Hey all! Before you send a request my way, I’d appreciate it if you took a moment to read through this.
Characters I will write for include :
Bucky Barnes (the most popular character I write for)
Benjamin Poindexter
John Walker
Bob Reynolds
Yelena Belova
Sam Wilson
Carol Danvers
Agatha Harkness
Natasha Romanoff
Joaquin Torres
If the Marvel character you’re thinking about isn’t on this list, shoot me a message, and I’ll let you know if I’m open to it!
Pairings :
I write in x reader stories in 2nd person POV.
I do not write for ships unless the reader is part of the dynamic.
I will write throuple/poly relationships if the reader is involved (Sambucky x Reader, WinterAgent x Reader, SentryAgents x Reader, GhostWidow x Reader, etc. If you're unsure, just ask.)
All my readers are fem!readers, just because that’s what I know best. There are plenty of other very talented writers who write for male!reader or gn!reader, so show them some love!
I do not write parent!character x child!reader dynamic as the main plot. I write romantic or platonic dynamics.
NSFW content :
I love writing intimacy, but I do not do graphic smut.
I’m very comfortable writing sensual, emotional, and R-rated or suggestive stories. I like focusing on tension, steamy scenes and emotional connection rather than graphic details. (references for these type of stories: Siren and Unholy Trinity)
I won't write :
Incest
Anything that romanticises substance abuse (that’s a very personal boundary for me as someone who struggles with that myself).
Non-con (but I’ll write power dynamics and dub-con to a limited extent)
How to Request :
You’re more than welcome to send in requests through my Tumblr asks. Just know that while I read every message, I can't guarantee that every request will be written. I get a lot of asks, and I choose what to write based on what clicks with me creatively.
If you’d like a guarantee of having your request written...
I’m starting to be active on Ko-fi again, so any requests made through my Ko-fi will be prioritised and written within a month as long as they follow these guidelines as my way of saying thank you for the support and helping me keep this hobby sustainable.
buy me a ko-fi here!
At the end of the day, this is something I do for love, not profit. It’s free labour, and I’m writing because it brings me joy, and this community keeps that joy alive.
I may not always be able to respond to every comment or ask, but I love y'all, and I’m grateful for this fandom ❤️
Summary : Dex realizes his son is trying to copy his aim.
Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x reader (she/her) | you and Dex have a son called Leo
Warnings/tags : dad/husband!Dex x mom/wife!reader, fluff!!! domestic!Dex, brief mentions of blood/violence (let me know if I missed anything!)
Word Count : 2.3k
Requested by : anon
Notes : Thank you for all the kind messages recently!!! Feel free to send more ideas for the series while I make my way through what’s already been sent. Enjoy!
Could be read as a one-shot, but you can read more stories in this universe here!
At first, you thought Leo was just making a mess.
Which wasn’t exactly shocking. He was a toddler, and that meant the house existed in a constant state of almost-clean. Yes, Leo was very specific about his toy dinos, but only that and nothing else. You would tidy the living room in the morning, put every plush animal back into the basket, rescue every tiny car from under the couch, collect every crayon from the floor, and by lunch, somehow, it looked like a toy shop had sneezed. Dex would clean it up, but it was still a teeny tiny bit annoying.
Still, Leo didn’t destroy things. He just had a way of spreading himself across every room he entered, like proof that he was there, that he was happy, that he was loved enough to leave things behind.
So when a stuffed giraffe flew across the living room and hit the side of the toy basket, you looked up from your book with a tired sort of fondness.
Leo stood in the middle of the rug in his mismatched socks, one green and one covered in little yellow stars (his choice. Dex dressed him up and told him he shouldn’t but Leo frowned and said “okay daddy,” so of course Dex sighed and told him it was fine). Leo’s hair was messy from rolling around on the couch earlier, his cheeks still sleepy from his nap. He stared at the giraffe lying on the floor with disappointment, his little brows drawn together like he had expected better from it.
Then he picked it up, walked back to the exact same spot, planted his feet, and threw it again.
This time, it landed closer.
Not inside, and not even really near enough to count. But it was closer.
You lowered your book slightly.
“Leo, honey,” you said, gently but suspiciously. “Why are we throwing toys?”
“I’m not throwing,” he said immediately, adorably offended in the way only small children could be offended. “I’m ayiming.”
From the kitchen, Dex stopped swiping.
Dex had been cleaning the counter for twenty minutes, but there had been a crumb by the toaster, and apparently that was unacceptable.
“What?” you asked.
“Ayiming,” Leo repeated, slower this time, like the problem was clearly your listening and not his pronunciation.
You looked at Dex. Dex looked at you.
Leo huffed, impatient now, and pointed toward the little bowl by the door. “The thing Mommy say Daddy does with the keys.”
Your eyes followed his finger to the key bowl.
Then Leo pointed at the laundry basket. “And the clothes.”
Then toward the kitchen sink. “And the spoons.”
Dex’s expression shifted.
Oh.
Oh.
“Do you mean aiming, honey?” you said softly.
Leo nodded, relieved that you had finally caught up. “Yes. Ayiming.”
Dex went very still, because he understood it at the exact same second you did.
Leo had been watching him.
Dex always put things away from a distance. Not because he was showing off, though sometimes you accused him of exactly that. He just casually tossed keys into their bowl without a glance. Socks flicked into the laundry hamper. A pen into a drawer. A fork landing in the sink with a clean little clatter that had made you stare and chuckle, “do you really need to use the sink as aim training?”
He kissed the back of your neck and whispered, arrogantly, “Don’t need the training.”
So yeah, Leo had been watching.
He had been studying Dex, collecting the pattern, learning that Daddy didn’t just put things away. Daddy aimed.
Dex realised it at the same time you did.
His face barely changed, but you knew him too well to pretend he wasn’t affected. His eyes were fixed on Leo now.
You could see a small, startled pride behind his eyes. Your son had watched him do something and wanted to do it, too. Your son, with his sleepy face and sticky fingers and endless questions, had looked at him and thought, Daddy can do that. I want to do that.
For a second, Dex looked like he could barely stand the sweetness.
Aw. My son wants to be like me.
And then, almost immediately, he frowned.
Oh no. My son wants to be like me.
Dex’s hand tightened around the cloth.
You could see a spiral forming, quiet from the outside, violent from the inside. You could almost hear the thoughts piling on top of one another behind his still face. Leo wanted to copy him. Leo was watching. Leo was learning from him. What else had Leo seen? What else had Leo absorbed? The anger? The detachment? The wrongness? What, what, what?
You had normalised so much of Dex that sometimes he almost forgot that people were scared of him. His precision, under your fond little eye-rolls, had stopped feeling like evidence against him and started feeling… domestic. You had even held his face between your hands and told him that wrong didn’t mean unlovable, that being deadly didn’t mean doomed, that love didn’t require him to become someone else entirely before he was allowed to receive it.
He is who he is, and nothing will ever truly change that. And it has always been easier to be himself around you, when you excused half of what he did.
But of course he thought there was something wrong with him. There had to be. Normal fathers probably didn’t feel the ground split open because their son wanted to copy the one part of him that had always felt closest to a weapon. That had always been the reason he was used.
Leo was different, because Leo was good.
So Dex stood there, proud and horrified at once, while Leo hugged the stuffed giraffe to his chest and looked up at him with absolute trust.
“I want to do it like Daddy,” Leo said.
You closed your book halfway and smiled fondly, pinching his cute little cheeks.
“Fine,” you said.
What?
Dex’s head snapped toward you before he could stop it.
No. No, no, no. Absolutely not. Leo was four. Leo was small. Leo still got jam in his hair and tried to put stickers on your work laptop and once cried because his banana had “too many lines.” His kid didn’t need to be learning aim. His kid didn’t need to be standing in the middle of the living room copying the part of Dex that had always felt the most like a loaded gun.
Had you lost your mind? Had you finally gone insane?
“But fluffy toys only,” you added simply.
Dex stopped.
Oh.
Your voice stayed light, almost amused. You didn't look at Leo like he had become a monster by wanting to be like his father. You didn’t look at Dex like this was the beginning of a tragedy. You only pointed toward the toy pile calmly.
“No dinos,” you said. “No blocks. No cars. No food. No cups. No forks.”
Dex blinked.
Huh.
Dex’s view on everything was never black and white. It was always grey and dull and somewhere in the middle unless you told him otherwise. When it came to you and Leo, though, he only thought in absolutes. Safe or unsafe. Threat or not threat. Yours or not yours. Protect them. Keep them safe. Don’t let anyone touch them. Don’t ruin them.
But you didn’t go there.
You didn’t see Leo copying him and jump straight to blood, violence, fear, knives, bodies, every nightmare Dex had ever had about being a father. You didn’t see the worst version first.
You saw your son throwing a stuffed giraffe at a basket and thought it was cute.
You thought that Leo copying him didn’t have to mean an awful thing was blooming in the middle of your living room. It didn’t have to mean Dex’s damage had found its way into his son’s little hands. It didn't have to mean every wrong thing inside him had become inheritable.
It could just mean… playing.
Dex swallowed.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “That’s okay.”
Leo lit up. “Daddy can show me?”
Dex looked at you again.
He was checking on you. He still needed your approval to be absolute.
You smiled at him, “of course.”
He nodded once, as if you had given him a manual of the world.
Then he set the cloth down and stepped onto the living room carpet.
The mess was already spreading. There was a giraffe near the basket, a rabbit by the couch, a foam ball near your slipper, one of Dex’s socks, stolen from the laundry pile, lying on the rug like evidence. You watched Dex notice every single thing out of place. You could feel the part of him that wanted to fix it.
But he didn’t. He crouched beside Leo instead.
“Show me,” Dex said.
Leo planted his little feet, concentrating so hard his tongue poked out slightly, and threw the giraffe again.
He missed.
Dex nodded. “Too much power on this arm.”
Leo looked at his arm, betrayed. “This arm?”
“Yes.”
“What do I do with it?”
“A bit less, sweetheart.”
You pressed your book over your mouth.
Dex glanced at you, and despite everything, despite the spiral still lingering behind his eyes, his mouth twitched upwards.
He shifted behind Leo and adjusted his stance with two fingers at his shoulder. He was always so gentle with him. It made you melt, seeing those hands, hands that could be terrifying, become careful enough to guide a child’s balance without startling him.
“Look first,” Dex said.
Leo glared at the basket.
“Don’t be angry about it,” Dex frowned nervously.
“I’m thinking.”
“You don’t have to think about it, you just have to feel it,” Dex said encouragingly, using the tone you usually used with him.
You made a small sound behind your book, almost like a giggle..
Leo threw again. This time, the giraffe landed closer.
“Almost!” he gasped.
Dex smiled. Big, helpless, ridiculous pride moved through his eye before he could help it. Not because Leo had done anything extraordinary to anyone else, not because the throw was perfect, but because Leo had adjusted.
Leo had listened. Leo was trying to do something Dex had taught him.
“Better,” Dex said kindly.
Leo turned to you immediately. “Mommy, did you see?”
“I saw, baby.”
Then he turned back to Dex, waiting.
Dex nodded. “Good job, buddy.”
Leo beamed, and Dex looked like he might never recover.
After that, the living room became a small battlefield. The giraffe missed. The rabbit missed. The elephant missed so badly it bounced off Dex’s foot. Toys landed by the coffee table, by the basket, on the edge of the rug, once almost in the laundry hamper by accident. Leo picked each one up, cheeks flushed, little chest rising with effort, determined in a way that looked painfully familiar.
Dex let the mess stay.
Dex, who needed everything in the right place, who needed rituals and order, let the mess stay if it meant he was having fun with his son. If it meant he got to experience something he never got with his own father.
Every miss was just there where it fell, until Leo went to collect it. Every mistake remained visible. Dex, who lived by putting things where they belonged, sat in the middle of disorder and allowed it to have no purpose at all but play. Even if you could see it bothering him. His eyes flicked once toward the sock. His fingers flexed when the foam ball rolled farther under the table.
But he didn’t pick it up. He watched Leo. He let his son learn.
Once, Leo picked up the rabbit and went still. His mouth wobbled before his arm even let go of the toy.
Sure enough, he missed.
He was getting upset, you realised, because he was starting to feel that his toys would miss before it even landed.
“I’m bad at ayiming,” he whispered.
The room quieted.
Dex didn’t deny it. Of course he was not great at it. Not everyone can be Bullseye, not to mention, his hand-eye-coordination was still being developed. Still, your husband looked at the rabbit, then at Leo.
Then he picked it up and placed it back in his hands.
“Try again,” he said.
Leo sniffled. “But I know.”
He knew he was going to miss.
“Maybe,” Dex said. “Try anyway.”
Leo looked at him for a long second, but tried again
The rabbit missed.
And then it missed again.
And then, finally, it hit the inside of the basket, wobbled on the edge, and fell in.
Leo screamed. “I did it!”
You laughed, clapping before you could stop yourself. “You did!”
Leo ran into Dex like a tiny comet, and Dex caught him immediately, one arm wrapping around his back. For a moment, Dex just held him there, his face pressed briefly into Leo’s messy hair, eyes closed like the hug had knocked the breath out of him.
“Good shot,” he murmured.
Leo glowed.
Then he ran to you, climbing into your lap and grabbing your face with both hands.
“Mommy saw?”
You melted instantly, pulling him close. “‘Course I did, honey.”
Dex sat beside you after that, close enough for his knee to touch yours. Leo settled between you, one hand in your sweater and one foot pressed against Dex’s thigh, holding both of you in place like he needed his whole world within reach.
Leo peeked up. “Again after snack?”
Dex answered immediately. “If you want to.”
You stared at your husband, then at your son, both of them excited and already thinking about the next throw.
“Oh my god,” you said jokingly. “There’s two of them.”
And Dex only chuckled and kissed your temple, because he now understands that being like him in some ways and not others didn't have to be a bad thing.
After reading Dex interaction with Leo, i thought about Leo watching Dex aim; throwing away the dirty clothes at the cleaning basket, the keys at their holder/basket, and Leo is trying now with his toys.
ughhh this is so cute! this fic will be posted soon <3
Greek Myth AU | Demigod! Bucky Barnes x Nymph! Reader where Bucky has a forge near the woods where you live.
TW battle trauma, magical prosthetic metal arm, food, theft, grumpy x sunshine, son of Hephaestus! Bucky
Bucky Barnes hasn't gone to battle since he encountered the Hydra.
He still remembers the marsh and the screaming and the sound of teeth closing around bone. He remembers how the monster dragged him down into the mud by the arm and the whole world went white with pain. The poets say he fought bravely, that he stood his ground, that the son of Hephaestus didn’t break, even beneath the jaws of a beast older than most kings.
Bucky knows better.
There was nothing noble about it. There was blood in his mouth, poison in his veins and hands clawing uselessly at the wet earth underneath. And then there was pain, and then there was nothing.
When he opened his eyes, his father was standing over him in the red light of a fire.
Hephaestus made him a new arm.
What else could the god of the forge do to repay his son for running his errands? Console him? Talk to him? Say son, I’m proud of you and I’m sorry this happened? Ha!
No, gods aren't really known for their stellar parenting. Instead, his father built something out of it.
It was state of the art, if such a mortal phrase could be used for something made by divine hands. It was made of bronze and celestial iron, gold-threaded mechanisms beneath the plating, joints so fluid they moved like water. His father carved protective spells into the inner frame and fitted it to him so perfectly that Bucky could still feel heat, pressure, texture, weight of everything.
It didn't feel so different from the arm he had lost, and that made it worse.
Because men saw it and thought it was a miracle. Kings saw it and thought it was weapon. Heroes saw it and thought it was an advantage. They stared at the shining metal and forgot there had ever been flesh beneath it. They forgot a monster had taken something from him before his father gave anything back.
So Bucky stopped going to war.
He let other men chase glory while he stayed in Lemnos.
His father gave him the forge there, the greatest forge on the island, built deep into black volcanic stone where the heat rose from the earth itself. The whole place breathed fire. The walls glowed at night.
Or, at least, everyone said it did.
The son of Hephaestus in a forge, the man with the metal arm making metal things. Very poetic. People loved when suffering became useful.
And Bucky was useful. That much, no one could deny.
He made swords for kings who wanted their enemies to slain before sunset. He made armour for heroes who spoke of destiny as though destiny had ever once done the washing up after a war. He made arrowheads for hunters, axes for warlords, helmets for princes, daggers for queens who pretended they had no use for daggers at all.
His work was legendary. A blade from Barnes’ forge did not dull. A shield from Barnes’ forge did not crack. Chainmail from Barnes’ hands could turn aside a spear thrust, a lion’s claw, sometimes even a god’s temper.
Men came to him asking for things that could cut, pierce, crush, defend, maim, conquer, survive.
And Bucky gave it to them.
Because that was what all his hands were good for.
At least, that was what he believed.
And then you come in.
You are a wood nymph, Bucky realises, because no ordinary girl walks into a forge with leaves in her hair and moss on the hem of her dress. You look too kind for all the heat and smoke here, too green and alive for a room full of fresh weapon.
For a second, Bucky forgets to be rude.Then he remembers.
“Forge is closed,” he says.
You blink at the swords on the wall, the armour hanging from hooks, the coals burning bright enough to turn the whole room gold. “Oh,” you say with a frown. “I just… I heard you fix things.”
Bucky froze.
Nobody… has ever said it like that before.
They say he makes weapons. They say he forges armour. They don’t say fix, like his work made people happy.
You open your palm and show him a broken anklet, thin gold, little leaves dangling from the chain. “It caught on a root.”
“A root,” Bucky repeats.
“A rude one,” you say, as if you have a personal vendetta against the tree. You probably do.
He should send you away. He has a sword half-finished for a king and a shield waiting for Ares demigod. He doesn’t mend pretty little things for pretty nymphs with sunlight in their eyes.
But you’re looking at him like he can help.
So Bucky sighs, reaches for the anklet, and mutters, “Fine.”
Your smile blooms so quickly he has to look down.
It is the first time anyone has asked his hands to make something that wasn’t meant to hurt.
He pretends that doesn’t matter.
But the. you keep coming back.
At first, Bucky assumes it is coincidence. Wood nymphs probably break things all the time. You live in forests. Forests have branches, rocks, rude little animals with grabby mouths. So when you return three mornings later with a bent hairpin, he only grunts and takes it from your hand.
“Another root?” he asks.
“A bird,” you say.
Bucky huffs despite himself and fixes it in less than five minutes.
Then you come back with a clasp from your dress. Then a little bronze bell. Then a ring made of twisted copper that you swear belongs to a dryad friend, though Bucky notices it fits your finger perfectly when he gives it back.
You don’t have gold or silver, and Bucky knows that, so he insisted you don’t pay him. You said nonesense! And only ever pay him in flowers.
He’ll never admit it but it’s… sweet.
You gave him small white blossoms, bluebells, white thyme, and tiny yellow things you say grow near the river. Sometimes you bring fruit wrapped in leaves, because apparently you’ve decided he forgets to eat and apparently you’re right.
The first time, Bucky says, “This isn’t payment.”
You look genuinely worried. “Do you not like them?”
“No, I—” He stops, because saying I like them feels impossible and saying I like you feels too vulnerable. He looks down at the flowers in your hands, too bright for his forge, and mutters, “They’ll die in here.”
You smile. “Then I’ll bring more.”
And you do.
Soon there are flowers everywhere, tucked into old jars, hanging upside down from the rafters where the heat dries them beautifully. One little daisy sits in a crack on his workbench for three days before he realises he’s been carefully moving around it.
He tells himself he is only being polite.
Except he starts saving pretty scraps of gold and copper and stone because maybe you’ll bring him another broken little thing and maybe he can make it better than it was before.
You ask him to fix a chain, and he adds tiny leaves to it.
You ask him to mend a pin, and he shapes the end into a flower.
You ask him if he can make a clasp stronger, and he makes it so beautiful you stare at it with no thoughts for a full second.
Bucky looks away every time.
He’s not making pretty things because he thinks you’re pretty. That would be ridiculous. He makes swords for kings and armour for heroes. He doesn’t sit in his forge at night thinking about what different shades of gold would look like against your skin.
Ugh. Fine. He does.
One day, Bucky realises you have not come by in too long.
The forge feels too quiet without the little chime of your anklet, without you leaning over his workbench and asking if something hopelessly broken can still be fixed.
So he goes looking, until he realizes he doesn’t actually know where you live.
He asks a fisherman near the cliffs says he saw a wood nymph by the olive groves that morning. He asks an old woman carrying figs and says she thinks you keep to the trees by the river when you are upset, though she doesn’t explain how she knows that and Bucky doesn’t ask. A shepherd points him farther inland.
By the time Bucky finds you, he is already in a temper, but not at you. At the world, mostly. At whatever has kept you away. At himself for caring enough to come all this way.
Then he sees you, sitting by the riverbank with your knees drawn up, your face turned away, shoulders hunched so small The whole grove is green and dappled with afternoon light, lovely in the way nymph places always are.
You are crying.
Oh.
He clears his throat.
You look up, startled, and then your eyebrows softened when you see him. You are relieved.
“Bucky,” you say, and your voice wobbles.
He hates whoever caused that.
He comes closer. “What happened?”
You wipe at your face with the heel of your hand and laugh a little, embarrassed. “It’s silly.”
He waits.
You glance down at the grass. “I made a flower crown this morning.”
Bucky says nothing.
“I know,” you say quickly. “It sounds ridiculous.”
“It doesn’t.”
You look at him then, something in Bucky’s chest goes tight.
“I spent all morning on it,” you murmur. “I made it from river jasmine and clover and the little blue flowers that grow by the reeds. It was very pretty.”
He can imagine it.
You make a face that is halfway between misery and indignation. “A local river god stole it.”
Bucky blinks.
“He said it was the prettiest thing he’d seen in a long time,” you continue, clearly offended all over again, “and then he just… he just took it. Put it on his own head and disappeared back into the water.”
For a moment, Bucky can only stare.
That little river bastard.
Bucky knows a little of what that’s like. He has spent his whole life making beautiful things only for someone else to walk away with them. At least, though, he’s beautifully compensated for it.
“Come to my forge in three days,” he says.
When he gets back to his forge, three men are waiting with commissions. And enough money to last him many months.
Bucky looks at all of them and says, “No.”
Then he shuts himself inside the forge and begins to make the most intricate thing he has ever made.
He bent gold into branches and shaped silver into tiny blossoms. He embeds blue stones like river flowers, set like dew. Each leaf was made by hand, each petal delicate beneath his metal fingers.
He has made a flower crown that will not wilt.
The, you come to his forge.
Bucky hears the anklet first, that soft little chime he has grown helplessly fond of. He pretends to be busy, pretends he has not spent three days thinking of you.
Then you step inside, and the forge feels warmer for reasons that have nothing to do with fire.
You have flowers in your hair again. Little white ones this time, tucked messily behind your ears, already wilting from the heat.
Bucky unwraps the crown after you say hi.
And it’s clear it’s not a crown for a queen. It’s not meant for a throne. It’s simply little piece of your grove, shaped by fire.
For a moment, you only stare.
Then your hands come up to your mouth. “Oh, Bucky,” you whisper.
“If the river god tries to take this away,” His chest goes tight. “Tell him a son of Hephaestus will come for him.”
You look at him like that is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to you.
Maybe, from him, it is.
You take it so carefully it makes his heart ache, setting it on your head with delicate fingers. Firelight catches in every petal, every leaf, every little stone, and Bucky forgets all the clever, gruff things he might have said to survive the sight of you.
You look like spring wandered into his forge and decided to stay.
You touch the edge of the crown, shy all at once. “Does it look pretty on me?”
Bucky’s answer comes without a filter. “Everything’s pretty on you.”
Oh, Bucky.
So you rise onto your toes and kiss him.
Bucky freezes because he’s not expecting it, startled still as stone, both hands hovering uselessly in the smoky air. But you are warm and gentle and careful with him, and when you start to pull away, he finally wakes up and chases another kiss.
His human hand finds your waist, his metal one touches your cheek.
He kisses you softer, deeper, like he is learning how to love again for the first time since the Hydra nearly killed him.
When you part, you look away shyly and rest your forehead against his chest. Bucky tries to ignore the patch of green growing by your feet magically, your emotions are bursting from the ground, but he can’t help but smile anyway.
The crown glimmers in your hair.
Bucky finally looks down at his hands, one flesh and one bronze, and thinks of every weapon he has ever made. All those years, he believed that that was all his hands were good for.
But you’re standing in his arms, wearing metal spring on your head, and for the first time in his life, he thinks maybe that was never true.
Maybe his hands can make beautiful things, too.
Maybe they were meant to hold you.
(You come back in a few days with a freshly made flower crown, of course. When it dries, he casts it in iron 🫶)
I wanted to contribute to some heartwarming comments from others, because your writing truly deserves it.
Among your great skills, I wanted to praise your ability to preserve character's real nature. When it comes to problematical characters, some writers like to sugarcoat their flaws, which is truly sad. Afterall we have eyes, and have fallen for those wicked individuals anyway. But never you — as far as I see — not only you keep character feeling alive and just like we remember them from the show, but also, somehow, made them very enjoyable! Wow, lot's of praise to you!
(btw, your last story made me realise that I forgot to check my locks. Thanks for keeping me safe, Bullseye)
You are too kind, Anon!
It’s been a while since I went through all my asks that aren’t requests, simply because I don’t have the time, but I don’t regret doing it now! Honestly, I love this little community so much and I love all the overwhelming love. You are the best!!
and don’t forget to check your locks every night, anon!
Hiya! Just came to say thank you for writing principles! While dad, family dex is cute - I miss the psycho dex. Like wym he is jealous of toys, ofc he is. What a good read. Ty for all you do !
I did find it difficult to switch between the two but I got there! Thank you so much for reading, dear anon 🫶
bro I just read Principles and I got so turned on but then I remembered you don’t write explicitly anatomical smut and I’m like there’s no way you didn’t do that. Anyway I re-read it and you were right, noting is ever super graphically detailed. They’re mostly just talking about the toys and exes and detailing Dex’s internal thoughts. You write sex so vividly without making it full-on p🌽 I really don’t know how tf you do it. Thank you for making your smutty stories character studies YOU ARE VERY TALENTED!
I feel like I keep repeating myself but the reason I don’t is because lowkey I can’t lol. There’s so many talented writers writing anatomically explicit Dex smut out there, go give them some love, too!! I’m definitely super interested in the character aspect but sometimes some people just wanna be horny haha!
anyway. You are so so kind for sending this. Much love, anon!!! 🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶
i need what makes a good man!reader and dex to have a pregnancy scare!!! well it would be a scare for reader because reader would be like no! nows not the time and ben would be like 😍😏
but dex secretly just wants to experience you pregnant and holding his teeny tiny baby 🥲
You and Dex Have a Pregnancy Scare
TW false positives, birth control mention, Dex is in a perpetual state of baby fever with you, domestic fluff, a bit of hurt/comfort. You and Dex have a son called Leo, Husband! Dex x Wife! Reader (lmk if you I missed anything)
WC 1.2k
Part of What Makes a Good Man? (I think it could still be read as a one shot, but a couple of references would be missed)
The pregnancy test was positive.
It was faintly positive, barely positive. And you didn’t trust it because the line looked like it had been drawn by a ghost with an emptying dry-erase marker. But it was there.
It was there, and it was the last test in the house, and the pharmacies were closed because it was late the universe had chosen today, a specifically long day, to become theatrical.
So for one full day, you had to live with the possibility that you might have a baby in you. Again.
It was one full day of walking around your own house like your body had become a sealed envelope. One full day of trying not to touch your stomach. One full day of mentally rearranging your entire life around the possibility.
Leo was still little. You were still tired. Dex had literally just come back six months ago. You had only just started feeling like a whole person.
You loved your life, as complicated as it may be. You loved your husband and son more than oxygen.
But another baby?
Now?
Your brain kept tripping over the word.
Baby. Baby. Baby.
Tiny socks. Sleepless nights. Appointments.
Your body changing again.
Leo’s cute little face looking at a newborn in your arms. Dex’s hands on your stomach. Dex, being handed the knowledge that you were carrying his baby again, and this time. He would be here to witness the process.
Oh, fuck.
Dex was the actual problem.
He was trying to be normal about it, and failing. Because when was he ever good at concealing his emotions, huh?
You told him twenty minutes ago, and told him it was nothing until you could take another test, but he kept looking at you like you were glowing. His eyes kept finding your stomach. His hand kept hovering by your back.
He kept doing tiny things, maddening things. He was bringing you water before you asked, taking the laundry basket out of your hands, watching you walk up the stairs of the building like you were already wobbly.
“Dex,” you said once, flatly.
He looked up too fast. “What?”
“Stop looking so happy.”
His mouth curled up into a smile.
You nearly threw a cushion at his head.
You were properly spiralling. You even stood in the kitchen staring at a mug for two full minutes because you couldn’t remember whether you wanted tea or whether caffeine was suddenly a horrible idea. You opened your calendar to put down one of Leo’s school events and immediately closed it again because you were reminded that your period was late. You looked at Leo eating cereal for dinner with his little spoon and almost cried because he was your baby, your baby, and how were you supposed to have another one when you still sometimes looked at him and felt like he was born yesterday.
And then, of course, Leo overheard Dex comforting you. Dex tried, but he didn’t really help. He clearly wanted another one.
“Mommy has baby?”
Apparently, he couldn’t hear you when you asked them to put their shoes on, but they could apparently detect a private conversation through the wall.
You turned so fast your neck hurt. Dex froze beside you, one hand still on the counter, his face stupid and hopeful that made you want to kiss him and kill him in equal measure.
Leo stood in the doorway with a toy car in one hand, looking between you and Dex. He didn’t even know where babies came from! How did he even get the gist of the conversation?
You crouched immediately. “We don’t know yet, baby.”
Leo frowned, unconvinced by his father’s unearned excitement.
Because Dex, behind you, looked like he was fucking vibrating.
You could feel the horrible little smile he was trying to swallow. The emotional equivalent of hehehehehehehe.
He wasn’t laughing at you. He would never. But he was delighted and already picturing Leo as a big brother, already picturing a tiny baby in the crook of his arm, already picturing you pregnant and tired and letting him fuss over you like a full-time occupation.
Leo frowned. “But maybe?”
“Maybe,” Dex said immediately.
You turned your head slowly. “Dex.”
He straightened, clearly still wanting to please you. “… or maybe not?”
Still, your husband wasn’t pressuring you. He knew you were scared, and because he loved you, your fear mattered more than his wants or needs. But you could see the want anyway. You could see how badly he wanted to be allowed to be happy.
And for one full day, he was.
For one day, Dex lived like there might be another little life coming.
When the pharmacies finally opened, you bought three tests. Dex came with you, hovering at your side like a bodyguard to your uterus, carrying Leo on his hip while pretending he was not staring at the boxes like they contained his future.
Then you got home.
Then you took them.
Negative.
Negative.
Negative.
Oh.
Your knees nearly went soft with relief. You laughed once, then covered your mouth, then laughed again because the sound had nowhere else to go.
You were not pregnant. Your life was not changing today.
And then you looked at Dex.
Oh, fuck.
Outwardly, he was smiling because you were relieved, because that was the correct thing to do, because Dex would set himself on fire before making you feel bad for feeling happy. But underneath it, you saw his heart drop. The future he had let himself hold for one day just slipped through his fingers, and he tried to pretend it didn’t hurt when it hit the floor.
Oh, Benjamin.
“Dex.”
“I’m good.”
“Don’t do that.”
He looked away, and that was worse. “It’s good. You’re relieved.”
“I am.”
“Then it’s good.”
“Dex.”
His teeth tightened. Dex was clearly trying to make himself smaller than his disappointment. Dex was trying to be good for you by wanting less.
So you pulled him in.
He came apart so quietly it almost killed you. He pressed his forehead to your stomach, and his arms wrapped around knowing your womb was empty after spending the entire night fantasising about watching you grow.
“It’s not never,” you whispered. “It’s just not now.”
He breathed out, and it came out long and shaky.
Then Leo appeared, because apparently this family had no concept of emotional privacy.
He looked at you. Then Dex.
“No baby?” He asked, as if he knew it was the answer all along.
You swallowed a laugh and a sob at the same time. “No baby, sweetheart.”
Leo’s little face twisted, confused and offended, like everyone had missed something extremely obvious.
“It’s okay, daddy,” Leo insisted, “I’m baby.”
Dex let out a sound so pathetic and wounded that you had to press your lips together to keep from falling apart. Leo toddled over with great seriousness patting his face because he knew Dex was the one who needed comforting.
Dex wrapped one arm around him and kept the other around you. “Yeah buddy,” he murmured, “You are.”
And you stood there with your terrifying man clinging to you and your son defending his title.
That was how you knew, that when the time came, Dex would knock you up again in a heartbeat.
All you had to do was ask.
—
Note : I’m going through all your kind comments and asks!! I feel so loved, thank you for all the support for this series 🫶
Summary : You wish on a shooting star, but unfortunately, it’s not a star at all. It’s an Imperial transport crash-landing with Bucky Barnes inside.
Pairing : Imperial Asset! Bucky Barnes x Scavanger! reader (she/her) | Star Wars AU
Warnings/tags : toxic parents, crash site/bodies, amnesia, PTSD, nightmares, forced proximity(?), slow burn, home invasion by stormtroopers, interrogation/torture, blood/injury, protective Bucky, hurt/comfort, (Let me know if I missed anything!)
Word count : 7.7k
Note : It was supposed to be a hear me out but I went overboard. Enjoy!
You were raised Imperial.
Your parents worked for the Empire, and they expected you to do the same when you grow up. They believed in order, in obedience. They believed some worlds needed to be conquered for their own good. They believed the fear of the native population was useful. They believed mercy was weakness and they were owed the power they wielded.
For a long time, you believed them too.
As children usually do. But then, you got older. And you woke up.
You started feeling disgusted by the way your parents spoke about mineral-rich planets like they were economic opportunities instead of homes. You started hating them when they discussed occupation routes during dinner. You eventually realize that your comfortable childhood, your privileged life, had been paid for by people who had never asked to be ruled and used by the empire while your parents and the other senior officers reaped their rewards.
And every time you tried to bring it up, they dismissed you. They told you that you were ungrateful for their hard work. They told you they were protecting you. They told you that you’d never survive out there without the safety that the empire afforded you.
Frankly, you feel… gaslit.
By the time you turned eighteen, you knew one thing with absolute certainty: You would rather live a hard life than make someone else’s harder.
So you ran.
You packed what you could carry, emptied the credits you had from the savings account your parents had set for you, and disappeared into the Outer Rim before your parents could drag you back and talk you into joining the imperial work force.
The life you built there was not easy. But really, nothing in the Outer Rim ever was.
Your hut leaked during acid rain. Your speeder broke down every other cycle. Half your meals came from tins with faded labels, and the other half came from whatever you could barter, fix, steal, or scavenge. Your hands were always bruised. Your boots were always full of dust.
But it was yours. That mattered because you proved your parents wrong. You survived.
No one was demanding you to salute. No one barked orders at you. No one asked you to kill a witness. You weren’t contributing to war crimes. You scavenged wrecks, repaired junk, sold parts, kept your head down, and survived.
It was a simple life.
Lonely, sometimes, but simple. You told yourself company was overrated anyway. Most days, you even believed it.
Then one night several years later, on what would have been your birthday back on your home planet, you sat outside your hut with a cup of bitter caf going cold in your hands and realised you had no one to celebrate it with.
No one knew. No one cared.
Oh.
For the first time since you left, you felt truly alone.
You cried quietly under the wide black sky, angry at yourself for it, because loneliness felt too much like weakness and you had spent your whole life making sure you didn’t need anyone.
Then something bright streaked across the stars.
A shooting star.
You almost laughed.
Some stupid, embarrassing part of you closed its eyes and made a wish:
I don’t want to be alone anymore.
Then the star broke apart. The light flared and it grew larger.
Your breath hitched.
That was not a star. That was a ship.
It tore through the atmosphere in a burning line of fire, vanishing beyond the ridge with a distant, shaking boom. For a long moment, you just stared.
Then you wiped your tears off with the heel of your hand.
A ship always meant one thing: Payday tomorrow.
By morning’s first light, you were standing by the wreckage of the ship, assessing the damage.
It was Imperial. No doubt about it.
Even half-buried in the sand, you could recognise the grey plating and militarised design.
You stared at it for a moment, before spitting into the dust. “Figures.”
The crash had carved a long, black mark through the flats. Debris scattered everywhere, glittering in the early sun like treasure if you were desperate enough.
You were.
To be fair, a wreck like this could keep you fed for weeks if you were careful. Power cells. Rations. Med supplies. Navigation parts. Maybe even weapon components, if the fire had been kind.
So you pulled your scarf over your mouth and climbed inside.
The pilot was dead, and so were the others you found.
Stormtroopers, mostly. Bodies broken by impact, armour cracked open against the walls because they’re useless. The empire always gave their grunt workers the weakest, flimsiest armors. You stepped around them without looking too closely.
No movement, according to your scanner, which likely meant there were no survivors.
Good.
You got to work.
The first hour was easy. You filled your bag with ration packs, two intact med kits, a coil of wiring, a handful of power cells, and one data cylinder that looked sealed enough to be worth something. You found a half-crushed crate of thermal blankets and marked it for later.
Then you reached the cargo manifest.
You usually uploaded files and sold their intel. Most of the display was damaged, lines of text blinking in and out on the cracked screen, corrupted by impact.
Still, you scrolled through the manifest:
Medical equipment.
Restricted military hardware.
Carbonite containment.
High-value asset.
You went still. High value asset???
“Well,” you murmured. “That sounds expensive.”
You followed the remaining power trail deeper into the hold.
The air changed the lower you went. Frost clung to the walls despite the heat outside, and your breath fogged in front of your face. The emergency lights pulsed red along the floor, turning the corridor bloody in flashes.
At the end of it, behind a jammed door you had to cut open with your torch, you found a containment chamber.
You expected maybe weapons or credits.
Instead, you found a man frozen in carbonite.
For a long moment, you only stared at him.
He stood upright in the transport frame, trapped beneath a thick, dull sheen of carbonite. His face was barely visible, but clearly it was tactical clothes under the freeze. Human, as far as you could tell.
Not treasure.
Your stomach sank.
“No,” you whispered, already angry. “No, no, no.”
Because this wasn’t what you wanted.
You wanted parts. You wanted credits. You wanted something you could pull apart, sell, eat from, survive on.
You didn’t want a moral crisis in the shape of a frozen man.
You knew you should have left him.
The Empire did not freeze harmless people and label them high-value assets. He could be dangerous. He could wake up and kill you. He could be someone so terrible that even the Empire had decided to keep him locked away.
Or he could be someone the Empire had used.
Oh, stars.
You thought of your parents, explaining that occupation was necessary, that rebellion was disorder, that some planets simply needed a firmer hand. You remember them telling you some people deserved to die.
So if you left him here, trapped in a dead Imperial ship because saving him was inconvenient, you were no better than them, were you?
You swore under your breath.
“Maker,” you muttered. “I hate this.”
Getting him home was miserable.
The carbonite slab was too heavy and your makeshift hover-sled kept dragging to one side. You cursed him the entire way across the flats. You cursed the Empire. You cursed your own conscience most of all.
By the time you reached your hut, your back hurt, your arms shook, and the first sun was already high enough to turn the sand bright and cruel.
You dragged the slab inside and left him propped against the far wall.
For a while, you just stood there, breathing hard.
He said nothing. Obviously.
You pointed at him anyway.
“You’re already a problem.” Then, quietly, because you hated yourself for caring, you said. “Don’t make me regret this.”
You went back for the defrosting equipment after a cup of caf and half an hour of lying on your floor questioning every decision you had ever made.
The chamber was too big to move whole, so you stripped what you could: Heat regulators, pressure valves, control panel, cables, anything that looked remotely necessary and only mildly likely to explode.
By the time you got it all home and wired it into your generator, the night had started to creep over the desert.
Your hut smelled like dust, old metal, and overheating circuits.
The lights flickered when the machine powered on.
You stood in front of the carbonite slab, hand on the defrost switch in the other.
A sensible person would have stopped. A smarter person would have sold his location.
But you were neither.
So you took one steadying breath and hit the switch.
The machine groaned.
Heat hissed through the slab. Frost melted in streaks. Carbonite softened, shining wet under the light of your hut. The man’s shape became clearer by degrees: his face, his chest, his shoulders…
Oh. His left arm was metal.
It was silver, segmented, and impossibly well-crafted, catching the light in a way that made your scanner chirp sharply from your workbench.
You glanced at the reading, then back at the arm.
Your mouth went dry. Beskar alloy.
“What the fuck?” you whispered.
The carbonite released with a violent crack.
The man fell forward, and you barely caught him.
Damn.
He was heavy.
That was your first thought when the man came crashing out of the carbonite and nearly took you down with him. Not he’s alive. Not what did the Empire do to him? Not even why in the stars does he have a stupidly expensive arm?
Just…
Damn.
The Empire really had frozen the densest man in the galaxy and made him your problem.
He hit the floor hard, half on top of you, shivering like his body had forgotten how to be a body. His lungs dragged in air with a terrible, broken sound. His metal hand scraped against the floor. His eyes were open, but cloudy and unfocused, staring through you like he was still trapped. “Hey,” you said, breathless under half his weight. “Hey. Easy. Don’t die on me now. I worked very hard to steal you.”
He didn’t answer.
After that, he was feverish for days.
Carbonite sickness, you guessed. He must’ve been frozen long enough that he could barely see, barely stand, barely make it three steps without his knees giving out. You had to help him drink. Help him sit up. Help him stumble to the fresher with one of your hands braced carefully around his waist and the other hovering near his arm, because you still were not sure whether touching the metal would make him panic.
To be fair, things made him panic at first.
He flinched when the kettle screamed, when the generator kicked on, when your boots scuffed the floor too suddenly, when your hand came too close without warning.
He never attacked you, not really, but sometimes he woke up with a terrified inhale and that beskar hand clenched hard enough to dent the edge of your cot. Sometimes he stared at the wall for hours. Sometimes he looked down at his own arm like he had woken up expecting it not to be there.
So you learned to speak before entering the room. You told him what you were doing before you touched him. You left food within reach and pretended not to notice that he only ate when your back was turned.
You gave him the living room because you only had one bedchamber and you were kind, not stupid. The first few nights, he sat upright against the wall instead of lying down, blanket untouched beside him. By the fourth night, he slept under it. By the sixth, he stopped flinching when you walked across the room. By the eighth, he let you change the bandage around a raw patch of skin near the edge of his metal shoulder without looking like he wanted to disappear through the floor.
He still didn’t speak, though.
You asked once, because you could not help yourself. “Do you have a name?”
His teeth clenched and his eyes lowered.
Nothing.
You waited.
Still nothing.
So you sighed and raised both hands. “Fine. Keep your secrets, scary carbonite man.”
That became his name in your head after that.
Scary Carbonite Man.
Scary Carbonite Man sat silently at your table while you repaired circuit boards. Scary Carbonite Man watched the door like he expected the whole galaxy to come through it with a blaster. Scary Carbonite Man drank broth like it was a task he’d been assigned and not nourishment.
And then, somewhere between one cycle and the next, Scary Carbonite Man started helping around the hut.
You woke up one morning to find the loose panel by the door screwed back into place.
Another day, the water filter stopped making that awful grinding noise it had made for cycles. You had been meaning to fix it. You had also been meaning to fix the roof, the heater, the left stabiliser on your speeder, and your entire life, so the filter had been low on the list.
But he fixed it as if he was trying to make himself useful enough to be allowed to stay.
You came home from the market one afternoon and found him crouched beside your faulty generator, brows drawn together, metal fingers surprisingly delicate around the wiring. He froze when you stepped inside, like he had been caught stealing instead of repairing the only thing keeping your hut warm at night.
You stared at him. He stared back.
The generator hummed smoother than it had in years.
You cleared your throat.
“I…,” you said, setting your bag down. “Thank you, Scary Carbonite Man.”
His mouth barely lifted, a little.
It was embarrassing, how much you noticed.
It was worse how quickly you got used to him.
Especially because you should’ve known better.
You knew better than to let a strange man stay in your house, especially one the Empire had frozen, transported, and labelled important enough to hide behind ten layers of encryption. You knew better than to sleep under the same roof as someone who could dent durasteel with his bare hand. You knew better than to start trusting someone who hadn’t even told you his name.
But your hut had been so quiet before him.
You hadn’t realised how quiet until it wasn’t anymore.
Now there was the shift of another person breathing in the living room. The scrape of a chair being moved back into place. The clink of him washing the bowl you had left beside him. The small, strange comfort of coming home and knowing you were not walking into emptiness.
You were no longer lonely.
You liked telling him things.
He never answered, but you talked anyway.About the trader in town who was absolutely watering down his fuel and lying about it. About the woman at the market who sold you bruised fruit at half price because she liked your attitude, which probably meant she was insane. About your speeder making a new noise, which you described to him in great detail while he listened with the seriousness of a man receiving military orders.
You told him about the sandstorms. The broken latch on the supply shed. The stupid little lizard that kept getting into your storage crate. Nothing important.
But he listened. And you knew he listened because he fixed what he could. The speeder and latch were fixed. The lizard was relocated.
And after a while, you started leaving pauses like maybe one day he would fill them.
You told yourself you were only letting him stay until he was well enough to leave.
You told yourself a lot of things.
Then one evening, as the suns sank low and painted the walls of your hut in warm amber light, you placed a bowl of broth in front of him and asked, not really expecting an answer anymore, “Do you remember anything yet?”
Silence.
You sat across from him, spooning your own food around the bowl. Then he looked down at his hands and his throat moved.
When he spoke, his voice was rough from disuse, barely more than a scrape.
“Bucky.”
You went still.
He swallowed, like the name hurt coming out. “My name,” he said quietly. “I think.”
For a second, you couldn’t speak.
Your chest gasped so suddenly it almost scared you. So you smiled instead.
“Well,” you said gently, “welcome back, Bucky.”
After that, Bucky started remembering in pieces.
Not enough to make a full picture. Just little scraps of a life that had been torn apart and scattered somewhere he couldn’t reach.
A name, sometimes.
Winnie, Steve, Rebecca, Howard.
He said them once while helping you repair the water filter, so quietly you almost thought you imagined it.
Another time, he said, “There was snow.” And then nothing else for the rest of the day.
You learned not to ask too much.
Bucky didn’t like being asked for things he couldn’t give. You saw it in the way his jaw clicked, the way his eyes dropped, the way his flesh curled against his knee like he was punishing himself for not knowing more.
So you stopped making memory feel like a test.
You let him offer what he could. A mountain. A freight. A fall.
Sometimes, he looked at his metal arm like it belonged to the nightmare and not to him.
You never told him it was okay. You thought maybe he had been told too many things were okay when they were not.
So instead, you sat beside him and said ordinary things. You told him the caf trader in town was still a thief. You told him the left stabiliser on your speeder was making a suspicious noise again. You told him you were fairly certain the little lizard he moved had children and those children were migrating back.
And Bucky listened.
He was still scary if someone in the market looked at him (or you) wrong. But inside your hut, around you, he had started to become careful and gentle.
He put your tools back exactly where you liked them. He moved hot pans away from the edge of the counter after seeing you burn your fingers once. He pretended not to watch you struggle with heavier scrap until you sighed and said, “Fine,” and then he carried it like it weighed nothing.
And oh, it was humiliating.
Even then, the nightmares still came.
Some nights, you heard him from the living room, breathing too fast, shifting on the couch like he was trying not to scream.
Usually, you got up. Usually, you sat near him in the dark and said his name until he came back to himself.
“Bucky. You’re here. You’re safe. It’s just me.”
But one night, you were too tired to do it properly.
You had spent all day in the heat, hauling scrap and bargaining with a man who deserved to be bitten by a sand rat. Your whole body ached. Your eyes burned. You were half-buried under your blanket, right on the edge of sleep, when you heard him give a small, heartbreaking sound from the living room.
You opened your eyes.
For a second, you just stared at the wall.
You were so tired.
So, so tired.
Then you heard him whisper, rough and afraid, “No.”
And that was it. You couldn’t leave him to face the darkness alone.
You got out of bed.
You shuffled out half-asleep, blanket still wrapped around your shoulders, hair a mess, eyes barely open. Bucky was sitting upright on the mat in the living room, his back against the wall, chest rising and falling too quickly.
His metal hand was curled tight. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t really seeing the room.
You stood in front of him for a moment, swaying with exhaustion.
Then you reached down and gently took his wrist. It was warm beneath your fingers, because you wanted him to know where you were before he had to decide whether to touch you back.
He froze.
You gave the smallest tug.
“Bucky,” you mumbled, voice thick with sleep. “Come on.”
He stared up at you, still breathing hard.
So you tugged again, softer this time. “Come on, Buck.”
And he eventually followed like a tired man hearing his name from the only safe place he knew.
He stood. Perhaps he was half expecting you to do the usual routine of sit-with-Bucky-on-the-couch until he calms down.
Instead, you just led him into your room, fingers still wrapped around his wrist, your blanket trailing behind you on the floor. You were too tired to overthink it. Too tired to be embarrassed. Too tired to remember the usual routine.
You climbed into bed first, then looked back at him. You patted the space beside you.
“Here.”
He hesitated.
You sighed, but there was no bite in it. “Bucky.”
That was all, just his name.
He came to you.
Carefully, like your bed was fragile and he was afraid his body would ruin it by being there. He lay down beside you with far too much space between you, stiff and silent and barely breathing.
Absolutely ridiculous, heartbreaking man.
You lasted maybe five seconds before scooting closer.
You curled into his side like it was the most natural thing in the galaxy. Like you had not spent years sleeping alone and insisting you preferred it. Like he had always been there. Your arm slipped over his middle.
Your cheek pressed gently to his shoulder.
“There,” you whispered. “That’s better.”
Bucky didn’t move at first.
For a few breaths, he stayed painfully still, like this comfort was another kind of danger.
So you didn’t push.
You just stayed sleepy and warm and stubborn.
You held him like it was no big thing, like he wasn’t an ex-Imperial asset with a beskar arm and a head full of broken memories.
Slowly, his breathing changed. His shoulders lowered. The tension left him in tiny pieces.
His flesh hand hovered above your arm, uncertain and careful, before settling over you.
You smiled against him, too sleepy to hide it.
The nightmare didn't come back.
Neither of you said anything else.
You just slept.
And for the first time since he fell out of the sky and into your life, Bucky slept like he was allowed to rest.
In the morning, you woke up tucked against him, warm all the way through.
Your arm was still around his waist. His hand was still over yours.
Bucky was awake, staring at the ceiling, perfectly still like he had been afraid to move and ruin it.
You blinked. He blinked.
Neither of you spoke for a while.
Then, because you were you, and feelings were horrifying, you said, “If you tell anyone I’m nice, I’ll deny it.”
For one second, nothing happened. Then Bucky smiled.
Oh, that was dangerous.
Because you had dragged a frozen man out of an Imperial wreck.
Because you had rescued a frozen man from an Imperial wreck, let him sleep in your living room, fed him your terrible broth, given him your spare blanket, and now he was smiling in your bed like maybe he had found his way back to the galaxy through you.
That morning, Bucky announced he was going to the market alone.
You almost dropped the credit chips you were counting.
“Alone?”
He stood near the door, already dressed for the heat, hair tied back in a way you had started pretending didn’t do anything to you. His cloak was pulled over the arm, because people had seen it and you both agreed the attention wasn’t worth it.
He looked at you and nodded once. “Yeah.”
You stared at him. He stared back.
You looked down at the credits spread across the table, then back at him. “Are you sure?”
Bucky’s expression didn’t change much, because it rarely did, but a flicker of amusement went through his eyes. “I know the way.”
He did.
He knew the way because he had been going with you for weeks now. He knew which stalls sold honest parts and which ones sold faulty ones. He knew the woman who kept spare copper wiring under the table. He knew the mechanic who paid you late but always paid eventually. He even helped when you took freelance repair jobs.
He knew your life now.
Still, you frowned. “What do you even need from the market?”
His face went blank too quickly. “Things.”
“Things?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not an answer.” You narrowed your eyes.
Bucky looked away.
Oh, that was definitely suspicious.
You sat back in your chair, credits forgotten beneath your fingers. “You’re being weird.”
His mouth twitched. Then he adjusted the strap of his satchel and said, “I’ll be back before the second sun gets high.”
You wanted to argue, and not because you didn’t trust him. You did, more than you should have. More than you liked admitting to yourself. But the thought of him walking into town alone made you frightened.
Because if he didn’t return, you’d be alone again.
Bucky noticed and softened his voice. “I’ll come back.”
You hated how badly you needed to hear that. So you rolled your eyes and looked back down at the credits. “You better. I still need you to fix the west panel before the next sandstorm.”
“I know.”
“And if you get robbed, I’m not rescuing you.”
Then Bucky said, very quietly, “you think I’d need rescue?”
You waved him off without looking up, because your face had gotten warm for absolutely no reason. “Go away.”
He did.
The hut felt too quiet the second he left.
You tried to ignore it.
You sorted credits. You wrote down what you owed for fuel. Checked the payment from the repair job you had done three days ago and cursed the client under your breath because he had absolutely shorted you. Then you started organising scrap by resale value, because apparently you were the kind of person who needed busy hands to avoid thinking about a man going to the market alone.
You were halfway through separating usable wiring from junk when the first shadow passed the window.
You froze.
That was way too many footsteps to be Bucky.
Your hand moved toward your blaster. The door blew inward before your fingers reached it.
Then, white armour filled the room.
Stormtroopers.
For one stupid second, your mind couldn’t make sense of them inside your hut. They belonged on ships. In garrisons. In your childhood.
Not here. Not in the doorway Bucky had fixed. Not stepping over the threshold of the one place in the galaxy you had made for yourself.
Then one of them raised a blaster.
The first shot scorched the wall where your head had been.
You grabbed the knife from under the table and drove it into the gap beneath the nearest trooper’s helmet. He went down choking. Another one lunged at you. You slammed your elbow into his throat plate and tried to reach your blaster, but there were too many of them, too fast, too loud.
A rifle butt caught you across the ribs and you hit the floor hard.
Still, you kicked, bit, and scrambled.
You got one by the ankle and dragged him down with you, feral and furious, because if the Empire wanted you back on your knees, they would have to break you first.
So they did.
A trooper’s boot came down on your leg, and the pain was instant and blinding.
Your bone broke, and you screamed before you could stop yourself.
The sound ripped out of you, ugly and raw, and for a moment the whole room went white. You couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think past it. Your hands clawed at the floor as pain tore up from your shin into your hip.
A trooper grabbed your hair and yanked your head back.
Then, you felt the cold metal of a blaster pressed to your temple.
That brought the room back into focus.
A trooper crouched in front of you. His helmet tilted slightly, almost curious.“Where is the Winter Soldier?”
You blinked through the pain. “What?”
The blaster dug harder into your skin. “The asset. Where is he?”
Asset.
What, was Bucky this mysterious Winter Soldier? The high value asset they were transporting in carbonite?
Because Bucky wasn’t that to you. He wasn’t a weapon or a thing. When you thought of him, you thought of him sitting at your table with a bowl of broth in his hands. Bucky repairing your generator without saying a word. Bucky lying stiff beside you in bed, afraid to breathe too loudly.
Your fear turned into hatred pretty quickly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The trooper hit you. Your cheek split sideways and blood filled your mouth. “Where is the Winter Soldier?”
You laughed.
It was a terrible sound, wet and shaky and half-mad from pain. “I don’t know what a Winter Soldier is.”
He landed another hit. This time, your vision blurred.
A trooper stepped on your broken leg again, not hard enough to finish it, just enough to make sure you remembered they could. You choked on a sob and hated yourself for it.
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not.”
“The asset was tracked to this dwelling.”
You swallowed blood. “Well,” you rasped, “your tracker’s a pile of shaak shit.”
The blaster pressed harder on your skin.
You could feel the circle of it now. You knew if you stopped being useful, you were going to die.
You thought, absurdly, of Bucky at the market.
Bucky, choosing fruit with too much consideration. Bucky. trying not to get overcharged. Bucky walking back under the suns with that careful focus of his, maybe carrying whatever mysterious things he had refused to explain.
Now, your hopes have changed. You hoped he stayed away. You hoped he ran.
The trooper leaned closer. “Last chance.”
You looked at the black visor where a face should have been.
Your whole body shook. After all, the hurt made the edges of the room pulse. You were terrified. Only idiots and dead people pretended not to be.
But you had been raised by Imperials.
You knew this game. You knew what they wanted.
And you would never let Bucky become one of theirs ever again. So you bared your bloody teeth.
“I said,” you whispered, “I don’t know.”
The trooper’s finger shifted on the trigger.
That’s all, folks! You thought cynically to yourself. It was a short life, and not necessarily a good one, but at least I don’t regret anything!
Then the trooper’s helmet snapped sideways. A giant crack crack split through white plastoid.
The blaster meant for your brains went off into the ceiling.
For half a second, the whole room flashed bright in your ears
Then the body dropped hard.
You flinched against the floor, blinking through blood and dust and the watery edge of your own vision. Your ears rang so badly the entire world seemed like it was underwater. You couldn’t breathe right. Every inhale pulled pain sharp through your muscles. Your broken leg throbbed in bright, sick waves that made the edges of the hut bend and smear.
Another stormtrooper went down. Then another.
At first, you didn’t understand what you were seeing.
A shadow moved through the doorway where your door used to be.
You saw a hint of dark cloak and loose hair. After adjusting your focus, you saw a silver arm catching the light.
It was Bucky, you realised.
Oh.
Bucky.
He didn’t shout your name or make some grand heroic entrance.
He just did what had to be done. Tactical, cold, and frighteningly smart.
And stars, you had never seen anyone fight like that.
He strode into the room like the violence he was about to commit had already happened in his head and his body was only catching up. When a trooper lifted a rifle, Bucky’s beskar hand closed around the barrel and crushed it inward with a shriek of ruined metal. His other hand struck once beneath the helmet. The trooper dropped before the broken weapon hit the floor.
Another turned, but he was too slow. Bucky was already there.
You tried to keep your eyes open, but everything came in pieces: A flash of beskar, A boot sliding through blood, A white helmet hitting the wall hard enough to leave a dent. A gloved hand reaching for him and then bone bending the wrong way. A blaster firing wildly.
Bucky ducked under the shot.
Bucky turned the blaster around and ended the trooper with a shot meant for him.
He didn’t waste motion. There was no anger in it, not the way you understood anger. Just cold, brutal certainty.
It was beautiful in a way that made your stomach twist with grief, because this was what they had wanted from him. This was what the Empire had built out of a broken man and called useful.
This was not the Bucky who fixed your heater. Not the man who listened to you complain about watered-down fuel with the seriousness of a battlefield report.
This was the weapon they had come for.
This was the Winter Soldier.
And you hated them for it so much it burned through the fear.
A stormtrooper stumbled backward over a body, trying to raise both hands.
Bucky didn’t hesitate. You blinked, and the trooper was on the floor.
Another tried to run. He didn’t make it past the threshold.
Then there was only one left. The one whose boot had pressed into your broken leg until your scream tore out of you.
He backed away from you now.
Not far enough. Never far enough for Bucky.
Bucky turned his head.
The man raised his blaster with shaking hands. Bucky closed the gap between them before he could fire.
You didn’t see the killing blow clearly.
Maybe that was mercy. Maybe your body simply gave up on looking.
Then, there was only blissful silence.
Your hut smelled like blaster smoke, hot metal, blood, dust, and the bitter remains of your caf from that morning still sitting on the table. The west panel that Bucky had promised to fix hung crooked from the wall. Your door was gone. Your floor was covered in dead men.
And Bucky stood in the middle of it all, breathing hard.
For one moment, he just stood there with his hands loose at his sides, like he didn’t know where to put them now that there was no one left to hurt.
You tried to say his name, but it only came out as a broken, wet, little sound.
Bucky turned so fast it scared you.
The bloodlust emptied out of his face, and just like the Winter Soldier vanished.
What was left was your Bucky.
He looked mildly horrified, though he could bring himself to regret what he did. His skin was pale beneath the dust. His cerulean blue eyes blown wide as he studied in your cheek, your mouth, your leg, the blood under you, the way you were curled around the pain like your body was trying to protect itself from being alive.
He dropped to his knees so hard you heard it.l“Hey.”
His voice barely worked.
He crawled the last distance to you, hands hovering over you, not touching yet. His metal fingers flexed open, closed, open again, like he was afraid they would forget how to be gentle.
“Hey,” he said again, softer, rougher. “Look at me.”
You tried.
Your left eye, for lack of a better word, was failing. Your vision kept dipping in and out, Bucky’s face breaking apart and coming back together.
His hand moved toward your leg, then stopped when he saw the wrong angle of it.
His mouth parted, but sound came out at first.
“No,” he breathed.
It was almost nothing but a ruin of a word.
“No.”
You wanted to make him stop looking like that.
You wanted to tell him you were fine, even though you were very much not fine. You wanted to tell him his repairs were going to be useless if he kept letting stormtroopers blow doors off their hinges. You wanted to say something sarcastic enough to make this less frightening.
But your tongue was heavy and your teeth were red. Your leg was a star going supernova beneath your skin.
Bucky swallowed hard and slid one arm beneath your shoulders.
“I have you,” he said. “I have you.”
His other arm went beneath your knees, careful around the broken leg, so careful it made tears spill down your temples and into your hair. Even that tiny shift dragged a whine out of you.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped.
You could feel him shaking now. It was a tremor through his chest, his hands, the arm under your back.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, lifting you anyway, because he had to.
Because the floor was soaked with your blood and stormtroopers were dead around you and your little hut, your little life, had been cracked wide open.
You clutched at him with one weak hand, fingers catching in the front of his shirt.
Bucky pulled you into his lap right there among the bodies, not caring about the blood.
His metal hand cradled the back of your head, impossibly gently. His flesh hand pressed over your side where your ribs hurt, not pushing, just holding, like he could keep you together by touch alone.
His throat worked. His eyes wouldn’t stay on yours. They kept flicking away, to the bodies, to the broken door, to his own metal hand in your hair.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
You blinked slowly.
Bucky’s face was close now. Too close for him to hide from you. His jaw was pulled tight, and his lips trembled. Dust clung to the dampness at his temples. Blood, not his, marked the line of his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
That was all he could manage.
Not I’m sorry I killed them.
No, Bucky might regret a great many things, but he could never be sorry for protecting you.
He was just sorry that you saw.
Like the worst thing in the room was that you had seen what he could do.
It was that now, finally, he thought you might understand why they had put him in carbonite. Why they had called him an assert. Why stormtrooper squadrons with blasters had crossed the galaxy to a stupid desert planet to drag him back.
His eyes lifted to yours, terrified. He was waiting, you realised, for you to be disgusted by his actions.
Oh, Bucky.
Your heart hurt worse than your ribs.
You lifted your hand. It was pathetic, really. Your fingers barely obeyed you. Your arm shook with the effort. You missed his face the first time, knuckles brushing his collar instead.
Bucky caught your wrist gently.
He held your hand in his like he didn’t know whether he was allowed to bring it closer.
You made a small sound of frustration.
His eyes narrowed immediately. “What? What hurts?”
You stared at him. He stared back, beautiful and ruined all the same.
So you used the last of your strength to tug your hand free, curl your fingers into his shirt, and pulled
You couldn’t pull far, but Bucky understood enough.
His breath hitched
“No,” he whispered, like he was refusing himself something because he didn’t deserve it. “You don’t—”
You kissed him, and it was not graceful. It was barely even a kiss.
Your split mouth pressed to his, and pain sparked across your cheek so sharply your eyes watered. You tasted blood. Your blood, maybe his. You didn’t care.
Bucky went utterly still.
For one terrible second, he didn’t breathe.
Then a sound left his chest, almost wounded, and his mouth moved against yours with a kind of careful desperation that made you want to sob. He kissed you like he was afraid you would vanish. Like he was afraid he would hurt you by being himself. Like he was trying to ask forgiveness without having enough words to build the question.
His hand stayed at the back of your head. His thumb moved once against your hair.
When you pulled back, he followed for half a breath before stopping himself.
His forehead touched yours, eyes closed. “You came back,” you whispered.
Bucky’s breath shuddered.
“Of course.” It was hoarse and almost angry with how true it was.
That was more than enough.
Your fingers loosened in his shirt.
For a moment, you just existed there in his arms while the world tilted around you. His heartbeat was too fast beneath your palm. His breathing kept catching. Every few seconds, his grip adjusted, checking you, making sure you were still there.
Then his gaze dropped to your throat, just between your collarbones, as if he remembered something.
His face changed.
You frowned weakly. “What?”
Bucky didn’t answer right away. Instead, he shifted you against him with unbearable care, keeping your broken leg supported, and reached into the inside of his cloak.
His hand came out closed around a small piece of metal.
For one exhausted, feverish second, you thought it might be medicine.
It wasn’t.
A necklace slipped from his fingers.
It has a simple chain and a little pendant. The silver metal curled around a blue stone, cloudy at the centre, bright at the edge. It wasn't polished or perfect by any standards. It was handmade and slightly uneven.
It was… lovely.
So lovely your breath hitched.
Bucky looked down at it like he didn’t know what to do with this gift now that he had brought it into a room full of death.
“I got it for you, from the market,” he said.
You blinked at him, throat closing.
He stared at the necklace, not at you.
“You said it was your birthday when you saved me.”
You forgot, for one stupid second, how much pain you were in.
“You remembered?”
Bucky’s thumb rubbed over the little blue stone once.
“You said.” His brow furrowed, like the memory was delicate and he was afraid of breaking it. “The night before you found me.”
You didn’t even realize he had heard you at that point. You were just rambling to him in his post-carbonite fugue state, you didn’t even realise he would remember the information for a later date.
Your birthday.
Your stupid, lonely birthday.
You remembered that day, having a cold caf in your hands. You remembered watching the black sky over your hut. You remembered the tears running down on your face. You remembered making a pathetic wish made on what you thought was a star.
I don’t want to be alone anymore.
You had thought no one in the galaxy had heard you.
But whoever the maker was, they had sent him.
Frozen in carbonite, maybe. Falling out of the sky, maybe. Half-dead, half-gone, dragged through the atmosphere by an Imperial ship.
It didn’t matter.
He had remembered.
Bucky, who still lost whole pieces of himself. Bucky, who remembered snow and names and falling only in fragments. Bucky, who couldn’t always trust his own mind.
Bucky remembered that his ship fell out birthday.
A broken sound left your lips, and his head snapped up. “Does it hurt?”
You laughed and cried at the same time, which was a mistake because your ribs immediately punished you for it.
“Don’t,” he said, helpless. “Don’t do that. Just stay with me, okay?”
“You bought me a necklace,” you whispered.
His mouth tightened, like he was bracing for rejection.
“I wish I could get you it sooner,” he said.
“Bucky….”
“I saved credits from repairs.”
“I know, Buck.”
His eyes flicked to yours.
“I wanted…” He stopped as the words failed him.
His teeth clenched worked once, then he tried again.
“I wanted you to have something from me.”
Your lips parted.
Bucky looked down again, ashamed of the softness, maybe. Ashamed that the hands that had just killed men could still want to give you a pretty thing.
His voice went smaller. “You have given me so much.”
Oh.
Oh Bucky, as if you needed repayment. As if your kindness was currency. As if you needed him to give you something to be loved.
You only wanted him.
Carefully, with the kind of concentration he usually reserved for delicate wiring, Bucky shifted the chain around your neck. His fingers brushed your skin. The metal was cool at first, then warmed almost instantly against your throat.
The clasp took him longer than it should have. His hands were shaking too badly.
You watched his face as he worked. The furrow between his brows. The tight set of his mouth. The way he kept pausing whenever you breathed wrong, checking if he had hurt you.
Finally, the necklace settled against your chest.
The little blue stone rested above your heartbeat.
Bucky’s fingers stayed there for half a second longer than necessary.
Then he pulled away like he had no right.
You caught his wrist. “Bucky.”
He looked at you.
You wanted to say it properly: You weren’t afraid.
He had saved you.
Whatever the Empire had made him, it didn’t get to own every part of him.
That you had now seen the weapon, yes, but you had also seen the man who fixed your water filter, remembered your birthday, listened to your useless stories, and came back.
But pain was dragging you under. Your thoughts were slipping loose, and words were hard.
So you said the only thing you could, “Stay.”
He bent over you, forehead pressing to your temple, his breath shaking against your skin.
“Always,” he said.
Outside, the suns burned over the desert. Somewhere beyond the ridge, more Imperials would come, more ships, more hunters.
But in your ruined hut, with your blood drying on his shirt and his gift resting over your heart, Bucky held you like the galaxy could take anything else from him and he would still refuse to let go of this.
And for the first time in your life, you knew that neither of you would ever have to be alone again.
Summary : You wish on a shooting star, but unfortunately, it’s not a star at all. It’s an Imperial transport crash-landing with Bucky Barnes inside.
Pairing : Imperial Asset! Bucky Barnes x Scavanger! reader (she/her) | Star Wars AU
Warnings/tags : toxic parents, crash site/bodies, amnesia, PTSD, nightmares, forced proximity(?), slow burn, home invasion by stormtroopers, interrogation/torture, blood/injury, protective Bucky, hurt/comfort, (Let me know if I missed anything!)
Word count : 7.7k
Note : It was supposed to be a hear me out but I went overboard. Enjoy!
You were raised Imperial.
Your parents worked for the Empire, and they expected you to do the same when you grow up. They believed in order, in obedience. They believed some worlds needed to be conquered for their own good. They believed the fear of the native population was useful. They believed mercy was weakness and they were owed the power they wielded.
For a long time, you believed them too.
As children usually do. But then, you got older. And you woke up.
You started feeling disgusted by the way your parents spoke about mineral-rich planets like they were economic opportunities instead of homes. You started hating them when they discussed occupation routes during dinner. You eventually realize that your comfortable childhood, your privileged life, had been paid for by people who had never asked to be ruled and used by the empire while your parents and the other senior officers reaped their rewards.
And every time you tried to bring it up, they dismissed you. They told you that you were ungrateful for their hard work. They told you they were protecting you. They told you that you’d never survive out there without the safety that the empire afforded you.
Frankly, you feel… gaslit.
By the time you turned eighteen, you knew one thing with absolute certainty: You would rather live a hard life than make someone else’s harder.
So you ran.
You packed what you could carry, emptied the credits you had from the savings account your parents had set for you, and disappeared into the Outer Rim before your parents could drag you back and talk you into joining the imperial work force.
The life you built there was not easy. But really, nothing in the Outer Rim ever was.
Your hut leaked during acid rain. Your speeder broke down every other cycle. Half your meals came from tins with faded labels, and the other half came from whatever you could barter, fix, steal, or scavenge. Your hands were always bruised. Your boots were always full of dust.
But it was yours. That mattered because you proved your parents wrong. You survived.
No one was demanding you to salute. No one barked orders at you. No one asked you to kill a witness. You weren’t contributing to war crimes. You scavenged wrecks, repaired junk, sold parts, kept your head down, and survived.
It was a simple life.
Lonely, sometimes, but simple. You told yourself company was overrated anyway. Most days, you even believed it.
Then one night several years later, on what would have been your birthday back on your home planet, you sat outside your hut with a cup of bitter caf going cold in your hands and realised you had no one to celebrate it with.
No one knew. No one cared.
Oh.
For the first time since you left, you felt truly alone.
You cried quietly under the wide black sky, angry at yourself for it, because loneliness felt too much like weakness and you had spent your whole life making sure you didn’t need anyone.
Then something bright streaked across the stars.
A shooting star.
You almost laughed.
Some stupid, embarrassing part of you closed its eyes and made a wish:
I don’t want to be alone anymore.
Then the star broke apart. The light flared and it grew larger.
Your breath hitched.
That was not a star. That was a ship.
It tore through the atmosphere in a burning line of fire, vanishing beyond the ridge with a distant, shaking boom. For a long moment, you just stared.
Then you wiped your tears off with the heel of your hand.
A ship always meant one thing: Payday tomorrow.
By morning’s first light, you were standing by the wreckage of the ship, assessing the damage.
It was Imperial. No doubt about it.
Even half-buried in the sand, you could recognise the grey plating and militarised design.
You stared at it for a moment, before spitting into the dust. “Figures.”
The crash had carved a long, black mark through the flats. Debris scattered everywhere, glittering in the early sun like treasure if you were desperate enough.
You were.
To be fair, a wreck like this could keep you fed for weeks if you were careful. Power cells. Rations. Med supplies. Navigation parts. Maybe even weapon components, if the fire had been kind.
So you pulled your scarf over your mouth and climbed inside.
The pilot was dead, and so were the others you found.
Stormtroopers, mostly. Bodies broken by impact, armour cracked open against the walls because they’re useless. The empire always gave their grunt workers the weakest, flimsiest armors. You stepped around them without looking too closely.
No movement, according to your scanner, which likely meant there were no survivors.
Good.
You got to work.
The first hour was easy. You filled your bag with ration packs, two intact med kits, a coil of wiring, a handful of power cells, and one data cylinder that looked sealed enough to be worth something. You found a half-crushed crate of thermal blankets and marked it for later.
Then you reached the cargo manifest.
You usually uploaded files and sold their intel. Most of the display was damaged, lines of text blinking in and out on the cracked screen, corrupted by impact.
Still, you scrolled through the manifest:
Medical equipment.
Restricted military hardware.
Carbonite containment.
High-value asset.
You went still. High value asset???
“Well,” you murmured. “That sounds expensive.”
You followed the remaining power trail deeper into the hold.
The air changed the lower you went. Frost clung to the walls despite the heat outside, and your breath fogged in front of your face. The emergency lights pulsed red along the floor, turning the corridor bloody in flashes.
At the end of it, behind a jammed door you had to cut open with your torch, you found a containment chamber.
You expected maybe weapons or credits.
Instead, you found a man frozen in carbonite.
For a long moment, you only stared at him.
He stood upright in the transport frame, trapped beneath a thick, dull sheen of carbonite. His face was barely visible, but clearly it was tactical clothes under the freeze. Human, as far as you could tell.
Not treasure.
Your stomach sank.
“No,” you whispered, already angry. “No, no, no.”
Because this wasn’t what you wanted.
You wanted parts. You wanted credits. You wanted something you could pull apart, sell, eat from, survive on.
You didn’t want a moral crisis in the shape of a frozen man.
You knew you should have left him.
The Empire did not freeze harmless people and label them high-value assets. He could be dangerous. He could wake up and kill you. He could be someone so terrible that even the Empire had decided to keep him locked away.
Or he could be someone the Empire had used.
Oh, stars.
You thought of your parents, explaining that occupation was necessary, that rebellion was disorder, that some planets simply needed a firmer hand. You remember them telling you some people deserved to die.
So if you left him here, trapped in a dead Imperial ship because saving him was inconvenient, you were no better than them, were you?
You swore under your breath.
“Maker,” you muttered. “I hate this.”
Getting him home was miserable.
The carbonite slab was too heavy and your makeshift hover-sled kept dragging to one side. You cursed him the entire way across the flats. You cursed the Empire. You cursed your own conscience most of all.
By the time you reached your hut, your back hurt, your arms shook, and the first sun was already high enough to turn the sand bright and cruel.
You dragged the slab inside and left him propped against the far wall.
For a while, you just stood there, breathing hard.
He said nothing. Obviously.
You pointed at him anyway.
“You’re already a problem.” Then, quietly, because you hated yourself for caring, you said. “Don’t make me regret this.”
You went back for the defrosting equipment after a cup of caf and half an hour of lying on your floor questioning every decision you had ever made.
The chamber was too big to move whole, so you stripped what you could: Heat regulators, pressure valves, control panel, cables, anything that looked remotely necessary and only mildly likely to explode.
By the time you got it all home and wired it into your generator, the night had started to creep over the desert.
Your hut smelled like dust, old metal, and overheating circuits.
The lights flickered when the machine powered on.
You stood in front of the carbonite slab, hand on the defrost switch in the other.
A sensible person would have stopped. A smarter person would have sold his location.
But you were neither.
So you took one steadying breath and hit the switch.
The machine groaned.
Heat hissed through the slab. Frost melted in streaks. Carbonite softened, shining wet under the light of your hut. The man’s shape became clearer by degrees: his face, his chest, his shoulders…
Oh. His left arm was metal.
It was silver, segmented, and impossibly well-crafted, catching the light in a way that made your scanner chirp sharply from your workbench.
You glanced at the reading, then back at the arm.
Your mouth went dry. Beskar alloy.
“What the fuck?” you whispered.
The carbonite released with a violent crack.
The man fell forward, and you barely caught him.
Damn.
He was heavy.
That was your first thought when the man came crashing out of the carbonite and nearly took you down with him. Not he’s alive. Not what did the Empire do to him? Not even why in the stars does he have a stupidly expensive arm?
Just…
Damn.
The Empire really had frozen the densest man in the galaxy and made him your problem.
He hit the floor hard, half on top of you, shivering like his body had forgotten how to be a body. His lungs dragged in air with a terrible, broken sound. His metal hand scraped against the floor. His eyes were open, but cloudy and unfocused, staring through you like he was still trapped. “Hey,” you said, breathless under half his weight. “Hey. Easy. Don’t die on me now. I worked very hard to steal you.”
He didn’t answer.
After that, he was feverish for days.
Carbonite sickness, you guessed. He must’ve been frozen long enough that he could barely see, barely stand, barely make it three steps without his knees giving out. You had to help him drink. Help him sit up. Help him stumble to the fresher with one of your hands braced carefully around his waist and the other hovering near his arm, because you still were not sure whether touching the metal would make him panic.
To be fair, things made him panic at first.
He flinched when the kettle screamed, when the generator kicked on, when your boots scuffed the floor too suddenly, when your hand came too close without warning.
He never attacked you, not really, but sometimes he woke up with a terrified inhale and that beskar hand clenched hard enough to dent the edge of your cot. Sometimes he stared at the wall for hours. Sometimes he looked down at his own arm like he had woken up expecting it not to be there.
So you learned to speak before entering the room. You told him what you were doing before you touched him. You left food within reach and pretended not to notice that he only ate when your back was turned.
You gave him the living room because you only had one bedchamber and you were kind, not stupid. The first few nights, he sat upright against the wall instead of lying down, blanket untouched beside him. By the fourth night, he slept under it. By the sixth, he stopped flinching when you walked across the room. By the eighth, he let you change the bandage around a raw patch of skin near the edge of his metal shoulder without looking like he wanted to disappear through the floor.
He still didn’t speak, though.
You asked once, because you could not help yourself. “Do you have a name?”
His teeth clenched and his eyes lowered.
Nothing.
You waited.
Still nothing.
So you sighed and raised both hands. “Fine. Keep your secrets, scary carbonite man.”
That became his name in your head after that.
Scary Carbonite Man.
Scary Carbonite Man sat silently at your table while you repaired circuit boards. Scary Carbonite Man watched the door like he expected the whole galaxy to come through it with a blaster. Scary Carbonite Man drank broth like it was a task he’d been assigned and not nourishment.
And then, somewhere between one cycle and the next, Scary Carbonite Man started helping around the hut.
You woke up one morning to find the loose panel by the door screwed back into place.
Another day, the water filter stopped making that awful grinding noise it had made for cycles. You had been meaning to fix it. You had also been meaning to fix the roof, the heater, the left stabiliser on your speeder, and your entire life, so the filter had been low on the list.
But he fixed it as if he was trying to make himself useful enough to be allowed to stay.
You came home from the market one afternoon and found him crouched beside your faulty generator, brows drawn together, metal fingers surprisingly delicate around the wiring. He froze when you stepped inside, like he had been caught stealing instead of repairing the only thing keeping your hut warm at night.
You stared at him. He stared back.
The generator hummed smoother than it had in years.
You cleared your throat.
“I…,” you said, setting your bag down. “Thank you, Scary Carbonite Man.”
His mouth barely lifted, a little.
It was embarrassing, how much you noticed.
It was worse how quickly you got used to him.
Especially because you should’ve known better.
You knew better than to let a strange man stay in your house, especially one the Empire had frozen, transported, and labelled important enough to hide behind ten layers of encryption. You knew better than to sleep under the same roof as someone who could dent durasteel with his bare hand. You knew better than to start trusting someone who hadn’t even told you his name.
But your hut had been so quiet before him.
You hadn’t realised how quiet until it wasn’t anymore.
Now there was the shift of another person breathing in the living room. The scrape of a chair being moved back into place. The clink of him washing the bowl you had left beside him. The small, strange comfort of coming home and knowing you were not walking into emptiness.
You were no longer lonely.
You liked telling him things.
He never answered, but you talked anyway.About the trader in town who was absolutely watering down his fuel and lying about it. About the woman at the market who sold you bruised fruit at half price because she liked your attitude, which probably meant she was insane. About your speeder making a new noise, which you described to him in great detail while he listened with the seriousness of a man receiving military orders.
You told him about the sandstorms. The broken latch on the supply shed. The stupid little lizard that kept getting into your storage crate. Nothing important.
But he listened. And you knew he listened because he fixed what he could. The speeder and latch were fixed. The lizard was relocated.
And after a while, you started leaving pauses like maybe one day he would fill them.
You told yourself you were only letting him stay until he was well enough to leave.
You told yourself a lot of things.
Then one evening, as the suns sank low and painted the walls of your hut in warm amber light, you placed a bowl of broth in front of him and asked, not really expecting an answer anymore, “Do you remember anything yet?”
Silence.
You sat across from him, spooning your own food around the bowl. Then he looked down at his hands and his throat moved.
When he spoke, his voice was rough from disuse, barely more than a scrape.
“Bucky.”
You went still.
He swallowed, like the name hurt coming out. “My name,” he said quietly. “I think.”
For a second, you couldn’t speak.
Your chest gasped so suddenly it almost scared you. So you smiled instead.
“Well,” you said gently, “welcome back, Bucky.”
After that, Bucky started remembering in pieces.
Not enough to make a full picture. Just little scraps of a life that had been torn apart and scattered somewhere he couldn’t reach.
A name, sometimes.
Winnie, Steve, Rebecca, Howard.
He said them once while helping you repair the water filter, so quietly you almost thought you imagined it.
Another time, he said, “There was snow.” And then nothing else for the rest of the day.
You learned not to ask too much.
Bucky didn’t like being asked for things he couldn’t give. You saw it in the way his jaw clicked, the way his eyes dropped, the way his flesh curled against his knee like he was punishing himself for not knowing more.
So you stopped making memory feel like a test.
You let him offer what he could. A mountain. A freight. A fall.
Sometimes, he looked at his metal arm like it belonged to the nightmare and not to him.
You never told him it was okay. You thought maybe he had been told too many things were okay when they were not.
So instead, you sat beside him and said ordinary things. You told him the caf trader in town was still a thief. You told him the left stabiliser on your speeder was making a suspicious noise again. You told him you were fairly certain the little lizard he moved had children and those children were migrating back.
And Bucky listened.
He was still scary if someone in the market looked at him (or you) wrong. But inside your hut, around you, he had started to become careful and gentle.
He put your tools back exactly where you liked them. He moved hot pans away from the edge of the counter after seeing you burn your fingers once. He pretended not to watch you struggle with heavier scrap until you sighed and said, “Fine,” and then he carried it like it weighed nothing.
And oh, it was humiliating.
Even then, the nightmares still came.
Some nights, you heard him from the living room, breathing too fast, shifting on the couch like he was trying not to scream.
Usually, you got up. Usually, you sat near him in the dark and said his name until he came back to himself.
“Bucky. You’re here. You’re safe. It’s just me.”
But one night, you were too tired to do it properly.
You had spent all day in the heat, hauling scrap and bargaining with a man who deserved to be bitten by a sand rat. Your whole body ached. Your eyes burned. You were half-buried under your blanket, right on the edge of sleep, when you heard him give a small, heartbreaking sound from the living room.
You opened your eyes.
For a second, you just stared at the wall.
You were so tired.
So, so tired.
Then you heard him whisper, rough and afraid, “No.”
And that was it. You couldn’t leave him to face the darkness alone.
You got out of bed.
You shuffled out half-asleep, blanket still wrapped around your shoulders, hair a mess, eyes barely open. Bucky was sitting upright on the mat in the living room, his back against the wall, chest rising and falling too quickly.
His metal hand was curled tight. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t really seeing the room.
You stood in front of him for a moment, swaying with exhaustion.
Then you reached down and gently took his wrist. It was warm beneath your fingers, because you wanted him to know where you were before he had to decide whether to touch you back.
He froze.
You gave the smallest tug.
“Bucky,” you mumbled, voice thick with sleep. “Come on.”
He stared up at you, still breathing hard.
So you tugged again, softer this time. “Come on, Buck.”
And he eventually followed like a tired man hearing his name from the only safe place he knew.
He stood. Perhaps he was half expecting you to do the usual routine of sit-with-Bucky-on-the-couch until he calms down.
Instead, you just led him into your room, fingers still wrapped around his wrist, your blanket trailing behind you on the floor. You were too tired to overthink it. Too tired to be embarrassed. Too tired to remember the usual routine.
You climbed into bed first, then looked back at him. You patted the space beside you.
“Here.”
He hesitated.
You sighed, but there was no bite in it. “Bucky.”
That was all, just his name.
He came to you.
Carefully, like your bed was fragile and he was afraid his body would ruin it by being there. He lay down beside you with far too much space between you, stiff and silent and barely breathing.
Absolutely ridiculous, heartbreaking man.
You lasted maybe five seconds before scooting closer.
You curled into his side like it was the most natural thing in the galaxy. Like you had not spent years sleeping alone and insisting you preferred it. Like he had always been there. Your arm slipped over his middle.
Your cheek pressed gently to his shoulder.
“There,” you whispered. “That’s better.”
Bucky didn’t move at first.
For a few breaths, he stayed painfully still, like this comfort was another kind of danger.
So you didn’t push.
You just stayed sleepy and warm and stubborn.
You held him like it was no big thing, like he wasn’t an ex-Imperial asset with a beskar arm and a head full of broken memories.
Slowly, his breathing changed. His shoulders lowered. The tension left him in tiny pieces.
His flesh hand hovered above your arm, uncertain and careful, before settling over you.
You smiled against him, too sleepy to hide it.
The nightmare didn't come back.
Neither of you said anything else.
You just slept.
And for the first time since he fell out of the sky and into your life, Bucky slept like he was allowed to rest.
In the morning, you woke up tucked against him, warm all the way through.
Your arm was still around his waist. His hand was still over yours.
Bucky was awake, staring at the ceiling, perfectly still like he had been afraid to move and ruin it.
You blinked. He blinked.
Neither of you spoke for a while.
Then, because you were you, and feelings were horrifying, you said, “If you tell anyone I’m nice, I’ll deny it.”
For one second, nothing happened. Then Bucky smiled.
Oh, that was dangerous.
Because you had dragged a frozen man out of an Imperial wreck.
Because you had rescued a frozen man from an Imperial wreck, let him sleep in your living room, fed him your terrible broth, given him your spare blanket, and now he was smiling in your bed like maybe he had found his way back to the galaxy through you.
That morning, Bucky announced he was going to the market alone.
You almost dropped the credit chips you were counting.
“Alone?”
He stood near the door, already dressed for the heat, hair tied back in a way you had started pretending didn’t do anything to you. His cloak was pulled over the arm, because people had seen it and you both agreed the attention wasn’t worth it.
He looked at you and nodded once. “Yeah.”
You stared at him. He stared back.
You looked down at the credits spread across the table, then back at him. “Are you sure?”
Bucky’s expression didn’t change much, because it rarely did, but a flicker of amusement went through his eyes. “I know the way.”
He did.
He knew the way because he had been going with you for weeks now. He knew which stalls sold honest parts and which ones sold faulty ones. He knew the woman who kept spare copper wiring under the table. He knew the mechanic who paid you late but always paid eventually. He even helped when you took freelance repair jobs.
He knew your life now.
Still, you frowned. “What do you even need from the market?”
His face went blank too quickly. “Things.”
“Things?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not an answer.” You narrowed your eyes.
Bucky looked away.
Oh, that was definitely suspicious.
You sat back in your chair, credits forgotten beneath your fingers. “You’re being weird.”
His mouth twitched. Then he adjusted the strap of his satchel and said, “I’ll be back before the second sun gets high.”
You wanted to argue, and not because you didn’t trust him. You did, more than you should have. More than you liked admitting to yourself. But the thought of him walking into town alone made you frightened.
Because if he didn’t return, you’d be alone again.
Bucky noticed and softened his voice. “I’ll come back.”
You hated how badly you needed to hear that. So you rolled your eyes and looked back down at the credits. “You better. I still need you to fix the west panel before the next sandstorm.”
“I know.”
“And if you get robbed, I’m not rescuing you.”
Then Bucky said, very quietly, “you think I’d need rescue?”
You waved him off without looking up, because your face had gotten warm for absolutely no reason. “Go away.”
He did.
The hut felt too quiet the second he left.
You tried to ignore it.
You sorted credits. You wrote down what you owed for fuel. Checked the payment from the repair job you had done three days ago and cursed the client under your breath because he had absolutely shorted you. Then you started organising scrap by resale value, because apparently you were the kind of person who needed busy hands to avoid thinking about a man going to the market alone.
You were halfway through separating usable wiring from junk when the first shadow passed the window.
You froze.
That was way too many footsteps to be Bucky.
Your hand moved toward your blaster. The door blew inward before your fingers reached it.
Then, white armour filled the room.
Stormtroopers.
For one stupid second, your mind couldn’t make sense of them inside your hut. They belonged on ships. In garrisons. In your childhood.
Not here. Not in the doorway Bucky had fixed. Not stepping over the threshold of the one place in the galaxy you had made for yourself.
Then one of them raised a blaster.
The first shot scorched the wall where your head had been.
You grabbed the knife from under the table and drove it into the gap beneath the nearest trooper’s helmet. He went down choking. Another one lunged at you. You slammed your elbow into his throat plate and tried to reach your blaster, but there were too many of them, too fast, too loud.
A rifle butt caught you across the ribs and you hit the floor hard.
Still, you kicked, bit, and scrambled.
You got one by the ankle and dragged him down with you, feral and furious, because if the Empire wanted you back on your knees, they would have to break you first.
So they did.
A trooper’s boot came down on your leg, and the pain was instant and blinding.
Your bone broke, and you screamed before you could stop yourself.
The sound ripped out of you, ugly and raw, and for a moment the whole room went white. You couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think past it. Your hands clawed at the floor as pain tore up from your shin into your hip.
A trooper grabbed your hair and yanked your head back.
Then, you felt the cold metal of a blaster pressed to your temple.
That brought the room back into focus.
A trooper crouched in front of you. His helmet tilted slightly, almost curious.“Where is the Winter Soldier?”
You blinked through the pain. “What?”
The blaster dug harder into your skin. “The asset. Where is he?”
Asset.
What, was Bucky this mysterious Winter Soldier? The high value asset they were transporting in carbonite?
Because Bucky wasn’t that to you. He wasn’t a weapon or a thing. When you thought of him, you thought of him sitting at your table with a bowl of broth in his hands. Bucky repairing your generator without saying a word. Bucky lying stiff beside you in bed, afraid to breathe too loudly.
Your fear turned into hatred pretty quickly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The trooper hit you. Your cheek split sideways and blood filled your mouth. “Where is the Winter Soldier?”
You laughed.
It was a terrible sound, wet and shaky and half-mad from pain. “I don’t know what a Winter Soldier is.”
He landed another hit. This time, your vision blurred.
A trooper stepped on your broken leg again, not hard enough to finish it, just enough to make sure you remembered they could. You choked on a sob and hated yourself for it.
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not.”
“The asset was tracked to this dwelling.”
You swallowed blood. “Well,” you rasped, “your tracker’s a pile of shaak shit.”
The blaster pressed harder on your skin.
You could feel the circle of it now. You knew if you stopped being useful, you were going to die.
You thought, absurdly, of Bucky at the market.
Bucky, choosing fruit with too much consideration. Bucky. trying not to get overcharged. Bucky walking back under the suns with that careful focus of his, maybe carrying whatever mysterious things he had refused to explain.
Now, your hopes have changed. You hoped he stayed away. You hoped he ran.
The trooper leaned closer. “Last chance.”
You looked at the black visor where a face should have been.
Your whole body shook. After all, the hurt made the edges of the room pulse. You were terrified. Only idiots and dead people pretended not to be.
But you had been raised by Imperials.
You knew this game. You knew what they wanted.
And you would never let Bucky become one of theirs ever again. So you bared your bloody teeth.
“I said,” you whispered, “I don’t know.”
The trooper’s finger shifted on the trigger.
That’s all, folks! You thought cynically to yourself. It was a short life, and not necessarily a good one, but at least I don’t regret anything!
Then the trooper’s helmet snapped sideways. A giant crack crack split through white plastoid.
The blaster meant for your brains went off into the ceiling.
For half a second, the whole room flashed bright in your ears
Then the body dropped hard.
You flinched against the floor, blinking through blood and dust and the watery edge of your own vision. Your ears rang so badly the entire world seemed like it was underwater. You couldn’t breathe right. Every inhale pulled pain sharp through your muscles. Your broken leg throbbed in bright, sick waves that made the edges of the hut bend and smear.
Another stormtrooper went down. Then another.
At first, you didn’t understand what you were seeing.
A shadow moved through the doorway where your door used to be.
You saw a hint of dark cloak and loose hair. After adjusting your focus, you saw a silver arm catching the light.
It was Bucky, you realised.
Oh.
Bucky.
He didn’t shout your name or make some grand heroic entrance.
He just did what had to be done. Tactical, cold, and frighteningly smart.
And stars, you had never seen anyone fight like that.
He strode into the room like the violence he was about to commit had already happened in his head and his body was only catching up. When a trooper lifted a rifle, Bucky’s beskar hand closed around the barrel and crushed it inward with a shriek of ruined metal. His other hand struck once beneath the helmet. The trooper dropped before the broken weapon hit the floor.
Another turned, but he was too slow. Bucky was already there.
You tried to keep your eyes open, but everything came in pieces: A flash of beskar, A boot sliding through blood, A white helmet hitting the wall hard enough to leave a dent. A gloved hand reaching for him and then bone bending the wrong way. A blaster firing wildly.
Bucky ducked under the shot.
Bucky turned the blaster around and ended the trooper with a shot meant for him.
He didn’t waste motion. There was no anger in it, not the way you understood anger. Just cold, brutal certainty.
It was beautiful in a way that made your stomach twist with grief, because this was what they had wanted from him. This was what the Empire had built out of a broken man and called useful.
This was not the Bucky who fixed your heater. Not the man who listened to you complain about watered-down fuel with the seriousness of a battlefield report.
This was the weapon they had come for.
This was the Winter Soldier.
And you hated them for it so much it burned through the fear.
A stormtrooper stumbled backward over a body, trying to raise both hands.
Bucky didn’t hesitate. You blinked, and the trooper was on the floor.
Another tried to run. He didn’t make it past the threshold.
Then there was only one left. The one whose boot had pressed into your broken leg until your scream tore out of you.
He backed away from you now.
Not far enough. Never far enough for Bucky.
Bucky turned his head.
The man raised his blaster with shaking hands. Bucky closed the gap between them before he could fire.
You didn’t see the killing blow clearly.
Maybe that was mercy. Maybe your body simply gave up on looking.
Then, there was only blissful silence.
Your hut smelled like blaster smoke, hot metal, blood, dust, and the bitter remains of your caf from that morning still sitting on the table. The west panel that Bucky had promised to fix hung crooked from the wall. Your door was gone. Your floor was covered in dead men.
And Bucky stood in the middle of it all, breathing hard.
For one moment, he just stood there with his hands loose at his sides, like he didn’t know where to put them now that there was no one left to hurt.
You tried to say his name, but it only came out as a broken, wet, little sound.
Bucky turned so fast it scared you.
The bloodlust emptied out of his face, and just like the Winter Soldier vanished.
What was left was your Bucky.
He looked mildly horrified, though he could bring himself to regret what he did. His skin was pale beneath the dust. His cerulean blue eyes blown wide as he studied in your cheek, your mouth, your leg, the blood under you, the way you were curled around the pain like your body was trying to protect itself from being alive.
He dropped to his knees so hard you heard it.l“Hey.”
His voice barely worked.
He crawled the last distance to you, hands hovering over you, not touching yet. His metal fingers flexed open, closed, open again, like he was afraid they would forget how to be gentle.
“Hey,” he said again, softer, rougher. “Look at me.”
You tried.
Your left eye, for lack of a better word, was failing. Your vision kept dipping in and out, Bucky’s face breaking apart and coming back together.
His hand moved toward your leg, then stopped when he saw the wrong angle of it.
His mouth parted, but sound came out at first.
“No,” he breathed.
It was almost nothing but a ruin of a word.
“No.”
You wanted to make him stop looking like that.
You wanted to tell him you were fine, even though you were very much not fine. You wanted to tell him his repairs were going to be useless if he kept letting stormtroopers blow doors off their hinges. You wanted to say something sarcastic enough to make this less frightening.
But your tongue was heavy and your teeth were red. Your leg was a star going supernova beneath your skin.
Bucky swallowed hard and slid one arm beneath your shoulders.
“I have you,” he said. “I have you.”
His other arm went beneath your knees, careful around the broken leg, so careful it made tears spill down your temples and into your hair. Even that tiny shift dragged a whine out of you.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped.
You could feel him shaking now. It was a tremor through his chest, his hands, the arm under your back.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, lifting you anyway, because he had to.
Because the floor was soaked with your blood and stormtroopers were dead around you and your little hut, your little life, had been cracked wide open.
You clutched at him with one weak hand, fingers catching in the front of his shirt.
Bucky pulled you into his lap right there among the bodies, not caring about the blood.
His metal hand cradled the back of your head, impossibly gently. His flesh hand pressed over your side where your ribs hurt, not pushing, just holding, like he could keep you together by touch alone.
His throat worked. His eyes wouldn’t stay on yours. They kept flicking away, to the bodies, to the broken door, to his own metal hand in your hair.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
You blinked slowly.
Bucky’s face was close now. Too close for him to hide from you. His jaw was pulled tight, and his lips trembled. Dust clung to the dampness at his temples. Blood, not his, marked the line of his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
That was all he could manage.
Not I’m sorry I killed them.
No, Bucky might regret a great many things, but he could never be sorry for protecting you.
He was just sorry that you saw.
Like the worst thing in the room was that you had seen what he could do.
It was that now, finally, he thought you might understand why they had put him in carbonite. Why they had called him an assert. Why stormtrooper squadrons with blasters had crossed the galaxy to a stupid desert planet to drag him back.
His eyes lifted to yours, terrified. He was waiting, you realised, for you to be disgusted by his actions.
Oh, Bucky.
Your heart hurt worse than your ribs.
You lifted your hand. It was pathetic, really. Your fingers barely obeyed you. Your arm shook with the effort. You missed his face the first time, knuckles brushing his collar instead.
Bucky caught your wrist gently.
He held your hand in his like he didn’t know whether he was allowed to bring it closer.
You made a small sound of frustration.
His eyes narrowed immediately. “What? What hurts?”
You stared at him. He stared back, beautiful and ruined all the same.
So you used the last of your strength to tug your hand free, curl your fingers into his shirt, and pulled
You couldn’t pull far, but Bucky understood enough.
His breath hitched
“No,” he whispered, like he was refusing himself something because he didn’t deserve it. “You don’t—”
You kissed him, and it was not graceful. It was barely even a kiss.
Your split mouth pressed to his, and pain sparked across your cheek so sharply your eyes watered. You tasted blood. Your blood, maybe his. You didn’t care.
Bucky went utterly still.
For one terrible second, he didn’t breathe.
Then a sound left his chest, almost wounded, and his mouth moved against yours with a kind of careful desperation that made you want to sob. He kissed you like he was afraid you would vanish. Like he was afraid he would hurt you by being himself. Like he was trying to ask forgiveness without having enough words to build the question.
His hand stayed at the back of your head. His thumb moved once against your hair.
When you pulled back, he followed for half a breath before stopping himself.
His forehead touched yours, eyes closed. “You came back,” you whispered.
Bucky’s breath shuddered.
“Of course.” It was hoarse and almost angry with how true it was.
That was more than enough.
Your fingers loosened in his shirt.
For a moment, you just existed there in his arms while the world tilted around you. His heartbeat was too fast beneath your palm. His breathing kept catching. Every few seconds, his grip adjusted, checking you, making sure you were still there.
Then his gaze dropped to your throat, just between your collarbones, as if he remembered something.
His face changed.
You frowned weakly. “What?”
Bucky didn’t answer right away. Instead, he shifted you against him with unbearable care, keeping your broken leg supported, and reached into the inside of his cloak.
His hand came out closed around a small piece of metal.
For one exhausted, feverish second, you thought it might be medicine.
It wasn’t.
A necklace slipped from his fingers.
It has a simple chain and a little pendant. The silver metal curled around a blue stone, cloudy at the centre, bright at the edge. It wasn't polished or perfect by any standards. It was handmade and slightly uneven.
It was… lovely.
So lovely your breath hitched.
Bucky looked down at it like he didn’t know what to do with this gift now that he had brought it into a room full of death.
“I got it for you, from the market,” he said.
You blinked at him, throat closing.
He stared at the necklace, not at you.
“You said it was your birthday when you saved me.”
You forgot, for one stupid second, how much pain you were in.
“You remembered?”
Bucky’s thumb rubbed over the little blue stone once.
“You said.” His brow furrowed, like the memory was delicate and he was afraid of breaking it. “The night before you found me.”
You didn’t even realize he had heard you at that point. You were just rambling to him in his post-carbonite fugue state, you didn’t even realise he would remember the information for a later date.
Your birthday.
Your stupid, lonely birthday.
You remembered that day, having a cold caf in your hands. You remembered watching the black sky over your hut. You remembered the tears running down on your face. You remembered making a pathetic wish made on what you thought was a star.
I don’t want to be alone anymore.
You had thought no one in the galaxy had heard you.
But whoever the maker was, they had sent him.
Frozen in carbonite, maybe. Falling out of the sky, maybe. Half-dead, half-gone, dragged through the atmosphere by an Imperial ship.
It didn’t matter.
He had remembered.
Bucky, who still lost whole pieces of himself. Bucky, who remembered snow and names and falling only in fragments. Bucky, who couldn’t always trust his own mind.
Bucky remembered that his ship fell out birthday.
A broken sound left your lips, and his head snapped up. “Does it hurt?”
You laughed and cried at the same time, which was a mistake because your ribs immediately punished you for it.
“Don’t,” he said, helpless. “Don’t do that. Just stay with me, okay?”
“You bought me a necklace,” you whispered.
His mouth tightened, like he was bracing for rejection.
“I wish I could get you it sooner,” he said.
“Bucky….”
“I saved credits from repairs.”
“I know, Buck.”
His eyes flicked to yours.
“I wanted…” He stopped as the words failed him.
His teeth clenched worked once, then he tried again.
“I wanted you to have something from me.”
Your lips parted.
Bucky looked down again, ashamed of the softness, maybe. Ashamed that the hands that had just killed men could still want to give you a pretty thing.
His voice went smaller. “You have given me so much.”
Oh.
Oh Bucky, as if you needed repayment. As if your kindness was currency. As if you needed him to give you something to be loved.
You only wanted him.
Carefully, with the kind of concentration he usually reserved for delicate wiring, Bucky shifted the chain around your neck. His fingers brushed your skin. The metal was cool at first, then warmed almost instantly against your throat.
The clasp took him longer than it should have. His hands were shaking too badly.
You watched his face as he worked. The furrow between his brows. The tight set of his mouth. The way he kept pausing whenever you breathed wrong, checking if he had hurt you.
Finally, the necklace settled against your chest.
The little blue stone rested above your heartbeat.
Bucky’s fingers stayed there for half a second longer than necessary.
Then he pulled away like he had no right.
You caught his wrist. “Bucky.”
He looked at you.
You wanted to say it properly: You weren’t afraid.
He had saved you.
Whatever the Empire had made him, it didn’t get to own every part of him.
That you had now seen the weapon, yes, but you had also seen the man who fixed your water filter, remembered your birthday, listened to your useless stories, and came back.
But pain was dragging you under. Your thoughts were slipping loose, and words were hard.
So you said the only thing you could, “Stay.”
He bent over you, forehead pressing to your temple, his breath shaking against your skin.
“Always,” he said.
Outside, the suns burned over the desert. Somewhere beyond the ridge, more Imperials would come, more ships, more hunters.
But in your ruined hut, with your blood drying on his shirt and his gift resting over your heart, Bucky held you like the galaxy could take anything else from him and he would still refuse to let go of this.
And for the first time in your life, you knew that neither of you would ever have to be alone again.
Summary : You wish on a shooting star, but unfortunately, it’s not a star at all. It’s an Imperial transport crash-landing with Bucky Barnes inside.
Pairing : Imperial Asset! Bucky Barnes x Scavanger! reader (she/her) | Star Wars AU
Warnings/tags : toxic parents, crash site/bodies, amnesia, PTSD, nightmares, forced proximity(?), slow burn, home invasion by stormtroopers, interrogation/torture, blood/injury, protective Bucky, hurt/comfort, (Let me know if I missed anything!)
Word count : 7.7k
Note : It was supposed to be a hear me out but I went overboard. Enjoy!
You were raised Imperial.
Your parents worked for the Empire, and they expected you to do the same when you grow up. They believed in order, in obedience. They believed some worlds needed to be conquered for their own good. They believed the fear of the native population was useful. They believed mercy was weakness and they were owed the power they wielded.
For a long time, you believed them too.
As children usually do. But then, you got older. And you woke up.
You started feeling disgusted by the way your parents spoke about mineral-rich planets like they were economic opportunities instead of homes. You started hating them when they discussed occupation routes during dinner. You eventually realize that your comfortable childhood, your privileged life, had been paid for by people who had never asked to be ruled and used by the empire while your parents and the other senior officers reaped their rewards.
And every time you tried to bring it up, they dismissed you. They told you that you were ungrateful for their hard work. They told you they were protecting you. They told you that you’d never survive out there without the safety that the empire afforded you.
Frankly, you feel… gaslit.
By the time you turned eighteen, you knew one thing with absolute certainty: You would rather live a hard life than make someone else’s harder.
So you ran.
You packed what you could carry, emptied the credits you had from the savings account your parents had set for you, and disappeared into the Outer Rim before your parents could drag you back and talk you into joining the imperial work force.
The life you built there was not easy. But really, nothing in the Outer Rim ever was.
Your hut leaked during acid rain. Your speeder broke down every other cycle. Half your meals came from tins with faded labels, and the other half came from whatever you could barter, fix, steal, or scavenge. Your hands were always bruised. Your boots were always full of dust.
But it was yours. That mattered because you proved your parents wrong. You survived.
No one was demanding you to salute. No one barked orders at you. No one asked you to kill a witness. You weren’t contributing to war crimes. You scavenged wrecks, repaired junk, sold parts, kept your head down, and survived.
It was a simple life.
Lonely, sometimes, but simple. You told yourself company was overrated anyway. Most days, you even believed it.
Then one night several years later, on what would have been your birthday back on your home planet, you sat outside your hut with a cup of bitter caf going cold in your hands and realised you had no one to celebrate it with.
No one knew. No one cared.
Oh.
For the first time since you left, you felt truly alone.
You cried quietly under the wide black sky, angry at yourself for it, because loneliness felt too much like weakness and you had spent your whole life making sure you didn’t need anyone.
Then something bright streaked across the stars.
A shooting star.
You almost laughed.
Some stupid, embarrassing part of you closed its eyes and made a wish:
I don’t want to be alone anymore.
Then the star broke apart. The light flared and it grew larger.
Your breath hitched.
That was not a star. That was a ship.
It tore through the atmosphere in a burning line of fire, vanishing beyond the ridge with a distant, shaking boom. For a long moment, you just stared.
Then you wiped your tears off with the heel of your hand.
A ship always meant one thing: Payday tomorrow.
By morning’s first light, you were standing by the wreckage of the ship, assessing the damage.
It was Imperial. No doubt about it.
Even half-buried in the sand, you could recognise the grey plating and militarised design.
You stared at it for a moment, before spitting into the dust. “Figures.”
The crash had carved a long, black mark through the flats. Debris scattered everywhere, glittering in the early sun like treasure if you were desperate enough.
You were.
To be fair, a wreck like this could keep you fed for weeks if you were careful. Power cells. Rations. Med supplies. Navigation parts. Maybe even weapon components, if the fire had been kind.
So you pulled your scarf over your mouth and climbed inside.
The pilot was dead, and so were the others you found.
Stormtroopers, mostly. Bodies broken by impact, armour cracked open against the walls because they’re useless. The empire always gave their grunt workers the weakest, flimsiest armors. You stepped around them without looking too closely.
No movement, according to your scanner, which likely meant there were no survivors.
Good.
You got to work.
The first hour was easy. You filled your bag with ration packs, two intact med kits, a coil of wiring, a handful of power cells, and one data cylinder that looked sealed enough to be worth something. You found a half-crushed crate of thermal blankets and marked it for later.
Then you reached the cargo manifest.
You usually uploaded files and sold their intel. Most of the display was damaged, lines of text blinking in and out on the cracked screen, corrupted by impact.
Still, you scrolled through the manifest:
Medical equipment.
Restricted military hardware.
Carbonite containment.
High-value asset.
You went still. High value asset???
“Well,” you murmured. “That sounds expensive.”
You followed the remaining power trail deeper into the hold.
The air changed the lower you went. Frost clung to the walls despite the heat outside, and your breath fogged in front of your face. The emergency lights pulsed red along the floor, turning the corridor bloody in flashes.
At the end of it, behind a jammed door you had to cut open with your torch, you found a containment chamber.
You expected maybe weapons or credits.
Instead, you found a man frozen in carbonite.
For a long moment, you only stared at him.
He stood upright in the transport frame, trapped beneath a thick, dull sheen of carbonite. His face was barely visible, but clearly it was tactical clothes under the freeze. Human, as far as you could tell.
Not treasure.
Your stomach sank.
“No,” you whispered, already angry. “No, no, no.”
Because this wasn’t what you wanted.
You wanted parts. You wanted credits. You wanted something you could pull apart, sell, eat from, survive on.
You didn’t want a moral crisis in the shape of a frozen man.
You knew you should have left him.
The Empire did not freeze harmless people and label them high-value assets. He could be dangerous. He could wake up and kill you. He could be someone so terrible that even the Empire had decided to keep him locked away.
Or he could be someone the Empire had used.
Oh, stars.
You thought of your parents, explaining that occupation was necessary, that rebellion was disorder, that some planets simply needed a firmer hand. You remember them telling you some people deserved to die.
So if you left him here, trapped in a dead Imperial ship because saving him was inconvenient, you were no better than them, were you?
You swore under your breath.
“Maker,” you muttered. “I hate this.”
Getting him home was miserable.
The carbonite slab was too heavy and your makeshift hover-sled kept dragging to one side. You cursed him the entire way across the flats. You cursed the Empire. You cursed your own conscience most of all.
By the time you reached your hut, your back hurt, your arms shook, and the first sun was already high enough to turn the sand bright and cruel.
You dragged the slab inside and left him propped against the far wall.
For a while, you just stood there, breathing hard.
He said nothing. Obviously.
You pointed at him anyway.
“You’re already a problem.” Then, quietly, because you hated yourself for caring, you said. “Don’t make me regret this.”
You went back for the defrosting equipment after a cup of caf and half an hour of lying on your floor questioning every decision you had ever made.
The chamber was too big to move whole, so you stripped what you could: Heat regulators, pressure valves, control panel, cables, anything that looked remotely necessary and only mildly likely to explode.
By the time you got it all home and wired it into your generator, the night had started to creep over the desert.
Your hut smelled like dust, old metal, and overheating circuits.
The lights flickered when the machine powered on.
You stood in front of the carbonite slab, hand on the defrost switch in the other.
A sensible person would have stopped. A smarter person would have sold his location.
But you were neither.
So you took one steadying breath and hit the switch.
The machine groaned.
Heat hissed through the slab. Frost melted in streaks. Carbonite softened, shining wet under the light of your hut. The man’s shape became clearer by degrees: his face, his chest, his shoulders…
Oh. His left arm was metal.
It was silver, segmented, and impossibly well-crafted, catching the light in a way that made your scanner chirp sharply from your workbench.
You glanced at the reading, then back at the arm.
Your mouth went dry. Beskar alloy.
“What the fuck?” you whispered.
The carbonite released with a violent crack.
The man fell forward, and you barely caught him.
Damn.
He was heavy.
That was your first thought when the man came crashing out of the carbonite and nearly took you down with him. Not he’s alive. Not what did the Empire do to him? Not even why in the stars does he have a stupidly expensive arm?
Just…
Damn.
The Empire really had frozen the densest man in the galaxy and made him your problem.
He hit the floor hard, half on top of you, shivering like his body had forgotten how to be a body. His lungs dragged in air with a terrible, broken sound. His metal hand scraped against the floor. His eyes were open, but cloudy and unfocused, staring through you like he was still trapped. “Hey,” you said, breathless under half his weight. “Hey. Easy. Don’t die on me now. I worked very hard to steal you.”
He didn’t answer.
After that, he was feverish for days.
Carbonite sickness, you guessed. He must’ve been frozen long enough that he could barely see, barely stand, barely make it three steps without his knees giving out. You had to help him drink. Help him sit up. Help him stumble to the fresher with one of your hands braced carefully around his waist and the other hovering near his arm, because you still were not sure whether touching the metal would make him panic.
To be fair, things made him panic at first.
He flinched when the kettle screamed, when the generator kicked on, when your boots scuffed the floor too suddenly, when your hand came too close without warning.
He never attacked you, not really, but sometimes he woke up with a terrified inhale and that beskar hand clenched hard enough to dent the edge of your cot. Sometimes he stared at the wall for hours. Sometimes he looked down at his own arm like he had woken up expecting it not to be there.
So you learned to speak before entering the room. You told him what you were doing before you touched him. You left food within reach and pretended not to notice that he only ate when your back was turned.
You gave him the living room because you only had one bedchamber and you were kind, not stupid. The first few nights, he sat upright against the wall instead of lying down, blanket untouched beside him. By the fourth night, he slept under it. By the sixth, he stopped flinching when you walked across the room. By the eighth, he let you change the bandage around a raw patch of skin near the edge of his metal shoulder without looking like he wanted to disappear through the floor.
He still didn’t speak, though.
You asked once, because you could not help yourself. “Do you have a name?”
His teeth clenched and his eyes lowered.
Nothing.
You waited.
Still nothing.
So you sighed and raised both hands. “Fine. Keep your secrets, scary carbonite man.”
That became his name in your head after that.
Scary Carbonite Man.
Scary Carbonite Man sat silently at your table while you repaired circuit boards. Scary Carbonite Man watched the door like he expected the whole galaxy to come through it with a blaster. Scary Carbonite Man drank broth like it was a task he’d been assigned and not nourishment.
And then, somewhere between one cycle and the next, Scary Carbonite Man started helping around the hut.
You woke up one morning to find the loose panel by the door screwed back into place.
Another day, the water filter stopped making that awful grinding noise it had made for cycles. You had been meaning to fix it. You had also been meaning to fix the roof, the heater, the left stabiliser on your speeder, and your entire life, so the filter had been low on the list.
But he fixed it as if he was trying to make himself useful enough to be allowed to stay.
You came home from the market one afternoon and found him crouched beside your faulty generator, brows drawn together, metal fingers surprisingly delicate around the wiring. He froze when you stepped inside, like he had been caught stealing instead of repairing the only thing keeping your hut warm at night.
You stared at him. He stared back.
The generator hummed smoother than it had in years.
You cleared your throat.
“I…,” you said, setting your bag down. “Thank you, Scary Carbonite Man.”
His mouth barely lifted, a little.
It was embarrassing, how much you noticed.
It was worse how quickly you got used to him.
Especially because you should’ve known better.
You knew better than to let a strange man stay in your house, especially one the Empire had frozen, transported, and labelled important enough to hide behind ten layers of encryption. You knew better than to sleep under the same roof as someone who could dent durasteel with his bare hand. You knew better than to start trusting someone who hadn’t even told you his name.
But your hut had been so quiet before him.
You hadn’t realised how quiet until it wasn’t anymore.
Now there was the shift of another person breathing in the living room. The scrape of a chair being moved back into place. The clink of him washing the bowl you had left beside him. The small, strange comfort of coming home and knowing you were not walking into emptiness.
You were no longer lonely.
You liked telling him things.
He never answered, but you talked anyway.About the trader in town who was absolutely watering down his fuel and lying about it. About the woman at the market who sold you bruised fruit at half price because she liked your attitude, which probably meant she was insane. About your speeder making a new noise, which you described to him in great detail while he listened with the seriousness of a man receiving military orders.
You told him about the sandstorms. The broken latch on the supply shed. The stupid little lizard that kept getting into your storage crate. Nothing important.
But he listened. And you knew he listened because he fixed what he could. The speeder and latch were fixed. The lizard was relocated.
And after a while, you started leaving pauses like maybe one day he would fill them.
You told yourself you were only letting him stay until he was well enough to leave.
You told yourself a lot of things.
Then one evening, as the suns sank low and painted the walls of your hut in warm amber light, you placed a bowl of broth in front of him and asked, not really expecting an answer anymore, “Do you remember anything yet?”
Silence.
You sat across from him, spooning your own food around the bowl. Then he looked down at his hands and his throat moved.
When he spoke, his voice was rough from disuse, barely more than a scrape.
“Bucky.”
You went still.
He swallowed, like the name hurt coming out. “My name,” he said quietly. “I think.”
For a second, you couldn’t speak.
Your chest gasped so suddenly it almost scared you. So you smiled instead.
“Well,” you said gently, “welcome back, Bucky.”
After that, Bucky started remembering in pieces.
Not enough to make a full picture. Just little scraps of a life that had been torn apart and scattered somewhere he couldn’t reach.
A name, sometimes.
Winnie, Steve, Rebecca, Howard.
He said them once while helping you repair the water filter, so quietly you almost thought you imagined it.
Another time, he said, “There was snow.” And then nothing else for the rest of the day.
You learned not to ask too much.
Bucky didn’t like being asked for things he couldn’t give. You saw it in the way his jaw clicked, the way his eyes dropped, the way his flesh curled against his knee like he was punishing himself for not knowing more.
So you stopped making memory feel like a test.
You let him offer what he could. A mountain. A freight. A fall.
Sometimes, he looked at his metal arm like it belonged to the nightmare and not to him.
You never told him it was okay. You thought maybe he had been told too many things were okay when they were not.
So instead, you sat beside him and said ordinary things. You told him the caf trader in town was still a thief. You told him the left stabiliser on your speeder was making a suspicious noise again. You told him you were fairly certain the little lizard he moved had children and those children were migrating back.
And Bucky listened.
He was still scary if someone in the market looked at him (or you) wrong. But inside your hut, around you, he had started to become careful and gentle.
He put your tools back exactly where you liked them. He moved hot pans away from the edge of the counter after seeing you burn your fingers once. He pretended not to watch you struggle with heavier scrap until you sighed and said, “Fine,” and then he carried it like it weighed nothing.
And oh, it was humiliating.
Even then, the nightmares still came.
Some nights, you heard him from the living room, breathing too fast, shifting on the couch like he was trying not to scream.
Usually, you got up. Usually, you sat near him in the dark and said his name until he came back to himself.
“Bucky. You’re here. You’re safe. It’s just me.”
But one night, you were too tired to do it properly.
You had spent all day in the heat, hauling scrap and bargaining with a man who deserved to be bitten by a sand rat. Your whole body ached. Your eyes burned. You were half-buried under your blanket, right on the edge of sleep, when you heard him give a small, heartbreaking sound from the living room.
You opened your eyes.
For a second, you just stared at the wall.
You were so tired.
So, so tired.
Then you heard him whisper, rough and afraid, “No.”
And that was it. You couldn’t leave him to face the darkness alone.
You got out of bed.
You shuffled out half-asleep, blanket still wrapped around your shoulders, hair a mess, eyes barely open. Bucky was sitting upright on the mat in the living room, his back against the wall, chest rising and falling too quickly.
His metal hand was curled tight. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t really seeing the room.
You stood in front of him for a moment, swaying with exhaustion.
Then you reached down and gently took his wrist. It was warm beneath your fingers, because you wanted him to know where you were before he had to decide whether to touch you back.
He froze.
You gave the smallest tug.
“Bucky,” you mumbled, voice thick with sleep. “Come on.”
He stared up at you, still breathing hard.
So you tugged again, softer this time. “Come on, Buck.”
And he eventually followed like a tired man hearing his name from the only safe place he knew.
He stood. Perhaps he was half expecting you to do the usual routine of sit-with-Bucky-on-the-couch until he calms down.
Instead, you just led him into your room, fingers still wrapped around his wrist, your blanket trailing behind you on the floor. You were too tired to overthink it. Too tired to be embarrassed. Too tired to remember the usual routine.
You climbed into bed first, then looked back at him. You patted the space beside you.
“Here.”
He hesitated.
You sighed, but there was no bite in it. “Bucky.”
That was all, just his name.
He came to you.
Carefully, like your bed was fragile and he was afraid his body would ruin it by being there. He lay down beside you with far too much space between you, stiff and silent and barely breathing.
Absolutely ridiculous, heartbreaking man.
You lasted maybe five seconds before scooting closer.
You curled into his side like it was the most natural thing in the galaxy. Like you had not spent years sleeping alone and insisting you preferred it. Like he had always been there. Your arm slipped over his middle.
Your cheek pressed gently to his shoulder.
“There,” you whispered. “That’s better.”
Bucky didn’t move at first.
For a few breaths, he stayed painfully still, like this comfort was another kind of danger.
So you didn’t push.
You just stayed sleepy and warm and stubborn.
You held him like it was no big thing, like he wasn’t an ex-Imperial asset with a beskar arm and a head full of broken memories.
Slowly, his breathing changed. His shoulders lowered. The tension left him in tiny pieces.
His flesh hand hovered above your arm, uncertain and careful, before settling over you.
You smiled against him, too sleepy to hide it.
The nightmare didn't come back.
Neither of you said anything else.
You just slept.
And for the first time since he fell out of the sky and into your life, Bucky slept like he was allowed to rest.
In the morning, you woke up tucked against him, warm all the way through.
Your arm was still around his waist. His hand was still over yours.
Bucky was awake, staring at the ceiling, perfectly still like he had been afraid to move and ruin it.
You blinked. He blinked.
Neither of you spoke for a while.
Then, because you were you, and feelings were horrifying, you said, “If you tell anyone I’m nice, I’ll deny it.”
For one second, nothing happened. Then Bucky smiled.
Oh, that was dangerous.
Because you had dragged a frozen man out of an Imperial wreck.
Because you had rescued a frozen man from an Imperial wreck, let him sleep in your living room, fed him your terrible broth, given him your spare blanket, and now he was smiling in your bed like maybe he had found his way back to the galaxy through you.
That morning, Bucky announced he was going to the market alone.
You almost dropped the credit chips you were counting.
“Alone?”
He stood near the door, already dressed for the heat, hair tied back in a way you had started pretending didn’t do anything to you. His cloak was pulled over the arm, because people had seen it and you both agreed the attention wasn’t worth it.
He looked at you and nodded once. “Yeah.”
You stared at him. He stared back.
You looked down at the credits spread across the table, then back at him. “Are you sure?”
Bucky’s expression didn’t change much, because it rarely did, but a flicker of amusement went through his eyes. “I know the way.”
He did.
He knew the way because he had been going with you for weeks now. He knew which stalls sold honest parts and which ones sold faulty ones. He knew the woman who kept spare copper wiring under the table. He knew the mechanic who paid you late but always paid eventually. He even helped when you took freelance repair jobs.
He knew your life now.
Still, you frowned. “What do you even need from the market?”
His face went blank too quickly. “Things.”
“Things?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not an answer.” You narrowed your eyes.
Bucky looked away.
Oh, that was definitely suspicious.
You sat back in your chair, credits forgotten beneath your fingers. “You’re being weird.”
His mouth twitched. Then he adjusted the strap of his satchel and said, “I’ll be back before the second sun gets high.”
You wanted to argue, and not because you didn’t trust him. You did, more than you should have. More than you liked admitting to yourself. But the thought of him walking into town alone made you frightened.
Because if he didn’t return, you’d be alone again.
Bucky noticed and softened his voice. “I’ll come back.”
You hated how badly you needed to hear that. So you rolled your eyes and looked back down at the credits. “You better. I still need you to fix the west panel before the next sandstorm.”
“I know.”
“And if you get robbed, I’m not rescuing you.”
Then Bucky said, very quietly, “you think I’d need rescue?”
You waved him off without looking up, because your face had gotten warm for absolutely no reason. “Go away.”
He did.
The hut felt too quiet the second he left.
You tried to ignore it.
You sorted credits. You wrote down what you owed for fuel. Checked the payment from the repair job you had done three days ago and cursed the client under your breath because he had absolutely shorted you. Then you started organising scrap by resale value, because apparently you were the kind of person who needed busy hands to avoid thinking about a man going to the market alone.
You were halfway through separating usable wiring from junk when the first shadow passed the window.
You froze.
That was way too many footsteps to be Bucky.
Your hand moved toward your blaster. The door blew inward before your fingers reached it.
Then, white armour filled the room.
Stormtroopers.
For one stupid second, your mind couldn’t make sense of them inside your hut. They belonged on ships. In garrisons. In your childhood.
Not here. Not in the doorway Bucky had fixed. Not stepping over the threshold of the one place in the galaxy you had made for yourself.
Then one of them raised a blaster.
The first shot scorched the wall where your head had been.
You grabbed the knife from under the table and drove it into the gap beneath the nearest trooper’s helmet. He went down choking. Another one lunged at you. You slammed your elbow into his throat plate and tried to reach your blaster, but there were too many of them, too fast, too loud.
A rifle butt caught you across the ribs and you hit the floor hard.
Still, you kicked, bit, and scrambled.
You got one by the ankle and dragged him down with you, feral and furious, because if the Empire wanted you back on your knees, they would have to break you first.
So they did.
A trooper’s boot came down on your leg, and the pain was instant and blinding.
Your bone broke, and you screamed before you could stop yourself.
The sound ripped out of you, ugly and raw, and for a moment the whole room went white. You couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think past it. Your hands clawed at the floor as pain tore up from your shin into your hip.
A trooper grabbed your hair and yanked your head back.
Then, you felt the cold metal of a blaster pressed to your temple.
That brought the room back into focus.
A trooper crouched in front of you. His helmet tilted slightly, almost curious.“Where is the Winter Soldier?”
You blinked through the pain. “What?”
The blaster dug harder into your skin. “The asset. Where is he?”
Asset.
What, was Bucky this mysterious Winter Soldier? The high value asset they were transporting in carbonite?
Because Bucky wasn’t that to you. He wasn’t a weapon or a thing. When you thought of him, you thought of him sitting at your table with a bowl of broth in his hands. Bucky repairing your generator without saying a word. Bucky lying stiff beside you in bed, afraid to breathe too loudly.
Your fear turned into hatred pretty quickly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The trooper hit you. Your cheek split sideways and blood filled your mouth. “Where is the Winter Soldier?”
You laughed.
It was a terrible sound, wet and shaky and half-mad from pain. “I don’t know what a Winter Soldier is.”
He landed another hit. This time, your vision blurred.
A trooper stepped on your broken leg again, not hard enough to finish it, just enough to make sure you remembered they could. You choked on a sob and hated yourself for it.
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not.”
“The asset was tracked to this dwelling.”
You swallowed blood. “Well,” you rasped, “your tracker’s a pile of shaak shit.”
The blaster pressed harder on your skin.
You could feel the circle of it now. You knew if you stopped being useful, you were going to die.
You thought, absurdly, of Bucky at the market.
Bucky, choosing fruit with too much consideration. Bucky. trying not to get overcharged. Bucky walking back under the suns with that careful focus of his, maybe carrying whatever mysterious things he had refused to explain.
Now, your hopes have changed. You hoped he stayed away. You hoped he ran.
The trooper leaned closer. “Last chance.”
You looked at the black visor where a face should have been.
Your whole body shook. After all, the hurt made the edges of the room pulse. You were terrified. Only idiots and dead people pretended not to be.
But you had been raised by Imperials.
You knew this game. You knew what they wanted.
And you would never let Bucky become one of theirs ever again. So you bared your bloody teeth.
“I said,” you whispered, “I don’t know.”
The trooper’s finger shifted on the trigger.
That’s all, folks! You thought cynically to yourself. It was a short life, and not necessarily a good one, but at least I don’t regret anything!
Then the trooper’s helmet snapped sideways. A giant crack crack split through white plastoid.
The blaster meant for your brains went off into the ceiling.
For half a second, the whole room flashed bright in your ears
Then the body dropped hard.
You flinched against the floor, blinking through blood and dust and the watery edge of your own vision. Your ears rang so badly the entire world seemed like it was underwater. You couldn’t breathe right. Every inhale pulled pain sharp through your muscles. Your broken leg throbbed in bright, sick waves that made the edges of the hut bend and smear.
Another stormtrooper went down. Then another.
At first, you didn’t understand what you were seeing.
A shadow moved through the doorway where your door used to be.
You saw a hint of dark cloak and loose hair. After adjusting your focus, you saw a silver arm catching the light.
It was Bucky, you realised.
Oh.
Bucky.
He didn’t shout your name or make some grand heroic entrance.
He just did what had to be done. Tactical, cold, and frighteningly smart.
And stars, you had never seen anyone fight like that.
He strode into the room like the violence he was about to commit had already happened in his head and his body was only catching up. When a trooper lifted a rifle, Bucky’s beskar hand closed around the barrel and crushed it inward with a shriek of ruined metal. His other hand struck once beneath the helmet. The trooper dropped before the broken weapon hit the floor.
Another turned, but he was too slow. Bucky was already there.
You tried to keep your eyes open, but everything came in pieces: A flash of beskar, A boot sliding through blood, A white helmet hitting the wall hard enough to leave a dent. A gloved hand reaching for him and then bone bending the wrong way. A blaster firing wildly.
Bucky ducked under the shot.
Bucky turned the blaster around and ended the trooper with a shot meant for him.
He didn’t waste motion. There was no anger in it, not the way you understood anger. Just cold, brutal certainty.
It was beautiful in a way that made your stomach twist with grief, because this was what they had wanted from him. This was what the Empire had built out of a broken man and called useful.
This was not the Bucky who fixed your heater. Not the man who listened to you complain about watered-down fuel with the seriousness of a battlefield report.
This was the weapon they had come for.
This was the Winter Soldier.
And you hated them for it so much it burned through the fear.
A stormtrooper stumbled backward over a body, trying to raise both hands.
Bucky didn’t hesitate. You blinked, and the trooper was on the floor.
Another tried to run. He didn’t make it past the threshold.
Then there was only one left. The one whose boot had pressed into your broken leg until your scream tore out of you.
He backed away from you now.
Not far enough. Never far enough for Bucky.
Bucky turned his head.
The man raised his blaster with shaking hands. Bucky closed the gap between them before he could fire.
You didn’t see the killing blow clearly.
Maybe that was mercy. Maybe your body simply gave up on looking.
Then, there was only blissful silence.
Your hut smelled like blaster smoke, hot metal, blood, dust, and the bitter remains of your caf from that morning still sitting on the table. The west panel that Bucky had promised to fix hung crooked from the wall. Your door was gone. Your floor was covered in dead men.
And Bucky stood in the middle of it all, breathing hard.
For one moment, he just stood there with his hands loose at his sides, like he didn’t know where to put them now that there was no one left to hurt.
You tried to say his name, but it only came out as a broken, wet, little sound.
Bucky turned so fast it scared you.
The bloodlust emptied out of his face, and just like the Winter Soldier vanished.
What was left was your Bucky.
He looked mildly horrified, though he could bring himself to regret what he did. His skin was pale beneath the dust. His cerulean blue eyes blown wide as he studied in your cheek, your mouth, your leg, the blood under you, the way you were curled around the pain like your body was trying to protect itself from being alive.
He dropped to his knees so hard you heard it.l“Hey.”
His voice barely worked.
He crawled the last distance to you, hands hovering over you, not touching yet. His metal fingers flexed open, closed, open again, like he was afraid they would forget how to be gentle.
“Hey,” he said again, softer, rougher. “Look at me.”
You tried.
Your left eye, for lack of a better word, was failing. Your vision kept dipping in and out, Bucky’s face breaking apart and coming back together.
His hand moved toward your leg, then stopped when he saw the wrong angle of it.
His mouth parted, but sound came out at first.
“No,” he breathed.
It was almost nothing but a ruin of a word.
“No.”
You wanted to make him stop looking like that.
You wanted to tell him you were fine, even though you were very much not fine. You wanted to tell him his repairs were going to be useless if he kept letting stormtroopers blow doors off their hinges. You wanted to say something sarcastic enough to make this less frightening.
But your tongue was heavy and your teeth were red. Your leg was a star going supernova beneath your skin.
Bucky swallowed hard and slid one arm beneath your shoulders.
“I have you,” he said. “I have you.”
His other arm went beneath your knees, careful around the broken leg, so careful it made tears spill down your temples and into your hair. Even that tiny shift dragged a whine out of you.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped.
You could feel him shaking now. It was a tremor through his chest, his hands, the arm under your back.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, lifting you anyway, because he had to.
Because the floor was soaked with your blood and stormtroopers were dead around you and your little hut, your little life, had been cracked wide open.
You clutched at him with one weak hand, fingers catching in the front of his shirt.
Bucky pulled you into his lap right there among the bodies, not caring about the blood.
His metal hand cradled the back of your head, impossibly gently. His flesh hand pressed over your side where your ribs hurt, not pushing, just holding, like he could keep you together by touch alone.
His throat worked. His eyes wouldn’t stay on yours. They kept flicking away, to the bodies, to the broken door, to his own metal hand in your hair.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
You blinked slowly.
Bucky’s face was close now. Too close for him to hide from you. His jaw was pulled tight, and his lips trembled. Dust clung to the dampness at his temples. Blood, not his, marked the line of his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
That was all he could manage.
Not I’m sorry I killed them.
No, Bucky might regret a great many things, but he could never be sorry for protecting you.
He was just sorry that you saw.
Like the worst thing in the room was that you had seen what he could do.
It was that now, finally, he thought you might understand why they had put him in carbonite. Why they had called him an assert. Why stormtrooper squadrons with blasters had crossed the galaxy to a stupid desert planet to drag him back.
His eyes lifted to yours, terrified. He was waiting, you realised, for you to be disgusted by his actions.
Oh, Bucky.
Your heart hurt worse than your ribs.
You lifted your hand. It was pathetic, really. Your fingers barely obeyed you. Your arm shook with the effort. You missed his face the first time, knuckles brushing his collar instead.
Bucky caught your wrist gently.
He held your hand in his like he didn’t know whether he was allowed to bring it closer.
You made a small sound of frustration.
His eyes narrowed immediately. “What? What hurts?”
You stared at him. He stared back, beautiful and ruined all the same.
So you used the last of your strength to tug your hand free, curl your fingers into his shirt, and pulled
You couldn’t pull far, but Bucky understood enough.
His breath hitched
“No,” he whispered, like he was refusing himself something because he didn’t deserve it. “You don’t—”
You kissed him, and it was not graceful. It was barely even a kiss.
Your split mouth pressed to his, and pain sparked across your cheek so sharply your eyes watered. You tasted blood. Your blood, maybe his. You didn’t care.
Bucky went utterly still.
For one terrible second, he didn’t breathe.
Then a sound left his chest, almost wounded, and his mouth moved against yours with a kind of careful desperation that made you want to sob. He kissed you like he was afraid you would vanish. Like he was afraid he would hurt you by being himself. Like he was trying to ask forgiveness without having enough words to build the question.
His hand stayed at the back of your head. His thumb moved once against your hair.
When you pulled back, he followed for half a breath before stopping himself.
His forehead touched yours, eyes closed. “You came back,” you whispered.
Bucky’s breath shuddered.
“Of course.” It was hoarse and almost angry with how true it was.
That was more than enough.
Your fingers loosened in his shirt.
For a moment, you just existed there in his arms while the world tilted around you. His heartbeat was too fast beneath your palm. His breathing kept catching. Every few seconds, his grip adjusted, checking you, making sure you were still there.
Then his gaze dropped to your throat, just between your collarbones, as if he remembered something.
His face changed.
You frowned weakly. “What?”
Bucky didn’t answer right away. Instead, he shifted you against him with unbearable care, keeping your broken leg supported, and reached into the inside of his cloak.
His hand came out closed around a small piece of metal.
For one exhausted, feverish second, you thought it might be medicine.
It wasn’t.
A necklace slipped from his fingers.
It has a simple chain and a little pendant. The silver metal curled around a blue stone, cloudy at the centre, bright at the edge. It wasn't polished or perfect by any standards. It was handmade and slightly uneven.
It was… lovely.
So lovely your breath hitched.
Bucky looked down at it like he didn’t know what to do with this gift now that he had brought it into a room full of death.
“I got it for you, from the market,” he said.
You blinked at him, throat closing.
He stared at the necklace, not at you.
“You said it was your birthday when you saved me.”
You forgot, for one stupid second, how much pain you were in.
“You remembered?”
Bucky’s thumb rubbed over the little blue stone once.
“You said.” His brow furrowed, like the memory was delicate and he was afraid of breaking it. “The night before you found me.”
You didn’t even realize he had heard you at that point. You were just rambling to him in his post-carbonite fugue state, you didn’t even realise he would remember the information for a later date.
Your birthday.
Your stupid, lonely birthday.
You remembered that day, having a cold caf in your hands. You remembered watching the black sky over your hut. You remembered the tears running down on your face. You remembered making a pathetic wish made on what you thought was a star.
I don’t want to be alone anymore.
You had thought no one in the galaxy had heard you.
But whoever the maker was, they had sent him.
Frozen in carbonite, maybe. Falling out of the sky, maybe. Half-dead, half-gone, dragged through the atmosphere by an Imperial ship.
It didn’t matter.
He had remembered.
Bucky, who still lost whole pieces of himself. Bucky, who remembered snow and names and falling only in fragments. Bucky, who couldn’t always trust his own mind.
Bucky remembered that his ship fell out birthday.
A broken sound left your lips, and his head snapped up. “Does it hurt?”
You laughed and cried at the same time, which was a mistake because your ribs immediately punished you for it.
“Don’t,” he said, helpless. “Don’t do that. Just stay with me, okay?”
“You bought me a necklace,” you whispered.
His mouth tightened, like he was bracing for rejection.
“I wish I could get you it sooner,” he said.
“Bucky….”
“I saved credits from repairs.”
“I know, Buck.”
His eyes flicked to yours.
“I wanted…” He stopped as the words failed him.
His teeth clenched worked once, then he tried again.
“I wanted you to have something from me.”
Your lips parted.
Bucky looked down again, ashamed of the softness, maybe. Ashamed that the hands that had just killed men could still want to give you a pretty thing.
His voice went smaller. “You have given me so much.”
Oh.
Oh Bucky, as if you needed repayment. As if your kindness was currency. As if you needed him to give you something to be loved.
You only wanted him.
Carefully, with the kind of concentration he usually reserved for delicate wiring, Bucky shifted the chain around your neck. His fingers brushed your skin. The metal was cool at first, then warmed almost instantly against your throat.
The clasp took him longer than it should have. His hands were shaking too badly.
You watched his face as he worked. The furrow between his brows. The tight set of his mouth. The way he kept pausing whenever you breathed wrong, checking if he had hurt you.
Finally, the necklace settled against your chest.
The little blue stone rested above your heartbeat.
Bucky’s fingers stayed there for half a second longer than necessary.
Then he pulled away like he had no right.
You caught his wrist. “Bucky.”
He looked at you.
You wanted to say it properly: You weren’t afraid.
He had saved you.
Whatever the Empire had made him, it didn’t get to own every part of him.
That you had now seen the weapon, yes, but you had also seen the man who fixed your water filter, remembered your birthday, listened to your useless stories, and came back.
But pain was dragging you under. Your thoughts were slipping loose, and words were hard.
So you said the only thing you could, “Stay.”
He bent over you, forehead pressing to your temple, his breath shaking against your skin.
“Always,” he said.
Outside, the suns burned over the desert. Somewhere beyond the ridge, more Imperials would come, more ships, more hunters.
But in your ruined hut, with your blood drying on his shirt and his gift resting over your heart, Bucky held you like the galaxy could take anything else from him and he would still refuse to let go of this.
And for the first time in your life, you knew that neither of you would ever have to be alone again.
Greek myth AU | Hunter!Dex x Demigod!Reader where Artemis sends Dex, a virgin hunter, to protect you, a daughter of Zeus.
TW violence, temporary transformation, daughter of Zeus!reader, blood/injury, temple sex.
Artemis usually does not bless male hunters.
With the exception of Orion and Hippolytus, she just doesn’t. And even those exceptions kinda backfired.
See, Artemis knows men are messy. Men boast. Men ruin things. Men wander into sacred groves, see one divine deer minding its business, and immediately go, hmm, what if I made this about myself? So Artemis, as a rule, keeps her hunters female, and she makes sure these men belong to the forest more than they belong to any man or kingdom or stupid mortal expectation.
And then there’s Dex.
Dex, whose aim is so perfect even Artemis has to stop and go, okay, fine, that is art.
He’s just that naturally talented. He’s capable of putting an arrow through a crow’s eye in total darkness and looking vaguely bored about the whole thing, like accuracy isn’t a miracle when he does it. It’s just muscle memory.
So in exchange for being her personal assassin, Artemis offers him eternity.
Immortal life in exchange for service. Be her assassin, her hunter. Kill where she points. Answer when she calls.
When Artemis wants someone kept alive, she sends Dex. When she wants someone dead, she sends Dex.
And Dex was if anything, grateful for the direction. He belonged to no throne, no lover, no mortal future. He belongs to the hunt.
And, obviously, as a virgin goddess, Artemis makes him swear celibacy.
Of course she looks at this disciplined and deeply repressed man with nothing in his eyes and thinks, perfect. Finally. One male follower who will not embarrass me over desire.
HAHA.
Anyway.
And then Zeus asks Artemis for a favour.
Because of course, Zeus has another child. This time, it’s a demigod daughter, storm-born and politically inconvenient as hell. Hera hates you on principle, which is frankly exhausting because you didn't ask Zeus to be your father. You didn’t ask to become the newest target in Olympus’ worst marital dispute.
Still, Hera wants you dead.
She has been sending minor deities and monsters after you for weeks. She even sent a murderous peacock once. Sometimes, she doesn’t even have to send anyone.
Local queens started hunting you because they think handing Zeus’ daughter over to Hera might earn them divine favour. Ambitious princes, bored warriors, random glory-hungry idiots who hear “spawn of Zeus” and immediately decide killing you would make them legends.
Congratulations! You are a person, a scandal, a political threat, and a trophy kill all at once!
Worse, you don’t even know how your inherited gifts work.
You are powerful, obviously. Storms gather when you are upset. Sometimes you cry and it rains for miles. Sometimes someone grabs your and lightning strikes. Sometimes you wake up from nightmares with thunder shaking the windows and no idea what you almost destroyed in your sleep.
You aren’t trained, safe, or in control.
So Zeus needs safe passage from Athens to his temple in Olympia, where you will be under his protection properly. The journey should be simple, except everyone between Athens and Olympia has apparently decided that murdering you is their personal side quest.
All Artemis has to do is send one of her hunters to escort you there alive, so she sends Dex.
After all, she has sent him to guard women before. Queens, priestesses, nymphs, maidens, any devout follower of Artemis in enough danger.
He has guarded beautiful women. Powerful women. Terrified women. Furious women. Women who wept. Women who tried to seduce him.
Dex has never once gotten distracted.
So when Artemis sends him to you. She doesn’t see why this should be different.
Except you are difficult.
You don’t trust him. You don’t want him walking behind you. You don’t want him walking in front of you either. You flinch when he moves too suddenly, then get angry at yourself. You tell him you don't need a guard while bleeding through your bandage and shaking so badly the clouds above you turn purple.
Dex only looks at your arm and says, “You need stitches.”
You hate him a little.
You hate that heat calm when everything in you is loud. You hate that he doesn’t seem impressed by your father or afraid of Hera or startled by the lightning that crawls over your fingers when you are scared. You hate that he looks at you and sees danger, yes, but not in the way everyone else does.
Everyone else looks at you like you are dangerous to them. Dex looks at you like danger has been done to you.
At first, you think he is only good at killing.
Which, to be fair, he is very good at killing.
The first monster finds you before you even make it out of Attica. Some long-limbed thing with a woman’s hair, lion claws, and Hera’s hatred shining through. You only hear it scream once before Dex’s arrow goes through its throat.
The next creature is pinned to an olive tree, clawing at the shaft in its neck, and Dex is already reaching for another arrow like this is casual.
You stare at him.
He says, “Keep walking.”
A demigod of Ares tries to drown you in a river and Dex drags him out by the hair, holds him under instead, and tells you to look away. A prince recognises you in a market and reaches for his sword, and Dex puts a knife through his arteries. A flock of bronze-beaked birds follows you for two days until Dex disappears before dawn and comes back with blood on his hands and feathers stuck to his cloak.
And okay.
Fine.
Maybe you start trusting him a little.
Maybe not completely. You’re not stupid. Trust is how girls in myths get turned into trees or cows. It’s how you happened. But you start sleeping when he takes watch. You start walking closer to him on narrow roads. You start noticing that he always positions himself between you and any temple marked with Hera’s name.
He notices everything.
He notices that you stop eating after attacks, so he starts handing you food before the shaking can settle into nausea. He notices that the sky turns cloudy when you’re upset. He notices that you don’t like washing blood from your hands in rivers because the water reminds you of the thing that tried to drown you. He notices that when people call you “Zeus’ daughter,” your face goes blank, but when someone simply calls you by your name, you smile a little.
And then he starts leaving dead monsters at the edge of your camp like cats bringing mice to their owners.
Seriously. It’s insane.
You wake up one morning to find a dead serpent-thing laid neatly by the tree line, head severed, body still twitching.
You stare at it. Then at Dex.
“Is that for me?”
Dex, cleaning his knife, says, “It was following us.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“It cannot follow us anymore.”
“Dex.”
He looks at you, radiating the energy of a feral cat hoping you will appreciate the bird it left on your pillow.
You laugh a little, and Dex looks away so fast you almost miss the warmth at the tips of his ears.
Oh.
Oh, no.
Are you starting to find him… endearing?
Dex isn’t sweet in any normal way. He doesn’t bring you flowers or tell you daisies look nice in your hair.
He brings you corpses.
He kills the thing that scared you and lays it down like proof. Like, see? I took care of it. Nothing that wants you dead gets to stay alive near me.
And it works. You do feel safer because of him.
Dex, who starts watching the sky when thunder rolls because he has learned that your moods and the weather are basically in a long-term toxic relationship. Dex, who looks up the second clouds gather too quickly because he is checking on you.
Dex, who’s fine.
Dex, who’s definitely not distracted.
Dex, who’s catastrophically lying to himself.
One day, you wake up from a nightmare, lightning stealing the hearth of the camp, lighting the air blue-white for a second. Dex is next to you before you t fully conscious, one hand hovering near your shoulder, not touching because he has learned that touch can scare you worse when you wake up like this.
“It’s me,” he says. “You’re safe.”
You look at him through tears and say, “Hold me.”
Dex freezes.
Because what?
He knows how to shield you with his body. He knows how to cut a throat. He knows how to track monsters through rain, how to hear arrows before they fly, how to make death certain.
He doesn’t know how to hug you.
But you’re reaching for him, shaking, and Dex has never been good at denying you anything.
So he moves carefully and wraps his arms around you.
At first, he’s terrible at it.
He’s so stiff and awkward. Then you bury your face against his neck and let out a deep breath like you finally believed you were allowed to rest.
And Dex…
Oh.
Dex likes it.
He likes that your fingers clutch at his tunic. He likes that, for once, his body is not being used to kill or obey or endure.
It is keeping you warm.
He holds you tighter, just enough that you can feel it in the body language: I have you. I have you. I have you.
You fall asleep like that, storm quieting down into rain.
Dex doesn’t sleep.
He sits awake with you in his arms until dawn turns the sky gold, staring at the dying fire, having a mental crisis.
Because what is this?
What is this?
What is this ache in his chest? This panic when you cry? This satisfaction when you sleep because of him? This unreasonable hatred for anything that frightens you? This need to stand between you and the entire world, and not because Artemis ordered it?
Oh no.
Oh, fuck.
Is this love?
Is he in love?
Dex looks down at you sleeping against him, lashes damp, one hand still curled in his tunic like you chose him even unconscious.
The sky above the camp is clear for the first time in days.
And Dex, Artemis’ coldest weapon, thinks with absolute horror and wonder:
Yes.
Yes, I am.
Uhhh.
Well.
This is awkward.
Because Dex is celibate. Divinely celibate. Artemis-contract celibate. But it’s fine.
He doesn’t have to do anything about it. He can love you quietly. Professionally, even.
Except then he sees you bathing in the river one morning and immediately becomes very interested in the trees. The sky. His knife. Literally anything else. He looks away, enough to pretend this is still discipline and not the beginning of an identity crisis.
Then he saves you again from one of Hera’s ugly little errands. Dex kills it before it reaches you, and you are so relieved you grab his shoulder and kiss his cheek.
Dex forgets how to breathe.
So. Fine. Maybe this is becoming a problem.
But he has it under control.
Which is why he starts disobeying Artemis in tiny, completely reasonable ways. Artemis says move at dawn, but you are finally sleeping, so he lets you sleep in. Artemis says take the shortcut through the city, but cities make you nervous, so Dex takes the long road through the olive groves instead.
It was just strategy, obviously.
Then you fall asleep against his shoulder and murmur his name like you trust him even in dreams.
Dex stares into the fire.
Yeah.
He is so fucked.
Maybe even literally.
The day it happens is the day a drakaina manages to corner you both in one of Hera’s abandoned temples.
Dex moves between you and the monster, but she pins him.
She pings him down against the altar steps, coils around his body, holds him there with his bow out of reach and blood at his mouth, and oh.
Oh, that is the wrong thing to do.
Because you are watching Dex on the floor, trapped, furious because he cannot get to you.
No.
The temple goes blinding white.
Lightning tears out of the sky so violently Hera’s own altar cracks down the middle. The drakaina screams, and you don’t stop. You drive a broken spear through its throat and let the storm pour through the hole in the ceiling until there is nothing left but blood, smoke, and the sound of Dex breathing hard behind you.
And when you turn, Dex is looking at you like he has finally seen you.
See, he knew you’d be powerful. He just never expected you to be able to control that power enough to save him.
You say, out of breath, “She tried to kill you.”
Dex gets up with blood on his mouth and anger still in his eyes.
Because how dare Hera? No, really, how dare she? How dare she look at you and make you pay for Zeus’ sins? How dare she send monsters after a girl who never asked to be born, never asked to be hunted? How dare she make you feel unwanted when Dex is standing right there?
It's too much for Dex’s heart to handle, so he kisses you.
Right there in Hera’s temple. Against Hera’s altar.
His lips are hot and desperate and viciously devoted, his hands are on you like he has spent weeks holding himself back and now the leash has finally snapped.
“Dex,” you gasp, because you still have enough sense left to be horrified. “Your vow.”
“I know.”
“Artemis—”
“I know.”
But he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t even hesitate. His mouth is at your skin, your throat, your shoulder, kissing you like he is trying to erase your fear.
“I want Hera to know she failed,” he says against your skin, peeling away cloth.
Oh.
Oh.
“I want her to look down and see you alive. I want her to hear you. I want every god in Olympus to know she sent death and all she did was give me another reason to worship you.”
Like??? Dex????
Sir????
Your vow????
But no, he still doesn’t fucking care. Not when you are shaking under his hands. Not when thunder is rolling over the broken roof. Not when your fingers are in his hair.
“You are not Zeus’ mistake,” he says, rough and wrecked. “You are not a curse. You are perfect.”
His hands are shaking, and his hands never shake.
Not with arrows. Not with knives. But with you?
Yeah.
“You are mine to protect,” he murmurs, like blasphemy.
Your breath hitched.
“And I am so tired,” he says, “of pretending that is only duty.”
He’s feral and this whole ordeal is mythologically catastrophic.
It’s the kind of decision bards will one day sing about in metaphor because “Artemis’ supposedly celibate hunter railed Zeus’ daughter on Hera’s altar out of spite” is apparently too much for polite society.
But that is exactly what happened.
Dex wants the temple to remember. He wants the rain, the marble, the dead monster, the split peacock carvings, all of it, to bear witness to the fact that Hera tried to make you a tragedy and Dex turned you into worship instead.
By morning, a goddess is waiting outside, but it’s not Hera.
It’s Artemis.
Dex steps out to meet her with your marks still on his skin and no apology in his eyes.
Artemis looks at him, disappointed. “You broke your vow.”
Dex says nothing.
“There is no exception,” she says. “Not for love. Not for pity. Not even if the person you broke it for it is Zeus’ daughter.”
And Dex, because he’s ruined by the act of love and apparently determined to make every god in Greece furious before breakfast, says, with a smile, “She’s worth it.”
When you finally stumble outside, you find a beautiful white stag, antlers pale as bone, hide bright as moonmilk, and hazel eyes you would know anywhere.
Oh.
Oh, fuck.
Artemis turned Dex into a stag.
For the crime of—checks notes—fucking you.
Like. Okay. Sure. Very normal goddess behaviour. He broke a vow after you saved his life, and Artemis went, hmm. Deer.
You shout so loud the sky cracks open.
Somewhere, Hera is probably cackling. Somewhere else, Artemis is probably standing under a tree being self-righteous about discipline and men disappointing her.
Stag-Dex only lowers his crowned head into your shaking hands like he’s saying, I would do it again.
Obviously, you drag him to Apollo’s temple, since he’s probably more normal about getting laid.
Because if Artemis is going to be dramatic, then fine. You can be dramatic too. You can drag your cursed deer-lover through the nearest village while crying, sparking lightning across the road, and absolutely terrifying every farmer, priest, and goat within a five-mile radius.
Apollo appears because of all the commotion. He takes one look at you. Then at the white stag.
“Did my sister do this?”
“Yes.” You wipe your face with the back of your hand. “He broke his celibacy vow on Hera’s altar.”
Apollo goes still and smiles.
Because Apollo is a god, yes. Radiant and prophetic, blah blah blah. But he's also Apollo, which means he is physically incapable of hearing the sentence my twin sister’s assassin broke got some on my stepmother’s altar for Zeus’ demigod and not finding it at least a little bit funny.
Like, that’s peak family drama.
Apollo looks at stag-Dex with the distant, considering eyes of a god reviewing paperwork. “So,” he says. “Artemis has dismissed him.”
The stag huffs.
“And he is an archer, yes?”
You blink through your tears. “What?”
“A very good archer, if the stories are accurate,” Apollo continues, like this is now a professional department transfer.
Stag-Dex lowers his head like he would rather be killed again than have his résumé read aloud by Apollo.
Apollo’s mouth twitches up.
Because yes, he is amused. He hates Hera, likes annoying his twin sister, and loves sex. Like Artemis, he is also god of archery, so really, if she’s going to throw away a perfectly good impossible shot because he got emotionally attached and made one spectacularly horny decision, that sounds like her loss.
“Fine,” Apollo says, lifting one golden hand. “I’ll take him.”
“Take him?” You hiccuped. “Take him where?”
“Relax. I’ll take him under my protection,” Apollo says. “Call it a transfer of patronage. At least until Artemis stops being dramatic, which may take several centuries, but oh well.”
Like.
Your eye twitches and you think, he cannot be serious. He's doing this because he thinks it's funny.
Except he is. Light spills from his palm, and suddenly Dex is human again.
He's shaking and reaching for you like being turned into a stag was less traumatic than being away from your hands.
You crash into him. Dex catches you. His arms lock around you, one hand in your hair, the other at your back, and you kiss him like you are trying to put him back together
Apollo watches for maybe three seconds.
Then he glances toward his altar. Then back at you two.
“If you’re going to do it on mine too,” he says, amused and absolutely shameless, “at least let me watch.”
Dex slowly lifts his head, still half-mad from the curse, and the fact that this unserious god (who he now answers to) is speaking at all.
He glares, and Apollo’s smile widens.
Oh, this was going to be an interesting patronage experience, indeed.
—
Note: I’m doing a Greek myth AU for Bucky tomorrow stay tuned guys 🫶🫶🫶
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I just want to let you know. Love your writings. You have the highest honor of I have notifications on for when you post stuff on my tumblr app. I only have 1 other person currently I get notifications for. So uh congrats I guess. Lol
thank you so much and you need to know this is a compliment of the highest degree! I sincerely wish you find more creators you love as much so we may have company 🫶
hello dear! I hope you’re doing good! I just needed to let you know that yesterday night I couldn’t sleep and found myself reading good eyes! thank you so much for writing that, it was so sweet!! leo is just the most adorable kid in the world 😭
l’ve been in a reading slump for quite some time but your story felt so refreshing to my anxious brain, and you know what’s the funniest thing? I don’t even know who dex is 😭 I know he’s in daredevil but just because I looked him up (I’m a little behind with marvel tv series 🥸) AND YOU MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH HIM??? now I need to read the rest of your dex stories 🙂↕️
you’re one of my favorite writers—actually, one of the first ones I stumbled upon when I started reading bucky fanfics—so thank you again, your writing is awesome 🩵
oh my god I need to give you a hug right now. This is so kind and I will be thinking about this message for weeks 🫶🫶🫶 May you never step on a Lego barefoot ever again🫶
