followyourheart

21| female| Hufflepuff| my best friend's dog is my everything because I don't have one😈🐾| the world's your oyster| Marvel doesnt own my ass but it's pretty close to that

[cheekybarnes]

blood upon the snow | bucky barnes x reader

Summary: You’re bleeding out alone in the snow and your brain does the only mercy it has left: runs every version of Bucky Barnes you’ve ever known in hopes that the real one makes it in time.

MCU Timeline Placement: Post TFATWS

Master List: Find my other stuff here!

Warnings: graphic injuries, gunshot wound, blood loss, near-death experience, hypothermia, dissociation, memory distortion, hallucination-like flashbacks, language, hurt/comfort, mutual pining

Word Count: 17.4k (holy shit)

Author’s Note: hi friends <3 i fell down that whole “pov: you’re dying in the snow” rabbit hole that was floating around online a while back and my brain said oh bet?? cue me listening to no surprises by radiohead on repeat and accidentally writing this beast. lmao i’m so sorry and also absolutely not sorry. this is also not proofread :'(

Snow had a way of erasing the world. It fell between breath and bone, layered over footprints, swallowed distance until the tree line blurred and the hills became one pale unbroken thought. 

You watched it drift through the crosshairs of your vision, lashes spidered with frost, every flake a soft impact on the heat that poured from your side. The sky had been iron when you went in and now it was the purest white, a ceiling with no seam. 

Your radio had died somewhere between the second perimeter and the drop to your back. You knew because the last thing you heard was static chewing through Bucky’s voice, a cut-off syllable that might have been your name.

Your hand pressed into the wound on your side. It gaped with a slow-warm intelligence, a second mouth opening and closing around your palm. Your breath steamed in uneven ropes as you struggled to blink.

In an unsettlingly clean way, you understood that if you closed your eyes you would not open them again, so you fixed them on the sky and let the snow find you, let it rest on your cheekbones where your skin still knew how to be skin.

The treetops were black wires against the white sky. A rook cawed once and then the forest went back to listening. You had always thought the snow would be silent if it came to this, a pillowed quiet, a gentle drift into nothing, but it was not. 

It crackled where it landed on your jacket, hissed where it touched blood. You could hear the far low groan of ice shifting in the ravine. Your breath whistled at the edges, a thin reed instrument you could not quite control. Somewhere to your right, your rifle lay half-submerged like a sleeping animal. The scope glass had frosted over. The magazine was still heavy. Useless now.

You tried the comm again because that is what you would do. Thumb found the push-to-talk and held it, out of habit if not hope. The headset answered with the same blunt silence, the same small stutter of static that might have been wind crawling along the antenna. 

You pictured the little red light on your vest, the one that had stopped blinking. You pictured the map in your head, the way Bucky had tracked it with a gloved finger over the hood of the truck, the way he had tapped the switchback that led to the outbuilding and said he would keep to your flank. 

He always did that. Quiet promises. No showy heroics. Just the fact of him at your side when things went bad.

It had gone bad at the bend, where the cut barrels ringed the slope, where the snow hid the old razor wire and the men inside the outbuilding were faster than they looked. You heard the shots the way you might hear bees. You had not felt the first hit at all, only a sudden looseness in your knees, the ground reaching up, the smack of your shoulder on ice that felt like a door closing.

The second hit had been a flower opening under your ribs. There was maybe a third, but you couldn't remember. After that there had been movement and then there had not. Someone had shouted. You had returned fire and the fire had not mattered because the world had already tilted toward this.

He would be coming. 

You believed that because it was true every other time. 

Bucky Barnes did not leave people behind. He did not leave you behind. 

He could move through a fight like a shadow that knew exactly what needed to be done. He could put his body where the bullets wanted to be. He had a way of speaking into your comm when you were about to do something reckless, a low note that slid under panic and clicked into place. 

You could hear it then like you always did, the memory of his tone more than the words. Steady. Breathe. Two more steps. On your six. He never told you to be careful. He never told you to wait. He met you where you were and made all of this survivable.

The cold creeped into the wound on your side like unwelcome fingers. You felt it as a clarity first, as a kind of antiseptic truth. Then you stopped feeling the edges of it at all. Your fingers had gone rigid where they cupped your side. 

You meant to dig in harder and there was no difference. You meant to curl your knees and they were heavy stone ovals under the snow. You had a thought about how you might look from above, the black of your suit like spilled ink, the red staining out around you like a map you had not intended to draw. 

You did not like that thought, so you watched the snow again and let it occupy you.

Footfalls would sound, you told yourself once more.

He made no noise when he wanted to, but for you he would call out first. Bucky had learned that after the first time a year back in Russian tunnels when you put a round into the wall an inch from his head. 

He had laughed later, head tipped back, teeth bright and quick in the dim light, but his voice had gentled when he came up on you after that. He would say your call sign before he said anything else. He would say it like a question with an answer built in. 

You heard it now the way you wanted to hear it. The syllables hit the frozen minutes and shattered, nonexistent.

You couldn’t turn your head, so you turned your eyes. The world rimmed in salt-white. The wind barely moved and yet every flake fell as if purposeful, one after another. You counted them as if counting could keep you awake. You ran out of numbers and began again, and the counting became a hum that anchored you to the moment of your breath and the moment after that. 

Your tongue had the taste of iron. Your throat felt lined with glass. You swallowed and the glass complained. You tried to cough and even that was too much. The cough lived inside your chest without moving the air.

On the edge of hearing, like a trick the brain plays when it catalogs what it misses, a radio chirped. You froze inside the body that could not move. The chirp became a crackle. The crackle opened like a curtain to a voice that was there and not there, a sound shaped like him.

You did not know if it was memory or mercy. You knew what he would say if it was real. You waited for the habit of him to arrive.

You had met Bucky Barnes in winter, which felt like a private joke you had never admitted out loud. He was winter the way a river is winter. Cold only to the touch. Underneath, the force of him moved dark and certain. 

He wore layers like armor and then shed them like a man shrugging out of a story he did not want anymore. He stood with his weight balanced as if ready to break into motion with a breath and he could be still for longer than anyone else. 

The first time he had handed you a thermos after a long, dead stakeout, his mouth had moved around the shape of a smile that pretended it was not one. That motion lived in your head even now, precise as a photograph. You let it play behind your eyes to distract yourself from the creeping quiet at your extremities.

Another minute slid past with the round edges that minutes have when they are running out. The treetops shifted. Somewhere distant, an engine coughed and went silent. You could not tell if that was the truck or a memory of a truck you had slept in once, shoulder to shoulder in the back while frost filmed the windows and the only warmth was breath and shared curses. 

Bucky had said you snored. You had said he slept with his eyes open sometimes and it creeped you out. You had wanted to touch his knuckles where his flesh hand rested on his thigh. You had not. You were very responsible about some things.

Now you wanted a miracle and all you had was snow. 

You wanted a hand to move the hair out of your face because it had stuck there, stiff with melted snow and blood, because it tickled in the way you could not reach. You wanted Bucky to cut through the tree line with that clean, predatory economy of his, to drop to his knees beside you and say your name like you had not wrecked him for weeks with an almost-confession you did not know you had made. 

You wanted his breath in your ear as he told you to hold on, and you wanted to because he would say it.

But you did not have that. 

You had the memory of his palm spanning your shoulder when he pushed you down behind a barrier two missions ago. You had the sound of his boots on concrete, always closer than you expected. You had the little ordinary things he did that felt like a prayer. He fixed the strap on your holster without comment. He handed you his spare knife when yours went skidding. He stood in the door while you fell asleep and then left to watch the hallway whenever the two of you were stuck in a safehouse.

He never made it feel like a favor. It was just that he was there.

You thought about how he would be angry at himself for not being faster, how he would scuff the snow with the heel of his boot while he gathered you up, how he would look at your face first and then at his hands to check for what he had missed. 

He would allow himself that one loss of composure, that tiny tic of self-cruelty, and then force it down because there was work to do. He did not yell when it mattered. He moved. He made use of whatever he had.

He had you. And that had always surprised you more than it should have.

You let your eyes slide to the right as far as they would, just enough to catch the slope where the path cut through. You imagined the curve of his body as he dropped into a run. You imagined the precision of the vibranium arm, the way the plates caught light and gave it back in sharp pieces.

You had once watched him at a bench under a bad flickering bulb, oiling the joints with the concentration of a man tending a garden. You had wanted to ask what it felt like. He had looked up at you as if he had heard the question anyway. He had said it felt like a hand. He had said it felt like the rest of him. You believed him.

Snow settled in the hollow of your throat. It itched like a memory you could not place. You wanted to laugh because it was so stupid, to be bothered by that while the center of you opened into the cold. 

Your breath clouded and thinned. You tried to flex your fingers and the signal did not travel. You tried to say his name and the sound stuck to your teeth. The wind shifted and brought you the faintest scent of gunpowder and sap. The outbuilding door slammed somewhere behind the drift and the sound was very small from here, like a door closing in another house in another life.

You knew you should keep fighting. You knew the list of things to do, the order in which to do them. You had given that brief yourself like a bedtime story before ops. Breathe. Pressure. Elevation. Communicate. Stay awake. Count. Catalog your surroundings. Find a landmark and fix on it. Feed yourself tasks so the panic has no room to move in. 

You had been good at it because you were stubborn and because you wanted to keep coming back to the people who made the fight make sense. You wanted to keep coming back to him and the unspoken thing that sat between you like a live wire taped neat and tucked out of sight.

He had said your coat looked ridiculous that morning. He had said it in a way that meant he liked it. You had rolled your eyes and said his needed patching and he had allowed the insult because you were the one who did the patching. He had watched your hands move the needle through the fabric with a stillness that felt like being seen.

 If you closed your eyes now you could see that exact thread shining between your fingers. If you closed your eyes now…

No. Your eyes stayed open. They burned. They watered. The world doubled at the edges and then sharpened again like a lens trying to find you. You focused on the nearest branch where a clot of snow thickened and slid in slow motion, fell without a sound, punctured the layer beside your ear. You tried again to drag breath past the weight in your chest and the breath went in like a reluctant guest.

When he looked at your headset later he would press it to his ear as if that could pull your voice back through. You saw that so clearly it might as well have been happening beside you. He would check the wiring, not because he did not know but because his hands needed a job. 

He would track the blood you had left against the white and it would lead him here. He would call for you then, low and sure like he could will it into an answer. He would kneel and the snow would creak and the world would tilt back toward the side where you lived.

You wanted that. You had never wanted anything the way you wanted that.

The wind picked up. A veil of snow dusted across your face and your eyes blinked clean on reflex. It was getting darker in a way that had nothing to do with time. The clouds had thickened into a single sheet and the line of the hill melted into it. 

You thought for a split second that you heard his boots. You thought for another that you saw a shadow detach from the trees and start down the path. You held yourself ready for the relief that would follow, for the way your body would answer that presence by remembering itself.

It was only the wind playing with the shape of the trees. It was only the little mean tricks the cold does as it settles into you.

You told yourself a story anyway, because that had always been how you kept the worst edges from cutting too clean. You told yourself he was close enough to hear your heartbeat. You told yourself he was swearing in that quiet way of his, the syllables clipped, the heat under them banked. 

You told yourself he had the med kit out and the tourniquet ready. You told yourself his breath clouded the air above you and you turned your face into it because it was warm. You told yourself you would give him hell for taking so long and he would give it back, eyes crinkled at the corners, mouth a line he could not stop from lifting.

Your story could not move your blood. It could not knit flesh. It could only hold you in place while the world kept snowing.

Pain flared once, brilliant as a flare against fog, and then folded into itself and left a ringing quiet. You breathed into that quiet and felt something in you unspool, a slow ribbon, warm where it left.

If he had been here, you would have leaned into his chest while he got the bleeding under control. You would have let the lines of him hold the lines of you together. You would have listened to the steady drum of his heart like a metronome you could set yourself to. He would have said your name then. Not your call sign. Your name. He would have said it like a fact, like an anchor thrown into deep water that hits bottom and holds.

You thought you saw a figure again and you let yourself believe it this time without interrogating it. The snow had a way of making lies tender. You watched the shape come closer in the long patience of someone who had run out of choices and found, to your small surprise, that there was no fear in you at all. Just the strange, clean relief of not needing to move. 

If it was him, he would kneel. If it was not, you would not have to know.

If he was coming.

You took another breath because breath was a thing you could still do. The snow touched your lips like hands would. Your vision narrowed its aperture. For a heartbeat the world clicked into focus with such precision it hurt. Every needle on the firs was an individual thing. Every flake was a star with a private trajectory. Every memory of how he looked at you slotted into place behind your eyes like rounds into a magazine. 

You felt the heat of your blood where it pooled under your palm. You felt the stiffness of the fabric where it froze at the edges. You felt the small ceiling of sky press down and you pressed back by staying.

The figure did not resolve. The comm did not spark to life. The snow kept falling because that is what it does. You tasted iron. Your tongue was heavy. Your throat had learned silence and did not want to unlearn it. 

You thought of the way he held the world together when he could. You thought of how he would hate this. You thought of his hands, one flesh, one forged, both equally careful when they touched what mattered. 

You let those thoughts sit with you in the snow like companions. You let them be enough to keep your eyes open one minute more. Then another. You let them be the warmth you did not have, the promise the moment did not offer, the echo of a voice that had so often been the last thing between you and the dark.

Hold on, you heard, whether from memory or mercy you did not know. Hold on.

You did, the way you always had, with your teeth even when your hands had nothing left in them, with your attention fixed like a blade on the next small thing you could ask your body to do. 

Breathe. Watch the snow. Wait for the sound of him. Refuse the easy closing.

The snow on your lashes blinked, and when your eyes opened, it was dust floating in the gym's fluorescent light.

You were still on your back, but the sky had become a ceiling, low and stained and hummed through with old wiring. The cold pressing into your spine softened into the thin ache of concrete that had stored years of footsteps. Your breath no longer streamed white; it fogged in front of your face in little bursts that smelled like recycled air and metal. 

Somewhere nearby, a door slammed, the sound familiar in a way the crack of gunfire had never been.

You knew this room. You knew this version of the world like the inside of your own mouth. The compound. Early days. Before anyone trusted you with anything that mattered; before you believed them when they did. 

You watched the dust drift between you and the light overhead and realized you were not lying on snow anymore but on the mat inside the gym, chest heaving, lungs burning from the last set.

"You good?"

Bucky’s voice came from just beyond your line of sight, lazy as if he already knew the answer and didn't trust it. 

You turned your head and there he was, sitting with his back against the wall, knees drawn up, forearms resting across them. Hair damp at the temples, a darker ring on the collar of his shirt where sweat had soaked through. Dog tags winked once when he shifted, catching the light like a tiny, private snowfall.

"Pretty sure I'm dying," you had rasped, and the way your voice sounded then layered perfectly over the way it sounded now, raw and edged with something you hadn't named yet.

He huffed, that almost-laugh he did when something amused him but he refused to give it the satisfaction of a real reaction. The corner of his mouth tilted. His eyes dragged over you, fast and brief, like a scan for damage first and always.

"If you were dying, you wouldn't be whining about it," he said. "You'd be quiet. Terrifies me, remember?"

You remembered. You remembered the way he'd said it once after a mission, when you came back bleeding and making jokes, and his shoulders dropped like someone had cut a wire. Quiet, for him, meant missing. Meant gone. Meant tombstones with names that never should have had dates carved underneath. 

He preferred noise. Preferred the way you swore when you took a hit, the way you grumbled when he pushed you too hard, the way you argued about tactics with hands moving in sharp little arcs.

You hadn't understood how much that meant, back then. You only knew the look in his eyes now, in this hallway, as he watched you fight for breath after another training session you insisted on taking too far. The look that said he was cataloging you into the part of his brain where things he couldn't lose got stored.

"You should've let me stop two rounds ago," you said, still trying to drag air into lungs that didn't want to expand.

"You said don't go easy on you," he reminded you, shrugging one shoulder. "You wanna take it back, now's the time."

"Not in front of a witness." You gestured weakly at the doorway to the gym, where the heavy bag still swung on its chain. "Gotta maintain my image."

He snorted, finally, a real sound. It scraped warm along your spine, an internal reflex you didn't have a name for yet. His metal hand flexed once against his knee, the plates catching the light in that soft ripple that fascinated you no matter how many times you saw it.

"Your image," he said slowly, "is the person that doesn't back down when a guy like me tells them to call it for the day."

Guy like me. You heard it the way he meant it, heavy with every history he still wore like old scars under his shirt, the ones no serum could smooth out. You pushed yourself up on your elbows, hands shaking, and looked at him full-on, your vision still rimmed in spots.

"A guy like you is the reason I'm not dead already," you said. "So if I wanna keep up, I can't tap out every time my muscles cry about it."

He watched you while you said it. Didn't look away. That was new; for months he had skated around full eye contact like it would reveal something he hadn't agreed to show. Now his gaze stayed on you, steady, thoughtful. 

The blue of his eyes was darker here than it looked under the harsh lights of the briefing rooms. Closer, you could see every line at their corners, the little tightness that settled in when he was thinking too much.

"You keep talking about being dead," he said quietly. "Kinda makes me wanna wrap you in bubble wrap and lock you in a closet."

"Kinky," you had shot back, on instinct more than intention.

Silence, then, followed by a slow blink and a breath that might have been a laugh if he'd let it. He shook his head at you, hair falling into his eyes for half a heartbeat before he smoothed it back with his flesh hand.

"You're impossible," he said. "Get up. Hydrate. Before I end up explaining to Steve why you passed out in the hallway."

You remembered the way his hand had hovered for a moment before it caught your forearm to help you to your feet. The warm hand first, a firm grip, fingers bracketing bone. The metal one resting loose on his knee, deliberately not touching. As if he had made some kind of private rule about where each belonged when it came to you.

You let him haul you up, your legs wobbling, shoulder bumping his chest when you overshot your center of gravity. For one heartbeat you were pressed up nearly against him, every breath you took syncing with his, your cheek inches from his sternum. You remembered the way his heart had felt like a steady drum against your skin, even through layers.

He smelled like soap that had nothing to do with who he was and everything to do with who he was trying to be now. Coffee and gun oil ghosted under it. Something citrus, faint.

"Careful," he had murmured, reflexive, hand tightening on your arm.

"That's your job," you'd said, and then the hallway, the gym, the dust all shifted as if the whole compound inhaled and exhaled at once.

The air changed temperature. The fluorescent buzz smoothed itself into the softer hum of an old refrigerator. The light over your head yellowed, warm and uneven. Your back didn't ache from concrete anymore but from the unforgiving springs of a cheap mattress. The smell of metal and sweat thinned into the smell of rain hitting pavement outside a cracked window, exhaust and wet asphalt and cheap takeout.

You blinked, and you were on your side in a safe house bed, blanket tangled around your legs, shirt twisted, heart doing something reckless in your chest. The room was small, all peeling paint and mismatched furniture, but it felt too big with just the two of you in it. 

The storm outside smeared shadows across the ceiling. A leak tapped somewhere in the corner. The warmth in the air was borrowed from an ancient space heater rattling in the corner.

Bucky was sitting on the edge of the bed, back to you. His metal arm reflected faintly in the gloom, the delicate seams between plates tracing their own geometry. He was rolling his neck like it hurt, head tipped back just enough to show the strong line of his throat.

You shouldn't have been awake. You should have been sleeping off the mission, letting the adrenaline seep out of your muscles. But he had been too quiet when you came in, too neat with his movements, and your body had learned to wake up when quiet wrapped itself this tight around him.

"You're thinking loud," you said, voice soft in the thick, late hour. The words arrived in this room and in the snow at the same time, as if they had never left your tongue.

He half-turned, enough for you to see the line of his jaw, the way his mouth pulled when he tried to decide whether to deny it. He didn't. He just shrugged one shoulder, the muscles there jumping, the metal arm resting on his thigh like an animal at ease.

"Can't sleep," he said simply.

"Nightmare?"

You watched the way his hand—flesh this time—tightened on his knee. The flicker at the corner of his eye. He didn't answer and that was answer enough. Your chest ached in that familiar way it did when you thought about all the nights he had lived through that had no decent ending.

"C'mere," you said, like you were offering him a glass of water instead of the mess of your own heart.

He hesitated exactly long enough for you to know this wasn't simple. And you knew it wasn’t. 

Finally, he shifted, the mattress dipping under his weight as he turned toward you. The room was too small to pretend this was casual; when he lay down on top of the blanket, it was with a care that bordered on reverent. 

He shoved his boots off, like he was taking at least one step toward comfort but refusing the rest. The metal arm stayed angled away from you at first, braced against the headboard, like a part of him was holding himself up off you even while the rest sank down.

You rolled onto your back to make room. The old bed squeaked. Your shoulder brushed his. The contact felt like it should have set off alarms. You stared up at the cracked plaster above you, tracing the faint water stains with your eyes.

"You know," you said, after the silence nested too comfortably in the room, "you are allowed to sleep. The world keeps spinning without you supervising it."

"Does it?" His voice was quieter here than it was on the field, as if the walls might tell on him. "Pretty sure every time I let my guard down, something goes sideways."

"The heater's the only thing going sideways tonight," you replied. "And if it explodes, at least we'll go in our sleep. Real mercy kill."

He made a sound that might have been a laugh or a frustrated exhale; with him, they were almost the same. You could feel the vibration of it through the mattress, through the few inches between you. 

His gaze flicked over to you in the dark, catching just enough of your features to make them real: the curve of your cheek, the line of your mouth, the way you stared stubbornly at the ceiling as if refusing to look at him too much might save you from something.

"You got a real cheerful streak, you know that?" he murmured.

"I work with what I have." You let your hand rest near his on the blanket, not touching but close enough that the heat of him gathered in your palm. "You wanna talk about it?"

The storm outside filled the pause. Rain hit the window like thrown gravel. Somewhere far off, a car rolled through water, the sound dopplering away. He breathed in, slow and precise, like a man approaching a minefield.

"Same old," he said. "Faces I don't remember. Things I did. Things I didn't do."

"And me?" you asked, before you could tell your tongue to mind its business. "Do I show up in there yet?"

You had meant it as a joke. Light, deflecting. You had not expected the way it landed between you with weight. 

His head turned, full-on now, eyes finding yours in the half-light. There was something like surprise in them and something like resignation, like he'd been waiting for you to ask and had hoped you wouldn't.

"No," he said simply. Then, after a beat, "You show up after."

"After?"

"Yeah." He let his gaze drop to the line of your shoulder, your throat, the rise and fall of your chest. "After I wake up. After I remember where I am. You're there. You sound annoyed. Tellin' me I'm hogging the covers or snoring or…something." He swallowed. "It's not like the dreams. It's quieter. Easier to breathe."

You could have said a dozen things. Any of them might have broken the fragile, careful balance of the moment. So you picked the least dangerous one and hoped it was enough.

"For the record," you said, voice softer than you meant it to be, "you absolutely snore."

"Yeah?" He huffed again, mouth curling despite himself. "You keepin' notes?"

"I'm a professional," you replied. "I observe. I report. I'm very thorough."

His fingers moved then, just a fraction. The metal ones, where his arm had been anchored to the headboard. They flexed like they wanted to close around something. Maybe around your hand. Maybe around his own throat. 

You shifted your hand the smallest distance, letting the back of your fingers brush the cool plates where his wrist rested near your head. The contact was brief, accidental on the surface. It lit up a whole system in you that had nothing to do with nerves or blood and everything to do with the careful way he drew in his next breath.

"Gonna put that in the report too?" he asked, but his voice had gone lower, roughened at the edges.

"Only the important parts," you said. "Bucky Barnes: snores, hogs blankets, represses emotions, has decent hair."

He rolled his eyes, but he was smiling now, real and reluctant. He let the metal hand turn under yours so your fingers could rest in the thinner seam between plates, the place where warmth leaked through from the machinery underneath. You felt that warmth travel up your arm, lodging somewhere inconvenient behind your ribs.

"Decent?" he repeated. "That's the best you got?"

"Don't push your luck," you murmured.

The room held onto that, tucking it into its corners, into the creak of the bed, into the whisper of rain on glass. You had laid there, side by side, not touching more than that point of contact, and felt the entire axis of your life tilt by degrees you couldn't measure. 

Outside, someone in the world was dying, someone was being born, someone was making coffee, someone was stealing a car. Inside that little room, the biggest thing happening was two people lying very still, pretending breathing wasn't a confession.

The bed beneath you now, in the snow that had become the gym that had become this safe house, gave one long, low groan, and you blinked again.

The warmth of his arm under your fingers cooled, the hum of the heater faded into the distant, steady roar of engines. The rain against the window turned into the shudder of metal walls under heavy wind. The mattress pitched, and you were strapped into a seat instead, shoulder harness biting into your chest. The air tasted like high altitude, thin and filtered, tinged with jet fuel and sweat and something like anticipation.

You looked up at the interior of the quinjet around you, all matte black surfaces and exposed wiring, the faint blue glow of instruments painting everyone in cold light. Across the aisle, Bucky sat with his forearms braced on his knees, eyes fixed on the floor between his boots. Gloves on this time. Strap secured. Weapon at his feet. The set of his shoulders said he was thinking too much. Again.

"You look like you're about to bolt," you said over the engine noise, because you had never really learned how to leave him alone when he folded into himself like that.

He lifted his head, eyes dragging up to meet yours, and the motion happened here in the jet and out there in the snow where you imagined it, where you waited. The duality of it made your lungs stutter. He frowned at you, familiar and fond.

"Remind me which one of us jumped out of a plane without a parachute once?" he called back, mouth quirking.

"Peer pressure," you shouted. "Terrible influence in my life."

"You volunteered," he said. "I remember."

"You asked," you shot back. "There's a difference."

He gave you that look then, the one he reserved specifically for you, where exasperation and something softer wrestled to a draw. His gaze flicked over you quickly, checking gear, checking weapons, checking the line of your mouth like it could tell him if you were lying about being okay.

"You don't gotta prove anything," he said, the words bending around the roar of the engines but still reaching you clearly. "Not to me."

"Maybe I'm not doing it for you," you said, but it came out gentler than you intended. "Maybe I like jumping out of planes."

"You're a menace," he muttered, but there was a hint of pride threaded through it. "You stick to the plan this time, yeah?"

"I always stick to the plan."

He arched a brow.

"Most of the plan," you corrected. "Some of the plan."

His eyes closed briefly, like he was making a wish he didn't believe in. When he opened them again, they were steady, all business, that sharp, clear soldier-killer-operative gaze that saw everything and revealed nothing. Except—when it landed on you, there was that fraction of a degree softer, that fractional tilt of world where you fit.

"Just…" he said, pausing, the word hanging between you. His hand lifted, then dropped, as if he'd thought about reaching for you and changed his mind at the last second. "Come back."

It wasn't an order. It wasn't even a request. It was more like a fact he was trying to negotiate with the universe directly. You felt something in your chest catch on it, like cloth snagged on a nail.

Before the feeling could settle, he added, "I am not writing a report on this mission if you die halfway through. That's paperwork I don't need."

"You too, Barnes," you replied, trying to keep it light.

He shook his head, lips twitching. Then, quietly, not quite over the noise but close enough that your brain filled in the missing pieces, he added, "Not planning on going anywhere."

The jet bucked slightly, turbulence or a shift in altitude. You remembered the lurch in your stomach, the way your fingers curled around the strap of your harness. You remembered thinking, let him be right. Let him be right this time.

The engines roared louder. The jet blurred. The straps bit a little deeper into your shoulder, then loosened like someone had cut them. The black interior faded to gray, then to white. The air thinned and sharpened. The metal floor under your boots dissolved into snow again.

You blinked back into your own body, the one lying on the slope, blood soaking into cold earth. The flash of his face in the quinjet flickered like a film frame over the blank sky. For a second you saw both at once: him across from you under humming lights, and the emptiness above you now where his silhouette should be.

The snow brushed your cheek. Your breath hitched, shallow, then steadied again in its fragile rhythm. Your mind, stubborn thing, refused to stay in the present for long. It reached for him again and found him somewhere else, somewhere softer.

The compound kitchen this time. Late enough that the overheads were dimmed. The fridge hummed louder than seemed reasonable. The world had shrunk down to the island countertop, the half-empty mug in front of you, and the way he leaned against the opposite edge like he owned the space without meaning to. 

He wore a t-shirt that had seen better days, a line of text you couldn't quite make out in the low light, and sweatpants that told you he'd likely been asleep before a nightmare yanked him out of it. His hair was a riot, sticking out in directions that made him look younger, almost, if you ignored the tired etched into the corners of his mouth.

You had been raiding the cabinets for something with sugar in it, bare feet cold on the tile. The mission was over, debriefs done. Your formal mask was off. You were holding a spoon in one hand and a jar of Nutella in the other like they were standard-issue equipment.

"You know they make actual food here," he'd said from the doorway, surprising you but not really. He had a way of appearing wherever you were like the universe had assigned him the job of shadowing you.

"This is actual food," you answered, dipping the spoon. "It's got nuts. And…ella."

"That's not how that works." He pushed off the doorframe and came closer, eyes narrowing at your haul. "You plan on sleeping ever again, or you just gonna ride that sugar high 'til you pass out?"

"Bold of you to assume I sleep now," you said. "Besides, you drink coffee like it's a religion. At least my terrible coping mechanism tastes like chocolate."

He made a face like he wanted to argue and couldn't quite find a foothold. After a second, he extended a hand, palm up, expectant.

"What?" you asked.

"Gimme the spoon," he said.

"Get your own."

"I'm not stickin' my fingers in there like an animal," he replied. "Now share before I tell Sam you got caught double-dipping in the communal snacks."

"Coward," you muttered, but you handed over the spoon anyway, heart doing that stupid flip it did when he took something from you like it was the most natural action in the world. His fingers brushed yours in the exchange, warm and callused. He didn't seem to notice. You absolutely did.

He took a scoop and made a face like he wanted it to be terrible and it foolishly, traitorously, wasn't. The spoon clicked against his teeth. He handed it back with a little nod.

"Okay," he admitted. "Could be worse."

"High praise," you said. "I'll take that glowing review to my grave."

The word lodged in the air between you in this kitchen the way it was lodging in your throat in the snow now. Grave. You had meant it as nothing, throwaway hyperbole. A joke. As you always did. You hadn't known how literal it would feel later when cold seeped into your bones.

He set the jar down on the counter, closer to you than to himself. His metal hand rested on the edge, the fingers leaving tiny crescents in the laminate where the pressure concentrated. You watched his knuckles turn faintly white in the flesh hand.

"Don't talk like that," he said, quietly enough that the fridge almost drowned it out.

"Like what?" You took another scoop, feigning ignorance.

"Like your grave's a funny punchline all the time," he said. His eyes were on the spoon, not on your face. "Like you're not…" He exhaled, searching for the word. "Like you're not important."

Something inside you stilled. You leaned your hip against the counter, letting the spoon hover halfway to your mouth.

"Bucky," you said, because his name felt like a hand wrapped around your wrist, steadying. "I'm not—"

"I know what it looks like out there," he cut in, finally meeting your gaze. "I know how quick it can go bad. I know you think if you joke about it all the time, it won't get to you. But it gets to me."

The honesty in it landed like a blow. You swallowed, the taste of chocolate turning faintly metallic at the edges. The kitchen seemed too small to hold all the implications of that sentence.

"It gets to you," you repeated, because you needed to be sure you heard him right.

He nodded, once. Barely. "Yeah."

"Because…?" you prompted, the word gentle as you could make it.

He made a small, frustrated noise, like the problem wasn't what he felt but the fact of being asked to name it. His fingers tapped once on the counter, a little staccato rhythm. Finally, he shook his head and settled on the simplest version, the one that carried the least risk but still told the truth.

"Because I don't want anything else on my conscience," he said quickly. "And that includes you."

It wasn't the whole truth. You heard the missing pieces in the space between syllables. But it was enough to send a flush creeping up your neck, enough to make your chest feel like it had grown too small for your ribs.

"Well," you said softly, the jokes falling away one by one until only sincerity remained, raw and exposed, "for what it's worth, I don't particularly wanna end up dead either. So." You lifted the spoon in a mock toast. "I'll do my best not to traumatize you and ruin dessert for everyone."

He snorted again, but his eyes softened. You watched the tension in his jaw loosen by fractions. He reached over and, without comment, took the spoon back from you, scooping one last bit before setting it deliberately in the sink.

"Alright, that's enough," he said. "You'll be bouncing off the walls."

"Jealous?" you asked. "You could join me in the sugar high, stay up all night. We could make a whole thing of it."

He shook his head at you, fond and exasperated. "Go to bed," he said. "We move early."

"You bossing me around again?"

"Somebody has to," he replied, already turning toward the door. Then he paused, glanced back over his shoulder. "And hey," he added, tone lighter, almost tentative. "Try to get some actual sleep, okay? Just because you're up doesn't mean you gotta…think the whole time."

You stared at him, caught off guard by the care in the suggestion. "You too," you said, because it felt like something you owed him. "No brooding in the dark. Doctor's orders."

"You're not a doctor," he said, but the corner of his mouth twitched.

"Field medic," you shot back. "Close enough."

"Goodnight," he said, and it sounded heavier than the word should, like it was doing more work than just ending the conversation.

He left the kitchen smelling like sugar and something fragile. The overhead light buzzed once and then steadied. You had stood there a moment longer, hand wrapped around the jar like an anchor, feeling the shape of his concern settle over your shoulders like a jacket you weren't sure you had earned.

Now, in the snow, with your blood seeping out into the earth and your body growing too heavy to own, that jacket felt like the only thing keeping your mind from sliding off the edge. Every memory of him layered over the last—gym, safe house, quinjet, kitchen—until they formed a continuous film, running frame by frame behind your eyes. 

You felt the shove of his hand between your shoulder blades when he pushed you behind cover. You heard the crack in his voice the one time he said your name like a plea instead of a warning. You saw the way his face had changed the first time you came back from a mission you were supposed to be too far away from, how shock melted into relief so intense it nearly knocked him to his knees. 

All of it lived inside you now, playing on a loop as the present thinned around the edges.

You didn't want to die.

The snow kept falling. The sky kept being indifferent. But in your head, you were still in all those rooms with him, still laughing, still arguing, still pressing fingers to scars and pretending you weren't memorizing their map. You were still hearing his voice cut through static, through nightmare, through the heavy, dragging exhaustion of a life you hadn't expected to survive this long.

You realized, with a strange, quiet clarity, that if this was the last thing your brain chose to circle around—the shape of him in doorways, the weight of his gaze, the way his hand felt when he chose to touch you and when he chose not to—it wasn't the worst road to go out on.

You took another breath, thin and rattling and precious. The white above you blurred, then sharpened, then blurred again. Suddenly it was dark. You must've closed your eyes. Somewhere in the overlapping layers of your life, he was still sitting on the edge of your bed, still arguing with you in the quinjet, still stealing your spoon or mug in the kitchen. Somewhere he was still saying your name like a promise, even if he never meant you to hear what sat under it.

The corridor of memories snapped like someone cutting film.

All of it tore away in one sharp, white-hot jerk, and you were back in your body like slamming into a wall. Cold vaulted up your spine. The snow on your face was real again, not dust or rain or flickering fluorescence. Your lungs forgot how to work for a second, then clawed for air that burned going in.

Sound arrived in pieces.

First, the muffled crush of boots in snow somewhere above you. Then the ragged, too-fast drag of someone breathing hard, closer than your own, overlapping it. A voice, too low and blurred to make out at first, like the comm when it had started dying—static wrapped around syllables, desperation chopped into fragments.

Then, all at once, the volume snapped up. The world caught.

“—no, no, no—”

The words landed right above you, sharp and terrified and half-swallowed, and if you hadn’t known better you would have thought they belonged to someone else.

The weight in your side changed. Something pressed harder against the wound, firm enough to drag a rough sound out of your throat. It hurt in a way that felt almost bright, almost clarifying. Your eyes flew open on reflex.

Sky. Still white, still falling. But there was a shape cutting into it now, leaning over you, blocking some of the snowfall. A shadow with a familiar outline. Broad shoulders in dark gear, hair half-plastered to a sharp, pale face framed in the blurred halo of his breath.

Bucky.

You stared up at him through lashes crusted in frost and whatever your brain had left of coherence tried to reorder itself around the reality of him actually being here. He wasn’t a memory version this time. He wasn’t lit by kitchen fluorescents or quinjet LEDs. He was right there, real, close enough that flakes were catching in his hair and melting on his skin.

His eyes found yours like they’d been looking for that exact thing and nothing else.

“Hey,” he said, too loud, too rough, like the word scraped its way out of his chest. “Hey. Look at me. Stay with me, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart. The nickname cracked something in you that pain hadn’t touched. He didn’t toss that one around easy. It slipped in the spaces when he was tired, when his guard thinned. Hearing it here, now, felt like your name and something more, stuffed into one, pressed into your ribs.

You tried to say his name and your tongue—or maybe your whole mouth, your whole fucking face—didn’t get the message. It came out in a broken exhale, more air than sound. You weren’t even sure it made it past your teeth.

His gaze dropped to your mouth for half a heartbeat like he was checking, like he was reading the shape of what you’d tried to say.

“Yeah,” he breathed, quieter, like you’d managed it anyway. “It’s me. I’m here. I got you.”

His hands moved at your side, all business, the familiar, efficient brutality of field triage. The pressure on your wound redoubled, making the edges of your vision bloom black and crowd in. You felt the firm, unyielding plates of the metal hand digging in over your own useless fingers, the warm clamp of his flesh one above it, like he was trying to compress not just skin and muscle and ruptured vessels but the entire situation down into something he could actually handle.

You made a sound. You didn’t mean to. It wasn’t a word, just a hoarse, wet choke that twisted up and out of your throat. The cold had lined you on the inside; every breath felt like you were inhaling razor wire.

“I know,” he said immediately, the words snapping down over your noise like a shield. “I know, I know. Hurts like hell. That’s good. Means you’re still with me.”

You focused on his mouth because his eyes were too much—too full, too bright, too terrified. You could see the line of concentration there, the way his lips flattened when he was doing a dozen calculations at once. Distance to extraction. Time to bleed out. Temperature. Your weight. His own stamina. Probability curves. You knew that brain. You’d watched it grind through worse.

He shifted his weight and your world rocked with him. The snow beneath you squelched, a wet sound that had nothing to do with melt. He peeled your hand away from your side—somehow, at some point, your fingers had gone numb enough that they didn’t even try to resist—and replaced it with a balled-up compress from the kit. Pressure. Constant. Unrelenting.

“Lost you on comms,” he said, hands working while his mouth did. “Went dead right as you hit the bend. Static, then nothing. You know what that does to a man with my track record?” His voice cracked once, just a fracture in the middle of a sentence that he pretended wasn’t there. “Drove me fuckin’ crazy trying to pick a signal outta snow and concrete.”

His movements were fast but controlled. Tourniquet pulled tight above the wound. Seal slapped over an entry you couldn’t see. Somewhere, he’d ripped your jacket open; you didn’t remember when. The cold had burrowed into every exposed inch of you, but where his hands were, it was just heat, just pressure, just the fierce, stubborn insistence of him refusing to let anything leak out that he hadn’t given permission to.

“Thought—” He cut himself off, jaw locking. You saw the muscle jump there, the tendons stand out. He swallowed hard and tried again. “Fuck. You weren’t where you were supposed to be. Trail was half-covered. You bled all over my damn map, sweetheart.”

There it was again. A soft name in a place it didn’t belong, said like he didn’t have time to filter anything. You latched onto it the way your body tried to latch onto oxygen.

You could hear other noises now, too. Distant, on the periphery. Voices over his shoulder—Sam, maybe, or whoever else had made it to the treeline with him. Footsteps crunching, the whine of a quinjet engine ramping up in the far-blue distance. Someone on comms yelling coordinates. But all of it sounded like it was happening underwater. He was the only thing in crisp focus.

Your lips moved again. It felt like dragging them through wet cement. You were trying for something simple. Two words. You came. It was a stupid thing to say, redundant and childish, but it was the only thought that had enough weight to make it to your mouth. You had pictured him not making it over and over in the snow. The fact of him kneeling here, cursing under his breath and leaving dents in the earth with his knees, felt like it needed acknowledging.

It came out a fragile stutter of consonants and air. “Y—you… c—”

His head dipped, forehead nearly touching yours as he leaned in, like he could catch the sound before it froze.

“What?” he said, and the word was gentler than anything had any right to be out here. “Say it again. I got you. I’m right here, I can hear you.”

You tried. You dragged breath in past the thick, heavy thing sitting on your chest and shaped it as best you could. “You… came.”

It barely existed. Not even a whisper, more like the ghost of one.

But he heard it.

Of course he did. This was the man who could pick out the click of a safety in a firefight. Who heard the difference between your footsteps and anyone else’s in the hallway. His eyes flared, a flash of something raw that made your pulse jump weakly in your throat.

“Yeah,” he said, voice going rough again in a whole new way. “Yeah, of course I came.” He let out a shaky, humorless huff. “Took you long enough to notice, layin’ here making snow angels in your own damn blood.”

You blinked up at him, slow and stupid, and for half a second his mouth actually curved. The expression was a mess: relief trying to be a joke, fear trying not to be a sob, anger at himself coated in that familiar exasperation he used to keep from unraveling.

“Had to make, you know,” you rasped, every syllable sandpaper. “Dramatic… entrance.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Almost made a dramatic exit, too. Overachiever.”

He slid his hand under your head, lifting it just enough to wedge something rolled—his jacket? your pack?—beneath it to keep you from sinking deeper into the cold. His fingers were warm against the back of your neck. Calluses pressed into skin. You felt the precise care in the way he moved you, every angle measured so he didn’t jostle the hole in your side any more than he had to.

“Stay with me, okay?” he said, and the steadiness in his tone did not match the frantic glitter in his eyes. “I know you’re tired. I know. But you don’t get to tap out on me now. We’re not done arguing about proper nutrition or whatever dumb thing you’re gonna pick next.”

You wanted to tell him you’d absolutely fight him about nutrition, about sleep, about whose turn it was to wash the damn mugs in the kitchen. You wanted to point out that if he’d wanted you to rest, maybe he shouldn’t have made breathing around his presence so difficult. Instead, all that came out was a small, wrecked noise that could have been a laugh in a better world.

“S’rry,” you breathed, though you weren’t sure what for. For bleeding on the snow. For dropping comms. For scaring him. For not being stronger. For all of it and none of it.

His face hardened, not at you but at the word.

“No,” he said, sharp and immediate. “No ‘sorry.’ You hear me?” He shook his head once, snow scattering from his hair onto your cheeks. “You got nothing to apologize for. I should’ve been closer. I should’ve—”

He cut off again, like he’d hit a wall inside his own head.

Should’ve. You knew the rest of that sentence without hearing it. Should’ve checked the bend myself. Should’ve stood in front of you instead of trusting the angle. Should’ve known the comms were about to die because everything that could go wrong tended to when he had something to lose.

You wanted to tell him to shut up. That it wasn’t his fault. That you never listened to perfect plans anyway. That if he’d been any closer, maybe the bullet would’ve gone into him instead, and that was a timeline you refused with a kind of exhausted certainty that surprised you.

Your lips tried to shape his name again, but your throat rebelled. Your lungs were working so hard on the simple inhale-exhale loop that adding consonants seemed rude.

He saw the effort and leaned in like he could carry some of it for you.

“I know,” he said, soft. “I know what you’re tryna say. Save your breath for yelling at me later, okay?”

The metal hand kept pressure on the wound with relentless, uncomplaining force. The other was everywhere at once—checking your pulse at your throat, brushing wet hair away from your face, adjusting the angle of the bandage, reaching back to gesture furiously at whoever was behind him.

“Med evac, now!” he snapped, hand coming quickly to his comms, without looking away from you. “I don’t care if you gotta land that bird on one engine, Wilson, you get it down here.”

“We're landing, as fast as we can” Sam’s voice crackled through faintly, far and tinny to your ears but apparently in his. “You just keep them breathing.”

“Working on it,” Bucky muttered, more to himself than the comm, his hand moving back to you.

You felt his thumb drag once along your jaw, an absent, grounding touch like he wasn’t even aware he was doing it. There was a smear of red across his knuckles now, not all of it yours; he moved like he’d already gone through dozens of other people to get to you.

“Eyes on me,” he said. “Don’t look at the sky. Don’t look at the snow. That’s my job. Yours is just…” He hesitated, searching. “…just stay here.”

“I… am… here,” you mumbled, every word a separate, clumsy attempt. The syllables frayed at the edges, but you got them out.

“That’s right,” he said quickly, like he was rewarding a kid for doing something hard. “That’s it. That’s my girl.”

The phrase detonated quietly between you. He seemed to hear it a second after he said it, because his mouth pressed into a thin line—and for half a breath his eyes flicked away, like he needed to look at anything else.

My girl. You would have replayed it a thousand times in your head if you’d had the spare oxygen. As it was, all you could do was let the resonance of it hum through the spaces pain hadn’t filled yet.

You swallowed, the action slow and foreign. It felt like the first time you’d tried to use your voice after a bad smoke inhalation mission—everything scraped, everything resisted. “Thought…” you managed, vowels dragging. “You… didn’t… like… paperwork.”

He blinked, thrown. “What?”

“Reports,” you slurred, vaguely proud of yourself for getting the word mostly intact. “If I… didn’t… come back… you’d… have… to…”

“You are not, not dying because I hate forms,” he said, incredulous, and for the first time since he’d appeared, something like real, rough amusement flickered through his panic. “Jesus. Only you would try to guilt-trip me from a bullet hole.”

“Tactic,” you whispered. Your chest hurt from this much talking, but you couldn’t make yourself stop. It felt important to crowd the air with anything but silence. “Weapon… of choice.”

“Yeah, well, it’s working,” he said. His hand slid from your throat to your cheek, thumb pressing lightly at your cheekbone as if to keep your eyes open by sheer force. “Don’t you dare check out on me, you hear? I’m not done givin’ you shit for this. You went off alone, comms dead, no backup on the blind side—”

“Backup…” you wheezed before thinking. “S’pposed… to be… you.”

He flinched like you’d hit him. Just a tiny jerk, barely there, the kind someone who didn’t know him would’ve missed. You felt it in the way his fingers tensed.

“It was,” he said, voice dropping low and rough, like gravel under tires. “It is. I’m here now. I’m sorry.”

You might have reminded him of his own rule about apologies. You might have told him you didn’t blame him. Instead, your body chose that moment to curl in on itself, a cough tearing up from somewhere deep. It felt like your lungs turned inside out. Pain stabbed through your side like a hot, clean blade, and for a second everything white-ed out, the world narrowing to a rushing in your ears.

You would have rolled if you could move. He stopped you before the impulse even finished firing.

“Whoa, hey, easy—easy,” he said, bracing you with one hand splayed against your sternum, the metal still clamped at your side. “You gotta breathe gentle, sweetheart. Little sips. In and out. Don’t fight it. Atta girl.”

His voice did something to the panic clawing at your chest. It cut through the animal urge to thrash, to escape the burn, and threaded command through the chaos instead. You clung to it. In. Out. The breaths were shallow, ragged, but they happened. Your vision stuttered, then steadied enough to find his face again.

“There you go,” he murmured, relief bleeding into the words. “There you are.”

You saw it then, in the tiny lines around his eyes, in the way his mouth kept trying to settle and couldn’t: he was terrified. Not the kind of fear that froze. The kind that sharpened everything until it cut him from the inside.

“Couldn’t—” You swallowed, tasted blood. Your eyes pricked. “Couldn’t… hear you.”

“At the bend?” he asked, knowing exactly what you meant. “Yeah. I know. Comms fried. Whole channel went dead. I was callin’ you for twelve full minutes, felt like two goddamn years.” His jaw clenched. “By the time I got eyes on this slope—”

He glanced down at the trail you’d left, the carved red path in the snow. You watched his throat work like he had to physically swallow something.

“—I thought I was too late,” he finished, quietly. “Thought I was gonna be diggin’ you out, not patching you up.”

“Almost,” you croaked, because honesty had never really left you a choice. “I… thought… you weren’t…”

“I know what you thought,” he said, and there was a rawness in his tone you’d only heard a handful of times. The night he’d told you about the first time he woke up in HYDRA hands. The time he’d confessed, in a roundabout way, how many names he woke up with on his tongue.

He leaned in closer, until his nose almost brushed your temple. You could feel the heat of his breath on your ear, the trembling in it he was trying so hard to hide.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, quieter. “For that. For that feeling. For every second you lay here thinking you were alone. You weren’t. I swear to you, you weren’t. I was coming. I was… I’m here now.”

Your vision blurred—not from blood loss this time, but from something hot that had no business existing in this cold. You blinked hard, lashes sticking.

“Didn’t… want…” You had to stop, breathe, gather what little strength you had left. “Didn’t want… you… to see.... if I...”

His head drew back a fraction so he could see your face. His brows pulled together.

“See what?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“Like this,” you whispered. It sounded pathetic out loud, but there it was. “You’ve… seen enough.”

The words hung between you, heavy with all the images you knew lived behind his eyes. War. Blood. The bodies he’d made and the ones he’d failed to save. You weren’t arrogant enough to think you’d be some special exception to that catalog. Still, the idea of your shape joining that crowd in his head made something in you rebel.

His expression shifted, something fierce and almost offended tearing through the shock.

“Hey,” he said sharply, fingers tightening just enough on your jaw that you had to look at him. “You don’t get to decide what I can handle. You hear me? You don’t get to take choices away from me ‘cause you’re trying to protect me.”

You would’ve laughed if you had the breath for it. “Hypocrite,” you rasped.

He barked out a strangled sound that might have been a laugh, might have been a choked sob. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Yeah, I know. But I mean it. You think I want my last image of you to be a fuckin’ radio going quiet? An empty patch of snow? No chance.”

His thumb stroked once along the hinge of your jaw, almost reverent. He looked at you like he was trying to memorize every line, every fleck of color in your eyes, every shape your mouth made—even while those eyes fluttered and that mouth barely moved.

“If this is what I get,” he said, voice low and rough, “if this is the moment I gotta hold on to if everything goes sideways, then I’m gonna be here for all of it. You don’t get to protect me from that. That’s not how this works.”

The if in that sentence sat in your chest like a stone. He’d said if, not when. He believed in some version where you walked away from this. You wanted that too. You wanted it so badly it felt like a second wound under the first.

“Bucky,” you whispered, and this time your mouth cooperated, got all the letters out.

His eyes shut for a second, just one. When they opened, they were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the snow.

“There you go,” he said, like you’d done something heroic by managing two syllables. “That’s me. I’m here. Look—” He shifted his grip, lifting your hand with his, guiding your fingers clumsily to press over the back of his metal knuckles where they pressed into your side. “You feel that? That’s me. Not going anywhere.”

The metal was warm, almost hot, from the constant work. Under your numb fingertips, the faint whir of servos thrummed, steady as a heartbeat. You latched onto it, on the pressure of his hand and the solidity of his arm, as if the contact alone could tether you.

“You’re… gonna be okay,” he said, like he could bully the universe into compliance. “We’re gonna get you on the jet, we’re gonna get you to a med bay with actual walls and not these goddamn trees, and then I’m gonna sit in the corner and glower at every doctor that comes near you until they’re too scared to discharge you before I say so.”

“Gonna… scare… them,” you breathed, a ghost of a smile twitching at your mouth.

“Good,” he said promptly. “They should be scared. You’re my favorite pain in the ass. I’m not lettin’ anyone half-ass your care.”

Favorite. The word slid in under your ribs. It fit with my girl in a way that made your chest throb for reasons that had nothing to do with trauma.

Somewhere behind him, closer now, you heard the heavy thump of the quinjet’s ramp hitting snow. Voices rose, clearer. Sam calling his position. Someone else—maybe a med tech—barking orders. The world expanded slightly, the edges of your focus dragging outward to include more than just Bucky’s face.

He didn’t look away.

“Okay,” he said, more to himself than you. “Okay, they’re here. We’re gonna move you now. It’s gonna suck. You’re allowed to hate me for it. You can yell at me later. Right now, you go limp, you hear? Don’t fight it. Let us do the work.”

“Bossy,” you muttered, the word slurring.

“Yeah,” he said. “Somebody’s gotta be. You’re terrible at following suggestions.”

Hands slid under you—Bucky’s, solid and sure, and another pair you couldn’t place. Maybe Sam’s. Maybe the medic’s. The moment your body lifted off the ground, pain screamed through you in an electric wave so intense your vision went fully white. You didn’t even realize you’d cried out until you felt your throat rasping.

“I know, I know,” Bucky’s voice cut through, right at your ear. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Breathe. I’ve got you.”

Your head lolled against something firm and warm. You realized it was his chest when the rhythm of his heartbeat crashed into your ear—fast but steady, a pounding drum against your skull. The world tilted as they carried you, the snow-sky trade flipping: white above, then sideways, then replaced by the dark maw of the quinjet’s cargo bay.

“Watch the IV line—no, we don’t have one yet, goddammit—just get them in and shut the door!” someone yelled.

The ramp clanged under booted feet. The air changed, the outside cold trading places with the metallic warmth inside. The thrum of the engines deepened, vibrating through the floor, up through Bucky’s legs, into your bones.

He didn’t put you down right away. Even when they reached the stretcher, he lowered you onto it like he was afraid you’d shatter. His hands never fully left you—palm on your shoulder while the medic worked, fingers brushing your wrist when they inserted a line, the metal still hovering near your side as if he’d punch anyone who got the tourniquet wrong.

“BP’s in the toilet,” a voice said somewhere to your left. “They need volume now. Who did this dressing?”

“I did,” Bucky snapped.

“It’s solid,” the medic said immediately, no challenge in it. “Good work. Let’s build on it. Hey—” A face swam into your peripheral. “Stay with me, alright? Can you squeeze my hand?”

You tried. Your fingers twitched weakly. The medic smiled like you’d just done a backflip.

“There we go. Keep that up. What’s their name?” they asked, presumably to Bucky.

He answered without hesitation, your name landing heavy in the air. Hearing it like that, in his voice, made you ache. Made you want to live out of sheer spite, just to hear it like that again without blood in your throat.

“Okay, Y/N,” the medic said. “I’m putting something in your line that’s gonna feel really warm. That’s normal. Gonna help your blood remember what it’s supposed to be doing. You’re doing great.”

Warmth spread up your arm, alien and strange, different from the dull, dead cold of the snow. This was sharper, focused, purposeful. It raced to your chest and blooming there, chasing some of the heavy fog back from the edges.

Bucky hovered at your head, his body between you and the rest of the world. He was a wall you’d never been more grateful for. He kept one hand braced on the stretcher as the jet shifted, like he didn’t trust the laws of physics to handle it alone.

“You still with me?” he asked, leaning into your line of sight again. His face was closer now than it had been on the ground, every freckle, every scar, every crease up for inspection. “C’mon. Gimme somethin’. Blink if you’re planning on ignoring my orders for another few years.”

You blinked. It took effort. Felt like pushing against a heavy door. But you did it. Once. Twice.

His mouth kicked up in a breathless, disbelieving grin that looked like it hurt him to make.

“That’s my girl,” he said again, softer. “God, you’re stubborn.”

“You… like…” you tried, the words slurring beyond recognition even to your own ears.

“Yeah,” he said, not even bothering to pretend he didn’t understand. His eyes didn’t leave yours. “I do.”

You didn’t know which part of that he was answering. Your weird half-formed accusation. Your blink. Your existence. It didn’t matter. The warmth of it threaded with the medicine in your veins, tangling until you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

The medic rattled off numbers. Someone said something about ETA to the facility. The engines roared, then steadied as the jet leveled out. The pressure in your side settled into a brutal, throbbing ache rather than an active, tearing burn. Each breath hurt, but it was less like drowning now and more like treading water with bricks tied to your ankles.

“You’re doing good,” Bucky murmured. “Proud of you.”

You almost rolled your eyes at him. Proud of you, like you’d done anything but lie here and bleed. But you could hear what he meant under it: thank you for not dying. Thank you for still being here where I can see you. Thank you for not adding another ghost to the pile.

“Can’t… get rid… of me…” you forced out, the words thin but there.

The edges of the world dimmed again, but it was different this time. Less like slipping away into cold and more like someone gently turning the lights down. Your body had reached its limit. You could feel it in the way your limbs refused every command, in the heavy pull at the back of your eyes.

Sleep, your bones whispered. Just for a second. Just to stop holding everything together so hard.

You must have let some of that show, because Bucky leaned closer, his forehead almost touching yours.

“Hey,” he said, and his voice had gone soft and dangerous, the way it did when he meant every word. “Listen to me. You wanna close your eyes, you can. You earned that. But you remember—this isn’t you checking out. This is you letting us carry some of this for a while. You get to rest because we’re not lettin’ go. You understand?”

You stared at him, at the lines of his face, at the snow still melting in his hair, and thought, wildly, that if this was the last thing you saw, it wouldn’t be the worst. But something stubborn and mean in you, something that had survived things it shouldn’t have long before you’d ever met him, reared up at the idea.

“‘Kay,” you breathed, because it hurt to argue even in your own head. “But… you’ll… be… there.”

It wasn’t a question. It felt like one anyway, hanging between you.

His eyes went glassy at the edges. He nodded once, like swearing an oath.

“Yeah,” he said. “You wake up, I’ll be the one you’re pissed at for letting the nurses poke you. I promise.”

You held his gaze for one more beat. Two. You watched his mouth press into a line that was half determination, half fear. You felt his thumb stroke along your cheekbone again, slow and almost absent, like he couldn’t stop touching you now that he’d started.

Then, finally, you let your eyes slip closed.

You woke up to the sound of something insisting you were alive.

A steady, thin beeping cut through the dark first, clinical and patient. It met the dull throb in your chest and the heavy ache in your side and negotiated with them, beat for beat. Light came next, too bright even behind your eyelids, pressing red against them like someone had laid the sun on your face. Your mouth tasted like cotton and metal and the ghost of plastic. Your throat ached deep, as if something had been there that didn’t belong and had been yanked out in a hurry.

For a second, you didn’t move. Couldn’t, really. Your limbs felt wrong—too heavy, too far away—as if someone had put your bones in the wrong gravity. Even trying to tell your fingers to twitch was like shouting down a long, empty hallway.

You cataloged what you could without opening your eyes. The air was warm and dry, smelling faintly of antiseptic, recycled ventilation, and the weird, overboiled tang of hospital food you hoped wasn’t for you. Sheets brushed your forearms, stiff and too clean. 

Something tugged at the inside of your elbow—IV line, taped down. A cuff squeezed your bicep in steady pulses. There was weight across your midsection, not crushing but firm: heavy bandage, maybe a brace. Something cold and foreign sat against your ribs on one side, the ache around it deep and pulsing. Chest tube, your training supplied, clinical and calm. Good. Bad. Both.

You were in a med bay. Facility, probably—one of the ones with real walls and humming machines and doctors who glared at Avengers like they were walking malpractice suits.

You were not in the snow. You were not staring up at a white sky and waiting to find out if the last thing you saw would be nothing.

The beeping ticked on, counting heartbeats you had been very close to not having.

You pried your eyes open. Slowly. The world came in a messy blur—light overhead, pale ceiling. Peripheral shapes of monitors and hanging bags. The room swam once, then steadied. Your vision sharpened in increments until you could track lines and edges again.

To your right, in a hard plastic chair shoved as close to the bed as physically allowed, was Bucky.

He looked wrong in med bay lighting. Too human and too haunted at the same time. The overhead fluorescents bleached the color from him, highlighting every shadow under his eyes, every line carved into his forehead. 

His hair was a wreck, pushed back in a way that spoke of frustrated fingers and zero regard for mirrors. Stubble darkened his jaw. He was slouched forward, elbows on his knees, metal hand braced around his own wrist like he needed the grip to stay anchored.

His eyes were closed. For half a second, you thought he was asleep. The idea of Bucky Barnes letting his guard down enough to actually sleep in a chair next to you made your chest lurch. Then you saw the way his thumb kept tracing the line of your wrist where your hand lay in his, skin to skin, as if he needed the movement. 

Not asleep.

Your throat tried to clear itself and immediately regretted it. The cough you meant to be quiet scraped up like broken glass. You choked on it. Every muscle between your neck and hip spasmed in miserable protest. Pain flared white-hot along your side, radiating out from the bandaged hole like someone had poured acid into your nerve endings. Your lungs seized, then dragged in air too fast, too shallow. The monitor at your head sped up, a frantic little staccato.

Bucky’s eyes snapped open instantly.

“Hey—hey, whoa,” he said, already on his feet, the chair skidding back with a harsh squeak. “Easy.”

He was at your side before you’d even finished the first broken inhale. His hand left your wrist only long enough to hit the bed control, raising the head a fraction so you weren’t flat. The movement made your side scream again. You winced, teeth grinding together, fingers clawing at the sheet.

“Buck,” you rasped. Or tried to. It came out like someone dragging a shovel over gravel.

His gaze dragged up to your face. When your eyes met, a whole storm passed through his expression in about half a second—shock, relief, anger, something so raw and bright it almost hurt more than your side.

“Yeah,” he said, voice gone rough, like he’d been yelling or not talking at all for too long. “Yeah, it’s me.”

He put his flesh hand around the back of your neck, not lifting you, just steadying, thumb careful against the tender tendons there. The contact grounded you in a way the machines couldn’t. Your pulse thudded under his fingers, frantic but real.

“Slow,” he added, softer, eyes never leaving yours. “Breathe slow. They gave you some fun stuff. Your lungs are gonna feel all kinds of weird about it.”

You tried to listen. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Each breath dragged over the sore spot in your chest where the tube sat, but it settled, inch by inch, into something more manageable. The monitor agreed, its panicked blip easing back into a steadier rhythm.

“Where…?” you managed, glancing around, though moving your head even that much made black spots flirt at the edges of your vision.

“Med facility,” he said. “Off-grid. Good docs. Good equipment. Terrible coffee.” He hesitated a beat. “You’re okay.”

The word hung there. Okay felt like a stretch. You felt like you’d been run over by a truck, stripped for parts, then stapled back together. Your side burned in a deep, wet way that said serious internal damage, not just a flesh wound. The bandage pulled uncomfortably with every breath. Your chest ached in time with the IV pump.

But you were not dead.

You blinked, trying to fit that fact into your skull. Your brain snagged on another question instead.

“How… bad?” you whispered.

His jaw flexed. You watched him decide between lying and not. The lines around his eyes tightened. He hesitated for a moment, dragging the chair back with his free hand and sitting back down.

“Bad,” he said finally, because he respected you too much to sugarcoat. “Bullets went in shallow, but it hit all the wrong shit—ricocheted, tore through part of your liver, nicked your lung. Lots of blood. You gave the surgeons a real workout.”

You swallowed. Your mouth felt like sand. “And I…?” You had meant to ask something flippant—did I win? do I at least get a lollipop?—because that was how you handled this stuff. The effort of forming the words stripped the humor out of them.

“You made it,” he said. No joke in his tone. Just flat, stubborn certainty. “They had to transfuse you, patch you up from the inside out, shove a tube in your chest to help you breathe. They were talking about percentages for a while. I didn’t like their math.”

You pictured him, pacing like a caged animal outside an OR door, counting every second with his teeth. It did something ugly to your heart.

“How long…?” you asked.

He glanced at the cheap wall clock in the corner like it had offended him personally. “You’ve been out, off and on, for…about four days. Longer if you count the part where you were half-conscious in the snow and arguing with me.”

The fact that he was measuring time in arguments almost made you smile. Almost. Everything in your face hurt when you tried.

“Sorry,” you said automatically, because the idea of him stuck in this room that long, with nothing to do but watch monitors and think, made guilt crawl under your skin.

His eyes snapped back to yours, sharp. “What did I say about that?”

You frowned, brain moving slow through the fog.

“No ‘sorry,’” he reminded you, voice softening but not backing off. “You did your job. Didn’t exactly throw yourself in front of a bullet for fun.” He paused. “At least I hope not, ‘cause that would really ruin the ‘you’re not expendable’ speech I’ve been rehearsing.”

You huffed a tiny sound that might’ve been a laugh if it hadn’t felt like your ribs were full of knives. “You… rehearsed… a speech?”

He shifted his weight, suddenly looking almost…sheepish. It didn’t sit naturally on him, like the chair under him. “Yeah, well. Had some time on my hands.”

You let that sink in: Bucky Barnes, former brainwashed assassin, current pain-in-your-ass, sitting in a too-small med bay chair for days, crafting a lecture about your value. Because of course he did.

“You… didn’t have to…” you started.

“Yeah,” he cut in, “I did.”

The firmness in his tone made your breath stutter. His hand at your neck tightened fractionally, thumb resting in the hollow under your skull.

“You remember,” he went on, staring at you like he could pin your attention in place, “all those times you joked about not making it? About your grave? About going out in some blaze of glory?”

Heat flushed under your skin, embarrassed and defensive all at once. “That’s…just how I cope, Buck.”

“I know,” he said. “Believe me, I know about coping mechanisms.” His mouth twisted. “But seeing you lying in the snow after following a trail of your blood, looking at you half-frozen and half-gone, hearing you wheeze about how I ‘came’ like you were surprised I showed up? That wasn’t coping. That was…”

He broke off, eyes closing for a second. When he opened them again, they were too bright.

“That was you actually thinking I might not get there,” he finished, quieter. “That I might not come. And that? That’s not a joke I can live with.”

You stared at him, throat thick. You remembered it all too vividly: the snow, the silence, the distance between where you were and where he might have been. The way your brain had quietly considered the possibility that he wouldn’t make it in time, and how you’d tried to make peace with that by replaying him in your head.

“I didn’t…” you started, then stopped. Honesty tasted like antiseptic and fear. “I didn’t want you to see me like that.”

He let out a humorless scoff. “Newsflash: I’ve seen worse.”

“That’s exactly the point,” you said, voice scraping but gaining a little strength. “You’ve seen too much. Done too much. I didn’t want to be another—” You gestured weakly, the IV tugging. “Another body on the ground somewhere in your head.”

His jaw clenched. You watched the tendons jump.

“You’re not,” he said, firmly. “You’re not a body on the ground. You’re—”

He cut himself off again, looking abruptly away, like the words had gotten too close to something he hadn’t decided whether to say. His metal hand flexed at his side, fingers curling and uncurling with a faint whir.

“You’re loud,” he muttered instead, after a second. “Annoying. Stubborn. You steal my coffee. You hide my knives as a ‘trust exercise.’ You call me on my bullshit. That’s what you are in my head. Not…this.”

“Loud,” you repeated, trying to keep your mouth from shaking. “I almost died and that’s the best you can do?”

He shot you a look, exasperated and fond and utterly, painfully familiar. “Don’t start,” he said. “I’ve been nice to you for like seventy-two hours straight. I’m exhausted.”

You would’ve rolled your eyes if they weren’t already fighting to stay open. “This is you…being nice?”

“This is me not putting you in a medically induced coma myself so I can yell at you without anyone interrupting,” he said dryly. Then the humor drained, leaving something softer behind. “This is me telling you I’m glad you’re still here to piss me off.”

Silence settled between you for a moment, thick and humming. The monitors filled it with a steady, background reassurance: you’re here, you’re here, you’re here.

“You stayed,” you said, because it felt necessary to name it. “The whole time.”

He shrugged, as if he were answering a question about the weather. “Yeah.”

“You could have…slept. Showered.” You sniffed faintly. “You smell like jet fuel and bad coffee.”

“Romantic,” he murmured. “Look, they came in and poked you, and cut on you, and yelled about blood loss. You coded once.”

You blinked. “I…what?”

“For about eight seconds,” he said, voice going flat in that way it did when he forced his emotions into a box. “Heart stopped. They shocked you. You came back.” He inhaled slowly. “I did not feel like going to take a nap after that.”

Eight seconds. A tiny rip in time. Long enough for him to stand in a doorway and watch your monitor flatline. Long enough for every bad thing that had ever happened to him to line up behind that moment and wait its turn.

You swallowed hard. “Bucky…”

He shook his head once, like he could physically dislodge whatever memory you were about to apologize for.

“Doc says you’re past the worst of it,” he said. “Liver’s patched. Lung’s reinflated. They’ll pull the tube in a day or two if your numbers behave. You’re gonna hurt like hell for a while. You’re gonna hate physical therapy. You’re probably gonna try to skip half your meds and pretend you’re fine.”

“That sounds…accurate,” you admitted.

“And I,” he continued, “am going to be here, making your life miserable, making sure you do none of that.”

“You gonna…hover?” you asked, the word weaker and more hopeful than you meant it to be.

He huffed, eyes flicking heavenward like he was asking for patience. “I’m gonna make sure you don’t pull your stitches trying to prove something,” he said. “If that qualifies as hovering, then yeah.”

You let your gaze roam over him properly now, taking in the details you’d missed in the initial foggy panic of waking. The dark crescents under his eyes. The dried smear of something on his sleeve that looked like blood but might not be yours. His shoulders were hunched in that way that told you he’d been braced for bad news, arms crossed so tight over his chest earlier he might have left bruises on his own ribs.

He looked like something a storm had chewed up and spit out. And still, he was here.

“You look like shit,” you said, because that’s what you did when things edged too close to unbearable.

His mouth actually curled. “You always this charming after almost dying?”

“You always this…clingy after saving someone?”

“Only the ones who make fun of their own funerals,” he said. “Gotta keep an eye on you. Can’t trust you not to try and skip out on your own wake.”

A memory flickered: the kitchen, the jar of Nutella, the way his face had gone hard when you joked about taking what he said to the grave.

“Guess I’m not as funny as I thought,” you murmured.

He exhales through his nose, slow. “You’re funny,” he said. “You kill me sometimes. But maybe ease up on the death jokes for a bit, yeah? They hit different when I’ve watched you bleed out.”

You swallowed around the sudden lump in your throat. “Too soon?”

His gaze softened, the edges of his eyes crinkling in a way that always made you feel like the air had thickened. “Way too soon,” he said. “Gimme, like, ten years. Then you can start with the graveyard material again.”

You tried to laugh, then winced as the movement tugged your side. He caught the wince like it was his own.

“Okay,” you said, breathless. “No more…grave jokes. At least for a while.” You paused. “Maybe… just favorite patient jokes?”

He blinked, something flickering in his expression that wasn’t just relief. “You’re not my patient,” he said, almost automatically.

You raised a brow, or tried to. “I'm not?”

He looked at you for a long moment. Then his shoulders dropped a fraction, as if some invisible weight had shifted. His metal fingers flexed against the bed rail, a tell you’d learned to read like a paragraph.

“You’re more than that,” he said quietly.

The words slipped out too honest, too bare. He didn’t look away this time. He let them sit there between you, like a live wire.

Your pulse monitor ticked up a notch. You felt it. You were sure he heard it.

“Bucky…” you started again, for what felt like the hundredth time, and this time you didn’t know what you were apologizing for or trying to say. You only knew that the room felt too small for everything pressed into your ribs.

He beat you to it.

“Thought I was gonna lose you,” he said, the words coming out low and fast, like if he didn’t get them out now, he never would. “Out there. On that hill. In here. Eight seconds on a flatline feels a lot like every other time I watched somebody die. And I—I can’t—”

His voice cracked, just once, violently. He sucked in a breath like it hurt.

“I can’t go through that with you and pretend you’re just another teammate,” he finished hoarsely.

Your heart did something painful and grateful at the same time. “Good,” you whispered. “Hate to be…generic.”

He let out a strangled laugh that sounded a little like he might cry. “You’re the least generic person I’ve ever met,” he said. “You drive me up the wall. You scare the hell out of me. You make me…want things. For myself. That I thought I was done wanting.”

You stared at him, words gone.

“When I couldn’t reach you on comms,” he went on quietly, eyes fixed on the line of your shoulder now, like looking directly at your face might be too much, “all I could think about was every stupid joke you’ve ever made about not making it. About going out. About it not being a big deal. And I was—I was furious. At you. At me. At every bastard who ever made you think that maybe you were…not worth staying for.”

Your throat tightened. “Bucky—”

He looked up then, finally, and the intensity in his gaze pinned you to the bed more effectively than any strap.

“I would miss you,” he said. No hesitation. No deflection. “I do. When you’re gone for an hour on a run, I feel it. When you’re not in the kitchen at 2 a.m. raiding the cabinet, I notice. When you’re not bitching about my music or falling asleep on the couch with a book on your face, the whole place feels…wrong.”

The monitor tattled on you, speeding up again. He didn’t flinch.

“You’re in my day even when you’re not there,” he said. “So don’t you ever think for one second that I wouldn’t move heaven, hell, and every goddamn city left on this earth to get to you.”

You blinked hard, the world blurring in that way that had nothing to do with drugs.

“I only joked like that,” you managed, voice small, “because…if I said it serious, it would sound pathetic. Needy. Like I wanted…more than I should.”

His expression shifted—something pained and tender all at once.

“You’re allowed to want more,” he said. “Especially from me.”

That last part hung there, thick as smoke.

“You…want more?” you asked, because apparently you’d almost died and your brain had decided to stop filtering anything.

He let out a breath that sounded like surrender. “Maybe,” he said. “Yeah.”

He raked his flesh hand through his hair, like he was bracing for impact.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he said. “Didn’t go out and decide, ‘hey, let’s catch feelings for the one person on this team who actually has standards.’ It just…kept happening. Every time you rolled your eyes at me. Every time you patched me up without making it a big deal. Every time you made some awful joke about us going out in a blaze of glory but still checked my six before your own.”

He shook his head slightly.

“I kept telling myself it was just…combat attachment,” he said. “Buddy cop bullshit. Shared trauma. Whatever label made it easier. But the second you went quiet out there, it wasn’t tactical. It wasn’t about losing an asset. It was—”

He swallowed. The word stuck. He pushed it out anyway.

“It was personal,” he finished.

You lay there, heart pounding unhelpfully fast, trying to process the fact that Bucky Barnes was confessing he cared about you more than made sense, in a tone that suggested he’d been fighting it every step of the way.

“Funny,” you whispered, “that you think I have standards.”

His mouth twitched. “You do,” he said. “They’re just weird.”

A breathless laugh escaped you. It hurt. You didn’t care.

“You know,” you said, “I kept…joking about dying because…honestly, I thought that’s how it’d be. Quick. Messy. No warning. That nobody would…care enough for it to really…matter after the fact.”

His fingers tightened on your neck again, gently but firm enough to yank you back from that cliff.

“Wrong,” he said, simply. “On all counts.”

You believed him. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was the fact that you’d seen the look on his face in the snow, the way his hands had moved over your wound with a desperation he hadn’t allowed into his voice. Maybe it was the way he was standing here now, like the only thing keeping him upright was the fact that you were.

“Bucky,” you said, letting his name hold everything you couldn’t fit into sentences yet. “I…didn’t plan on this either, you know.”

“On what?” he asked, voice cautious.

“You,” you said, because there was no point dancing around it anymore. “Getting under my skin. Making it…hard to breathe, and not just because I have bullet holes in my side.”

A soft, disbelieving breath of laughter escaped him.

“You’re really gonna make jokes in the middle of this?” he asked.

“That’s how you know it’s me,” you murmured.

He nodded, eyes damp at the corners. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that tracks.”

You wet your lips, gathering what scraps of courage you had left. “I didn’t want to…say anything,” you admitted, “because I figured…if you didn’t feel the same, I could just…keep joking about dying and never have to deal with it.”

He winced, like he’d been physically hit.

“That,” he said, “is the worst plan I’ve ever heard you have. And you’ve had some terrible ones.”

“Hey,” you croaked. “I survived. Mostly.”

“Yeah,” he said. “In spite of your best efforts.”

You let your head sink a little deeper into the pillow, exhaustion pulling at your edges. The IV pump clicked. The monitors hummed. Somewhere outside the door, a cart rattled by, tires squeaking. The world felt weirdly distant, like you were wrapped in glass. The only thing that felt real was the way his thumb kept moving in slow circles against your skin, like he needed that contact as much as you did.

“So what now?” you asked softly. “We…pretend this didn’t happen? Go back to making morbid jokes and hiding in safe house kitchens?”

He took a breath, slow and deliberate, like he was bracing to step onto a minefield.

“No,” he said.

The word settled in your chest like a warm weight.

“I can’t go back to pretending I don’t…” He trailed off, searching for the right phrasing, as if every word was a potential trap. “That I don’t care this much. That you’re just another mission file. That I’d be fine if you didn’t come back one day. I’ve done enough pretending in my life.”

“Me too,” you admitted.

His gaze softened, something like pride flickering in it.

“So we don’t pretend,” he said. “We…figure it out. Slowly. Carefully. When you’re not on enough meds to take down an elephant.”

You snorted, the sound dissolving into a wince. “Are you…asking me out…or scheduling a…feelings debrief?”

He shook his head, a wry smile tugging at his mouth. “Little of both, maybe,” he said. “I’m sayin’…when you’re cleared, when you’re not held together by staples and sheer spite, I’d like to take you somewhere that isn’t a safehouse or a warzone. Get coffee that isn’t from a shitty machine. Maybe sit in a park like normal people and argue about something stupid.”

“Sounds dangerous,” you whispered.

“Yeah,” he said, eyes crinkling. “Terrifying. I’ll bring backup.”

“Sam?” you asked.

“Hell no,” he said. “He’d never let me hear the end of it.”

You smiled, small and wobbly. “I’d like that,” you said, and the simplicity of the words nearly undid you.

His shoulders loosened, just a fraction. You saw the tension bleed out of him like air from a too-tight balloon.

“Okay,” he said, like the decision had been a battle and he was finally letting himself believe he’d won. “Okay.”

The room seemed to breathe with you then. Everything felt a little less sharp, a little less precarious. The pain was still there, deep and insistent, but it had context now. It had a shape that wasn’t just fear.

“You know,” you murmured, because your brain refused to stop offering up mortifying honesty, “if this had gone the other way…you would’ve been the last thing I thought about.”

His face went very still.

“I know,” he said quietly. “I could see it on the hill. You were looking right through me like you were seeing everything all at once. I figured at least some of that was my charming face.”

“Always,” you whispered. “Annoying to the end.”

He huffed, but there was no bite in it. Only relief.

“Do me a favor?” he asked.

“Depends,” you said.

“Next time you wanna test-drive dying,” he said, voice dipped in dry sarcasm to hide the shake under it, “don’t.”

You nodded, or tried to. “I’ll…put in a formal request,” you said. “File it with…whoever’s in charge of…mortality.”

“I got connections,” he said. “Guy with a hammer owes me a favor. I’ll see what I can do.”

You snorted again, exhausted and weirdly light.

“Can I…sleep again now?” you asked, suddenly bone-deep tired. The drugs and the adrenaline crash and the conversation had wrung you out. Your eyelids felt like they had weights sewn into them.

He studied you for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, you can sleep.”

“You’ll still…be here?”

He didn’t even pretend to consider the alternative. “Yeah,” he said. “Right here. When you wake up, when you start trying to sign yourself out against medical advice, when you worry about the scars—I’ll be here for all of it.”

“That’s…a lot of Bucky,” you mumbled, already drifting.

“Well, get used to it,” he said, like it was the easiest thing in the world.

You smiled, eyes finally sliding shut. The darkness that rose this time was softer, edged in steady beeping and the low hum of the med bay. Somewhere in the middle of it, his thumb kept tracing that slow, grounding circle at the base of your skull.

Right before you slipped under, you heard him say it, voice barely above a whisper, like he was talking to himself.

“I love you,” he murmured. “So don’t pull that shit again.”

If you’d been any more awake, you might have grabbed his wrist, forced him to repeat it, teased him until he turned red. As it was, the words sank into you like morphine, warm and heavy and strangely clean.

You drifted, pulled under before you could shape even a half-formed answer. Maybe that was for the best. It gave you something to wake up to. Something real, not imagined in the snow.

no more taglists! tumblr’s @ limit said no 💔 follow @cheekybarnesupdates + turn on notifs for all fic drops!

[belongsto-prachi]

what a beautiful read

[eoieopda]

Yoongi + “runaway bride” I’mma leave this one up to your interpretation bc I know I’ll love it either way and also wanna see what you come up with 👀

oooooooh!!! v excited by this prompt, lol. this is, um, going to hurt kind of a lot at the beginning, but stick with me!!!! also, i accidentally made this >3.3k words….. which i will proofread when i am no longer exhausted 🤪

the one with yoongi and the fucking hydrangeas

ft. POV shift, pining & correlating angst, reader who’s🎵 a runner she’s a track star 🎵, a #nonspon vans product placement, a very unfortunate namjoon (sorry, buddy,) childhood idiots in love

2024 ETA: long after this was written, the user who requested this drabble admitted that they were a minor masquerading as an adult, violating my explicitly stated boundaries re: minors being prohibited from interacting with me and my content. this user has since been blocked.

Yoongi sat in a seat chosen specifically for him not because he wanted to, but because he knew how much time you’d sacrificed in writing every place card by hand.

To be clear, he’d never wanted to attend this rehearsal dinner in the first place. Unfortunately, he knew the stakes. That wasn’t something he’d dare to say out loud — especially not to you. Not in that restaurant while you fluttered between tables and shined your warm light on every single guest, one by one. Not ever, because you’d slipped through Yoongi’s fingers the second Namjoon slid that ring on yours.

If, in twelve hours’ time, Yoongi could force his deflated body out of bed, he’d have to watch quietly while you got away for good.

There was nothing he could do about it, either, so he swallowed that grief with a mouthful of bibim nengmyun. He knew it wasn’t the food that tasted so bitter on his tongue; however, on the off-chance that it was, he followed suit with another ill-advised swig of makgeolli.

During the two subsequent hours he sat and stewed at that table, Yoongi had lost count of just how many glasses he’d had. His eyes never lingered on the bottle, sticking instead to you and the smile that didn’t seem to spread beyond the curve of your lips. Every now and then, you’d glance his way — and every time you did, there was a microscopic twinge at the corner of your mouth.

It felt like a signal, something cryptic, but he wasn’t in the proper headspace to begin making assumptions. For the first time ever, you’d hit Yoongi with a look he didn’t know what to do with, and that fact drove him insane. This was what he was afraid of, after all — that the invisible string between you would be re-routed to someone else, and the telepathic link you’d always shared would disappear with it.

Your friendship had started early because your respective mothers had grown up together, and found each other once again as adults with two kids each. Back then, both of your front teeth were missing and — if Yoongi made you laugh too hard at routine, weekend gatherings — banana milk would occasionally fly out through the gap. He was nine-years-old and had no concept of it, but now he knows that he loved you then.

He loved you when you were ten, and you kneed a classmate in the dick for bullying Yoongi on the basketball court. You were two years younger and half his size, but you were a force to be reckoned with.

He loved you when you were fourteen, and a wave of brand new hormones made you a little bit of a fucking nightmare to be around.

At seventeen, twenty-one, still.

Now.

There, while everyone around him clinked their chopsticks against their glasses and Namjoon accepted the crowd’s wordless demand that he kiss you.

Yoongi had done well enough with your previous relationships. None of them made him feel like this, though, and he’d spent two years unable to put his finger on why. Sandwiched at that carefully chosen table between his mother and older brother, it finally clicked: None of them ever threatened to last.

Yoongi had never been a particularly hopeful person, but buried deep in the back of his brain, there had always been a crumb of it. Part of him, however stupid, thought you’d end up together at a dinner like this. All of this was the last nail in the coffin, the alarm clock screaming that it was time to wake up.

Suddenly more nauseous than he’d ever been before, Yoongi scooted his chair back so abruptly that it scraped along the floorboards. Just as quickly, he got to his feet and made a beeline for the exit. Of all the heads that turned to watch him leave, yours was the only one he noticed in his peripheral vision. He could feel your eyes on his back — pictured how confused you must look — and it only made his stomach acid churn faster.

When he finally made it out to the patio behind the restaurant, Yoongi’s suspicions were confirmed: closed for the season. Fitting. He wasn’t in the mood to heed the signs, so he stepped carefully — one leg at a time — over the hip-high metal gate and gulped down sharp, late autumn air. As he did, he begged himself to get his shit together for you, if not for him.

He spent several minutes out there, maybe even hours, sitting on a bare, metal chair and glowering out at the trees at the edge of the property. He hated himself, he realized, for how easily he wasted time. Let it slip by unnoticed while he stood still.

The clock seemed to mock him, ticking faster from behind him as if time was going to outrun him again.

At least, that was his first guess.

Yoongi quickly learned that the clicks weren’t signaling the passing seconds; they were broadcasting the urgent beat of stilettos on brick. So, having figured that his mother had appeared outside to gun him down, Yoongi glanced over his shoulder and braced himself for the be-all, end-all of scoldings.

What he got instead was you and the undeserved concern that caused your eyebrows to furrow.

“Are you okay?” You asked quietly once you reached the gate. With your manicured hands on the cold metal, you shivered, but you didn’t seem to notice. “Did you eat too much of the gochujang? I definitely did, and now I’ll be up all night with heartburn.”

Yoongi felt as though he’d been punched in the chest. The memory caught him in a riptide, beat him bloody against the rocks because he could’ve sworn he was sixteen again, stacking old encyclopedias under the headboard of your bed. He’d read somewhere online that, while sitting upright in a chair can exacerbate reflux, sleeping at an angle could help.

He was dizzy when he blinked back at you and saw your lips moving. He had to focus hard to figure out what you were saying.

“You remember that?”

Yoongi struggled to even out his breathing; he had no hope at all of finding the plot he’d lost. “Huh?”

You grinned and it made up for all the stars that had been hidden by grey clouds overhead. “The encyclopedias,” you chuckled, “They worked, you know.”

Yoongi didn’t mean to say it. He knew it before, during, and after it slipped out of his mouth that it was the worst goddamn thing he’d ever done, but he couldn’t stop himself — couldn’t shove the bullet he’d shot back into the gun. With the way it exploded through his chest — I love you — he was surprised that his body was still intact. No viscera sprayed out from the exit wound, no stains appeared on your chic, white cocktail dress.

You opened your mouth but closed it soon after, so clearly stunned by his unsolicited admission that you couldn’t find the words. Yoongi had no expectations whatsoever when it came down to your reaction because he hadn’t meant to provoke one in the first place. Even still, the wounded look on your face was worse than anything he might’ve imagined.

The two of you stood in tense silence for so long that Yoongi’s soul had nearly ejected itself fully from his body.

“That’s not fair,” eventually came your shaky reply. You clenched your fist tight around the top of the gate to anchor yourself and stammered, “Yoongi, that is not — Why would you —”

As soon as he aimed to take a step in your direction, your shock gave way to a scowl that could’ve boiled him alive.

“Why would you dump that at my feet? Tonight, of all fucking nights, Yoongi — seriously?” You snapped, though it sounded like a sob. “What am I supposed to do with this now?”

Now?

He didn’t know how to respond. He was paralyzed, inside and out, and he deserved it. Who the fuck was he, forcing the burden of his feelings onto you?

Selfish. Stupid. Out of time, as usual.

The makeup you always took so much time on started to run alongside your tears. Yoongi had seen you cry before, though he’d always been the reason you stopped, rather than started. He hated every single one of those muddied, black tears because he knew you. He knew you would have worn waterproof mascara if you’d had any reason to anticipate crying on your special night.

“I’m getting married in the morning!”

Your reminder was a dagger flying out of your mouth, sticking him right between the ribs. It stung as images flooded his mind — of you and Namjoon, your guests, and your out-of-season, imported fucking hydrangeas. It hurt even worse to see how badly you shook as you glared at him.

“Yoongi — fuck!”

Before you walked away, your eyes locked on his for a fraction of a second. In that moment, Yoongi promised himself that it was the last time you’d ever have to see his face.

When you were little, you pictured your wedding day like a moment ripped straight out of Cinderella. In your head, you’d wake up to birds singing at your window and mice scurrying around your feet, eager to dress you in a gown of epic and magical proportions. It’d be perfect. For years, you’d been sure of it.

In reality, there was no waking up because there hadn’t been a single second of sleep to begin with. No beauty rest, no sweet dreams of marital bliss — just you, feeling as if you’d swallowed a car battery. It sat heavy in the pit of your stomach, let acid burn all the way up to your esophagus. And it’d been all too easy to toss and turn in your hotel bed, which laid perfectly level on top of a plush, floral rug.

You crawled out of bed without the assistance of altruistic rodents and shuffled your dead weight over to the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. For once, your imagination had been accurate. Your puffy eyes were red in the aftermath of all your tears. They ached above circles so deep and dark that they would’ve alarmed you if you hadn’t expected them.

Namjoon had seen you at what you both believed to be your worst. Neither of you could’ve ever predicted that the Corpse Bride would be the one staggering down the aisle towards him. He’d love you anyway, you knew it, no matter how you looked. But if he knew what you spent all night toiling over…

You shook your head and abruptly turned away from the mirror. There were several of your dearest friends bustling around the room next to yours, all of whom were waiting on you. Swallowing hard, you headed for the adjoining door and promised yourself that the only person you’d let down today would be you.

You lost all track of time when a blur of hands went to work on you. If you’d closed your eyes while you dissociated, you could’ve pretended that your assistants were those woodland creatures you used to dream about. But you couldn’t close your eyes, couldn’t sleep through this part, couldn’t let your mind wander all the way back to that patio.

It’d been terrifying, staring your own heart in the face like that. More than anything, it was confusing because it didn’t look like you expected it would — not like an organ at all, but a person. You’d gotten so good at ignoring it that you couldn’t reasonably expect yourself to recognize it. It knew you, though, and loved you. Apparently, it always had.

As you sat in that hotel room, far away from the patio, you pictured every other moment you wished Yoongi had said what he did. The thousand times you’d thought for sure he felt the same, and all the ways you distracted yourself when you resigned to believing he didn’t. Every person you dated until you finally managed to move on —

“— please, love?”

You blinked rapidly to force your eyes to focus. In front of you, your mother stood with a knowing smile on her face and a sokchima in her hands. You didn’t need to ask her to repeat herself; you took the hint and rose slowly to your feet.

“I was nervous on my wedding day,” she hummed as she pulled the undergarment gently over your head. “Hungover, too, but your grandmother does not need to know that. Frankly, I’m surprised she couldn’t tell with how bloated I was when she helped me get ready…”

The bright scarlet chima followed without so much as a word from you. Your heart slammed helplessly against your rib cage when your mother proceeded to tug the sleeves of your jeogori up your arms. This moment should be special, you thought bitterly. All you wanted to do was cry; to apologize to your mother for your total inability to care while your wedding happened around you, not for you.

Soon enough, you were dressed. Your friends and older sister gushed about how beautiful you looked — the perfect bride — like you weren’t caught in the web of an anxiety attack. Like it wasn’t all wrong, and you weren’t dangling on the precipice of your life’s greatest mistake. Like you hadn’t spent so much of your hard-earned money on invitations and greenhouse-grown, special-ordered fucking hydrangeas.

Like you could catch a fucking breath under all the layers of your hanbok.

Sensing that a moment alone was necessary, your mother kissed your cheek and ushered the others out the door ahead of her. Before seeing herself out, too, she stalled in the threshold, turned back around to look at you, and exhaled through a pause.

“I left your shoes by the dresser,” she chirped.

The gentleness of her tone was reassuring, but there was a faint gleam in her eyes that caught your attention. Before you could ask after it, she nodded firmly once and let the door click shut behind her.

Alone again, your instinct was to do the same thing you’d spent ten consecutive hours doing — burying yourself under pillows and crying until you ran out of tears. But you had run out, which was precisely was the problem. You had no options left, nothing left to do but lean in.

At least, that was your first guess.

Your list of choices expanded by one when you saw the well-worn pair of slip-on Vans your mother had set out for you.

Yoongi sat on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands.

Only two meters away, a garment bag hung from the hook on the back of his bedroom door. That bag — and the crisp, black suit it concealed — lingered there for weeks in the shadows, untouched since the day he bought it. Even though it hadn’t left its hanger, he felt it smothering him throughout the night. It choked him while one thought ran circles in his sleep-deprived brain:

The reason he bought it was the same reason he’d never be able to wear it.

Sick of the way he’d trapped himself with his thoughts, Yoongi pushed himself to his feet and crossed over to the door. With the way he flung it open, knob slamming against the wall, he’d likely never recover his security deposit. It felt good, though, taking his grief out on that godforsaken suit.

On his way to his front door, Yoongi stopped short. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a cabinet he hadn’t opened in weeks. As he stared at it, the devil and angel on his shoulders warred over the action he wanted so desperately to take.

Sure, he’d recently — finally — quit at your insistence, but what did that matter now?

He gritted his teeth and shook his conscience off his shoulders with a shrug. Within seconds, Yoongi was on the other side of his kitchen, grabbing an unopened pack of cigarettes and the lighter that lay in wait next to it. He closed his hand tight around it so he couldn’t see the Hello Kitty stickers you’d placed all over the plastic; your attempt to dissuade him from using it in public.

Joke’s on you, he thought as he placed a cigarette between his lips, your plan backfired. Leaving your mark on it the way you had was the only thing that’d kept him from throwing it away — and the only reason he still had a lighter to use at all.

Yoongi opened his front door with one hand as he tried to ignite the lighter with the other. No matter how many time he flicked the pad of his thumb over those little metal ridges, nothing sparked. Defeated yet again, he slumped down onto the porch swing, closed his eyes, and willed himself not to break down over something so stupid.

He had no way of knowing how much time passed as he sat like that. He had no way to tell who those urgent footfalls belonged to, either. That is, not until panted breaths hit his ears and prompted him to open his eyes.

Admittedly, Yoongi had pictured you in your bridal hanbok more than once throughout the years. Half the time, it hadn’t even been purposeful. From first to third grade, you’d rambled to him about your dream wedding on your daily walks home from school. You spoke about it so often, in fact, that even he started thinking about what embroidery a mouse might add to the hem of your chima.

As the pair of you got older, you brought it up less, so Yoongi didn’t think about it often. The image crept up on him, though, once in a while. Every time you brought him as a plus one to your friends’ weddings because you didn’t want to dance alone; and he nearly told you that he’d always want to be your partner.

Or that time you cried through your worst ever heartbreak on his couch, lamented that you’d die an old maid, and never get to wear one.

Even as recently as last night, when he drank half a fifth of whiskey and grieved over the fact that he’d never get to see you wear one.

He couldn’t make heads or tails of the real thing, not with the way you’d doubled over to catch your breath; and bunched the ends up in your fists, presumably to prevent yourself from tripping as you — ran here?

“What did I tell you about the cigarettes?” You puffed, still with your hands on your knees and your face angled at the sidewalk.

Somehow, despite running five kilometers to Yoongi’s doorstep, you hadn’t displaced a single hair from your artfully crafted up-do. Your makeup hadn’t budged, either, which meant that the only sign of your expended effort was the tint of pink on your cheeks and the tip of your nose.

You’d outrun his train of thought in your scuffed, old Vans. Yoongi had to buffer for a moment in order to catch up, but the involuntary smile fighting its way over his mouth didn’t bother to wait. Eventually, he recited your long-suffering appeal, smirking all the while, “They’ll fuck me up, and I’ll have to be wheeled out onto the basketball court in an iron lung.”

“Exactly.”

With one last, deep breath, you returned to your upright position. The second you did, Yoongi was the one choking up.

Rapid blinking did nothing to stop the tears pricking at the inner corners of his eyes. He swallowed the lump in his throat to the best of his ability, but he couldn’t shake the inexplicable flutter in his chest at the sight of you. You’d always been perfect, but this was —

“Oh, my god,” he croaked, thoroughly melted from the inside out.

Yoongi stood before his brain could signal his legs to do so; or remind his hands not to drop the phone, lighter, and cigarettes he’d been holding. His eyes, on the other hand, knew exactly what to do. He drank in your appearance like he’d spent the last twenty-two years wandering, dehydrated in the desert — and in a way, he had.

You blinked back at him with swimming eyes as if you’d found sanctuary, too. Suddenly aware of what you were gripping, you opened your fists and let the fabric flutter down to the ground. While smoothing out wrinkles that didn’t exist, you asked softly, “Not bad for a bunch of mice, right?”

“Look just like a dream,” he replied just as gently.

Yoongi’s hands, which were thankfully now free, reached out and grabbed yours. You followed his lead as he spun you, twirled under his raised arm until you ended up with your face mere centimeters from his.

“Yoongi,” you breathed. Your eyes danced from his, to his lips, and back again. “If you wait another twenty-two years to tell me how you feel, please pick a time and place that is mutually convenient. I swear to God, I’ll —”

It came out much more easily the second time than the first; and when it did, it felt more like a beginning than a bomb:

“I love you.”

[eoieopda]

Yoongi + “runaway bride” I’mma leave this one up to your interpretation bc I know I’ll love it either way and also wanna see what you come up with 👀

oooooooh!!! v excited by this prompt, lol. this is, um, going to hurt kind of a lot at the beginning, but stick with me!!!! also, i accidentally made this >3.3k words….. which i will proofread when i am no longer exhausted 🤪

the one with yoongi and the fucking hydrangeas

ft. POV shift, pining & correlating angst, reader who’s🎵 a runner she’s a track star 🎵, a #nonspon vans product placement, a very unfortunate namjoon (sorry, buddy,) childhood idiots in love

2024 ETA: long after this was written, the user who requested this drabble admitted that they were a minor masquerading as an adult, violating my explicitly stated boundaries re: minors being prohibited from interacting with me and my content. this user has since been blocked.

Yoongi sat in a seat chosen specifically for him not because he wanted to, but because he knew how much time you’d sacrificed in writing every place card by hand.

To be clear, he’d never wanted to attend this rehearsal dinner in the first place. Unfortunately, he knew the stakes. That wasn’t something he’d dare to say out loud — especially not to you. Not in that restaurant while you fluttered between tables and shined your warm light on every single guest, one by one. Not ever, because you’d slipped through Yoongi’s fingers the second Namjoon slid that ring on yours.

If, in twelve hours’ time, Yoongi could force his deflated body out of bed, he’d have to watch quietly while you got away for good.

There was nothing he could do about it, either, so he swallowed that grief with a mouthful of bibim nengmyun. He knew it wasn’t the food that tasted so bitter on his tongue; however, on the off-chance that it was, he followed suit with another ill-advised swig of makgeolli.

During the two subsequent hours he sat and stewed at that table, Yoongi had lost count of just how many glasses he’d had. His eyes never lingered on the bottle, sticking instead to you and the smile that didn’t seem to spread beyond the curve of your lips. Every now and then, you’d glance his way — and every time you did, there was a microscopic twinge at the corner of your mouth.

It felt like a signal, something cryptic, but he wasn’t in the proper headspace to begin making assumptions. For the first time ever, you’d hit Yoongi with a look he didn’t know what to do with, and that fact drove him insane. This was what he was afraid of, after all — that the invisible string between you would be re-routed to someone else, and the telepathic link you’d always shared would disappear with it.

Your friendship had started early because your respective mothers had grown up together, and found each other once again as adults with two kids each. Back then, both of your front teeth were missing and — if Yoongi made you laugh too hard at routine, weekend gatherings — banana milk would occasionally fly out through the gap. He was nine-years-old and had no concept of it, but now he knows that he loved you then.

He loved you when you were ten, and you kneed a classmate in the dick for bullying Yoongi on the basketball court. You were two years younger and half his size, but you were a force to be reckoned with.

He loved you when you were fourteen, and a wave of brand new hormones made you a little bit of a fucking nightmare to be around.

At seventeen, twenty-one, still.

Now.

There, while everyone around him clinked their chopsticks against their glasses and Namjoon accepted the crowd’s wordless demand that he kiss you.

Yoongi had done well enough with your previous relationships. None of them made him feel like this, though, and he’d spent two years unable to put his finger on why. Sandwiched at that carefully chosen table between his mother and older brother, it finally clicked: None of them ever threatened to last.

Yoongi had never been a particularly hopeful person, but buried deep in the back of his brain, there had always been a crumb of it. Part of him, however stupid, thought you’d end up together at a dinner like this. All of this was the last nail in the coffin, the alarm clock screaming that it was time to wake up.

Suddenly more nauseous than he’d ever been before, Yoongi scooted his chair back so abruptly that it scraped along the floorboards. Just as quickly, he got to his feet and made a beeline for the exit. Of all the heads that turned to watch him leave, yours was the only one he noticed in his peripheral vision. He could feel your eyes on his back — pictured how confused you must look — and it only made his stomach acid churn faster.

When he finally made it out to the patio behind the restaurant, Yoongi’s suspicions were confirmed: closed for the season. Fitting. He wasn’t in the mood to heed the signs, so he stepped carefully — one leg at a time — over the hip-high metal gate and gulped down sharp, late autumn air. As he did, he begged himself to get his shit together for you, if not for him.

He spent several minutes out there, maybe even hours, sitting on a bare, metal chair and glowering out at the trees at the edge of the property. He hated himself, he realized, for how easily he wasted time. Let it slip by unnoticed while he stood still.

The clock seemed to mock him, ticking faster from behind him as if time was going to outrun him again.

At least, that was his first guess.

Yoongi quickly learned that the clicks weren’t signaling the passing seconds; they were broadcasting the urgent beat of stilettos on brick. So, having figured that his mother had appeared outside to gun him down, Yoongi glanced over his shoulder and braced himself for the be-all, end-all of scoldings.

What he got instead was you and the undeserved concern that caused your eyebrows to furrow.

“Are you okay?” You asked quietly once you reached the gate. With your manicured hands on the cold metal, you shivered, but you didn’t seem to notice. “Did you eat too much of the gochujang? I definitely did, and now I’ll be up all night with heartburn.”

Yoongi felt as though he’d been punched in the chest. The memory caught him in a riptide, beat him bloody against the rocks because he could’ve sworn he was sixteen again, stacking old encyclopedias under the headboard of your bed. He’d read somewhere online that, while sitting upright in a chair can exacerbate reflux, sleeping at an angle could help.

He was dizzy when he blinked back at you and saw your lips moving. He had to focus hard to figure out what you were saying.

“You remember that?”

Yoongi struggled to even out his breathing; he had no hope at all of finding the plot he’d lost. “Huh?”

You grinned and it made up for all the stars that had been hidden by grey clouds overhead. “The encyclopedias,” you chuckled, “They worked, you know.”

Yoongi didn’t mean to say it. He knew it before, during, and after it slipped out of his mouth that it was the worst goddamn thing he’d ever done, but he couldn’t stop himself — couldn’t shove the bullet he’d shot back into the gun. With the way it exploded through his chest — I love you — he was surprised that his body was still intact. No viscera sprayed out from the exit wound, no stains appeared on your chic, white cocktail dress.

You opened your mouth but closed it soon after, so clearly stunned by his unsolicited admission that you couldn’t find the words. Yoongi had no expectations whatsoever when it came down to your reaction because he hadn’t meant to provoke one in the first place. Even still, the wounded look on your face was worse than anything he might’ve imagined.

The two of you stood in tense silence for so long that Yoongi’s soul had nearly ejected itself fully from his body.

“That’s not fair,” eventually came your shaky reply. You clenched your fist tight around the top of the gate to anchor yourself and stammered, “Yoongi, that is not — Why would you —”

As soon as he aimed to take a step in your direction, your shock gave way to a scowl that could’ve boiled him alive.

“Why would you dump that at my feet? Tonight, of all fucking nights, Yoongi — seriously?” You snapped, though it sounded like a sob. “What am I supposed to do with this now?”

Now?

He didn’t know how to respond. He was paralyzed, inside and out, and he deserved it. Who the fuck was he, forcing the burden of his feelings onto you?

Selfish. Stupid. Out of time, as usual.

The makeup you always took so much time on started to run alongside your tears. Yoongi had seen you cry before, though he’d always been the reason you stopped, rather than started. He hated every single one of those muddied, black tears because he knew you. He knew you would have worn waterproof mascara if you’d had any reason to anticipate crying on your special night.

“I’m getting married in the morning!”

Your reminder was a dagger flying out of your mouth, sticking him right between the ribs. It stung as images flooded his mind — of you and Namjoon, your guests, and your out-of-season, imported fucking hydrangeas. It hurt even worse to see how badly you shook as you glared at him.

“Yoongi — fuck!”

Before you walked away, your eyes locked on his for a fraction of a second. In that moment, Yoongi promised himself that it was the last time you’d ever have to see his face.

When you were little, you pictured your wedding day like a moment ripped straight out of Cinderella. In your head, you’d wake up to birds singing at your window and mice scurrying around your feet, eager to dress you in a gown of epic and magical proportions. It’d be perfect. For years, you’d been sure of it.

In reality, there was no waking up because there hadn’t been a single second of sleep to begin with. No beauty rest, no sweet dreams of marital bliss — just you, feeling as if you’d swallowed a car battery. It sat heavy in the pit of your stomach, let acid burn all the way up to your esophagus. And it’d been all too easy to toss and turn in your hotel bed, which laid perfectly level on top of a plush, floral rug.

You crawled out of bed without the assistance of altruistic rodents and shuffled your dead weight over to the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. For once, your imagination had been accurate. Your puffy eyes were red in the aftermath of all your tears. They ached above circles so deep and dark that they would’ve alarmed you if you hadn’t expected them.

Namjoon had seen you at what you both believed to be your worst. Neither of you could’ve ever predicted that the Corpse Bride would be the one staggering down the aisle towards him. He’d love you anyway, you knew it, no matter how you looked. But if he knew what you spent all night toiling over…

You shook your head and abruptly turned away from the mirror. There were several of your dearest friends bustling around the room next to yours, all of whom were waiting on you. Swallowing hard, you headed for the adjoining door and promised yourself that the only person you’d let down today would be you.

You lost all track of time when a blur of hands went to work on you. If you’d closed your eyes while you dissociated, you could’ve pretended that your assistants were those woodland creatures you used to dream about. But you couldn’t close your eyes, couldn’t sleep through this part, couldn’t let your mind wander all the way back to that patio.

It’d been terrifying, staring your own heart in the face like that. More than anything, it was confusing because it didn’t look like you expected it would — not like an organ at all, but a person. You’d gotten so good at ignoring it that you couldn’t reasonably expect yourself to recognize it. It knew you, though, and loved you. Apparently, it always had.

As you sat in that hotel room, far away from the patio, you pictured every other moment you wished Yoongi had said what he did. The thousand times you’d thought for sure he felt the same, and all the ways you distracted yourself when you resigned to believing he didn’t. Every person you dated until you finally managed to move on —

“— please, love?”

You blinked rapidly to force your eyes to focus. In front of you, your mother stood with a knowing smile on her face and a sokchima in her hands. You didn’t need to ask her to repeat herself; you took the hint and rose slowly to your feet.

“I was nervous on my wedding day,” she hummed as she pulled the undergarment gently over your head. “Hungover, too, but your grandmother does not need to know that. Frankly, I’m surprised she couldn’t tell with how bloated I was when she helped me get ready…”

The bright scarlet chima followed without so much as a word from you. Your heart slammed helplessly against your rib cage when your mother proceeded to tug the sleeves of your jeogori up your arms. This moment should be special, you thought bitterly. All you wanted to do was cry; to apologize to your mother for your total inability to care while your wedding happened around you, not for you.

Soon enough, you were dressed. Your friends and older sister gushed about how beautiful you looked — the perfect bride — like you weren’t caught in the web of an anxiety attack. Like it wasn’t all wrong, and you weren’t dangling on the precipice of your life’s greatest mistake. Like you hadn’t spent so much of your hard-earned money on invitations and greenhouse-grown, special-ordered fucking hydrangeas.

Like you could catch a fucking breath under all the layers of your hanbok.

Sensing that a moment alone was necessary, your mother kissed your cheek and ushered the others out the door ahead of her. Before seeing herself out, too, she stalled in the threshold, turned back around to look at you, and exhaled through a pause.

“I left your shoes by the dresser,” she chirped.

The gentleness of her tone was reassuring, but there was a faint gleam in her eyes that caught your attention. Before you could ask after it, she nodded firmly once and let the door click shut behind her.

Alone again, your instinct was to do the same thing you’d spent ten consecutive hours doing — burying yourself under pillows and crying until you ran out of tears. But you had run out, which was precisely was the problem. You had no options left, nothing left to do but lean in.

At least, that was your first guess.

Your list of choices expanded by one when you saw the well-worn pair of slip-on Vans your mother had set out for you.

Yoongi sat on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands.

Only two meters away, a garment bag hung from the hook on the back of his bedroom door. That bag — and the crisp, black suit it concealed — lingered there for weeks in the shadows, untouched since the day he bought it. Even though it hadn’t left its hanger, he felt it smothering him throughout the night. It choked him while one thought ran circles in his sleep-deprived brain:

The reason he bought it was the same reason he’d never be able to wear it.

Sick of the way he’d trapped himself with his thoughts, Yoongi pushed himself to his feet and crossed over to the door. With the way he flung it open, knob slamming against the wall, he’d likely never recover his security deposit. It felt good, though, taking his grief out on that godforsaken suit.

On his way to his front door, Yoongi stopped short. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a cabinet he hadn’t opened in weeks. As he stared at it, the devil and angel on his shoulders warred over the action he wanted so desperately to take.

Sure, he’d recently — finally — quit at your insistence, but what did that matter now?

He gritted his teeth and shook his conscience off his shoulders with a shrug. Within seconds, Yoongi was on the other side of his kitchen, grabbing an unopened pack of cigarettes and the lighter that lay in wait next to it. He closed his hand tight around it so he couldn’t see the Hello Kitty stickers you’d placed all over the plastic; your attempt to dissuade him from using it in public.

Joke’s on you, he thought as he placed a cigarette between his lips, your plan backfired. Leaving your mark on it the way you had was the only thing that’d kept him from throwing it away — and the only reason he still had a lighter to use at all.

Yoongi opened his front door with one hand as he tried to ignite the lighter with the other. No matter how many time he flicked the pad of his thumb over those little metal ridges, nothing sparked. Defeated yet again, he slumped down onto the porch swing, closed his eyes, and willed himself not to break down over something so stupid.

He had no way of knowing how much time passed as he sat like that. He had no way to tell who those urgent footfalls belonged to, either. That is, not until panted breaths hit his ears and prompted him to open his eyes.

Admittedly, Yoongi had pictured you in your bridal hanbok more than once throughout the years. Half the time, it hadn’t even been purposeful. From first to third grade, you’d rambled to him about your dream wedding on your daily walks home from school. You spoke about it so often, in fact, that even he started thinking about what embroidery a mouse might add to the hem of your chima.

As the pair of you got older, you brought it up less, so Yoongi didn’t think about it often. The image crept up on him, though, once in a while. Every time you brought him as a plus one to your friends’ weddings because you didn’t want to dance alone; and he nearly told you that he’d always want to be your partner.

Or that time you cried through your worst ever heartbreak on his couch, lamented that you’d die an old maid, and never get to wear one.

Even as recently as last night, when he drank half a fifth of whiskey and grieved over the fact that he’d never get to see you wear one.

He couldn’t make heads or tails of the real thing, not with the way you’d doubled over to catch your breath; and bunched the ends up in your fists, presumably to prevent yourself from tripping as you — ran here?

“What did I tell you about the cigarettes?” You puffed, still with your hands on your knees and your face angled at the sidewalk.

Somehow, despite running five kilometers to Yoongi’s doorstep, you hadn’t displaced a single hair from your artfully crafted up-do. Your makeup hadn’t budged, either, which meant that the only sign of your expended effort was the tint of pink on your cheeks and the tip of your nose.

You’d outrun his train of thought in your scuffed, old Vans. Yoongi had to buffer for a moment in order to catch up, but the involuntary smile fighting its way over his mouth didn’t bother to wait. Eventually, he recited your long-suffering appeal, smirking all the while, “They’ll fuck me up, and I’ll have to be wheeled out onto the basketball court in an iron lung.”

“Exactly.”

With one last, deep breath, you returned to your upright position. The second you did, Yoongi was the one choking up.

Rapid blinking did nothing to stop the tears pricking at the inner corners of his eyes. He swallowed the lump in his throat to the best of his ability, but he couldn’t shake the inexplicable flutter in his chest at the sight of you. You’d always been perfect, but this was —

“Oh, my god,” he croaked, thoroughly melted from the inside out.

Yoongi stood before his brain could signal his legs to do so; or remind his hands not to drop the phone, lighter, and cigarettes he’d been holding. His eyes, on the other hand, knew exactly what to do. He drank in your appearance like he’d spent the last twenty-two years wandering, dehydrated in the desert — and in a way, he had.

You blinked back at him with swimming eyes as if you’d found sanctuary, too. Suddenly aware of what you were gripping, you opened your fists and let the fabric flutter down to the ground. While smoothing out wrinkles that didn’t exist, you asked softly, “Not bad for a bunch of mice, right?”

“Look just like a dream,” he replied just as gently.

Yoongi’s hands, which were thankfully now free, reached out and grabbed yours. You followed his lead as he spun you, twirled under his raised arm until you ended up with your face mere centimeters from his.

“Yoongi,” you breathed. Your eyes danced from his, to his lips, and back again. “If you wait another twenty-two years to tell me how you feel, please pick a time and place that is mutually convenient. I swear to God, I’ll —”

It came out much more easily the second time than the first; and when it did, it felt more like a beginning than a bomb:

“I love you.”

[outrogi]

laura’s yoongi recs

I’ve been reading fics in here nonstop way before I started this blog. It felt like a sin not compiling a list of some of the stories that I loved and hadn’t gotten around to sharing yet, a few of them safe in my drafts until I was ready to make this.

I will keep on adding onto this list as I keep finding stories I’ve read before and would love to share with you. Leave some love and appreciation to the authors if you can!

disclaimer: all stories that include mature themes will be labeled accordingly. DNI if you aren’t 18+.

♡ - favorite

Keep reading

[outrogi]

laura’s yoongi recs

I’ve been reading fics in here nonstop way before I started this blog. It felt like a sin not compiling a list of some of the stories that I loved and hadn’t gotten around to sharing yet, a few of them safe in my drafts until I was ready to make this.

I will keep on adding onto this list as I keep finding stories I’ve read before and would love to share with you. Leave some love and appreciation to the authors if you can!

disclaimer: all stories that include mature themes will be labeled accordingly. DNI if you aren’t 18+.

♡ - favorite

Keep reading

[sugajimin]

yoongi's habit of covering his face when he gets shy🥺

(cr: memories 2020: namuspromised, kbs stardust/sbs gayo/mma 2019/isac: 0613data, sweets party in harajuku: jung-koook)

[belongsto-prachi]

he's soooo goddamn endearing

[jung-koook]

I’m blushing 😳

[jung-koook]

he’s so beautiful ♡

[heybaetae]

he’s so boyfriend coded cr. namuspromised

[casuallyimagining]

When September Ends // part one.

Min Yoongi x female reader

Summary: Six years after leaving your home planet, you’re forced to confront your past… and the one you left behind.  Word Count: 4,128 Genre: Star Wars au, friends to enemies to lovers, angst Warnings: minor character death, survivor's guilt, yoongi has anger issues, mentions of the death of an entire planet, anxiety, alcohol, reader character suffers from the burden of high expectations, mentions of torture (nothing  explicit), mentions of needles, hospitalization, brief descriptions of scarring, brief descriptions of panic, hospitalization, an assassination attempt, a gun fight, murder

Notes: Thanks to @daechwitatamic and @the-boy-meets-evil for listening to me complain about this fic, helping me plan, and beta-ing for me; to @oddinary4bts for the late-game encouragement and edits.

Playlist: All of the poetry in this fic has been pulled from various songs and poems. You can find all the songs (and some others) in the playlist that I made for this fic on Spotify.

previous | masterlist | next

Fuck this planet, Yoongi thinks as he stalks his way through the corridors. It’s freezing. It’s always fucking freezing. Granted, it’s an ice planet, but he preferred the last base on the tropical forest moon, thank you very much. Sure, it had been so humid that his hair curled at the ends most days, but at least there, he could feel his toes.

Two junior pilots jump out of the way as he rounds the corner. He doesn’t blame them. He’s probably wearing quite the scowl, and the heavy steps of his boots against the steel flooring leave an angry echo reverberating through the mostly empty halls. For a moment, he considers apologizing–the junior pilots haven’t done anything, and he knows he should at least try to fit himself back in here. But then he’s standing in front of the door to his destination, and the apology dies before it even has the chance to form.

The doors hiss open mechanically, and the council room is already full. Yoongi picks his way through the crowd, eyes on the only empty seat in the room. Someone greets him, and he offers a quick nod in recognition but says nothing else. Suddenly, inexplicably, he’s nervous. This meeting was supposed to be with some of the higher ups–Yoongi expected some majors, a few captains, maybe a colonel. But some of the council is here, and he recognizes at least one general by the five pips on the man’s breastplate. 

Someone clears their throat just as Yoongi sits down, and it only takes a moment for the room to fall eerily quiet. He can feel every pair of eyes focusing on him, and Yoongi would love nothing more than to pull the hood of his puffy coat up over his head and hide away. He’s never been one for attention, but he does his best to appear nonchalant, like he doesn’t want the frozen ground to open up and swallow him whole. (He might not mind if it did.)

“Thank you for coming, Captain Min,” one of the commanders says.

Didn’t really have a choice, Yoongi thinks. But it’s not like I had anything better to do.

“We’ve received your official request to return to duty,” the commander–Commander Vela, Yoongi notes, though he’s only seen the man a small handful of times. “All six of them. Given the circumstances, we wanted to give you the opportunity to discuss this in person.”

What is there to discuss? Yoongi wants back in. He’s bored, itching to get back out in the field. He’s exhausted, he’s not sleeping, but that’s nothing a little adrenaline can’t fix. If he stays here, sitting around, doing nothing, he’s going to go fucking insane. And truthfully, not doing anything feels like he’s letting the Empire win, like Kitt and Feeney and Jieun’s deaths meant nothing. 

And he won’t let that happen.

But instead of saying all that, he says simply, “You need spies. I’m a spy. I don’t see where the issue is.”

Commander Vela hums, his attention falling to the data pad sitting on the table in front of him. “You’ve been through a lot, captain. Most men would, understandably, need to take time off to-”

“I don’t want time off.” Yoongi can tell his interruption isn’t taken well based on the grumbles that ripple through the room. But he can’t help it. If they would just listen to him, he could convince them that he was fine. Or, at least, that he would be fine if he could just get his life back to normal. “I’ve had time off. I want to get back out there. You need me back out there.”

It sounds cockier than he’d intended, but the sentiment is true. They’d just lost three of their best intelligence operatives. Yoongi knows they can’t afford to lose another. 

“How can we guarantee you’ll perform to standard?” A Mon Calamari major pipes up from the corner, his gravelly, grumbly voice cutting through the rabble that Yoongi’s words have caused. “How do you know you’re ready?”

The question catches Yoongi off-guard. “I just do,” he answers, and though it feels like a feeble, desperate answer, his voice comes out cool and confident.

More of the committee speaks up. Yoongi can feel his blood pressure rise as the questions come, both more probing and more asinine. How is he feeling? How is he processing? Is he still up to date on his marksmanship training (even though his marksmanship training was basically just here’s a blaster, go shoot stuff)?

He’s fine. He’s processing well. Why don’t you give him a blaster and stand at twenty paces, and you can check yourself if his training is up-to-date?

Yoongi feels like he’s being interrogated. Do they treat their Imperial prisoners like this? He can feel the heat on his skin, can feel the thrumming in his veins. He takes a deep breath to calm himself, forces himself to unclench his jaw. He can’t let them see how much the questioning has affected him, even if the effect is just to piss him off. If they think he’s anything less than perfectly collected, they’ll never let him back in the field.

A dark-skinned commander is halfway through a long-winded question about security protocols, and safety, and something else that Yoongi has lost track of when a voice rings out above the din of the room.

“This is ridiculous,” it says, and it takes Yoongi a moment to find the speaker.

His heart rate picks up, and he can feel his palms get clammy as he zeroes in on her. There, three seats to the left of Commander Vela. He’d know that voice anywhere. And when her eyes lock with his, the room stops, the rest of higher command doesn’t matter.

It’s you.

“Clearly he wants to come back,” you say, leaning forward out of the shadows. You observe him casually, almost bored. “We’re clearly in need, otherwise we wouldn’t be entertaining the idea. Just let him come back. Assign an in-field eval.”

Commander Vela hums, twirling the end of his mustache in his forefingers. From the corner, the Mon Calamari major grumbles his agreement. Some other members of the committee voice their displeasure with what you’ve said, but Yoongi watches as you simply turn your head to look at Vela, a small, seemingly innocuous smile on your lips. But Yoongi knows what it means. He’s seen it hundreds of times.

Gotcha.

The Commander clears his throat and nods in your direction. “An interesting compromise, major,” he says, and Yoongi doesn’t miss the hint of pride in the officer’s voice. “Very well. Captain Min will accompany you on your upcoming mission. With the two of you together, we should expect first-rate results.”

The world freezes. Yoongi’s heart stops. And then just as suddenly, it starts again, the thrumming going into overdrive. He is dismissed in slow-motion, and his body moves without his brain’s acknowledgement. Suddenly, he’s standing, and in a small handful of steps, he’s outside of the council room.

It’s much quieter out here. The hum of the electricity running through the walls, the howl of the freezing wind outside, the far-off cacophony of the rebellion’s finest doing what they can to stay prepared for a moment-notice fight. It all comes together, washes over Yoongi. It’s chaotic, but it’s also strangely comforting. The cold seeping through the walls, though still bitter and absolutely intolerable, cools his temperature and his temper easily.

Yoongi takes a deep, slow breath through his nose. A mission. With you. Upon which his future hangs precariously on the condition of success. Truthfully, he’s not sure how to feel. He’s excited. He’s nervous. He’s hopeful. But somewhere within him, there’s something bubbling, something angry, something that he doesn’t want to confront right now. So he pushes it down and vows to himself. 

He will be back in the field. This mission will go well. 

It has to.

The mess hall is crowded and loud, and Yoongi hates crowded and loud. But he manages to find a table in a corner, blocked by a wall, that isn’t quite so noisy. It’s been months, but people still avoid him. And he gets it. People don’t know how to talk to him anymore, and it’s not like he’s ever been the easiest guy in the world to converse with. He’s always found small talk difficult, always preferred to listen rather than speak. All of the friends he’s ever made have been more a reflection of their stubbornness rather than a result of his ability and desire to be outgoing. So despite the fact that the mess is practically full, Yoongi’s table in the corner remains single occupancy. 

That is, until you appear in front of him.

You stand there, holding a tray in one hand and a cup of caf in the other, your datapad tucked between your elbow and your body. “Mind if I sit?” you ask. It’s soft. He can barely hear it over the din of the room. 

For a moment, he stares at you, expression flat. You offer him a small smile. It’s a lifeline, he realizes, a peace offering. But something roils inside of him, something angry, and he’s not sure why. Maybe it’s the slight air of apology he can see in your eyes. You have a look that says you’d like nothing more than to talk. Something in Yoongi wants that, too. But a larger part is six years deep into thinking his best friend is dead. And that part is pissed.

“I thought we could go over mission details,” you tell him, awkwardly shuffling so he can better see your datapad. As if keeping things strictly business might help bridge the gap. “I don’t know how you’re used to doing things–if you’d come find me or if-”

“I haven’t been able to find you for six years. I stopped trying a long time ago.” It comes out venomous, almost like an accusation.

He watches as your smile falters, can see in your eyes the exact moment it transitions from genuine to practiced. You cough, and nod once, very quickly.

“Okay. Just meet me in the hangar tomorrow at oh-nine-hundred.”

Yoongi watches in silence as you turn on your heel. He follows you with his eyes, watching as you power-walk to the mess exit, dumping your tray and your caf in a trashcan on the way out. The angry part of him quiets, and suddenly, he’s no longer hungry.

The klaxon is shrill in the once-calm cockpit. Outside the windshield, TIE fighters shriek past, their guns targeting the small transport ship. In the belly of the vessel, Yoongi can hear banging and shouting. For a moment, he considers going to help Feeney and Jieun prepare the escape pods. But then Kitt swears from the cockpit, and another alarm sounds, and Yoongi is rooted to the spot.

He watches the displays, unable to look away as the shields deplete steadily. Those Imperial fucks can’t hit the broad side of a star destroyer, and yet today, of all days, they’ve managed to nearly deplete the ship’s shields.

“This is Tatooine one-two-five-niner-oh-five requesting immediate ceasefire,” Kitt says into the ship’s comms. Yoongi can hear the desperation in her voice. “Please. We’re just a haulcraft.”

The comms crackles, but no reply comes. Kitt swears again. Kitt never swears unless things are really bad. The displays start to beep urgently, and Yoongi’s eyes are drawn to a flashing indicator on the wall to his left. Ten percent shields left.

Things are really bad.

“I can man one of the guns,” Yoongi offers, following Kitt out of the cockpit and down the ladder into the belly of the craft. He skips the last few rungs, jumping off when he’s still a foot from the ground. “Buy us some time.”

“No.” Kitt pats his shoulder and offers him a small smile. The scar on her upper lip pulls taught, and her smile looks almost broken in half. In her eyes, there’s a small fire. She’s determined to see this through. 

The look scares Yoongi.

“You go. Get in a pod.” She pushes Yoongi in the direction of one of the escape pods that Jieun and Feeney have readied. Kitt turns to Feeney and presses a small metal rectangle into his chest. “Take this,” she tells him. “Get out of here. We’ll be right behind you.”

For a moment, Feeney looks like he wants to protest. But then he shuts his mouth and nods. The ship can only launch two pods at a time. “Come on,” he says, clapping Yoongi on the shoulder. “You heard her.”

Yoongi doesn’t know what happens next. He can’t remember getting into the escape pod, doesn’t know how he managed to hit the ready to launch button on the internal console. He’s really not even sure if he turned on the encoded tracker. 

All he remembers is the pounding of his heart in his ears and the feeling of weightlessness as the pod decouples from the ship and the zero gravity of space takes hold. He remembers his pod floating away from the main ship, remembers watching in horror as a third pod attempts to deploy and the grappling arm sticking without letting go. He remembers seeing movement in the cockpit of the haulcraft, a blinding light, his pod rocking through space with the force of an explosion.

Yoongi jolts, and for a moment, he’s disoriented. Everything is spinning. He can still see the debris field, but slowly, it morphs into his quarters in the base on Hoth. It’s the chill that brings him back. The cold air on his exposed skin forces his mind back to now. He’s not even laying down–his back is against the metal wall, he’d fallen asleep with one leg tucked up against his chest. His pillow is at the other end of the cot entirely. 

Yoongi sighs, his heart still hammering in his chest. His head falls backwards against the cool of the metal, and he forces himself to breathe deeply.

That was months ago, he tells himself. Pull yourself together, idiot.

It feels like an eternity later, but eventually, his heartbeat slows, his breathing evens out, the adrenaline leaves his system. He’s exhausted–this is the fourth time this week the dream has plagued his sleep–but he doesn’t dare lie down. Instead, he gropes around his cot until his hand brushes against the screen of his datapad. He turns it on, and the cool blue of the letters on screen strain his eyes.

My friends, my friends forgive me That I live and you are gone There's a grief that can't be spoken There's a pain goes on and on

He’d been working on a poem when he’d fallen asleep. It was a habit he’d picked up from Kitt. Poetry and music, she’d told him once, were things the Empire could never take from you. They have their roots in your soul and bloom in your mind. As long as there are people, there will be poetry and music.

It’s only half true, Yoongi thinks bitterly, picking up his stylus and tapping into the document to edit it. He has poetry, but he’s lost the people he cared about most.

“If we do not leave in 20 minutes, our chances of success go down to-”

“Please stop talking,” you tell the droid, TK-53. You’re sitting on a crate just outside of your ship, waiting for Yoongi. 

Tee’s right, though. Yoongi’s over half an hour late, and if you’re not gone in 20 minutes, you won’t make it to Bespin in time. There’s a small window that you have to hit, just a short span of time where the Tibanna refineries’ contracts are up before they restart. You have to be there in that window, otherwise, you may as well give up. Major Kim would be stuck on the planet for another year.

Though, you suppose even if Yoongi turned up in the next ten seconds, you aren’t sure how successful the mission will be.

“Tee, check the med bay. Perhaps he fell ill.” 

The droid hums, and you can hear the whirring of her joints as she moves over to a panel in the wall. But before Tee can even access the panel, there’s a cough behind you. When you turn, Yoongi is standing there, a rucksack slung over his shoulder. It’s a small comfort that he looks like shit. His hair is a mess, and he looks exhausted. But when he wordlessly pushes his bag into Tee’s arms, you can feel yourself get angry.

“You’re late,” you say flatly, grabbing the bag from your droid.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Right.” You roll your eyes and motion for him to walk up the ramp into the ship. You shove his bag back to him as he passes you. Tee clanks in after him–a solid foot and a half taller, she has to duck to make it in the ship without bumping her head. 

As soon as you’re inside, the ramp starts to ascend into the hull of the ship. It’s small inside. The cockpit is the biggest part of the ship, but there’s a small cabin with hideaway beds and a galley. For a moment, it’s quiet. 

“Do you usually not care about your missions, or should I consider myself lucky?”

“What?” Yoongi’s brow furrows. He’s made himself comfortable in one of the jump seats in the cockpit.

“Can you at least pretend to give a shit about this mission?” You plop into the co-pilot’s chair. Tee has already started going through the pre-flight procedures. “I mean, honestly Yoongi. Did you act like this for your last commander? Because I wouldn’t-”

“Don’t talk about her.” His voice is deep, angry, and for the briefest of moments, you can see the hurt in his eyes. “Get pissed at me all you want, but keep her name out of your fucking mouth.”

Quickly, you pivot. “We had things to do this morning, Yoongi. Preparations. We needed to get papers made. Now we don’t have those. I didn’t tell you a specific time because I thought it would be fun.”

You barely register Tee speaking into the comms, asking for clearance to launch.

“I said I’m sorry, okay? You think I wanted to be late?”

“I don’t know!” You admit, exasperated. You turn in your seat and press the last few buttons in the launch sequence, and the ship rumbles to life under you. A slight jolt, and it’s up in the air. “I don’t know what you want anymore,” you mumble.

Behind you, Yoongi grumbles something, but you don’t pay attention to it. Your focus is on the console in front of you and getting the ship into hyperspace. It takes a few minutes of tense silence for you to get out of Hoth’s atmosphere and into the hyperspace lane. But as soon as the ship leans into the speed and the stars are speeding past the cockpit windows in a cluster of bright lines, you let yourself change focus.

You turn in your seat only to see that the jump seat is empty–Yoongi is gone. You can see him in the cabin, leaning against one of the bunks. Taking a deep breath, you let it out in a heavy sigh. 

It’s hard seeing him like this. The Yoongi you remember was quiet, but kind and gentle. So gentle that you’d had to stand up to bullies for him when you were children. There was a time when you’d tell each other everything. There had been plenty of nights when you’d sat on the roof of your building side by side, staring at the stars and dreaming of something better.

But a lot has happened in six years. You don’t blame him for the animosity, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

Once again, you sigh. But then you force yourself to stand and step into the cabin. It’s quiet for a while. Yoongi doesn’t look at you as you make your way over to the galley and slide into one of the benches. Eventually, you get sick of the silence, sick of only hearing the hum of the hyperdrive all around you.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” you say quietly. “Why don’t we get the mission talk out of the way, hm? Start with that.” Then, maybe, you can get him calmer, less hostile.

He’s quiet, and you risk a glance over at him. His eyes are on the metal flooring as he chews on the inside of his cheek–a habit he’s had since he was a kid. But after a second, he pushes himself off the wall and stiffly moves to the seat across from you. Good. Progress. Progress is good.

You push your datapad across the small table so he can see the information. “We’re going to Bespin,” you explain. “To the Tibanna refineries in Cloud City. Major Kim Namjoon has been undercover there for almost a year.”

It doesn’t take long to describe the scope of the mission. Get in, get out, simple extraction. No combat anticipated, mostly just the two of you talking your way into getting Major Kim off-planet. On paper, it’s easy. In practice, you’re sure it’ll be more difficult. But there’s no way to know how things are going to go until you’re in the moment.

It doesn’t take long to explain. Yoongi has a few questions, and you’re happy to answer him. They’re simple, informative, and you get the sense that he’s testing the waters a bit. It’s a little tense, but it’s the most comfortable conversation you’ve had with him so far. 

When you’re done, he continues to look at your datapad, dark eyes scanning the mission log. He doesn’t look up when he speaks. “Where’d you go?”

You frown. You should have expected it, but the question still catches you off-guard. You know what he’s asking, know what he’s looking for, but fuck, you wish you didn’t. 

“Here and there for a few weeks,” you finally answer, playing with your fingers. “And then finally here, to the rebellion.”

He nods, and for a moment, you think he’s satisfied. But then, “Why’d you leave?”

“You know why.”

“Humor me.”

You sigh. You could walk away right now, not answer him and go back to the cockpit. You could hide behind duty and professionalism and rank. But something about you hates that idea. Yoongi was your best friend from ages six through 22. He deserves more than to be iced out. But god, did you really want to get into that blackhole now?

Finally, you settle on, “I was smothering on Fest. I had to get out.”

“You didn’t tell me.” He looks up, then, and even though his deep brown eyes don’t meet yours, you can see the hurt in them. Six years of it. And it crushes you. “You were my best friend. And you didn’t tell me you were leaving.”

“I did the best I could.” Your voice comes out shakier than you intend it to.

Yoongi stands. “You know,” he turns and makes his way over to the bunk he’s claimed, tossing his rucksack onto the floor, “there was a time I’d believe that.” He climbs into the bunk and rolls so that his back is facing you.

And with that, any hope of rekindling your friendship dies in your heart. Of course, it bothers you. So, despite everything in your soul screaming at you not to, you push.

“Why are you being such an asshole?”

“What?” His head turns so he can see you over his shoulder.

“You heard me. You’ve been nothing but an impossible, immature, impetuous asshole since you walked into your hearing. I-”

“Ever think that maybe it’s you?”

It’s a punch to the gut you weren’t expecting. You can feel the wind leave your sails. “What?”

“You’re the problem. I just want to get this mission done and get back in the field. That’s it. Just leave me alone, you don’t need to be annoying.”

You nod, despite the fact that you know he can’t see you. It’s the mess hall on Hoth all over again. Yoongi has always known how to disarm you. You used to think it was a good skill. As teenagers, you’d been able to calm each other’s tempers, keep each other grounded. But now, you aren’t sure that it’s such a good thing.

Your heart is heavy when you slip back into the co-pilot’s seat.

“We should arrive in Bespin airspace on schedule,” Tee reports, turning to you. “I’m detecting an abnormal heart rate, and your breathing is shallow. Should I begin protocol 04-”

“I’m fine, Tee.”

previous | masterlist | next

okay, so like.... how do we feel about the first chapter? I'm so curious to know your thoughts! my ask box is open--feel free to shoot me a message and let me know how we're feeling.

Yoongi's poetry this part is from "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" from the musical Les Miserables.

[yunkiiiiimarymeee]

My pretty boyyy, always smile 🌫️💗

[yunkiiiiimarymeee]

Yeah, suga 🖤

[smokingtiger-deactivated2024090]

more FESTA ship discourse and delusion...

The number of shipping and delusional posts I have seen in regard to the FESTA APOBANGPO project video.... some of y'all need serious help.

I have seen people saying that BigHit purposely arranged the members in a way to promote certain ships... are you actually for real right now? If you see a few members standing next to one another and immediately assume that it's for a ship, that is a YOU problem.

Have any of you taken school photos before? Stood in a choir? Had to create a formation for sports pictures? Sometimes -- and I know this is going to sound soooo crazy -- but just sometimes, companies and/or organizations arrange people within photos to fit whatever creative vision they had. BTS have arranged themselves into a certain order on red carpets, it's clear that perhaps they have a set formation that they like to utilize for professional photos...

Like, if BTS have photoshoots, their stylists usually pick their outfits. If they have subunits, their stylists will usually choose outfit pieces to complement one another. NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT SHIPPING. It's not always boyfriend clothes! I swear this obsession with who's-fucking-who has infected some of your minds like a brain-eating amoeba.

(and I have stated MANY times in the past that I don't mind shipping, I don't care if you think a pair is real... but this type of obsession or hatred is not okay)

Can BTS members, who have been friends for well over a decade now, not stand next to each other without constantly being hyper-analyzed and made to be enemies of other members because you want one pair to come true? This is not normal behavior, this is lunacy.

Seriously... what the hell is wrong with some of you people?

Each member is known to be pretty affectionate with one another, so who cares if Taehyung rested his head on Jungkook's? Have any of you sat with a friend before and draped yourself on them? I'm seriously convinced some of you have never had friends in your entire life. That does not mean the company is trying to shove taekook down your throat... this is getting ridiculous. Some of these accusations are actually just hateful comments towards the boys. You guys despise a ship so much that you're literally projecting onto the close friendship of REAL people. Just because YOU hate Jikook, or Vmin, or Namgi -- whatever the fuck it is -- does not mean Jungkook hates Jimin, or that Taehyung is fighting with Yoongi over Jin... like do you not see how stupid this is?

BTS: We're actually really close friends, I don't know what I'd do without these guys. I hope we can be together for a long time. Delusional and hateful shipper: Actually, Jungkook hates Jimin because the company forces them to do fanservice and he is actually in love with Taehyung... Taehyung gets super jealous and constantly wants Jimin out of their life! Just because Taehyung says Jimin is his best friend and that he's written several songs about him and their close relationship does not mean they're actually best friends. But me, a literal stranger on the internet who probably doesn't even speak Korean... I know wayyy more about their relationship than they do!

THIS IS WHAT YOU GUYS SOUND LIKE! YOU DON'T EVEN TRY TO HIDE THAT YOU'RE BEING AN ANTI!

Can we not just appreciate OT7 content? Like, we haven't seen them together in such a long time and you guys have found a way to ruin something extremely special. Please stop projecting, please stop accusing members of lying, and for god's sake, please stop telling other people that the BTS members fucking hate each other.

Take Two comes out tonight! Please focus this rabid behavior on something productive, like streaming a song the members have been waiting to release for months.

Happy FESTA!

[gukgi]

he’s so beautiful

[yooboobies-deactivated20240123]

yoongi making this year the bestest by having long, black hair 7.0

[yoonminist]

suchwita gave us an absolutely insane deep dive into the yoonmin lore…. jimin remembering yoongi in the middle of the night telling him he’s a great singer and that he wants him on the team as the starting point for his motivation to debut with bts.. jimin crying outside of the bathroom before a live perf and yoongi finding him and comforting him.. yoongi giving jimin his first drink.. yoongi making sure he gets trained as a singer??? and then the fact that he told jimin to promote on music shows and promised to be there to show support???? him asking jimin to show up and perform on HIS solo tour just because he wants an excuse to have jimin there????? god bless

[parkparkjeon-deactivated2024031]

So the behind for Amygdala confirms Yoongi was taking pills less for physical pain management and more to numb his emotional pain, as he says he doesn’t know how fans will take him showing the fact that he took pills in his late teens and early twenties (he jokes they’re vitamins) but that he wanted to show what he really went through. So that answers my question on how he was using them and what message was trying to convey.

Also, despite knowing Amygdala is based on his real life and real traumas, it still sort of took me by surprise to learn just how real it all is. Which doesn’t really make sense to me, because I thought I had already processed this, but idk. And it didn’t hit until the scene where he’s dressed in a school uniform, and he says “This scene isn’t real.” He only added snippets of a school-aged version of himself to illustrate how his struggles were still very present while he was trainee.

So idk. I guess I just wasn’t expecting an even more blatant reminder that the video really is true to life. He’s traumatized, has self-harmed, and did turn to pills and alcohol to try and suppress all that pain. Even doing something he loved, basketball, wasn’t enough to take away his loneliness. Leaving him to of course still be in his metaphorical trench even as he perused his ultimate goal of making music at a professional level.

This behind just adds more layers to the video, honestly. Because I also didn’t realize the light that flashes on him while he’s trying to open the door — from the darkness side — is meant to be headlights of the car hitting him. Or that the version of him sitting on the couch is eating pills like candy, as he watches himself suffer through traumatic relapses. Yet the version of him against the door is eating almonds which comes before the couch shot.

So along with the pill bottles on the side table, my new understanding of the video is that we’re seeing Yoongi go from already having substance and alcohol dependencies, get hit by a car that causes physical pain which is exacerbated by anxiety of him being afraid he can’t tell anyone. So he turns even further toward substances to cope, only to be hit with his parents suffering from health scares. Leaving him cycling through anxiety, pain, and fear over and over again. Which I can relate to, but am lucky enough to not also be in physical pain. At least not to the degree he was in.

But yeah. I think I’ll be forever intrigued by this video and his story, and I hope he continues to trust us with his vulnerabilities.