don't regret; remember

You don’t heal as fast as what the serum allows him to do – after a few days, Bucky’s arm is stable enough to manage with just a brace. But your recovery is still proficient and quicker than the average person, so by the time you leave the hospital, the swelling has gone down, the bruises have dulled to patchy shadows, and the stitches have been removed.

You’re largely independent now, albeit slow with sore ribs when bending, reclining, or getting up. Still, Bucky, ever so insistent, walks you up to your apartment, calls in a delivery order for Shepard’s pie from the diner you like, and runs warm water for your shower. Even after you’ve assured him that you can be trusted alone, promising to hold to your heart that he’s only a phone call away, since he also deserves to go home and get some proper sleep. You probably could’ve tried harder – Bucky is compelling but never pushy. Though, caving in perhaps isn’t such an unappealing choice. When the image of him fitting so seamlessly in your home, indulging in the intimacy of going through your cupboards to make you tea or through your closet to get you a fresh pair of clothes, could nearly dizzy you with thrill.

It’s not what you end up feeling, though, the idyllic vision unravelling as fast as it is crafted. Because what you’d imagined to be pleasant – him carefully helping you out of your clothes before you shower, sharing bashful and affectionate laughs with each other as inches of skin innocently graze in the movement of it – plays out much less so. Slipping off your shirt, the coy smile on him is instantly smothered when his glance browses the ridges of your healing wounds, peeking out beneath your undershirt, sized and textured and discolored in a way that epitomizes the pain you had endured, reminding him all over again all the ways he’s disgusted with himself.

You realize he hadn’t gotten a good look at the injury up until this point. Politely turning away or leaving the room to give you privacy when nurses came to check on your sutures and change the dressing; stepping aside for Nat to take over to comfortably assist you when it came to personal care. That look of self-loathing, wretched remorse on this face that he had brought to you when he saw you in the hospital for the first time, that had then gradually receded over the following few days, letting you naively think that the two of you could possibly move forward with some degree of normalcy, now comes torrenting back, making you the portrait of his foremost fear and cardinal shame.

You stop him before he helps you out of your pants, ask him to leave under the guise of reacquainting with your autonomy, because if he’s upset by the sight of your scars, he’ll be upset by the sight of you wincing and lagging as you move. And you can’t bear to be viewed with such plague in his eyes. You wait until you’re in the shower before you start crying, tears and snivels veiled by the rushing stream of water.

You should know better than to continue being deluded, yet your tragic gullibility has you damn near white-knuckling the hope that his dejection will not last, just like the lurid presence of your scars will fade away too. Maybe if you keep the wounds out of his sight in the meantime. The optimism retreats, of course, when he quickly, unknowingly proves to you just how enduring his feeling of guilt can be. Fiercely urging you to rely on him to get you things when he sees you bend the slightest to reach for the HP sauce on the lower shelf of the refrigerator door. Uneasy as he sits across from you at the dinner table, fork listlessly prodding his half of the Shepard’s pie on his plate, seemingly unable to stomach more than two petty bites when the slits in the crust resemble the slits carved into your side. Anything but discreet as he arduously watches you eat, like you are a hair’s breadth away from choking at any moment, parts of you aren’t working as well by his doing after all. Despondent stare, loud with apology, when he passes you your next dose of painkillers, wondering if you would still need them had you just left him there to die instead.

It reaches a summit – the burden, the embarrassment, the disgust you feel for yourself, being the object that he looks upon to find everything that he thinks is wrong with him. You throw the pills into your mouth, already of paramount discomfort you nearly gag on them, plunge it down with water before carelessly dropping the glass into the sink.

“Go home, Bucky.”

A mean grip on the kitchen counter when you hear how tersely the words leave your mouth, no soft margins in your cadence. You keep your back turned to him to save yourself from witnessing a face that’ll either be the cause of your anguish or your surrender. Probably both.

“I’m sorry,” he swallows hard, enough for you to hear, enough to burn your eyes with tears. He takes cautious steps closer. “I’m sure you’d like to be alone and get some rest without being bothered. I just don’t think you should be alone on your first night home.”

“Then I’ll call Nat.”

It startles him, you can just about hear it – barely audible when he draws in air, yet its pace and shape somehow resoundingly hurt. The taste of charcoal collects at the back of your mouth.

“Did I…” Bucky starts, quietly, apprehensively. You’re susceptible to the wary fingers that just scarcely touch your elbow, guiding you to turn around, and you have no resilience to fight against it. You wearily peer up at him, finding all edges and angles of him slack and wilting with heartbreak. “Did I say something to upset you?”

“You didn’t have to.” A stifled gasp into the clasp of your palm across your mouth when you feel the sob verging the cap of your throat. Your breathing quivers as you brace for what you say next. “I’m going to talk to Cap, tell him I need some time away for now.”

Confused, worried, pensive, he nods in agreement, stays silent in suspense of what has you so distraught.

You rasp out a hefty exhale to carry your next words. “But when I’m ready to come back, I think I’m going to ask him to keep me off the missions you’re in.”

So then, he drowns in a storm of dread in front of you, rattled by your sudden turn of tide after the beautiful mutuality you two had shared over the last few days. “Was it something I did, sweetheart? Are you scared of what I’ll—”

“God, no, Bucky!” The crying builds, inflames the throbbing in your chest in tandem with your breathing, puts a buckle in your joints so that you have to lean against the counter for balance. “You know I don’t blame you for what happened. But I don’t know if you’ll ever stop blaming yourself, when I am a walking reminder of why you don’t think you deserve forgiveness. You look at me with such sadness, like you don’t even see me but only see everything you regret instead. It’ll kill me, Bucky, if I can’t be around you without you feeling broken, if the mere sight of me makes you hate yourself. So… maybe it’ll help you forget, if I’m not near.”

Strength and will atrophying, he falls to his knees at your feet, the spread of his hands ghosting above your hips, so he doesn’t offend by grabbing you in his plea. Desperation radiates off his skin as heat that throngs the parts of you proximate to him. “No, no, you’re everything to me. God, I’m so sorry. I never meant to make you feel that way. I just…” His voice decays there as he struggles to give a reason that isn’t verbatim from what you’ve already said. He gulps, his palms commit to enveloping your thighs, his forehead nestles lightly against the pit of your belly to find that temperature of yours that always calms him. The words that leave him next are as fragile as ever. “I’ve been unfair to you. I won’t let it happen again. I’m sorry. Please don’t leave, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

A life without him is not one you’d like to get to know either.

You sigh, heavy, and with it you feel what’s left of your stamina leave too. Slowly, you lower yourself until you are on the floor with him, sitting on your calves, holding his face in your hands before he starts worrying about your ability to take this position. As a last-ditch attempt, you confess to him what you had been reluctant to say, scared that it would worsen his fears. But trying to overcome this was never going to be comfortable.

“It was terrifying, you know? Getting hurt like that. Nearly dying. I’ve never been so scared in my life,” you admit with a frayed voice, jaw gritting anxiously as you recollect the exhaustion and the dread and the pain of a degree exceeding anything you’ve known before. You soothe the weeps that start to stutter from his lips by the tender brush of your thumb, and then he anchors himself by clutching your hips. “And yet, here you are in front of me, in the middle of my home, holding me, and I don’t feel anyfear. I’m not scared of you, Bucky. I never was and I never will be. Because you’re not the one who wanted to hurt me. Blaming yourself for what happened to me is as good as blaming Steve, don’t you think? He’s the one who put me on the mission after all. But that would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?”

The zenith of your sincerity laying bare, carried by a delicate tenor teeming with heart and care, garnished by the unhurried drag of your lips down his temple, his cheek, priming the surface for your most intimate whispers next.

“I wish you’d be gentler with yourself. You went through a terrible thing too, Bucky. To lose control of your own body again, your autonomy, forced to do things you would never want to do. After everything you’ve done to try to leave that part of you behind. That’s an awful thing to go through. I’m sorry. You deserve kindness and to be cared for too. Please let yourself be cared for.”

He draws away the slightest, just to find your gaze again, and when he does, he could map galaxies in your eyes, the boundless and unending capacity to shelter him and love him. It makes him so sure that with you, he’ll always feel the ground beneath his feet, the earth beneath that still, the omnipotent currents beyond even that. His north star, his ceaseless beacon, the crux of his existence, so if you think he deserves the entire scope of your patience and compassion, how could he do anything but to believe you?

His nose tucks below your ear, into your hair where he drinks in your addicting scent, his greatest craving, blurring the borders where he ends and you start. He’s never been so sure.

“You saved me, doll. You could’ve left me to die, but you didn’t. You saved me even if it was going to kill you. And because you did, I can be here to hold you like this.” His timber is lower and softer than ever before, hardly intruding the seal of your skin, so you know that these very words are reserved for only you. “I owe you everything. Thank you.” He kisses you, so tender, so warm. His lips on yours punctuating every beat of his speak. “Thank you, thank you, thank you—”

Your senses brim with gladness and thrill, so penetrating that you lose track of the floor under you, lose track of how you manage to take in air when you don’t break from him for even a second, lose track of exactly when you both moved onto the couch. Losing track of everything except for the certainty of how you two feel for each other, the totality of it, the gravity of it.

He’s sitting next to you – hardly, when one of your legs overlap his and most of his upper body is leaning over you. Magnified neediness when his caution and care over the last few days only allowed himself gentle pecks on the crown of your head.

“Ah,” you wince. Your first withdrawal from him comes when the appetite in the kisses builds, until it crowds against certain parts of your face a little too much and ripples a sparse ache through your head.

“Shit—sorry.” Bucky jerks away as if terrified of drawing blood, and it makes you chuckle. Your wordless reassurance is enunciated by pressing onto his mouth once more, at an angle that spares the side of your face with the mending fractures. There’s hesitation when he returns the kisses, until you become awfully convincing by the deliberate swipe of your tongue across his bottom lip.

A breathy drone in his voice in response. He might even be trembling. How easily you could unravel him – it’s exhilarating. For now, you’ll find other ways to be indulgent.

“Bucky.” A startled flush across your face when you hear the small whine in your tone. Unintended, but plausible. You continue, “Will you stay here with me tonight?”

He sighs his reply, a gravely start from him astonished by it, a lush end from him longing for it.

---

From the bedroom, you hear the squeak of the shower faucet turning off. It’s silly but can’t be helped, the shy smile that emerges as you imagine him climbing out of your bathtub, smelling like your pomegranate-scented body wash.

You’ve changed into your sleep clothes, now perched on the edge of your bed, taking your last dose of meds for the night, applying the topical gel that will help fade your scars. With your back turned to the door, you don’t realize Bucky is standing at the frame of it until you set the tube down and catch his shadow in your peripheral.

Damp hair, fresh clothes, one of the extra pairs he already had packed for his stay with you at the hospital. He looks like he’s been waiting there, patiently, silently, still fixed there when he innocuously says, “Thanks for letting me use your shower.” And then still, stays there, not moving a muscle, not until he’s prompted. You hadn’t really specified the parameters of what you meant when you asked him to stay over after all. He would’ve been fully willing to get settled on the floor for the night, simply glad to just share in your company, within your home, circumstances he’s only ever dreamed about.

A charmed laugh bright in your voice, measured movements bring your legs onto the bed as you turn your body towards him. Your hand then pats the space next to you to invite him in, to welcome him unambiguously. “Come here,” you chime, letting a bit of timidity through to soften the pitch, to echo that you’re a little nervous too. Nervous but eager, articulated by your outstretched hand that reaches for him when he prudently closes the distance to the edge of the bed.

His warm fingers interlace with yours when he’s near enough. He smells like your soap. Only one knee on the mattress before his gaze searches for permission in yours, which you give with a nod and a light tug of your wrist. Though, the thick fabric of his clothes against the downy of your blanket stirs an idea in your mind. “Will you be comfortable in that?”

Clean syllables as if it is a candid suggestion, but whatever you feel is far from casual – an immodest drumming in your chest and a feverish rouge on your ears – as he glances down at his clothes with a slow nod of agreement. He straightens back up, goes along with your recommendation, yet your stare still lurches elsewhere when he starts peeling off his sweater and sweatpants. When he joins you in bed again, he’s only in boxer briefs.

Gingerly, your eyes draw back to him. The two of you mirror one another by the coyness in your grins, and then also the quiet huffs of laughter that follow upon recognizing it. It emboldens you a bit more to glimpse the brawn of him, the inviting rifts and hills, some still dewy from his shower, parts you’ve seen and parts you haven’t. It’s as if you’re spellbound, lured in to cushion your lips against the swell of his shoulder without even planning to, your kisses then intuitively mapping a path to his collarbone.

Bucky hums, and then quickly swallows, as if he hadn’t meant to sound out his satisfaction so blatantly. Delighted by it, though, you lightly nip at the base of his neck, and then revel in the vibrations you feel under his skin when his breath shudders. “Sweetheart, I should let you get some rest.”

“Soon,” your vague reply, but the deepening strokes low on his throat suggest otherwise. He takes it as consent to eagerly nudge his nose against your forehead, following the magnetic pull until you crane your neck up at him for him to meet your lips.

He kisses you with so much intention, like now that he has you, he’s afraid to lose you. Now that he has you, he thinks he might not be able to stave off his selfishness any longer. His touch ghosts on your knee while he licks your bottom lip for permission, and when you mewl your approval for him to drink in, he allows himself to be greedy with the thorough drag of his palm up your thigh to your hip. His expertise there shifts you smoothly, comfortably, until you lay on your back. Careful not to weigh any part of him on you, he leans his head over yours, still uninterrupted with the caresses between your mouths.

Only when you hear the tearing of velcro does the fluency between your lips and his break. You peer down towards the sound to find that he’s released the straps of his arm brace. It’s tossed over his shoulder next, disappearing over the edge of the bed.

“Are you sure?” you ask, concerned.

And he performs just how sure he is when he closes back in, his tongue slipping into your mouth this time, pushing against yours so gorgeously. Must be the full stability returning to the limb by his urgency to touch you. Like he’s refusing anything that’ll hinder him from wholly participating in this moment – a moment no longer confined to the limits of his imagination, the feel and smell and taste of you now all so real in front of him.

At first, his fingers reluctantly trace the band of your pants, the bottom hem of your shirt, until your tangling grip in his hair permits him to snake his touch up your waist where you aren't injured, then down to pinch at your pants until it’s just an inch lower. Zealously he enjoys the supple, velvety texture, breathless with every exciting new inch he discovers, but stopping just shy of indecently hiking up your shirt.

You only hear it when he splits from you the slightest. He’s panting. In the near fictional distance between, he brims it with a hushed cadence that’s still somehow almost fanatical, staggeringly laden with desire. “I can’t—I can’t do everything I want to do to you yet, but… fuck.”

A vernacular that hurtles you to dangerous heights of exultant anticipation. Then, as if you would ever need convincing, he scatters kisses down your neck to embellish his plea.

“Can I touch you? Please, baby, will you let me touch you? You don’t have to do anything, I just needto feel you.” Overcome with desperation, he is completely babbling. “Been wanting this for so long. Can I, baby? Please?”

He’s never been so undone. You’re entranced by it, stunned out of your wits, hardly coherent enough to detail how painstakingly you’d enjoy that, just about managing a twitching nod and a few primitive words crudely threaded together. “Take off my clothes.”

A heaved “yeah” is his immediate, instinctive response. It’s exactly what he asked for, and yet, the image of it still makes him exhaustively ache with need. He repeats himself to emphasize his willingness, “Yeah, okay. Okay. Oh.”

You watch him bite back the hisses threatening to spill past his teeth, taming his rush of hunger as he steadily, thoughtfully pulls your pants off your legs and your shirt over your head with minimal discomfort. Seeing beat by beat, the mesmerization that bleeds across his face makes your nipples tighten and your thighs squeeze together in anticipation. The sight of you only becomes more captivating that way as you lay bare only in your panties below him.

“Fuck, doll, you’re so beautiful. How can you be this beautiful?” he rasps, trails his knuckles through the valley between your breasts, down to your navel, so careful like he doesn’t want to taint the art of you with fingerprints. You tremble wildly under it. “Haven’t been with anyone since… but still don’t think anything could be prettier than you.”

Your digits tenderly hug the side of his jaw, and his unfailing instinct will always be to lean into your hold. “You haven’t been with anyone since…?”

Since before he was made a super soldier, since before the war.

Too subtle to see, but you feel it, his nod in your palm. A bashful smile on your lips, but the thoughts in your head much less so as you ponder all the ways you’ll spoil him as soon as your body feels stronger. For now, you draw him in, and he unreluctantly submits, latching his lips onto the column of your neck. There, he sucks a dark ache for you to remember tomorrow.

The initial taster of naked skin melded together fuels his craving for more, and he relieves it by swathing his hand over your breast, thumb rolling over the nipple. Satiates his appetite to learn your contours and textiles, gets his fill, and then shifts to kneel between your legs so both hands can swallow the swell of your hips, his mouth taking its place on your chest, leaving wet nips and blooming aches across the hills and dips.

You’re hardly even touching him, yet his baritone is just shy of a moan, all from simply feeling you heated and flush against him, whimpering his name with none of your usual good manners. This time, he won’t have to fantasize about ways to louden your voice as you bid for him; he can tangibly, bodily find out for himself now.

Bucky only lets himself be so bold as to hook a single finger under the top edge of your underwear, stopping himself there while he lifts his head, hoping to pinpoint a gluttonous quality in your eyes that parallels what he feels for you in this moment.

“Okay?” he huffs, not many tones away from sounding impatient, but his digit pauses there virtuously.

Words of approval clumsily string together, stammering from your mouth only as a series of unpolished noises. And he’s too keyed up to even wait until he’s stripped you of your underwear, choosing to just tug the fabric aside instead. He groans, enthralled by the saturation he sees and then by the heat he feels when he dips two fingers into it.

Your jaw slackens with a shameless whine when he works his way in, earns himself a depth that’s to his knuckles. There, he feels the tightness and the drench that makes him huff proudly. “Shit, doll, this is how you feel for me?”

You’re too disarmed to assemble anything more intelligible than a succinct, choked cry. “More.”

Whether you’re describing the measure of your yearning or the demand for a stronger rhythm, he is satisfied by it. Dragging a delectable pressure through you, the impulse is to arch your back at the pleasure, but Bucky flattens a secure yet unintrusive metal palm across your belly to keep you leveled, so you don’t strain the parts of you that are still mending. Instead, your nails find purchase at a burrowing depth on his flesh arm, goading him for more.

There is not a single thread of thought in his mind that isn’t loud with the instinct to fulfill your plea. But it’s not all selfless. Not when he’s gaining his own fulfillment too, watching you and his fingers inside you so intently, gaze scanning you up and down so thoroughly, like he wants to commit this vision to memory, sear it into the back of his eyelids so he doesn’t have to go even a single blink of his eye without you.

But when he builds his pace just like you whined for, you suddenly remember his arm brace that’s probably sprawled somewhere on your bedroom floor. So then, it’s your turn to clasp onto him, stilling his wrist. “Your arm. Don’t overexert it,” you pant.

A bantering laugh at your ability to advise against the very thing you are so flagrantly enjoying. “You want me to stop?”

“Fuck, no. You’ve got two hands, haven’t you?” you scoff, teasingly, thinking it might be fun to be a little insolent, thinking you might be amused by his reaction. And you are right. Because he accepts your prompt, only to challenge it and show you he’ll do just that and more, both by sinking vibranium inside of you and by stroking the wet warmth of his tongue against your clit too. Soon relishing the full-body quakes and the fragmented dialect it earns him. 

He starts pumping into you with an intentional rhythm, one that’s too cautious, because this is the same metal that makes steel look pliable after all. The same metal that has stopped speeding cars and thrown helicopters out of the sky, is now touching you where you’re most sensitive. And you’re just so precious to him.

He’s lapping gorgeously at your clit, the breadth of his vibranium fingers stretching you in a foreign and fascinating way, but you need him to throw caution to the wind, quick.

“Baby, I can handle it. Harder, please,” you gasp, twitching your hips desperately to try to lunge down deeper on him. “Please, give me more.”

Hissing, almost taken aback by the sheer degree of unchaste lust that’s overt in your face, your tone, your writhing core. And how can he do anything but oblige? He’s immediately rewarded for it too, when you moan at a volume that outdoes anything you’ve used prior, rocked by the elation when his mouth sucks harder and his hand plunges heavier. The pride, the bliss that barrages him, makes him painfully aware of the throbbing tensity of his cock.

You look down when you feel him shift, finding that he’s pulled his length out from the waistband of his underwear, pumping it with his other palm at the same pace he’s fingering you. Pleasuring himself from pleasuring you. And God, you find that so hot. Would find it even hotter if it was your hand bobbing on it, so the two of you can come together.

The grip in his hair and the chant of his name reels him back up above you once again, digits still inside you. You replace his clutch on his cock, eager to touch him too, to relieve him instead of himself. You just barely get to familiarize with the staggering girth of him, its weight solid in your palm, before he guides your hand off him. Interlocks with your fingers and holds it on the pillow beside your head instead. 

“No. Just relax. It’s okay. Just want you to feel good,” he whispers, calmly, contently, maybe even to lull you to sleep. 

You mewl in protest, “But—want to make you feel good too.”

A boastful grin stark on his lips. “Sweetheart, you already are.” Convinces you of its truth when he kisses you soft but thrusts his fingers into you hard, not enough to hurt, just enough to meet the depth that has you stupefied with rapture. 

Your lips drive onto his, pleasing him immeasurably when your breathy cry of his name rushes into his mouth and overlays the taste of your cunt still fresh on his tongue.

His name, which has recently become so precious to him. Just simply his own name, but it sounds so good when it’s shaped by your mouth. Only realizing it not long ago, after you first told him you loved him, because any time you spoke his name after that, you no longer tried to hide the incredible fondness in your voice. So silly, that his own name could become his favorite sound, only when you speak it. But he knows it with such certainty now, now that it’s carried by a wanton moan, colored by your pleasure at its vertex.

Bucky has become so aware of your body, attuned, expert. He sees it contorting your face, feels it pulsing on his fingers inside, white-knuckling his fingers on the pillow, your rapidly nearing climax. Knows precisely how to lean his frame on you, just conservatively enough not to smother any sore muscle or bone, but sturdy enough to obstruct your figure from thrashing, which will in turn exacerbate any sore muscles or bones. Tireless and unfaltering with his tempo and pressure working inside you, he brings you to a detailed orgasm that thunders madly through you, seeps into your deepest recesses so you’ll still feel the stain of it when you wake tomorrow, the phantom tides of it will continue to feel like motion while you’re motionless.

His nose nuzzling yours breathes in every obscene and immodest noise that casts from your throat, astounding him with a certain type of thrill that’ll satisfy him for a lifetime. His strokes and caresses far from forfeit, so long as your body still vibrates. Only when your quivering completely recedes does he finally withdraw from your cunt, then straight into his mouth, wasting not even a dribble.

Watching him you hum with delight, giggle even, made foolish with ecstasy. And even then, he couldn’t possibly cast aside his need to check in.

“You’re alright?”

Whether he means your condition or his performance, you’re overjoyed on all fronts regardless, sighing idyllically an uninterrupted string of yeses as you kiss him repeatedly. Until you tire. Until the residuals of climax ebbs and lulls you entirely. Eyelids heavy now. And then it’s dark. Just scarcely conscious enough to register the weight and shadow lifting off you, just barely enough reflex left in you to closely nestle yourself into the entity before he departs far.

Soft lips delicate on your forehead then, maybe a voice droning quietly but feverishly, damp breath on your skin, a rhythmic wet sound below too, like slapping, but not violent. A vague rocking sensation of the mattress under you next, only ceases after there’s a twitching movement and a noise like a grunt.