Winter Child.

It always passed.

Eventually.

He didn't know how long he'd been here. Days, maybe. A week? Time moved strangely when every waking moment was either pain or the exhausted emptiness that came after.

The cave wasn't his. Wasn't anyone's, as far as he could tell. Just a pathetic hollow in the rock he'd found when swimming became too much, when his body had simply refused to go any farther. Dark. Cold. Deep enough that light didn't reach. Far enough from anything that no one would stumble across him by accident.

Which was good. He didn't want to be found.

His limbs drifted limp in the water, some coiled loosely against the rock floor, others floating weightless. He should move them. Stretch. Keep the muscles from atrophy. But the thought of moving -of doing anything- felt impossible.

Another wave of pain crashed through his head, and he hissed through his teeth, claws scraping against rock.

Was it the magic?

It had to be. What else could it be?

Steve had destroyed the collar, ripped it off with his bare hands in those first violent hours when Bucky hadn't known who he was, hadn't known anything except the screaming need to obey obey obey-

His breath hitched.

Don't think about Steve.

But the pain made it hard not to. Made everything blur together: past and present, memory and moment.

"You need to eat."

Steve's voice. Firm. Worried.

Bucky had turned his head away from the fish he offered, his stomach twisting with nausea that had nothing to do with hunger.

"You haven't eaten in three days."

The memory dissolved as another spike of pain lanced through his brain. Bucky's hand flew to his head, fingers digging into his scalp, his shorter, uneven hair catching between his claws.

Maybe this was hunger.

Or maybe it was the magic, still rooted in his nervous system like poisoned kelp, slowly consuming him from the inside out, eating away at whatever was left.

He'd felt it in those early days -weeks?- when Steve had kept him in that other place. The compulsions. The way his body would try to follow orders that no longer existed, and when it couldn't, when there was no voice commanding him, his muscles would seize and his mind would fracture and-

"Bucky. Look at me."

Hands on his face, forcing eye contact.

"You're safe. Do you hear me? No one's controlling you anymore."

But his body hadn't believed it. Had thrashed against the bindings Steve had used to keep him from hurting himself, from swimming back to-

Where?

He couldn't even remember where they'd kept him. Just glass. Cold glass walls. Chains. The bite of iron on his skin.

Bucky's eyes opened -when had he closed them?- and he stared into the darkness of the cave.

How long had Steve kept him there?

Long enough for the worst of it to pass, for him to stop attacking on sight, for the convulsions to space out from constant to occasional, from several times a day to once every few days.

Long enough for Steve to tell him-

His jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.

But the memory came anyway, sharp and jagged:

"Now that you're better-"

"I'm not better."

Steve had paused, floating in the water across from him. The space had been bigger than this one. Lighter. Steve had chosen it carefully, close enough to his territory that he could hunt, far enough from others that no one would find them.

"Better enough," Steve amended quietly. "You're lucid now. You know who you are. Who I am."

"And that means you're leaving."

It wasn't a question.

Steve's expression had changed -guilt, relief, something Bucky couldn't name-and then nodded.

"Yeah."

Bucky's fingers dug harder into his scalp.

He should've known.

He had saved him because he owed him. All those winters Bucky had kept him alive when he'd been small, weak, struggling. This was just... repayment. Settling a debt.

And now the debt was paid.

"There's someone," Steve had said, and his voice had gone soft in a way that made Bucky's skin crawl. "I met her before I found you."

Bucky's brow furrowed. Someone?

Their kind didn't do that. Didn't pair off. Didn't wait for anyone.

"Someone?" he repeated slowly.

The blonde nodded, and he could see it... the guilt in his expression.

"She's waiting for me."

"She's-" Bucky stopped. "Who? We don't-”

"She's not one of us."

Something cold slithered down Bucky's spine. Every muscle in his body went tense.

Not one of them.

His mind raced through possibilities, each worse than the last. What else lived in these waters? What else could Steve possibly-

"What," Bucky said, his hard. "A siren? Ningyo?"

The disdain in his tone was sharp enough to cut.

Steve's jaw clenched. His eyes dropped for just a moment before meeting Bucky's again.

"Human."

The word landed like a stone in deep water.

Bucky stared at him, certain he'd misheard. Certain this was another trick of the magic still rotting in his brain, making him hear things that weren't real.

"You're mating with a human."

It wasn't a question. It was an accusation.

Steve exhaled slowly. "It's not- it wasn't planned. I didn't mean for it to happen, it just-"

"Just what?"

"It just... did."

Bucky's eyes burned.

He'd said horrible things after that. Things he couldn't take back. Things that had made Steve flinch and then made his expression harden.

Things that were true.

Because humans were weak. Prey. The same creatures that had chained, tortured, and controlled him, turning him into a weapon against his own kind.

And Steve was going to-

His stomach lurched, and this time it wasn't from the pain in his head.

He forced himself to breathe slowly. In. Out. In. Out.

It didn't matter.

Steve was gone.

Had been gone for... how long now?

A week?

More?

He had left that cave as soon as Steve disappeared. Couldn't stay there. Couldn't stand the way it smelled like both of them, couldn't stand the fish left behind like Bucky was some kind of pathetic-

So he'd swum.

Didn't know where. Didn't care.

Just away.

And when his body had finally given out, when the pain in his head had become too much, and his muscles had stopped cooperating, he'd found this place.

This cold, dark, empty place.

Where he could-

What?

Recover?

He almost laughed, but the sound died in his throat.

There was nothing to recover to. Steve had made that clear enough before he left.

"You can't go back to the communal areas. Not yet. Maybe not ever."

"Why?"

But Bucky had known why. Had seen it in Steve's eyes.

"They-"

"Think I'm a traitor."

Steve hadn't denied it.

So.

Here he was.

Alone in a cave that wasn't his, in pain that wouldn't stop, with a body that was still trying to obey commands from a master who no longer can puppeteer him.

Starving, probably.

Or being eaten alive by residual magic.

Did it matter which?

The pain crested again, and he pressed himself harder against the stone, squeezing his eyes shut.

----

The first winters were hard.

Not because of the ostracism, the Thal'kyr weren’t exactly social to begin with. The only reason to gather was mating, an occasional territorial dispute that required a council's intervention, or to seize weakened territory from other merfolk for the benefit of the pups’ colonies, and little else. Solitude was normal. Expected, even.

No, the hard part was the nights.

Or what passed for nights in the depths where he'd made his temporary territory. Time lost meaning when you avoided the surface, when you spent your days drifting between caves and rocky outcrops, never staying long enough to call any of them home.

The nightmares were relentless.

He'd close his eyes -or try to- and immediately he was back there. Chained. The narrow glass walls pressing around him. The cold bite of iron around his limbs and neck, hooks piercing his flesh to keep him suspended, on display.

Sometimes he dreamed of the commands. The voice -multiple voices, layered and wrong- worming into his head, wrapping around his thoughts until they weren't his anymore.

Kill.

Destroy.

Tear them apart.

And he had.

His eyes snapped open in the darkness. His limbs had closed tight around his body without him realizing, a defensive posture, like he could protect himself from memories.

He forced himself to uncoil. To breathe.

The magic was gone. The collar was destroyed. The commands were silent.

He was free.

Free.

But the word tasted like a lie.

He'd been so sure of himself before. Proud. Reckless. After killing that colossal squid, he'd felt invincible, like nothing in the ocean could touch him, like he was apex, untouchable.

What a fool he'd been.

Because there were other forces in this world. Forces that didn't need teeth or limbs or brute strength. Magic that could reach inside you and hollow you out, turn you into a puppet wearing your own skin.

He didn't sleep much after that. Couldn't. Every time he tried, the dreams pulled him back to that glass prison, to the weight of the chains, to the feeling of his will dissolving like salt in water.

So he swam instead.

Aimlessly. Endlessly.

He avoided the communal areas without Steve needing to tell him. Stayed away from the breeding grounds, the territorial waters where others of his kind might cross paths.

He didn't want to see the recognition in their eyes. Didn't want to hear what they'd call him.

The moons bled together. He hunted when hunger became impossible to ignore, ate without tasting, and kept moving.

Always moving.

The passing of winters blurred together like ink in water. Four, maybe five. He stopped counting after the first few seasons, stopped marking time in any way that mattered. The nightmares faded to a dull constant. Not gone, never gone, but manageable. Background noise he'd learned to function through.

Eventually, he claimed a territory in the northern reaches. Not a home -he wouldn't call it that- but a space that was his. Cold water, deep trenches, rocky outcrops that felt familiar after months of drifting past them.

The magic's grip loosened, degree by painful degree. The phantom compulsions grew quieter. His hands shook less. He learned to sleep again. Not well, but enough.

The pattern became routine: hunt, drift, avoid. And when the water warmed each spring, he swam farther north, following the cold until the season passed.

Again.

And again.

This year was no different. He felt it gradually, the shift in currents, the change in the way prey moved through the depths. His own body responded despite everything, that biological pull he couldn't ignore, no matter how much he wanted to.

He swam farther.

He pushed north, then east, following cold currents that tasted of ice and emptiness. The open ocean stretched endlessly around him, dark and vast and blessedly empty of anyone who might know his name.

Here, he could drift.

And if his body ached with the season's demands, if instinct pulled at him like a hook in his gut, he would ignored it.

He'd gotten good at ignoring things.

Pain. Hunger. The way his hands still shook sometimes when he woke from the dreams.

This was just one more thing to endure.

----

He might have kept enduring it if he hadn't noticed he was being followed. Two days now, nothing obvious. Just the faint disturbance in the water that meant someone was tracking him, staying just outside his sensory range but not quite careful enough to be completely invisible.

At first, he'd thought it was paranoia. The magic-induced hypervigilance that still hadn't fully left him, that made him startle at shadows and hear threats in every shift of current.

But no.

Someone was following him.

And if they wanted him dead, they were taking their time about it.

Fine.

If they wanted to play hunter, he'd give them prey.

He found a kelp forest -dense enough to hide in, open enough to maneuver- and made a show of settling there. Nested against a rocky outcrop, half-hidden in the swaying fronds, his skin shifting to match the mottled greens and browns around him.

Then he waited.

It didn't take long.

The water shifted. A presence moved through the kelp with predatory silence, approaching from behind.

Amateur mistake.

Bucky's limbs shot out fast, wrapping around tentacles and torso before his stalker could react. He yanked hard, dragging them forward, spinning them around, and pressing them against the rock face.

His forearm pressed across their throat. His clawed hand readied to pierce a vital point-

And stopped.

Wide female eyes stared back at him, more annoyed than afraid. Her limbs had shifted to a deep burgundy, dark and unmistakable even in the filtered light.

Oh.

He released her immediately, pushing back, putting space between them.

She straightened slowly, adjusting the shells and bone ornaments braided into her hair, her expression utterly unbothered by the fact that he'd just had her pinned with a crushing grip.

"Satisfied?" she asked, her tone dry.

Bucky's eyes narrowed. "What do you want?"

She tilted her head, regarding him like he was something mildly interesting she'd found abandoned on the ocean floor. Her gaze traveled deliberately down to his left arm, lingering on the dark patterns, the raised scars.

Then back to his face.

"I remember you being more intelligent than this," she said.

Her limbs rippled, that burgundy deepening, spreading up toward her torso.

Not all females could produce the red pigment, but among those who could, it had only one meaning.

Bucky's teeth clicked. "What, are you so desperate you're hunting down a pariah? No one else would have you?"

Her expression didn't change, but something sharp flickered in her eyes.

"The males I've seen lately don't surprise me," she said coolly. "Adequate marks. Mediocre strength. Nothing worth my time."

She drifted closer, and he forced himself not to move back.

"I don't consider you a traitor," she continued, her tone matter-of-fact. "Weak-minded for letting yourself be manipulated? Yes. But what I'm looking for is a strong mate, not mental fortitude."

The words landed like a slap.

Bucky's jaw clenched, his own limbs darkening reflexively, blacks and deep blues bleeding through his skin.

"How flattering," he bit out.

She shrugged, unbothered. "I'm not here to flatter you.” Her eyes dropped to his arm again. “I'm here because you're the only male in three territories with a mark worth considering." She said it like she was reciting facts, not praise. "That level of capability doesn't just disappear because humans broke your mind."

His hands flexed into fists. "Careful."

"Why?" She met his gaze evenly. "You going to tell me I'm wrong? That you weren't their puppet?"

The anger that surged through him was white-hot, immediate.

But she didn't flinch. Didn't back down.

Just watched him with those calculating eyes, waiting to see if he'd prove her right about the weak-minded part.

He forced himself to breathe. Forced the rage down into something cold and controlled.

"What makes you think I'm interested?" he asked, his voice dangerously quiet.

"Your body is," she said bluntly, glancing down.

And damn it, she wasn't wrong. The season had him primed whether he wanted it or not, and the proximity to a receptive female was making that abundantly clear.

"A reaction doesn't mean interest," he growled.

Her lips twitched, not quite a smile, but close. "No. But it's honest."

She circled him slowly, evaluating. He tracked her movement, tense, waiting for-what? An attack?

"You can deny me," she said after a moment. "I'm not desperate enough to force the issue. But I'll be in the kelp beds east of here for the next three days. If you change your mind."

She started to drift away.

Then paused, glancing back over her shoulder.

"For what it's worth," she said, and her tone lost some of its sharp edge. "What they did to you was... unfortunate. But you survived it. That counts for something."

Unfortunate.

Like it was bad weather. A minor inconvenience.

She disappeared into the kelp before he could respond, leaving him alone with the word echoing in his head.

He wanted to laugh. Or scream. Or both.

Instead, he just floated there in the swaying kelp, staring at the space where she'd been, his traitorous cock pulsing in the open and his mind a tangled mess of anger and something that might have been temptation.

Three days.

She'd be there for three days.

----

He told himself he wouldn't go.

He told himself a lot of things over the winters.

Apparently, this was just another lie to add to the collection.

He found her in the kelp beds on the second day, because waiting three would've felt like proving a point he didn't care about anymore.

She didn't look surprised when he appeared. Just looked up from where she'd been running her fingers over a cluster of shells embedded in the rock, and tilted her head.

"Changed your mind?"

He didn't answer. Didn't need to.

His presence was answer enough.

What followed was exactly what he should've expected. What he'd seen every time in the breeding grounds before his capture, before everything went wrong.

She initiated -baring her throat in that age-old invitation, her scent flooding the water between them- then went through all the courting steps, only to fight him in the end.

Hard.

Claws raking across his ribs. Limbs wrapping around his, trying to make him lose balance. Her teeth sank into his shoulder when he got too close, drawing blood that clouded the water darkly.

It wasn't playful or gentle.

It was a test. Pure and brutal.

Prove you're strong enough. Prove you can overpower me. Prove you're worthy of what I'm offering.

So he did.

He caught her wrists when she tried to claw his face. Pinned her against the rocks when she tried to twist away. Used his weight and his limbs to hold her still, to force compliance even as she thrashed and snarled beneath him.

And when he finally pushed inside her -when her body yielded- there was no tenderness in it.

Just friction. Pressure. The mechanical drive to satisfy the biological imperative screaming through both their bodies.

She stopped fighting completely. Went still beneath him, her pupils blown wide as her body responded even if her pride wouldn't let her acknowledge it.

He didn't stop.

Couldn't.

The season had him in its grip now, and his body knew what it needed even if his mind was somewhere else entirely.

----

They'd separate only for the briefest of times -resting, tending wounds- and then the need would rise again, sharp and undeniable, pulling them back together.

She'd initiate sometimes, other times he'd be the one to seek her out, his body overriding whatever reluctance his mind tried to maintain.

And every single time, it was the same. Fighting and fucking.

Sometimes she drew more blood than he did. Sometimes it was the other way around.

By the second week, they were both covered in healing bites and claw marks, their skin mottled with bruises that bloomed dark against flesh.

It didn't stop.

The season wouldn't let them stop.

And somewhere in the third week, when his body was buried deep inside hers and she'd finally gone still beneath him, her claws still dug into his shoulders but no longer trying to push him away-

He wondered again if there was more than this. If this was all their kind had. All they'd ever have.

Violence and release. Strength proven through domination. A connection that lasted only as long as their bodies demanded it.

She'd leave when the season ended. Would swim away without looking back, and if they crossed paths again next year, they might repeat this, or she might choose someone else, a male with a more impressive mark.

It didn't matter either way. That's what he told himself. Wishing for anything else would be weakness.

The word surfaced in his mind like something poisonous, and he shoved it down violently.

He thought of Steve. Of that soft tone in his voice when he'd talked about her. About choosing to leave the ocean, to deny their kind of strong offspring, to degrade himself-

He drove harder into the female beneath him, chasing away the idea with the familiar rhythm of taking and being taken.

This was right. This was natural.

This was all there could ever be.

----

Hours later, maybe longer, the desperate edge faded.

He spilled inside her one last time and pulled away, his body finally, temporarily satisfied.

They floated in the kelp, not touching, both breathing hard.

Blood drifted in lazy spirals between them, his and hers both, from the bites and scratches that came with mating.

Mating season wasn't over yet. There would be more of this.

But for now, the urgency had subsided into something manageable.

She examined a particularly deep set of claw marks on her hip, prodding at it with clinical detachment.

He watched her, this female he'd spent weeks inside, whose name he didn't know and hadn't asked for.

And felt nothing.

Nothing except that same hollow ache that never quite went away, no matter how many times he tried to fill it.

----

Eventually, near the end of the moon cycle, something changed.

He woke one morning -afternoon? time still moved strangely- and realized the pull wasn't there anymore.

The constant need that had driven him to her again and again had... faded. Not gone entirely, but dulled to something ignorable.

He floated in the kelp where he'd been resting, and the thought of seeking her out felt less like instinct and more like obligation.

And then, worse, almost repellent.

His skin crawled at the idea of it. Of the fighting, the biting, the feral rutting that his body had demanded.

She was nearby. He could sense her presence in the water, that familiar chemical signature he'd been attuned to for weeks.

But she didn't approach.

Usually by now -after a few hours had passed- one of them would've initiated. She'd appear with that burgundy flush, or he'd find himself drifting toward her without consciously deciding to.

He wondered if she felt it too. The sudden absence of need. The way instinct had simply... released them.

Hours passed.

Then a full day.

Neither of them sought the other out.

On the second day, he saw her in the distance, weaving through the kelp. Hunting, probably. Her movements were purposeful and completely unbothered by his presence.

She didn't acknowledge him.

He didn't acknowledge her.

It was like the past moon cycle had simply... ended. Whatever contract their bodies had made was fulfilled, dissolved, irrelevant now.

On the third day, she left.

He didn't see her go, but he felt the absence. The way her chemical signature faded from the water, growing distant and then disappearing entirely.

She hadn't said goodbye, hadn't said anything. As if those weeks had meant nothing.

Because they hadn't.

That was how it worked.

So why did the kelp forest -where he'd spent the entire mating season with her- suddenly feel too empty?

He told himself the hollowness would fade, that it always did, that this was just his body readjusting to the absence of the breeding chemical flood.

But as he swam through the open ocean, he couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong.

Not with the mating itself, that had been exactly what it was supposed to be.

But with him.

Maybe the human magic had scrambled his brains for good. But… he had felt this before them. The emptiness.

He didn't have an answer about whether there was supposed to be more to all.

Didn't know if there even was one.

----

A week later, he felt them.

The water carried disturbances too deliberate to be natural: currents shifting in patterns that spoke of coordination, of intent. Multiple presences moving through the depths, not quite close enough to see but near enough that his skin prickled with awareness.

They were hunting him.

He'd been drifting through open water, no destination in mind, when the first telltale pressure changes reached him. Then another. And another.

Four, maybe five.

Circling.

Bucky stopped swimming and let himself float, limbs spreading slightly in the water. His eyes tracked the movements he couldn't quite see yet, cataloging positions, calculating angles of approach.

They wanted him to know they were there.

Wanted him to feel trapped.

Eventually, they materialized from the gloom. Four males, each one positioning themselves to cut off an escape route. Larger than average, their marks visible even in the filtered light. Not exceptional, but competent enough to think they had a chance if they worked together.

His gaze moved slowly from one to the next, his expression neutral.

"Didn't realize there was a council scheduled," he said, his tone dry.

None of them acknowledged the comment. Their faces remained hard, cold.

One of them -the largest, with mottled gray limbs and a mark that crawled up his right arm in angular patterns toward his elbow- drifted slightly forward.

"I knew it was your mating mark I smelled on Miriel when I crossed paths with her," he said, his voice carrying equal parts disgust and disbelief. "Still can't believe she lowered herself that much."

Bucky's lips pulled into something that wasn't quite a smile.

“Maybe you should ask yourself what it says about the rest of you, if lowering herself to me was still an upgrade.”

The words landed exactly as intended. He watched the way their limbs darkened, colors bleeding through in aggressive displays of pigments.

The one who'd spoken about Miriel bristled, his tentacles coiling tight.

But before he could respond, another male cut in, this one with rust-colored limbs that had already flushed nearly black with aggression.

"You killed our kind on human orders," he snarled, drifting closer. "And you dare speak without shame. Dare to mate like you have any right-"

"Strength gives me the right," Bucky interrupted, his voice cold and even. His eyes moved deliberately from one male to the next, making sure they all felt the weight of his gaze. "And it's the reason there are four of you, and one of me."

The silence that followed was sharp enough to cut.

He'd just called them cowards. Called them weak. Told them to their faces that they knew -knew- they couldn't take him alone.

The water between them practically vibrated with tension.

Bucky kept his expression neutral and unbothered, but inside…

Inside, he was so fucking tired of this.

He didn't want to fight. Didn't want to prove anything. Didn't want to add more violence to the endless catalogue already burned into his memory.

But they were going to make him.

He could see it in the way their bodies tensed, in the way their claws flexed, in the way they exchanged those brief glances that meant they were coordinating.

They were going to attack.

And he was going to have to put them down.

----

They attacked as one.

No warning. No posturing. Just coordinated violence.

The first came from above, limbs reaching to grapple. The second from below, trying to pin his tentacles. The other two flanked, claws extended, aiming for vulnerable points: throat, sides, anywhere that would bleed profusely.

Bucky moved.

He'd fought like this before. Multiple opponents. Coordinated attacks. His body remembered even when his mind wanted to forget.

He caught the one coming from above by two of his limbs and twisted, using the momentum to swing him directly into the path of another. They collided in a tangle of limbs and curses.

The third raked claws across his ribs, painful but shallow. Bucky's elbow cracked into his face in response, and he felt bone give way beneath the impact.

They regrouped fast. He'd give them that.

Came at him again, learning, adjusting.

One wrapped around his limbs, trying to immobilize him. Another lunged for his throat. Bucky twisted aside and drove his claws into the one holding him, felt flesh tear and the grip loosen.

He was stronger. Faster. Better.

But they knew that.

They were counting on attrition. On exhaustion. On the fact that even he couldn't fight four at once forever without taking damage.

And they were right.

Claws found purchase on his shoulder. Teeth sank into his forearm. A limb wrapped around his throat from behind, squeezing.

Bucky drove himself backward into the rock face, crushing whoever had him against the stone. The grip loosened. He turned sharply, claws flashing through the water, and opened a deep gash across someone's chest.

Blood clouded the water between them.

They didn't stop.

The one with the mottled gray skin -the largest- came at him again, and this time Bucky saw the glint of metal too late.

A blade.

Human-made. Old but sharp, the edge catching what little light filtered down.

It pierced into his side, just below his ribs.

Not too deep -Bucky twisted away before it could sink fully- but deep enough.

Pain flared hot and immediate.

The male pulled back, brandishing the dagger, and Bucky saw the satisfaction in his eyes. Thought he'd just gained the advantage. Thought the weapon made him dangerous.

His hand shot out, fast as a striking eel, and closed around the male's wrist. Then squeezed.

Bones ground together. The male's eyes went wide, his grip spasming open.

The dagger tumbled free.

Bucky caught it.

And smiled.

It wasn't a nice smile.

"Thank you," he said quietly.

The water around them went very, very still.

Then they'd just armed him.

And they all knew -knew- what he'd been trained to do with weapons.

The first one lunged at him again, stupid with aggression.

Bucky moved as one with the water and slipped under the attack, bringing the blade up and dragging it across the male's torso. Not deep enough to kill, but deep enough that blood poured freely into the water, enough that the pain would take him out of the fight.

One down.

The others came at him together, trying to use numbers to overwhelm him before he could pick them apart one by one.

He didn't give them the chance.

The second got close -too close- and Bucky reversed his grip on the dagger, driving the metal pommel into his temple with precision.

The attacker’s eyes rolled back, and he went limp before beginning to sink.

Two down.

The third wrapped around him from behind, trying to restrain his arms, keep him from using the weapon.

And he let him think he had control for just a second.

Then he drove his head back, felt the bone shatter beneath the impact, and when the grip loosened, he twisted and slashed. The blade caught limbs, opened flesh, carved through muscle and cartilage with the ease of something made for exactly this purpose.

The male recoiled, clutching at the stumps where tentacles had been severed halfway down their length.

Not gone. Not dead.

But out of the fight.

The last one -the one with rust-colored limbs, now flushed almost black- hesitated.

Bucky could see the calculation in his eyes. The moment of doubt.

He was the only one left standing. The others were bleeding, wounded, one of them drifting unconscious.

And Bucky was standing there with a human blade in his hand, barely fatigued, and most of the blood in the water wasn't his.

"You want to keep going?" he asked, his voice quiet and cold.

The male's limbs coiled tight. His claws flexed.

For a moment, Bucky thought he might actually be stupid enough to try. Then his eyes dropped -just slightly, just enough- and Bucky recognized it for what it was: Submission.

He didn't lower the blade.

"Leave," he muttered.

The male didn't need to be told twice.

He turned and disappeared into the gloom without a word, or looking back at the others he was abandoning.

No loyalty. No sentiment.

Bucky's gaze focused on the three that remained. The one with the gash across his chest, still bleeding freely. The one missing half his limbs, curled around himself in pain. The unconscious one, drifting slowly with the current.

They were helpless.

Pathetic.

"If you ever try to come for me again," he said, his voice low and cold, "you'll get more than scars and shame."

None of them responded.

He watched them for another moment -broken, defeated- and left them there to figure out their own survival.

As it had always worked.

----

The adrenaline was fading.

That's when he felt it: the sharp, burning pain in his side where the blade had pierced him. Deep enough that blood was seeping steadily into the water around him.

He pressed his hand against the wound and felt the torn flesh beneath his palm.

There were other injuries, too. Claw marks across his shoulder, still bleeding. A gash on his forearm where teeth had found purchase. Bruises blooming across his ribs where he'd been squeezed.

The water carried the scent of his blood outward, broadcasting his injury to anything with the sense to smell it.

He needed to get away from here before something else decided he was easy prey. Or before more of his kind showed up, drawn by the promise of finishing what the others had started.

His limbs coiled beneath him, and he pushed off from the rock face.

He didn't know where he was going. Didn't care. Just needed distance from this place, from the blood in the water, from the reminder of how easy it had been to tear them apart.

The pain in his side flared with each movement, but he ignored it. North. West. Wherever the currents took him, as long as it was away.

The water around him grew colder. Darker.

Good.

He dove deeper, following the pull of the abyss, letting the pressure build around him until his ears ached and his vision narrowed.

Hours passed. Maybe days.

Time blurred together the way it always did when he pushed himself like this, injured, exhausted, running on nothing but the desperate need to be somewhere else.

The wound in his side had stopped bleeding, finally, but it throbbed with every movement. His shoulder ached, and his head-

The headache was back.

But stopping meant thinking. And thinking meant acknowledging what he'd just done. How easily he'd dismantled them. How comfortable the blade had felt in his hand.

Eventually -he didn't know how long- his body simply gave out.

His muscles seized, and his limbs stopped responding. The pain in his head crested into something unbearable, and his vision went completely dark.

He was sinking.

Distantly, he knew he should care about that, do something.

But his body had nothing left to give.

The current caught him and dragged him sideways, carrying him through water that tasted different somehow. Colder. Emptier. And carried him wherever it wanted.

----

He didn't remember finding it.

One moment, he was drifting, half-conscious, and the next, he was aware of shallow water beneath him. Rock. The scrape of stone against his skin as the tide pulled him forward and then back, like the ocean couldn't decide whether to keep him or spit him out.

His limbs dragged across a rocky floor. Not sand, though there was some scattered between the larger stones. Boulders, some of them. Big enough to break the surf, to create tidal pools that never fully drained.

He forced his eyes open.

Darkness. But not complete.

Pale light filtered down from somewhere above, shafts of silvery illumination cutting through gaps in the stone ceiling. Moonlight, he realized distantly. Chimneys in the rock, natural vents that let it through.

A cave.

He'd washed into a cave.

His body had wedged itself into one of the deeper pools near the back, away from the mouth where the waves still crashed against rock. The water here was calmer. Still. Cold.

He tried to move, and his side screamed in protest.

Right.

The wound.

He should tend to it. Clean it. Make sure it didn't fester.

But he just lay there in the pool, half-submerged, staring up at the thin streams of moonlight filtering through the stone above.

The cave was big. He could sense that much even through the haze of pain and exhaustion. Deep. Multiple exits leading back out to open ocean through the darker depths. The kind of place that would be easy to defend, easy to escape from if needed.

And completely empty.

No scent of other Thal'kyr or merfolk. No territorial markers. Nothing.

Abandoned, probably. Or just... unwanted.

----

He didn't leave. Not that day, or the next.

The wound in his side needed time to heal, and moving was a task he didn’t want to perform.

So he stayed.

By the third day, he dragged himself toward the mouth of the cave.

Just to see. Just to know where he'd ended up.

The opening was wide, facing out toward the water. Waves crashed against the rocks outside, spray misting the air. He moved onto one of the larger boulders near the entrance, his limbs splayed across stone still warm from the day's sun.

And that's when he saw them.

Lights.

Distant. Scattered across the darkness like stars had fallen to earth.

A human settlement.

Not close but visible. Undeniable.

He stared at those pinpricks of light for a long time, his jaw tight.

A settlement meant fishermen. Boats. Nets. People who would come and go from these waters, who might notice things they shouldn't.

No one in their right mind would claim territory this close to these creatures. His kind avoided the surface, avoided anything that might draw human attention, except to hunt them.

This place was worthless.

Unwanted.

His gaze moved from the distant lights back to the dark mouth of the cave behind him.

Perfect.

----

He claimed one of the deeper pools. The one farthest from the cave mouth, where the moonlight barely reached even when it streamed through the chimneys above.

And he stayed.

Because, where would he go?

Back to the open ocean, where others might find him? Where there was always a fight?

This place was exactly what he needed.

A tomb that still let him breathe.

Close enough to humans that no Thal'kyr would ever willingly come here. Deep enough, dark enough, isolated enough that he could simply... stop.

Stop running. Stop fighting.

He didn't know how long he'd stay, or if "stay" was even the right word for what he was going to do.

Existing, maybe.

His thoughts drifted back to Steve. To that conversation he'd tried so hard not to think about.

He had chosen a human over their kind.

Bucky's sharp teeth clenched in the darkness.

He wondered, distantly, if that human had given him something their kind never could.

That "more" he craved but never understood.

His fingers traced idle patterns against the stone floor, claws scraping quietly.

Maybe it existed. Maybe Steve had found it.

But if there was, it wasn't meant for him. This cave, this darkness, this was what he deserved. For his pride. For his weakness.

He let himself sink deeper into the pool, his body settling against the rocky bottom, his limbs coiling loosely around ancient stone.

The water cradled him, cool and undisturbed.

He closed his eyes.

And the years passed.

Then decades.

And all of it dissolved like salt in dark water.

One passed close enough that the wind of it tugged at his tunic.

He started walking.

His gaze roamed over everything: the glass fronts of the shops, the painted signs, the wires strung between buildings like black veins against the grey sky. And the people.

Lord, the people.

Men in strange short coats and narrow hats. Women with bare legs, bare arms, painted mouths, walking alone as though the world had not lost its mind.

Another contraption rolled past him.

A man balanced on a device with two impossibly thin wheels, propelling himself forward with his own legs pumping at metal arms near the ground. No horse. No visible engine or magic. Just the man and the skeletal black frame beneath him, moving at a speed no human should manage on foot.

Bucky stopped dead.

The thing came at him with no reins, no visible means of being controlled beyond the rider's boots working those narrow metal arms. Its wheels were impossibly thin, its bell giving a sharp little trill that cut through the street noise like a thrown knife.

The rider leaned around him at the last possible moment, coat flapping, one hand lifted from the handlebar in furious accusation.

"Watch it, pal!"

Bucky turned with him, tracking the motion, the insult, the impossible narrow-wheeled thing as it shot past his shoulder close enough that he felt the brush of air against his sleeve. His boots moved half a step off the curb before his mind had decided anything useful.

A horn blared. A flat, mechanical scream that didn't belong to any animal he'd ever heard.

He turned back just as one of those horseless carriages -wide and green and shining like a beetle's carapace- bore down on him with two round eyes burning pale through the grey morning. For a heartbeat, he stood rooted to the ground, unable to make his legs obey.

Then, a hand closed around his left wrist.

The contact went through him like a struck bell, and his whole body answered before thought could intervene, muscles jerking in the direction of the grip, boots scraping over wet pavement as he stumbled backward.

Pain lit up his ribs, white and vicious. The green beast roared past close enough that its wind slapped cold against his face, horn still bellowing as the driver shouted something filthy through an open window and did not stop.

Bucky hit the edge of the sidewalk hard enough to jar his teeth.

The woman struck him in the arm a second later with her free hand. Not hard, exactly, but sharp enough to snap him back to his senses.

"What is wrong with you?"

He stared at the place where the carriage had been, watching it disappear down the street.

The traffic kept moving as if nothing had happened.

Another one followed behind it. Dark blue this time. Smaller. More of them farther down the road, parked along the curb like sleeping beasts, their windows reflecting pieces of the sky in impossibly clear glass.

His wrist was still held.

He looked down at it.

Her fingers were wrapped tight enough to blanch the skin beneath her own knuckles. She seemed to realize it at the same moment he did and let go at once, as if his skin had burned her.

Her mouth moved. Red. That impossible red, angry now.

"Do you have a special wish to die this morning?"

He heard the words. Understood them individually. Could not make them gather into meaning.

His hands were empty. He had no sword. No shield. No idea what kingdom this was, what laws governed it, what god had built machines to transport people without horses as though it were the most natural thing in the world, people walking past in their strange attire as if nothing remarkable had happened.

His chest worked once.

Then again.

The breath would not settle.

He tried to force it down into the place where his discipline lived. The old place. The trained place. The place that had carried him through broken ribs, frozen marches, cells too dark to measure time in, men asking questions with tools because words had failed to satisfy them.

It was there.

He could feel its shape, familiar as the weight of a sword, but he simply could not reach it.

The street stretched wide before him, slick and grey, full of motion. The wires overhead trembled in the wind. Somewhere nearby, unseen machinery thudded and clanged. A woman laughed. A dog barked. Another horn sounded in the distance, and his shoulders flinched before he could stop them.

----

She saw the flinch.

It was small, almost nothing, just the quick betrayal of his shoulders at the distant horn, but it made whatever else she had been about to say die behind her lips.

Her question was still there between them, and he had not answered it.

Not that he was ignoring her. Not exactly. Men ignored women in a variety of ways, and she had developed, over the course of owning a business and being alive in general, a fairly extensive catalogue.

This wasn't that.

This man was not ignoring her.

He was… not there. Not properly.

He stood six inches from her on the sidewalk outside her own shop, broad and filthy and absurd in those boots, and looked past her with eyes that had gone distant in a way that made the back of her neck prickle.

The color had drained from his face.

The bruise along his cheekbone looked darker for it, purple-black against the sudden pallor. The cut above his brow, which she had almost forgotten in the general catastrophe of him, had opened again somehow; a thin line of red slipped down toward his temple.

His body was trembling.

Not dramatically. Nothing anyone passing by would notice unless they were close enough to see the tiny, involuntary shiver running through his hands. Through his jaw. Through the tendons in his neck, standing out like rope under skin.

She saw it because she was standing too close.

Because she had grabbed his wrist and felt the shock.

Because for one terrible second, when the car had come at him, and he had simply stood there, she had known with absolute certainty that he was about to die in front of The Sweet Briar before the shop had even opened for the day.

Her own heart was still beating in her throat.

"You could have been killed," she said, quieter this time.

He did not answer.

His gaze flicked once to the street, then to the cars, then upward to the wires, then back to the place where the green car had disappeared around the corner. Too much. That was what his face said now, beneath the stubbornness, beneath the absurd severity of all that knight-of-the-realm nonsense.

Her anger lost its footing.

Damn him.

Damn him for being frightening, and rude, and possibly insane, and then standing there looking like a lost thing that had wandered too far from wherever it belonged.

"Mr. Barnes," she said carefully.

His eyes moved to her face. Not focused, at first.

She lifted both hands a little, palms angled toward him in what she hoped was a calming gesture.

"Listen to me," she said. "You need to come back inside."

His jaw shifted.

"No."

Of course.

Of course the man who had nearly been flattened by a sedan five seconds ago still had room in him to be obstinate.

She took a breath and counted to three.

"Fine. Stay out here. Get yourself killed. But do it after lunch hour, so at least my customers don't have to step over you to buy lilies."

Something passed across his face. A flicker. Not amusement, exactly, but something close to it. Then his attention cut past her shoulder.

She followed it automatically.

A patrolman was coming down the opposite side of Camden Street from the corner near Levinson's pharmacy, where the sidewalk opened into a clear view of the street in front of her shop.

He must have seen the bicycle swerve. Must have seen the car skim by close enough to make two women outside the bakery gasp into their gloves.

And now he was looking directly at her companion.

At the strange clothes. The long hair. The bruising on his face. The blood at his brow. The size of him. The way he stood there, pale and shaking and not quite oriented toward the world around him.

The patrolman adjusted his cap and crossed the street at an angle, long strides eating up the wet pavement with purpose.

Oh, wonderful.

Perfect.

Exactly what the morning needed.

She turned back to Mr. Barnes.

Something in him changed. The trembling did not stop, but it went underground, forced beneath a sudden hardening of posture. His shoulders squared. His chin lifted. The lost look vanished so quickly that if she had not been watching, she might have thought she'd imagined it.

A mask, she realized.

No. Not a mask.

An armor.

He didn’t have one, so his face became it.

"Don't," she said under her breath.

His eyes did not leave the approaching patrolman. "Don't what."

"Whatever it is you're about to do."

"I am doing nothing."

"You're standing like you're about to challenge the entire police department to single combat."

His gaze cut briefly to her, offended despite everything. "I don't know what that is."

"That," she said, pointing with one discrete motion of her head toward the uniform, "is a policeman. He keeps order. He asks questions. He carries a gun. And if you call him a knave or try to throw him to the floor, this morning is going to get much worse for both of us."

The word gun did something. His eyes narrowed slightly.

"A guardsman."

"Close enough."

"Yours?"

"What?"

"Is he yours?"

She stared at him. "No, he is not mine. I don't keep policemen."

The patrolman was halfway across the street now. She had perhaps eight seconds before he reached them.

Eight seconds to decide whether to tell the truth -which would sound insane- or lie.

This strange, injured man appeared in my locked stockroom. He says he's a medieval knight and believes I'm a witch. Oh, and he almost died because he doesn't understand automobiles.

Yes, officer, please take him somewhere kind.

But there was nowhere kind, and that was the problem.

She knew enough about the state institutions to know that. A man like him was not gently escorted to a warm bed and a sensible doctor. A man like this would get handcuffed if he startled the wrong person. A cell if he argued. A hospital ward, if someone felt charitable. An institution, if someone with authority decided his mind was more inconvenient than treatable.

The officer stepped up onto the curb.

"Morning, ma'am," he said, though his eyes stayed mostly on Barnes. "Everything all right here?"

She smiled.

It was not a good smile. It arrived quickly and had too many teeth, the kind of smile that fooled absolutely no one but was required by the social contract.

"Good morning, officer."

Barnes looked at her.

She felt it rather than saw it, the sudden sharp turn of his attention. Suspicious. Assessing. Probably wondering if she was about to have him arrested, detained, executed, or whatever else knights expected from guardsmen in impossible cities.

She kept smiling.

"Had a little scare, that's all."

The patrolman's gaze moved over the man beside her again, slow and professional, cataloguing details. "Looked like your friend here nearly stepped in front of a car."

Friend.

The word hung there, wrong and convenient.

Barnes's expression did not change, but she could feel his objection forming between his brows like a gathering storm.

She stepped on it before it could speak.

"My cousin," she said.

The patrolman blinked. So did the man beside her.

She did not look at him.

"My cousin," she repeated, silently kicking herself for the flimsy excuse even as she committed to it. "From up north."

The patrolman's brows lifted slightly.

"Up north."

"A little town near Mount Katahdin. Very remote, really. Hardly any roads to speak of."

Behind her, he drew a slow breath through his nose. She could feel judgment radiating from him like heat from a stove. She ignored it.

"He came in early this morning, he’s looking for a job, you see," she continued with a bright tone. "He's had a long trip and hardly slept. He’s a stubborn backwoodsman with no sense around traffic. He was bewildered by the view, and then that bicycle startled him, and- well. You saw what happened.”

"I saw him walk into traffic."

"Yes. He does that."

The patrolman squinted at her, and she immediately regretted having a mouth.

"I mean," she amended quickly, "he doesn't usually do that. Obviously. That would be very troubling as a habit. He's just tired. Disoriented. And he took a fall yesterday, so he's not entirely himself."

The officer's gaze went to the bruise on Barnes's cheek, then the cut above his brow, lingering there with professional interest.

"A fall."

"From a horse," she said.

That, at least, felt thematically appropriate.

Barnes's head turned very, very slowly toward her.

She gave him a look that she hoped communicated several things at once, including but not limited to: be quiet, I am saving you, and if you ruin this, I will personally murder you with a pair of pruning shears.

Miraculously, he said nothing.

The patrolman studied him for a long moment.

"That true, sir?"

His eyes moved from her to the officer.

A pause. Too long. Much too long.

Then, with grave reluctance, "I was unseated."

Her eyes nearly closed with relief.

The patrolman seemed to accept this, or at least failed to find the obvious hole in it quickly enough to press. Maybe it was too early in the morning for him, too.

"Looks like you ought to have a doctor look at that."

"He will," she said firmly.

"I do not require-"

"He will," she repeated, louder, and smiled harder at the patrolman. "As soon as I get him inside and settled. He also needs a change of clothing, as you can see. Can't have him walking around looking like he lost a fight with a hay wagon."

The officer looked between them, considering.

The moment stretched.

Someone across the street had stopped pretending not to watch. Mrs. Kaplan from the bakery stood with one hand on her door, eyes bright with the terrible appetite of neighborhood gossip that would fuel conversations for a week.

No.

Absolutely not.

She could not have this become a story before mid-morning.

The patrolman finally nodded once, seeming to decide the situation was odd but not dangerous.

"Best keep him out of the road, then."

"That is very much my plan."

The man's gaze flicked to Barnes one more time. "You take care, sir. City streets aren't forgiving."

He looked at the road, then back at the officer, and when he spoke, his voice was quiet and oddly sincere.

"No," he said. "They are not."

Something in his tone made the patrolman pause, a flicker of concern crossing his features. But then he simply tipped his cap to her.

"Ma'am."

"Officer."

He moved on, though not quickly. She watched him walk back down the block toward the pharmacy, glancing back once before he reached the corner.

Only when he had turned out of sight did she let the smile fall off her face like an abandoned coat.

He was staring at her.

"What," she said flatly.

His expression was unreadable again, which she was beginning to suspect meant he was feeling several things at once and had decided none of them were fit for public display.

"Your cousin," he said.

"It was the first thing that came to mind."

"From up north."

"It seemed plausible."

"It did not."

"Well, he bought it, didn't he?"

"Did he?"

She looked toward the corner where the patrolman had disappeared. Then at Mrs. Kaplan, who was still watching from the bakery window like a hawk spotting a rabbit. Then at the two women whispering near the bus stop. Then at him, standing there like a brawl in human form, bleeding gently onto the collar of his impossible shirt.

"Maybe," she admitted.

A horn blared somewhere down the street, and he flinched.

Small, contained and brutally fast.

But she saw it.

His jaw clenched afterward, as if he could trap the reaction between his teeth and kill it there.

She sighed, feeling what was left of her anger drain away and leave behind something uncomfortably close to pity. And the very reasonable desire to shove him back into the street herself and let nature finish what the sedan had started.

But beneath all of it was the fact of him: pale, shaking, hurt, completely unmoored, and looking at Camden Street as if it were a battlefield he'd stumbled onto without armor or weapons or any idea which side he was meant to be fighting for.

"Inside," she said.

His eyes narrowed.

She pointed at the shop door behind them.

"Now."

"I told you-"

"I lied to a policeman for you, Mr. Barnes, so unless you'd like me to call him back and explain that you are not, in fact, my cousin from up north, you are going to walk through that door, sit down somewhere that is not my begonias, and let me clean the blood off your face before Mrs. Kaplan decides to come over here and ask questions I cannot answer."

He stared at her.

For one second, she could almost see the refusal rise in him, proud and immediate and utterly stupid.

Then another car passed, and he did not look at it; that was how she knew it had frightened him. Then, he turned toward the flower shop without another word.

The bell above the door gave its bright chime as he stepped back inside.

She followed, locked the door behind them, and flipped the sign to CLOSED with more force than strictly necessary.

----

Bucky heard the bolt slide into place with a soft, final click.

A small sound. Ordinary, probably, to her. To him, it landed with considerably more weight. The sound of a cell door, a gate closing, an exit sealed.

He turned his head to her.

She reached up and drew down a strange fabric stretched between narrow wooden slats that clattered softly as it descended, stopping halfway down the window. Not a curtain, exactly. Something that rolled and caught on a mechanism he couldn't see.

He noticed everything, apparently, except the things that might keep him from nearly being killed by horseless carriages.

"Come on," she said and walked past him toward the rear of the shop.

There were, at present, too many questions in his head. They had gathered in his head like crows on a battlefield fence, black and loud and waiting for something to die.

So he followed.

The shop looked different from behind her.

That was not a thought he should have had.

It arrived anyway, unbidden and unhelpful.

Her skirt moved when she walked, a soft, hypnotic sway that drew the eye and then punished the man attached to it for having one. The fabric brushed the backs of her knees with each step, and below that -God help him- her calves were bare, the skin catching the morning light filtering through the half-drawn shade.

The sight shouldn't have affected him the way it did.

He'd seen far worse immodesty in camp followers, tavern girls who unlaced their bodices for coin, even a countess once who'd been shameless enough to receive him in his own chambers in nothing but a loose shift that left very little to imagination.

But this felt different somehow.

Deliberate in its casualness. Ordinary in its brazenness.

As if every woman in this godforsaken century simply walked around like this, and he was the fool for noticing.

He wrenched his gaze toward the nearest bucket of flowers with such determination that he might as well have been preparing to duel it.

Roses.

White ones, their petals just beginning to unfurl, with the faintest blush of pink at the heart of each bloom. Innocent. Chaste. Entirely safe to look at.

Unlike certain other things in this room.

She reached the back room and stepped aside, pointing toward a chair beside the worktable.

"Sit."

He looked at it with immediate suspicion.

The chair was made of metal. Thin silver legs bent in a precise curve, holding up a seat covered in some smooth green material that was neither leather nor cloth. It shone faintly under the light overhead, reflecting the ceiling in a way that seemed unnatural.

Bucky stared at it for a second too long.

"It's a chair," she seemed fit to clarify.

"I can see that."

"Wonderful. Then use it."

He should not have.

There were several reasons he should not have.

For one, it was unwise to place himself at a disadvantage in a room he did not understand, with a woman he did not know, in a century that seemed very committed to making a fool of him at every opportunity.

For another, it was utterly inappropriate.

There was no servant. No matron tucked into the corner with her embroidery and her sharp little coughs to remind them of propriety. No chaperone at all to lend respectability to the fact that this woman was about to put her hands near his face, possibly his body, while the two of them were alone behind a locked door.

A decent man would object.

A prudent man would leave.

He sat.

The metal chair gave a faint protesting creak beneath his weight but did not collapse, which was more than he had expected from something built with legs that narrow. The act of lowering himself was unpleasant. His ribs had apparently chosen this moment to remind him -in exhaustive detail- that they had been cracked before the universe had lost its mind and had not improved during the intervening catastrophe.

His breath caught despite his best efforts.

She noticed. Her gaze flicked down to his side, then back up, too quick to be called staring and too sharp to be accidental.

"You hurt your ribs?"

"No."

She gave him a look that suggested she had heard better lies from children.

He met it stubbornly.

A pause.

"Yes," he admitted.

"Thought so."

She turned toward a small wooden cabinet mounted low on the wall and crouched down. From inside, she pulled out a metal case. Small, rectangular, with a hinged lid and a painted red cross on the top.

A coffer, his mind supplied automatically, though it was made of metal rather than wood, and far too uniform in its construction to have been hammered by any smith he knew.

She set it on the worktable and flipped the latch.

The cross should have been reassuring.

It was not.

Inside were bottles, tins, folded cloths, strange implements he had no names for. She began sorting through them, and he watched her hands move.

Competent hands. Not delicate, though they looked as if they could be when they wanted to. She knew where things were, even in the disorder. She found a clean cloth, a small brown bottle, and a roll of white bandaging and set them on the table.

He cleared his throat and she glanced over her shoulder.

The words should have come easily. Courtesy did, when one was raised with enough of it beaten in by tutors and lords and the general expectation of civilized behavior.

He had thanked lords he despised, maesters who'd prodded at wounds, servants who'd brought water, boys who'd held horses, women who had done far less for him than lie to an armed city guardsman.

Still, it took him a moment.

"For what you said to the guardsman," he began carefully. "Outside."

Her hands stilled completely. She turned to face him, the cloth still held loosely in her fingers.

"The policeman," she corrected gently.

"The policeman," he repeated, the word still feeling foreign on his tongue. He met her eyes. "For that. You have my thanks."

Something in her expression softened. The wariness didn't disappear entirely, but it eased.

"You're welcome," she said simply.

She set the cloth down on the worktable and leaned back against it, her hands bracing on the edge behind her. The posture was less guarded than before.

"Though for the record," she added, and there was the faintest hint of amusement in her voice now, "you made that more difficult than it needed to be."

He shifted in the metal chair, wincing slightly as his ribs protested. "I said very little."

"You said it with the face of a man about to fight." She tilted her head, studying him.

“I was inquired by a law enforcement."

"You were asked whether you fell off a horse." She crossed her ankles, settling more comfortably against the table. The motion drew his eye briefly to those impossible shoes before he forced his gaze back to her face.

"I was unseated," he corrected with careful dignity.

She blinked at him for a moment.

Then her lips curved into something that was almost a smile, warm in a way that made something in his chest tug unexpectedly.

"Fallen, unseated…" she said softly, waving her hand.

The strange thing was, he almost wanted to explain. Wanted to tell her that it was not the same thing at all.

That falling could be clumsy, careless, the result of poor seat or a man who didn't know his business. Being unseated meant impact, skill, another man's force meeting yours at the exact angle required to take you from the saddle despite everything you did to prevent it.

There was dignity in the distinction.

But she was looking at him with something gentler than he'd seen from her yet. So he did not explain. He was, as she had said, trying not to make things more difficult than they needed to be.

Also, and more pressing, he was hungry.

The realization came with embarrassing force now that he was seated and no longer fighting for his life against bicycles and automobiles. He had not eaten since before the tournament.

Had meant to, after. Had meant to remove his armor, find bread and stew at the tavern down the street, and perhaps sleep for half a day if his luck could be persuaded toward mercy for once.

Instead, he had put on a cursed ring and been thrown into a florist's back room nearly six centuries from where he belonged.

His stomach gave a low, traitorous growl that echoed in the stockroom with all the subtlety of a church bell at matins.

The woman paused mid-motion.

He closed his eyes briefly.

Lord.

When he opened them, she was looking at him with something that might have been concern or exasperation or both.

"When did you last eat?"

He considered lying.

His stomach, apparently tired of his pride, made the answer unnecessary by growling again, louder this time.

She set the cloth down with a soft sigh.

"Right," she said. "Blood first. Food after."

"That’s not-"

"Mr. Barnes."

He stopped.

Her tone had changed. It was the voice of a woman who had discovered the exact amount of patience she possessed and found him standing at the far edge of it with his boots on.

"You are bleeding, you nearly got killed by a car, and I have already lied to a policeman before midday.” She gestured at the chair, less sharp than simply direct. "Sit still and let me clean that before you pass out and make this morning worse than it already is. Then, we'll figure out food."

He was opening his mouth to object-

"Please," she added, and something about her tone reached him. So he leaned back in the metal chair and said nothing.

She seemed to take that as victory.

Perhaps it was.

She stepped closer, and the air between them shifted. He caught her scent more clearly now: flowers, yes, but also something faintly powdery and sweet that he couldn't name. Soap, perhaps. Or some cosmetic concoction women of this time favored.

The cloth in her hand was damp; he could see the darkness of moisture against the white fabric.

He kept perfectly still.

She bent toward him, close enough that her breath would have touched his face if she'd spoken, and then her fingers touched his jaw.

The contact was brief, impersonal, the gesture of someone accustomed to arranging things precisely.

It went through him like a strike of flint.

His breath caught with the sudden, with the unwelcome awareness of how close she was. How warm. How the neckline of her dress sat just low enough that if he dropped his gaze even slightly-

He locked his eyes on the ceiling and kept them there.

"Hold still," she said quietly.

He was already still. Rigid as a man in armor, every muscle tense by the maddening fact that her thumb was resting just below his jaw, her fingertips cool against the edge of his beard.

The damp cloth touched his brow.

Cool. Clean. It stung where the cut was, a sharp little bite that he barely felt through everything else.

What he felt was her.

The bend of her body as she leaned in. The brush of her skirt against his knee. Brief, accidental, gone before he could react. The small crease of concentration between her brows as she worked, utterly focused, utterly unaware of what the simple act of touching him was doing.

She tilted his face slightly toward the light.

His jaw shifted under her hand, and the movement made her fingers slide -just barely- along the line of bone and muscle beneath his ear.

Heat crawled up the back of his neck.

This was absurd.

She was cleaning a wound. Nothing more. She had shown him no interest beyond the bare minimum of human decency, and even that had been grudging. She thought him mad, or damaged, or some combination of both. She had called him cousin to a lawman to avoid further inconvenience.

And here he sat, breathing too carefully, thinking about what it would feel like if those hands moved with intent instead of practicality. If they slid into his hair. If her thumb pressed just a little harder against his throat. If she leaned closer and-

Fuck.

He was acting like some green boy again.

Worse. He was acting like a man who hadn't been touched by anyone in far too long, and whose body had decided now -of all the godsforsaken moments- was the time to remind him of it.

The cloth moved to his cheekbone, gentler now, following the edge of the bruise.

"It's not deep," she said after a moment. "Won't need stitches. Just needs to be clean."

"I've had worse." He managed.

"I don't doubt it."

She stepped back, and the absence of her touch was immediate and disorienting. She studied her work, then reached for the brown bottle, uncorking it with a soft pop.

The smell hit him immediately. Sharp. Medicinal. Something that burned the inside of his nose and made his eyes water.

"This is going to sting," she warned.

"I can-"

She dabbed it on before he could finish.

It did not sting.

It burned like the fires of hell had been distilled into liquid form and applied directly to his face.

He did not move. Did not make a sound.

His hand, however, gripped the edge of the metal chair hard enough that he heard the frame creak.

"Sorry," she said, and she actually sounded it. "It's awful, but it'll keep it from getting infected."

He managed a nod, not trusting his voice.

She corked the bottle and set it aside, examining the cut again, and then stepped back fully, putting a respectable distance between them, and he could breathe again.

Then his stomach growled. Again. Loud and shameless.

She paused.

He watched something shift in her expression, watched her think. Her gaze went to the little corner table where the tin of those dried herbs sat, and her mouth pressed into a thoughtful line.

"I don't have much here," she said slowly. "It's a stockroom, not a kitchen. Tea and stale biscuits in some corner, mostly."

He opened his mouth to tell her it didn't matter, that he required nothing-

"Wait here," she said abruptly.

Before he could object, she was already moving toward the front of the shop, pulling a key from somewhere in her skirt and unlocking the door.

"Don't touch anything," she added over her shoulder. "And for God's sake, don't go outside again."

The bell chimed.

The door closed.

He sat alone in the stockroom, surrounded by buckets of flowers and incomprehensible objects, with no earthly idea where she had gone or whether she would return.

For a brief, ungenerous moment, he considered the possibility that she had simply gone to fetch the authorities after all. Left him here to be collected like a stray dog.

He could not have blamed her if she had.

But he stayed.

Partly because his ribs ached and his legs felt unsteady, and the metal chair, absurd as it was, held his weight. Partly because the door to the street terrified him in a way he was not prepared to examine.

And partly -mostly- because some quiet, exhausted part of him had decided to trust her, and he was too tired to argue with it.

Time passed. He did not know how much. Somewhere beyond the walls, the muffled sounds of the impossible city continued: horns, voices, the rumble of those horseless carriages.

Then the bell chimed again, and he heard the click of her heels through the shop. She reappeared through the storage door with a brown paper sack clutched in one hand.

"Here," she said, crossing to him and holding it out. "Eat this before you fall over."

He took it cautiously.

The sack was warm. And the smell…

God, the smell.

Something rich and savory drifted up from inside, meat and bread and something he couldn't identify, and his mouth flooded with saliva before he'd even looked inside.

He opened it.

Within was a strange construction: two thick slices of bread pressed together, and between them, slices of roasted meat layered with melted cheese, what appeared to be a cooked egg, and some green leaves he didn't recognize.

He turned it over, examining the oddity from several angles.

"It's a sandwich," she said, watching his confusion with poorly concealed amusement. "Roast beef. From the diner on the corner. You eat it. With your hands."

A sandwich.

He had never heard the term. Never seen meat and bread arranged in such a deliberate, portable fashion. In his world, meat was served on a trencher, or in a pie, or skewered over a fire. Not... stacked.

The smell did not care about his confusion, and his stomach growled a third time, traitorous and insistent, and he abandoned his examination in favor of simply eating.

The first bite was a revelation.

Warm bread. Tender meat, properly seasoned. The richness of the cheese, the unexpected softness of the egg, the crunch of whatever green leaves she'd called them.

It was, without exaggeration, one of the finest things he had ever tasted.

He ate with more control than he felt, forcing himself to chew, to pace himself, to not devour the entire thing in three bites like a starving animal.

She watched him for a moment, then turned away to give him privacy.

He was grateful for it.

When he'd finished -every crumb, every scrap, the paper sack reduced to a crumpled ball in his fist- he set it down carefully and cleared his throat.

She turned.

"Better?"

"Yes." His voice came out rough. "Thank you. That was..."

He didn't have words for what it was.

A sandwich, apparently.

"...generous of you," he finished.

She nodded, accepting it, and for a moment neither of them said anything.

The silence stretched, not quite comfortable but not hostile either. Finally, she crossed her arms over her chest in a way that was becoming familiar.

"So," she said. "What are we going to do with you, Mr. Barnes?"

He looked at her standing there in her scandalously short skirt and her impossible shoes.

"I don't know," he said honestly.

Next Chapter

June 2026

by @navybrat817

📙 Drive You Home | comf | 12k | You’re Bucky’s favorite passenger. He knows your schedule by heart. The same day, time, and location. You’re kind. You talk to him like he’s more than just the man behind the wheel. You always tip well.

📙 Last Call | Bucky helps you out of the bar after a few drinks.

📙 Come Home | Bucky wants you to come home.

📙 it's all for you by @mwahforbucky | Your sweet neighbour harbours a crush on you and painfully watches you stay in a toxic relationship, he wishes he could be yours. He would treat you so well.

📙 eighteen hours. by @buckyseternaldoll | +18 | Weeks apart on separate missions leave you and Bucky Barnes aching, desperate, and one heartbeat away from unraveling. The reunion? Eighteen hours of pure, breathless release.

by @aquaticmercy

📙 Bucky Likes Your Tramp Stamp | he gets turned on when he finds out you have a tramp stamp

📙 Smug About It | Bucky Has a Praise Kink and You’re Smug About It

📙 Confessions by @mickimoo1409 | You and Bucky have been in an arranged marriage for a year and finally get the nerve to confess your feelings to each other. 

📙 Drowned in You by @bees-library3 | +18 | After a disaster of a press conference, Bucky copes by fucking you in the shower.

📙 Patch you up by @multiversefanfics | After a mission gone sideways, Bucky is patching you up and some things are said and maybe taken the wrong way.

📙 the final act by @w1nter-fairy | +18 | 10k | Loving Bucky Barnes was never supposed to happen. He was older, off-limits; but stolen nights turn into something neither of you can't ignore and when the truth comes out, it threatens to destroy everything. Because some acts aren't meant to last... and some loves refuses to end when the curtain falls.

by @sunday-bug

📙 Twisted in Bedsheets | +18

📙 Primary Source

📙 Town Gossip | Lee Bodecker x Reader

📙 Clapping Erasers (And Cheeks)

📙 sexting with bucky by @godmadeaterribleerror

📙 Private Affairs by @saiyanprincessswanie | +18 | Bucky and Reader have a secret relationship that they don’t want to share with anyone.

📙 Nutshell by @superbassbuck | 11k | You are Bucky’s most prized possession. Your mind, body, and soul were crafted by his own hands—he gave you life, and he could just as easily take it away. He never imagined he’d feel threatened by his own creation, until the day you began to have desires of your own.

by @societyfolklore

📙 Every Word | Lance Tucker x Reader

📙 Window Seat | Chris Beck x Reader

📙 Good Time | Lee Bodecker x Reader

📙 Give Me a Whirl | Lee Bodecker x Reader

📙 Caught Your Name | Max Burnett x Reader

📙 Premonition | Chase Collins x Female Reader

📙 Another Reason | Nick Fowler x Reader

📙 Stay the Night | Hal Carter x Reader

📙 Look At Me | +18

📙 Just Competitive | +18 | Sam’s new gf keeps waking you up

📙 Make Things Right | Steven Kemp x Reader

by @winteryn

📙 BUNNY GONE WILD | +18 | the winter soldier infiltrates a college halloween party to follow the pretty girl with bunny ears who collided into him on the sidewalk. 

📙 ROUGH HANDS, STRAWBERRY KISSES & OTHER SOFT THINGS | +18 | 26k | navigating your first relationship feels overwhelming at times—every touch, every question, every new feeling makes you wonder if you’re doing things right. thankfully, bucky loves you with enough patience and gentleness to turn every new experience into a reason to hold you a little closer. or, a collection of moments in which your boyfriend teaches you that love was never supposed to feel frightening—not when it’s held in careful hands like his.

📙 FRAGMENTS OF A LONELY TIDE | series | a grumpy dockworker reluctantly rescues you—a stranded, wounded mermaid—with every intention of sending you back to the sea once you’ve healed. until the idea of losing you becomes something he can no longer bear.

📙 Heiress in Hiding by @semper-nox | +18 | 20k | stucky x reader | Backstage, you were just the agency’s trusted makeup artist... until the calls got urgent, the secrets got heavier, and Steve and Bucky realized you weren’t only hiding stress… you were hiding a whole identity. When the truth finally comes out, they have to decide what’s real: your name, your power, or the feelings you’ve been trying so hard to protect.

by @phoenix-in-writing

📙 Get Lost In It | +18 | Andrew x Reader | On a night out, you meet a man who claims he was looking for you all along. But was he really though?

📙 Art History | An after hours meeting proves that you may need more than just a private lesson to bring your grades up.

📙 The Scam | Max Burnett x Reader | No one said the world of fraud was simple. It's even less so when your mentor doesn't allow you to fulfill your end of the deal.

📙 Pan Fried | Steve Kemp x reader | Maybe...grabbing a cast iron skillet wasn't the best idea...

📙 Wheel of Wonder | Somehow, your new boyfriend sweet talked you onto The Wonder Wheel at Coney Island despite you being afraid of heights.

📙 The Stork Club | Bucky lays eyes on the most beautiful girl he's ever seen, and is convinced he has a shot.

📙 Anonymous Contact | Anonymity is the name of the game. But what happens when he keeps coming back?

📙 Princess Treatment | Being the prized possession of one James Buchanan Barnes sure did come with a lot of perks.

📙 The Fixer | Sent to spy on The Asset in Romania, you bite off more than you can chew.

📙 Hold the Door

📙 Bedtime Story | Maybe that last shot was a bad idea.

📙 Old Money | Leo Reilly x Reader | A game of strip poker has it's stakes raised.

📙 run little bunny by @bucksangel | +18 | Being John Walker’s assistant is hard; he’s mean, disrespectful, misogynistic, the whole nine yards. On top of that, he hardly pays you fairly. So, when you’re fired for a mistake you’re sure wasn’t your fault, you’re at risk of being kicked out by your rude roommates. Luckily for you, James Barnes, a wildly successful CEO, has found his way into your life. And he’s going to take such good care of you.

📙 Bad timing by @imnotjustreadingg-volume-two | +18 | Bucky took something Sam gave him as a joke... turned out it wasn't a joke

by @gravelocked

📙 voice message | +18 | multiple x reader

📙 mean | +18 | multiple x reader

by @jamesbbcrnes

📙 SAVE ME A DANCE

📙 ROUGH DAY

📙 APOLOGISE

📙 HAUNTING PAST

📙 GONNA MAKE HER MINE

📙 I’LL BE SEEIN’ YOU

📙 YOU’RE THE ONE

📙 GIRL CRUSH

📙 BEDTIME

📙 GLITTERY CHAOS

by @azriona

📙 She's Singing | Why is Bucky's new teammate singing?!?!?

📙 Slow Dance | The music may change, but the dance doesn't. (And isn't that the way it should be?)

📙 Misdirection | You're dancing. Bucky's watching. Neither of you are paying attention.

📙 Right Place, Wrong Time | In 1972, the Asset broke free of his handlers. He was found in New York City three weeks later.

📙 The Jackknife | The shark has such teeth, dear. And there is work to be done.

by @sassandscribbles

📙 Memories worth a lifetime | a car ride, an old song, and memories worth lifetime.

📙 Wrong Place, Wrong time | Empty meeting rooms are not supposed to be used for fucking your boyfriend before a mission. But since when do you follow any rules?

📙 Mine | +18 | The winter soldier visits you late at night. And only wants one thing.

by @stardustrider

📙 Rules Are for Breaking

📙 Good time

📙 A Good Man by @apenny4thots | A night in has Bucky reflecting on time lost.

by @perdidosbucky-yyo

📙 Can't Promise | Professor Barnes tries to break up with you.

📙 SWEET TOOTH | Your sweet tooth will be your downfall

by @cueloki

📙 New neighbors

📙 The first move

📙 soft by @maerieee

📙 Brown Sugar and Gunmetal vol.3 by @vunblr | +18 | 11k | Who would have thought that an inconspicuous vent in a bakery alley would be what brought them together: the omega who never felt right with any alpha, and the asset who wasn't supposed to want at all.

by @metal-armed-muse

📙 bucky barnes vs. one (1) annotated romance novel | +18 | Bucky finds your romance novel. Bucky reads the highlighted part. Bucky discovers you've both been silently wanting the same thing. Bucky proves he’s incapable of acting normal about this information.

📙 BAD HABITS | +18 | 12k | What’s so bad about Bucky Barnes? The fact that he watches you or calls you kid while he does it?

by @buckyalpine

📙 most soft shy little bunny ever | +18 | You know who'd talk you through it? Bucky. Bucky would talk you through it.

📙 cameras to HD quality | +18 | "So what you're saying is that footage would've recorded everything in the kitchen from morning to evening and the middle of the night...everything?"

📙 kiss cam by @barnesafterglow | fluff | when you and bucky go on a date, you end up on the kiss cam

📙 Double Blind by @wkemeup | Set up on what might be the worst blind date you’d ever been on, you find yourself captivated by the mysterious bartender instead 

📙 your man loves by @kittennextdoor | +18 | your man loves when you fuck him back

📙 loca by @late-to-the-party-81 | Nick Fowler x reader

📙 Starry summer by @w1nter-fairy | +18 | For months, Bucky has looked forward to one thing: seeing his favorite camgirl live. He never expected to find her poolside in a white bikini... or discover that she's been flirting with him all summer long.

📙 All You Get by @tw1sters | +18 | Nick Fowler x reader | Nick Fowler is not the man of your dreams, not with the way he refuses to love, but you can't help yourself anyway.

by @iamthatonefangirl

📙 fallout | +18

📙 valentine's day | +18

📙 whirlwind | +18

by @stanmarvelous

📙 Born to Sing

📙 Fooled

📙 Gonna Make Her Mine, All Mine

📙 stuck in bed by @aerisque | After spending the entire day curled up in ded with painful cramps, you do everything you can to keep Bucky from finding out

📙 I’ll Take the Sticks, I’ll Take the Stones by @singulartoast | You dislike the false glamour of politics, but your husband Bucky is there to shield and steer you through.

<part15 ...

One passed close enough that the wind of it tugged at his tunic.

He started walking.

His gaze roamed over everything: the glass fronts of the shops, the painted signs, the wires strung between buildings like black veins against the grey sky. And the people.

Lord, the people.

Men in strange short coats and narrow hats. Women with bare legs, bare arms, painted mouths, walking alone as though the world had not lost its mind.

Another contraption rolled past him.

A man balanced on a device with two impossibly thin wheels, propelling himself forward with his own legs pumping at metal arms near the ground. No horse. No visible engine or magic. Just the man and the skeletal black frame beneath him, moving at a speed no human should manage on foot.

Bucky stopped dead.

The thing came at him with no reins, no visible means of being controlled beyond the rider's boots working those narrow metal arms. Its wheels were impossibly thin, its bell giving a sharp little trill that cut through the street noise like a thrown knife.

The rider leaned around him at the last possible moment, coat flapping, one hand lifted from the handlebar in furious accusation.

"Watch it, pal!"

Bucky turned with him, tracking the motion, the insult, the impossible narrow-wheeled thing as it shot past his shoulder close enough that he felt the brush of air against his sleeve. His boots moved half a step off the curb before his mind had decided anything useful.

A horn blared. A flat, mechanical scream that didn't belong to any animal he'd ever heard.

He turned back just as one of those horseless carriages -wide and green and shining like a beetle's carapace- bore down on him with two round eyes burning pale through the grey morning. For a heartbeat, he stood rooted to the ground, unable to make his legs obey.

Then, a hand closed around his left wrist.

The contact went through him like a struck bell, and his whole body answered before thought could intervene, muscles jerking in the direction of the grip, boots scraping over wet pavement as he stumbled backward.

Pain lit up his ribs, white and vicious. The green beast roared past close enough that its wind slapped cold against his face, horn still bellowing as the driver shouted something filthy through an open window and did not stop.

Bucky hit the edge of the sidewalk hard enough to jar his teeth.

The woman struck him in the arm a second later with her free hand. Not hard, exactly, but sharp enough to snap him back to his senses.

"What is wrong with you?"

He stared at the place where the carriage had been, watching it disappear down the street.

The traffic kept moving as if nothing had happened.

Another one followed behind it. Dark blue this time. Smaller. More of them farther down the road, parked along the curb like sleeping beasts, their windows reflecting pieces of the sky in impossibly clear glass.

His wrist was still held.

He looked down at it.

Her fingers were wrapped tight enough to blanch the skin beneath her own knuckles. She seemed to realize it at the same moment he did and let go at once, as if his skin had burned her.

Her mouth moved. Red. That impossible red, angry now.

"Do you have a special wish to die this morning?"

He heard the words. Understood them individually. Could not make them gather into meaning.

His hands were empty. He had no sword. No shield. No idea what kingdom this was, what laws governed it, what god had built machines to transport people without horses as though it were the most natural thing in the world, people walking past in their strange attire as if nothing remarkable had happened.

His chest worked once.

Then again.

The breath would not settle.

He tried to force it down into the place where his discipline lived. The old place. The trained place. The place that had carried him through broken ribs, frozen marches, cells too dark to measure time in, men asking questions with tools because words had failed to satisfy them.

It was there.

He could feel its shape, familiar as the weight of a sword, but he simply could not reach it.

The street stretched wide before him, slick and grey, full of motion. The wires overhead trembled in the wind. Somewhere nearby, unseen machinery thudded and clanged. A woman laughed. A dog barked. Another horn sounded in the distance, and his shoulders flinched before he could stop them.

----

She saw the flinch.

It was small, almost nothing, just the quick betrayal of his shoulders at the distant horn, but it made whatever else she had been about to say die behind her lips.

Her question was still there between them, and he had not answered it.

Not that he was ignoring her. Not exactly. Men ignored women in a variety of ways, and she had developed, over the course of owning a business and being alive in general, a fairly extensive catalogue.

This wasn't that.

This man was not ignoring her.

He was… not there. Not properly.

He stood six inches from her on the sidewalk outside her own shop, broad and filthy and absurd in those boots, and looked past her with eyes that had gone distant in a way that made the back of her neck prickle.

The color had drained from his face.

The bruise along his cheekbone looked darker for it, purple-black against the sudden pallor. The cut above his brow, which she had almost forgotten in the general catastrophe of him, had opened again somehow; a thin line of red slipped down toward his temple.

His body was trembling.

Not dramatically. Nothing anyone passing by would notice unless they were close enough to see the tiny, involuntary shiver running through his hands. Through his jaw. Through the tendons in his neck, standing out like rope under skin.

She saw it because she was standing too close.

Because she had grabbed his wrist and felt the shock.

Because for one terrible second, when the car had come at him, and he had simply stood there, she had known with absolute certainty that he was about to die in front of The Sweet Briar before the shop had even opened for the day.

Her own heart was still beating in her throat.

"You could have been killed," she said, quieter this time.

He did not answer.

His gaze flicked once to the street, then to the cars, then upward to the wires, then back to the place where the green car had disappeared around the corner. Too much. That was what his face said now, beneath the stubbornness, beneath the absurd severity of all that knight-of-the-realm nonsense.

Her anger lost its footing.

Damn him.

Damn him for being frightening, and rude, and possibly insane, and then standing there looking like a lost thing that had wandered too far from wherever it belonged.

"Mr. Barnes," she said carefully.

His eyes moved to her face. Not focused, at first.

She lifted both hands a little, palms angled toward him in what she hoped was a calming gesture.

"Listen to me," she said. "You need to come back inside."

His jaw shifted.

"No."

Of course.

Of course the man who had nearly been flattened by a sedan five seconds ago still had room in him to be obstinate.

She took a breath and counted to three.

"Fine. Stay out here. Get yourself killed. But do it after lunch hour, so at least my customers don't have to step over you to buy lilies."

Something passed across his face. A flicker. Not amusement, exactly, but something close to it. Then his attention cut past her shoulder.

She followed it automatically.

A patrolman was coming down the opposite side of Camden Street from the corner near Levinson's pharmacy, where the sidewalk opened into a clear view of the street in front of her shop.

He must have seen the bicycle swerve. Must have seen the car skim by close enough to make two women outside the bakery gasp into their gloves.

And now he was looking directly at her companion.

At the strange clothes. The long hair. The bruising on his face. The blood at his brow. The size of him. The way he stood there, pale and shaking and not quite oriented toward the world around him.

The patrolman adjusted his cap and crossed the street at an angle, long strides eating up the wet pavement with purpose.

Oh, wonderful.

Perfect.

Exactly what the morning needed.

She turned back to Mr. Barnes.

Something in him changed. The trembling did not stop, but it went underground, forced beneath a sudden hardening of posture. His shoulders squared. His chin lifted. The lost look vanished so quickly that if she had not been watching, she might have thought she'd imagined it.

A mask, she realized.

No. Not a mask.

An armor.

He didn’t have one, so his face became it.

"Don't," she said under her breath.

His eyes did not leave the approaching patrolman. "Don't what."

"Whatever it is you're about to do."

"I am doing nothing."

"You're standing like you're about to challenge the entire police department to single combat."

His gaze cut briefly to her, offended despite everything. "I don't know what that is."

"That," she said, pointing with one discrete motion of her head toward the uniform, "is a policeman. He keeps order. He asks questions. He carries a gun. And if you call him a knave or try to throw him to the floor, this morning is going to get much worse for both of us."

The word gun did something. His eyes narrowed slightly.

"A guardsman."

"Close enough."

"Yours?"

"What?"

"Is he yours?"

She stared at him. "No, he is not mine. I don't keep policemen."

The patrolman was halfway across the street now. She had perhaps eight seconds before he reached them.

Eight seconds to decide whether to tell the truth -which would sound insane- or lie.

This strange, injured man appeared in my locked stockroom. He says he's a medieval knight and believes I'm a witch. Oh, and he almost died because he doesn't understand automobiles.

Yes, officer, please take him somewhere kind.

But there was nowhere kind, and that was the problem.

She knew enough about the state institutions to know that. A man like him was not gently escorted to a warm bed and a sensible doctor. A man like this would get handcuffed if he startled the wrong person. A cell if he argued. A hospital ward, if someone felt charitable. An institution, if someone with authority decided his mind was more inconvenient than treatable.

The officer stepped up onto the curb.

"Morning, ma'am," he said, though his eyes stayed mostly on Barnes. "Everything all right here?"

She smiled.

It was not a good smile. It arrived quickly and had too many teeth, the kind of smile that fooled absolutely no one but was required by the social contract.

"Good morning, officer."

Barnes looked at her.

She felt it rather than saw it, the sudden sharp turn of his attention. Suspicious. Assessing. Probably wondering if she was about to have him arrested, detained, executed, or whatever else knights expected from guardsmen in impossible cities.

She kept smiling.

"Had a little scare, that's all."

The patrolman's gaze moved over the man beside her again, slow and professional, cataloguing details. "Looked like your friend here nearly stepped in front of a car."

Friend.

The word hung there, wrong and convenient.

Barnes's expression did not change, but she could feel his objection forming between his brows like a gathering storm.

She stepped on it before it could speak.

"My cousin," she said.

The patrolman blinked. So did the man beside her.

She did not look at him.

"My cousin," she repeated, silently kicking herself for the flimsy excuse even as she committed to it. "From up north."

The patrolman's brows lifted slightly.

"Up north."

"A little town near Mount Katahdin. Very remote, really. Hardly any roads to speak of."

Behind her, he drew a slow breath through his nose. She could feel judgment radiating from him like heat from a stove. She ignored it.

"He came in early this morning, he’s looking for a job, you see," she continued with a bright tone. "He's had a long trip and hardly slept. He’s a stubborn backwoodsman with no sense around traffic. He was bewildered by the view, and then that bicycle startled him, and- well. You saw what happened.”

"I saw him walk into traffic."

"Yes. He does that."

The patrolman squinted at her, and she immediately regretted having a mouth.

"I mean," she amended quickly, "he doesn't usually do that. Obviously. That would be very troubling as a habit. He's just tired. Disoriented. And he took a fall yesterday, so he's not entirely himself."

The officer's gaze went to the bruise on Barnes's cheek, then the cut above his brow, lingering there with professional interest.

"A fall."

"From a horse," she said.

That, at least, felt thematically appropriate.

Barnes's head turned very, very slowly toward her.

She gave him a look that she hoped communicated several things at once, including but not limited to: be quiet, I am saving you, and if you ruin this, I will personally murder you with a pair of pruning shears.

Miraculously, he said nothing.

The patrolman studied him for a long moment.

"That true, sir?"

His eyes moved from her to the officer.

A pause. Too long. Much too long.

Then, with grave reluctance, "I was unseated."

Her eyes nearly closed with relief.

The patrolman seemed to accept this, or at least failed to find the obvious hole in it quickly enough to press. Maybe it was too early in the morning for him, too.

"Looks like you ought to have a doctor look at that."

"He will," she said firmly.

"I do not require-"

"He will," she repeated, louder, and smiled harder at the patrolman. "As soon as I get him inside and settled. He also needs a change of clothing, as you can see. Can't have him walking around looking like he lost a fight with a hay wagon."

The officer looked between them, considering.

The moment stretched.

Someone across the street had stopped pretending not to watch. Mrs. Kaplan from the bakery stood with one hand on her door, eyes bright with the terrible appetite of neighborhood gossip that would fuel conversations for a week.

No.

Absolutely not.

She could not have this become a story before mid-morning.

The patrolman finally nodded once, seeming to decide the situation was odd but not dangerous.

"Best keep him out of the road, then."

"That is very much my plan."

The man's gaze flicked to Barnes one more time. "You take care, sir. City streets aren't forgiving."

He looked at the road, then back at the officer, and when he spoke, his voice was quiet and oddly sincere.

"No," he said. "They are not."

Something in his tone made the patrolman pause, a flicker of concern crossing his features. But then he simply tipped his cap to her.

"Ma'am."

"Officer."

He moved on, though not quickly. She watched him walk back down the block toward the pharmacy, glancing back once before he reached the corner.

Only when he had turned out of sight did she let the smile fall off her face like an abandoned coat.

He was staring at her.

"What," she said flatly.

His expression was unreadable again, which she was beginning to suspect meant he was feeling several things at once and had decided none of them were fit for public display.

"Your cousin," he said.

"It was the first thing that came to mind."

"From up north."

"It seemed plausible."

"It did not."

"Well, he bought it, didn't he?"

"Did he?"

She looked toward the corner where the patrolman had disappeared. Then at Mrs. Kaplan, who was still watching from the bakery window like a hawk spotting a rabbit. Then at the two women whispering near the bus stop. Then at him, standing there like a brawl in human form, bleeding gently onto the collar of his impossible shirt.

"Maybe," she admitted.

A horn blared somewhere down the street, and he flinched.

Small, contained and brutally fast.

But she saw it.

His jaw clenched afterward, as if he could trap the reaction between his teeth and kill it there.

She sighed, feeling what was left of her anger drain away and leave behind something uncomfortably close to pity. And the very reasonable desire to shove him back into the street herself and let nature finish what the sedan had started.

But beneath all of it was the fact of him: pale, shaking, hurt, completely unmoored, and looking at Camden Street as if it were a battlefield he'd stumbled onto without armor or weapons or any idea which side he was meant to be fighting for.

"Inside," she said.

His eyes narrowed.

She pointed at the shop door behind them.

"Now."

"I told you-"

"I lied to a policeman for you, Mr. Barnes, so unless you'd like me to call him back and explain that you are not, in fact, my cousin from up north, you are going to walk through that door, sit down somewhere that is not my begonias, and let me clean the blood off your face before Mrs. Kaplan decides to come over here and ask questions I cannot answer."

He stared at her.

For one second, she could almost see the refusal rise in him, proud and immediate and utterly stupid.

Then another car passed, and he did not look at it; that was how she knew it had frightened him. Then, he turned toward the flower shop without another word.

The bell above the door gave its bright chime as he stepped back inside.

She followed, locked the door behind them, and flipped the sign to CLOSED with more force than strictly necessary.

----

Bucky heard the bolt slide into place with a soft, final click.

A small sound. Ordinary, probably, to her. To him, it landed with considerably more weight. The sound of a cell door, a gate closing, an exit sealed.

He turned his head to her.

She reached up and drew down a strange fabric stretched between narrow wooden slats that clattered softly as it descended, stopping halfway down the window. Not a curtain, exactly. Something that rolled and caught on a mechanism he couldn't see.

He noticed everything, apparently, except the things that might keep him from nearly being killed by horseless carriages.

"Come on," she said and walked past him toward the rear of the shop.

There were, at present, too many questions in his head. They had gathered in his head like crows on a battlefield fence, black and loud and waiting for something to die.

So he followed.

The shop looked different from behind her.

That was not a thought he should have had.

It arrived anyway, unbidden and unhelpful.

Her skirt moved when she walked, a soft, hypnotic sway that drew the eye and then punished the man attached to it for having one. The fabric brushed the backs of her knees with each step, and below that -God help him- her calves were bare, the skin catching the morning light filtering through the half-drawn shade.

The sight shouldn't have affected him the way it did.

He'd seen far worse immodesty in camp followers, tavern girls who unlaced their bodices for coin, even a countess once who'd been shameless enough to receive him in his own chambers in nothing but a loose shift that left very little to imagination.

But this felt different somehow.

Deliberate in its casualness. Ordinary in its brazenness.

As if every woman in this godforsaken century simply walked around like this, and he was the fool for noticing.

He wrenched his gaze toward the nearest bucket of flowers with such determination that he might as well have been preparing to duel it.

Roses.

White ones, their petals just beginning to unfurl, with the faintest blush of pink at the heart of each bloom. Innocent. Chaste. Entirely safe to look at.

Unlike certain other things in this room.

She reached the back room and stepped aside, pointing toward a chair beside the worktable.

"Sit."

He looked at it with immediate suspicion.

The chair was made of metal. Thin silver legs bent in a precise curve, holding up a seat covered in some smooth green material that was neither leather nor cloth. It shone faintly under the light overhead, reflecting the ceiling in a way that seemed unnatural.

Bucky stared at it for a second too long.

"It's a chair," she seemed fit to clarify.

"I can see that."

"Wonderful. Then use it."

He should not have.

There were several reasons he should not have.

For one, it was unwise to place himself at a disadvantage in a room he did not understand, with a woman he did not know, in a century that seemed very committed to making a fool of him at every opportunity.

For another, it was utterly inappropriate.

There was no servant. No matron tucked into the corner with her embroidery and her sharp little coughs to remind them of propriety. No chaperone at all to lend respectability to the fact that this woman was about to put her hands near his face, possibly his body, while the two of them were alone behind a locked door.

A decent man would object.

A prudent man would leave.

He sat.

The metal chair gave a faint protesting creak beneath his weight but did not collapse, which was more than he had expected from something built with legs that narrow. The act of lowering himself was unpleasant. His ribs had apparently chosen this moment to remind him -in exhaustive detail- that they had been cracked before the universe had lost its mind and had not improved during the intervening catastrophe.

His breath caught despite his best efforts.

She noticed. Her gaze flicked down to his side, then back up, too quick to be called staring and too sharp to be accidental.

"You hurt your ribs?"

"No."

She gave him a look that suggested she had heard better lies from children.

He met it stubbornly.

A pause.

"Yes," he admitted.

"Thought so."

She turned toward a small wooden cabinet mounted low on the wall and crouched down. From inside, she pulled out a metal case. Small, rectangular, with a hinged lid and a painted red cross on the top.

A coffer, his mind supplied automatically, though it was made of metal rather than wood, and far too uniform in its construction to have been hammered by any smith he knew.

She set it on the worktable and flipped the latch.

The cross should have been reassuring.

It was not.

Inside were bottles, tins, folded cloths, strange implements he had no names for. She began sorting through them, and he watched her hands move.

Competent hands. Not delicate, though they looked as if they could be when they wanted to. She knew where things were, even in the disorder. She found a clean cloth, a small brown bottle, and a roll of white bandaging and set them on the table.

He cleared his throat and she glanced over her shoulder.

The words should have come easily. Courtesy did, when one was raised with enough of it beaten in by tutors and lords and the general expectation of civilized behavior.

He had thanked lords he despised, maesters who'd prodded at wounds, servants who'd brought water, boys who'd held horses, women who had done far less for him than lie to an armed city guardsman.

Still, it took him a moment.

"For what you said to the guardsman," he began carefully. "Outside."

Her hands stilled completely. She turned to face him, the cloth still held loosely in her fingers.

"The policeman," she corrected gently.

"The policeman," he repeated, the word still feeling foreign on his tongue. He met her eyes. "For that. You have my thanks."

Something in her expression softened. The wariness didn't disappear entirely, but it eased.

"You're welcome," she said simply.

She set the cloth down on the worktable and leaned back against it, her hands bracing on the edge behind her. The posture was less guarded than before.

"Though for the record," she added, and there was the faintest hint of amusement in her voice now, "you made that more difficult than it needed to be."

He shifted in the metal chair, wincing slightly as his ribs protested. "I said very little."

"You said it with the face of a man about to fight." She tilted her head, studying him.

“I was inquired by a law enforcement."

"You were asked whether you fell off a horse." She crossed her ankles, settling more comfortably against the table. The motion drew his eye briefly to those impossible shoes before he forced his gaze back to her face.

"I was unseated," he corrected with careful dignity.

She blinked at him for a moment.

Then her lips curved into something that was almost a smile, warm in a way that made something in his chest tug unexpectedly.

"Fallen, unseated…" she said softly, waving her hand.

The strange thing was, he almost wanted to explain. Wanted to tell her that it was not the same thing at all.

That falling could be clumsy, careless, the result of poor seat or a man who didn't know his business. Being unseated meant impact, skill, another man's force meeting yours at the exact angle required to take you from the saddle despite everything you did to prevent it.

There was dignity in the distinction.

But she was looking at him with something gentler than he'd seen from her yet. So he did not explain. He was, as she had said, trying not to make things more difficult than they needed to be.

Also, and more pressing, he was hungry.

The realization came with embarrassing force now that he was seated and no longer fighting for his life against bicycles and automobiles. He had not eaten since before the tournament.

Had meant to, after. Had meant to remove his armor, find bread and stew at the tavern down the street, and perhaps sleep for half a day if his luck could be persuaded toward mercy for once.

Instead, he had put on a cursed ring and been thrown into a florist's back room nearly six centuries from where he belonged.

His stomach gave a low, traitorous growl that echoed in the stockroom with all the subtlety of a church bell at matins.

The woman paused mid-motion.

He closed his eyes briefly.

Lord.

When he opened them, she was looking at him with something that might have been concern or exasperation or both.

"When did you last eat?"

He considered lying.

His stomach, apparently tired of his pride, made the answer unnecessary by growling again, louder this time.

She set the cloth down with a soft sigh.

"Right," she said. "Blood first. Food after."

"That’s not-"

"Mr. Barnes."

He stopped.

Her tone had changed. It was the voice of a woman who had discovered the exact amount of patience she possessed and found him standing at the far edge of it with his boots on.

"You are bleeding, you nearly got killed by a car, and I have already lied to a policeman before midday.” She gestured at the chair, less sharp than simply direct. "Sit still and let me clean that before you pass out and make this morning worse than it already is. Then, we'll figure out food."

He was opening his mouth to object-

"Please," she added, and something about her tone reached him. So he leaned back in the metal chair and said nothing.

She seemed to take that as victory.

Perhaps it was.

She stepped closer, and the air between them shifted. He caught her scent more clearly now: flowers, yes, but also something faintly powdery and sweet that he couldn't name. Soap, perhaps. Or some cosmetic concoction women of this time favored.

The cloth in her hand was damp; he could see the darkness of moisture against the white fabric.

He kept perfectly still.

She bent toward him, close enough that her breath would have touched his face if she'd spoken, and then her fingers touched his jaw.

The contact was brief, impersonal, the gesture of someone accustomed to arranging things precisely.

It went through him like a strike of flint.

His breath caught with the sudden, with the unwelcome awareness of how close she was. How warm. How the neckline of her dress sat just low enough that if he dropped his gaze even slightly-

He locked his eyes on the ceiling and kept them there.

"Hold still," she said quietly.

He was already still. Rigid as a man in armor, every muscle tense by the maddening fact that her thumb was resting just below his jaw, her fingertips cool against the edge of his beard.

The damp cloth touched his brow.

Cool. Clean. It stung where the cut was, a sharp little bite that he barely felt through everything else.

What he felt was her.

The bend of her body as she leaned in. The brush of her skirt against his knee. Brief, accidental, gone before he could react. The small crease of concentration between her brows as she worked, utterly focused, utterly unaware of what the simple act of touching him was doing.

She tilted his face slightly toward the light.

His jaw shifted under her hand, and the movement made her fingers slide -just barely- along the line of bone and muscle beneath his ear.

Heat crawled up the back of his neck.

This was absurd.

She was cleaning a wound. Nothing more. She had shown him no interest beyond the bare minimum of human decency, and even that had been grudging. She thought him mad, or damaged, or some combination of both. She had called him cousin to a lawman to avoid further inconvenience.

And here he sat, breathing too carefully, thinking about what it would feel like if those hands moved with intent instead of practicality. If they slid into his hair. If her thumb pressed just a little harder against his throat. If she leaned closer and-

Fuck.

He was acting like some green boy again.

Worse. He was acting like a man who hadn't been touched by anyone in far too long, and whose body had decided now -of all the godsforsaken moments- was the time to remind him of it.

The cloth moved to his cheekbone, gentler now, following the edge of the bruise.

"It's not deep," she said after a moment. "Won't need stitches. Just needs to be clean."

"I've had worse." He managed.

"I don't doubt it."

She stepped back, and the absence of her touch was immediate and disorienting. She studied her work, then reached for the brown bottle, uncorking it with a soft pop.

The smell hit him immediately. Sharp. Medicinal. Something that burned the inside of his nose and made his eyes water.

"This is going to sting," she warned.

"I can-"

She dabbed it on before he could finish.

It did not sting.

It burned like the fires of hell had been distilled into liquid form and applied directly to his face.

He did not move. Did not make a sound.

His hand, however, gripped the edge of the metal chair hard enough that he heard the frame creak.

"Sorry," she said, and she actually sounded it. "It's awful, but it'll keep it from getting infected."

He managed a nod, not trusting his voice.

She corked the bottle and set it aside, examining the cut again, and then stepped back fully, putting a respectable distance between them, and he could breathe again.

Then his stomach growled. Again. Loud and shameless.

She paused.

He watched something shift in her expression, watched her think. Her gaze went to the little corner table where the tin of those dried herbs sat, and her mouth pressed into a thoughtful line.

"I don't have much here," she said slowly. "It's a stockroom, not a kitchen. Tea and stale biscuits in some corner, mostly."

He opened his mouth to tell her it didn't matter, that he required nothing-

"Wait here," she said abruptly.

Before he could object, she was already moving toward the front of the shop, pulling a key from somewhere in her skirt and unlocking the door.

"Don't touch anything," she added over her shoulder. "And for God's sake, don't go outside again."

The bell chimed.

The door closed.

He sat alone in the stockroom, surrounded by buckets of flowers and incomprehensible objects, with no earthly idea where she had gone or whether she would return.

For a brief, ungenerous moment, he considered the possibility that she had simply gone to fetch the authorities after all. Left him here to be collected like a stray dog.

He could not have blamed her if she had.

But he stayed.

Partly because his ribs ached and his legs felt unsteady, and the metal chair, absurd as it was, held his weight. Partly because the door to the street terrified him in a way he was not prepared to examine.

And partly -mostly- because some quiet, exhausted part of him had decided to trust her, and he was too tired to argue with it.

Time passed. He did not know how much. Somewhere beyond the walls, the muffled sounds of the impossible city continued: horns, voices, the rumble of those horseless carriages.

Then the bell chimed again, and he heard the click of her heels through the shop. She reappeared through the storage door with a brown paper sack clutched in one hand.

"Here," she said, crossing to him and holding it out. "Eat this before you fall over."

He took it cautiously.

The sack was warm. And the smell…

God, the smell.

Something rich and savory drifted up from inside, meat and bread and something he couldn't identify, and his mouth flooded with saliva before he'd even looked inside.

He opened it.

Within was a strange construction: two thick slices of bread pressed together, and between them, slices of roasted meat layered with melted cheese, what appeared to be a cooked egg, and some green leaves he didn't recognize.

He turned it over, examining the oddity from several angles.

"It's a sandwich," she said, watching his confusion with poorly concealed amusement. "Roast beef. From the diner on the corner. You eat it. With your hands."

A sandwich.

He had never heard the term. Never seen meat and bread arranged in such a deliberate, portable fashion. In his world, meat was served on a trencher, or in a pie, or skewered over a fire. Not... stacked.

The smell did not care about his confusion, and his stomach growled a third time, traitorous and insistent, and he abandoned his examination in favor of simply eating.

The first bite was a revelation.

Warm bread. Tender meat, properly seasoned. The richness of the cheese, the unexpected softness of the egg, the crunch of whatever green leaves she'd called them.

It was, without exaggeration, one of the finest things he had ever tasted.

He ate with more control than he felt, forcing himself to chew, to pace himself, to not devour the entire thing in three bites like a starving animal.

She watched him for a moment, then turned away to give him privacy.

He was grateful for it.

When he'd finished -every crumb, every scrap, the paper sack reduced to a crumpled ball in his fist- he set it down carefully and cleared his throat.

She turned.

"Better?"

"Yes." His voice came out rough. "Thank you. That was..."

He didn't have words for what it was.

A sandwich, apparently.

"...generous of you," he finished.

She nodded, accepting it, and for a moment neither of them said anything.

The silence stretched, not quite comfortable but not hostile either. Finally, she crossed her arms over her chest in a way that was becoming familiar.

"So," she said. "What are we going to do with you, Mr. Barnes?"

He looked at her standing there in her scandalously short skirt and her impossible shoes.

"I don't know," he said honestly.

Next Chapter

Drabble #1 - Hope Rating: General Audiences 

The battle ended without fanfare. No portal in the sky, no impossible odds, no incursions. The multiverse was safe. 

Weeks later Bucky was at an animal shelter, standing in front of a white kitten in the cage.

Retirement wasn’t what he’d expected. He imagined boredom, restlessness. His days became wonderfully ordinary: coffee, aimless walks, reading, sitting with Alpine on the balcony, watching the sunset.

He started imagining a different future: go back to school, reelection.

Perhaps, settle down, start a family.   

It felt unbelievable. The universe had stopped asking from him or taking from him. 

Bucky was allowed to live.

🚫

Drabble #2 - Shots Fired Rating: General Audiences

"This is stupid!" Sam yelled, waving his gun in the air.

"The games the game." Bucky chuffed with a smirk.

"You're the one who suggested this." Yelena chuckled alongside Bucky.

"Yeah a nice normal game of Lazer tag. Not Lazer tag with the world's best assassin!" Sam continued.

"Look man," Joaquin huffed as he joined Sam's side, "Maybe we just call it quits, we've gone 5 rounds, we keep losing."

"No we go again." Sam replied sternly, pointing at Bucky with narrowed eyes, "You, left hand only."

"Fine by me." Bucky grinned before jogging back into the darkened zone laughing.

🚫

Drabble #3 – Do This All Day? Rating: General Audiences

Sam laughed once humorless. “Trust? Don’t start with me on trust, Buck. I had to hear about your new team from the evening news.”

“That’s not what happened.” Bucky groaned

“No? ’Cause it sure as hell felt like it.” Sam's tone cold.

Bucky stepped closer, jaw tight. “They have information. Information that can help.”

Sam opened his mouth, anger ready.

Another voice beat him to it.

“You two gonna do this all day?”

Everything in Bucky locked up. He turned too fast, breath catching painfully.

Steve stood there, steady and impossible.

For one stunned second, Bucky only stared. Disbelieving.

“Steve?”

🚫

Drabble #4 - Doomsday, Declined Rating: General Audiences

Bucky is trying, with effort, to understand a tax-credit rider. It’s not going well, but it is going privately, which seems important.

You’re halfway through explaining depreciation when his phone rings.

YELENA BELOVA

Decline.

Again.

Decline.

YELENA: Stop being dramatic. Is only maybe end of world.

Swipe.

SAM: don’t be like this.

His jaw shifts.

Swipe.

DEADPOOL: Winter grandpa, Kevin says assemble.

Swipe.

You lower the bill.

“James.”

“No.”

“Could be important.”

“It’s always important.” Bucky’s phone flips facedown. “I’ve appeared in every MCU phase. The other guy who managed that turned into a tree. Let me legislate in peace.”

🚫

Drabble #5 - Apocalypse Meow Rating: General Audiences

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Steve, preparing to face the end of the world was familiar. Everything after that was not.

“That was anticlimactic,” Steve said.

“They can’t all be Thanos,” Bucky agreed.

“Hardly worth coming out of retirement. This happen a lot since I left?”

“Fury’s cat’s saved the day before, but it’s a first for Alpine.” After a beat, Bucky added defensively, “She’s still a kitten.”

Kitten or not, her purrs almost drowned out Doom’s booming admiration while he pet her rather than lay waste to the world.

“Come on, Steve. Fight’s back on if I can’t rescue my cat!”

🚫

Drabble #6 - Them Rating: General Audiences

The ozone on his tongue was sharp and growing sharper by the second.

Something was wrong.

More than the battle chaos amidst the ruins of the Stark Expo grounds.

Bucky turned slowly, surveying his surroundings.

Then he saw them.

Each wore his face but not his history. One in a crisp, white uniform from some alternate century, a stillness to him like a wolf that knew every trick in the book and didn’t need to snarl. The other a grizzled wreck: gray at the temples, sleep deprivation tattooed under his eyes. Both sported the arm—his arm, that ugly, magnificent thing.

🚫

Drabble #7 – Tumblr to the Rescue Rating: General Audiences

He was dying. Fine. He'd done it before.

Then the portal opened. Blue. Tumbling. Chaos shaped like small circular portraits of strangers, cats, anime characters, and— unsettlingly— him. Long hair. Short hair. One arm. Two. Smiling, something he didn't remember doing.

One handed him a juice box.

Bucky stared at it. Stared at himself, multiplied, in eras he couldn't fully account for.

"This," announced an icon of a small white blue-eyed cat, "will not happen in Doomsday."

He had no idea what that meant.

Something about the cat felt familiar. He couldn't place it.

He drank the juice box anyway.

🚫

Drabble #8 – Fix It Rating: General Audiences

Bucky sheathed his knife when you walked in. 

“Bucky,” you began softly. “What are you doing?”

“I’m gonna make the writers fix it.”

“Fix what exactly?”

“Everything,” he answered through his teeth. “Like Natasha dying.”

“Bucky…”

“And Steve’s ending.”

“Bucky.”

“And Sam and I being on the outs again.”

“Bucky!” 

He paused to look at you. 

“You can’t fix it,” you whispered. “You’re not supposed to be aware that you’re in a movie, and I shouldn’t even be here.”

He blinked, confused. “Then… what do I do?”

You smiled. “Leave it to the fanfiction writers. They’ll know what to do.”

🚫

That's all the General Audience drabbles for today!

Be sure to read the Explicit Drabble if you haven't already.

Otherwise, please head over to the voting poll to choose your two favorite drabbles.

Drabble 9 - End of the World Rating: Explicit

The world was ending. Again. Bucky didn’t care.

He’d booked the lakeside cabin to spend this weekend with you six months ago. The apocalypse could wait.

His phone kept buzzing. 

Bucky dipped his head, tongue dragging slow and filthy through your soaked folds, sucking your clit until your back arched.

“Doomsday can wait until Monday. I’m busy," he murmured against your cunt, pushing two thick metal fingers inside you. You shattered with a cry.

Bucky lapped up every drop, drawing out your orgasm until you were sobbing. His belt clinked open.

“Good girl, now turn over, we’ve got all weekend.”

🚫

That's all the General Audience drabbles for today!

Be sure to read the General Audience Drabbles if you haven't already.

Otherwise, please head over to the voting poll to choose your two favorite drabbles.

Drabble #1 - Hope Rating: General Audiences 

The battle ended without fanfare. No portal in the sky, no impossible odds, no incursions. The multiverse was safe. 

Weeks later Bucky was at an animal shelter, standing in front of a white kitten in the cage.

Retirement wasn’t what he’d expected. He imagined boredom, restlessness. His days became wonderfully ordinary: coffee, aimless walks, reading, sitting with Alpine on the balcony, watching the sunset.

He started imagining a different future: go back to school, reelection.

Perhaps, settle down, start a family.   

It felt unbelievable. The universe had stopped asking from him or taking from him. 

Bucky was allowed to live.

🚫

Drabble #2 - Shots Fired Rating: General Audiences

"This is stupid!" Sam yelled, waving his gun in the air.

"The games the game." Bucky chuffed with a smirk.

"You're the one who suggested this." Yelena chuckled alongside Bucky.

"Yeah a nice normal game of Lazer tag. Not Lazer tag with the world's best assassin!" Sam continued.

"Look man," Joaquin huffed as he joined Sam's side, "Maybe we just call it quits, we've gone 5 rounds, we keep losing."

"No we go again." Sam replied sternly, pointing at Bucky with narrowed eyes, "You, left hand only."

"Fine by me." Bucky grinned before jogging back into the darkened zone laughing.

🚫

Drabble #3 – Do This All Day? Rating: General Audiences

Sam laughed once humorless. “Trust? Don’t start with me on trust, Buck. I had to hear about your new team from the evening news.”

“That’s not what happened.” Bucky groaned

“No? ’Cause it sure as hell felt like it.” Sam's tone cold.

Bucky stepped closer, jaw tight. “They have information. Information that can help.”

Sam opened his mouth, anger ready.

Another voice beat him to it.

“You two gonna do this all day?”

Everything in Bucky locked up. He turned too fast, breath catching painfully.

Steve stood there, steady and impossible.

For one stunned second, Bucky only stared. Disbelieving.

“Steve?”

🚫

Drabble #4 - Doomsday, Declined Rating: General Audiences

Bucky is trying, with effort, to understand a tax-credit rider. It’s not going well, but it is going privately, which seems important.

You’re halfway through explaining depreciation when his phone rings.

YELENA BELOVA

Decline.

Again.

Decline.

YELENA: Stop being dramatic. Is only maybe end of world.

Swipe.

SAM: don’t be like this.

His jaw shifts.

Swipe.

DEADPOOL: Winter grandpa, Kevin says assemble.

Swipe.

You lower the bill.

“James.”

“No.”

“Could be important.”

“It’s always important.” Bucky’s phone flips facedown. “I’ve appeared in every MCU phase. The other guy who managed that turned into a tree. Let me legislate in peace.”

🚫

Drabble #5 - Apocalypse Meow Rating: General Audiences

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Steve, preparing to face the end of the world was familiar. Everything after that was not.

“That was anticlimactic,” Steve said.

“They can’t all be Thanos,” Bucky agreed.

“Hardly worth coming out of retirement. This happen a lot since I left?”

“Fury’s cat’s saved the day before, but it’s a first for Alpine.” After a beat, Bucky added defensively, “She’s still a kitten.”

Kitten or not, her purrs almost drowned out Doom’s booming admiration while he pet her rather than lay waste to the world.

“Come on, Steve. Fight’s back on if I can’t rescue my cat!”

🚫

Drabble #6 - Them Rating: General Audiences

The ozone on his tongue was sharp and growing sharper by the second.

Something was wrong.

More than the battle chaos amidst the ruins of the Stark Expo grounds.

Bucky turned slowly, surveying his surroundings.

Then he saw them.

Each wore his face but not his history. One in a crisp, white uniform from some alternate century, a stillness to him like a wolf that knew every trick in the book and didn’t need to snarl. The other a grizzled wreck: gray at the temples, sleep deprivation tattooed under his eyes. Both sported the arm—his arm, that ugly, magnificent thing.

🚫

Drabble #7 – Tumblr to the Rescue Rating: General Audiences

He was dying. Fine. He'd done it before.

Then the portal opened. Blue. Tumbling. Chaos shaped like small circular portraits of strangers, cats, anime characters, and— unsettlingly— him. Long hair. Short hair. One arm. Two. Smiling, something he didn't remember doing.

One handed him a juice box.

Bucky stared at it. Stared at himself, multiplied, in eras he couldn't fully account for.

"This," announced an icon of a small white blue-eyed cat, "will not happen in Doomsday."

He had no idea what that meant.

Something about the cat felt familiar. He couldn't place it.

He drank the juice box anyway.

🚫

Drabble #8 – Fix It Rating: General Audiences

Bucky sheathed his knife when you walked in. 

“Bucky,” you began softly. “What are you doing?”

“I’m gonna make the writers fix it.”

“Fix what exactly?”

“Everything,” he answered through his teeth. “Like Natasha dying.”

“Bucky…”

“And Steve’s ending.”

“Bucky.”

“And Sam and I being on the outs again.”

“Bucky!” 

He paused to look at you. 

“You can’t fix it,” you whispered. “You’re not supposed to be aware that you’re in a movie, and I shouldn’t even be here.”

He blinked, confused. “Then… what do I do?”

You smiled. “Leave it to the fanfiction writers. They’ll know what to do.”

🚫

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Drabble 9 - End of the World Rating: Explicit

The world was ending. Again. Bucky didn’t care.

He’d booked the lakeside cabin to spend this weekend with you six months ago. The apocalypse could wait.

His phone kept buzzing. 

Bucky dipped his head, tongue dragging slow and filthy through your soaked folds, sucking your clit until your back arched.

“Doomsday can wait until Monday. I’m busy," he murmured against your cunt, pushing two thick metal fingers inside you. You shattered with a cry.

Bucky lapped up every drop, drawing out your orgasm until you were sobbing. His belt clinked open.

“Good girl, now turn over, we’ve got all weekend.”

🚫

That's all the General Audience drabbles for today!

Be sure to read the General Audience Drabbles if you haven't already.

Otherwise, please head over to the voting poll to choose your two favorite drabbles.