A Cup of Coffee
Summary: Bucky Barnes x fe!Reader -> You and Bucky make a promise to share a cup of coffee when he gets back from war. But sometimes a promise has to be broken.
Disclaimer: Fluff, hurt/comfort vibes, little angst. Asgardian!reader. 40s!Bucky/Winter Soldier. Kinda ignores the full MCU timeline but follows it enough to make sense...I hope. Mentions of death and violence (but not too much). Not Proof Read.
“Just a cup of coffee, please.” A voice spoke beside you before stradling the stool, two seats down from you. “Thank you.”
You’d been seeing them all day. Young men fighting for an old man’s cause across the water. A lot of them wouldn’t return. You knew that. You also knew the ones that would, would definitely have a few stories to tell. Most would probably take them to the grave.
You’d seen plenty of men die in war. Some were stories. Most were beside you.
“When do you leave?”
“Sorry?” The man turned and looked at you eventually. You hadn’t looked at him when you spoke. Your eyes remained fixed on the cup of coffee in front of you.
You looked at him, eventually. A soft look in your eyes. “I asked, when do you leave?”
“Oh,” he seemed a little embarrassed. He should have known what you’d asked him. “A few hours. Got my orders this morning.”
As the waitress came back with his coffee, he went to pay. But you beat him to it. It’s the least you could do for him.
“No, I’ve got it.”
He seemed a little surprised but thankful all the same. “I feel like I need to pay you back somehow.”
You shook your head with a light smile. “No need.”
He nodded, looking at his coffee cup before looking back at you. “I’m Bucky, by the way.”
You smiled, “Y/n.”
“That’s a beautiful name.”
You smiled. “Thank you.”
He motioned to the seat beside you. “Mind if I sit with you?”
“No. But I would have figured you’d be waiting on someone special.”
He chuckled a little, but shook his head. “No. Not tonight.”
Bucky moved to sit beside you and you turned your stool to face him a little better. It was up close you realised his eyes were blue. The corner of his mouth raised slightly as he talked, his voice deep. There was still a youthful and hopeful glint in his eyes.
You hoped he held onto that.
The conversation between yourself and the soldier lasted two hours or more. Eventually, you walked with him to his train station. Wives were kissing their husbands goodbye, sisters were hugging their brothers, kids were kissing their fathers and uncles goodbye, and mothers were drying their tears from the thoughts that they’d never see their sons again.
“You really should have let me walk you home,” Bucky told you.
You smiled and looked away, shaking your head. “No. It’s better this way.”
“If you say so.”
You nodded and looked back up at him in time to see his expression change. The smile faltered for a moment as his thoughts took over.
“You asked me before if I was meant to be meeting someone special tonight.”
You nodded, stepping a little closer. “I did.”
The smile returned on his face as you felt his hand take yours. He raised it between you both. “I think you were meant to be that someone special.”
You smiled, closing your eyes for a moment as he kissed your knuckles before kissing your palm. Soon, you felt the scratchy green material of his lapel under your palm, his kiss searing into your skin. You made a decision.
Pulling him in by his lapels, you leaned up and kissed him.
It was like electricity inside you before a calming wave of serenity took you over as he held you closer to him. All the other passengers on the train melted away; their voices became nothing but white noise behind you both.
Laying a hand over his heart, you heard the final whistle being called.
“Good luck, soldier.”
“Will you be here when I get back?”
You’d been moving from place to place on earth for the last five years. You never stayed in one place longer than a few months. You also never returned.
But that was the first time you’d broken your promise to yourself.
“When you get back, I’ll meet you at the cafe. You buy the coffee.”
Bucky chuckled. “Deal.”
He kissed you once more before one of the wardens walked by and tapped him on the back. “Better get on the train, son. Before it leaves without you.”
Bucky nodded, holding onto your hand and kissing your knuckles as you closed the door to the carriage with him.
“Wait, I-I need your address. To write to you.”
The train was starting to move. You didn’t want anyone to have your address, just in case.
“Write to the cafe!” You called over the sound of the horn. “I’ll write you back, I promise!”
The train was moving faster than people on the platform could keep up with and eventually you had to let go of his hand.
From the distance until the train disappeared, Bucky continued to wave goodbye to you.
A letter was waiting for you at the cafe two weeks later. You and Bucky wrote to each other for almost a year. Little did you know, those would be the only thing you’d have left from him.
A little over a year later, you found a thick letter waiting for you at the cafe. The waitress, Dottie, handed it over to you with a saddened look in her eye.
“The mailman dropped this by, this morning. I’m so sorry, honey.”
You sat down with a weight on your chest as you opened it. A sob caught in your throat as four letters fell out. Three of them you recognised immediately. Bucky’s handwriting. But the fourth…
In the cafe, sat in the same seat you’d first met Bucky on, you read from Captain America’s own handwriting. What had happened on the train, what had happened to Bucky, how he’d talked about you enough to let Steve know the final letters and pictures should be sent to you. He wrote about how sorry he was. A real funeral couldn’t be held until the war was over.
Without a body, it was simply about raising a toast for another young life given to a cause.
“Can I get you anything, honey?”
You wiped away your tears, quickly. “Yeah, um, can…can I get a cup of coffee. Please?”
Dottie nodded with a sad smile. “Of course, honey.”
So.
Sitting alone in the cafe you were meant to see him again, you raised a cup.
“I love you, soldier.”
When you finished, you thanked Dottie for everything and left her a large tip. That evening, you moved away and tried to move on.
It proved more difficult than you expected.
You’d lived thousands of years, seen thousands of people die, seen thousands of people fall in love. And yet, Bucky was the one person out of it all that never seemed to leave you.
After twenty or more years, you stopped running. Asguardian soldiers stopped hunting you, Loki came to find you and you both hashed out your grievances.
But despite all of that, you ended up settling back in Brooklyn. You watched as people went to and from work, forgetting the histories you’d lived through; creating futures they dreamed of.
You heard of Peggy starting up Shield. And one afternoon you strolled past the memorial set up in the soldiers’ memories.
And the first name you spotted was Bucky’s.
He’d been lost years before Shield, but Peggy still continued to honor Bucky alongside the rest. You kept your eye on his fellow Howling Commandos. Watched as they had kids, who eventually had kids of their own.
You watched them grow a family part of you still dreamed about with Bucky.
As the years passed by, you settled into ‘normal’ life. You dated every now and again, but none of them ever lasted. None of them contained that spark you had with Bucky. You didn’t mean to compare them, but what had happened in the 40s…
That was the kind of love that lasted a lifetime. The kind grandkids would look up to and say, “That’s the love I want out of life.”
Yet, as the years rolled by, things started to happen that even you had never seen before. Men came back from the dead. Men you had known.
First it was Steve. It was all over the news. A fallen soldier pulled out of the ice. A man out of his time.
You could still remember the thundering in your heart as you watched him run through Times Square.
He was alive?
He was alive.
“Oh, god.” You held a hand over your heart.
Three weeks later, all hell broke loose. Loki, a man you’d once considered a brother, an enemy, and then a friend. He decided to have a moment in the spotlight for all the world to see.
You had ran round New York, helping those you could. You tried to find him. You might not have seen each other in five decades, but you couldn’t just let him tear the world apart.
But The Avengers beat you to it. From there, Odin and Thor would handle the rest.
You thought about going back, but you never did. Something in you told you to stay for the sake of Steve. He didn’t know you existed. To him, you’d been long gone since the 40s. Probably dead.
If he only knew.
However, everything changed when he was made an enemy of the State and footage from a fight on the bridge made its way to social media. You watched as a masked man with a metal arm jumped onto a car and swaggered his way over, changing the clip in his gun.
CCTV footage that was shown on the six o’clock news revealed a fight between the ghost dubbed The Winter Soldier and Steve.
From there, your research began.
Decrypting Hydra files, travelling to countries you hadn’t seen since England’s Tudor era, facing climates some people would never know. But it was just before a bomb had been detonated outside the UN building that you came to discover the first successful subject of the Winter Soldier programme.
James Buchanan Barnes.
Bucky.
You’d eventually found yourself in Serbia, but you were far too late. All that was left were scratches on walls in place of a fight. And, considering Steve was on the run, it didn’t take a genius to work out who it had been between.
You searched for two years.
You had tried to contact Thor and Loki. Maybe they could help. But they were no use. Off world and fighting someone else, probably.
After a year and half in Wakanda, Bucky was finally free of the Winter Soldier’s control. And, ultimately, joined Steve to help weed out the final members of Hydra and The Red Room.
But the longer he spent with his fellow man out of time, he started to feel like he was being watched. Not by the Wakandans. Not even by his team. But by…a ghost.
He’d look across the street and see someone. But it was only a flash in his memory. Someone who’d been in his dreams long before the nightmares of Hydra took his mind over.
But it wasn’t.
Because a moment later, they were gone. A shadow in the dark. A sunray behind a tree branch.
It took another year, but Steve and his team somehow received a full padron. Probably had something to do with the whole world going to shit. But even as he lived a semi-normal life outside of the Tower and training facility, the memory seemed to constantly follow him.
Buses through the city, subway staircases, busy street-corner food trucks, green parks with enough space for kids and cyclists.
Then one day he found it wasn’t a memory at all, but rather a person.
The part of his mind that longed for his past was playing tricks on him. So, he made a decision.
And it was in a cold warehouse with a dusty concrete floor and broken ceiling lights, Bucky came face to face with his ghost.
You breathed heavily and smiled a little as his blue eyes landed on your gaze. “Hey, Soldier.”
Bucky couldn’t breathe. His hand still held onto your arm as you lay on the floor below him. “You…you…you’re not…this isn’t real.”
“I can explain.”
He was shocked, which you expected.
“Mind helping a girl up?”
Bucky, for a moment, did so. But then stopped, pinning you back onto the dusty floor. “How do I know this is even…you? Who are you?”
You understood completely. “The day we met, it was in a cafe. I bought you a cup of coffee and our waitress was called Dottie. You asked for my address and I told you to write to the cafe, instead.”
He believed you. You could see it in his eyes. You could also see that he didn’t believe it could be possible.
“I know I made you promise to buy me a cup of coffee the next time we saw each other, but I think I should buy this one.”
It took a little more convincing but eventually Bucky helped you up from the ground and walked with you to a cafe.
“Is this?”
You smiled and unlocked the door. “Yeah.”
You locked the door behind you once more and lowered the shutters a little more. Walking around the cafe bench, you started up the percolator. Turning around, you saw Bucky look around the place. Photos scattered the walls. Some that were still on the walls when he was young. But the more he looked, the more he noticed.
Old signs, posters and pictures. But the ones that stood out to him the most were the ones he was in. One from a pub table in London. Him, Steve, Peggy, and the Howling Commandos. A few more were filled with the same people. Others had soldiers Bucky had met or seen when he was still in the army. A few love letters had been framed and hung up, too.
“Couples.” Bucky looked at you as you spoke. “Turns out this place can bring people together in unexpected ways.”
He kept looking across the walls. That was when he saw an old receipt, the paper aged with time.
The receipt from the night he met you. Dottie’s name was scribbled across the top, the bill was at the bottom.
“Here,” you said as you began pouring the hot coffee. “Get it while it’s hot.”
Bucky took his old seat across from you, holding the mug in his two hands.
“Thanks.”
You smiled, “You’re welcome.”
“So,” Bucky took a sip of the hot drink. “When did you buy this place?”
“Mid 90s, I think. It was a cafe for a long time. Then a sandwich shop, then a laundry place. Eventually, it went on the market and…I took it on. Restored it back to what I remembered it to be.
Bucky nodded, impressed. But one question remained on his mind. And just like that night on the station floor, you watched as Bucky’s smile fell from his face. But this time, it didn’t return. Memories haunted his mind, part of him still not believing it to be true.
For all he knew, he was about to wake up.
“How are you here?”
You took your time explaining your past. How you were not from the world he knew…once knew. You were from a completely different one.
Asgard.
A few earth years before Bucky met you, you’d upset a lot of people. Specifically one of the princes. Eventually, you were pardoned when they realised you’d only meant kindness when you gave your opinion in the court that day.
You’d voted against Loki.
He was one of your closest friends, but you knew he wasn’t ready. Considering he was Odin’s son, most people voted for him.
As his closest friend, you’d not only betrayed him but also the throne he sat on.
You nearly got caught a few times, but managed to evade them. But despite all being forgiven, you’d decided to come back to the one place that had felt like home since you’d left Asgard.
“And you’ve been following me ever since?”
You nodded.
“So…in London? And Edinburgh?”
You nodded. “I didn’t think it was time for you to know, yet. But I wanted to make sure you were safe.”
“Does Steve know?”
You shook your head. “No. Peggy didn’t either. But I kept my eye on him when he came out of the ice. I waited for him to walk in here one day. He’d passed this place so many times. He would have known instantly considering the pictures I keep in here.”
“Why do you keep them here?”
You shrugged and smiled, if a little sadly. “Reminds me of a life I nearly had. Of a life others have had. That…” you gave a deep sigh, “that life keeps going but the past should never be forgotten. You never know when it might show up again.”
Bucky looked at you, and for the first time since the day he left you, he smiled.
Your soul felt light again.
Sheepishly, he looked at the cup in his hand before looking back at you. “I know I might be…”
Bucky took a guess at the amount of time.
“Eighty years too late. And that you might own this place but…would you mind me buying you a cup of coffee sometime?”
You nodded, trying to suppress the glow in your smile. “I’d love that.”
















