soft. Hopeful.

You nodded, voice catching. “It’s perfect.”

Behind the couch, John made a strangled noise that was somewhere between a snort and a half-swallowed chuckle. “I told you it should’ve had night-vision goggles on it.”

“Oh my god,” Ava muttered, voice flat with practiced tolerance.

“Tiny ones,” John added, undeterred. “For tactical situations.”

Yelena didn’t even spare him a glance. She bumped your shoulder with hers and said, “I had to beg the vendor to overnight it. Told him it was for an emergency tactical op baby situation.”

That pulled another laugh from you—wet, shaky, a little hoarse, but real.

You looked down again at the onesie, fingers smoothing over the bold white letters. It still felt a little unreal. But not in the foggy, detached way it had before.

No. This felt different.

For the first time since waking up in that medbay with your body broken and your mind drowning in what-if’s, it didn’t feel like everything was falling apart.

It felt like maybe, just maybe, you were allowed to want this.

This messy, ridiculous, duct-taped-together chaos of a team. This baby. This life.

And Bucky’s hand still held tight to yours, his grip unwavering. Like he wasn’t going anywhere. Like there wasn’t a force on earth strong enough to pull him loose.

You weren’t sure you could’ve pried him off even if you tried.

Not that you ever would.

You still remembered the moment Bucky told Valentina he was stepping back from the field.

He hadn’t asked.

He hadn’t negotiated or framed it like a compromise. There was no pacing. No restless silence. No edge-of-brooding self-doubt. He didn’t chew his cheek or weigh the risks out loud. He just said it. Quiet and even and absolute. The kind of quiet that made people stop talking.

“I’ll take the ops desk,” he said. “And I’m not leaving the Tower again. Not while she’s pregnant.”

Val had opened her mouth—probably to mock him, snarl something about duty or loyalty or pulling his clearance—but he didn’t give her the chance. He turned and walked away, back straight, steps even. Never looked back.

It should’ve been harder. The transition. You’d expected it to be. And in some ways, it was.

The field clung to him. It lived in his shoulders, coiled tight in his spine like he hadn’t figured out how to stop expecting gunfire around every corner. Even when his badge started reading Senior Liaison, even when his hands were on a comm panel instead of a rifle, Bucky still moved like a man who hadn’t learned how to stand down.

But then he’d hear your footsteps outside his office.

Just a shift of your weight, a soft scuff of your heel on the polished floor, the gentle cadence of your breathing with one hand cradling your swollen belly, and he’d melt.

You’d watch it happen in real time. His whole body softened. The tension bled from his shoulders. He’d drop whatever he was holding and rise immediately, meeting you halfway down the corridor like you might vanish if he let you go too long unseen.

You’d never seen him like that before.

Not even after the mission where he thought you’d died. Not even the day you told him you were pregnant.

This was different. It wasn’t just fear, it was something deeper, more instinctual. It lived behind his eyes, crept into the lines of his jaw every time you winced from the weight of your belly, every time your breath hitched or you forgot to eat or someone startled you with too loud a laugh.

And hovering didn’t even begin to cover it.

There was a solid month where you caught him on the Tower’s med floor, interviewing pediatric trauma nurses like he was building a task force. He spent hours Googling prenatal CPR protocols. He downloaded emergency birth apps on three different burner phones. He made a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet. For vitamins.

You weren’t allowed to take the stairs after week twenty. Not once. As if gravity itself had suddenly become hostile.

If you so much as tilted toward a cabinet shelf, he was already at your side—shadow-quick, impossibly steady, murmuring, “I’ve got it, sweetheart. Sit down.”

Once, you teased him. Something light. Something sitcom-worthy. You made a crack about helicopter dads and crib bumpers and babyproofing a hallway. He didn’t laugh.

He just looked at you. Really looked at you. Eyes serious. Steady.

“I used to be a weapon,” he said. “I can’t undo that. But I can control what comes near you now.”

And that was it. End of discussion.

So you let him be scared. You let him take the fear and turn it into something solid, something done. You let him carry your water bottle like it was a bomb about to go off. You let him turn down half the lighting in the Tower because the flickering fluorescents gave you migraines. You let him sleep sitting up for three straight weeks because lying down made you nauseous and he didn’t want you waking up alone. You let him research and talk through baby gates in a hypothetical house you didn’t even live in yet, because just in case.

Because when Bucky Barnes loved something, he loved it like a soldier. With his whole body. With his teeth and his spine and the parts of himself that once tore through cities without mercy. That fire didn’t die when he turned soft.

He just aimed it differently.

And he showed up.

To every appointment.

Every single one. Even the ones you waved off as routine. Even the ones you rescheduled three times because of backup in the parking garage. Even the one that was just a quick form signed for a prenatal massage. He was there. On time. Usually early. Holding your coat like it was his only job. Memorizing the parking level like it was a mission grid.

He sat beside you in every waiting room, his knee bouncing under one palm, his metal hand loosely wrapped around yours like he could will the world quiet just by being present enough.

And when they called your name?

He stood. Always.

He asked more questions than you did. Half the time, you were just trying to remember what snacks you still liked. He was already ten tabs deep in medical journals.

What were the signs of placental abruption? Could it happen without warning? What were the safest sleeping positions during the third trimester? Was the fetal heart rate slightly elevated at your last visit—and was that a concern? What kind of magnesium dosage was too high?

During your first intake appointment, the OB actually stopped mid-sentence. Her eyebrows climbed a full inch.

“Are you in medicine?” she asked, pen pausing on the clipboard.

Bucky didn’t blink.

“No,” he said. Deadpan.

You bit the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing.

The doctor blinked. Paused. Then nodded slowly like she was deciding whether or not to question it further.

He had nightmares a few times during those nine months.

More than a few.

You never asked how many. You already knew he wouldn’t give you the real number.

Sometimes you’d wake to the sound of the bathroom fan running—soft, constant, a hum trying too hard to be innocuous. You’d find him curled on the tile floor, bare feet braced against the cold, elbows on his knees, metal hand cradling his forehead like it could hold the weight of whatever he was still seeing behind his eyes.

Other nights, it was pacing. Back and forth, barefoot in the hallway, dog tags swinging low in one hand like they might tether him back to the now if he just held on tightly enough. Sometimes you’d hear him muttering under his breath, trying to piece together a memory that wasn’t real. Trying to rewrite the ending before it devoured him.

They weren’t always about you anymore.

Sometimes, they were about the baby.

About tiny shoes lying crumpled and blood-soaked on a street he couldn’t name. About an empty crib across a gulf he couldn’t cross fast enough. About a scream that echoed long after he woke, still ringing in his ears even as his throat burned from yelling back.

About his hands not catching. Not saving. Failing.

You never tried to talk him out of the fear. You just found him every time, half-asleep and unsteady yourself, the weight of your belly making movement awkward. But you went anyway. Sat beside him on the cool tile or leaned against the wall at his side, your knee pressed to his, your hand sliding into his with quiet insistence.

You didn’t try to fix it. Just whispered steady truths, even through the hitch in your own breath.

You’re not alone. You don’t have to be perfect. You are already everything this child could ever need, because you never stop trying.

He listened. Most of the time, he believed you.

But he was still Bucky. Still the man who’d survived by never letting his guard drop. He didn’t know how to rest when it came to protecting something he loved. Not completely. Not yet.

So he channeled it.

The nursery became a mission. A full-scale, classified operation.

You found him one evening in the Tower’s common room, hunched over the coffee table with a schematic of HVAC systems spread out like a battle map, a measuring tape looped across his shoulder like a combat sling. There were three different notebooks open beside him and a laser level clamped to the back of a kitchen chair.

When you asked—tentatively—what exactly he was doing, he simply said, “Checking airflow safety metrics for crib placement.”

Apparently, he’d consulted John for help picking a paint color. Claimed John seemed like “a guy who’s spent time around boring domestic shit.” That conversation turned into a two-hour debate about whether beige promoted calming baby vibes or if navy was more tactical and timeless.

They compromised, under duress, on sage green. Yelena had stormed into the room mid-argument, called both of them idiots, and texted you a Pinterest board titled Nurseries That Don’t Suck. It had a surprisingly solid aesthetic.

Yelena also offered to babysit.

The first time, she was still breathing heavily from sparring with Alexei, hair plastered to her temple and one knuckle split open, saying she’d “punch any baby fear in the face.”

The second time, she was quieter. Sat beside the half-assembled stroller on the living room floor and muttered that she’d go get certified in infant CPR if you wanted. Added something under her breath about how American training is always shit anyway.

Ava was, unsurprisingly, more practical.

She sent a spreadsheet. Three, actually.

One with registry suggestions categorized by safety ratings. One tracking gear by function, size, and transportability. And one, ominously titled, EMERGENCY INFANT KITS. Inside it was a fully color-coded chart detailing tactical go-bags, and emergency exits.

Bob, sweet Bob, never made a fuss about it.

But the gifts started showing up anyway. Quietly. Without fanfare. A woven basket of baby booties left just outside your door one morning, none of them hand-knit by him, clearly, but chosen with care. A stack of parenting books with sticky notes marking sections he’d vetted, some with underlines, one flagged skip chapter 6, chapter 7 is better. And once, inexplicably, a bottle of the exact brand of stretch mark cream you’d mentioned once during a team debrief.

You never figured out how he got it. You didn’t ask.

Alexei, of course, took a more… declarative approach.

He marched in one afternoon, arms crossed over his chest like he was preparing to be knighted. “I have seen death,” he intoned gravely. “I have seen birth. I have wrestled a bear. I will be the protector of this tiny warrior!”

No one argued. He said it with such conviction that even Bucky, stone-faced and skeptical, just blinked at him and nodded once.

John, however, did elbow him in the ribs and mutter, “Maybe let’s get through one diaper change before we start bestowing titles.”

Still, no one took the godfather badge away from Alexei.

Not even Bucky.

But no matter the chaos—no matter the cracked jokes, the unsolicited opinions, or the never-ending shipments of baby wipes in bulk—Bucky was the constant.

The anchor.

The steady presence who never flinched, even when everything else cracked at the seams.

He was the one who held your hair back through the morning sickness, rubbed your lower back through the bone-deep fatigue, and massaged your swollen ankles with a kind of reverence that made your chest ache. He kissed your temple when you doubted yourself. Brushed your tears away when you spiraled. Touched your stomach like it was something holy.

Whispered to it at night like she was already listening.

And maybe… maybe she was.

Because by the time you felt that first real kick—sharp, certain, impossible to ignore—Bucky was already there.

He was always there.

Kneeling in front of you, both hands splayed across your belly, eyes wide with something too big to name. Like the whole sky had split open and poured straight into his chest. He didn’t speak for a moment. Just let his forehead rest against your skin, the soft rise and fall of your breath catching on the weight of it.

Then, barely above a whisper:

“Hi, sweetheart. I’m your dad. And I love you already.”

The baby came in early spring.

A girl. Loud and furious. All lungs and fists and the softest downy dark hair you’d ever seen.

She wailed the moment the cold air hit her, but Bucky didn’t move.

Didn’t breathe.

He just stared, stunned silent as they laid her against your chest. His metal hand hovered inches above her back, trembling, like he wasn’t sure if touching her would make her vanish. Like maybe he’d break her just by getting too close.

You reached up—shaky, exhausted—and wrapped your fingers around his.

Guided his hand gently down, resting it against the tiny curve of her spine.

And that was the moment he broke.

Not loudly. Not with sobs or gasping breaths.

Just a quiet shattering.

Tears sliding, unchecked, down his cheeks as he leaned down and pressed his face into your hair. His voice was a wreck, low and raw as he whispered thank you over and over again like a prayer he wasn’t sure he deserved to say out loud.

The Tower didn’t last long after that.

You’d both known it wouldn’t.

Even before the due date. Before the sleepless nights. Before the lullabies and growth charts and sleepy 3 a.m. feedings when the world narrowed down to nothing but her. You wanted something quieter. Softer. A place that didn’t smell like reinforced steel and hand sanitizer. A place that couldn’t be burned down around you.

And somehow in between team rotations and budget scraps and whispered promises made in the middle of briefings, Bucky found it.

A cottage.

Small, tucked between thick evergreens near a lake you couldn’t pronounce, where the sky always looked just a little bigger. The porch creaked. The chimney leaned. There was no cell service unless you stood on a specific mossy rock out back. Wild thyme and honeysuckle climbed the windowsills like they’d been waiting for you.

When he handed you the keys, he didn’t say much. Just:

“This okay?”

Your throat had gone tight. Because it wasn’t okay. Not even close.

It was perfect.

And now the cottage felt broken in. Familiar. Like it had always known you were coming.

The nursery smelled like lavender and laundry soap. The rocking chair clicked softly if you leaned too far back. The floorboards moaned every time someone stepped too hard, and the kitchen faucet always dripped when it rained. But none of that mattered.

Because Bucky hadn’t taken his eyes off her for more than ten minutes since the day you brought her home.

She was four months old now. Teething. Vocal. Stubborn as hell.

You’d caught her chewing on his dog tags that morning, smacking them against her gums with the solemn determination of a tiny war general.

Bucky looked completely horrified.

And proud.

“Sweetheart,” he’d whispered, lifting her gently off his chest with practiced ease. “You’re gonna give me a heart attack.”

She giggled. Loud. Right into his neck.

You swore you saw his entire spine melt on the spot.

Some nights, when the house finally quieted—when dishes were done and lullabies had faded and the sky outside had gone inky and wide—he would hold you like the world might try to take you both if he let go.

One arm around your waist. The other cradling your hand, always, thumb brushing lazy circles.

Sometimes he’d press his lips to your shoulder and just breathe there, like he still didn’t quite believe this was real. Like maybe it would vanish if he blinked too long.

“She’s got your stubbornness,” he’d murmur into your skin.

“She’s got your eyes,” you’d whisper back.

And then—after a beat, long and heavy and breakable—he’d ask, in that soft, careful voice he only ever used when the lights were off:

“Do you think she’ll be proud of me someday?”

It undid you every time.

You’d turn to face him, fingers catching gently on his jaw, pulling him in like gravity. And you’d say it with everything in you. No hesitation. No doubt.

“She already is.”

Because how could she not be?

Bucky Barnes had walked through hell and clawed his way back with his heart intact. He’d unlearned everything Hydra tried to build him from. He’d fought for softness without forgetting how to be steel. He’d made a promise in a blood-soaked medbay and never once faltered.

And now, he was here.

You watched him from the doorway, one hand resting on the frame, breath caught behind your ribs.

He sat in the nursery’s dim glow, her tiny body curled against his chest. One of her fists gripped his finger like she’d decided it belonged to her now. He was swaying gently, humming something low beneath his breath, maybe a lullaby. Maybe just her name.

His hair was pulled back, messy. His sweatshirt had a dried stain on the collar that might’ve been from formula or spit-up or both. And he looked, God, he looked wrecked.

Wrecked by love.

Completely undone by it.

He was a father.

And not just that.

He was hers.

And you were his.

And somehow—against every odd, against every scar, every nightmare, every time you both thought you wouldn’t make it—this wasn’t the end of the story.

This was the beginning of everything.

The outpost had been a decommissioned Soviet weapons vault, long gutted by time and rain just outside of Kozelsk. But that intel was two weeks old, and it sure as hell didn’t account for the tripwire mines rigged beneath the floor tiles or the new signature explosives packed into the shell of the forward lab.

You spit blood and pushed onto your elbows.

Your comm buzzed once, then cracked to life in your ear.

“Detka, tell me you’re not dead,” Yelena snapped, her voice patchy through static but sharp as ever. “I swear to god if you are dead, I am not hauling your body out of here. I’ll leave you for the fucking vultures.”

You could’ve cried at the sound of her voice.

“Still breathing,” you coughed. “Mostly.”

“Good. Because I am three corridors west of wherever that boom came from and it smells like burning piss in here. You see any of those freelancers yet?”

“No visuals,” you groaned. “But I’ve got bodies. Clean kills. Their throats are open but there’s no blood on the floor. No drag marks either.”

Yelena swore under her breath. “That’s not freelancers. That’s extraction protocol. Someone’s clearing the site.”

You already knew. You’d seen enough black ops sanitizations to recognize the signs: no witnesses, no trace. If Valentina had found this place and thought there was something worth salvaging, so had someone else. And someone faster. This wasn’t a recon mission anymore.

This was a cleanup.

And you were on the wrong side of the mop.

And this time, there was more to lose than just intel. More than reputation. Your hand brushed low across your abdomen, barely grazing the fabric there like it might burn you, like maybe ignoring it long enough would make it untrue. 

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not here. Not now. 

You hadn’t even told him yet.

Your chest tightened. Not from pain. From panic. Real and hot and rising up the back of your throat like bile.

A sound echoed down the hall. Boots scraping stone, deliberate and unhurried. You didn’t breathe. Not even when your lungs screamed. You counted the steps. Four sets. Heavy.

“Yelena,” you whispered into your comms. “One o’clock. Not ours.”

Another pause.

“Copy. Backtracking to your location. ETA two minutes. Do not engage.”

Too late.

The boots stopped, pivoted.

You backed into the nearest alcove, just wide enough for shadow to fold around you and let your pulse slow in your throat. Your weapon was warm in your grip. One mag loaded. One spare. Not enough for four if they got close.

Especially not like this.

You took a breath. Then another.

The first one rounded the corner, rifle up. Big. Bulked out in matte armor, but his line of sight was narrow. Tunnel vision.

You waited until he passed you fully, until you could hear the click of his comm mic as he keyed it.

Your elbow slammed into the back of his skull with enough force to make his knees buckle. You twisted, dropped low, and swept his legs as he toppled, dragging him sideways to muffle the sound of his body hitting the ground. 

You shoved your knife up under his chin. The blade punched through soft tissue with a wet snap. His body thrashed once, then went still.

The second came running at the subtle noise, catching a glimpse of your crouched silhouette too late. He fired once, the shot ricocheting just inches above your head. You surged forward, used your momentum to jam your shoulder into his gut and drove him into the wall.

Your ribs lit up from the impact, but you gritted your teeth and held.

He swung, catching your cheekbone with the butt of his rifle. The blow made your ears ring. You ducked under his next swing, grabbed the arm of his jacket, and bit hard.

He screamed.

You shoved your thumb into his eye socket before he recovered, using the distraction to snatch his sidearm, flip it in your palm, and shoot him point-blank in the head. Twice, for good measure.

He dropped, still twitching.

You stumbled back, hand instinctively pressed low and flat to your stomach again. You breathed through the sharp pang in your side and steadied your stance again.

There were still two more.

You sprinted toward the third as soon as you saw movement, zig-zagging low as bullets peppered the wall behind you. Sparks flew from the conduit lines as a round hit something vital. Smoke curled in your lungs. The air stung with ozone and copper.

You dove into him feet-first—heel to knee, your full body weight behind the strike. He crumpled with a yell, and you rolled, landed hard on your side, and caught his fallen knife.

But he recovered faster than you anticipated, before you were even on your knees again.

He grinned.

“Не двигайся (Don’t move),” he said, low and rough, the Russian curling sharp off his tongue like he’d said it a thousand times before. Like he had the upper hand. Like you were done.

You hurled the knife, despite your eyesight blurring slightly.

It missed. Barely.

But it made him flinch.

You moved with everything you had left—ducked under his swing, used your shoulder to ram his center of gravity off-balance, and jammed your boot between his legs with such force he let out a choke. 

He went down swinging. Caught your bicep with a blade. Hot pain tore across your arm. You didn’t stop. You grabbed the closest thing, a broken pipe that was jagged at one end, and drove it into his neck with a scream.

His blood hit your face in a hot arc.

You staggered back, wild-eyed, panting, blood soaking through your clothes. Smoke still curled from the wrecked conduit. A siren blared somewhere far away.

You fired your last two rounds at the fourth just as he rounded the corner, one round to the knee. He dropped hard, snarling. You aimed for the killshot, but it veered, hitting his shoulder as he went for his weapon. He still managed to return fire.

Fuck.

The wall just beside your head cracked.

You bolted through the next doorway, gun hot in your palm, shoulder still screaming where the blast had torn through muscle. There was blood on your sleeve now, more than before, but your legs still worked. That was enough.

You ducked through a lab corridor, ruined wires dangling from the ceiling like seaweed. A flickering red light pulsed from an old generator in the corner, painting everything in bursts of blood.

It would be enough. You’d make it back. You’d tell him. The right way. With time to breathe. With his hand in yours—No. Not now. Don't think. Focus.

One step—two—and then something gave beneath your boot.

Click.

Then snap.

Pain tore up your leg like lightning through steel, white-hot and blinding, so sudden it didn’t even feel real. Your body flinched before your mind caught up, before you could even look down, before you understood. A crunch. A grind. The jagged burn of something metal sinking deep.

Your vision stuttered.

You hit the ground hard, knees buckling like wet paper, concrete tearing through your palms, breath punching out of your lungs in a single wrecked gasp.

A pressure trap.

You hadn’t seen it—disguised beneath fallen rubble, metal jaws wired to catch from shin to thigh height. It didn’t go off fully. Didn’t explode. But the clamp hit with enough force to break bone.

A scream tore from your throat before you could stop it. The world reeled. You scrambled backward on your elbows, dragging your leg free, gasping as the pain ripped up your side. You couldn’t see straight. Couldn’t focus.

Your hand pressed instinctively to the flat of your abdomen. You hadn’t meant to do it again but—

The comm crackled again.

“Where are you—”

“I’m hit,” you choked. “West wing. Level 2. Trap rigged to the door. I didn’t see it.”

“Stay awake,” Yelena said, sharper now. “I am coming. You don’t move. You hear me? You don’t fucking move.”

But you had to.

Because the sound of boots had returned. The one you shot. Limping, but closer. A soft shuffle, like he was dragging a blade across the tile for your benefit.

Taunting.

You forced yourself up onto one knee, teeth bared. The pain was beyond language now, beyond screaming. Your hand reached for your sidearm. Gone. You must’ve dropped it when you fell.

Your fingers brushed the hilt of your boot knife instead.

The man stepped into view, grinning through blood.

“Милая (Cute),” he said.

Then lunged.

You didn’t have time to think, you just swung.

Your blade hit home right under his ribs. He hissed, dropped low, and drove his elbow into your throat. The air vanished from your lungs. Your head cracked back against the wall. He grabbed for the knife, twisted it out, and slammed it back toward you—

You shoved it down. It missed your stomach by an inch. Sank deep into your thigh instead.

You screamed again, ugly this time. Wordless.

He raised the blade again.

A single gunshot split the air.

He jerked. Stumbled. Collapsed. Blood spilled from the back of his skull like syrup.

Yelena stepped into view behind him, smoke still curling from the barrel of her sidearm.

She didn’t say anything. Just dropped to her knees beside you just as you did, eyes scanning the ruin of your leg and your expression like she was trying to decide which was worse.

You stared up at the broken ceiling above, vision narrowing at the edges. Your lips moved, but nothing came out.

Yelena pressed her hands to one of the puncture wounds. “Hey, hey, hey! Stay with me. Don’t you dare pass out. I don’t have time to carry your dramatic ass out of here—”

You tried to laugh, but it came out broken. Just a dry exhale through cracked lips. Your hands had gone numb—pressure loss, you were sure—but Yelena’s were firm, steady, digging into the torn flesh above your knee with trained precision.

“There’s too much blood, to many entry wounds,” she muttered. “Shit, shit—okay. It’s not arterial. Maybe not. Don’t move. Just don’t move—”

You weren’t planning on it.

The hallway pulsed in and out of clarity, red light still flickering overhead, your own pulse a tidal roar behind your ears. But beneath it, beneath everything, there was a pressure blooming behind your ribs. A wild, animal panic. Not just for you.

Don’t think about it.

You shoved the thought down.

You couldn’t afford to feel anything else.

Not now. Not when the tremor of more boots echoed down the ruined corridor.

Yelena looked up. Went still.

You didn’t have to ask. You knew that sound. Not your team. Too heavy. Too many. Not a rescue. A sweep.

More were coming.

Yelena shifted her weight off your leg, already reaching for your belt—grabbed your spare magazine, tucked it into her own vest. The way her eyes flicked toward the end of the hall made your stomach pitch harder than the blood loss.

“They’ll have to come through me,” she said.

“Don’t be a dumbass,” you croaked. “Go. Take the passage to the furnace room. You can double back—”

“Shut up.”

She pressed her sidearm into your hand. Yours had been lost. She didn’t hesitate. Didn’t even glance at it. “You buy me thirty seconds. I’ll clear the rest.”

“I’m not bait.”

“You’re bleeding into the floor. You are already bait.”

Another laugh. Another failed breath.

Something sharp twisted behind your navel, deep and low, and you flinched. It was too much. The pain. The pressure. The screaming throb in your skull and the weight blooming beneath your skin like a second heartbeat. Something primal and new, something that didn’t belong in warzones or kill zones or places like this where people like you died ugly.

Yelena’s eyes locked on your face. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” you croaked, trying not to focus on the pain.

“You grabbed your stomach.”

“No, I—”

“Don’t bullshit me, that's the third time I've seen you do that today,” she snapped.

You didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

She stared at you for one beat too long, too long to be safe, but you couldn’t give her what she was asking. Couldn’t even say it. Not here. Not with the taste of smoke on your tongue and death pressing in from both sides of the corridor.

You curled your fingers tighter around the sidearm. Your hands were slick. You didn’t know if it was hers or yours.

“Go,” you rasped. “You have to go.”

Yelena didn’t argue this time.

But she hesitated. A blink of something behind her eyes. Not fear. Something heavier. Something sharp.

Then the sound of boots again, closer now.

She shoved a flash grenade into your palm, already armed to detonate in six seconds.

“When you see their boots,” she said, “you throw it. You count to four, then run. Limp. Crawl. I don’t care. But you move, alright?”

You didn’t trust your voice, so you nodded.

Yelena was gone a second later, vanishing into the smoke like a blade into water.

And you were alone.

Alone in a crumbling corridor, leg torn open, lungs full of smoke, blood slicking the floor beneath you like oil. You could feel the weight again, heavy and awful, curling behind your sternum like something waiting. Not just adrenaline. Not just pain.

You didn’t want to die here. Not like this.

You couldn't.

A flicker of guilt followed. A whisper of something like hope.

The shadows moved. Voices barked. Feet thundered.

They were coming fast. A whole squad. You saw the first silhouette appear through the haze—rifle raised, sweeping side to side. You waited, hand wrapped around the grenade like a prayer, heart screaming behind your ribs.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

You threw it.

The flash hit with a scream of light so loud it fractured the hallway.

You didn’t look back.

You dragged your body forward, weight on your elbows, on your left knee, hauling yourself through the broken floor toward the stairwell. Everything screamed. Your thigh. Your ribs. The low, foreign ache in your gut that had nothing to do with war but had everything to do with why you had to live.

Gunfire split the air behind you. Shouting. Movement.

It grew louder behind you, closer now. Shouts tangled through the static still buzzing in your ear, foreign commands barked over comms that weren’t yours.

You barely made it to the stairwell. One hand gripped the banister slick with dust, rust, and your own blood. You hauled yourself up a single step, then another, panting, ears ringing from the flashbang.

That ache behind your navel flared sharp again, twisting deep and low, not like any wound you knew. It slowed you. Staggered you.

But the shout that followed snapped everything else into focus.

You heard it before you saw it: the sharp scrape of metal boots. The crunch of shattered tile. Then a yell.

You turned on instinct. No plan. No thought. Just move.

“Yelena—!”

You half-crawled, half-limped toward the sound, yelling out, but you didn't care, vision tunneling. You reached the edge of the corridor just in time to see her—back against the wall, gun empty, knife in her hand, pressed to the throat of a man easily twice her size. There were two more behind him, closing in. One of them had her in his sights.

You didn’t stop to count bullets.

You didn’t stop at all.

You raised the sidearm Yelena had given you, your hand shaking, and fired.

One shot. Missed.

Second. Hit a shoulder. Not enough.

Your hands were too shaky.

So, you lunged into the open, screaming as your leg nearly buckled beneath you, throwing the full weight of your body toward the second man, the one with the rifle. 

Your shoulder slammed into his chest, and the impact sent you both to the ground. The rifle clattered away. He was faster, stronger, barely staggered by your hit, and he recovered first, driving his elbow down hard.

Your vision exploded in white.

You didn’t stop.

Your hand found a jagged piece of rebar on the floor. You drove it upward into the side of his throat.

He gurgled once. Then stopped moving.

But not before he got one last blow in, one savage kick to your stomach that left you gasping, choking, every nerve in your body screaming.

Yelena was beside you a second later.

One clean throw, and her knife lodged in the final attacker’s neck. He dropped before he could even react.

Silence fell like a body.

Then the floor tilted under you. Your arms didn’t work. You couldn’t move.

You were still looking at Yelena, her face flushed and streaked with blood, crouched in front of you. You tried to speak. Nothing came out.

She grabbed your face, her palms rough and shaking. “You fucking idiot. That’s twice now.”

You blinked hard. Everything was blurring. Your fingers curled weakly toward your middle.

“I—I had to,” you whispered.

Yelena’s eyes were wide. She shook her head. “You’re gonna bleed out. Stop talking. Save your breath—”

“Tell Bucky…”

You barely managed it.

She froze. “No.”

Your mouth opened again. “Tell him I’m sor—”

“Shut the fuck up,” she snapped, voice cracking now. “You don’t get to say that.”

Your throat felt tight. The pain was unbearable now. Your vision dimmed at the edges, the world flattening to static and heat and the ghost of her hands holding your face.

“Tell him yourself,” she said. Quieter. Fiercer. “You tell him yourself, do you hear me? You don’t get to leave me with that.”

Your fingers twitched once against your stomach.

Then everything went black.

You weren’t shaking until the timer went off.

Three minutes wasn’t long. You’d sat through debriefs far longer. But in that small, stifling pocket of silence—curled on the edge of the bathtub, cheek pressed to the cool tile wall—it stretched and warped like time did in firefights. Slow. Loud. A countdown with no cover and no escape route.

You didn’t look at first. Just sat there, the plastic stick face-down on the lip of the sink, heartbeat pounding like a warning beneath your ribs. You’d picked it up two nights ago. Tossed it into your basket with toothpaste and Advil like it wasn’t setting your whole life on fire.

No reason to panic yet, you’d told yourself. Your body had been off before. Travel. Stress. Field meds. You’d slept six hours across four days and eaten a protein bar that was months expired. This wasn’t new. Wasn’t unmanageable. You were probably fine.

But your body felt…different.

Not just tired. Not just sore. Not even the nausea that crept in each morning the past few weeks and refused to leave. Something deeper. Heavier. Like your blood was thicker now. Like you were carrying something, and your body had already started rearranging around it.

You’d known.

Before the test. Before the countdown. Before the lines even appeared.

You’d known.

And now that you were staring at the proof—those two lines, faint but unmistakable—you realized that the terror didn’t come from the answer. It came from the silence after.

The front door clicked open just as you turned your face to the towel hanging on the wall after splashing yourself with cold water. You didn’t have time to move, didn’t even wipe your eyes before Bucky’s voice filled the apartment. Low and familiar and worn around the edges with something close to fondness.

“Hey,” he called casually, voice already warmer now that he was inside. “They were out of the egg noodles you like, so I got the fried rice instead. Hope that’s ok.”

His boots scuffed softly against the entryway tile. You heard the rustle of a bag, the crinkle of cardboard.

You swallowed the lump in your throat and stood too fast. The room reeled. You shoved the test into the drawer beneath the sink and slammed it shut with your hip.

“That’s…it’s perfect,” you called back. “Stomach’s still off.”

He didn’t question it. He never did. You’d been off before missions before—hell, usually everyone was. He chalked it up to adrenaline, or the fact that Valentina always held the worst ones just long enough for you all to get twitchy. He never read more into it than that.

You didn’t want him to.

When you stepped out of the bathroom, the living room was already warm with light. Bucky stood at the counter with your favorite takeout in one hand and a bottle of ginger ale in the other. His hair was damp from the rain outside, curling slightly at the ends. He wore one of the soft old hoodies you always tried to steal.

God, he looked tired.

“Still nauseous?” he asked without turning, already reaching into a drawer for a fork. “I told you not to eat the eggs in the tower fridge. John says they’re powdered.”

You managed a tight smile. “I didn’t eat the eggs.”

He glanced at you then, brow furrowed. Not suspicious. Just worried.

“Everything okay?”

You nodded. Too fast.

He didn’t buy it. Of course he didn’t. His gaze dropped for a half-second, scanning you like he always did, like you were a map of terrain he’d memorized too many times to ever get lost in. You wondered if he could see it. If your skin looked different. Paler. Warped. Touched by some invisible shift.

“Come here,” he said. “Sit.”

You did. He placed the container in front of you, still warm. Fried rice and plain steamed chicken. The only thing you could stomach lately. He cracked open the ginger ale with a flick of his thumb and set it down beside the plate.

He didn’t ask why you were shaking.

Didn’t ask why your face was paler than usual, or why your breathing was shallow. Didn’t say a word about how your hands lingered too long against the counter or why your gaze kept drifting toward the bathroom.

He just stood there, leaning on his elbow, watching you pick at the food like he could will you back into being okay.

You loved him so fucking much it made your throat close.

And that was the problem.

You couldn’t tell him. Not yet. Not now. God, maybe not ever.

You weren’t sure if it was even supposed to be possible, not after everything they did to him. Hydra had carved him down to the bone and rebuilt him into something inhuman. Something they thought didn’t need softness. Didn’t need futures or family or hope. 

Bucky never said it directly, but he didn’t talk about that kind of life. Not for himself. Not after what he’d done. Not with blood on his hands and weight in his eyes.

You knew that kind of grief. The kind that wrapped around your ankles and whispered, you don’t deserve nice things.

You remembered an offhand comment once—months ago, maybe longer—when Yelena had made a crack about raising tiny assassins and Bucky had gone quiet, the kind of quiet that meant don’t. 

He’d said it flat, even: “That ship sailed.” Like it wasn’t just impossible but irrelevant. Like it wasn’t even a thought he let himself have.

You’d shrugged it off. Because you loved him. Not for what he could give you, or not give you. Just for him. The broken, beautiful, brutal truth of him. His silence. His weight. His hands, warm against your lower back when nightmares woke you. His voice when it was three in the morning and the world wouldn’t stop spinning.

But now you were here. With a plastic pregnancy test hiding in the bathroom cabinets and a gut full of something new and terrifying and real.

This tiny, terrifying thing inside you. This unknown. This heartbeat that didn’t exist yet but already made your chest ache.

You looked down at your hands. They didn’t feel like yours.

If you told him now, it wouldn’t be fair. He was one day out from deployment, and you were four days out from a mission you’d just been assigned. He needed clarity. Precision. Control. You couldn’t be the thing that pulled the ground out from under his feet.

You forced down a bite. Swallowed it with effort. Took a sip of ginger ale and smiled like it didn’t feel like your entire life had just split in half.

Bucky leaned across the counter and brushed his fingers along your arm, barely there. His thumb skimmed your elbow like he was grounding himself. Like he always did right before he left for something bad.

“You get the call about Kozelsk?” you asked, voice steadier than it felt.

He nodded slowly, still watching you. “Yeah. Valentina’s already sent me the files. Cut and dry recon. You and Belova should be in and out in less than 24 hours.”

You gripped your fork harder than necessary. Nodded like it meant nothing. Like your body wasn’t already vibrating with a thousand what-ifs. You told yourself it wasn’t a lie. Just a delay. Just time to think.

He set the takeout down without a sound. Didn’t speak. Didn’t rush.

Just moved toward you with that particular kind of caution only he ever seemed to get right—like you were both wild animal and wounded thing, like he knew better than to corner you even if you looked fine on the outside.

“Sweetheart,” he said, voice low. A thread of something softer caught in it. “Come here.”

You didn’t hesitate. You couldn’t. Your body answered before your mouth could.

He caught you as soon as you reached him. One arm warm and solid around your waist, the other colder where the vibranium wrapped your back, a press of protection you hadn’t realized you’d been aching for until you were tucked beneath it. He didn’t squeeze. Didn’t rock or shush or demand. Just held you there in the quiet, nose pressed to your temple like maybe he could breathe for the both of you.

You let your face fall against his chest. Inhaled. Exhaled. Didn’t move.

His thumb brushed the back of your neck, slow and steady, like he could coax the tension out of your spine by touch alone.

“You’ve been quiet today,” he murmured against your hair. Not accusing. Not even curious. Just noticing.

You nodded.

Didn’t lift your head.

Didn’t answer.

“You sure you're alright?”

Another nod. Smaller this time.

You felt his chest rise beneath your cheek. Felt him start to ask more, but stop. Think better of it.

Instead: “Do you want me to run you a bath?” His lips grazed your hairline. “I can put the lavender stuff in. The one you pretend not to like.”

You almost smiled.

Almost.

He waited. A long moment. Then leaned down and pressed a kiss to the side of your head—slow and certain, like a promise. His hand never left your back. His other one shifted just slightly, curling around your hip like it could shield whatever part of you was fraying most.

“Everything’s gonna be okay,” he said finally. Quiet. Firm. Like he meant it. Like saying it made it true.

You didn’t correct him.

Didn’t tell him what your body already knew.

You just nodded again.

And let yourself believe it. If only for a minute. If only because it was him.

The call came through at 03:41.

Not a full report. Not even proper clearance. Just a clipped string of emergency codes dumped through a back channel Bucky hadn’t checked in weeks. The kind of channel they only used when there wasn’t time to waste on protocol.

His comms had lit up in red.

Your name came first.

Then injured.

Then unconscious.

Then medevac.

Then...nothing.

No location. No vitals. No timestamps. Just five fragments, jagged and cold, vibrating through the band on his wrist like a warning shot to the heart.

The silence that followed was worse. Not blank. Hollow. The kind of nothing that meant something had already gone wrong.

Bucky didn’t think. There wasn’t time for it. Thought required oxygen, and that had already drained out of the room the second your name hit the screen. His body moved before his mind caught up—spinning on his heel, breaking into a sprint like he could rewind time with sheer speed alone.

He was still mid-mission, a low-risk sweep on the fringes of Senta with a two-man backup team and half a page of useless intel. They were searching abandoned bunkers for intel that probably didn’t exist, tracing signatures that pinged and vanished like ghosts. 

He should’ve called in a full reroute. Should’ve waited for extraction clearance. Should’ve done anything except what he did.

But he didn’t care.

Not when it was you.

He reached the jet in under three minutes. Didn’t speak when the co-pilot tried to block him. Just pushed past and took the seat, fingers already flying through the console, overriding the flight path manually. He wasn’t shouting. Wasn’t panicked. But his voice didn’t sound like his own when he keyed in his name and entered the override code.

He didn’t sit still after that.

Didn’t rest. Didn’t blink.

The jet took off and he paced the length of it like a caged animal, barely registering the turbulence, barely noticing the blood on his knuckles from punching the wall beside the comms station when the outbound call failed to connect.

Everything about those few hours on the jet felt like someone had taken a crowbar to the scaffolding of his brain and just kept hitting until all that was left was your name and the phantom of your voice in his head.

You were supposed to be fine. You’d said as much the night before his mission—half asleep on the couch, wrapped in his hoodie, your fingers brushing his where they met on the blanket between you. Told him not to worry, that your op was routine stuff, nothing he had to lose sleep over.

Then you’d kissed him. Real slow. Like you knew something he didn’t.

He hadn’t pushed. Just smiled into your hair and murmured something soft about taking you on a proper date when he got back.

And then yesterday, on comms, you’d called him on your way out. Clear signal. Short call.

“You’ll beat me home,” you’d said, trying to sound light.

“Don’t do anything stupid before I get back.”

You’d laughed. But there was a hitch in it. A crack he’d almost asked about. Almost.

He didn’t remember landing.

One moment, the jet was still five minutes out—dark sky, shaking frame, the pilot avoiding turbulence. The next, the ramp cracked open and he was already moving. Wind in his face, boots hitting tarmac, lungs half-full of air that felt too thin.

Move. Just fucking move.

He took the stairs four at a time, quicker than the elevator. Through the lower hangar. Past Ops. Some tech tried to call his name and didn’t finish it, he was already gone. 

The world narrowed to sharp lines and glaring light. The Tower looked the same as it always did—brushed steel, sterile walls, military-grade silence—but it all felt wrong. Too clean. Too quiet. Like the whole place was holding its breath.

Like it already knew.

He turned the corner. Nearly collided with a figure stepping out of the shadows of the west corridor.

John. Shoulders squared. Dressed down in field gear, sleeves rolled to the elbows. His mouth opened like he’d been waiting there, like he knew this would happen. Like he was stupid enough to try and intercept him.

“Barnes—”

“Where is she.”

No pause. Not a greeting. Just fire.

John took a step back. Not scared. Just reading the room. Reading him.

“She’s in room three,” he said. “Med bay. She's stable.”

The word made Bucky flinch.

“Define stable.” His voice scraped low. Controlled, but only just.

“She’s alive,” John said carefully. “But she’s still under, intubated. Oxygen, fluids. The whole nine yards.”

Bucky blinked once. Hard. His jaw locked so tight it popped.

John took that as agreement and turned, motioning him to follow.

The hallway felt longer than it had any right to be. Bucky’s boots beat a steady rhythm against the tile, but his thoughts outran it, spiraling tighter with each step.

“That mission was supposed to be recon,” he said finally, voice rough. “Clean in, clean out. So what the fuck happened?”

Walker followed beside him, matching his pace, but his voice wasn’t flippant the way it usually was. “We don’t really know yet.”

“Try again.”

“I’m not bullshitting you, Barnes. We had no red flags on the pre-sweep. Site had been cold for months. No chatter, no heat signatures. They went in blind.”

“No backup?”

John’s jaw ticked. “Wasn’t supposed to need any.”

They turned a corner. The lights dimmed slightly overhead, switching into night mode. Everything felt more sterile. More final. Bucky’s skin crawled.

John didn’t stop talking. “They walked into what sounded like a fucking cleanup. Not ours. Not friendly. Belova said the floor was rigged—pressure traps, gas leaks, low-profile explosives. No chatter about it beforehand. Nothing in our intel. They got there and shit was already smoking. Someone was erasing evidence, and they didn’t care who they took with it.”

Bucky’s jaw clicked.

He stopped walking for half a breath. Just long enough for John to notice.

“What am I walking into, Walker?” Bucky’s voice dropped, sharp and cold and coiled like a live wire. “Don’t sugarcoat it.”

John’s gaze flicked toward the medbay doors just ahead, then back. “I told you—she’s stable.”

“I don’t give a fuck about stable,” Bucky snapped. “I’ve been stable on an operating table with my arm missing.”

The hallway was suffocating—every fluorescent hum too loud, every inch of floor stretching like it was trying to keep him from getting to you. He was too hot in his jacket. His shoulder ached. His hands wouldn’t stop twitching. There was a sourness behind his teeth, behind his ribs, building like bile in his throat.

“She was bleeding out when they brought her in,” John started, slowly. “Her leg’s the worst of it. Pressure-triggered trap. She pulled herself out of a hallway on that leg. Didn’t wait. Got Belova clear.”

Bucky’s jaw clenched.

“She’s got a skull fracture. Took a hit from behind—blunt force. Her head was bleeding bad. Ribs too. Maybe internal. I don’t know what the hell happened—”

“Fuck.” Bucky’s voice cut through the space like a blade. “She was walking just last week before I left, she was fine.”

John went quiet.

“You ever see her when she’s really tired?” Bucky kept his eyes ahead, voice clipped, unraveling thread by thread, his mouth moving faster than his brain could keep up. “She hums. Half-conscious, doesn’t even know she’s doing it. When she’s too tired to fight it off, she curls her foot up against the couch cushion and knocks it against the fabric until it leaves a mark. Like a metronome.”

He swallowed hard.

“She did that before I left. Last thing I saw.”

The lights above them flickered.

“And you’re telling me that she is behind a wall right now, not breathing on her own, because no one thought to double-check the fucking floor plan?”

“Bucky—”

“You tell me the name of the analyst who cleared that op,” Bucky said, voice low and cold enough to cut steel. “And you tell Val she better not be in my fucking line of sight when I walk out of that room.”

The edges of the hallway started to warp. Not visually, just something in the way the air bent around him, too loud and too sharp. His pulse had long since abandoned rhythm. He blinked hard, once, like it might shake the tension loose from his spine.

John didn’t argue. Just gave a slow nod, jaw tight. He turned toward the panel, reaching for the override to the medbay doors.

“Hey, man—” His free hand hovered like he meant to touch Bucky’s shoulder, to ground him somehow, but he stopped himself. Let it fall. “She’s strong. You know that. Just…it looks worse than it is.”

Bucky didn’t answer. Couldn’t. He’d already started moving.

He walked the last stretch alone.

The corridor narrowed. Dimmed. Sterile med bay walls that had all started to look the same after too many years of bleeding into them. But this one was different.

The door was marked with a small glowing three in the upper corner, backlit in blue like it meant nothing at all. There was a narrow observation window set into the center of it, sterile glass and reinforced steel, standard issue. He could see through it from halfway down the corridor. 

Could see you.

He stopped walking.

Stopped breathing.

Stopped everything.

His boots stilled. His hands curled at his sides, tight enough that the vibranium plates clicked under the skin. One step from the door and his whole body locked. Not because of the security code or the weight of John’s voice behind him, but because he could finally see you now. Not a report. Not a briefing. Not numbers or charts or the sound of someone else’s voice saying you’re stable like that meant anything.

You.

You were unconscious. Intubated. Pale in a way he’d never seen before, chalk white against hospital linens, color stripped from your face like it had been taken. Your lips were slightly parted around the oxygen tube. Your chest lifted just barely under the sheet with every controlled breath the machine gave you. 

There was gauze wrapped around your head, dark pink in places where blood had leaked through. Your leg was elevated, casted and braced and still twice the size it should’ve been. A bruise bloomed across your shoulder—deep and rotten-looking under the skin—and there was a fresh cut along your cheekbone, barely stitched, swollen and angry.

You looked like you’d been left to die.

Like they hadn’t meant to bring you back.

And for a moment, Bucky couldn’t move.

The air outside the door felt thin. Not stale, just missing. Like everything had been sucked out of this one corner of the Tower and left hollow. Like he was standing in the vacuum left behind by something sacred cracking open.

This was the thing he never let himself imagine. The image he never let form behind his eyelids, even on the bad nights. Not you. Not like this.

He pressed one hand to the wall beside the door and bowed his head, his palm flat to the cold surface. His chest rose, shuddered once, and held. He counted to five. To ten. He tried to focus on the weight of his own body. The feeling of his boots against the tile. The edge of the wall biting into his palm. Anything to keep himself tethered. Anything but your face behind that glass.

You were alive.

But that fact didn’t settle in his chest like it should have. It didn’t soothe. It didn’t offer relief.

Because all he could see were the places where that truth had almost unraveled. The bandages. The monitors. The thin line between your makeshift breaths. 

And where it still could. Not when he could see how close it had been. How much of you was still in danger. How easily this could’ve been the morgue instead of a medbay.

How easily he could’ve lost you without ever hearing your voice again.

Without holding your hand. Without telling you that everything else in his life—every broken, violent, worthless part—meant nothing if you weren’t in it.

He didn’t even remember walking toward the door.

Didn’t remember the first step. Or the second. Or how his hand found the keypad through fingers that didn’t feel like they belonged to him anymore. Just knew that if he stood there a second longer, he’d come apart in the hallway and never make it back.

It wasn’t strength that made him move.

It was desperation.

The kind that stripped a man of pride and breath and sense. The kind that whispered cruel things in his ear and made him believe them. She could’ve died without you. She almost did. And you don’t deserve a second chance.

The door opened with a hiss.

He stepped inside like the floor might collapse under him. Every movement was cautious. Careful. Like you might break if he breathed too loud.

The lights inside were low, adjusted to night levels, soft and indirect. The room smelled like antiseptic and gauze and something faintly metallic. Machines hummed in the background, steady and unrelenting.

He made it halfway to the bed before his knees almost gave out.

His eyes were locked on your hand, the one nearest to him, lying limp on top of the blanket with a thin white IV line threaded into the crook of your elbow. He reached for it, slowly, and didn’t care that his hands were shaking so hard he could barely keep them steady. He just needed to feel your skin again. To know it was real. To know you were still real.

He sat beside you, the chair groaning under his weight. He didn’t lean back. Just folded over his knees, one hand gripping yours and the other braced against the side of the bed. His head hung low, and for a long time, he said nothing. Didn’t move. Didn’t blink.

Then, he lifted his head. Reached for your face.

Some hair had stuck to your temple—damp with sweat, clinging to the edge of the bandage there. He brushed it back gently with two fingers, like he’d done a hundred times when you were half-asleep on the couch or pretending not to cry after watching a sappy movie.

But it looked different now. Smaller. Like everything in this room had shrunk down to one unbearable moment, stretched out across too much time.

His fingers trembled as they pulled back.

“Jesus,” he murmured. The word cracked in the middle.

His throat burned.

Your face was still slack, pulled tight with bruising.

You didn’t stir. Didn’t twitch.

That terrified him more than anything.

He leaned forward again, his elbows digging into the edge of the mattress, and he held your hand in both of his—flesh and metal, warm and cold. He stared down at them like they didn’t belong to him. Like he could squeeze hard enough to push time backward.

He didn’t know how long he sat like that.

Could’ve been twenty minutes. Could’ve been hours. The walls didn’t move. The light didn’t change. It was just the constant, low hum of machines and the slow, glacial rhythm of your pulse ticked out on the monitor. Too slow. Too goddamn quiet. He counted the beats. Every one. Anchoring himself to it like it was the only real thing in the room.

At some point, his legs had gone numb.

His neck ached from the way he’d curled it to rest his forehead against the back of your hand. But he didn’t move. Not really. Not until there was a knock at the door, barely audible.

His body tensed.

The door opened with a soft hiss and a man stepped inside—white coat, small tray in hand, a lanyard with two clipped badges bouncing lightly against his chest. Mid-forties, maybe. Tired eyes. The kind of face that had delivered too much bad news to too many people.

“Ah, Barnes,” the doctor said, voice quiet, respectful. “You got here fast.”

Bucky didn’t answer at first. He just sat back slightly, gaze fixed on the man’s hands as he moved toward the IV line.

It was automatic, the way his muscles coiled, just under the surface. His jaw ticked.

He knew this wasn’t a threat. Knew this man was here to help.

But there was a part of him, something wired into his bones and gut and breath, that didn’t want anyone touching you. Not right now. Not while you were like this. Not while he couldn’t do anything to stop it.

He swallowed heavily and kept his voice flat. “Came as soon as I heard.”

The doctor nodded and glanced at the chart hanging near the bed. He was quiet for a while—replacing one IV vial with another, checking vitals, updating a digital pad with a slow drag of his stylus.

Bucky didn’t take his eyes off your face.

“She’s holding steady,” the doctor offered eventually. “Brain swelling’s gone down since the scan we took this morning. That’s a good sign.”

Bucky blinked once. His throat ached. “When’ll she wake up?”

“Hard to say. Could be hours. Could be another day or two. With blunt trauma to the skull, everyone’s timeline looks different.” A pause. “But the oxygen’s helping. And she’s strong.”

Bucky nodded slightly. He’d heard that too many times now. It wasn’t enough. Not even close.

The doctor hesitated. Then cleared his throat gently. “If it’s okay, I just want to ask you a few questions for her record. While we’ve got a quiet window.”

Bucky exhaled through his nose. “Yeah. Sure.”

“She listed you as her primary in the system,” he continued. “So I’ll walk you through some of the next steps once we get past the acute stage. But just for the chart—are you two… partnered? Cohabitating?”

Bucky glanced over. His brows drew together slightly. “We live together. Yeah.”

“And how long’s the relationship been established, roughly?”

The question was phrased clinically, but something about it made the back of Bucky’s neck prickle.

“Four years and change,” he muttered. “Why?”

“Oh, just part of the standard update,” the doctor said casually. “Especially in cases like this, where stress can impact… well, a number of things.”

Bucky didn’t respond. His grip on your hand shifted slightly. The doctor made a note, eyes still on the screen.

A few more seconds passed.

Then:

“She’s… not on any hormone therapy, correct? No recent adjustments in medications?”

Bucky’s jaw tightened. “No.”

Another pause.

The doctor nodded, looking at something on the screen again, something Bucky couldn’t see. “Right. I thought so, but I wanted to confirm. Her file’s a little sparse on that front. We ran a full tox panel and basic endocrine workup when she came in, just routine, and some of the markers… well.”

That cold feeling crawled back up Bucky’s spine.

“Well what?”

The doctor hesitated this time. Looked up.

“I’m sorry,” he said gently. “Pardon my wording here—I just want to make sure I’m not stepping into anything sensitive. But… had the two of you been trying to conceive?”

Bucky blinked.

The words didn’t land at first.

“What?”

“I only ask,” the doctor continued, slower now, more cautious, “because we noted elevated hCG levels. Not extreme, but consistent with early gestation. Six to eight weeks, give or take. It’s not uncommon for someone in her position to not realize it yet. But based on the labs, it seems likely that she may—”

Bucky stood up.

The chair scraped against the floor, sharp and jarring in the quiet of the room.

“She’s...pregnant?” he said, his voice low. Disbelieving. Barely holding together.

The doctor’s mouth flattened. “We didn’t want to make assumptions until we had context. I assumed you would’ve been aware.”

Bucky stared at you. Stared like he’d never seen you before.

He couldn’t breathe.

Not because he was angry. Not because he was blindsided.

Because he felt like the fucking ground had disappeared beneath his feet.

Because it was you. And it was this. And it was real.

And he hadn’t known.

And now you were lying here with a goddamn tube down your throat and a second heartbeat that wasn’t yours might’ve already—

His hand clenched into a fist at his side, metal creaking softly.

Bucky stood motionless, fists curled at his sides, every muscle wound so tight it hurt. His eyes were locked on you, on the bruising at your ribs just visible beneath the blanket, on the plastic tubing taped to the soft skin above your collarbone. He didn’t blink. Couldn’t.

His voice scraped up through his throat like broken glass. “Are you sure?”

The doctor—still standing a few cautious paces from the bed—shifted his weight and offered a nod, slow and grave. “The labs were repeated three times. Elevated hCG levels. Progesterone consistent with early gestation. We ran hormone panels as a baseline given the trauma….It’s not just a possibility. It’s confirmed.”

Bucky’s mouth opened, then closed. The words didn’t form right. His lips were dry. His chest felt like it had been filled with sand.

“You said six to eight weeks,” he said, barely above a whisper.

The doctor tilted his head slightly, expression softening—not out of pity, but out of clinical care. He knew who he was talking to. Knew Bucky Barnes wasn’t the kind of man who cried wolf.

“Give or take,” the man answered gently. “That’s an estimate based on hormone levels, not ultrasound, but yes. I’d say closer to eight weeks along.”

Eight weeks.

Eight weeks.

That was before this last mission cycle. Before the op outside Madrid. Maybe even before the one before that.

And you hadn’t said a word.

Bucky’s eyes dragged back to you. You were so still. Your hand resting under the blanket, palm turned up, the edges of your fingers bruised like you’d been gripping something hard.

He couldn’t stop seeing it now. Couldn’t unsee it.

You’d been off. He’d chalked it up to nerves, pre-op jitters, the heavy rhythm of one mission bleeding into the next. He’d told you to rest. Offered takeout. Tried to make you laugh the night before he left.

And you had. Smiled. Said thank you. Kissed his cheek. You’d curled into him that night like your ribs ached and your mind was somewhere else, and he’d thought it was just exhaustion.

He’d believed you when you said it was nothing.

God, how fucking stupid could he be?

His voice broke. “She would've known?”

The doctor hesitated. Not from doubt. From restraint.

“There’s no way to say for certain,” he said carefully. “But even as early as four weeks, many people start to notice changes. Nausea. Fatigue. Food aversions. Emotional shifts. Even small things like dizziness or temperature changes. Some miss it entirely. Others…” He paused. “Others don’t.”

Bucky didn’t need a fucking doctor to tell him you knew. He could see it now, clear as a sniper’s scope.

“She didn’t tell me.” Bucky’s voice was hoarse. Raw. Like something was tearing loose inside his chest. “She didn’t say a word.”

“I understand that must be difficult,” the doctor said, not unkindly.

Bucky laughed, just once, sharp and empty. It didn’t sound like anything close to humor.

“She was sick last week. I told her it was nerves. I said she just needed rest.” He blinked, hard. “And she nodded. And let me believe it.”

He felt sick. Hollow. As if someone had cut him open and left the pieces spread out across the room for everyone to examine.

“She made me dinner and couldn’t even taste it. She spit it out. Said it was too salty.” He dragged a hand down his face, breath unsteady.

“I knew. I fucking knew something was off and I didn’t—” He stopped. Pressed his palm into his forehead like he could shut off the noise in his brain. “—I didn’t ask.”

The doctor didn’t respond right away. He didn’t need to. The silence hung there, heavy, just long enough to let Bucky crumble beneath it.

“I would’ve pulled her,” Bucky said, voice low, like it hurt to speak. “If I’d known—I would’ve pulled her off the mission. I would’ve stayed. Christ, I never would’ve let her walk into that hellhole alone.”

“I believe you,” the doctor said softly.

Bucky shook his head. “No, you don’t.” His gaze locked on yours again, like you might open your eyes at any second and tell him it was all a joke, some stupid, sick prank. But your lashes didn’t so much as twitch. “I didn’t even notice. What kind of man misses that? What kind of man lets her go?”

“You trusted her,” the doctor said. “She clearly trusted you too.”

Bucky let out a breath that sounded like it had been clawed from his lungs. “She didn’t tell me.”

“No. She didn’t.” The doctor’s voice was quieter now. “But people keep things for all kinds of reasons. Even from the people they love most.”

Bucky scrubbed a hand down his face, fingers trembling at the edge of his jaw. “You don’t get it. She doesn’t hide things from me. Not like this. Not the big stuff. We—we don’t do that.” He looked up again, eyes wet and sharp. “She was going to tell me. I know she was. I think—shit. I think she was, the morning she left.”

He could hear it now. In the way you’d paused before signing off the comms. He thought you were worried about the mission. About Belova watching your six. About slipping into yet another building you weren’t sure you’d walk back out of.But it hadn’t just been that. It had been this. This had been behind your eyes.

He hadn’t kissed you like he should’ve. Hadn’t said goodbye like it might’ve mattered.

Hadn’t known it wasn’t just your life you were walking into that op with.

He didn’t even realize he was crying until the next breath caught wrong in his throat.

“I let her go,” he repeated. “And now she’s in this bed, and I didn’t even know she—”

He stopped again, unable to finish.

The doctor waited a beat longer. Let the silence settle. Then cleared his throat, careful and slow, trying to guide the conversation back to what had to be said.

“I know it’s not what you want to be thinking about right now,” he said gently, “but we do need to talk through some things. Just to make sure you’re fully informed.”

Bucky didn’t look at him. Just stared at you.

The doctor glanced at the vitals monitor. Back to the chart. His voice shifted—soft, but steady.

“With blunt force trauma to the abdomen,” he said, quieter now, more clinical, “there’s always a risk of complications. Especially in early pregnancy. Her vitals are stable. The fetus hasn’t shown signs of rejection yet—but we’re watching. Closely.”

That was it. The word. Yet.

Bucky turned sharply. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we’re monitoring her around the clock. Ultrasound will be scheduled once the swelling goes down and her vitals can handle the scan. But we have to be honest about the risk.” A beat. “The trauma she took to the torso—the pressure trap, the fall, and then the blunt impact to the skull—all of it compounds.”

Bucky’s jaw was shaking now.

“So you don’t know,” he said slowly. “You don’t know?”

“We’re doing everything we can.”

Bucky stepped back like he’d been shoved.

You were pregnant.

You were pregnant.

And you were unconscious. Intubated. Hooked to machines in a quiet room with no windows while doctors ran numbers behind glass and he didn’t even know you were carrying his kid.

He couldn’t breathe.

You’d gone into that mission with someone else’s life inside you and hadn’t said a word.

He covered his mouth with the back of his hand, eyes stinging.

You didn’t tell him. You didn’t fucking tell him.

And he almost lost you.

Almost lost both of you.

The thought hit harder than anything he’d felt in months. In years. In decades. And it didn’t come like a scream. It came like a whisper. Like a crack in a wall that’d held for too long.

“How?”

His voice was shredded. Barely audible.

The doctor paused mid-step, halfway to the door. Turned back, cautious. “I’m sorry?”

Bucky looked at him, finally. Really looked. And there was nothing left in his face but disbelief—exhaustion and heartbreak stretched thin over bone.

“How is that possible?” he rasped. “I—” He shook his head once, quick, like he couldn’t believe he even had to say it. “I’ve been tested. Just to know. After everything Hydra did—what they rewired, replaced, burned out of me—they said it wasn’t possible.”

The words felt like rot in his mouth.

The doctor stepped forward slightly, his voice measured now, clinical but not cold. “If you’re referring to chemical sterilization procedures or structural modification, yes, those can have long-term effects. Especially in cases involving trauma at a cellular level, or—”

“Don’t give me the medical lecture,” Bucky snapped, not loud but sharp enough to slice. His hands were trembling again. “Just tell me how the hell this is happening.”

The doctor nodded, slowly. “There are always edge cases. Nothing in reproductive medicine is absolute. The body adapts. Heals. Finds workarounds.” He paused. “Even when we’re told it can’t.”

That didn’t feel like hope. It felt like a gut punch.

“You’re saying it was a fluke.”

“I’m saying biology is unpredictable. And what Hydra did to your body…” The man hesitated again. “No one fully understands the parameters of their enhancements. You weren’t born with a blueprint. You were made in fragments. It’s entirely possible that something shifted. Repaired. Regenerated. Something no one thought to look for.”

Bucky was silent.

A breath dragged into his lungs like it didn’t belong there.

His voice was hollow. “Fuck, why wouldn’t she tell me?”

The doctor hesitated. “That’s not a question I can answer.”

Bucky nodded, barely.

No, of course it wasn’t. Because there was only one person who could answer that, and you were lying there pale and quiet with blood dried at the edge of your mouth and a monitor deciding whether or not you were still alive.

The doctor moved slowly, starting to step back, sensing the unraveling thread beneath Bucky’s words.

“If you have any more questions,” he said quietly, “you can reach me on comms. I’ll be just down the hall for the next few hours. We’re not touching her chart again without looping you in.”

Bucky didn’t answer.

The doctor nodded once more, set the tablet down gently on the small table by the foot of your bed, and slipped out without another word.

The door clicked shut behind him with a soft hiss of pressurized air. It was too quiet. Too polite. Like this was just another room. Just another patient. Just another day.

Bucky stood there for a moment, still. Breathing like it hurt. Hands flexing at his sides, unsure where to go, unsure what they were supposed to do now. The silence didn’t feel sterile anymore, it felt thick. Like it had teeth. Like if he stayed on his feet another second it’d tear him apart.

So he sat.

Not with purpose. Not with control. His knees just buckled, and the chair caught him on the way down. Same place as before. Same cold vinyl digging into the backs of his thighs. But this time, there was no weight steadying his hands. No warmth beneath his palm.

Only you. Still and pale and too fucking quiet. And something else now, tucked deep inside you, something no one had planned for and nothing could prepare him for.

His elbows braced on his knees. Shoulders rounded. His hand dragged across his face like it could scrape away the thoughts already forming. The ones he couldn’t bear. The ones he couldn’t stop.

You were pregnant.

You were pregnant.

And you didn’t tell him.

Not because you didn’t trust him. He didn’t believe that. Not for a second. But because you’d wanted to carry it on your own. Because you didn’t want to burden him. Because something in you—something he should’ve seen, should’ve known—thought maybe he couldn’t handle it.

And maybe you were right.

Because even now, he wasn’t handling it. He was drowning in it.

His throat felt raw. Not from yelling, he hadn’t spoken above a whisper since he walked in, but from the pressure. From everything he was trying to hold back.

A child.

Your child.

His.

It didn’t feel real. Not in the soft, sweet way people talked about in books or in old movies. Nothing about this felt glowing or golden. It felt like being cracked open. Like someone had reached into his chest and handed him something impossibly fragile and said hold this steady while the building burns.

He’d never let himself imagine this. Not seriously. Not in any long-term, Sunday morning kind of way. Not beyond the haze of half-formed thoughts he shoved down when you fell asleep with your hand on his chest and he let himself pretend, just for a second, that maybe he got to keep this. That maybe he got to build something.

But it was never real. Not to someone like him.

Kids were for other people. People who hadn’t been turned into weapons. People who didn’t flinch in crowded hallways or track exits in grocery stores or dream in blood and ash. People who weren’t always calculating how many ways a room could go wrong.

And yet—

There’d been that mission last fall. Rural outskirts of Kashgar, the safe house turned hostage site. He still remembered the layout: three stories, west-facing collapse, no rear exit. Ten children trapped underground. One window for evac. You’d gone in without blinking.

You’d stayed behind to cover the last kid’s exit, barely clearing the detonation radius yourself. He’d screamed in your comm so loud he blew the mic out, but you made it. Coughed through smoke, limped out with soot in your lashes, cradling a little girl in your arms like she was made of glass. And after it was done, after the sirens quieted and the evac crews pulled out, he’d watched you kneel in the dirt and let those kids braid flowers into your hair while you wiped their tears with bare hands.

He’d never forgotten the way you looked that day. Not fierce. Not victorious. Just human. Soft where the world had tried to make you hard. Unshakable. Protective. Gentle in a way he didn’t know how to be, not really.

He’d caught himself watching too long. Something old and aching in his chest pulling tight.

And now that image cut through him like a blade.

Because this wasn’t some faraway fantasy anymore. This wasn’t a brief daydream before falling asleep or a fleeting glance across a wrecked city street.

It was blood.

It was cells dividing inside you.

It was something real, something terrifyingly alive that was already in danger. That he hadn’t known about. That he hadn’t protected.

And what if it was already too late?

His hand curled into a fist. Metal groaned softly under the tension, joints whining from the pressure. He pressed it to his lips like he could hold something back. Like if he kept still enough, quiet enough, maybe it wouldn’t fall apart. Maybe you’d wake up, and this would all just be a nightmare version of a conversation you hadn’t known how to start.

But what if you never woke up?

Bucky looked at you then—really looked. At the pale stretch of your brow, the tiny twitch of the monitor lights reflecting in your lashes. At the loose strands of hair tucked behind your ear, the cut near your temple where the blood had crusted over in dark rust red. He wanted to gather it all. Hold it together with his hands, press his mouth to your skin and promise things he didn’t know how to say.

He would’ve held your hair back every morning if the nausea got bad. Would’ve left saltines by the bed. Would’ve learned every goddamn craving and run halfway across the city to get it. Would’ve kept you off missions. Would’ve made Valentina herself eat glass if she tried to stop him.

He would’ve built the whole world over again just to make it safer for you.

For the baby.

His baby.

Bucky let his head drop into his hands. Breath shuddering. Shoulders heaving once—just once—before he ground it down again. Because he couldn’t break now. Couldn’t afford it.

You needed him.

And he hadn’t been there.

But he was now.

God help anyone who tried to take that away.

Part 2

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It started as a flicker—barely a thought, just an off-feeling in your chest. The kind of gut instinct you couldn’t shake even when you told yourself you were being paranoid. You weren’t nauseous. You weren’t even late yet. Your next cycle wasn’t due for another few days. But the feeling was strong. Heavy. Familiar in a way that scared you.

You told yourself it was stress. You tried to brush it off.

Still, that same afternoon—while Bucky was stuck in a debrief with another congressional committee—you found yourself quietly slipping out to the pharmacy and buying a pregnancy test. Just one. Just to shut the feeling up. You didn’t tell him.

You waited until he left again the next day, locked in his office for hours, drafting policy proposals and doing interviews you never had the patience to watch in full. You stayed in the bathroom, reading the test’s instructions over and over again. Your hands trembled a little as you peed on the stick and set your phone timer. Three minutes.

You weren’t expecting anything. You told yourself that. But you exhaled so hard it almost hurt.

When the timer buzzed, your hand hovered. You picked the test up.

Two lines. One faint. But undeniably there.

You stared at it for longer than you meant to, pulse crawling up your throat.

Could be a false positive. Could be a fluke. The box did say early testing wasn’t always accurate. So you tucked the test into the back of the bathroom drawer, locked your phone, and waited for your period to come.

It didn’t.

—

The next evening, Bucky was humming low under his breath in the kitchen, layering lasagna sheets like some war hero–turned–domestic god. You told him you’d set the table. Instead, you went into the bathroom again.

This time you brought five different tests. Two of them were digital.

Your hands didn’t shake as much this time, but your heart still did. You weren’t even sure what you wanted the answer to be. You weren’t planning for this. You’d never even let yourself imagine it.

You waited on the cold tile floor, knees to your chest, staring at the row of tests on the counter.

Positive.

Pregnant.

Double lines.

Double lines.

Pregnant.

It was real. It was all real. And somehow you weren’t surprised. Your body had known.

But you didn’t tell him.

Not that night. Not the next day either.

You read somewhere that early pregnancies could be fragile, and maybe you needed time—to adjust, to breathe, to even believe it yourself. You thought: twelve weeks. That’s when I’ll tell him. When I’m sure everything’s okay.

So you kept the secret. Quiet. Close.

It wasn’t hard at first. You felt fine. No morning sickness. No major symptoms. Just… tired. A little lightheaded sometimes. But nothing dramatic.

Then one morning, you woke up shivering with fever, body aching like you were coming down with something nasty. It was the first time Bucky saw you that way—slumped on the couch, bundled in a blanket, half-asleep with your forehead damp with sweat.

He panicked.

You never got sick. In your whole time together, you’d only ever had one cold, and you still powered through like a soldier. But now? You could barely keep your eyes open.

He made soup. Texted Sam. Cancelled his meetings for the next three days. Sat on the floor beside the couch, cradling your feet in his lap, running his metal hand over your skin to gauge your temperature. You’d never seen him that still, that focused.

When you saw him reaching for the phone again, you reached for his hand.

“Don’t,” you croaked softly. “I’m okay. It’s just a fever. Probably something nasty going around.”

“You never catch anything nasty,” he muttered, brows still furrowed.

You gave him a tired smile, voice hoarse but teasing. “That’s because you’re the one who’d shut down completely if you were the one in this blanket.”

He huffed a soft, reluctant laugh. But he still looked worried. He didn’t call the doctor—but only because you insisted.

Bucky took the next three days off entirely. No briefings. No dinners. He nursed you like it was the most natural thing in the world. Made warm broths. Pressed cool cloths to your forehead. Cooked whatever you wanted, even when your cravings barely made sense. He watched over you like you were breakable.

And somehow, he still didn’t suspect.

Not once did he mention your period. Not once did he count the days.

By day four, the fever was easing. You could move again. Shower. Change clothes. Brave through small chores like folding laundry or wiping down the kitchen counter. You were still tired—bone tired—but you masked it when Bucky was around. You smiled more. Sat up straighter. Made jokes just to ease the look in his eyes.

And when he was gone—when he left for Capitol meetings or early morning roundtables—you slept.

You slipped out once, too. Quiet and careful. While he was caught in back-to-back interviews, you went to the clinic alone and met a doctor. You wanted to know. Needed to hear it from someone else.

Five weeks pregnant, the doctor said.

You held your breath as the ultrasound wand moved across your stomach. There was nothing but a soft blur of shadows.

No heartbeat yet.

But the doctor smiled gently and told you not to worry—it was too early.

“Come back around week eight,” she said. “We’ll most likely see the heartbeat then.”

It didn’t mean anything was wrong.

So you nodded. Took the list of supplements they offered. Bought the vitamins. And started taking them in secret, tucking them behind other bottles in the cabinet, swallowing them quietly when Bucky was too busy reading news reports to notice.

You hadn’t told him yet.

But you were sure of it now.

Your body wasn’t whispering anymore. It was humming—quiet, steady, certain.

You were pregnant.

And someday soon, you were going to have to tell the man you loved that his whole world was about to change.

—

You didn’t tell him right away.

You waited. Waited for something firmer, clearer. Something that said yes, this is real, not just a whisper in your body.

So three weeks after that first quiet visit, you went back to the clinic. Alone again. Your palms were cold, pressed between your thighs as you sat on the edge of the exam table. The nurse adjusted the wand and angled the screen toward you.

“There,” she said softly. “Right there.”

A tiny rhythm blinked on the monitor—irregular, still faint, but undeniably alive.

A heartbeat.

You covered your mouth with both hands. You didn’t cry, not quite, but your eyes went glassy with warmth. It wasn’t fear this time. Not even nerves. Just… awe. A slow rush of something that felt bigger than joy.

You were a mom now. A tiny life was growing inside you, and it already had its own pulse. Its own tiny rhythm that matched nothing in this world but itself.

And suddenly the fear about telling Bucky didn’t feel as heavy. You still didn’t know exactly how, but you knew one thing for certain: he’d be a good dad. Maybe the best. You’d seen it already—in the way he took care of your fever like it might steal your breath. In the way he looked at you like the world never made sense until you existed.

You spent the next few days curating a box.

You tucked in both ultrasound scans—the first one, and the newer one from your latest visit, where the baby looked more like a little lima bean than a blur. You carefully cleaned and dried the pregnancy tests, lined them up in order, like stepping stones leading to the truth. And in the corner of a baby blue velvet pouch, you placed one tiny pair of LEGO-sized shoes you’d found at a novelty store downtown. No laces. Just molded plastic. They made you laugh the second you saw them, and you figured Bucky would too. Humor was how you both survived the hard stuff.

You tied it up with twine and hid the box in your nightstand drawer. Waiting for the right moment.

—

That moment came quietly.

It was a weekend. The kind that moved slow, where the sunlight stretched across the sheets and neither of you had anywhere to be. He was spooned around you, your back to his chest, one arm slung across your middle, chin nestled in your hair.

“You look…” he hummed, low and lazy, “kinda glowy lately. You know that?”

Your cheeks warmed. “Glowy?”

“Yeah. Like you’ve got this extra something. Little dash of beautifulness I can’t quite figure out.”

You smiled against his forearm, heart thudding louder now. You turned in his hold until your cheek rested on his chest, hand splayed over his sternum. The rhythm of his heart was steady under your fingers.

“I’ve got something for you,” you murmured.

That got his attention.

“Yeah?” His brow ticked, lips curving at the corner. “What kind of something?”

“Sit up,” you whispered, voice softer now. “And close your eyes.”

He did—without teasing, without hesitation. You could see him trying to guess by the way his jaw shifted slightly, but he kept his eyes shut, a little grin playing at his lips.

You reached for the drawer, fingers brushing the twine-wrapped box.

“Okay,” you said, voice just a little shaky. “You can open them.”

Bucky opened his eyes.

And went still.

The grin slipped from his mouth, lips parting slowly. His eyes scanned the open box in his lap—the scans, the tests, the tiny plastic shoes—and everything inside him shifted in that moment. His brows drew together. His mouth moved but no sound came out at first.

Then—

“Wait…”

His voice cracked slightly, low and careful.

“You’re…?”

You nodded.

He blinked twice, still looking at the contents of the box like they might dissolve if he stared too hard. Then he looked up at you.

And you didn’t expect it—how fast he moved. One second he was sitting there, and the next his arms were around you, pulling you tight against him, burying his face in your neck like he couldn’t hold himself together otherwise.

The first words he said were not about the baby.

“How are you, baby? How’s your body?”

You blinked against his shoulder, caught off guard.

“Are you okay? Have you been in pain? Was that fever—was that because of this?” He leaned back just enough to cup your face, eyes flicking over every part of you like he was cataloging anything he’d missed. “Have you had morning sickness? You didn’t say anything, you—Jesus, sweetheart, are you okay?”

You laughed, breath catching a little at how serious he looked. “You’re asking all the questions like you’re the one growing it.”

His thumb brushed your cheek. “I’m serious. I’m trying to catch up.”

You kissed his jaw, smiling. “I’m okay, Buck. No morning sickness, no pain. The fever passed. I’ve been tired, that’s all. And I’ve been taking my vitamins.”

He exhaled hard, like he’d been holding that breath for weeks. His eyes finally flicked back to the box.

You watched him, amused. “You’re not curious about the baby, love?”

He blinked. “Shit. I didn’t even ask.”

You smiled gently, heart soft. “I know.”

He swallowed hard. “I’m just… I’m so used to it being us. You’re the only thing I’ve ever really had.”

You nodded. “I know.”

He looked down at your belly—not showing yet, not even a hint—and placed his hand there. Just rested it, like he was trying to feel something through the skin.

“How far along?”

“Thirteen weeks yesterday.”

He looked up, eyes shining with something thick and quiet.

“And the baby’s okay?”

You nodded. “Healthy. Measuring right on track. I even heard the heartbeat last week. It’s strong.”

He pulled you back into him again, holding you even tighter this time. His lips brushed your temple. Then your cheek. Then your jaw.

“You’re gonna be the best mom,” he whispered, voice thick with awe. “God. I’m so fucking in love with you.”

And you just smiled—because at that moment, the world felt steady. Full.

You didn’t know what would come next, but you knew you’d face it with him. With his hand on your belly, and yours over his heart.

Together.

—

Time slipped by like soft wind. Weeks passed in a rhythm that grew more familiar by the day—naps in sunlit rooms, grocery lists that included pickles and strawberries, quiet Saturday mornings with Bucky curled around you like a human blanket. You were twenty-four weeks along now, and it felt real in every sense. Visible. Tangible.

Bucky had never missed a single checkup—not once. And today was no different. He was already in the waiting room with your hand held tight in his, thumb brushing little circles into your wrist like it was muscle memory. His eyes had this light in them—like he couldn’t wait to see his kid again.

Every time he heard the heartbeat, he got a little quiet. You’d learned to read the change in his face—how his smile turned a bit softer, his eyes just a little glassier. He never said much in those moments, but his grip on your hand would tighten, and he’d kiss your temple like he couldn’t help it.

He was attached. In love. With both of you.

He’d even taught himself how to read ultrasound scans—seriously taught himself, like some people learn how to restore motorcycles. The last visit, before the tech even said a word, Bucky had leaned forward with this quiet little grin and whispered, “She’s a girl, isn’t she?”

The technician had paused. Blinking. Then turned to look at the screen again.

“…I didn’t even say anything yet,” she’d laughed. “How did you—?”

You chuckled, rubbing your belly, voice warm.

“He’s just overjoyed. And very skilled at everything.”

Bucky blushed and ducked his head, but you saw the quiet pride on his face. And he’d earned it—he really was learning. You found three pages of names tucked inside his notebook, all neatly written in his sharp, precise print. Girls’ names this time. Ones he liked the sound of when said with your last name. Or his.

—

Despite how overwhelmed he sometimes looked when he stared at your growing belly like it still surprised him… Bucky never let the nerves get louder than the joy. And he never once forgot you in the process.

He treated you like you were royalty. No—like something holier than that.

He came home during lunch hours just to eat with you, even if it meant rushing back into meetings with food stains on his shirt. He brought flowers one evening. Plums the next. There was no pattern—just whatever reminded him of you. Your body started to ache in the evenings, so he massaged your hips, your calves, your shoulders, murmuring low praises as he worked out the knots.

He got serious when your OB mentioned blood sugar.

“I’ve been reading about gestational diabetes,” he said one night, flipping through a folder of printed articles. “You’ve got me now, doll. That means no extra spoonfuls of honey. And you’re down to one coffee a day, max.”

You gave him a look. “Are you going to monitor my espresso shots?”

“Yes,” he said flatly. “And I’ll replace them with kisses. More effective.”

Even weekends became little love letters. He’d take you out—to museums, parks, bookstores, lakesides. Nothing too crowded. Nothing that would make you tired. He kept a blanket in the trunk of the car just in case you needed to lie down somewhere. Always thinking ahead. Always thinking of you.

It wasn’t just something he started doing after you got pregnant. It was simply who he was. It was in his DNA. This quiet devotion. This way he loved you in every language—words, time, touch, gifts, acts. He spoke all five fluently. And with you, he was always fluent.

—

Sometimes, late at night, you’d lie awake and watch him sleep beside you—his hand resting over your belly without even thinking, as if that was where it belonged. As if he already knew what it meant to protect someone too small to be seen.

You felt blessed. Not in the way people toss the word around lightly.

But truly, deeply, humblingly blessed.

To have him by your side.

And to be carrying his child.

 "This idiot is trying to set me up again.” He said, nodding towards Sam. "And I told you I'm not interested."

 “But why? Don't you want to feel like back in the days and have some fun with pretty women? This Hydra shit clearly wasn’t good for you. You’re too tense and always mad. Go on a date, maybe you’ll find a good girl to spend some time with.” Sam genuinely wanted to help his friend, and he didn’t understand why Bucky was so mad about it.

The look on Bucky’s face was weird. Like he wanted to say something but, at the same time, didn’t want to share his thoughts. 

“Are you already dating someone?” Natasha leaned with her elbows on her knees and studied his face. There was definitely something that Bucky didn’t want to say.

Steve looked between the three of his friends, and when Nat asked Bucky a question, it was like a bulb turned on in his head.

 "Buck…" Bucky met Steve's eyes, holding eye contact for a few seconds, like they were talking about something that only they knew.

 “Hey!” Sam said, waving his hands. “What are you two doing? Do you know something, Rogers?”

 “Buck, is it because of her?” The blonde said it almost in a whisper. “You still remember, right?”

“Did you have a girlfriend before the war?” Natasha, as always, understood everything immediately, and it was funny to see how Sam’s mouth fell open in shock.

Bucky clenched and unclenched his hands in his lap, not sure if he should reveal the truth. He had kept it to himself for so long—ever since he escaped Hydra and the memories from the past started to flood his head. It was too painful to think about you. To think about the woman who was his whole life many years ago. He remembered everything, and now he sees you in his dreams almost every night. Sometimes in nightmares, sometimes in the good ones, about the life that you two would’ve had if he hadn’t gone to war.

“What the hell are you hiding from us?” Sam shouted again, trying to get attention.

 “I…” Bucky frowns, staring at his hands. “I had a girlfriend... before the army, before the Hydra.” He closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing. Just the thought of you hurt him, making him regret everything. That he left, that he didn’t marry you, and that the universe had this shitty plan.

 “And that’s why you don’t want to go out with someone?” Come on, man, how long has it been?  80 years? Get over it. It must have been another one of your girlfriends that you hooked up with when you were young.” He chuckled, looking between his friends, none of whom seemed happy with his choice of words.

 "Sam, don't—"

“You sound like an asshole.” 

 “Get over it?” Bucky didn’t let Steve or Nat finish their sentences before he barked at Sam, looking even more angry than before. “Just another one of my girlfriends? Do you have any idea what the fuck you're talking about, Wilson? " He looked like he was ready to kick his friend right in the face. “She wasn’t one of them. In fact, there was no “them”. In my entire life, I’ve never even touched another woman because I've been in love with Y/N since I was 14. We started dating when I turned 18, and I proposed before I had to go to the war.”

Bucky’s emotions quickly changed as the hot rage turned into a longing for memories and feelings. He felt a lump in his throat, so he reached into his pocket for his wallet, from which he pulled out your old and shabby photo, gently running his finger over your face.

“Y/N was everything to me. She said yes, and I promised her that I would return so we could get married. I imagined that I would spend my whole life with her, you know? I don't need any other woman. I do not want it. I still love her, and I don't care if either of you find it funny.

The room fell into heavy silence. Steve just looked out the window, remembering the times when the three of you went to Coney Island, and he was always the third wheel. You were his friend too, and the aching feeling in his chest was too heavy.

Sam felt a little bit awkward after saying these things about your relationships. He wanted to tease Bucky, not be rude.

Natasha was the one who took the first step when she stretched the arm so Bucky would give her the photo. “You two look so cheesy. She’s really gorgeous.” She smirked, looking at the old black-and-white photo of you two sitting on the bench. Your back was almost lying on Bucky’s body, and his arms were wrapped around you. It seemed like you were talking about something and enjoying the private moment. Bucky had the biggest smile Natasha has ever seen on his face, as he was looking at you with heart eyes.

 “Can I see?” Sam finally asked, nodding at the photograph in Natasha's hands. She passed him the photo and Bucky moved in his place, feeling a little bit uncomfortable about revealing this part of his life. 

“You two look cute. Weird to see a smile on your face.” Sam chuckled.

“Where did you find this photo?” Steve leaned closer to the picture, immediately remembering the day you and Bucky took it and the way Bucky has had it with him ever since.

 “I took it to the war. Always had it in a jacket, even on missions. She was with me that day on the train. I think Hydra found this in my pocket. When I ran away from there, I found a box with my stuff; the photo was there.”

 “Have you… tried to find something about her?” Steve lifted his head, studying his friend's reaction.

 “Yeah,” Bucky sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose, “I don’t know how, but I didn’t find anything. Two years after my fall, there was no record of her. No marriage certificate, no place of residence, no place of work. Nothing. Like she just disappeared.” He shook his head in despair. 

 “But it's impossible.” Steve frowned, giving the photo back. “A person can't just disappear and leave nothing behind.”

 "I don't know," Bucky shrugged, looking back at the photo for a second and then slipping it back into his wallet. "Maybe it's for the best. I don't know how I would come to terms with the news of her death.”

It’s been almost two weeks since that conversation, and luckily for Bucky, Sam didn’t attempt to set him up with anyone anymore.

Earlier that day, Tony announced that his new technology had spotted some weird activity in something that looked like an old and hidden Hydra base. It was pretty much abandoned, but there were signs of small energy consumption, as if something was still constantly working. That’s why the team of Bucky, Steve, Sam, and Tony had to check it out and destroy any possible danger.

After being free from Hydra, Bucky didn’t take part in many missions because the team agreed that it would be better for him to heal and stay far away from triggers. But this base brought up many concerns: it was hidden far away, there was no information about it in nonofficial papers, and even Bucky himself had never heard about it. Tony insisted that someone with knowledge of the Hydra system should go there too.

When the four of them arrived on the quinjet at something that looked like a well-hidden abandoned bunker, they decided not to split up and go through the main and only entrance.

“Be careful; we don’t know that they might hide in here.” Steve said, going in first with a shield in front of him. Bucky and Sam went after him, holding rifles and checking the big and almost empty room.

“They should clean in here, kinda dusty.” Tony chuckled in his usual playful voice. 

“It’s not a good time for your jokes, Stark.” Steve was always a little too serious during missions, and Tony really liked pushing his buttons. “I see the light in the other room.” He whispered, carefully opening the door. 

“Holy shit.” Sam and Tony spoke at the same time when all four of them entered the giant room.

There were five big glass machines that were a little bit foggy and had a little lightning in them.

“What is this?” Steve ran closer to one of them and saw that there was a man inside. “Oh my god, there is a man in here... It looks like he’s alive.”

“There is a folder called “The Winter Soldier Program” with personal information.” Sam said, picking up a file from the shelf in the corner of the room. “George Harris, 27 from New York. Kathleen Hill, 21 from New York…” He read, mumbling to himself.

“It’s a cryostasis chamber. Hydra used it to freeze me.” Bucky lowered his rifle, coming closer to one of the chambers. Another man. “It lowers your body temperature to the point that you can be kept like that for many years. Hydra– “ Bucky went silent when he got to another glass camera. 

“Barnes? Why is there—” Sam didn’t finish his words when the sound of Bucky’s weapon falling on the cold concrete filled the room. 

“No-no-no, please, no!” He whispered, moving closer to the glass. He couldn’t believe what he saw. 

You were right in front of him, with closed eyes and too pale skin. That was impossible. It’s not you. There was no chance that you somehow ended up with Hydra. 

Bucky felt like he was unable to breathe. He tried to inhale some air, but the lump in his throat was too big. The tears blurred his vision; he didn’t hear anything around him, as your almost lifeless body was the only thing that he thought about. You, his sweet girl, somehow ended up trapped with monsters, and he couldn’t do anything to save you from it. 

“Bucky!” Two pairs of hands dragged him from the chamber, and the blurry vision of his best friend was now visible in front of him. “Bucky, listen to me! You should calm down, buddy. Just breathe, okay?” Steve deeply inhaled and exhaled to help Bucky, and after a few minutes, he was finally able to speak.

“T-that’s impossible, Steve. She shouldn’t be there! She should’ve found another man and lived a happy life with her family!” He said in a shaking voice, angrily wiping away tears from his face. 

“I don’t know how this happened, Buck; I really don’t. But she may be alive there.” Steve supportively squeezed Bucky’s shoulder. 

“We can’t just take these people out. We should transport them to the tower and find the safest way to unfreeze them.” Tony said in a serious voice, not joking around anymore. He walked closer to the chambers, studying each of them. “It looks like they are working on their own power, and this one, “he pointed at the one that was dark and with water drops from the inside. “Doesn’t work anymore. The man is probably dead.” 

“Are there any chances of getting them out of there alive?” Sam glared at Bucky, who was just staring at your peaceful but haggard face through the glass.

“I don’t know, but me and Banner will do everything we can.”

It took another day to find a way to move four of the still-working chambers to the compound and ten more hours to defrost everyone. and to say that Bucky was completely stressed out and exhausted was an understatement. He didn’t sleep at all, staying in the room near the lab to get all the news as soon as possible. He walked around the room for hours, overthinking everything—what will happen if you die or if you survive? Is it really better for you to wake up and see all the damage that he has done for the past years? To see the empty shell of the person you loved in the past?

“Barnes!” Tony blasted through the doors with a grin on his face. “We did it.”

“You did it?” Bucky’s whole body was buzzing with energy and anxiety. “Where is she? Is she alive? Is she conscious? Can I see her?”

“Wow-wow, calm down. She is alive, but you can’t see or visit her right now. Dr. Cho has to run many tests to find out whether your lovebird is healthy or not.” Tony nodded his head toward the corridor so Bucky would follow him. “We put each of them into a different room, and your Blonde Bestie insisted on putting Y/N into the best and the biggest one. There is a special window through which you can see her, but she cannot see you from the inside. So you can be as creepy as you want to until she gets better.” Stark slapped Bucky on the shoulder to show some kind of support when they stopped in front of the said window. 

You were lying on the bed, surrounded by too many wires and monitors. Dr. Cho was standing above you, writing something down, and checking the device near your head.

She said something aloud, probably talking to FRIDAY, and came out of the room. 

“Oh, Mr.Barnes, I heard that Y/N was your girlfriend, right?” She smiled, and Bucky slightly nodded, not being able to completely drag his attention from your body. “I’ll tell you this: it’s my most difficult and unique case, but she’s a strong one. Her body heals faster than other people’s from cryo. I believe she’ll be fully awake tomorrow.” 

“Thank you, Dr.Cho.” Bucky felt a little bit better now that he had more hope that you could really be back. Dr.Cho gave him another smile and left to check on her other patients. 

“I have to find out if these people have families. Did Y/N have someone who might be alive?” Tony asked. 

“No, she didn’t.”

“I’ll go, and you, Barnes, will stay away from her for now, understood?” He pointed a finger into Bucky’s face. 

“Yes. I’ll just watch from here.” 

You were alive. You were awake. Bucky saw with his own eyes as your body started moving and you slowly sat on the bed, confused by your surroundings. He saw panic on your face because you were clearly disoriented and scared to be alone in an unknown place. 

As fast as he could, he found Dr. Cho, who was in the room with Steve and Natasha. When he, choking on all the emotions, told them about you, it was a mess. 

Dr. Cho and a few other nurses ran to your room to check your condition because you were the first one to open your eyes.

Bucky, Steve, and Nat stood on the other side of the window. Bucky wasn’t able to fully convince himself that it was true that you were so close to him. It felt like a dream, like a weird picture that his brain created to comfort him. 

“She’s okay, Buddy.” Steve placed a hand on Bucky’s shoulder because it seemed like he didn’t even blink or breathe. “You can see her soon.”

“No.” He mumbled.

“What?” His friend’s head shot in his direction.

“Someone else should talk to her first. Tell her about my past. Maybe she won’t even want to see me after everything I’ve done.”

“I can go and talk to her first.” Natasha softly smiled. She knew the feeling when you’re afraid that someone will leave you because of your past. “I think it’s better for Y/N to first find out that she woke up in the new century and that she was cryofrozen for many years. I’ll tell her that Steve is alive, and then me and you can both tell her about Bucky.” 

Bucky just nodded to her words, still not being able to look at anything besides you. He wasn’t sure that after you find out all the truth, you’ll allow him to even be around you, so for now, he tried to memorize you as much as he could. 

Since the moment you opened your eyes, everything felt unknown and different. You couldn’t explain it, but something had changed. You didn’t know where you were, what time it was, how you ended up in that place, or who all these people were. You felt scared as too many doctors crowded your room and fussed around, talking about tests and medical procedures. 

The young woman who seemed to be in charge was actually really sweet. After only you and her were left in the room, she sat on your bed with a pile of clothes in her hands and smiled at you. 

“So, Y/N, my name is Dr. Cho, and I’m here to help you heal faster and without any consequences.” 

“Where am I?” Your voice was too raspy and harsh. It felt like you swallowed a glass of sand. 

She sighed, looking at her journal. “It’s hard to explain, but I promise that there’s nothing to worry about. You are safe. In a few minutes, someone will visit you to talk about everything and answer any of your questions. Now, I was told to give you these clothes so it would be more comfortable for you. You can change in the bathroom right there; there is also anything you might need like a toothbrush, soap, and so on.” She pointed at the door in the corner of the room. 

You stayed silent until Dr. Cho left your room, and then slowly, feeling kind of scared to move around this place, you went to the bathroom to change out of the hospital gown. 

The bathroom looked even weirder than the main room; you had never seen such furniture and interiors. And when you unfolded your new clothes, it took you a few seconds to figure it out. It was some kind of soft pants and a large t-shirt. What kind of clothes was it? Yes, they were actually comfortable, but it wasn’t something that you saw in the stores. 

While you were brushing your teeth, your brain was working too hard trying to figure out what the hell was going on, until you heard someone calling your name. 

“Hey, Y/N, my name is Natasha.” The pretty red-headed woman was standing near your bed with a tray and food in her hands. 

“Please, tell me what’s going on. Where am I? Why does everything look so strange here?” You said in a desperate voice, you almost wanted to scream because you woke up several hours ago, but no one told you a single thing.

“Don’t be nervous, honey. Let's sit on the bed; you’ll eat your special meal, and I’ll tell you everything you want.” She was so nice and genuine, so you nodded and sat down. 

Natasha placed a tray near you, and you saw that it was your favorite food of all time. You took a bite, and your taste buds were immediately filled with the taste of the meal that James cooked you almost every day. James. It was his recipe. The tears flooded your eyes when all of the memories about your dead boyfriend returned to your head. Yeah, how could you forget that it had been at least two years since he was gone? 

“Y/N? What happened?” Natasha’s worried voice distracted you. 

“It just reminded me of someone. I felt like I was home, and it hurts me because nothing is the same anymore.” You wiped your tears away, taking another bite. 

“I promise you that everything is going to be okay. You are not alone here.” You frowned at her words but still nodded. “So ask whatever you want to.” 

“Where am I, and why does everything look so different?”

“You are at the Avengers Tower, located in Manhattan, New York City. I know that might sound ridiculous, but you were in the cryostasis chamber up until now. It’s 2023, and a lot of things have changed in the world; that's why it might be confusing.”

You stayed silent for a few seconds, overthinking Natasha’s words. “It can’t be true. I can’t be more than one hundred years old now. And I look the same.” 

“This is how cryostasis works—it freezes the body so it can survive many years without any changes. Now tell me how you ended up with Hydra. What is the last thing you remember before waking up here?” 

“Back in the 40s, I was a nurse. My– my boyfriend— he died during the war.” You stopped because of the lump in your throat. It was too hard to bring back these memories because it was the first time you said these words out loud. “He died, and then my closest friend died too, and I just had no one left. I was alone, and I didn’t even know what to live for because all of my dreams about family and a happy life with the person I loved died too.” Natasha put her hand over yours on the bed and gave you a supportive squeeze. “Then one day in our hospital, scientists were looking for people who would like to test new serums. I decided that I had nothing to lose, so me and a few other nurses signed in.” 

“Kathleen, Josh, Adam, and Frank, right?” The woman in front of you gave you a sad smile.

“Yes, how do you know that?” 

“We found them with you. Adam’s camera was broken, so he died a long time ago, but the rest of them are here too, but, unfortunately, they haven’t regained consciousness yet.” 

You nodded. Your food was now done and set aside, and you sat on the bed more comfortably, bringing your knees to your chest. “These scientists were running some tests on us in the lab that they brought us in. It felt weird, and I remember that Kathleen always complained that it was painful. The last thing that happened was that they told us to step into a weird-looking machine that was meant to be a part of some kind of experiment. That’s it.”

“It was Hydra. A terrorist organization that tried to rule the world. They were evil, and you were lucky to get out of there alive.” Natasha pursed her lips. “Thank you for telling me this.” 

You two sat in silence for a few seconds until she looked over her shoulder at the weird-looking mirror that took up almost a whole wall. 

“Is anything wrong?” You furrowed.

“I have to tell and show you something really important, but everyone is worried about how you are going to react to this.” She studied your face with a weird expression. 

“Is there anything more crazy than me being in another century after I was frozen?” You tried to smile, but Natasha just nodded. 

“I’ll be right back. Please, try to breathe, okay?” She stood from your bed, took the tray, and left. 

Natasha came back, and behind her was the last person you ever expected to see again. You jumped on your feet, feeling like your eyes were lying to you. 

“This—this can’t be true... No, Natasha—Steve, you died.” You mumbled under your breath. Your heart rate was way higher than usual, and it felt like you were drowning. You put your hand over your eyes, as your body started shaking. It’s just a dream. It’s just a weird fucking dream.

Two large hands wrapped around your body, pulling you into the hard chest. “Sh-s, Y/N, breathe, just breathe.” His familiar voice filled your ears, and you started crying harder, gripping his shirt. He was rocking you from side to side like a baby, while your tears and sobs filled the silent room.

“What– how– how is this possible? You crushed the plane into ice.” You shattered, tears running down your face.

“The Super Soldier serum saved me. The S.H.I.E.L.D. found my body 12 years ago.” Steve loosened his arms around you, allowing you to look up at him. He was exactly the same. This blonde hair, these light blue eyes, and that soft smile that he always had for you. “Please, sit back on the bed. We have a lot to talk about.” His face was now more serious. Even though he was extremely happy to get back his second closest best friend, he knew that Bucky was dying without you.

Steve and Bucky both looked at your interaction with Natasha, and it was obvious that everything Bucky wanted was for you to be near him. He looked through that window without any distraction, and his face lit up with a small smile when you tasted the food that he cooked for you and became emotional. He knew that you would appreciate it.

“About what?” You wiped your face with the back of your hand and sat down, holding Steve's hand. Natasha, who was still standing in the middle of the room, passed him a thick folder and left. Steve sat near you and gave you a supportive smile. 

“Bucky.” 

You froze and snatched your hand out of his. 

“Steve, no. Please—” You wrapped your hands around your body, as if you were instantly trying to hide from the pain that was aching in your chest. “Please, don’t hurt me anymore. I can’t handle that. Talking about him w-when he’s not with me anymore.” The sods started to get out of you, and you hid your face from Steve’s soft and apologizing eyes.

“He is alive.” Steve’s hands fell on your shoulders, and he lowered his head, trying to make you look him in the eyes.

“Don’t lie to me! He is dead; I saw the reports; I got the letter from Phillips saying that he’s sorry for our loss!” You particularly yelled at your friend. 

“Y/N, listen to me, okay? Bucky is alive. He is here. Behind that door, he’s watching us right now.” You were shaking your head in denial. 

That was impossible. You knew all this story; Steve himself told you what happened that day. There was no chance for Bucky to survive the fall from that height in the middle of nowhere. Yet here was Steve, sitting right before you. His big blue and soft eyes were looking into your eyes, and you didn’t see a single sign of hesitation or lying in there. He was so genuine that you wanted to believe that your boyfriend was, in fact, a few meters away from you.

“How? And why? James– he would’ve been with me if he were alive. Why isn’t he here?” You sobbed, and then the realization came to you. “That food—the food that Natsha brought me. It tasted exactly like he made it.”

“Bucky thought that it might comfort you. He found you in that laboratory, he has been near you since that day, and he saw that you were scared and disoriented when you woke up. And that's why I am here. Bucky insisted that I should talk to you first and tell you everything. He is afraid that you might not see him anymore after finding out everything that is written here.” Steve picked up the folder and put it on your lap. 

“The Winter Soldier” was written on top of the old-looking piece of paper, and for some reason you felt something weird in your chest.

“I want to let you know that whatever is in here, it cannot make me hate him.” You mumbled, hesitating to open the folder. “What’s in there, Steve? Tell me everything.”

“These are the papers that S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra had on the Winter Soldier. Everything that happened to him: experiments, torture, assassinations, crimes. This is what happened to Bucky after the fall. This is what Hydra did to him over these years.” 

You felt a lump in your throat when you opened the first page and saw Bucky’s photo from the army. But nothing prepared you for everything you read and saw after that. He wasn’t even James or Bucky anymore. He was a Soldier. An Asset. Someone without an identity. All the detailed descriptions of the medical procedures, brainwashing, electroshock, torture, and punishments with attached photos made you want to vomit and cry hysterically. You couldn’t stop crying when your shaking hands took a picture of the love of your life sitting shirtless and unconscious on some kind of stool with wires attached to his head. 

How could someone do that? How could someone torture a person almost to death and then just write about it like it was a fucking dairy? 

“His arm, it’s metal. Why is it made from metal?” Your teary-red eyes shoot back to Steve’s face. 

“Bucky lost it during the fall. They gave him a new one, but it causes him a lot of pain. Physical and mental.”

“I don’t— Steve, I don’t understand.” You took another picture with Bucky standing in his full black costume and a mask, not a single emotion on his face. “Why did they do this? For what?” 

“Hydra wanted to have the perfect asset. Killing machine. To commit crimes, kill unwanted people, and basically rule the world.” Steve ran a hand through his hair, looking at the floor. “They made Bucky the best. They completely cleared his head from the memories of his past; they trained him to be invincible and invisible. They had a special combination of words to control him, so he would always come back and do as he was told.”

You closed the file and moved it aside, closing your face with your hands while you were crying.

“And he thinks that I can reject him?” You whispered.

“Y/N, please try to understand what such things can do to your brain. Bucky goes to therapy, but he probably would never be able to fully heal from this experience.” His hand fell on your shoulder and squeezed it slightly. “Bucky always was a good person; that's why right now he feels so much guilt that it’s unimaginable. Even if nothing of this is his fault, he can’t forgive himself for these murders and damage. He has PTSD, nightmares, and a lot of trust issues.”

“I understand, but I would’ve never rejected him. He’s everything that I had, and when I lost him, it felt like hell.” You took a deep breath, looking Steve in the eyes. “Please, let me see him. I need it, and he needs it too.” Steve’s eyes softened at you. He almost forgot the love that his two best friends had for each other. 

“Give me a minute, okay?” He smiled, kissed your head, and left your room, leaving you alone with your thoughts.

You were really going to see the man that you thought you had lost forever in a few seconds. It was almost three years for you, but almost eighty for him. A wave of anxiety washed over you when you thought that maybe he doesn’t feel the same anymore and doesn’t have the same feelings as you do. You almost went down a rabbit hole until the door started to open. 

You slowly stood up, feeling a little bit uneasy. Even though you and Steve were just talking about it, seeing Bucky alive felt unreal. Your eyes were sliding up and down his face to remember every little part. He looked different, more mature, with a broad chest and shoulders and long, silky hair. 

Bucky’s heart was pounding in his ears, and his mouth was completely dry while you were observing him. You had tears in your eyes, and your lower lip was trembling when you tried to hold yourself from crying out loud. You were in some baggy clothes that Nat found for you, but you still looked fucking gorgeous. Still the most beautiful girl on the whole planet. 

“Doll…” Bucky’s raspy voice filled the room, and it was everything you needed. 

In just a second, you ran to him, falling right into his body. Arms wrapped around his shoulders, and your face hidden into his neck. 

As soon as Bucky finally hugged your smaller body and felt that it was real and that you were real, he broke down. Every last piece of strength went through the window as the tears rolled down his cheeks, probably soaking your t-shirt.

He wanted to drop to his knees and beg for your forgiveness for all of the awful things that he had done. He didn’t deserve you anymore, not with this much blood on his hands. But Bucky couldn’t do what he wanted because your grip on him was so strong that he wasn’t even able to move away for an inch. 

“James…” Your quiet voice filled his ears, and it sent shivers down his spine. Only you and his ma called him that, and he missed it so fucking much.

Bucky’s hands moved from your waist a little bit lower, and you viewed it as an opportunity to get even closer. Your legs instantly wrapped around his body, and Bucky, making sure that you wouldn’t fall, went to the bed and sat down with you on his knees. 

“I’m so sorry... I’m so sorry for everything that I’ve done.” He sobbed, shaking his head. You pulled away a little bit, finally meeting Bucky face-to-face. 

“Don’t you dare apologize for the things that you weren’t able to control, James!” Your voice suddenly became rough, filled with so much anger toward the people who hurt your precious boy. His hand on your waist tightened, and you slid your own to cup Bucky’s face. “I want to kill every one of them. Everyone who hurt you, who punished you,” Soft fingertips traced the delicate skin of the templates where, as you remember from the photos, wires with electricity were placed. “You didn’t deserve to go through this, James. I wish I was there for you.” 

“You were always with me. Even when they wiped me, I still had someone in my head. A woman with a soft voice, who told me that I'm strong and that it will end soon. I would’ve died without it.” You both were looking into each other's teary eyes, both feeling too much love and desire. 

Your head slightly tilted towards his, connecting your foreheads, and for a few seconds, it felt like home. Like nothing happened and you two were just having a lazy morning in bed.

The calloused hand on the side of your face brought you back to reality. Bucky’s beautiful blue eyes were looking into yours, and, sharing one thought, you both moved closer and connected your lips. The kiss was so soft, slow, and gentle, like you had the whole time in the world. It was this type of kiss that said that you both were there and alive. It was a reminder of the love that you had for each other. Reassurance, that no matter what, you will be there.

“I missed you so fucking much, doll. Since the day I first remembered everything, all I could think about was you. Even tried to find you, but there was not a single document. I started to believe that you just found a man, changed your last name, and moved away from that mess.” You were so close to each other, not wanting to split up even for a second. Your hands were moving up and down Bucky’s hard chest while he was rubbing the soft skin of your cheek with his thumb.

“Are you joking, James? No one was able to replace you. The only people I talked to during that time were your mom and Becca.” His facial expression slightly changed at the mention of his family, and you placed a soft kiss on his stubble cheek. “I should’ve been the one who took care of them, but I was nothing without you, and Winnie almost made me move in with them. That’s why I jumped at the opportunity to be a volunteer for these tests.” 

Bucky shook his head, his eyes again full of regret and pain. “I hate that it happened because of me.”

“At least I’m here right now. With you.” You smiled, sliding your hand into his dark, long locks. “You know, James, you look really good for someone who’s older than one hundred years old. I like your hair. And stubble.” His eyes rolled back at the feeling of your nails on his scalp. It had been so long since someone touched him without an intention to hurt him, and the realization of that made your heart swell with the need to take care of your boyfriend. 

“You know that you’re one year younger than me, right?” Your favorite little smirk in the whole world appeared on Bucky’s lips, and you smiled, moving a little bit closer to his body. The metal hand on your waist tightened, and you realized that you hadn't seen it in person yet. 

Your right hand reached behind you, grabbing a hard wrist that was covered in leather. Bucky’s body immediately froze under you, and his eyes snapped open. 

“Doll, no… You don’t have to...” 

“I want to. Give me your hand, James.” You said without any hesitation. Bucky looked you in the eyes for a few seconds, but then brought his metal hand between your bodies. “It’s just me, okay? I’m not scared, and I want to know everything.” You wrapped both of your hands around his hand and then gently started to take off the glove. 

The dark metal with beautiful golden stripes was shining under the bright light of the room. Your mouth slightly opened when you moved each finger with interest. Your gentle hands slid higher, rolling up the sleeve of the red henley Bucky was wearing. It was so smooth, without any sharp details, just an amazing and mind-blowing mechanism. 

“That’s so beautiful.” You mumbled in awe. Suddenly the plates under your hands moved, and a quiet whirring sound filled the room. You shot your eyes back at Bucky in shock, only to see that he was already looking at you with so much love that you almost melted. “Did you do that?” 

“It’s a new arm, not from Hydra. It reacts to my emotions. No one ever touched it without any fear.” You almost missed that last sentence, but the hurt in Bucky’s voice made you grab his face with your hands to get his whole attention.

“Listen to me, James. I’m not afraid of you. I won’t reject you. You are everything that I want. You still have the biggest and kindest heart of the guy that I met many years ago, and I’ll do everything to prove to you this.” The metal hand carefully touched your hand on the side of his face. “I love you. I love you so much, James.”

“I love you too, Doll. More than anything in this life,” Your lips crushed into each other, now sharing a more passionate and deep kiss. You slightly tilted your head, allowing Bucky to part your lips with his tongue and playfully bite you. It was almost too overwhelming, and you both were completely lost in each other until you finally needed to breathe. 

“Stay here with me, please. I don’t want you to leave.” You whined, trying to push your big and strong super soldier onto the bed. 

“I won’t leave, baby.” He chuckled, allowing you to push him back. You happily giggled and laid near him, interlacing your bodies together. 

He had a system at home.

A good system.

Coffee. Silence. Alpine curled beside him on the couch like a tiny judgmental loaf of bread. Maybe a movie he wouldn’t pay attention to. Minimal human interaction.

Peace.

Instead, Sam showed up at his apartment an hour ago carrying cupcakes and bad intentions.

“You can’t stay inside that apartment forever with Alpine,” Sam says now, like he’s continuing an old argument. “That cat is starting to absorb your personality.”

“She likes me.”

“She bites everyone else.”

“That sounds like a them problem.”

Steve hides a smile.

Bucky leans his head back against the seat with a groan. “Why am I even needed at this thing?”

“It’s Morgan’s birthday,” Steve says.

Sam grins. “Family event. It will be good for you.”

Bucky flips him off without looking.

The car goes quiet for a minute.

Not awkward quiet. Just familiar.

The kind built over years of near-death experiences and too many shared memories.

Outside, the city slowly shifts into larger houses, quieter streets, cleaner sidewalks.

Rich people territory.

Bucky already hates it.

“You could try having fun,” Steve says eventually.

Bucky stares at him like he personally insulted his ancestors.

“Why are you saying that like it’s easy?”

Steve glances at him briefly. “Because staying miserable on purpose gets exhausting after a while.”

That lands harder than Bucky wants it to. He crosses his arms, glaring out the window again while they pull through the massive Stark gates.

Lights glow across the property ahead, warm against the dark evening sky.

Music drifts faintly through the air.

Too many people.

Too much noise.

He already wants to leave.

Sam unbuckles first and points at him before he can move. “And no disappearing after ten minutes.”

“I never do that.”

“You vanished through a bathroom window last time.”

“It was efficient.”

“You’re impossible.”

Bucky pushes the car door open. “Yet here you are. Voluntarily spending time with me.”

Sam throws an arm around his shoulders immediately, dragging him toward the house despite his complaints.

“That’s because underneath all the grumpy murder grandpa stuff,” Sam says, “you secretly love us.”

“I could bench press you into traffic.”

“But you won’t.”

Bucky doesn’t answer.

Mostly because Steve opens the front doors right then—

And somewhere inside the house, faint and warm and distant, he hears someone singing.

— 15 minutes earlier —

The dressing room is chaos.

Cheap rhinestones scattered across the counter. Someone in the hallway yelling about balloons. Someone else asking where the cake table went.

And Dylan is pacing.

“No, no, no,” he mutters, tugging at the ridiculous blue Beast jacket stretched across his shoulders. “I can’t do this.”

You pause halfway through putting on your gloves. “Dylan—”

“I’m serious.” He points toward the door like the answer is waiting outside. “Do you know whose house this is?”

“Yes,” you say carefully.

“It’s the Starks.”

You stare at him through the mirror. “Tony Stark is literally paying us to sing to children, not dismantle a bomb.”

“That’s worse.”

You snort despite yourself, adjusting the off-the-shoulder yellow gown. It’s prettier than you expected when the agency shoved the costume bag into your arms this morning. Layers of gold satin spill around your feet, catching the light every time you move.

For one stupid second, you almost feel like Belle.

Dylan doesn’t.

“I think I’m gonna throw up.”

“You’re not gonna throw up.”

“What if the Avengers are there?”

You stop.

Okay. Fair point.

The knot in your stomach tightens instantly.

You need this job. Rent is due in four days, your audition last week went nowhere, and the commercial you filmed still hasn’t paid you. Which means you absolutely cannot afford to panic now.

So you grab Dylan by the shoulders.

“Listen to me,” you say firmly. “You need to calm down. Do you know how much we’re getting paid for this?”

“Yes, but—”

“And if you ruin this for me, I will personally feed you to the Hulk.”

That earns a weak laugh.

“Pretty sure he’s off-world,” Dylan mutters.

“Then I’ll wait.”

Another laugh. Better this time.

You smooth nonexistent wrinkles from his jacket. “We go in there, smile, sing, wave at rich children, and leave with enough money to survive another month. That’s it.”

A knock hits the door before he can answer.

“Princess Belle? They’re ready for you.”

Your stomach flips.

Dylan immediately pales again.

You squeeze his arm once before stepping away. “Breathe.”

Then you lift your chin, paste on a princess smile, and walk out.

The Stark house looks less like a house and more like a museum designed by someone with unlimited money and zero restraint.

Everything gleams.

Soft golden lights wrap around the enormous backyard. Staff members move through the crowd carrying trays of tiny desserts that probably cost more than your electric bill. Children run across the lawn wearing paper crowns and superhero masks.

And near the center of it all—

“Mama! Belle’s here!”

Morgan Stark barrels toward you at full speed.

You barely have time to crouch before she crashes into your arms, giggling wildly.

“Oh my gosh,” you say in your best princess voice, warm and bright. “Princess Morgan! I’ve heard so much about you.”

Her gasp is immediate. “Really?”

“Of course. The castle talks about little else.”

She beams.

And just like that, the nerves disappear.

Because this part—you know this part.

You know how to soften your voice until children lean closer to hear you. You know how to make wonder feel real. You know how to turn exhaustion into magic for two hours at a time.

Morgan takes your hand immediately and drags you toward the other kids.

“Belle, can you sing?”

“Can you dance?”

“Where’s Beast?”

“Oh, he’ll join us later,” you say smoothly, praying Dylan survives the next ten minutes. “But for now…” You straighten dramatically. “Who would like to hear a story?”

A chorus of screams answers you.

Then you start singing.

And the entire party quiets.

Not because you’re loud.

Because you’re good.

Your voice carries softly through the backyard while the kids sit cross-legged around you, completely enchanted. You smile at each of them like they matter individually. Like this isn’t just another exhausting gig at the end of a long week.

Across the lawn, Bucky looks up almost by accident.

And immediately regrets it.

Because now he’s looking at you.

Fairy lights glow softly above your head while children crowd around your skirts, completely enchanted by every word that leaves your mouth. You laugh at something one of them says, bright and easy and real enough that it reaches him even from across the yard.

And for one strange second—

You don’t look like someone pretending to be a princess.

You look like one.

Then your eyes lift suddenly.

Find his across the crowd.

Bucky expects the usual reaction instantly.

The hesitation. The recognition. That brief flicker people always get when they realize who he is.

Instead, your expression softens.

Just slightly.

Like seeing him standing there alone somehow matters to you more than it should.

And the smile you give him—

God.

It’s small.

Almost shy.

But warm enough that he actually feels it.

Like sunlight slipping through something cracked open.

You hold his gaze for one tiny, suspended second longer than necessary before turning back to the children beside you.

But now your heartbeat feels different too.

Because there was something unexpectedly gentle in the way he looked at you.

Bucky watches Morgan stare at you like you hung the damn moon.

Watches you stay perfectly in character when another kid spills juice on the hem of your dress.

You don’t even flinch.

“Accidents happen,” you tell the horrified child gently. “Even in castles.”

Something in his chest shifts unpleasantly.

Or pleasantly.

He hasn’t decided yet.

Because normally, people trying too hard to be sweet annoys him.

But you kneel to talk to the children at eye level. You remember every single name they tell you. When Morgan grabs your hand during the story, you squeeze back automatically without breaking character once.

None of it feels fake.

Which is exactly the problem.

Bucky exhales slowly through his nose, already irritated with himself.

You’re midway through teaching Morgan and three other children how to properly curtsy when your phone starts vibrating inside the hidden pocket sewn into your dress.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Your stomach drops instantly.

Because only one person would call you repeatedly during a job.

“Princess Belle,” Morgan says seriously, tugging your glove, “Amelia says princesses aren’t allowed to eat chicken nuggets.”

You crouch slightly. “Amelia has clearly never met a princess after a long day.”

Morgan gasps. “You eat nuggets?”

“In alarming quantities.”

The children dissolve into laughter.

Your phone buzzes again.

Definitely Dylan.

“Excuse me one moment,” you say gently. “The castle may be under attack.”

Morgan grabs your skirt dramatically. “By who?”

You glance at the phone screen.

Dylan: I THINK IM DYING

“…the French.”

You slip away before the kids can ask further questions.

The second you push through the side doors into the hallway, you answer.

“What happened?”

“I threw up.”

You stop walking. “What?”

“I told you I was gonna throw up.”

“Oh my God.”

“Also,” he says weakly, “I think I have a fever.”

You press your fingers to your forehead.

Of course he does.

Of course this happens at Tony Stark’s house.

“Can you still come out for the photos at least?”

A miserable pause.

“…if I move too fast I think I’ll see God.”

“Great.”

“I’m so sorry.”

And the worst part?

He genuinely sounds devastated.

You sigh, leaning against the wall. “It’s okay. Stay in the dressing room. Drink water. Don’t die before I get paid.”

“That’s fair.”

You hang up.

Then immediately turn and nearly collide with Pepper Potts.

“Oh!” she says. “There you are. Morgan’s asking for—” She stops instantly. “What’s wrong?”

You try to smile professionally.

It must fail horribly.

“The Beast actor is sick.”

Pepper blinks once.

“Oh no.”

“Yeah.”

“He can’t come out at all?”

“He’s currently fighting for his life in the dressing room bathroom.”

Pepper’s face cycles rapidly through concern, stress, and the specific exhaustion only rich parents hosting children’s parties can achieve.

Because unfortunately, the timing is terrible.

Kids are already gathering near the photo backdrop.

Morgan keeps asking when Beast is coming.

And somewhere nearby, you hear Tony Stark loudly saying, “I can absolutely do it.”

Pepper turns sharply. “No.”

From the other room: “Why not? I have range.”

“You have an ego.”

“I can roar.”

“You have to greet people.”

“I can greet people as Beast.”

Pepper pinches the bridge of her nose.

You almost laugh despite yourself.

Then another voice joins in.

“…Tony’s right, though.”

You glance toward the doorway and nearly choke on your own heartbeat.

Because standing there casually like this is a completely normal Tuesday are two actual Avengers.

Captain America himself stands beside a man you recognize from the News. Sam Wilson.

You suddenly become intensely aware that you’re dressed as a Disney princess while holding a phone that still has Dylan: I THINK IM DYING on the screen.

This cannot be your life.

Sam leans against the doorway easily, looking far too entertained by the situation already.

But it’s the man beside him that catches your attention.

The same man from earlier.

The one who looked at you across the backyard like he’d forgotten, for a second, where he was.

Dark hair. Tall. Broad shoulders filling out a black Henley. Arms crossed tightly over his chest like he already wants no part in whatever conversation this is.

And yet somehow, standing this close to him now, you still feel that strange little pull from earlier.

Unlike the others, he isn’t smiling. If anything, he looks like he’d rather walk directly back out the door.

Sam’s eyes flick briefly toward you before landing on Pepper.

“All due respect,” he says, “I think we found a better option.”

Bucky narrows his eyes immediately, like he already knows where this is going.

Steve nods slowly, already betraying him. “Actually…”

Pepper looks between them hopefully. “Wait.”

Sam grins.

“Oh, this is perfect.”

Bucky straightens immediately. “Absolutely not.”

“You’re tall,” Sam says helpfully.

“So is Steve.”

Almost on cue, Morgan’s voice suddenly rings through the backyard.

“UNCLE AMERICA!”

Steve barely has time to react before a tiny blur in pink slams into his legs.

“There he is,” Bucky mutters.

Morgan grabs Steve’s hand immediately. “Come see my castle!”

And Steve actually lets himself get dragged away.

“You’re abandoning me?” Bucky calls after him.

Steve only throws him an apologetic smile over his shoulder before disappearing outside with Morgan.

Bucky looks deeply betrayed.

Sam looks delighted.

“You were saying?” Sam asks.

Bucky glares at him. “I hope your wings fall off.”

Pepper is visibly trying not to laugh now.

Meanwhile, you’re standing there clutching your phone like your entire career is collapsing in front of you.

“I really don’t want to cause trouble,” you say quickly. “I can just explain to Morgan that Beast got delayed—”

“Morgan’s seven,” Pepper says softly. “She’s been talking about this dance all week.”

Guilt hits instantly.

Bucky notices.

And unfortunately for him, Sam notices Bucky noticing.

Which means it’s over.

“Buck,” Sam says, suddenly far too smug, “you wouldn’t even have to talk much.”

“No.”

“You’d just stand there looking grumpy.”

“No.”

“You already do that recreationally.”

 “Why don’t you do it?” Bucky shoots back immediately.

Sam places a hand dramatically over his chest. “Because I’m beautiful in a completely different genre.”

“I’m gonna kill you.”

“See? Beast energy.”

Bucky looks at you then.

Really looks at you for the first time up close.

The gold dress.

The nervous expression you’re trying to hide.

The way your hands twist together for half a second before you force yourself still again.

You look exhausted.

But somehow you’re still worried about disappointing a little girl.

And that annoying feeling in his chest returns.

Stronger this time.

Pepper steps closer carefully. “Bucky,” she says softly, “could you help us out? Just for a little while.”

He exhales slowly.

Looks toward the backyard where Morgan’s laughter drifts through the open doors.

Then back at you.

“…I hate all of you,” he mutters.

Sam lights up instantly. “That’s not a no.”

“It should be.”

Pepper smiles hopefully. “Bucky?”

He closes his eyes briefly like a man accepting his fate.

“…fine.”

The room goes silent.

You blink. “Wait. Really?”

Bucky points at you immediately. “This doesn’t leave this house.”

Sam nearly folds in half laughing.

And ten minutes later, you’re backstage beside a very grumpy Beast while trying to adjust the dark blue coat around his shoulders.

The costume department clearly did not account for super soldiers.

The fabric pulls tight across his chest every time he moves.

Bucky notices you staring immediately.

You step closer carefully, adjusting the fur near the collar.

“I’m sorry if the costume’s too tight,” you murmur. “The actor who usually plays Beast is… significantly less built.”

Bucky huffs quietly.

“That’s one way to say it.”

Up close, he’s unfairly intimidating.

Dark blue fabric stretched over muscle. Gloves hiding the metal hand completely.

Even the ridiculous Beast mask somehow makes him look dangerous.

Which feels deeply unfair for a Disney prince.

“You know,” you say gently while fixing one of the gold buttons, “you really don’t have to do this.”

Bucky looks down at you.

Then toward the backyard where Morgan’s excited voice carries faintly through the doors.

“…yeah,” he says quietly.

A pause.

“I kinda do.”

Before either of you can say anything else, the dressing room door swings open and Morgan storms in dramatically.

“BEAST!”

The little girl launches herself directly at Bucky.

Every muscle in his body visibly locks.

You almost panic for him.

But then, carefully, awkwardly, he catches her before she can crash face-first into the costume.

Morgan gasps, completely enchanted. “You’re so tall.”

Bucky looks at you, and somehow you know that beneath the mask, he looks completely helpless.

You grin. “That’s Beast.”

Morgan grabs his gloved hand immediately. “Belle said you were late because of a curse.”

Bucky looks down at her.

“…yeah,” he says after a second. “Traffic curse.”

You snort so suddenly you choke on air.

Morgan is already dragging him toward the doors with alarming strength for a seven-year-old.

You smooth your dress quickly before following after them, trying to slip back into character.

But it’s harder now for some reason.

Because this doesn’t feel like part of the performance anymore.

You barely know him.

You know he looks permanently annoyed at the world. You know children somehow trust him instantly despite the terrifying resting expression.

And you know he agreed to wear a giant Beast costume for a little girl he clearly adores.

Which is doing unfortunate things to your brain.

The backyard erupts the second Morgan reappears with him.

“BEAST!”

Children swarm immediately.

Bucky freezes.

Again.

You quickly step beside him before the poor man fully short-circuits.

“Oh dear,” you say brightly in Belle’s voice, slipping naturally into the scene. “The Beast seems overwhelmed.”

“I wonder why,” he mutters under his breath.

You hide another smile.

The next twenty minutes become complete chaos.

Children asking Bucky impossible questions.

“Do you live in the castle?”

“Can you roar?”

“Why are your hands so big?”

One tiny girl stares at him suspiciously before asking, “Are you hairy everywhere?”

You nearly inhale your own tongue trying not to laugh.

Bucky looks ready to walk directly into the ocean.

But somehow he stays.

He does the photos.

Lets kids hold his hands.

Even growls once after Morgan begs him to.

The children lose their minds.

Across the yard, Sam is recording the whole thing while Steve laughs so hard he has to sit down.

You catch Pepper wiping tears from her eyes at one point.

Probably from laughing.

Probably.

Then the music changes.

Soft piano drifting through the speakers.

Your stomach drops instantly.

The dance scene.

Morgan gasps dramatically. “NOW!”

Bucky goes still beside you.

“No.”

“Oh yes,” you say, smiling at him through clenched teeth.

“I don’t dance.”

“You’re literally a prince.”

“I’m literally not.”

Morgan grabs both your hands and shoves them together before either of you can react.

And suddenly—

Oh.

Your gloved hand lands against his.

His hand settles carefully at your waist.

The other wraps around your fingers.

You feel him hesitate.

Not because he doesn’t know how to dance.

Because he’s trying not to hurt you.

The realization hits instantly.

“It’s okay,” you say softly before thinking better of it.

His gaze flicks down to yours through the mask.

The world around you keeps moving, kids laughing, phones taking pictures, Sam yelling something obnoxious in the background, but for one strange second, it narrows into just this.

The warmth of his hand.

The carefulness in the way he’s holding you.

The fact that he smells faintly like coffee under all the costume fabric.

“You trust people too easy,” he says quietly.

You blink.

“That’s a weird thing to say during a Disney dance.”

“You didn’t answer.”

You should probably make a joke.

Instead, your eyes catch briefly on his gloved fingers resting against your waist.

Gentle despite the strength behind them.

Then Morgan yells, “KISS HER!”

Both of you jump apart instantly.

“Nope,” Bucky says immediately.

“Absolutely not,” you add at the exact same time.

The music softens around you, warm piano drifting through the backyard while fairy lights glow overhead.

Bucky Barnes keeps one hand at your waist, the other holding yours carefully as he guides you through the slow steps.

Too carefully.

Like he’s afraid to press too hard.

Like he’s constantly aware of himself.

His hand tightens at your waist without warning, pulling you just a little closer each time. Close enough that you can feel the heat of him even through the heavy costume layers. And whenever he leans down to hear you over the music, a shiver runs all the way down your spine.

The music softens around you, warm piano drifting through the backyard while fairy lights glow overhead.

You glance up at him just as he looks down at your feet.

“…am I doin’ this right?” he asks quietly.

His voice comes out rough and muffled beneath the Beast mask, low enough that you almost don’t hear it over the music.

The question catches you completely off guard.

Because he sounds genuinely unsure.

You blink once. “You know how to dance.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

Something warm twists painfully in your chest.

His grip tightens slightly at your waist.

“Don’t wanna mess this up.”

You smile softly. “You know, most princes are a little more confident during the ballroom scene.”

“Yeah, well.” He exhales quietly. “Pretty sure this prince skipped rehearsal.”

That pulls a laugh out of you.

Bucky’s gaze lifts at the sound immediately.

Not to the children.

Not to the crowd.

Just you.

And for one strange second, the dance stops feeling like part of the performance at all.

Then, quieter this time:

“…seriously, though,” he murmurs, thumb shifting faintly against your waist, “I’m not crushin’ your feet, am I?”

Your heartbeat stumbles embarrassingly hard.

“No,” you whisper. “You’re perfect.”

This is getting dangerous. Because somewhere between the dancing and the quiet way he keeps looking at you, this stopped feeling like part of the job.

You clear your throat quickly and pull back just enough to look over his shoulder.

“Morgan!” you call brightly.

Across the dance floor, Morgan gasps dramatically like she’s been summoned by destiny itself.

“Princess Morgan,” you say sweetly, already stepping away from Bucky before your brain completely melts, “I believe the Beast owes you a dance.”

Morgan screams.

Actually screams.

Bucky looks at you immediately.

You give him your most innocent Belle smile.

His eyes narrow under the mask. “You’re ditching me.”

“I would never.”

“You literally are right now.”

Morgan crashes into him before he can argue further, grabbing both his hands excitedly.

“C’MON BEAST!”

Bucky looks at you one last time over her head.

“You’re trouble,” he says flatly.

Your pulse jumps embarrassingly hard.

Before you can answer, Morgan drags him away into the crowd of children demanding another dance.

The second he’s gone, you exhale.

Hard.

Then across the dance floor, Morgan spins dramatically beneath Bucky’s arm while he awkwardly tries to keep up without stepping on tiny children.

And despite the giant Beast costume and permanent grumpy expression he’s laughing.

You watch him crouch slightly when she talks so he can hear her better through the music. Watch him steady her automatically every time she nearly trips over her dress. Watch one huge gloved hand settle carefully at her back while she spins herself dizzy.