disclaimer: many of my fics are intended for mature audiences (18+) and deal with dark or intense themes, so please read the warnings and proceed with care!
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✧ indicate fan favorites!
"without obsession, life is nothing."
— john waters
bucky barnes ˏˋ°•*⁀➷
˗ˏˋ short reads ˎˊ˗
✧ margin of error → you skip the med bay after a mission that left you bleeding to keep bucky from finding out you’re hurt—not realizing he’s home early.
✧ promise without ceremony → bucky gave up on marriage a long time ago. but one day, when he pulls a bullet from your leg, he accidentally proposes.
+ secret deleted scene!
✧ tactical comfort → when your period hits early during a mission, you try to power through it. but, bucky notices everything, and he refuses to let you suffer in silence.
+ secret deleted scene!
golden hour → bucky asks you to move in after coming home from a mission.
somatic memories → bucky wakes from a nightmare about you and finds the apartment empty, convinced the worst has already happened.
half-light → 18+ you end up using your safeword with bucky for the first time.
night shift → you’re a nurse living below bucky, and when he shows up bleeding in the middle of the night, you’re the only person he trusts to stitch him back together.
shelter → bucky comes home late from a storm with groceries, a guilt complex, and a kitten in his jacket.
dress rehearsal → 18+ minutes before a gala, bucky finds you spiraling in front of the mirror and decides there are better ways to remind you you’re worth every second of the spotlight.
interim measures → (thunderbolts/bucky x reader) after officially moving into tower, the team is still figuring out how to coexist. game night helps!
pressure points → bucky never misses a tell and hiding an unexpected injury during a mission debrief forces both of you to confront what the two of you are really doing.
something worth holding → you bring bucky flowers for his birthday, and what starts as a simple gesture turns into something far more significant.
under the snowfall → snowed in at a safe house, you start a snowball fight with bucky, sam, and joaquin, and chaos quickly follows.
five times he almost did → five times bucky didn’t say "i love you", and one time he did.
˗ˏˋ long reads ˎˊ˗
✧ hold fast → a mission goes sideways, forcing you to cross a frozen lake. the ice doesn’t hold, and when you go under, Bucky is the only thing between you and the dark.
✧ comms interference → the team knew something was off about you, the one who kept hijacking their comms and saving their asses with pop music. what they don’t know is that you’re bucky’s secret wife.
✧ blood upon the snow → 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.
✧ proof of return → you die and come back every time. But when a mission pushes your limits and you don’t return right away, Bucky’s worst fear threatens to finally be true.
habits of the heart → you and bucky both know what it means to wake up haunted after a nightmare. over time, taking care of each other through it becomes second nature.
✧ a place to land → after a night out goes violently wrong, you call bucky—without knowing what you’re even asking for. he shows up anyway, until you finally start to believe you’re safe.
high water → you’ve stopped keeping track of the bruises. bucky hasn’t—and he doesn’t say anything, not until the patterns start looking too much like his own.
sound check → bucky’s never been one for live music or crowded bars, but the first time he hears you sing, he’s ruined for anything else.
into the void → inside the void, nothing is real, but the trauma is. as memory turns to ruin, bucky is found by the only person who ever made him believe he could survive what was done to him.
what stays → after disappearing for days, you didn’t expect bucky to show up at your door again, let alone help you through the spiral without judgment.
fault lines → after getting laid off from your job, you're doing everything you can to keep it together. bucky refuses to let you go through the unraveling alone.
the shape of a life → you didn’t plan to become a guardian overnight—and you never planned to ask bucky for help. he wants a future you’re not sure you believe in.
no way but through → a snowstorm swallows the world whole, leaving you and bucky stranded in the middle of nowhere during a mission with no way out.
a love letter to stone → you were bucky’s fiancée in the 40s, spending decades at his grave, never moving on. when he finally comes home, you’re already gone.
salt in the blood → you live in a fishing town far from the mess of global conflicts, until a stranger with a metal arm shows up at your dock asking for a boat.
˗ˏˋ double features ˎˊ˗
✧ aftershock | new avengers!bucky x pregnant!reader
you find out you’re pregnant days before a mission and decide not to tell bucky. but when everything goes wrong in the field, he’s left putting together the pieces until you wake up.
part 1 | part 2 | secret deleted scene!
˗ˏˋ series ˎˊ˗
a seat at the table | congressman!bucky x journalist!reader (ON HIATUS)
journalism was supposed to be about the truth. politics was supposed to be about power. when bucky barnes—former assassin, reluctant congressman—leaves you with more questions than answers, you find yourself caught in a different kind of story. leads into thunderbolts*
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5
✧ point of impact | civil war!avengers/bucky x transported!reader
in your world, the avengers are fiction—comics, movies, nothing more. when a lab experiment goes wrong, you wake up mid-civil war with no way out and no script to follow.
part 1 | part 2 | part 3
bob reynolds ˏˋ°•*⁀➷
˗ˏˋ short reads ˎˊ˗
the quiet that follows → (thunderbolts/bob x reader) you can dampen emotions, and you do it to keep the team steady. they try to show up in their own clumsy ways, bob just does it the quietest.
better than before → you’re head over heels for your boss, congressman bucky barnes, but when you move to assist the new avengers, you meet bob.
steve rogers ˏˋ°•*⁀➷
˗ˏˋ long reads ˎˊ˗
a place to burn → you and steve were lovers until the accords split the team. now three years after the snap, a failed mission forces you back into his orbit, where five years of silence finally demands an answer.
Summary: The team knew something was off about you, the one who kept hijacking their comms and saving their asses with pop music and precision. What they don’t know is that you’re Bucky Barnes’ secret wife.
MCU Timeline Placement: Thunderbolts*
Master List: Find my other stuff here!
Warnings: blood and injury detail, combat violence, gunfire, language, references to past trauma, mentions of HYDRA and Red Room conditioning, high-adrenaline tension, implied PTSD, emotionally repressed idiots in love
Word Count: 9.3k
Author’s Note: ok this was unhinged levels of fun to write and i regret nothing. i love the chaos. thank you again to the incredible request!! will i be writing more of this flavor of secret marriage? absolutely. also: i’m working through more requests soon so if i haven’t gotten to yours yet, i promise i haven’t forgotten!! thank you for being here and screaming with me always <3
The mission had gone to shit six minutes ago.
Yelena had called it first, with that vicious kind of sarcasm she reserved for the moments just before blood hit the concrete. “Ah, yes. Reinforcements. Wonderful. So glad we were not warned about that.” Somewhere ahead of her, gunfire cracked in frantic bursts, too far left for the recon drone’s range. The team had split off in the chaos. Ava had gone radio silent, Alexei had wandered too far into the smoke, and John—somewhere in the middle of it all—was bleeding too much for someone who insisted he had it handled.
Bucky moved like a phantom, silent and sharp, pulse pacing steadily with the beat of crisis. Not panic. Not anymore. He’d spent too many years being the last line between chaos and carnage to waste energy on nerves. But this was the kind of mission that reeked. Hasty intel. Unexpected players. A mess of underpaid mercenaries with too much firepower and no clear objective.
Something was wrong. And it wasn’t just the lack of backup.
He ducked behind a half-collapsed column, adjusting the comms in his ear. “Ghost, come in.”
Nothing.
“Belova, status?”
“Busy,” Yelena snapped back, followed by the heavy thud of a body hitting concrete.
“Walker?”
Crackling. Then, “Still upright. Not loving it.”
Not a lot to love. Their extraction point had been pushed back two miles, and the enemies just kept coming. Sloppy formation, uncoordinated, like someone was using them to smoke them out. But why? Sure, they were the newly named “Avengers”, but they weren’t even a proper unit yet. Just a bandage stretched too tight across a bleeding world.
A second burst of gunfire lit up the smoke ahead of him. Bucky pressed forward, adjusting the rifle over his shoulder.
His ribs ached. Something had cracked when he hit the wall earlier, but he was used to working broken. There wasn’t time to slow down. Another figure emerged from the mist and he recognized the clumsy footwork, the huffing breath. Walker. He was limping, red blooming across his arm, jaw clenched tight enough to crack enamel.
“They’re circling back,” he growled. “Either we regroup or we go down swinging.”
“We’re not dying here,” Bucky said simply.
The comms hissed.
Just a stutter of static at first. Barely enough to make anyone flinch. Then a pulse. Faint. Rhythmic. Almost like—
“Oh god,” Bucky breathed, just as the bass dropped.
It was unmistakable. Blown-out, over-compressed pop blaring directly into his left ear. Not military comms. Not interference. Music. High-energy, aggressively hyper-feminine, shamelessly catchy.
“Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me…”
“Are you—what is that?” Walker barked, slapping at his ear like the sound had crawled inside it.
Yelena’s voice buzzed back into the channel. “Is someone playing Pussycat Dolls on our frequency?”
Bucky didn’t answer. Couldn’t. His blood had turned to static. That song. That voice—not the lyrics, but the one threaded over the top of it, smooth and low and familiar. One he hadn’t heard in weeks and one he wasn’t supposed to be hearing for another few days.
“Miss me?”
Bucky turned and it was like watching the opening beat of a nightmare you hadn’t allowed yourself to dream in years.
The smoke curled around you first—black against the pale concrete, shivering in the aftermath of a concussion blast—and then you stepped through. Leather at your thighs, a familiar half-mask pulled just low enough to show your mouth, batons already swinging. One of the mercenaries clocked you too late. You dropped him with a strike to the temple, pivoted cleanly into another, ducked a swing and hit back twice as hard.
You weren’t supposed to be here.
Not in this fight, not in this city, not in this life.
At least, not anymore.
You had promised. Not with words, never with words, but in the quiet, liminal moments between missions. The soft touches passed like contraband between bodies that only knew how to break things. The way you said enough without ever needing to say it. The way you’d disappeared, with him, years ago, when it became clear the world didn’t need you anymore.
But you’d always needed him.
That much, apparently, hadn’t changed.
“Who the hell—” John started, eyes wide as he tracked your path through the battlefield.
“Shut up,” Bucky snapped. Too loud. Too fast. Too revealing. He kept his eyes on you. Didn’t dare blink.
You moved like you’d never stopped. Like the years hadn’t dulled you. Like civilian life had been a dream someone else lived for you.
Another merc tried to grab you from behind. You shattered his kneecap without looking, then tased him mid-collapse with a baton charged enough to light his vision up for a week. You were grinning now. Not wide. Not cocky. But with the same edge he’d seen years ago when you’d told him you didn’t believe in peace, just long stretches of boredom between moments worth bleeding for.
The team closed in slowly, instinct dragging them toward you without understanding why. Ava reappeared from a wall, phasing in with her hand on her weapon. Alexei lumbered forward, red suit charred at the edges. No one said a word. They all watched as you handled the remaining mercs like it was nothing. Like it was fun.
Then came more boots.
Bucky heard them before anyone else did, just barely, just over the last distorted chorus still crackling through the comms. A dull percussion of heavy soles slamming rhythmically into the concrete, coming fast through the fog of gunpowder and ruin. More reinforcements. He didn’t need eyes on them to know they weren’t freelancers this time. These steps were uniform. Trained. Unrushed.
Whatever this operation had started as, it had just shifted into something colder. Measured. Intentional.
“Movement,” he said, sharp into the mic. “East side. Full formation.”
Ava phased halfway through a concrete wall, scanning. “Tactical gear. Gas masks. No insignia.”
They were boxed in. Walker had maybe one clip left. Ava was half in and half out of phase, red bleeding under her ribs. Yelena’s shoulder was hit. Alexei’s arm was dislocated again and he kept wrenching it back into place like it was a door hinge.
And then there was you.
Standing calmly in the center of the chaos, blood on your knuckles, mask cracked at the jawline. Not tense. Not afraid. Just… assessing. Like you’d seen this play out already.
The first soldier in the oncoming wave raised a weapon.
And you moved.
Not back. Not for cover. Forward.
The stereo signal shifted with you, leaping from Bucky’s comms to the mercenaries’ headsets, hijacking every open frequency on-site. A different song—now louder, sharper, folding itself into the space like a knife into bone. The bass thudded through the pavement, disorienting, impossible to ignore.
“This place’s about to blow—”
The lyric hit just as you sprinted toward the advancing line, coat flaring behind you, batons tucked back into your belt. You didn’t need them now.
Two soldiers opened fire. You dropped low into a slide beneath their aim, boots skimming waterlogged concrete. You came up spinning, driving an elbow into one throat, then swinging around to knee the second across the jaw with enough force to crack his visor.
Bucky couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move.
You were in the center of it now, alone. Completely surrounded.
And utterly untouchable.
One mercenary tried to grab you in a bearhold from behind. Your head snapped back into his face before he could tighten the grip, cartilage crunching under the blow. You twisted free, used his moment of stunned pain to launch yourself off his chest, flipping backward into a double-leg kick that sent two more sprawling.
They were trying to flank you. Six at once now. You moved too fast to corner, slipped between them like smoke through fingers.
You caught a rifle midair—torn from one man’s grip—then swung it by the barrel, not to shoot but to break. Shattered it across another soldier’s helmet. Sparks flew. He screamed.
You tossed the ruined weapon aside like trash.
Another tried for a taser jab. You caught his wrist in one hand, yanked it forward, and let your forehead crack against his temple with a sickening thunk. He dropped. You rolled over his body, grabbed a sidearm from his hip, twisted the battery cell out of it mid-motion, and used the casing as a projectile. Hurled it into the next man’s throat with such force that he stumbled backward coughing blood.
You weren’t improvising. You were performing. A display in violence so surgical, it felt rehearsed.
There was nothing showy about it. No wasted breath. No excess.
But it was beautiful.
More than one of them hesitated now. The last cluster fell back into each other’s lines, rifles up—but jittering. Off-sync. Unsteady. You were outnumbered five-to-one and you looked like you were winning.
No comms. No backup. No partner on your six, despite Bucky standing right there.
And still, no one could touch you.
Alexei had frozen, one hand still holding his dislocated shoulder. He squinted through the haze. “Is that—are they doing this without a gun?”
“She’s using a speaker and spite,” Yelena said, breathless.
Bucky barely heard them. Every atom in him had locked onto you.
He hadn’t seen you like this in years. Not since the war-torn corners of places no one dared map. Not since missions that left no record. He’d watched you walk away from this life—bloody, ragged, swearing you were done with men who handed out orders and didn’t come home.
But here you were.
“This place's about to blow—oh oh oh—”
The beat peaked again. You moved with it.
Bucky didn’t realize until later, until the playback logs came through, that you’d used the signal bounce from the comm hijack to trigger a proximity ping in one of the mercenaries’ own mines. Subtle. Elegant. Just a single pressure charge set beneath the concrete underpass.
You’d timed it to the music.
The explosions hit not with a flash, but a boom—a deep, guttural bass that ripped through the center of the formation. It threw bodies. Concrete cracked. Rebar snapped like bones. The wave of force didn’t kill anyone outright—it was too clean for that. But it sent the force scattering, screaming, radios buzzing with confused shouts in languages the translation software couldn’t keep up with.
You walked through the smoke, now. No urgency.
One of the last men standing raised a trembling pistol.
You were on him in a breath—disarmed him with a spin, yanked the weapon apart in two brutal motions, and slammed the butt of the magazine into his vest until he collapsed, gasping, eyes wide with disbelief.
Bucky took a step forward. And then another. He didn’t know he was moving until the smoke curled at his boots.
Silence followed like a held breath.
When the last one fell, your music still bumping faintly over the comms, you finally looked at Bucky.
“Hi, baby.”
It wasn’t breathless. It wasn’t mocking. Just a quiet, dangerous kind of intimacy.
His heart felt like it stopped.
You moved to him casually, eyes raking over the bruise at his temple, the smear of blood under his collar. You tilted your head, inspecting him like he was a car you’d loaned out and found parked crooked in the wrong neighborhood.
The mask muffled your voice slightly, but not enough to hide the dryness in your tone. “Now that was a proper encore.”
The comms crackled again, faint and dazed.
“…Okay,” Walker muttered. “What the fuck just happened.”
No answer. Not from anyone.
Bucky approached you like someone walking through a minefield he already knew was active. Your eyes met his, slow and deliberate, as you reached up and peeled the broken edge of your mask back enough to speak.
“You look like shit,” you said simply.
“You blew up a fucking parking garage.”
“I nudged the pressure plate,” you corrected. “The garage blew itself up. Poor structural planning.”
Yelena finally spoke, somewhere off to the right. “Who are you?”
You didn’t look at her. Just exhaled through your nose like the question barely warranted a pause. “Old friend,” you said simply. “Fewer ethics, better taste in music.”
It hung there, ambiguous enough to pass but barbed enough that it didn’t invite further questions. You knew exactly how to deflect. How to disappear even while standing in plain sight.
You turned back to Bucky. The tilt of your head, the shift of your voice—both softened, only fractionally, but enough that he would feel it in his ribs. That awful, aching familiarity.
“You weren’t going to tell me about this op,” you said flatly, voice low, just for him.
“You're not supposed to be tracking me.”
You hummed. “And yet.” You tapped a gloved finger to his chest. Right above the hidden seam of his tac vest. He knew there was a tracker there. Or, he would now.
Behind you, the others were beginning to recover, weapons slack in their hands, confusion settling in like dust.
“Again, who is that?” Ava asked, still half in phase, her eyes narrowed.
“Nobody,” Bucky said quickly.
You turned to him again, one brow lifted.
He didn’t flinch.
The silence pressed in again. You could hear Walker muttering something—something about vigilantes, unregistered allies, probably some offhand comment about being underpaid—but it didn’t matter. Not right now.
You leaned in close enough for only Bucky to hear. “I don’t care who you work for now,” you murmured. “But if you’re going to keep playing hero, I’m not going to sit at home hoping you come back with all your pieces. You trained me better than that.”
“I didn’t train you to break into comms systems mid-op and hijack the sound system with—what was that?”
“Don’t Cha.” You smiled faintly. “It slaps.”
He closed his eyes for half a second. Breathed deep. Then opened them again. “You can’t do this.”
“Sure I can. I’m not a part of your team. I don’t need clearance. I just need one good signal bounce and an encrypted network to patch into.”
“And a speaker,” he added, dry.
You shrugged. “I improvise.”
Another pause.
“I’m not here to start saving the world again,” you said. “But I will show up when you’re two seconds from bleeding out in a parking garage in Bratislava because your team has shit intel and someone decided not to bring extra clips.”
He didn’t argue.
You patted his cheek briefly. Nothing overt, just enough to make the breath catch in his throat.
Then you turned, vanishing into the smoke just as casually as you’d arrived, music still pulsing faintly behind you.
Yelena said what everyone was thinking.
“What the fuck just happened?”
No one had an answer.
Bucky didn’t offer one either.
He just stood there, aching in every limb, and wondered how many more of his missions were going to end with Pussycat Dolls blaring through government-issued earpieces—and how many more trackers he was going to have to tear out of his suit.
The debrief had ended thirty minutes ago.
No one had left.
Yelena sat cross-legged in one of the overstuffed chairs, a protein bar crumpled in her palm like she’d forgotten she was holding it. Her blonde hair was scraped back in a half-twisted bun that had begun to unravel midway through the meeting, and her expression had only grown more pointed with every breath Bucky refused to waste explaining you.
Across from her, Walker was pacing—slow, agitated, like a caged animal that hadn’t quite figured out what corner to piss in yet. He’d ditched the tac vest but kept the sleeves rolled, flexing a bruised bicep every time he turned. Alexei had already snagged half of the post-mission snacks from the shared kitchenette and was now loudly crunching on something suspiciously orange. Ava sat against the far wall next to Bob, legs crossed at the ankle, arms folded, as silent and sharp as a scalpel.
Bucky sat alone near the far end of the table, arms folded loosely across his chest, gaze fixed on the blacked-out screen of a wall monitor.
“So,” Yelena said, picking at the wrapper. “Are you going to tell us who they were, or do I have to keep guessing?”
Bucky didn’t move.
Alexei pointed a carrot stick in his direction. “They knew you. Very well. This is not up for debate. They called you ‘baby.’” A pause. “Is that normal? Do coworkers in America do that now?”
“She hijacked our comms with bubblegum pop and flipped a full tactical team without breaking a sweat,” Ava said quietly. “I’d like to know who’s training with that kind of precision and not wearing a uniform.”
“She’s not on any registry,” Yelena added. “I checked. No files. No background. No facial ID. She doesn’t exist.”
“She’s not a threat,” Bucky said. Flat. Final. The tone of someone who’d been interrogated before and wasn’t interested in playing along.
“No. You don’t get to do that,” Yelena said, sliding off the table with a thud. “You don’t get to stand there all quiet and broody after someone cartwheeled through an active war zone, made our entire unit look like unpaid interns, and then blew up a parking garage with what I’m pretty sure was a Bluetooth speaker.”
Walker let out a bark of laughter and didn’t bother hiding it. “Thank you. Finally. I thought I’d imagined that.”
“You did not,” Ava said flatly, still watching the skyline. “I checked the audio logs. She used a frequency bounce to route music through nine of their channels simultaneously. Bounced it again to mask her own comm signature. She was using earpieces as echo chambers.”
“That’s not even real,” Walker scoffed. “That’s comic book shit.”
“So are we,” Yelena shot back.
Bucky rubbed his jaw, said nothing.
Bob looked up from where he’d been twiddling with the strap of his watch in the corner of the room. “I liked the song.”
Four heads turned toward him.
He blinked slowly. “I listened to the audio logs too. It was catchy.”
Alexei made a noise like he was preparing to argue with the furniture itself. “She took out twenty-five men, minimum. With her hands. And rhythm. I am sorry, but this is not someone who just wandered in from the street. This is not some random playlist enthusiast. You know her.”
Bucky didn’t flinch. “Yeah.”
That answer hung there, not quite satisfying.
Yelena stepped closer, arms folded, chin tilted like she was examining a lie for cracks. “Okay. So who is she. What’s her name.”
“I don’t know if she’s using one right now,” Bucky lied easily. “We worked together a long time ago. That’s all.”
Walker barked out another laugh. “Bullshit.”
“We ran ops in a couple regions,” Bucky said. “Mostly when things got too quiet for comfort. Off-books. Years ago. She walked away before everything really came apart.”
“She tracked you across a continent,” Yelena said.
He met her eyes. “She likes to be thorough.”
“Was she CIA?” Ava asked. “Because I’ve seen their psychological profiles and that was not the average ex-operative response to stress.”
Bucky shook his head. “No. Not Langley.”
“HYDRA?” Walker said too quickly.
“Jesus,” Yelena muttered.
“She moved like someone from a program,” Ava said, voice quiet but deliberate. “Someone conditioned. That kind of precision doesn’t come from basic black-ops.”
“She trained under someone worse than HYDRA,” Bucky said.
And just like that, the room shifted. The quiet got heavier. Bob looked away. Alexei stopped fidgeting. Ava stilled completely.
Yelena narrowed her eyes. “Red Room?”
“I didn’t ask,” Bucky said. “Didn’t need to.”
“But she knew you.” Ava again, calm, focused. “That kind of familiarity doesn’t just show up after a few jobs.”
Bucky looked up at her. “I didn’t say it was just a few.”
“You said she walked away.”
He paused.
“She did.”
Silence again.
Walker shifted, elbow on the back of his chair. “Well, wherever she walked to, she kept your damn tracking frequency. I still can’t get the ringing out of my left ear.”
Bucky didn’t look at him. “You’re welcome, by the way. For being alive.”
“Sure,” Walker said dryly. “Thanks to your mystery friend with a war crime mixtape.”
“And now she’s… what? A rogue asset?” Ava asked, tilting her head. “A merc? A vigilante with a playlist?”
“She’s not on anyone’s leash,” Bucky said simply.
“Except yours,” Walker muttered.
Bucky’s glare snapped to him. “She doesn’t answer to anyone. Not to me. Not to you.”
Alexei muttered something in Russian under his breath that sounded vaguely admiring and possibly inappropriate.
Bob finally spoke again, more alert this time. “She’s not joining us, is she?”
“No,” Bucky said.
He said it fast.
A beat.
“I’m sorry, why not,” Alexei said, throwing both hands into the air. “We have room! We have so much room! She could have the bunk above mine, I would even switch.”
“She doesn’t want to be on a team,” Bucky said. “She’s not the type.”
“You mean she’s not the type to follow orders,” Yelena said, eyes narrowing again.
“No,” he said slowly. “I mean she doesn’t give a shit about headlines, or missions, or doing this the right way. She shows up because she wants to. That’s it.”
“And you’re okay with that?” Ava asked. “Someone that volatile just showing up whenever she decides?”
“She’s not volatile,” Bucky said, the words a little sharper than intended.
Yelena caught it. Instantly.
She stepped forward, crossing into his space—not aggressive, but direct. Like someone circling a bruise. “You trust her.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No,” she said, “but you didn’t have to.”
Bucky didn’t speak.
“She’s not just an old op,” Yelena said, eyes still locked on his. “That wasn’t nostalgia out there. That was instinct. You moved like someone watching something yours walk into fire.”
Ava glanced between them. “She did save your life.”
“She saved all of us,” Bucky threw back.
“Okay, but why doesn’t she have a file,” Walker cut in. “Why doesn’t anyone know about her? If she’s that good, someone would’ve picked her up.”
“She’s good at disappearing,” Bucky said.
“And you just let her go?” Walker said. “After she pulls a fucking Mission: Impossible and struts off into the fog like a Bond girl?”
“I don’t let her do anything,” Bucky said. “She’s not mine to handle.”
Yelena leaned back in her chair. The protein bar wrapper crinkled in her palm.
“She’s not going to show up again, is she?”
Bucky shrugged. “Depends on whether I do something stupid again.”
He didn’t mention that you’d texted him two hours ago asking if he wanted to stop for groceries on his way back. He didn’t mention that the front porch light would be on tonight. That you’d probably be curled on the couch in socks and one of his old shirts, pretending you hadn’t crossed any borders this week.
They didn’t need to know that.
He rose from the table and grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair. The room watched him like he was walking out of an interrogation and back into something no one else could follow.
“Tell Val I’ll finish the debrief report tomorrow,” he said.
Yelena tilted her head. “And where are you going?”
Bucky paused in the doorway.
He didn’t look back.
“Home,” he said.
And then he was gone.
The porch light was on.
Not a floodlight, not a security cam. Just the soft golden bulb above the narrow step that flickered twice when the wind caught it wrong. One of the screws had loosened a few months back during a storm. Bucky had said he’d fix it. You’d said it didn’t bother you. It still hadn’t been fixed.
His boots were scuffed and his shoulder ached and there was probably still smoke in his hair, but he stood on the welcome mat for a second longer than necessary anyway, hand resting on the doorframe like he needed to feel something solid.
Then he unlocked it. Quiet. Familiar. Two clicks, one turn.
Inside smelled like clean laundry and old books and that lemongrass balm you always used for burns.
The record player was humming in the background, stylus long since run dry. You must’ve forgotten to turn it off again. He stepped into the living room and shrugged off his jacket, moving through the space like muscle memory. His eyes caught on the half-finished mug on the end table, a folded blanket on the couch, the sleeves of one of his shirts pushed up over your forearms where you were curled up sideways, knees tucked, reading a book with your bare feet propped against the armrest.
You didn’t look up. Just turned a page.
“I thought you’d be home earlier,” you said softly.
“Got cornered by the team.”
Your voice was light, almost teasing. “They want answers?”
“They want blood.”
You snorted and finally glanced over the edge of the book. “Yelena first?”
“Obviously.”
“Did she throw anything?”
“Just looks.”
You hummed and set the book aside, leaning forward to make room as he collapsed onto the couch beside you. He sat like a man whose bones hadn’t stopped vibrating. You shifted, swung your legs over his lap, and rested one arm lazily across his chest like it had always belonged there.
He didn’t speak. Just closed his eyes for a moment, the side of his head tilted toward yours.
You let the silence stretch. He needed that.
Then—
“Bob said he liked the song.”
You grinned against his shoulder. “He’s got taste.”
“He said it was catchy.”
“He’s not wrong.”
“Again, you blew up a parking garage.”
“I was subtle.”
“You were wearing a speaker rig stitched into your coat.”
“I didn’t say I was quiet.”
He huffed, a small thing. Almost a laugh.
You leaned your head back against the cushion and studied the ceiling. “They’ll figure it out eventually.”
He didn’t ask what.
You didn’t clarify.
“They’ll dig,” you continued, “because that’s what they do. Not because they don’t trust you. But because they can’t afford not to. You don’t keep ghosts around without asking where they sleep at night.”
“They’re not stupid.”
“No,” you said. “Just loyal.”
He rubbed a thumb along the inside of your wrist. You’d skinned it, just barely, probably during that slide beneath the gunfire.
“They think we’re ex-coworkers,” he said after a beat.
“Mm. That won’t last.”
“I know.”
You shifted to look at him, gaze steady. “You want me to stay gone next time?”
“No.”
It came out faster than he meant it to. And quieter.
You didn’t say anything.
His fingers ghosted across the edge of your thigh. “I just—this thing with the team. It’s still new. Messy. They’re watching me like I might snap. Or disappear.”
“You’ve earned that,” you said, not unkindly.
He nodded.
“They trust you more than they think,” you added after a moment. “Even Walker.”
“Walker thinks I’m one fight away from dragging a metal arm through a convenience store and snapping someone in half over a cereal shelf.”
You smiled. “You did that once.”
“I was sleep-deprived and the guy had it coming.”
“I’m just saying,” you murmured. “They’re not wrong to wonder.”
He let the silence settle again, the weight of your legs grounding him where he sat. Then he glanced over at you. “And you?”
You raised a brow. “Do I think you’re going to snap and kill the team in a cereal aisle?”
“Do you think you’re going to keep crashing my missions with bubblegum pop and a body count?”
You smiled, sharp and warm at once. “Only if you keep making it interesting.”
He stared at you for a moment. Then he reached out, brushed his fingers under your jaw—light, thoughtful, like he was confirming you were still here.
“I meant what I said,” you added, quiet now. “I wasn’t there to play hero. I’m not looking for redemption. Or recognition. That world chewed me up and spat me out long before I met you. I’m not going back.”
“I know.”
“But I’ll always come back. For you.”
His throat tightened.
You felt the shift before he said anything. The way his fingers stilled just under your jaw, how his gaze dropped for the barest second, like whatever he was about to admit weighed more than it should have.
“They’re going to find out,” he said finally. Voice low. Steady, but only just. “Not just who you are. What we are.”
You didn’t look away. “You sound like you’re bracing for it.”
“I am.” He leaned back slightly, enough to study your face. “I’ve kept a lot of things buried over the years. Some of it for good reason. Some of it because I didn’t know how to tell anyone without it sounding like a confession. But this—us—it’s not something I want in the crosshairs.”
You tilted your head. “You think they’ll aim at it?”
“I think people don’t like what they can’t label. And right now, you’re an anomaly with a body count, a comms breach, and no file. Add in a secret marriage to someone like me, and that’s a storm waiting to happen.”
You were quiet for a moment. Then: “You really didn’t tell them anything?”
“No.”
“Not even that we live together?”
“No.”
You nodded. Not in judgment. Just understanding.
“You scared they’ll treat me like a threat?”
He hesitated. “No. I’m scared they’ll treat us like one. Like I’ve been compromised. Like I’m… hiding something dangerous.”
“You are,” you said, with a small, lopsided smile. “But that’s never stopped you before.”
He didn’t smile back. Just ran a hand down his face, thumb braced at his temple. “Yelena’s already circling. Ava’s not far behind. Walker’s an idiot, but even he knows something’s off. And Alexei—Christ, I think he’s trying to adopt you.”
“I could do worse,” you deadpanned.
“He asked if you wanted the bunk above his. Said he’d move.”
You laughed, soft and sharp. “God, he’s going to be crushed when he finds out I’m not single.”
Bucky’s jaw tightened. “That’s not funny.”
You reached for his hand, interlaced your fingers with his. His skin was calloused, palms scarred, familiar in ways your body had memorized years ago.
“James,” you said, and your voice gentled, “I don’t care if they like me. Or believe in this. Or approve. I don’t need them to. I didn’t marry them. I married you.”
His eyes flicked to yours, something fierce and unspoken just behind them.
“You’re not a risk I regret,” you added. “And if they want to dig, let them dig. We’ve survived worse than a nosy debrief room.”
He leaned forward again, this time slower, and rested his forehead against yours. The press of skin, the shared breath, the quiet tension wound tight between your ribs—none of it felt like surrender. Just something harder to name.
He spoke quietly. “If this gets out, they’ll question my judgment.”
“Let them.”
“They’ll dig into your past.”
“Let them.”
“They’ll—” He cut himself off, exhaled. “They’ll try to separate us.”
You tilted your chin. “They can’t.”
It wasn’t a challenge. It was a fact. Solid. Unmoving.
Bucky didn’t answer, but you felt the way his breath dragged out through his nose, how his grip on your hand shifted—fingers tightening, not like fear, but habit. Like holding onto you was muscle memory. Like letting go wasn’t an option he entertained anymore.
You reached up with your free hand and pushed your fingers into his hair, slow and loose at the nape where it was just starting to curl from the heat. It was damp. He hadn’t showered yet. He hadn’t really come home yet. Just crossed the threshold.
“Go wash off the garage dust,” you said. “You smell like diesel and nerves.”
“Thought you liked how I smelled.”
“I do,” you murmured. “But I like it better when it’s under cedar soap and not post-combat sweat.”
He stayed where he was for another beat, forehead still resting against yours. Then he pulled back enough to look at you, just long enough for his gaze to drop to your mouth. He didn’t kiss you. Just studied you the way he always did when you told him the truth—like he was adding it to some invisible tally, a list only he kept track of.
Then he rose without a word.
You watched him walk down the hallway, unzipping the tactical vest as he went, shoulder muscles moving beneath the black fabric like tension still hadn’t learned how to let go. The bathroom door clicked open. You heard the water pressure shift in the pipes before the sound of the shower started.
You waited thirty seconds. Then you stood, peeled his shirt off your frame, and followed.
It had been nearly five months since Bratislava.
Since the parking garage. Since the Pussycat Dolls. Since you’d lit up half a mercenary task force with a smirk and a frequency bounce. Since you’d vanished again into the smoke like a goddamn myth, only to be curled up on the couch that next night asking if he wanted to split a sandwich or order out after the two of you spent far too long in the shower.
In that time, the team had gotten better. Not good, no one in that unit would ever be clean enough to call themselves that, but sharper. More in sync. Intel got vetted. Missions ran smoother. Yelena had even stopped threatening to stab Walker more than once per week.
But the bruises still came. The blood still dried in the seams of their suits. And when shit did go sideways, which it inevitably did, it was always in ways that no one could predict.
The second time you showed up, Bucky had barely made it through the post-mission patch-up before Yelena cornered him outside medical with her arms crossed and murder in her eyes.
“Was that Britney Spears?”
He didn’t answer.
She didn’t need him to. Ava had already ID’d the audio footprint as a hacked signal ping bounced from a cell tower two miles outside the safe zone. Alexei had hummed the song for three days afterward. Walker sulked about it until Bob offered him a playlist of his own.
Three weeks after that, you crashed an op in the Balkans with the entirety of Beyoncé’s Renaissance album queued up in reverse order. You landed halfway through “Pure/Honey,” took down thirteen hostiles, winked at the drone cam, and disappeared before the satellite feed could reorient.
By the time mission four hit, some remote hellhole near the Georgian border with shit reception and worse exits, the team was already halfway joking about which track you’d use next.
It was Kesha again. Naturally.
You’d popped out of a burning APC with "TiK ToK" already mid-chorus and a grin like you’d been waiting for someone to hit the big red button. That time, you didn't leave right away. You passed Bucky a protein bar before the team got on the extraction chopper, kissed his temple, and told Alexei he had a nice ass. He hadn't shut up since.
They were still digging, of course. Yelena and Ava, mostly. Alexei kept making increasingly unhinged guesses about your background—sometimes Russian ballet, sometimes MI6, sometimes something about Vatican ninjas that no one had the heart to correct. Bob just watched. Always quiet. Always listening. And Walker…
Walker had developed a twitch.
He’d started referring to you—loudly, bitterly—as “Bucky’s little bat-signal,” like if he said it enough times it’d turn into a punchline and not an ache. It never landed. Not really.
No one could prove anything. Not about your identity. Not about your methods. You moved too fast. You left nothing behind.
And Bucky never said much.
He never needed to.
But they were all watching. Closer. Louder. Testing the tension in every mission like they were waiting for it to snap.
Which is why, when everything finally went to hell, no one was surprised when Yelena snapped first.
The op was supposed to be simple. In and out. A weapons drop moving across eastern borders, underground tech funneled through an abandoned train yard. Bucky had checked the coordinates himself. The team had split into pairs. Ava and Walker on overwatch. Alexei by the perimeter with a surveillance drone. Yelena at Bucky’s six, teeth gritted, gun loaded.
It wasn’t an ambush.
It was an execution.
There had been too many of them, real mercenaries this time. Not freelancers. Not idiots. Not chaos agents looking for a payout. These ones moved together. Synchronized. Coordinated. Ava had gone down first, wounded. Not out, but down. Phasing between pain. Walker had followed, clipped hard in the leg, trying to cover her.
Alexei was pinned.
And Bucky was breathing too hard, right arm shattered at the elbow, the sound of blood slapping metal every time he moved.
Yelena was cursing. Loud and vicious. Ducking behind rusted train cars as bullets slammed through metal and concrete like the world had narrowed to pure impact.
“Fuck,” she spat, reloading. “We are going to die in a parking lot for stolen tech and Valentina’s shitty paycheck—”
Bucky’s teeth were red. His side was worse.
He grunted, low. “We’ve been through worse.”
“Speak for yourself,” she hissed. “This is bad. This is the bad kind. Unless your little friend plans to show up again with backup dancers and a boom box, we’re dead.”
Bucky would have replied—maybe something bitter, something deflective—but his jaw locked before he could open his mouth. His vision was graying at the edges, muscles refusing to follow orders. His right arm was entirely dead weight now, slung awkwardly against his chest, blood still slick at the wrist. He couldn’t tell if the warmth in his boots was from a burst vein or just the heat of the rail yard’s scorched concrete.
And you weren’t here.
That was the thought that hit him hardest. Not the pain, not the bodies, not the brutal math of angles and ammunition. You weren’t here.
You’d always been here before.
Not early. Not announced. But you showed up. On the edge of disaster, somewhere between the breaking point and the fallout, wrapped in leather and snatched frequencies and songs that shouldn’t have made sense on a battlefield but always did when it was you. And he never called you, never asked. You just came.
Because you always found him.
Because you tracked him.
Because you always knew.
He’d grown used to it without realizing. The hum of music bleeding in when the comms got too quiet. The shape of you moving through smoke like it wasn’t a threat but a threshold. He’d never said it aloud, but it had comforted him. Knowing you were out there, watching, waiting. Knowing he couldn’t disappear without you noticing.
But this time?
This was the worst it had been in months.
And still… nothing.
A part of him, the part that hadn’t already fractured under the pressure, felt it like abandonment. A dull edge of fear pressed hard to his sternum. Not because he doubted you, but because it meant something was wrong. Maybe the tracker hadn’t worked. Maybe the jet wasn’t prepped. Maybe you were late. Maybe you were hurt.
Before Bucky could fully spiral into his own thoughts, a sound split the air.
A low, dull rumble that climbed too fast, too smooth, to be more gunfire.
His head snapped toward the east quadrant of the yard, vision still smeared at the edges from blood loss. The others heard it next—Yelena ducked lower, muttering another string of obscenities. Walker flinched, dragging Ava back behind a stack of rusted shipping containers, weapon raised. Alexei braced one arm against a splintered wall of aluminum and groaned something about incoming air support.
“Jet,” Ava gritted out, barely upright. “No clearance on the feed. That’s not ours.”
Bucky blinked once. Hard.
The shape sliced low across the clouds. A short-range VTOL, clearly military-grade, but gutted and rebuilt. Fast. Loud.
Yours.
And then the music hit.
“Let’s go, girls.”
“Is that—” Walker squinted, staggering.
“I swear to God,” Yelena muttered, slapping another magazine into place. “If that hatch opens and she’s wearing denim, I’m going to cry.”
The jet didn’t touch down gently. It landed loud and hot, braking hard against concrete and kicking up a storm of soot that coated every blown-out car and corpse in a hundred-foot radius. The engines hadn’t even cooled before the rear hatch cracked open with a hiss and the speakers ratcheted louder.
“Man, I feel like a woman…”
And there you stood.
Framed by smoke and floodlights, one hand braced on the hydraulic frame, the other already holding a med bag like you’d jumped in from a dream with combat boots and a temper.
No weapons. No fanfare. Just get in the fucking jet energy radiating off your entire body.
“Everyone in,” you barked. “Now.”
Walker didn’t wait. He hauled Ava toward the ramp with one arm slung around her waist. She was still phasing in and out, blood coating her knuckles, the blur of her shoulder wound sparking faint with tech static.
Alexei limped next, muttering something about Canadian pop singers and spinal trauma. Bucky barely registered it. He couldn’t feel his arm. Could barely hear the pounding in his ears over the scream of the engines and the bassline.
You moved before he could, stepping off the ramp and into the smoke, boots crunching across grit and glass as you crossed the yard at a dead sprint.
“Jesus,” you snapped as you reached him, one hand already going to the blood-soaked hem of his jacket. “What the fuck, James.”
He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. You pressed one palm to his side, felt the heat radiating off his ribs, and looped your other arm under him to carry him to the jet.
“I couldn’t get the signal,” you said, voice tight. “The tracker was acting up.”
He hissed through his teeth as you shifted his weight, setting him down on one of the jet seats. “Where was it this time?”
You didn’t blink. “The right boot. Back corner. You never put your shoes back in the closet, so I figured I’d stick one there.”
Yelena turned her head so sharply it was audible. “What?”
You ignored her.
Bucky narrowed his eyes, breath still ragged. “I hadn’t even worn those boots in a week.”
“Yeah,” you said, voice edged and sharp, as you tugged off his jacket, “and you left them by the dryer again, James, so guess what? That’s where I put it. Along with three aspirin packets, a ten-dollar bill, and the spare keys you keep forgetting to bring with you.”
Yelena’s eyes went wide. “Wait. Wait, what?”
“Not now,” you snapped. “Stitches first, questions later.”
Yelena froze.
She had just stepped into the bay behind Alexei, one arm looped around a support pole, blood streaked down her left cheek. Her head turned slowly—very slowly—back toward the now closing loading ramp, where you were currently pressing gauze to Bucky’s side and muttering something about his inability to buy new med kits even though you were the one who’d asked for them on the last Target run.
“Hold on. Spare keys,” Yelena repeated, voice pitching up like a red flag had just gone up in her brain and she was sprinting to catch it.
You didn’t look up.
Neither did Bucky.
There was a beat—just one—but Bucky felt it ripple through the cabin like a hairline fracture under pressure. Yelena didn’t blink. Ava, still bleeding and silent, lifted her head just an inch off the headrest. Walker muttered something low under his breath, too quiet to catch. Alexei stilled completely.
You were still working.
You’d stripped back the ruined plate of his tac vest, fingers moving fast over the gauze tape. Your hands weren’t shaking, but they weren’t calm either—tight at the knuckles, decisive in that way they always were when someone you cared about had bled more than they should have.
Bucky sucked in a breath. It rattled at the end.
He could feel it happening. The shift. The attention tilting, zeroing in. It was like watching a tripwire get brushed in real time.
“Did you just say Target run?” Yelena’s voice cracked straight through the tension. “Like the store?”
You didn’t respond.
Walker made a strangled sound. “Hold on. You’re telling me this—this frequency-hacking psycho just casually shops for med kits in her downtime for you?”
“I didn’t say I shopped,” you muttered. “I said I asked. He’s the one who keeps forgetting the list.”
“I got the shampoo,” Bucky said through his teeth.
“You got the wrong shampoo.”
“It had the same label!”
“It was 3-in-1.”
“That’s efficient—”
“It’s disgusting, James.”
And just like that, the whole jet tilted again—only this time it wasn’t from blood loss or the pitch of the wind. It was the silence. The stunned, dawning silence that came from realizing something was very, very off.
Ava blinked. “James?”
Yelena’s mouth opened.
Then: “No, no. You don’t get to just drop a spare key confession mid-evac and not explain. What the fuck are you two on about?”
“Explain what?” Bucky barked, more out of pain than defensiveness, but it landed anyway.
Alexei staggered up from his seat, bleeding from the shoulder and grinning like he’d just watched his favorite soap opera hit a mid-season twist. “You two live together, yes?”
“No,” you said, at the same time Bucky said, “Yes.”
Yelena stopped cold. “What.”
“Fine. She has a drawer,” Bucky muttered, wincing as you pressed harder with the gauze.
“You have a drawer?” Yelena repeated, voice rising. “Do you have a shared grocery list too? Matching towels?”
“Technically,” you said, “we share an Amazon account, but only because I hate ads—”
“You share an address?”
You didn’t answer.
Walker limped past, dragging himself into the seat across the aisle. “I swear to God, if this turns into some Mr. and Mrs. Smith bullshit, I’m out.”
Bucky exhaled sharply through his nose. “It’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like,” Yelena snapped. “Because the last I checked, secret girlfriends don’t get comm access and personal extraction aircraft with customized playlists!”
“She’s not—” Bucky started, then stopped.
You paused, fingers frozen just inside his tac vest as you reached for the dressing pack in his inner lining. “James.”
His jaw flexed. “She’s not some secret girlfriend.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Yelena said, eyes wide now, practically vibrating with the sudden thrill of someone else’s exposed personal business. “Are you saying she’s not a girlfriend because she’s a roommate with benefits, or because she’s a literal government ghost you, what? Accidentally fell into bed with during an overseas op and neglected to tell us for five fucking months—”
“She’s my wife.”
The words snapped out like a misfired round—loud, brutal, final.
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
You straightened slowly, the antiseptic wipe still in your hand, now hovering somewhere between the edge of Bucky’s ribs and the cratered hole in his bloodstained shirt.
No one moved.
No one spoke.
Then Walker, voice hoarse and stunned: “I’m sorry. Wife?”
Ava, barely conscious, cracked one eye open. “What?”
Alexei groaned from the corner. “I knew it. I said they were either married or psychic. Maybe both.”
“Wait. Wait, no,” Walker held up a hand, bleeding. “You’re married? Like—married married? To her?”
You finally looked up. “Do you have another her in mind?”
Bucky winced. “Now’s not the time—”
“No, no, I think it is exactly the time,” Yelena said, stepping forward, pointing between the two of you. “Because we’ve all been getting tossed around like ragdolls for months while you two have been playing he’s mine, she’s chaos behind the scenes.”
You rose slowly, blood on your palms, face shadowed by the hatch lighting.
“We weren’t hiding it,” you said simply.
Yelena threw both arms in the air. “You were absolutely hiding it!”
“We were keeping it quiet,” you corrected. “There’s a difference.”
Walker sat down hard on the floor. “I’m gonna pass out.”
Ava, leaning against the wall, finally let out a low breath that might have been a laugh. “That explains so much.”
“I—what the fuck?” Walker’s mouth opened and closed twice. “Like with rings and vows and tax brackets?”
“Jesus Christ,” you muttered. “It was a courthouse in Budapest. No photographer. No playlist. Not even a Pinterest board.”
Alexei, who had been silently mouthing tax brackets, perked up. “How long?”
“None of your business,” Bucky said immediately.
“Four years,” you said, at the exact same time.
Yelena made a noise like a cat being punched.
“Four years?” she barked. “You’ve been married for four years and not one of us knew? Not even a hint? Not even a bad fake name on your emergency contact form?”
“Technically, it’s under her alias,” Bucky said, wincing as you pressed gauze to his side with more force than strictly necessary.
“Her alias,” Ava echoed from the back, eyebrows barely raised but eyes locked on you. “That’s comforting.”
Yelena dragged her hands down her face. “I need to sit down.”
“You’re already sitting down,” Walker said numbly. “We’re all sitting down. In hell.”
Alexei was shaking his head slowly, staring at you like you’d sprouted horns. “I can’t believe we have been flying into death zones with Captain Popsicle and his mystery combat Barbie and the two of you have been married this whole time?”
“Don’t call her that,” Bucky snapped.
“I meant it with admiration!”
“She’s a human being,” Ava said flatly.
“And his wife,” Yelena added, throwing her hands up again. “Which apparently gives her license to break every rule of engagement we’ve ever signed.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” you bit out, finally stepping away from Bucky just long enough to snap a fresh syringe out of the case and toss it to Ava. “Would you have preferred I not show up with an extraction vehicle and leave you all dying in a pile of your own egos?”
“You’re not even cleared!” Walker said, still stuck somewhere between disbelief and cardiac arrest. “You don’t have files. You don’t have a record. You married a former Hydra asset with no fucking paper trail—”
“John,” Bucky said, and his voice didn’t rise, didn’t shout. But the threat in it stopped everything.
Dead.
Walker’s mouth clamped shut.
You turned your back and crouched again, cracking open a package of suture strips with steady, sharp fingers. He didn’t look at you, but he didn’t move away either.
“You married him,” Yelena said slowly, like she was putting the last piece into a conspiracy board. “And you didn’t tell anyone.”
“Correct,” you said, without looking up.
“Why?”
You paused. For the first time since stepping onto the jet, you were still.
Then, quieter: “Because it was ours.”
Yelena blinked.
Walker slumped sideways, muttering something that sounded like Jesus Christ, I’m too concussed for this.
Ava didn’t say anything. She just studied you like she was adding this new truth to a map no one else could read yet.
And no one, not one of them, could argue with that.
No one said anything for a long time.
The jet rumbled beneath them, steady now. Altitude rising. Stabilizers evening out. The air had gone colder, thinner. Bucky could feel it in his lungs. How the heat of the rail yard had been replaced by that sterile chill of recycled pressurized air and drying blood.
He sat slumped against the inner wall of the aircraft, the pain at his side dulled but ever-present, a pulse of heat beneath the bandages. The lights overhead buzzed faintly. Across from him, Walker had gone quiet. Not passed out, just silent. That silence that came when you didn’t know how to re-enter a world that had just rearranged itself without warning.
Yelena didn’t have that problem.
“Where are the rings?”
You didn’t even blink. Just kept pressing the edge of a suture strip flat against Bucky’s ribs, calm as ever. “We don’t wear them on missions.”
“No, I mean—where are they. What are they. Are they like, hidden daggers? Laser-tracking nanotech? Poison darts? Do they explode?”
“We got tungsten bands off a street vendor in Pest,” you said, flicking the end of the strip down with surgical precision. “Ten bucks each. Mine’s probably under the couch.”
Yelena stared. “You’re telling me you got married with street metal and hid it like it was a war crime?”
You finally looked up. “We didn’t hide it. We protected it. There’s a difference.”
“Yeah,” Yelena muttered, flopping back against the padded bulkhead, “try that line at our next psych eval.”
Alexei perked up slightly. “Did you write vows?”
“Alexei—”
“No, I’m curious! Was it romantic? Did she threaten him? Did he cry?”
You turned to Bucky then, not grinning, not smirking—just steady. “Did you?”
He didn’t answer right away.
He remembered the cold marble floor of the consulate. The cheap pen. The tension in your hand when you signed. The way you didn’t smile, not once, but your shoulders had dropped like something finally let go. He remembered how you’d kissed him afterward, not like a new beginning but like something that had already been burned into your bones and you were just honoring the facts of it now.
He hadn't cried.
But he remembered feeling something break open inside his chest that hadn’t fully closed since.
“No,” he said quietly. “You did.”
That earned a scoff from Walker, who still looked half-sick. “You people are insane.”
“And you’re alive, you’re welcome,” you shot back, not even looking at him.
That shut him up.
Ava tilted her head slightly from where she sat, chin resting against her shoulder. “Are there any other secrets we should be aware of? Kids? A bunker in the Alps? Shared Spotify?”
“We don’t talk about the Spotify,” you said immediately, too flat to be joking.
“I knew you had a playlist,” Yelena muttered.
“Who do you think you’re talking to? I have several,” you corrected.
Bucky let the rhythm of your voice wash over him, the way it always had. It calmed something in him he didn’t have the words for. He wasn't sure he'd ever have the words for it. But that was the thing, wasn’t it? You’d never asked for the language of it. You just stayed. When everything else fractured. When he did.
He let his head tip back against the wall, the throb of the flight engines a dull hum against his skull.
You kept talking.
Yelena asked about Budapest—what song was playing in the cab, what flavor the celebratory gelato was, whether you’d told anyone or if you’d just ghosted the next assignment like it never happened. You didn’t flinch under any of it. You answered what you wanted to. Dodged the rest with a precision that made it clear you'd spent years doing exactly that.
And Bucky watched you.
Listened to the cadences you used with the team—how they shifted only slightly when you got tired, how your sarcasm always dulled at the edges when you were checking someone's wound without being obvious about it. How you deferred to Ava without making it feel like yielding. How you redirected Yelena’s prying with just enough detail to satisfy, just enough space to stay unreadable.
They’d come around.
Eventually.
They always did.
But it wasn’t for them that you showed up in a jet at the eleventh hour. It wasn’t for glory. Or redemption. Or to earn your seat.
It was for him.
And that, Bucky thought, pressing a blood-soaked gauze pad tighter against his ribs, was something no intel report could ever quantify.
He let his eyes slip shut, your voice still in his ears, arguing now with Yelena about the legality of impersonating air traffic control in four different countries. He didn’t smile. Not really.
But he breathed easier.
For the first time in hours.
Maybe days.
Maybe longer.
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omg thank you so much 😭 the secret wife agenda really does require both giggles and emotional damage, apparently. i’m so glad you loved the reader in this one because i had so much fun writing that dynamic!!
Summary: You and Bucky both know what it means to wake up haunted after a nightmare. over time, taking care of each other through it becomes second nature.
MCU Timeline Placement: Thunderbolts-ish
Master List: Find my other stuff here!
Warnings: nightmares, panic attacks, vomiting, nausea, PTSD, flashbacks, HYDRA and Red Room-related trauma, implied past torture / past conditioning, smoking, kind of two parts smashed into one, angsty af but with lots of comfort, two idiots in love it’s borderline painful
Word Count: 10.6k
Author’s Note: HIIIIII <3 crawling out of my nearly six-month hiatus to throw this at the wall and scuttle away like a goblin. life has actually been really good, which is WILD, and somehow my brain said guess what we have time for again?? bucky barnes! honestly, writing fics again felt so refreshing and familiar and sweet, and i missed this more than i realized. love you all dearly, thank you for still being here :’)
Your knees hit the tile hard enough to sting, but the pain barely registered over everything else.
The toilet bowl blurred in and out of focus beneath you, white porcelain swimming at the edges of your vision as another violent spasm tore through your stomach. Your body folded in on itself with brutal, helpless force, one hand braced against the seat, the other slipping against the floor where cold tile had already gone slick beneath your palm.
Your throat burned. Bitter acid clung to the back of your tongue. Tears dripped hot and useless down your face, dragged there by strain more than grief, though the two had long since learned how to wear each other’s skin.
By the time the heaving slowed, your lungs felt flayed open.
You stayed bent over anyway, forehead nearly touching the rim, breathing in harsh, ragged pulls that wouldn’t quite fill your chest. The sound of it crowded the tiny bathroom, too loud in the middle of the night. Wet, ugly, shaking. Every inhale snagged like there was something lodged behind your ribs, some leftover shard of fear your body hadn’t realized was no longer lodged in blood and bone but memory instead.
You tried to swallow and nearly gagged again. Your stomach cramped, empty. A tremor ran through your arms so hard your elbow buckled, and your shoulder knocked the side of the vanity with a dull thud.
For one disorienting second, the cramped bathroom wasn’t a bathroom at all.
It was a concrete floor slick with something darker than water. It was the sterile burn of antiseptic threaded with iron and something sour beneath it. It was the sharp, echoing crack of a baton striking bone, the clipped Russian commands that never needed to be loud to be obeyed. It was the snap of a restraint at your wrist, the bite of it, the cold certainty that your body was no longer your own—but something trained, sharpened, used.
Things you’d never truly forget, no matter how many nights you slept in clean sheets with Bucky Barnes’ arm draped heavy over your waist, his breath steady at the back of your neck: boots against concrete, measured and unhurried, the kind that meant someone was coming for you—or worse, that you were being sent for someone else. The soft click of a chamber being checked. The silence just before a command was given, before you moved without thinking, before you became something you could never quite scrub out of your skin.
Your stomach lurched again on pure reflex.
Nothing came up this time, just a dry, painful wrench that bowed your spine and pulled a strangled sound out of you. You squeezed your eyes shut, but that only made it worse.
The dark behind your lids fractured into pieces. Broken glass. A blood-slick knife. White lights. Red orders. Your hands steady around a throat, a trigger, a blade. The shape of Bucky turning back for you when every instinct in the world should have sent him the other direction. The heat of his hand catching yours. Gunfire. Fire licking up the walls of a place that should never have existed.
You knew where you were.
You did. You knew the apartment. Knew the soft yellow light above the sink. Knew the curtains Bucky kept meaning to replace because the bottom hem had started to fray. Knew the towel hanging crooked because he always tossed it there instead of folding it. Knew the dark blue bathmat under your knees and the way the grout line by the baseboard had a hairline crack running through it.
But knowing and feeling had never been the same thing. Not on nights like this.
Your hands had gone numb. You curled them into fists anyway, then flattened them again, fingertips pressing into tile like you could anchor yourself by force. Your pulse hammered so hard it made your teeth ache.
The room felt too small. Your skin felt too tight. Something hot and frantic clawed up the inside of your throat, and before you could stop it, another sound broke loose—thin, raw, humiliated by how frightened it sounded in the quiet.
The bed creaked in the other room.
You heard it faintly through the rushing in your ears. Then the rustle of sheets. Then footsteps—quick, heavy, instantly awake in the way only Bucky ever seemed to be, as if some part of him never fully slept at all. The door creaked open. It was silent for all but a second.
“Hey.”
His voice came rough with sleep and immediate concern from the doorway, low enough not to startle, but there was already movement in it, already urgency. “Hey, sweetheart.”
You didn’t turn.
A fresh wave of nausea and panic hit at once, and you coughed hard over the bowl, one hand flying to your chest like you could physically hold yourself together. The bathroom light was suddenly brighter. Had you turned it on? Had he? You couldn’t remember. Your vision had gone watery again.
Bucky crossed the space in two quick steps and dropped to his knees beside you before you could protest, bare shoulders tense, dog tags shifting against his chest. His hair was sleep-mussed, face still soft with the remnants of rest, but his eyes were already sharp, already searching you for damage.
His hand landed first between your shoulder blades. Steady. Warm. Broad enough to cover half your back.
You flinched anyway, not from him, just from the overload of sensation, and his palm immediately softened, not leaving, just easing into slow, grounding pressure.
Your throat worked uselessly around words that wouldn’t form. The air still wouldn’t come right. You tried to drag in a breath and choked on it, lungs hitching into that horrible in-between state where you weren’t quite hyperventilating, but every inhale was getting thinner, shallower, feeding the panic instead of easing it.
Bucky noticed in seconds. He always did.
“Don’t force it.” His voice stayed calm, even as you heard him shift, turning more fully toward you. His other hand came up to cup the side of your face, cool vibranium cradling your skin with impossible care as he coaxed your head away from the toilet just enough to see you. “Hey, look at me.”
You couldn’t. Not really. Your gaze skittered somewhere near his collarbone, then the hollow of his throat, then the edge of his mouth. But it was enough for him to catch on to where you were, enough for him to angle himself more squarely in front of you, making himself impossible to miss.
“Good,” he said softly, like you’d done something far harder than simply lift your head. “That’s it.”
Another tremor wracked through you. Your eyes squeezed shut.
Bucky reached blindly for the flush, handled it one-handed, then leaned back in without complaint the moment it was done. His fingers slid from your cheek to brush damp hair back from your face. There was no disgust in him, no hesitation, no trace of the sharp awkwardness other people might have carried into a moment like this.
“Can you breathe with me?” he asked.
You let out something between a laugh and a sob, because if you could do that, you wouldn’t be on the bathroom floor shaking apart in the middle of the night. But Bucky only huffed the faintest breath through his nose, not quite a smile, not quite amusement. Just recognition. You’d both been here before.
“That bad, huh?”
His thumb stroked under your eye, catching at the wetness there. You nodded before you could stop yourself, small and miserable and angry at how quickly the motion made more tears spill.
“Okay.” He shifted again, arm sliding around your ribs, careful of the way your muscles were still seizing, gathering you in his arms. “Come here.”
There was no room for pride in the state you were in. No strength left for pretending to protest.
He pulled you sideways, away from the toilet, not in one jarring motion but gradually, giving your body time to follow. The tile was freezing beneath your bare feet as they dragged over it. Then you were half turned, then fully turned, and then Bucky sat back against the side of the tub and brought you with him until you ended up in the space between his legs.
He adjusted instantly, one arm around your waist, the other cradling the back of your head, guiding you down until you were tucked against his chest like he could fold his whole body around yours and wall the rest of the night out.
The second you felt the solid heat of him, something inside you cracked.
A sob tore loose, ugly and helpless and far too loud for the hour, muffled into his shoulder.
His heartbeat thudded against your ear, fast enough to tell you he was scared too, or had been when he first woke and found the bed empty, but his hold never tightened in a way that trapped. One palm flattened between your shoulder blades again, rubbing slow circles. The other stayed at the nape of your neck, thumb brushing there in absent, cold-soothing sweeps.
“I know,” he whispered into your hair. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”
You hated how much your body needed that. Hated and loved it in equal measure. The softness of his voice. The way he anchored every word like it could keep you from slipping under.
You pressed closer instead of fighting it, face buried against his chest, and the scent of him—soap, detergent, something warm and sleep-soft, and the faintest lingering trace of gun oil that never seemed to leave his skin entirely no matter how long it had been since his last mission—hit you with such fierce familiarity it made your lungs stutter again.
Only this time, the breath came.
Still shaky. Still broken around the edges. But it came.
Bucky felt it and adjusted to that too, his own breathing turning deeper, slower on purpose so you could borrow the rhythm if you wanted it. He never made a performance out of helping. He never talked to you like you were fragile glass or some skittish thing that might bolt if handled wrong. He just offered himself, over and over, in small physical certainties your body could understand when words became useless.
Your stomach churned once more. You tensed immediately.
“Still sick?” he asked quietly.
You nodded hesitantly against him.
He reached without fully letting go of you, snagging the wastebasket next to the toilet with one arm and setting it within reach near your knee. It was such a practical, ridiculous little act—so unromantic, so matter-of-fact—that fresh tears burned at the backs of your eyes.
Bucky, still half asleep, sitting bare-chested on cold tile in the middle of the night, dragging the trash can closer in case moving back to the toilet was too much. Bucky, who knew what it was to wake with someone else’s orders still clawing under his skin, treating your panic with the same seriousness he would a wound.
You swallowed hard and finally managed a hoarse, “M’sorry.”
His hand stilled for half a second, then resumed its slow path up your spine.
“For what?”
The question came immediate and flat in that way he had when he thought something you were saying was fundamentally absurd.
You couldn’t answer. For waking him. For being like this. For the mess. For the fact that the past kept reaching into your throat and pulling you out of bed by the ribs no matter how safe the apartment was, no matter how many nights ended with his lips on your temple and his arm heavy over your waist and a quiet promise that he was here.
Bucky exhaled softly through his nose, like he’d heard every apology you hadn’t said anyway. He tipped his head until his lips pressed against your hairline.
“None of that,” he murmured. “You hear me? Not for this.”
Your fingers tightened around him. His skin was damp now where your tears had fallen. He didn’t care.
For a while, neither of you said anything else.
The silence wasn’t empty. It was full of your breathing evening out by degrees, the hum of the vent overhead, the muted city noise filtering in through the apartment windows. Bucky kept touching you the whole time, never restless, never distracted. Slow circles over your back. A steady palm at your side when another tremor hit.
His thumb at the base of your skull, rubbing little arcs there that made some of the locked tension in your neck begin, reluctantly, to loosen. Every now and then he kissed your temple or the crown of your head, quiet little presses of his mouth that asked for nothing and gave everything.
When the worst of the shaking finally passed, the exhaustion underneath it crashed in hard.
It settled over you like wet concrete, thick and immediate. Your limbs felt hollowed out. Your throat throbbed. There was sweat cooling at the base of your spine.
The adrenaline that had ripped you awake was draining now, leaving behind a full-body ache and that awful raw vulnerability that always came after, when you were no longer actively drowning in the panic but still stranded in what it left behind.
Bucky eased back just enough to look at you.
His hair was a mess, dark strands falling into his eyes. His face still carried the softened edges of sleep, but worry had sharpened the rest of it into something painfully tender. There was no impatience there. No strain. Just the familiar crease between his brows and the kind of attention that made you feel seen all the way down to the bones, even when you wanted to disappear from your own skin.
“Can I get you some water?” he asked.
You hesitated, then nodded.
“Okay.” He brushed your cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Think you can sit on your own for a second?”
Under any other circumstance, you would have rolled your eyes at the question. Bucky could make shifting you off his lap on a bathroom floor sound as careful as disarming a bomb. But tonight there was no teasing in him, only sincerity.
“I can sit,” you whispered.
“Yeah?”
You gave the smallest nod.
“All right.”
He helped you move slowly, one hand steady at your waist while the other guided your shoulder until your back rested against the side of the tub instead of his chest. He waited there a beat, making sure you didn’t tip sideways, then rose from the floor.
The bathroom felt colder without him around you.
He filled a cup from the sink, rinsed it once, then filled it again. When he came back, he didn’t hover over you. He lowered himself right back onto the tile beside you, shoulder pressed lightly to yours, close enough that his warmth found you again.
“Small sips,” he said, holding the cup near your mouth instead of handing it over immediately.
You did as told. The water tasted metallic at first, your mouth still sour and stripped raw, but it helped. Cooled some of the acid burn. Gave you something simple to focus on. Swallow. Breathe. Swallow again.
“Better?”
“A little.”
He took the cup and set it back on the sink, then moved to pick up a washcloth hanging over the edge. He ran it under warm water, wrung it out, kneeled in front of you, and brought it to your face with a gentleness that nearly wrecked you again.
He wiped under your eyes first, then your mouth, then the damp skin at your throat where sweat and tears had dried sticky-cold. The cloth was warm enough to coax a shiver out of you. Not from discomfort. From relief so deep it hurt.
You watched his hands because you couldn’t bear not to. Flesh and vibranium. Knuckles scarred, plates shifting soft and quiet when he moved. Capable of terrible things. Capable of this too. That was what ruined you most, how the same man who had been made into a weapon, who knew exactly what blood looked like under his own hands, could sit on a bathroom floor at three in the morning and clean your face like gentleness had always belonged to him.
When he was done, he set the cloth aside, gathered you back into his lap, and curled both arms around you again.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
The question stayed soft, neutral. No pressure either way.
You let your head tip against his shoulder and stared at the wall for a moment, at the shadow of the towel rack cast under the bathroom light. Pieces of the nightmare still clung like cobwebs, not a coherent story so much as a collage of every worst thing your body had cataloged and refused to forget. Fear rarely cared about chronology. It only cared about finding old wounds and pressing until they split.
“It was everything,” you said finally, voice scraped thin. “Not one thing. Just… all of it.”
Bucky went very still in the way he did when he was listening with his whole body.
“The room,” you whispered. “The lights. Somebody reading out orders like they were grocery lists. Girls screaming behind walls you couldn’t get through. Me with blood on my hands and no idea whose it was supposed to be.” Your throat tightened hard enough to hurt. “You turning around when you shouldn’t have. Over and over again.”
His hold on you changed in some subtle way, not tighter, exactly, but deeper. More deliberate. His jaw brushed your temple when he rested his cheek against your hair.
“I was always going to turn around.”
The words were so simple they lodged under your ribs.
You shut your eyes. “That’s not comforting.”
A faint breath left him, the closest thing to a tired little laugh. “Yeah. I know.” His mouth touched your temple again. “Still true.”
Something in your chest ached at that—at the awful, inevitable certainty in him. Bucky had never been good at preserving himself when someone he cared about was on the line. You knew that. He knew that you knew it. There was no use pretending otherwise. But there was something wrenchingly honest in the way he said it.
You turned your face into the line of his neck, pressing there until his skin warmed under your mouth.
“I hate when it follows us here,” you said, so quietly the words almost vanished.
His hand slid up to cradle the back of your head again. “Me too.”
That, more than any grand reassurance, made your eyes sting fresh. Because he didn’t lie to you. Didn’t tell you it was over in ways either of you knew weren’t real. Didn’t promise that the nightmares would stop for good if you just wanted hard enough. He met you where you were and stayed there.
After a moment, he shifted carefully and rose to his feet, bringing you with him before you could protest. One arm hooked under your knees, the other around your back, lifting you off the floor as if the effort cost him nothing. A startled breath caught in your throat.
“Bucky—”
“I know you can walk,” he said, already stepping out into the dim hallway. “Let me do it anyway.”
His voice had gone that little bit firmer, not unkind, just decided. Protective in a way that made warmth spread weakly through the cold aftermath inside you.
You were too wrung out to argue. Your arm slid around his neck instead, and he adjusted your weight closer to his chest.
The apartment beyond the bathroom was different in the dark, softer at the edges. The bedroom door stood open, the lamp on the nightstand casting a low amber pool across tangled sheets. Your side of the bed was still thrown back from where you’d bolted out of it. Bucky had clearly turned the lamp on when he went looking for you. The sight of that—evidence of his immediate search, his immediate response—hit something tender in you.
He carried you to the bed and lowered you onto the mattress with a care that still had the power to undo you, one arm behind your shoulders, the other under your knees until your head found the pillow. He pulled the blankets back, eased them over you, then climbed in beside you.
The mattress dipped under his weight. He gathered you in almost before his own head hit the pillow. One arm went under your neck. The other crossed your waist, pulling you flush against him until your face was tucked against his chest and one of his thighs bracketed yours. He was warm everywhere. Solid. The weight of him, the familiar architecture of his body around yours, made the room feel more real.
His fingers threaded into your hair and began smoothing it back from your face in slow passes.
“You cold?” he asked after a second.
“A little.”
He tugged the blanket higher around your shoulders, then reached back to snag the extra throw bunched at the side of the bed and draped it over both of you. The movement shifted him just enough that you could hear his heartbeat again when he settled, still slightly faster than normal, still not entirely come down from the rush of waking to find you gone and hurting. That frightened, fiercely controlled part of him never quite disappeared on nights like this. He just refused to let it become your problem.
Your body gave one last, exhausted shudder. Bucky’s hand immediately moved down your spine.
“Easy,” he murmured. “You’re okay.”
You stared at the hollow of his throat in the lamplight, at the faint shadow of stubble there, at the old scar just visible near his collarbone. The world had taken so much from both of you. It had left marks everywhere. Some visible. Some not.
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
There it was again, the apology you couldn’t seem to stop offering, though this one came softer now, less frantic. Just tired.
Bucky tipped your chin up enough that you had to look at him.
“Hey.” His voice was quiet, but there was steel under it now. “You don’t have to apologize. Not tonight. Not ever.”
The force of that hit you so hard your throat closed.
He must have seen it happen, because his expression changed instantly, the firmness melting back into warmth. His thumb traced once over your cheekbone. “Come here.”
You were already there, but you went anyway, pressing closer until there was no space left between you. His mouth touched your forehead, then lingered. Not a quick kiss. A long, deliberate press, like he was sealing something in place.
The silence that followed was different from the bathroom silence. Softer. Heavier with sleep. Your body still buzzed unpleasantly in places, adrenaline residue and lingering nausea and the deep ache of old fear reawakened, but it was no longer swallowing you whole.
His hand kept moving in your hair.
After a while, he said, very quietly, “You want me to talk?”
You knew what he meant. Sometimes, on nights when the nightmares left too much room in the dark, he’d fill it for you. Not with reassurance, but with small, ordinary things. The kind of details that pinned you back to the present.
He’d tell you about the coffee he meant to buy tomorrow, or the neighbor’s dog that had barked at him from the elevator last week, or the awful movie he’d half watched on a hotel television months ago and still hadn’t finished. Mundane things. Gentle things. Proof that life had continued after all the blood and terror, however unevenly.
You nodded.
So Bucky talked.
He told you he needed to get groceries because the two of you had somehow managed to end up with five different hot sauces in the fridge and nothing you could actually make for dinner. He told you the plant by the window was still alive, which he said in a tone suggesting he considered this a personal triumph, even though you were the one who remembered to water it. He told you he’d finally call the landlord about the kitchen light that kept flickering because if it shorted out while one of you was cooking, he was pretty sure that would be the stupidest possible way to survive everything else and die in your own apartment.
A weak, real sound escaped you at that. Not quite a laugh, but close.
Bucky’s mouth curved against your hair.
“There you are,” he murmured.
You kept listening.
He talked until your breathing had fully lengthened and the tight clench in your stomach eased into something survivable. Talked until your fingers loosened against his skin. Talked until the fear no longer felt like something standing over the bed, only a bruise left behind by a thing that had passed through.
His voice stayed low and rough and close, vibrating through his chest into your cheek. Sometimes he paused to kiss your temple. Sometimes his words blurred together as sleep began to pull at him again.
At some point, your eyes slipped closed.
The darkness was still there behind them. Of course it was. Memory did not vanish because you were tired enough to stop fighting it. But now there was the warmth of Bucky’s arm over your waist, the slow drag of his thumb just above your hip, the rise and fall of his breathing under your ear. There was the bed. The apartment. The lamp still glowing low on the nightstand. The familiar scent of laundry detergent and his skin. There was the shape of his promise, unspoken now because he had already proven it.
I’m here.
Your last waking thought was not of the nightmare.
It was of the way Bucky’s hand had found yours beneath the blankets and held on, even as his own breathing finally began to deepen, like some part of him refused to sleep unless he knew you had made it back too.
You woke to absence before you woke to anything else.
It was not a sound that pulled you up out of sleep, not at first. It was the shape of missing warmth beside you, the place in the bed where Bucky should have been and wasn’t, the subtle but immediate wrongness of sheets cooled too quickly in the dark.
Your hand moved before your mind did, sliding across the mattress in a half-conscious search for his chest, his shoulder, the easy, familiar weight of him. Your palm met only wrinkled cotton and a dip in the bed that had already started to rise. That alone was enough to sharpen you.
Your eyes opened to a room washed dim and blue by city light bleeding through the curtains, and for one disorienting second your heart kicked hard enough to hurt.
The apartment was quiet.
Too quiet in the particular way the middle of the night always was, when every ordinary sound seemed louder. The refrigerator humming in the kitchen. A pipe ticking faintly in the wall. The distant hiss of tires on wet pavement far below. The bedroom door stood cracked, the narrow slice of hallway beyond it dark, and the stillness pressing in around that darkness made something old and defensive stir under your ribs before you could stop it.
You pushed yourself up slowly, blankets dragging down into your lap, and let your eyes adjust.
Bucky’s side of the bed was empty down to the flattened pillow. He had been gone long enough for the heat to leave but not long enough to have done it quietly enough to fool the part of you that had learned, over time, exactly how his absence felt. There was a glass on the nightstand with water halfway gone. His phone lay face down beside it. He would not have left it there if he had gone anywhere beyond the apartment.
You listened harder.
There was no television. No running water. No cabinet doors in the kitchen. No soft scrape of his steps on hardwood. His shirt from earlier in the day had been draped over the chair in the corner. His belt lay half-looped through the top of his jeans where he’d dropped them.
You slipped out from under the blanket and stood, the floor cool beneath your feet. The apartment’s shadows shifted around you as you moved. You didn’t bother with the lamp. A pale wash of city light filtered through the curtains, enough to keep you from stumbling as you stepped into the hallway.
The bathroom was empty. Door open. Light off.
The kitchen too, when you reached it. The counters were dark. The sink was empty except for the two mugs you’d left there before bed. One cabinet stood open an inch, not enough to suggest he’d been rifling through it recently, just the normal lazy forgetfulness of your shared life together. A thin stripe of moonlight cut across the tile from the living room, and a breeze caught your arm.
The balcony door was cracked open.
Only by a few inches, but enough for the curtain beside it to stir in the night air. Enough to let in a ribbon of colder wind that made the fine hairs on your arms rise.
You crossed the living room quietly, heartbeat beginning to thud harder for reasons you didn’t entirely want to name. The city beyond the glass spread out in muted lights and dark shapes, buildings stacked in shadow, distant lone cars threading gold and white through the streets. And there, just outside, was the silhouette of Bucky.
He sat in the chair near the railing with his elbows braced on his knees and his hands clasped loosely between them, head bowed. He had thrown on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants sometime after leaving the bed, but neither seemed to be doing much against the cold.
The line of his shoulders was rigid, tension drawn tight and inward, every muscle held under a lid that looked deceptively calm from a distance. Moonlight caught in the dark mess of his hair, turning the edges pale where it fell loose around his face, bent at the crown where he’d probably dragged a hand through it too many times.
A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray on the little metal table beside him—nearly gone, burned down more than smoked, the ember at the tip pulsing red every few seconds in the dark.
Bucky didn’t smoke anymore.
Not at all. Certainly not often. Not unless something had him by the throat.
He should have heard you already. Bucky heard everything. The fact that he hadn’t turned yet meant he was farther gone than he wanted to be.
The thought made something deep and aching soften in your chest.
For a moment, you just stood in the doorway and looked at him. Not because you were unsure what to do, but because the sight of him like that always reached into something bruised and complicated inside you. Bucky carried himself with so much control in the daylight, so much deliberate stillness, all dry muttered humor and quiet restraint and that hard-won ability to make himself look solid even when the ground under him had every reason to give way.
But every now and then, usually in the middle of the night, when there was no mission to focus on and no immediate danger to cut through the noise, you caught glimpses of what lived underneath it. Not weakness. Never that. Just the kind of exhaustion that came from being turned into a weapon and surviving it. Something old enough to have settled into his bones.
You slid the door open.
The track gave a soft scrape. Bucky’s head lifted immediately.
Even half lost in whatever had dragged him out here, he still turned fast, still alert in that way that never really left him. His posture changed on instinct before his eyes found you—subtle, automatic, the ghost of a defensive response already fading by the time recognition softened his face.
“Sorry,” he said, voice low and rough with disuse. “Did I wake you?”
It was such a Bucky thing to say that it almost hurt. Sitting alone in the cold at an hour no one should have been awake, a cigarette burning itself to ash beside him, and his first concern was still whether he had disturbed your sleep.
You stepped out onto the balcony and let the door slide shut behind you until the two of you were left with the distant city and the whisper of wind between buildings. The balcony floor under your feet was freezing. You folded your arms loosely against the cold, more out of reflex than discomfort, and moved toward him.
“You weren’t in bed,” you said quietly.
Bucky watched you come closer, and something in his expression shifted—some small guarded thing tightening and loosening at once. His eyes were shadowed in the low light, bluer in the moonlight than they ever looked during the day, ringed by the kind of tiredness sleep didn’t fix. He looked devastatingly awake for someone who should have still been in bed.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said.
You stopped in front of him, close enough now to see the faint flex in his jaw, the way one thumb rubbed once across the side of his opposite hand and then stilled, like he’d caught himself doing it. Tiny tells.
Bucky was full of them if you knew where to look. The mistake most people made was expecting his distress to look dramatic. It almost never did. It was quieter. Straighter. More contained. Everything in him drew inward until the only evidence left was in the details: the sleepless eyes, the cigarette he wasn’t really smoking, the tension at the base of his neck, the way he kept his gaze fixed somewhere just past the railing like looking at you too directly might split something open he was trying to keep sealed.
You reached past him and pinched the cigarette out in the ashtray.
He made a faint sound that might have been a humorless little exhale.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Probably for the best.”
Then he leaned back just enough to look up at you properly. “You should be inside. It’s cold.”
You could have smiled at that, if the ache in your chest had left room for it. There he was again. Half frozen on the balcony in the dead of night, clearly unraveling in some private, disciplined way, and still trying to make sure you weren’t chilly.
Instead of answering, you moved closer until you stood between his knees. His gaze tracked you automatically. The city lights touched the edges of his face, caught along the bridge of his nose, the line of his mouth, the stubble that had come in a little darker by night.
“Hey,” you said, softer now.
Something flickered behind his eyes at the sound of your voice that close. Not surprise. Recognition. A yielding he didn’t always grant himself but gave you more readily than anyone else.
You lifted your hands and touched his face.
Just the pads of your fingers at first, brushing his cheeks, letting him feel you there before your palms settled fully against the sides of his jaw. His skin was cool from the air outside, but there was warmth underneath it, a pulse you could feel where your thumb rested near his temple. Bucky’s eyes shut for one brief, helpless second.
That tiny, involuntary reaction nearly broke you.
“You okay?” you asked.
He opened his eyes again, and for a moment you saw the instinctive answer rise—the automatic yes, the deflection, the practiced, manageable version of himself that had gotten him through years of surviving things no one should have had to survive. It reached his mouth, paused there, then died before he could give it shape.
His flesh hand came up instead, covering one of yours where it rested on his face.
“Not really,” he admitted.
The words were quiet. Controlled. But there was a nakedness to them that only made the restraint more painful.
You swallowed hard.
“Can I sit with you?”
Bucky looked at you like the question itself undid him a little. Like there was still some part of him, after everything, that expected to weather the worst nights alone unless someone explicitly chose otherwise.
“Yeah,” he said, almost immediately. “Yeah, of course.”
He shifted back in the chair, making room. It was a tight fit, the balcony chair not built for two people, but that hardly mattered. You settled sideways onto his lap, one leg tucked carefully along the outside of his thigh, the other bent at the knee against the edge of the seat.
The second your weight rested against him, Bucky’s arms came around you on instinct. Not as tightly as he held you when he was the one comforting you, not at first. There was a hesitation there, a fragility to the movement—as if he was trying not to need too much all at once.
You answered it by leaning fully into him.
Your chest against his. Your cheek near his temple. Your arms winding around his shoulders until there was no ambiguity left in the gesture. You felt the breath leave him. Felt the way his body gave, just slightly, the rigid line of his back easing by a degree as the contact settled into something real.
The wind threaded through the balcony railing in cool, intermittent currents. Far below, the city kept moving with the distant hush of tires and the occasional pulse of headlights crossing an intersection. Somewhere in another building, a television flickered blue against an unseen wall. The world went on, indifferent and ordinary, while you sat in Bucky’s lap in the middle of the night and felt the careful control in him slowly, reluctantly soften beneath your hands.
His face turned into the curve of your neck.
The movement was small. So small someone else might have missed the significance of it. But you felt it all the way through you—the way his forehead came to rest briefly against your shoulder, the way his breath hit your skin warmer than the night air, the way one hand spread over your back and stayed there as if grounding himself by the fact of you.
It was never easy, seeing Bucky like this.
Not because it made him less himself. If anything, it made him more. But because loving him meant learning the shape of all the things he carried, including the ones he didn’t have language for until they were already dragging him under.
It meant knowing that some nights the ghosts rose too close. That the body kept score in ways even he couldn’t out-stubborn forever. That beneath the training and the dry humor and the endless, exhausted competence was a man who had spent years surviving catastrophe after catastrophe and had somehow never learned how to believe he was allowed to simply fall apart in someone else’s arms.
You put your hand in his hair and stroked it back from his forehead.
“How long have you been out here?” you asked.
“A while.”
“That doesn’t answer me.”
He raised his head and let out a breath through his nose, looking out over the city like maybe the exact shape of the skyline might help him answer honestly. “Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” you asked.
Bucky’s grip tightened once at your waist, then loosened. His mouth moved back to brush your shoulder when he answered, words muffled against your skin.
“It’s stupid.”
“No, it isn’t.”
He let out a faint breath that stirred the collar of your shirt. “I know that’s the right answer.”
“It’s also the true one.”
That drew the barest huff from him, something dry and tired enough to almost qualify as amusement. Almost.
His silence stretched a little longer after that. You didn’t rush to fill it. Bucky needed space to reach for things in his own time. Pressing him too hard only made him retreat farther inside himself, not out of distrust, but out of habit.
“Just… one of those nights.”
The answer was so him you nearly laughed, if it hadn’t hurt.
One of those nights. As if there weren’t decades buried under a phrase like that. The snow. The train. Cryo fog and fluorescent lights. Russian in his ear. The names he didn’t know he remembered until they came back bloodstained. The things he had done with someone else’s hand on the back of his neck. The things done to him until choice had been peeled down to the nerve. Bucky had always had a way of making ruin sound smaller than it was, like if he kept his voice low enough it might not take up so much space between you.
“And what kind of night is it, exactly?”
His jaw moved once beneath his skin. “The kind where my brain decides I should’ve done everything differently.”
There it was.
Not the whole truth, not all of it, but a real piece. Enough to open the door.
His voice had gone flatter on the last word, not cold but tired, worn down by an argument he’d clearly already been having with himself for the better part of half an hour. You knew that tone. Knew the shape of the guilt that lived under it. Bucky’s ghosts were rarely the loud kind. They did not always arrive as vivid nightmares or violent wakeups. Sometimes they came as stillness. As silence. As the terrible calm of a man sitting out in the cold, replaying the things done to him, the things done through him, and all the pieces of himself he still couldn’t quite separate from the weapon they made.
You slid your hand from his neck to his cheek, turning his face toward you with gentle insistence until he looked at you fully.
The city light caught in his eyes, pale and far away. There was no deflection in him now. No muttered half-joke, no practiced flatness, none of that careful distance he sometimes pulled around himself like armor. You saw the moment he almost reached for it anyway. Then your thumb brushed beneath his eye, and whatever thin defense had started to lock into place went still.
“Do you want to tell me,” you asked, “or do you want me to just sit here and keep you company until your brain stops being an asshole?”
That got you something real.
Small, but real. A tired pull at one corner of his mouth, brief enough to vanish almost as soon as it appeared. His gaze dropped to your lips and back up again. “You make a compelling second option.”
“I know.”
His hand at your waist tightened slightly, not possessive, not restraining. More like he needed to feel something solid and chosen under his palm before he answered. When he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its flatness.
“I was dreaming,” he said slowly, as if deciding each word before he released it. “I was back in Siberia, except it wasn’t exactly. It was every place layered on top of each other. All of it wrong in that dream logic way where you know it doesn’t make sense and it still feels real.” He paused. “And I knew you were there somewhere. I could hear you, but I couldn’t get to you.”
Something tight and cold slid through you at that, but you kept your face open and your hands gentle.
His eyes dropped to the line of your shoulder, unfocused now, seeing something else. “Every door I opened led somewhere it shouldn’t. Every turn was the wrong one. And I kept being just a little too late.” The last four words came quieter. Rawer. “That part felt familiar.”
The understatement of it nearly broke your heart.
You let silence hold for a beat, giving the confession room to settle between you rather than rushing to patch it over. Bucky did not need false reassurance. He needed truth met with truth.
“And then you woke up,” you said softly.
He nodded. “And you were asleep. And for a second I just…” His throat worked. “I don’t know. I couldn’t shake it.”
The words thinned there, fraying around the edges, and you knew exactly what he meant. That first split second of waking had left something behind—something sharp enough that he’d gotten out of bed and come outside rather than risk lying in the dark beside you with it still climbing his throat. Maybe because he hadn’t wanted to wake you. Maybe because he hadn’t trusted himself to settle. Maybe because after a lifetime of associating love with danger, there were still nights when having something precious under his hand made the fear worse before it made it better.
He had probably laid there beside you, staring into the dark, trying to settle himself without moving enough to wake you. Trying to swallow it. Manage it. Handle it alone. Then finally given up and come outside instead, not because he wanted distance from you, but because he had wanted to contain the damage. Not to let the night touch you if he could help it.
The tenderness of that hurt. The stupidity of it hurt more.
You shifted just enough to take his face gently between both hands and draw him back so you could look at him.
Bucky let you, though the movement clearly cost him. His eyes met yours at last, and the sight of the strain there was almost unbearable. Not because he was crying—he wasn’t. Bucky’s pain rarely looked like that. It lived in the tension around his mouth, the exhaustion in his stare, the way he seemed to be holding himself together one deliberate breath at a time. But the emotion in him was no less fierce for being contained. If anything, the effort of containing it made it ache more.
“You didn’t have to come out here alone,” you said.
His gaze flicked over your face, searching it in that intensely attentive way of his, like he was testing for judgment, for pity, for anything that might make him retreat. He found none. After a beat, his expression changed—small, almost invisible. Something in him softened with a kind of weary disbelief.
“It was late,” he said, and the excuse was so weak you almost loved him for it.
A breath of incredulous affection escaped you. “Buck...”
A corner of his mouth pulled faintly, not enough for a smile. “I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
He leaned into your hand just a fraction, a motion so subtle it would have been easy to miss if you hadn’t been watching for exactly that. Then, as if some final line of resistance gave way, his forehead lowered until it rested against yours.
The position stole what little distance remained. Your breath mixed in the cold air. His lashes lowered. One of his hands slid up from your back to the nape of your neck, fingers spreading there, warm and steady despite the chill.
“I hate that you have to deal with this,” he murmured.
The confession sat between you, heavy with everything beneath it. Not just tonight. Not just the nightmare. The whole ugly web of loving someone whose life had been shaped by violence and loss, by years of being dropped into impossible situations and expected to keep moving afterward like survival alone was enough. Bucky’s guilt had always been like that—expansive, indiscriminate. He blamed himself for damage done with his own hands, even when those hands had never truly been his to command.
Your throat tightened.
“You are not something I deal with,” you said.
His eyes lifted to yours again.
You held his face gently, making sure he saw all of it. “You’re the person I love.”
The hand at his cheek slipped back into his hair again, fingertips scratching lightly at his scalp the way you knew he liked, the way that pulled the tension from him without forcing him to admit he needed it. His eyelids lowered halfway at once. The man was impossible. You wondered if he knew how transparently he betrayed himself in small comforts, in the way he leaned almost imperceptibly into the things that soothed him.
“You take care of me like it’s breathing,” you said quietly. “Like it never even occurs to you not to. And then the second it’s your turn, you act like making room for me in it is asking too much.”
He went still under that. Really still. Not rigid this time. Listening.
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
He looked at you for a long moment. When he answered, there was no self-protection left in it, only exhaustion and honesty worn raw.
“I spend enough of my life feeling like trouble follows me into every room,” he said. “I don’t want it following me with you too.”
The words landed with quiet force.
You stared at him, breath catching somewhere under your sternum. There it was. The heart of it. Not just guilt. Not just control. Fear. Not of his own pain, exactly, but of what it might do to the fragile pocket of peace the two of you had built together in this apartment, in this bed, in the ordinary domestic intimacy that both of you had earned the hard way and still sometimes looked at like it might vanish if held too tightly.
He thought he was protecting it by stepping away.
He thought he was protecting you.
Your hand slid from his hair to cup the back of his neck, holding him there, close enough that your noses almost brushed.
“Listen to me,” you said, and your voice came low and steady, leaving no room for him to turn the meaning aside. “The worst things that ever happened to us were never the nights we woke each other up.” His eyes did not leave yours. “The worst things were all the times we had to be alone in it.”
Something in his face changed.
It was small. A minute shift in the mouth, the brow, the stare he held on you like he was trying to absorb the shape of the sentence from every angle at once. But you felt it. The hit. The place where the truth had found him.
You stroked your thumb along the line just under his ear.
“I don’t care if it’s three in the morning,” you whispered. “I don’t care if you wake me up because you can’t breathe, or because you had a dream, or because your head won’t shut up and you need to hear something real. I don’t care if all I can do is sit with you on a freezing balcony in one of these terribly uncomfortable chairs.” His mouth twitched faintly at that, and you kept going before he could hide inside the almost-smile. “You do not have to try and be less heavy just because I love you.”
For one suspended second, he looked like he had forgotten how to breathe.
The hand on your thigh tightened. Enough to tell you exactly how hard he was holding himself together. Then he let out a breath so slow it seemed to drag out of him from somewhere much deeper than his lungs, and his forehead dropped against yours once more.
His eyes closed.
“Jesus,” he said quietly, the word more exhale than sound.
You felt the tremor in him then—a fine, internal shake that ran through his arm around your waist and into your ribs where you were pressed against him. The kind of tremor that came when the body finally stopped bracing quite so hard against being seen.
Your own throat tightened.
Without thinking, you shifted again and drew him down, one hand at the back of his head, guiding until he let himself fold into you as much as the awkward chair allowed. His face turned into the curve of your neck, breath warm against your skin despite the cold air around you. The position forced him to bend, broad shoulders crowding close, and there was something so starkly intimate in the sightless trust of it that your chest ached. Bucky was not a man who surrendered weight easily. Not physical weight. Not emotional. Yet here he was, head bowed into your shoulder, letting himself be held in the dark.
Your arms wrapped around him fully.
You held him the way he held you on bad nights: one hand in his hair, the other sliding slow and steady up and down his back. You could feel every line of tension there, muscles drawn tight beneath his shirt. You let the touch stay consistent. Grounding. Unhurried. The kind of care that asked for nothing except his continued presence.
The silence was not empty. His breathing was in it, gradually changing. The first few pulls were shallow, too high in the chest. Then deeper. Then deeper still. You felt his hand at your side start to move, not restless now, just tracing absent little paths over the fabric of the shirt you wore, as if reassuring himself by touch that you were really here, warm and living and within reach.
His other hand slid from your thigh around your back, settling there with a careful pressure that made the chair protest softly beneath you both. He was holding you now too. Not because he had to be strong again. Because comfort, with the two of you, had never been a one-way act.
The wind picked up just enough to stir your hair across his temple.
After a while, he lifted his head. His face stayed close to yours, not quite touching now, eyes open but softer than before. The distance in them had not vanished entirely—those things rarely did, not all at once—but it had eased. He looked more present. More here.
“You always know when I’m trying to pull that stoic bullshit,” he murmured.
A laugh escaped you then, quiet and a little wet around the edges. “You’re not as subtle as you think you are.”
He huffed a faint breath that almost resembled a laugh of his own. “That’s not what I hear.”
“That’s because everyone else is afraid of you.”
One brow lifted slightly.
You touched the crease between them with your thumb. “I’m serious. You do this whole brooding, emotionally-constipated, stare-at-the-wall-like-it-owes-you-money thing and people mistake it for mystery.”
That got you the closest thing to a real smile yet, brief and crooked and so achingly familiar it made warmth flood through you despite the cold. He dipped his head and pressed a kiss to the corner of your mouth.
“Emotionally constipated?”
“You heard me.”
“Wow.”
“You’ll survive.”
“I don’t know,” he said, dry now in a way that felt more like him, more daylight-Bucky creeping back in around the edges. “That one was brutal.”
You smiled in spite of yourself, but the softness in you never left. Neither did the ache. It sat there underneath the humor, the knowledge of what it had taken for him to open even this much. You brushed your lips to his cheek, then lingered there for a second, feeling the coolness of his skin and the faint roughness of stubble.
“You don’t have to be okay all the time,” you said into the space beside his mouth.
His eyes closed again at that. Not in pain. In acceptance of the thing he still didn’t know how to give himself, but maybe, slowly, could take from you.
“I know,” he said, and for once it didn’t sound like automatic agreement. It sounded like a man trying very hard to let the truth land somewhere it might stay.
Bucky’s mouth parted slightly, then closed again. His hand at your neck tightened, not enough to hurt, only enough to keep you close.
“C’mere,” he said.
You were already close enough to feel the shape of the word against your mouth, but you went anyway, and he met you halfway.
It was quiet, the first press of his lips. Careful in that way Bucky had when he was giving you something real. His metal hand settled more firmly at your waist, not pulling, just holding you there while his mouth moved against yours like he was trying to remember what it meant to stop bracing for impact. You felt the breath leave him, warm and uneven, felt the way he leaned in a fraction more when your fingers slid into his hair.
Something low caught in his throat.
You kissed him back gently, your hand at the nape of his neck, your thumb brushing skin still cool from the night air. He stayed close when it broke, forehead falling to yours again, breathing slow enough now to feel the difference.
After a moment, you said, “Your lips are freezing.”
That got a genuine, tired little exhale from him. “Says the person who came out here barefoot.”
You shifted one foot pointedly against the balcony floor. “And whose fault is that?”
That earned you the faintest ghost of a smile. There and gone, but enough to loosen something inside you. Enough to know he was coming back toward himself.
“I didn’t ask you to follow me.”
“No,” you said, brushing your nose lightly against his. “You just vanished in the middle of the night like a deeply concerning man.”
Bucky actually laughed then—quiet and brief, but real. It hit you with absurd force, relief moving through you so fast it almost made your eyes sting. He must have seen something of that on your face, because his expression softened immediately afterward, the humor fading into something warmer and deeper.
“Sorry,” he murmured, and you knew he meant for leaving the bed, for worrying you, for all of it.
You kissed him once more, quick and soft. “No apologizing. I think I’ve heard that somewhere before.”
His eyes narrowed a fraction in that sleepy, rueful way that told you he recognized his own words being handed back to him. “Using my own stuff against me?”
“Absolutely.”
“Cold.”
“You taught me that too.”
Another tiny, helpless smile. Then it slipped away as his gaze lingered on you, on your bare legs, your arms prickling in the night air, the fact that you had come out here without hesitation the second you realized he was gone. The look in his eyes changed with that realization—not guilt exactly, but something more fragile and more profound. A quiet wonder he’d never quite gotten good at hiding when the depth of your care caught him off guard.
He drew you closer until your chest pressed flush to his again and tucked his face into the side of your neck.
You sat with him in the cold and let the night pass around you. Your fingers moved lazily through his hair. His flesh hands slid beneath the hem of your shirt to rest warm against the small of your back, the touch intimate in its simplicity. You felt the gradual slowing of him there—the breaths evening out, the tension draining by fractions, the restless edge that had driven him from bed wearing down under the quiet persistence of being held.
Eventually, you drew back enough to brush your thumb over the crease between his brows.
“Come back to bed with me.”
Bucky looked out over the city for one last moment, as if checking whether there was anything left for him to outrun out here. There wasn’t. Not tonight. When he looked back at you, the sharpest edges in him had dulled.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
He stood with you still in his arms, steadying you automatically as your feet met the balcony floor. Before you could protest, he bent and scooped you up under the knees and back in one practiced motion. The sudden lift pulled a startled breath from you, and his mouth brushed the edge of your jaw.
“You’re cold,” he said simply, as though that explained everything.
“Bucky.”
“You can yell at me once we’re under a blanket.”
You huffed a laugh despite yourself and looped an arm around his neck as he carried you inside. The apartment was warmer the second the balcony door shut behind you, cutting off the wind and the noise. He locked it without even looking, all muscle memory and habit, then walked you back toward the bedroom.
The room was still dim, the sheets still half thrown back from where you’d woken. Bucky set you down gently on the mattress, then climbed in right after you, tugging the blankets up and around both of you until the trapped warmth began to gather again.
You turned into him immediately, one arm across his middle, your leg sliding between his. Bucky settled onto his side facing you, his hand spanning the back of your ribs, thumb moving in slow, absent strokes. Up close like this, the last traces of strain were still there in his face, but softer now, threaded through with exhaustion instead of active hurt. His eyes searched yours once, lingering.
“You okay?” he asked.
It was almost enough to make you laugh again. There it was. Even now.
“I’m okay,” you whispered. “Are you?”
He was quiet for a beat. Then he tipped his head in a small, honest half-shrug.
“Better.”
It was not a complete fix. Neither of you needed to pretend it was. The past didn’t vanish because the night had softened. Nightmares didn’t lose their teeth in a single hour. But there was something sacred in the smallness of that answer. Better. Not perfect. Not fine. Just better, because you had come looking for him. Because he had let you find him.
You reached up and smoothed his hair back from his forehead.
“Good.”
Bucky’s gaze moved over your face with that same impossible gentleness, and then he gathered you closer until your forehead tucked beneath his chin. His mouth brushed the top of your head. One kiss. Then another. The third lingered.
His breathing slowed.
You stayed awake a little longer, listening to it. Feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest against yours. The weight of his arm over you. The way his fingers, even half asleep, curled lightly into the fabric at your back as if some deep instinct in him needed to keep contact even in rest.
And when sleep finally began to pull at you again, softer this time, less sharp at the edges, your last clear thought was not of the empty bed or the cold balcony or the shadows he still carried.
It was of the way Bucky had let himself be held.
Of the way he had come back inside with you.
Of the fact that for all the things the world had carved out of both of you, this—your hand in his hair, his body warm around yours, the dark made bearable because neither of you was facing it alone—was still here.
And that was more than you could ever ask for.
no more taglists! tumblr’s @ limit said no 💔 follow @cheekybarnesupdates + turn on notifs for all fic drops!
also hopping on the positivity train! your writing is immaculate and i look forward to your fics often!
also - how goes the fic where bucky and reader get buried under a collapsed warehouse? i’ve been.. eying it.
omg the positivity train is going to make me crawl under my desk, actually.
thank you so much. everyone has been so kind and patient and lovely that i don’t really know what to do with myself besides sit here with big wet eyes and an alarming amount of affection for all of you.
as for the collapsed warehouse fic, she does still exist!! she is alive!! she is breathing!! she is under a large amount of rubble, which feels thematically appropriate lmao. i don’t have a timeline for it right now, but it’s like half finished so it’d be a little silly for me to abandon it now 👀
Are you still working on point of impact? love that story so i’m just curious
yes and no, which is the world’s least helpful answer, but unfortunately it is the honest one.
i still love point of impact, and i haven’t abandoned it or deleted it from my brain or anything dramatic like that. it’s just not something i’m actively pushing myself to work on right now because life has been very full, and i’m trying to let writing feel fun again instead of turning it into another little deadline-shaped creature that lives on my shoulder because my job has been and will continue to take a majority of my creative energy. it means the word that you love it though!! 🥹🫶🏻 i truly have high hopes that i will return to it at some point!
Hello! I stumbled across ‘Habits of the Heart’ across my dash without checking the author, thought it delectable, immediately clicked on the profile and gasped with joy when I realized it was YOU!! Of course it was!!!! You are to my mind the greatest writer of Bucky out there. I’m glad life has been treating you well!
this is so unbelievably kind, thank you 🥹 also the idea of you finding my fic in the wild, enjoying it, clicking through, and then realizing it was me is making me grin like an idiot. truly the best little plot twist and honestly i did kind of pop back in out of nowhere, lol.
also ‘greatest writer of bucky’ is FAR too generous and i am gently placing it in a box before it can make direct eye contact with me, but thank you. i’ve missed writing him so much, and it felt really good to come back with something that reminded me why i love it.
life has been treating me very well, just very busily, so this was such a sweet thing to find in my inbox. thank you for reading and for being so lovely xx
hopping on the bandwagon LOL but i honestly adore all of your writing 😭 i’ve read most of your bucky fics at least 3 times. your writing is just hits every single time I LOVE IT
omg not the bandwagon becoming a tiny little love parade in my inbox 😭😭
thank you so, so much. the fact that you’ve reread most of them multiple times is actually wild to me, and also very sweet, and also slightly concerning for your emotional wellbeing considering what i put everyone through in those fics.
but truly, it means a lot and i’m so happy i can still carve out even the smallest amount of time to write fics for y’all 🫶🏻
i miss u sweets hope u are doing well xx i reread ur fics all the time ur the best writer
🥹 i miss all of you too, and i’m doing really well!! life has just been very full lately in the best, weirdest, busiest way. new(ish) job, new routines, trying to have a social life, trying to write when my brain has more than three working sparks left, etc. so i’ve been a little quieter on here, but i promise it’s not for any bad reason.
thank you for rereading my little bucky emotional support disaster fics and for still being here. it genuinely means so much, and i’m very happy to be poking my head back in again xx
I skipped my classes this morning to binge read ur fics and safe to say I’ll do it again 10/10 recommend
omg noooo, i cannot officially endorse this behavior!!!
unofficially, however, i am kicking my feet and deeply honored to be part of your academic downfall. thank you for reading, please go to class, and also maybe bring bucky fics with you for emotional support.
just wanted to stop by and say that you’ve written some of my absolute favs on this site. I often go back for re-reads and i never get tired of your work. pls never delete them or i will spend the rest of my life mourning!!
omg stop 😭 thank you so, so much. the fact that you reread anything i’ve written is actually insane to me in the best way, and i’m so glad my silly little bucky feelings have earned a permanent spot in your brain. please know i have no plans to delete anything, mostly because i, too, am dramatic and sentimental and would probably mourn myself.
thank you for being here and for being so kind. this made my whole day!!
ash, come home, the kids miss you </3
(I hope you're ok wherever you are)
crawling out from under the floorboards as we speak </3
but truly, i love you, i miss you, please tell the kids i’m bringing snacks!! i’m kind of back, kind of still being held hostage by real life, but i did post something yesterday and it felt so good to write again. life has just been very busy in a very good but very oh my god where did my free time go kind of way.
i’m okay, i promise. just slower, sleepier, and apparently still capable of making bucky ruin all of our tastes in irl men.
Summary: You and Bucky both know what it means to wake up haunted after a nightmare. over time, taking care of each other through it becomes second nature.
MCU Timeline Placement: Thunderbolts-ish
Master List: Find my other stuff here!
Warnings: nightmares, panic attacks, vomiting, nausea, PTSD, flashbacks, HYDRA and Red Room-related trauma, implied past torture / past conditioning, smoking, kind of two parts smashed into one, angsty af but with lots of comfort, two idiots in love it’s borderline painful
Word Count: 10.6k
Author’s Note: HIIIIII <3 crawling out of my nearly six-month hiatus to throw this at the wall and scuttle away like a goblin. life has actually been really good, which is WILD, and somehow my brain said guess what we have time for again?? bucky barnes! honestly, writing fics again felt so refreshing and familiar and sweet, and i missed this more than i realized. love you all dearly, thank you for still being here :’)
Your knees hit the tile hard enough to sting, but the pain barely registered over everything else.
The toilet bowl blurred in and out of focus beneath you, white porcelain swimming at the edges of your vision as another violent spasm tore through your stomach. Your body folded in on itself with brutal, helpless force, one hand braced against the seat, the other slipping against the floor where cold tile had already gone slick beneath your palm.
Your throat burned. Bitter acid clung to the back of your tongue. Tears dripped hot and useless down your face, dragged there by strain more than grief, though the two had long since learned how to wear each other’s skin.
By the time the heaving slowed, your lungs felt flayed open.
You stayed bent over anyway, forehead nearly touching the rim, breathing in harsh, ragged pulls that wouldn’t quite fill your chest. The sound of it crowded the tiny bathroom, too loud in the middle of the night. Wet, ugly, shaking. Every inhale snagged like there was something lodged behind your ribs, some leftover shard of fear your body hadn’t realized was no longer lodged in blood and bone but memory instead.
You tried to swallow and nearly gagged again. Your stomach cramped, empty. A tremor ran through your arms so hard your elbow buckled, and your shoulder knocked the side of the vanity with a dull thud.
For one disorienting second, the cramped bathroom wasn’t a bathroom at all.
It was a concrete floor slick with something darker than water. It was the sterile burn of antiseptic threaded with iron and something sour beneath it. It was the sharp, echoing crack of a baton striking bone, the clipped Russian commands that never needed to be loud to be obeyed. It was the snap of a restraint at your wrist, the bite of it, the cold certainty that your body was no longer your own—but something trained, sharpened, used.
Things you’d never truly forget, no matter how many nights you slept in clean sheets with Bucky Barnes’ arm draped heavy over your waist, his breath steady at the back of your neck: boots against concrete, measured and unhurried, the kind that meant someone was coming for you—or worse, that you were being sent for someone else. The soft click of a chamber being checked. The silence just before a command was given, before you moved without thinking, before you became something you could never quite scrub out of your skin.
Your stomach lurched again on pure reflex.
Nothing came up this time, just a dry, painful wrench that bowed your spine and pulled a strangled sound out of you. You squeezed your eyes shut, but that only made it worse.
The dark behind your lids fractured into pieces. Broken glass. A blood-slick knife. White lights. Red orders. Your hands steady around a throat, a trigger, a blade. The shape of Bucky turning back for you when every instinct in the world should have sent him the other direction. The heat of his hand catching yours. Gunfire. Fire licking up the walls of a place that should never have existed.
You knew where you were.
You did. You knew the apartment. Knew the soft yellow light above the sink. Knew the curtains Bucky kept meaning to replace because the bottom hem had started to fray. Knew the towel hanging crooked because he always tossed it there instead of folding it. Knew the dark blue bathmat under your knees and the way the grout line by the baseboard had a hairline crack running through it.
But knowing and feeling had never been the same thing. Not on nights like this.
Your hands had gone numb. You curled them into fists anyway, then flattened them again, fingertips pressing into tile like you could anchor yourself by force. Your pulse hammered so hard it made your teeth ache.
The room felt too small. Your skin felt too tight. Something hot and frantic clawed up the inside of your throat, and before you could stop it, another sound broke loose—thin, raw, humiliated by how frightened it sounded in the quiet.
The bed creaked in the other room.
You heard it faintly through the rushing in your ears. Then the rustle of sheets. Then footsteps—quick, heavy, instantly awake in the way only Bucky ever seemed to be, as if some part of him never fully slept at all. The door creaked open. It was silent for all but a second.
“Hey.”
His voice came rough with sleep and immediate concern from the doorway, low enough not to startle, but there was already movement in it, already urgency. “Hey, sweetheart.”
You didn’t turn.
A fresh wave of nausea and panic hit at once, and you coughed hard over the bowl, one hand flying to your chest like you could physically hold yourself together. The bathroom light was suddenly brighter. Had you turned it on? Had he? You couldn’t remember. Your vision had gone watery again.
Bucky crossed the space in two quick steps and dropped to his knees beside you before you could protest, bare shoulders tense, dog tags shifting against his chest. His hair was sleep-mussed, face still soft with the remnants of rest, but his eyes were already sharp, already searching you for damage.
His hand landed first between your shoulder blades. Steady. Warm. Broad enough to cover half your back.
You flinched anyway, not from him, just from the overload of sensation, and his palm immediately softened, not leaving, just easing into slow, grounding pressure.
Your throat worked uselessly around words that wouldn’t form. The air still wouldn’t come right. You tried to drag in a breath and choked on it, lungs hitching into that horrible in-between state where you weren’t quite hyperventilating, but every inhale was getting thinner, shallower, feeding the panic instead of easing it.
Bucky noticed in seconds. He always did.
“Don’t force it.” His voice stayed calm, even as you heard him shift, turning more fully toward you. His other hand came up to cup the side of your face, cool vibranium cradling your skin with impossible care as he coaxed your head away from the toilet just enough to see you. “Hey, look at me.”
You couldn’t. Not really. Your gaze skittered somewhere near his collarbone, then the hollow of his throat, then the edge of his mouth. But it was enough for him to catch on to where you were, enough for him to angle himself more squarely in front of you, making himself impossible to miss.
“Good,” he said softly, like you’d done something far harder than simply lift your head. “That’s it.”
Another tremor wracked through you. Your eyes squeezed shut.
Bucky reached blindly for the flush, handled it one-handed, then leaned back in without complaint the moment it was done. His fingers slid from your cheek to brush damp hair back from your face. There was no disgust in him, no hesitation, no trace of the sharp awkwardness other people might have carried into a moment like this.
“Can you breathe with me?” he asked.
You let out something between a laugh and a sob, because if you could do that, you wouldn’t be on the bathroom floor shaking apart in the middle of the night. But Bucky only huffed the faintest breath through his nose, not quite a smile, not quite amusement. Just recognition. You’d both been here before.
“That bad, huh?”
His thumb stroked under your eye, catching at the wetness there. You nodded before you could stop yourself, small and miserable and angry at how quickly the motion made more tears spill.
“Okay.” He shifted again, arm sliding around your ribs, careful of the way your muscles were still seizing, gathering you in his arms. “Come here.”
There was no room for pride in the state you were in. No strength left for pretending to protest.
He pulled you sideways, away from the toilet, not in one jarring motion but gradually, giving your body time to follow. The tile was freezing beneath your bare feet as they dragged over it. Then you were half turned, then fully turned, and then Bucky sat back against the side of the tub and brought you with him until you ended up in the space between his legs.
He adjusted instantly, one arm around your waist, the other cradling the back of your head, guiding you down until you were tucked against his chest like he could fold his whole body around yours and wall the rest of the night out.
The second you felt the solid heat of him, something inside you cracked.
A sob tore loose, ugly and helpless and far too loud for the hour, muffled into his shoulder.
His heartbeat thudded against your ear, fast enough to tell you he was scared too, or had been when he first woke and found the bed empty, but his hold never tightened in a way that trapped. One palm flattened between your shoulder blades again, rubbing slow circles. The other stayed at the nape of your neck, thumb brushing there in absent, cold-soothing sweeps.
“I know,” he whispered into your hair. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”
You hated how much your body needed that. Hated and loved it in equal measure. The softness of his voice. The way he anchored every word like it could keep you from slipping under.
You pressed closer instead of fighting it, face buried against his chest, and the scent of him—soap, detergent, something warm and sleep-soft, and the faintest lingering trace of gun oil that never seemed to leave his skin entirely no matter how long it had been since his last mission—hit you with such fierce familiarity it made your lungs stutter again.
Only this time, the breath came.
Still shaky. Still broken around the edges. But it came.
Bucky felt it and adjusted to that too, his own breathing turning deeper, slower on purpose so you could borrow the rhythm if you wanted it. He never made a performance out of helping. He never talked to you like you were fragile glass or some skittish thing that might bolt if handled wrong. He just offered himself, over and over, in small physical certainties your body could understand when words became useless.
Your stomach churned once more. You tensed immediately.
“Still sick?” he asked quietly.
You nodded hesitantly against him.
He reached without fully letting go of you, snagging the wastebasket next to the toilet with one arm and setting it within reach near your knee. It was such a practical, ridiculous little act—so unromantic, so matter-of-fact—that fresh tears burned at the backs of your eyes.
Bucky, still half asleep, sitting bare-chested on cold tile in the middle of the night, dragging the trash can closer in case moving back to the toilet was too much. Bucky, who knew what it was to wake with someone else’s orders still clawing under his skin, treating your panic with the same seriousness he would a wound.
You swallowed hard and finally managed a hoarse, “M’sorry.”
His hand stilled for half a second, then resumed its slow path up your spine.
“For what?”
The question came immediate and flat in that way he had when he thought something you were saying was fundamentally absurd.
You couldn’t answer. For waking him. For being like this. For the mess. For the fact that the past kept reaching into your throat and pulling you out of bed by the ribs no matter how safe the apartment was, no matter how many nights ended with his lips on your temple and his arm heavy over your waist and a quiet promise that he was here.
Bucky exhaled softly through his nose, like he’d heard every apology you hadn’t said anyway. He tipped his head until his lips pressed against your hairline.
“None of that,” he murmured. “You hear me? Not for this.”
Your fingers tightened around him. His skin was damp now where your tears had fallen. He didn’t care.
For a while, neither of you said anything else.
The silence wasn’t empty. It was full of your breathing evening out by degrees, the hum of the vent overhead, the muted city noise filtering in through the apartment windows. Bucky kept touching you the whole time, never restless, never distracted. Slow circles over your back. A steady palm at your side when another tremor hit.
His thumb at the base of your skull, rubbing little arcs there that made some of the locked tension in your neck begin, reluctantly, to loosen. Every now and then he kissed your temple or the crown of your head, quiet little presses of his mouth that asked for nothing and gave everything.
When the worst of the shaking finally passed, the exhaustion underneath it crashed in hard.
It settled over you like wet concrete, thick and immediate. Your limbs felt hollowed out. Your throat throbbed. There was sweat cooling at the base of your spine.
The adrenaline that had ripped you awake was draining now, leaving behind a full-body ache and that awful raw vulnerability that always came after, when you were no longer actively drowning in the panic but still stranded in what it left behind.
Bucky eased back just enough to look at you.
His hair was a mess, dark strands falling into his eyes. His face still carried the softened edges of sleep, but worry had sharpened the rest of it into something painfully tender. There was no impatience there. No strain. Just the familiar crease between his brows and the kind of attention that made you feel seen all the way down to the bones, even when you wanted to disappear from your own skin.
“Can I get you some water?” he asked.
You hesitated, then nodded.
“Okay.” He brushed your cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Think you can sit on your own for a second?”
Under any other circumstance, you would have rolled your eyes at the question. Bucky could make shifting you off his lap on a bathroom floor sound as careful as disarming a bomb. But tonight there was no teasing in him, only sincerity.
“I can sit,” you whispered.
“Yeah?”
You gave the smallest nod.
“All right.”
He helped you move slowly, one hand steady at your waist while the other guided your shoulder until your back rested against the side of the tub instead of his chest. He waited there a beat, making sure you didn’t tip sideways, then rose from the floor.
The bathroom felt colder without him around you.
He filled a cup from the sink, rinsed it once, then filled it again. When he came back, he didn’t hover over you. He lowered himself right back onto the tile beside you, shoulder pressed lightly to yours, close enough that his warmth found you again.
“Small sips,” he said, holding the cup near your mouth instead of handing it over immediately.
You did as told. The water tasted metallic at first, your mouth still sour and stripped raw, but it helped. Cooled some of the acid burn. Gave you something simple to focus on. Swallow. Breathe. Swallow again.
“Better?”
“A little.”
He took the cup and set it back on the sink, then moved to pick up a washcloth hanging over the edge. He ran it under warm water, wrung it out, kneeled in front of you, and brought it to your face with a gentleness that nearly wrecked you again.
He wiped under your eyes first, then your mouth, then the damp skin at your throat where sweat and tears had dried sticky-cold. The cloth was warm enough to coax a shiver out of you. Not from discomfort. From relief so deep it hurt.
You watched his hands because you couldn’t bear not to. Flesh and vibranium. Knuckles scarred, plates shifting soft and quiet when he moved. Capable of terrible things. Capable of this too. That was what ruined you most, how the same man who had been made into a weapon, who knew exactly what blood looked like under his own hands, could sit on a bathroom floor at three in the morning and clean your face like gentleness had always belonged to him.
When he was done, he set the cloth aside, gathered you back into his lap, and curled both arms around you again.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
The question stayed soft, neutral. No pressure either way.
You let your head tip against his shoulder and stared at the wall for a moment, at the shadow of the towel rack cast under the bathroom light. Pieces of the nightmare still clung like cobwebs, not a coherent story so much as a collage of every worst thing your body had cataloged and refused to forget. Fear rarely cared about chronology. It only cared about finding old wounds and pressing until they split.
“It was everything,” you said finally, voice scraped thin. “Not one thing. Just… all of it.”
Bucky went very still in the way he did when he was listening with his whole body.
“The room,” you whispered. “The lights. Somebody reading out orders like they were grocery lists. Girls screaming behind walls you couldn’t get through. Me with blood on my hands and no idea whose it was supposed to be.” Your throat tightened hard enough to hurt. “You turning around when you shouldn’t have. Over and over again.”
His hold on you changed in some subtle way, not tighter, exactly, but deeper. More deliberate. His jaw brushed your temple when he rested his cheek against your hair.
“I was always going to turn around.”
The words were so simple they lodged under your ribs.
You shut your eyes. “That’s not comforting.”
A faint breath left him, the closest thing to a tired little laugh. “Yeah. I know.” His mouth touched your temple again. “Still true.”
Something in your chest ached at that—at the awful, inevitable certainty in him. Bucky had never been good at preserving himself when someone he cared about was on the line. You knew that. He knew that you knew it. There was no use pretending otherwise. But there was something wrenchingly honest in the way he said it.
You turned your face into the line of his neck, pressing there until his skin warmed under your mouth.
“I hate when it follows us here,” you said, so quietly the words almost vanished.
His hand slid up to cradle the back of your head again. “Me too.”
That, more than any grand reassurance, made your eyes sting fresh. Because he didn’t lie to you. Didn’t tell you it was over in ways either of you knew weren’t real. Didn’t promise that the nightmares would stop for good if you just wanted hard enough. He met you where you were and stayed there.
After a moment, he shifted carefully and rose to his feet, bringing you with him before you could protest. One arm hooked under your knees, the other around your back, lifting you off the floor as if the effort cost him nothing. A startled breath caught in your throat.
“Bucky—”
“I know you can walk,” he said, already stepping out into the dim hallway. “Let me do it anyway.”
His voice had gone that little bit firmer, not unkind, just decided. Protective in a way that made warmth spread weakly through the cold aftermath inside you.
You were too wrung out to argue. Your arm slid around his neck instead, and he adjusted your weight closer to his chest.
The apartment beyond the bathroom was different in the dark, softer at the edges. The bedroom door stood open, the lamp on the nightstand casting a low amber pool across tangled sheets. Your side of the bed was still thrown back from where you’d bolted out of it. Bucky had clearly turned the lamp on when he went looking for you. The sight of that—evidence of his immediate search, his immediate response—hit something tender in you.
He carried you to the bed and lowered you onto the mattress with a care that still had the power to undo you, one arm behind your shoulders, the other under your knees until your head found the pillow. He pulled the blankets back, eased them over you, then climbed in beside you.
The mattress dipped under his weight. He gathered you in almost before his own head hit the pillow. One arm went under your neck. The other crossed your waist, pulling you flush against him until your face was tucked against his chest and one of his thighs bracketed yours. He was warm everywhere. Solid. The weight of him, the familiar architecture of his body around yours, made the room feel more real.
His fingers threaded into your hair and began smoothing it back from your face in slow passes.
“You cold?” he asked after a second.
“A little.”
He tugged the blanket higher around your shoulders, then reached back to snag the extra throw bunched at the side of the bed and draped it over both of you. The movement shifted him just enough that you could hear his heartbeat again when he settled, still slightly faster than normal, still not entirely come down from the rush of waking to find you gone and hurting. That frightened, fiercely controlled part of him never quite disappeared on nights like this. He just refused to let it become your problem.
Your body gave one last, exhausted shudder. Bucky’s hand immediately moved down your spine.
“Easy,” he murmured. “You’re okay.”
You stared at the hollow of his throat in the lamplight, at the faint shadow of stubble there, at the old scar just visible near his collarbone. The world had taken so much from both of you. It had left marks everywhere. Some visible. Some not.
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
There it was again, the apology you couldn’t seem to stop offering, though this one came softer now, less frantic. Just tired.
Bucky tipped your chin up enough that you had to look at him.
“Hey.” His voice was quiet, but there was steel under it now. “You don’t have to apologize. Not tonight. Not ever.”
The force of that hit you so hard your throat closed.
He must have seen it happen, because his expression changed instantly, the firmness melting back into warmth. His thumb traced once over your cheekbone. “Come here.”
You were already there, but you went anyway, pressing closer until there was no space left between you. His mouth touched your forehead, then lingered. Not a quick kiss. A long, deliberate press, like he was sealing something in place.
The silence that followed was different from the bathroom silence. Softer. Heavier with sleep. Your body still buzzed unpleasantly in places, adrenaline residue and lingering nausea and the deep ache of old fear reawakened, but it was no longer swallowing you whole.
His hand kept moving in your hair.
After a while, he said, very quietly, “You want me to talk?”
You knew what he meant. Sometimes, on nights when the nightmares left too much room in the dark, he’d fill it for you. Not with reassurance, but with small, ordinary things. The kind of details that pinned you back to the present.
He’d tell you about the coffee he meant to buy tomorrow, or the neighbor’s dog that had barked at him from the elevator last week, or the awful movie he’d half watched on a hotel television months ago and still hadn’t finished. Mundane things. Gentle things. Proof that life had continued after all the blood and terror, however unevenly.
You nodded.
So Bucky talked.
He told you he needed to get groceries because the two of you had somehow managed to end up with five different hot sauces in the fridge and nothing you could actually make for dinner. He told you the plant by the window was still alive, which he said in a tone suggesting he considered this a personal triumph, even though you were the one who remembered to water it. He told you he’d finally call the landlord about the kitchen light that kept flickering because if it shorted out while one of you was cooking, he was pretty sure that would be the stupidest possible way to survive everything else and die in your own apartment.
A weak, real sound escaped you at that. Not quite a laugh, but close.
Bucky’s mouth curved against your hair.
“There you are,” he murmured.
You kept listening.
He talked until your breathing had fully lengthened and the tight clench in your stomach eased into something survivable. Talked until your fingers loosened against his skin. Talked until the fear no longer felt like something standing over the bed, only a bruise left behind by a thing that had passed through.
His voice stayed low and rough and close, vibrating through his chest into your cheek. Sometimes he paused to kiss your temple. Sometimes his words blurred together as sleep began to pull at him again.
At some point, your eyes slipped closed.
The darkness was still there behind them. Of course it was. Memory did not vanish because you were tired enough to stop fighting it. But now there was the warmth of Bucky’s arm over your waist, the slow drag of his thumb just above your hip, the rise and fall of his breathing under your ear. There was the bed. The apartment. The lamp still glowing low on the nightstand. The familiar scent of laundry detergent and his skin. There was the shape of his promise, unspoken now because he had already proven it.
I’m here.
Your last waking thought was not of the nightmare.
It was of the way Bucky’s hand had found yours beneath the blankets and held on, even as his own breathing finally began to deepen, like some part of him refused to sleep unless he knew you had made it back too.
You woke to absence before you woke to anything else.
It was not a sound that pulled you up out of sleep, not at first. It was the shape of missing warmth beside you, the place in the bed where Bucky should have been and wasn’t, the subtle but immediate wrongness of sheets cooled too quickly in the dark.
Your hand moved before your mind did, sliding across the mattress in a half-conscious search for his chest, his shoulder, the easy, familiar weight of him. Your palm met only wrinkled cotton and a dip in the bed that had already started to rise. That alone was enough to sharpen you.
Your eyes opened to a room washed dim and blue by city light bleeding through the curtains, and for one disorienting second your heart kicked hard enough to hurt.
The apartment was quiet.
Too quiet in the particular way the middle of the night always was, when every ordinary sound seemed louder. The refrigerator humming in the kitchen. A pipe ticking faintly in the wall. The distant hiss of tires on wet pavement far below. The bedroom door stood cracked, the narrow slice of hallway beyond it dark, and the stillness pressing in around that darkness made something old and defensive stir under your ribs before you could stop it.
You pushed yourself up slowly, blankets dragging down into your lap, and let your eyes adjust.
Bucky’s side of the bed was empty down to the flattened pillow. He had been gone long enough for the heat to leave but not long enough to have done it quietly enough to fool the part of you that had learned, over time, exactly how his absence felt. There was a glass on the nightstand with water halfway gone. His phone lay face down beside it. He would not have left it there if he had gone anywhere beyond the apartment.
You listened harder.
There was no television. No running water. No cabinet doors in the kitchen. No soft scrape of his steps on hardwood. His shirt from earlier in the day had been draped over the chair in the corner. His belt lay half-looped through the top of his jeans where he’d dropped them.
You slipped out from under the blanket and stood, the floor cool beneath your feet. The apartment’s shadows shifted around you as you moved. You didn’t bother with the lamp. A pale wash of city light filtered through the curtains, enough to keep you from stumbling as you stepped into the hallway.
The bathroom was empty. Door open. Light off.
The kitchen too, when you reached it. The counters were dark. The sink was empty except for the two mugs you’d left there before bed. One cabinet stood open an inch, not enough to suggest he’d been rifling through it recently, just the normal lazy forgetfulness of your shared life together. A thin stripe of moonlight cut across the tile from the living room, and a breeze caught your arm.
The balcony door was cracked open.
Only by a few inches, but enough for the curtain beside it to stir in the night air. Enough to let in a ribbon of colder wind that made the fine hairs on your arms rise.
You crossed the living room quietly, heartbeat beginning to thud harder for reasons you didn’t entirely want to name. The city beyond the glass spread out in muted lights and dark shapes, buildings stacked in shadow, distant lone cars threading gold and white through the streets. And there, just outside, was the silhouette of Bucky.
He sat in the chair near the railing with his elbows braced on his knees and his hands clasped loosely between them, head bowed. He had thrown on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants sometime after leaving the bed, but neither seemed to be doing much against the cold.
The line of his shoulders was rigid, tension drawn tight and inward, every muscle held under a lid that looked deceptively calm from a distance. Moonlight caught in the dark mess of his hair, turning the edges pale where it fell loose around his face, bent at the crown where he’d probably dragged a hand through it too many times.
A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray on the little metal table beside him—nearly gone, burned down more than smoked, the ember at the tip pulsing red every few seconds in the dark.
Bucky didn’t smoke anymore.
Not at all. Certainly not often. Not unless something had him by the throat.
He should have heard you already. Bucky heard everything. The fact that he hadn’t turned yet meant he was farther gone than he wanted to be.
The thought made something deep and aching soften in your chest.
For a moment, you just stood in the doorway and looked at him. Not because you were unsure what to do, but because the sight of him like that always reached into something bruised and complicated inside you. Bucky carried himself with so much control in the daylight, so much deliberate stillness, all dry muttered humor and quiet restraint and that hard-won ability to make himself look solid even when the ground under him had every reason to give way.
But every now and then, usually in the middle of the night, when there was no mission to focus on and no immediate danger to cut through the noise, you caught glimpses of what lived underneath it. Not weakness. Never that. Just the kind of exhaustion that came from being turned into a weapon and surviving it. Something old enough to have settled into his bones.
You slid the door open.
The track gave a soft scrape. Bucky’s head lifted immediately.
Even half lost in whatever had dragged him out here, he still turned fast, still alert in that way that never really left him. His posture changed on instinct before his eyes found you—subtle, automatic, the ghost of a defensive response already fading by the time recognition softened his face.
“Sorry,” he said, voice low and rough with disuse. “Did I wake you?”
It was such a Bucky thing to say that it almost hurt. Sitting alone in the cold at an hour no one should have been awake, a cigarette burning itself to ash beside him, and his first concern was still whether he had disturbed your sleep.
You stepped out onto the balcony and let the door slide shut behind you until the two of you were left with the distant city and the whisper of wind between buildings. The balcony floor under your feet was freezing. You folded your arms loosely against the cold, more out of reflex than discomfort, and moved toward him.
“You weren’t in bed,” you said quietly.
Bucky watched you come closer, and something in his expression shifted—some small guarded thing tightening and loosening at once. His eyes were shadowed in the low light, bluer in the moonlight than they ever looked during the day, ringed by the kind of tiredness sleep didn’t fix. He looked devastatingly awake for someone who should have still been in bed.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said.
You stopped in front of him, close enough now to see the faint flex in his jaw, the way one thumb rubbed once across the side of his opposite hand and then stilled, like he’d caught himself doing it. Tiny tells.
Bucky was full of them if you knew where to look. The mistake most people made was expecting his distress to look dramatic. It almost never did. It was quieter. Straighter. More contained. Everything in him drew inward until the only evidence left was in the details: the sleepless eyes, the cigarette he wasn’t really smoking, the tension at the base of his neck, the way he kept his gaze fixed somewhere just past the railing like looking at you too directly might split something open he was trying to keep sealed.
You reached past him and pinched the cigarette out in the ashtray.
He made a faint sound that might have been a humorless little exhale.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Probably for the best.”
Then he leaned back just enough to look up at you properly. “You should be inside. It’s cold.”
You could have smiled at that, if the ache in your chest had left room for it. There he was again. Half frozen on the balcony in the dead of night, clearly unraveling in some private, disciplined way, and still trying to make sure you weren’t chilly.
Instead of answering, you moved closer until you stood between his knees. His gaze tracked you automatically. The city lights touched the edges of his face, caught along the bridge of his nose, the line of his mouth, the stubble that had come in a little darker by night.
“Hey,” you said, softer now.
Something flickered behind his eyes at the sound of your voice that close. Not surprise. Recognition. A yielding he didn’t always grant himself but gave you more readily than anyone else.
You lifted your hands and touched his face.
Just the pads of your fingers at first, brushing his cheeks, letting him feel you there before your palms settled fully against the sides of his jaw. His skin was cool from the air outside, but there was warmth underneath it, a pulse you could feel where your thumb rested near his temple. Bucky’s eyes shut for one brief, helpless second.
That tiny, involuntary reaction nearly broke you.
“You okay?” you asked.
He opened his eyes again, and for a moment you saw the instinctive answer rise—the automatic yes, the deflection, the practiced, manageable version of himself that had gotten him through years of surviving things no one should have had to survive. It reached his mouth, paused there, then died before he could give it shape.
His flesh hand came up instead, covering one of yours where it rested on his face.
“Not really,” he admitted.
The words were quiet. Controlled. But there was a nakedness to them that only made the restraint more painful.
You swallowed hard.
“Can I sit with you?”
Bucky looked at you like the question itself undid him a little. Like there was still some part of him, after everything, that expected to weather the worst nights alone unless someone explicitly chose otherwise.
“Yeah,” he said, almost immediately. “Yeah, of course.”
He shifted back in the chair, making room. It was a tight fit, the balcony chair not built for two people, but that hardly mattered. You settled sideways onto his lap, one leg tucked carefully along the outside of his thigh, the other bent at the knee against the edge of the seat.
The second your weight rested against him, Bucky’s arms came around you on instinct. Not as tightly as he held you when he was the one comforting you, not at first. There was a hesitation there, a fragility to the movement—as if he was trying not to need too much all at once.
You answered it by leaning fully into him.
Your chest against his. Your cheek near his temple. Your arms winding around his shoulders until there was no ambiguity left in the gesture. You felt the breath leave him. Felt the way his body gave, just slightly, the rigid line of his back easing by a degree as the contact settled into something real.
The wind threaded through the balcony railing in cool, intermittent currents. Far below, the city kept moving with the distant hush of tires and the occasional pulse of headlights crossing an intersection. Somewhere in another building, a television flickered blue against an unseen wall. The world went on, indifferent and ordinary, while you sat in Bucky’s lap in the middle of the night and felt the careful control in him slowly, reluctantly soften beneath your hands.
His face turned into the curve of your neck.
The movement was small. So small someone else might have missed the significance of it. But you felt it all the way through you—the way his forehead came to rest briefly against your shoulder, the way his breath hit your skin warmer than the night air, the way one hand spread over your back and stayed there as if grounding himself by the fact of you.
It was never easy, seeing Bucky like this.
Not because it made him less himself. If anything, it made him more. But because loving him meant learning the shape of all the things he carried, including the ones he didn’t have language for until they were already dragging him under.
It meant knowing that some nights the ghosts rose too close. That the body kept score in ways even he couldn’t out-stubborn forever. That beneath the training and the dry humor and the endless, exhausted competence was a man who had spent years surviving catastrophe after catastrophe and had somehow never learned how to believe he was allowed to simply fall apart in someone else’s arms.
You put your hand in his hair and stroked it back from his forehead.
“How long have you been out here?” you asked.
“A while.”
“That doesn’t answer me.”
He raised his head and let out a breath through his nose, looking out over the city like maybe the exact shape of the skyline might help him answer honestly. “Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” you asked.
Bucky’s grip tightened once at your waist, then loosened. His mouth moved back to brush your shoulder when he answered, words muffled against your skin.
“It’s stupid.”
“No, it isn’t.”
He let out a faint breath that stirred the collar of your shirt. “I know that’s the right answer.”
“It’s also the true one.”
That drew the barest huff from him, something dry and tired enough to almost qualify as amusement. Almost.
His silence stretched a little longer after that. You didn’t rush to fill it. Bucky needed space to reach for things in his own time. Pressing him too hard only made him retreat farther inside himself, not out of distrust, but out of habit.
“Just… one of those nights.”
The answer was so him you nearly laughed, if it hadn’t hurt.
One of those nights. As if there weren’t decades buried under a phrase like that. The snow. The train. Cryo fog and fluorescent lights. Russian in his ear. The names he didn’t know he remembered until they came back bloodstained. The things he had done with someone else’s hand on the back of his neck. The things done to him until choice had been peeled down to the nerve. Bucky had always had a way of making ruin sound smaller than it was, like if he kept his voice low enough it might not take up so much space between you.
“And what kind of night is it, exactly?”
His jaw moved once beneath his skin. “The kind where my brain decides I should’ve done everything differently.”
There it was.
Not the whole truth, not all of it, but a real piece. Enough to open the door.
His voice had gone flatter on the last word, not cold but tired, worn down by an argument he’d clearly already been having with himself for the better part of half an hour. You knew that tone. Knew the shape of the guilt that lived under it. Bucky’s ghosts were rarely the loud kind. They did not always arrive as vivid nightmares or violent wakeups. Sometimes they came as stillness. As silence. As the terrible calm of a man sitting out in the cold, replaying the things done to him, the things done through him, and all the pieces of himself he still couldn’t quite separate from the weapon they made.
You slid your hand from his neck to his cheek, turning his face toward you with gentle insistence until he looked at you fully.
The city light caught in his eyes, pale and far away. There was no deflection in him now. No muttered half-joke, no practiced flatness, none of that careful distance he sometimes pulled around himself like armor. You saw the moment he almost reached for it anyway. Then your thumb brushed beneath his eye, and whatever thin defense had started to lock into place went still.
“Do you want to tell me,” you asked, “or do you want me to just sit here and keep you company until your brain stops being an asshole?”
That got you something real.
Small, but real. A tired pull at one corner of his mouth, brief enough to vanish almost as soon as it appeared. His gaze dropped to your lips and back up again. “You make a compelling second option.”
“I know.”
His hand at your waist tightened slightly, not possessive, not restraining. More like he needed to feel something solid and chosen under his palm before he answered. When he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its flatness.
“I was dreaming,” he said slowly, as if deciding each word before he released it. “I was back in Siberia, except it wasn’t exactly. It was every place layered on top of each other. All of it wrong in that dream logic way where you know it doesn’t make sense and it still feels real.” He paused. “And I knew you were there somewhere. I could hear you, but I couldn’t get to you.”
Something tight and cold slid through you at that, but you kept your face open and your hands gentle.
His eyes dropped to the line of your shoulder, unfocused now, seeing something else. “Every door I opened led somewhere it shouldn’t. Every turn was the wrong one. And I kept being just a little too late.” The last four words came quieter. Rawer. “That part felt familiar.”
The understatement of it nearly broke your heart.
You let silence hold for a beat, giving the confession room to settle between you rather than rushing to patch it over. Bucky did not need false reassurance. He needed truth met with truth.
“And then you woke up,” you said softly.
He nodded. “And you were asleep. And for a second I just…” His throat worked. “I don’t know. I couldn’t shake it.”
The words thinned there, fraying around the edges, and you knew exactly what he meant. That first split second of waking had left something behind—something sharp enough that he’d gotten out of bed and come outside rather than risk lying in the dark beside you with it still climbing his throat. Maybe because he hadn’t wanted to wake you. Maybe because he hadn’t trusted himself to settle. Maybe because after a lifetime of associating love with danger, there were still nights when having something precious under his hand made the fear worse before it made it better.
He had probably laid there beside you, staring into the dark, trying to settle himself without moving enough to wake you. Trying to swallow it. Manage it. Handle it alone. Then finally given up and come outside instead, not because he wanted distance from you, but because he had wanted to contain the damage. Not to let the night touch you if he could help it.
The tenderness of that hurt. The stupidity of it hurt more.
You shifted just enough to take his face gently between both hands and draw him back so you could look at him.
Bucky let you, though the movement clearly cost him. His eyes met yours at last, and the sight of the strain there was almost unbearable. Not because he was crying—he wasn’t. Bucky’s pain rarely looked like that. It lived in the tension around his mouth, the exhaustion in his stare, the way he seemed to be holding himself together one deliberate breath at a time. But the emotion in him was no less fierce for being contained. If anything, the effort of containing it made it ache more.
“You didn’t have to come out here alone,” you said.
His gaze flicked over your face, searching it in that intensely attentive way of his, like he was testing for judgment, for pity, for anything that might make him retreat. He found none. After a beat, his expression changed—small, almost invisible. Something in him softened with a kind of weary disbelief.
“It was late,” he said, and the excuse was so weak you almost loved him for it.
A breath of incredulous affection escaped you. “Buck...”
A corner of his mouth pulled faintly, not enough for a smile. “I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
He leaned into your hand just a fraction, a motion so subtle it would have been easy to miss if you hadn’t been watching for exactly that. Then, as if some final line of resistance gave way, his forehead lowered until it rested against yours.
The position stole what little distance remained. Your breath mixed in the cold air. His lashes lowered. One of his hands slid up from your back to the nape of your neck, fingers spreading there, warm and steady despite the chill.
“I hate that you have to deal with this,” he murmured.
The confession sat between you, heavy with everything beneath it. Not just tonight. Not just the nightmare. The whole ugly web of loving someone whose life had been shaped by violence and loss, by years of being dropped into impossible situations and expected to keep moving afterward like survival alone was enough. Bucky’s guilt had always been like that—expansive, indiscriminate. He blamed himself for damage done with his own hands, even when those hands had never truly been his to command.
Your throat tightened.
“You are not something I deal with,” you said.
His eyes lifted to yours again.
You held his face gently, making sure he saw all of it. “You’re the person I love.”
The hand at his cheek slipped back into his hair again, fingertips scratching lightly at his scalp the way you knew he liked, the way that pulled the tension from him without forcing him to admit he needed it. His eyelids lowered halfway at once. The man was impossible. You wondered if he knew how transparently he betrayed himself in small comforts, in the way he leaned almost imperceptibly into the things that soothed him.
“You take care of me like it’s breathing,” you said quietly. “Like it never even occurs to you not to. And then the second it’s your turn, you act like making room for me in it is asking too much.”
He went still under that. Really still. Not rigid this time. Listening.
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
He looked at you for a long moment. When he answered, there was no self-protection left in it, only exhaustion and honesty worn raw.
“I spend enough of my life feeling like trouble follows me into every room,” he said. “I don’t want it following me with you too.”
The words landed with quiet force.
You stared at him, breath catching somewhere under your sternum. There it was. The heart of it. Not just guilt. Not just control. Fear. Not of his own pain, exactly, but of what it might do to the fragile pocket of peace the two of you had built together in this apartment, in this bed, in the ordinary domestic intimacy that both of you had earned the hard way and still sometimes looked at like it might vanish if held too tightly.
He thought he was protecting it by stepping away.
He thought he was protecting you.
Your hand slid from his hair to cup the back of his neck, holding him there, close enough that your noses almost brushed.
“Listen to me,” you said, and your voice came low and steady, leaving no room for him to turn the meaning aside. “The worst things that ever happened to us were never the nights we woke each other up.” His eyes did not leave yours. “The worst things were all the times we had to be alone in it.”
Something in his face changed.
It was small. A minute shift in the mouth, the brow, the stare he held on you like he was trying to absorb the shape of the sentence from every angle at once. But you felt it. The hit. The place where the truth had found him.
You stroked your thumb along the line just under his ear.
“I don’t care if it’s three in the morning,” you whispered. “I don’t care if you wake me up because you can’t breathe, or because you had a dream, or because your head won’t shut up and you need to hear something real. I don’t care if all I can do is sit with you on a freezing balcony in one of these terribly uncomfortable chairs.” His mouth twitched faintly at that, and you kept going before he could hide inside the almost-smile. “You do not have to try and be less heavy just because I love you.”
For one suspended second, he looked like he had forgotten how to breathe.
The hand on your thigh tightened. Enough to tell you exactly how hard he was holding himself together. Then he let out a breath so slow it seemed to drag out of him from somewhere much deeper than his lungs, and his forehead dropped against yours once more.
His eyes closed.
“Jesus,” he said quietly, the word more exhale than sound.
You felt the tremor in him then—a fine, internal shake that ran through his arm around your waist and into your ribs where you were pressed against him. The kind of tremor that came when the body finally stopped bracing quite so hard against being seen.
Your own throat tightened.
Without thinking, you shifted again and drew him down, one hand at the back of his head, guiding until he let himself fold into you as much as the awkward chair allowed. His face turned into the curve of your neck, breath warm against your skin despite the cold air around you. The position forced him to bend, broad shoulders crowding close, and there was something so starkly intimate in the sightless trust of it that your chest ached. Bucky was not a man who surrendered weight easily. Not physical weight. Not emotional. Yet here he was, head bowed into your shoulder, letting himself be held in the dark.
Your arms wrapped around him fully.
You held him the way he held you on bad nights: one hand in his hair, the other sliding slow and steady up and down his back. You could feel every line of tension there, muscles drawn tight beneath his shirt. You let the touch stay consistent. Grounding. Unhurried. The kind of care that asked for nothing except his continued presence.
The silence was not empty. His breathing was in it, gradually changing. The first few pulls were shallow, too high in the chest. Then deeper. Then deeper still. You felt his hand at your side start to move, not restless now, just tracing absent little paths over the fabric of the shirt you wore, as if reassuring himself by touch that you were really here, warm and living and within reach.
His other hand slid from your thigh around your back, settling there with a careful pressure that made the chair protest softly beneath you both. He was holding you now too. Not because he had to be strong again. Because comfort, with the two of you, had never been a one-way act.
The wind picked up just enough to stir your hair across his temple.
After a while, he lifted his head. His face stayed close to yours, not quite touching now, eyes open but softer than before. The distance in them had not vanished entirely—those things rarely did, not all at once—but it had eased. He looked more present. More here.
“You always know when I’m trying to pull that stoic bullshit,” he murmured.
A laugh escaped you then, quiet and a little wet around the edges. “You’re not as subtle as you think you are.”
He huffed a faint breath that almost resembled a laugh of his own. “That’s not what I hear.”
“That’s because everyone else is afraid of you.”
One brow lifted slightly.
You touched the crease between them with your thumb. “I’m serious. You do this whole brooding, emotionally-constipated, stare-at-the-wall-like-it-owes-you-money thing and people mistake it for mystery.”
That got you the closest thing to a real smile yet, brief and crooked and so achingly familiar it made warmth flood through you despite the cold. He dipped his head and pressed a kiss to the corner of your mouth.
“Emotionally constipated?”
“You heard me.”
“Wow.”
“You’ll survive.”
“I don’t know,” he said, dry now in a way that felt more like him, more daylight-Bucky creeping back in around the edges. “That one was brutal.”
You smiled in spite of yourself, but the softness in you never left. Neither did the ache. It sat there underneath the humor, the knowledge of what it had taken for him to open even this much. You brushed your lips to his cheek, then lingered there for a second, feeling the coolness of his skin and the faint roughness of stubble.
“You don’t have to be okay all the time,” you said into the space beside his mouth.
His eyes closed again at that. Not in pain. In acceptance of the thing he still didn’t know how to give himself, but maybe, slowly, could take from you.
“I know,” he said, and for once it didn’t sound like automatic agreement. It sounded like a man trying very hard to let the truth land somewhere it might stay.
Bucky’s mouth parted slightly, then closed again. His hand at your neck tightened, not enough to hurt, only enough to keep you close.
“C’mere,” he said.
You were already close enough to feel the shape of the word against your mouth, but you went anyway, and he met you halfway.
It was quiet, the first press of his lips. Careful in that way Bucky had when he was giving you something real. His metal hand settled more firmly at your waist, not pulling, just holding you there while his mouth moved against yours like he was trying to remember what it meant to stop bracing for impact. You felt the breath leave him, warm and uneven, felt the way he leaned in a fraction more when your fingers slid into his hair.
Something low caught in his throat.
You kissed him back gently, your hand at the nape of his neck, your thumb brushing skin still cool from the night air. He stayed close when it broke, forehead falling to yours again, breathing slow enough now to feel the difference.
After a moment, you said, “Your lips are freezing.”
That got a genuine, tired little exhale from him. “Says the person who came out here barefoot.”
You shifted one foot pointedly against the balcony floor. “And whose fault is that?”
That earned you the faintest ghost of a smile. There and gone, but enough to loosen something inside you. Enough to know he was coming back toward himself.
“I didn’t ask you to follow me.”
“No,” you said, brushing your nose lightly against his. “You just vanished in the middle of the night like a deeply concerning man.”
Bucky actually laughed then—quiet and brief, but real. It hit you with absurd force, relief moving through you so fast it almost made your eyes sting. He must have seen something of that on your face, because his expression softened immediately afterward, the humor fading into something warmer and deeper.
“Sorry,” he murmured, and you knew he meant for leaving the bed, for worrying you, for all of it.
You kissed him once more, quick and soft. “No apologizing. I think I’ve heard that somewhere before.”
His eyes narrowed a fraction in that sleepy, rueful way that told you he recognized his own words being handed back to him. “Using my own stuff against me?”
“Absolutely.”
“Cold.”
“You taught me that too.”
Another tiny, helpless smile. Then it slipped away as his gaze lingered on you, on your bare legs, your arms prickling in the night air, the fact that you had come out here without hesitation the second you realized he was gone. The look in his eyes changed with that realization—not guilt exactly, but something more fragile and more profound. A quiet wonder he’d never quite gotten good at hiding when the depth of your care caught him off guard.
He drew you closer until your chest pressed flush to his again and tucked his face into the side of your neck.
You sat with him in the cold and let the night pass around you. Your fingers moved lazily through his hair. His flesh hands slid beneath the hem of your shirt to rest warm against the small of your back, the touch intimate in its simplicity. You felt the gradual slowing of him there—the breaths evening out, the tension draining by fractions, the restless edge that had driven him from bed wearing down under the quiet persistence of being held.
Eventually, you drew back enough to brush your thumb over the crease between his brows.
“Come back to bed with me.”
Bucky looked out over the city for one last moment, as if checking whether there was anything left for him to outrun out here. There wasn’t. Not tonight. When he looked back at you, the sharpest edges in him had dulled.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
He stood with you still in his arms, steadying you automatically as your feet met the balcony floor. Before you could protest, he bent and scooped you up under the knees and back in one practiced motion. The sudden lift pulled a startled breath from you, and his mouth brushed the edge of your jaw.
“You’re cold,” he said simply, as though that explained everything.
“Bucky.”
“You can yell at me once we’re under a blanket.”
You huffed a laugh despite yourself and looped an arm around his neck as he carried you inside. The apartment was warmer the second the balcony door shut behind you, cutting off the wind and the noise. He locked it without even looking, all muscle memory and habit, then walked you back toward the bedroom.
The room was still dim, the sheets still half thrown back from where you’d woken. Bucky set you down gently on the mattress, then climbed in right after you, tugging the blankets up and around both of you until the trapped warmth began to gather again.
You turned into him immediately, one arm across his middle, your leg sliding between his. Bucky settled onto his side facing you, his hand spanning the back of your ribs, thumb moving in slow, absent strokes. Up close like this, the last traces of strain were still there in his face, but softer now, threaded through with exhaustion instead of active hurt. His eyes searched yours once, lingering.
“You okay?” he asked.
It was almost enough to make you laugh again. There it was. Even now.
“I’m okay,” you whispered. “Are you?”
He was quiet for a beat. Then he tipped his head in a small, honest half-shrug.
“Better.”
It was not a complete fix. Neither of you needed to pretend it was. The past didn’t vanish because the night had softened. Nightmares didn’t lose their teeth in a single hour. But there was something sacred in the smallness of that answer. Better. Not perfect. Not fine. Just better, because you had come looking for him. Because he had let you find him.
You reached up and smoothed his hair back from his forehead.
“Good.”
Bucky’s gaze moved over your face with that same impossible gentleness, and then he gathered you closer until your forehead tucked beneath his chin. His mouth brushed the top of your head. One kiss. Then another. The third lingered.
His breathing slowed.
You stayed awake a little longer, listening to it. Feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest against yours. The weight of his arm over you. The way his fingers, even half asleep, curled lightly into the fabric at your back as if some deep instinct in him needed to keep contact even in rest.
And when sleep finally began to pull at you again, softer this time, less sharp at the edges, your last clear thought was not of the empty bed or the cold balcony or the shadows he still carried.
It was of the way Bucky had let himself be held.
Of the way he had come back inside with you.
Of the fact that for all the things the world had carved out of both of you, this—your hand in his hair, his body warm around yours, the dark made bearable because neither of you was facing it alone—was still here.
And that was more than you could ever ask for.
no more taglists! tumblr’s @ limit said no 💔 follow @cheekybarnesupdates + turn on notifs for all fic drops!
Fuck DAMN. Here I was, waking up to a more or less normal Sunday morning, and then this gem of a fic hit. I'M NOT NORMAL ANYMORE!!! hhjtawkljnkeadnpkuzictrr
Honestly, it's so in character it hurts. I forgot how good fics can be, and this reminder was just... *chef's kiss*
I swear, I'm close to asking you @cheekybarnes if you would be okay with me printing your best fics out, ofc private use only.
And just because I need to repeat it: DAMN. Fuck DAMN! That's one HELL of a fic!
please this is so nice and so funny, i’m framing this entire reblog in my brain forever 😭 ruining a normal sunday morning with bucky angst is apparently my brand now, and i’m honored. also the idea of someone wanting to print my fics for personal use might actually make me combust, so yes, of course. thank you thank you thank you <3
Summary: You and Bucky both know what it means to wake up haunted after a nightmare. over time, taking care of each other through it becomes second nature.
MCU Timeline Placement: Thunderbolts-ish
Master List: Find my other stuff here!
Warnings: nightmares, panic attacks, vomiting, nausea, PTSD, flashbacks, HYDRA and Red Room-related trauma, implied past torture / past conditioning, smoking, kind of two parts smashed into one, angsty af but with lots of comfort, two idiots in love it’s borderline painful
Word Count: 10.6k
Author’s Note: HIIIIII <3 crawling out of my nearly six-month hiatus to throw this at the wall and scuttle away like a goblin. life has actually been really good, which is WILD, and somehow my brain said guess what we have time for again?? bucky barnes! honestly, writing fics again felt so refreshing and familiar and sweet, and i missed this more than i realized. love you all dearly, thank you for still being here :’)
Your knees hit the tile hard enough to sting, but the pain barely registered over everything else.
The toilet bowl blurred in and out of focus beneath you, white porcelain swimming at the edges of your vision as another violent spasm tore through your stomach. Your body folded in on itself with brutal, helpless force, one hand braced against the seat, the other slipping against the floor where cold tile had already gone slick beneath your palm.
Your throat burned. Bitter acid clung to the back of your tongue. Tears dripped hot and useless down your face, dragged there by strain more than grief, though the two had long since learned how to wear each other’s skin.
By the time the heaving slowed, your lungs felt flayed open.
You stayed bent over anyway, forehead nearly touching the rim, breathing in harsh, ragged pulls that wouldn’t quite fill your chest. The sound of it crowded the tiny bathroom, too loud in the middle of the night. Wet, ugly, shaking. Every inhale snagged like there was something lodged behind your ribs, some leftover shard of fear your body hadn’t realized was no longer lodged in blood and bone but memory instead.
You tried to swallow and nearly gagged again. Your stomach cramped, empty. A tremor ran through your arms so hard your elbow buckled, and your shoulder knocked the side of the vanity with a dull thud.
For one disorienting second, the cramped bathroom wasn’t a bathroom at all.
It was a concrete floor slick with something darker than water. It was the sterile burn of antiseptic threaded with iron and something sour beneath it. It was the sharp, echoing crack of a baton striking bone, the clipped Russian commands that never needed to be loud to be obeyed. It was the snap of a restraint at your wrist, the bite of it, the cold certainty that your body was no longer your own—but something trained, sharpened, used.
Things you’d never truly forget, no matter how many nights you slept in clean sheets with Bucky Barnes’ arm draped heavy over your waist, his breath steady at the back of your neck: boots against concrete, measured and unhurried, the kind that meant someone was coming for you—or worse, that you were being sent for someone else. The soft click of a chamber being checked. The silence just before a command was given, before you moved without thinking, before you became something you could never quite scrub out of your skin.
Your stomach lurched again on pure reflex.
Nothing came up this time, just a dry, painful wrench that bowed your spine and pulled a strangled sound out of you. You squeezed your eyes shut, but that only made it worse.
The dark behind your lids fractured into pieces. Broken glass. A blood-slick knife. White lights. Red orders. Your hands steady around a throat, a trigger, a blade. The shape of Bucky turning back for you when every instinct in the world should have sent him the other direction. The heat of his hand catching yours. Gunfire. Fire licking up the walls of a place that should never have existed.
You knew where you were.
You did. You knew the apartment. Knew the soft yellow light above the sink. Knew the curtains Bucky kept meaning to replace because the bottom hem had started to fray. Knew the towel hanging crooked because he always tossed it there instead of folding it. Knew the dark blue bathmat under your knees and the way the grout line by the baseboard had a hairline crack running through it.
But knowing and feeling had never been the same thing. Not on nights like this.
Your hands had gone numb. You curled them into fists anyway, then flattened them again, fingertips pressing into tile like you could anchor yourself by force. Your pulse hammered so hard it made your teeth ache.
The room felt too small. Your skin felt too tight. Something hot and frantic clawed up the inside of your throat, and before you could stop it, another sound broke loose—thin, raw, humiliated by how frightened it sounded in the quiet.
The bed creaked in the other room.
You heard it faintly through the rushing in your ears. Then the rustle of sheets. Then footsteps—quick, heavy, instantly awake in the way only Bucky ever seemed to be, as if some part of him never fully slept at all. The door creaked open. It was silent for all but a second.
“Hey.”
His voice came rough with sleep and immediate concern from the doorway, low enough not to startle, but there was already movement in it, already urgency. “Hey, sweetheart.”
You didn’t turn.
A fresh wave of nausea and panic hit at once, and you coughed hard over the bowl, one hand flying to your chest like you could physically hold yourself together. The bathroom light was suddenly brighter. Had you turned it on? Had he? You couldn’t remember. Your vision had gone watery again.
Bucky crossed the space in two quick steps and dropped to his knees beside you before you could protest, bare shoulders tense, dog tags shifting against his chest. His hair was sleep-mussed, face still soft with the remnants of rest, but his eyes were already sharp, already searching you for damage.
His hand landed first between your shoulder blades. Steady. Warm. Broad enough to cover half your back.
You flinched anyway, not from him, just from the overload of sensation, and his palm immediately softened, not leaving, just easing into slow, grounding pressure.
Your throat worked uselessly around words that wouldn’t form. The air still wouldn’t come right. You tried to drag in a breath and choked on it, lungs hitching into that horrible in-between state where you weren’t quite hyperventilating, but every inhale was getting thinner, shallower, feeding the panic instead of easing it.
Bucky noticed in seconds. He always did.
“Don’t force it.” His voice stayed calm, even as you heard him shift, turning more fully toward you. His other hand came up to cup the side of your face, cool vibranium cradling your skin with impossible care as he coaxed your head away from the toilet just enough to see you. “Hey, look at me.”
You couldn’t. Not really. Your gaze skittered somewhere near his collarbone, then the hollow of his throat, then the edge of his mouth. But it was enough for him to catch on to where you were, enough for him to angle himself more squarely in front of you, making himself impossible to miss.
“Good,” he said softly, like you’d done something far harder than simply lift your head. “That’s it.”
Another tremor wracked through you. Your eyes squeezed shut.
Bucky reached blindly for the flush, handled it one-handed, then leaned back in without complaint the moment it was done. His fingers slid from your cheek to brush damp hair back from your face. There was no disgust in him, no hesitation, no trace of the sharp awkwardness other people might have carried into a moment like this.
“Can you breathe with me?” he asked.
You let out something between a laugh and a sob, because if you could do that, you wouldn’t be on the bathroom floor shaking apart in the middle of the night. But Bucky only huffed the faintest breath through his nose, not quite a smile, not quite amusement. Just recognition. You’d both been here before.
“That bad, huh?”
His thumb stroked under your eye, catching at the wetness there. You nodded before you could stop yourself, small and miserable and angry at how quickly the motion made more tears spill.
“Okay.” He shifted again, arm sliding around your ribs, careful of the way your muscles were still seizing, gathering you in his arms. “Come here.”
There was no room for pride in the state you were in. No strength left for pretending to protest.
He pulled you sideways, away from the toilet, not in one jarring motion but gradually, giving your body time to follow. The tile was freezing beneath your bare feet as they dragged over it. Then you were half turned, then fully turned, and then Bucky sat back against the side of the tub and brought you with him until you ended up in the space between his legs.
He adjusted instantly, one arm around your waist, the other cradling the back of your head, guiding you down until you were tucked against his chest like he could fold his whole body around yours and wall the rest of the night out.
The second you felt the solid heat of him, something inside you cracked.
A sob tore loose, ugly and helpless and far too loud for the hour, muffled into his shoulder.
His heartbeat thudded against your ear, fast enough to tell you he was scared too, or had been when he first woke and found the bed empty, but his hold never tightened in a way that trapped. One palm flattened between your shoulder blades again, rubbing slow circles. The other stayed at the nape of your neck, thumb brushing there in absent, cold-soothing sweeps.
“I know,” he whispered into your hair. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”
You hated how much your body needed that. Hated and loved it in equal measure. The softness of his voice. The way he anchored every word like it could keep you from slipping under.
You pressed closer instead of fighting it, face buried against his chest, and the scent of him—soap, detergent, something warm and sleep-soft, and the faintest lingering trace of gun oil that never seemed to leave his skin entirely no matter how long it had been since his last mission—hit you with such fierce familiarity it made your lungs stutter again.
Only this time, the breath came.
Still shaky. Still broken around the edges. But it came.
Bucky felt it and adjusted to that too, his own breathing turning deeper, slower on purpose so you could borrow the rhythm if you wanted it. He never made a performance out of helping. He never talked to you like you were fragile glass or some skittish thing that might bolt if handled wrong. He just offered himself, over and over, in small physical certainties your body could understand when words became useless.
Your stomach churned once more. You tensed immediately.
“Still sick?” he asked quietly.
You nodded hesitantly against him.
He reached without fully letting go of you, snagging the wastebasket next to the toilet with one arm and setting it within reach near your knee. It was such a practical, ridiculous little act—so unromantic, so matter-of-fact—that fresh tears burned at the backs of your eyes.
Bucky, still half asleep, sitting bare-chested on cold tile in the middle of the night, dragging the trash can closer in case moving back to the toilet was too much. Bucky, who knew what it was to wake with someone else’s orders still clawing under his skin, treating your panic with the same seriousness he would a wound.
You swallowed hard and finally managed a hoarse, “M’sorry.”
His hand stilled for half a second, then resumed its slow path up your spine.
“For what?”
The question came immediate and flat in that way he had when he thought something you were saying was fundamentally absurd.
You couldn’t answer. For waking him. For being like this. For the mess. For the fact that the past kept reaching into your throat and pulling you out of bed by the ribs no matter how safe the apartment was, no matter how many nights ended with his lips on your temple and his arm heavy over your waist and a quiet promise that he was here.
Bucky exhaled softly through his nose, like he’d heard every apology you hadn’t said anyway. He tipped his head until his lips pressed against your hairline.
“None of that,” he murmured. “You hear me? Not for this.”
Your fingers tightened around him. His skin was damp now where your tears had fallen. He didn’t care.
For a while, neither of you said anything else.
The silence wasn’t empty. It was full of your breathing evening out by degrees, the hum of the vent overhead, the muted city noise filtering in through the apartment windows. Bucky kept touching you the whole time, never restless, never distracted. Slow circles over your back. A steady palm at your side when another tremor hit.
His thumb at the base of your skull, rubbing little arcs there that made some of the locked tension in your neck begin, reluctantly, to loosen. Every now and then he kissed your temple or the crown of your head, quiet little presses of his mouth that asked for nothing and gave everything.
When the worst of the shaking finally passed, the exhaustion underneath it crashed in hard.
It settled over you like wet concrete, thick and immediate. Your limbs felt hollowed out. Your throat throbbed. There was sweat cooling at the base of your spine.
The adrenaline that had ripped you awake was draining now, leaving behind a full-body ache and that awful raw vulnerability that always came after, when you were no longer actively drowning in the panic but still stranded in what it left behind.
Bucky eased back just enough to look at you.
His hair was a mess, dark strands falling into his eyes. His face still carried the softened edges of sleep, but worry had sharpened the rest of it into something painfully tender. There was no impatience there. No strain. Just the familiar crease between his brows and the kind of attention that made you feel seen all the way down to the bones, even when you wanted to disappear from your own skin.
“Can I get you some water?” he asked.
You hesitated, then nodded.
“Okay.” He brushed your cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Think you can sit on your own for a second?”
Under any other circumstance, you would have rolled your eyes at the question. Bucky could make shifting you off his lap on a bathroom floor sound as careful as disarming a bomb. But tonight there was no teasing in him, only sincerity.
“I can sit,” you whispered.
“Yeah?”
You gave the smallest nod.
“All right.”
He helped you move slowly, one hand steady at your waist while the other guided your shoulder until your back rested against the side of the tub instead of his chest. He waited there a beat, making sure you didn’t tip sideways, then rose from the floor.
The bathroom felt colder without him around you.
He filled a cup from the sink, rinsed it once, then filled it again. When he came back, he didn’t hover over you. He lowered himself right back onto the tile beside you, shoulder pressed lightly to yours, close enough that his warmth found you again.
“Small sips,” he said, holding the cup near your mouth instead of handing it over immediately.
You did as told. The water tasted metallic at first, your mouth still sour and stripped raw, but it helped. Cooled some of the acid burn. Gave you something simple to focus on. Swallow. Breathe. Swallow again.
“Better?”
“A little.”
He took the cup and set it back on the sink, then moved to pick up a washcloth hanging over the edge. He ran it under warm water, wrung it out, kneeled in front of you, and brought it to your face with a gentleness that nearly wrecked you again.
He wiped under your eyes first, then your mouth, then the damp skin at your throat where sweat and tears had dried sticky-cold. The cloth was warm enough to coax a shiver out of you. Not from discomfort. From relief so deep it hurt.
You watched his hands because you couldn’t bear not to. Flesh and vibranium. Knuckles scarred, plates shifting soft and quiet when he moved. Capable of terrible things. Capable of this too. That was what ruined you most, how the same man who had been made into a weapon, who knew exactly what blood looked like under his own hands, could sit on a bathroom floor at three in the morning and clean your face like gentleness had always belonged to him.
When he was done, he set the cloth aside, gathered you back into his lap, and curled both arms around you again.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
The question stayed soft, neutral. No pressure either way.
You let your head tip against his shoulder and stared at the wall for a moment, at the shadow of the towel rack cast under the bathroom light. Pieces of the nightmare still clung like cobwebs, not a coherent story so much as a collage of every worst thing your body had cataloged and refused to forget. Fear rarely cared about chronology. It only cared about finding old wounds and pressing until they split.
“It was everything,” you said finally, voice scraped thin. “Not one thing. Just… all of it.”
Bucky went very still in the way he did when he was listening with his whole body.
“The room,” you whispered. “The lights. Somebody reading out orders like they were grocery lists. Girls screaming behind walls you couldn’t get through. Me with blood on my hands and no idea whose it was supposed to be.” Your throat tightened hard enough to hurt. “You turning around when you shouldn’t have. Over and over again.”
His hold on you changed in some subtle way, not tighter, exactly, but deeper. More deliberate. His jaw brushed your temple when he rested his cheek against your hair.
“I was always going to turn around.”
The words were so simple they lodged under your ribs.
You shut your eyes. “That’s not comforting.”
A faint breath left him, the closest thing to a tired little laugh. “Yeah. I know.” His mouth touched your temple again. “Still true.”
Something in your chest ached at that—at the awful, inevitable certainty in him. Bucky had never been good at preserving himself when someone he cared about was on the line. You knew that. He knew that you knew it. There was no use pretending otherwise. But there was something wrenchingly honest in the way he said it.
You turned your face into the line of his neck, pressing there until his skin warmed under your mouth.
“I hate when it follows us here,” you said, so quietly the words almost vanished.
His hand slid up to cradle the back of your head again. “Me too.”
That, more than any grand reassurance, made your eyes sting fresh. Because he didn’t lie to you. Didn’t tell you it was over in ways either of you knew weren’t real. Didn’t promise that the nightmares would stop for good if you just wanted hard enough. He met you where you were and stayed there.
After a moment, he shifted carefully and rose to his feet, bringing you with him before you could protest. One arm hooked under your knees, the other around your back, lifting you off the floor as if the effort cost him nothing. A startled breath caught in your throat.
“Bucky—”
“I know you can walk,” he said, already stepping out into the dim hallway. “Let me do it anyway.”
His voice had gone that little bit firmer, not unkind, just decided. Protective in a way that made warmth spread weakly through the cold aftermath inside you.
You were too wrung out to argue. Your arm slid around his neck instead, and he adjusted your weight closer to his chest.
The apartment beyond the bathroom was different in the dark, softer at the edges. The bedroom door stood open, the lamp on the nightstand casting a low amber pool across tangled sheets. Your side of the bed was still thrown back from where you’d bolted out of it. Bucky had clearly turned the lamp on when he went looking for you. The sight of that—evidence of his immediate search, his immediate response—hit something tender in you.
He carried you to the bed and lowered you onto the mattress with a care that still had the power to undo you, one arm behind your shoulders, the other under your knees until your head found the pillow. He pulled the blankets back, eased them over you, then climbed in beside you.
The mattress dipped under his weight. He gathered you in almost before his own head hit the pillow. One arm went under your neck. The other crossed your waist, pulling you flush against him until your face was tucked against his chest and one of his thighs bracketed yours. He was warm everywhere. Solid. The weight of him, the familiar architecture of his body around yours, made the room feel more real.
His fingers threaded into your hair and began smoothing it back from your face in slow passes.
“You cold?” he asked after a second.
“A little.”
He tugged the blanket higher around your shoulders, then reached back to snag the extra throw bunched at the side of the bed and draped it over both of you. The movement shifted him just enough that you could hear his heartbeat again when he settled, still slightly faster than normal, still not entirely come down from the rush of waking to find you gone and hurting. That frightened, fiercely controlled part of him never quite disappeared on nights like this. He just refused to let it become your problem.
Your body gave one last, exhausted shudder. Bucky’s hand immediately moved down your spine.
“Easy,” he murmured. “You’re okay.”
You stared at the hollow of his throat in the lamplight, at the faint shadow of stubble there, at the old scar just visible near his collarbone. The world had taken so much from both of you. It had left marks everywhere. Some visible. Some not.
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
There it was again, the apology you couldn’t seem to stop offering, though this one came softer now, less frantic. Just tired.
Bucky tipped your chin up enough that you had to look at him.
“Hey.” His voice was quiet, but there was steel under it now. “You don’t have to apologize. Not tonight. Not ever.”
The force of that hit you so hard your throat closed.
He must have seen it happen, because his expression changed instantly, the firmness melting back into warmth. His thumb traced once over your cheekbone. “Come here.”
You were already there, but you went anyway, pressing closer until there was no space left between you. His mouth touched your forehead, then lingered. Not a quick kiss. A long, deliberate press, like he was sealing something in place.
The silence that followed was different from the bathroom silence. Softer. Heavier with sleep. Your body still buzzed unpleasantly in places, adrenaline residue and lingering nausea and the deep ache of old fear reawakened, but it was no longer swallowing you whole.
His hand kept moving in your hair.
After a while, he said, very quietly, “You want me to talk?”
You knew what he meant. Sometimes, on nights when the nightmares left too much room in the dark, he’d fill it for you. Not with reassurance, but with small, ordinary things. The kind of details that pinned you back to the present.
He’d tell you about the coffee he meant to buy tomorrow, or the neighbor’s dog that had barked at him from the elevator last week, or the awful movie he’d half watched on a hotel television months ago and still hadn’t finished. Mundane things. Gentle things. Proof that life had continued after all the blood and terror, however unevenly.
You nodded.
So Bucky talked.
He told you he needed to get groceries because the two of you had somehow managed to end up with five different hot sauces in the fridge and nothing you could actually make for dinner. He told you the plant by the window was still alive, which he said in a tone suggesting he considered this a personal triumph, even though you were the one who remembered to water it. He told you he’d finally call the landlord about the kitchen light that kept flickering because if it shorted out while one of you was cooking, he was pretty sure that would be the stupidest possible way to survive everything else and die in your own apartment.
A weak, real sound escaped you at that. Not quite a laugh, but close.
Bucky’s mouth curved against your hair.
“There you are,” he murmured.
You kept listening.
He talked until your breathing had fully lengthened and the tight clench in your stomach eased into something survivable. Talked until your fingers loosened against his skin. Talked until the fear no longer felt like something standing over the bed, only a bruise left behind by a thing that had passed through.
His voice stayed low and rough and close, vibrating through his chest into your cheek. Sometimes he paused to kiss your temple. Sometimes his words blurred together as sleep began to pull at him again.
At some point, your eyes slipped closed.
The darkness was still there behind them. Of course it was. Memory did not vanish because you were tired enough to stop fighting it. But now there was the warmth of Bucky’s arm over your waist, the slow drag of his thumb just above your hip, the rise and fall of his breathing under your ear. There was the bed. The apartment. The lamp still glowing low on the nightstand. The familiar scent of laundry detergent and his skin. There was the shape of his promise, unspoken now because he had already proven it.
I’m here.
Your last waking thought was not of the nightmare.
It was of the way Bucky’s hand had found yours beneath the blankets and held on, even as his own breathing finally began to deepen, like some part of him refused to sleep unless he knew you had made it back too.
You woke to absence before you woke to anything else.
It was not a sound that pulled you up out of sleep, not at first. It was the shape of missing warmth beside you, the place in the bed where Bucky should have been and wasn’t, the subtle but immediate wrongness of sheets cooled too quickly in the dark.
Your hand moved before your mind did, sliding across the mattress in a half-conscious search for his chest, his shoulder, the easy, familiar weight of him. Your palm met only wrinkled cotton and a dip in the bed that had already started to rise. That alone was enough to sharpen you.
Your eyes opened to a room washed dim and blue by city light bleeding through the curtains, and for one disorienting second your heart kicked hard enough to hurt.
The apartment was quiet.
Too quiet in the particular way the middle of the night always was, when every ordinary sound seemed louder. The refrigerator humming in the kitchen. A pipe ticking faintly in the wall. The distant hiss of tires on wet pavement far below. The bedroom door stood cracked, the narrow slice of hallway beyond it dark, and the stillness pressing in around that darkness made something old and defensive stir under your ribs before you could stop it.
You pushed yourself up slowly, blankets dragging down into your lap, and let your eyes adjust.
Bucky’s side of the bed was empty down to the flattened pillow. He had been gone long enough for the heat to leave but not long enough to have done it quietly enough to fool the part of you that had learned, over time, exactly how his absence felt. There was a glass on the nightstand with water halfway gone. His phone lay face down beside it. He would not have left it there if he had gone anywhere beyond the apartment.
You listened harder.
There was no television. No running water. No cabinet doors in the kitchen. No soft scrape of his steps on hardwood. His shirt from earlier in the day had been draped over the chair in the corner. His belt lay half-looped through the top of his jeans where he’d dropped them.
You slipped out from under the blanket and stood, the floor cool beneath your feet. The apartment’s shadows shifted around you as you moved. You didn’t bother with the lamp. A pale wash of city light filtered through the curtains, enough to keep you from stumbling as you stepped into the hallway.
The bathroom was empty. Door open. Light off.
The kitchen too, when you reached it. The counters were dark. The sink was empty except for the two mugs you’d left there before bed. One cabinet stood open an inch, not enough to suggest he’d been rifling through it recently, just the normal lazy forgetfulness of your shared life together. A thin stripe of moonlight cut across the tile from the living room, and a breeze caught your arm.
The balcony door was cracked open.
Only by a few inches, but enough for the curtain beside it to stir in the night air. Enough to let in a ribbon of colder wind that made the fine hairs on your arms rise.
You crossed the living room quietly, heartbeat beginning to thud harder for reasons you didn’t entirely want to name. The city beyond the glass spread out in muted lights and dark shapes, buildings stacked in shadow, distant lone cars threading gold and white through the streets. And there, just outside, was the silhouette of Bucky.
He sat in the chair near the railing with his elbows braced on his knees and his hands clasped loosely between them, head bowed. He had thrown on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants sometime after leaving the bed, but neither seemed to be doing much against the cold.
The line of his shoulders was rigid, tension drawn tight and inward, every muscle held under a lid that looked deceptively calm from a distance. Moonlight caught in the dark mess of his hair, turning the edges pale where it fell loose around his face, bent at the crown where he’d probably dragged a hand through it too many times.
A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray on the little metal table beside him—nearly gone, burned down more than smoked, the ember at the tip pulsing red every few seconds in the dark.
Bucky didn’t smoke anymore.
Not at all. Certainly not often. Not unless something had him by the throat.
He should have heard you already. Bucky heard everything. The fact that he hadn’t turned yet meant he was farther gone than he wanted to be.
The thought made something deep and aching soften in your chest.
For a moment, you just stood in the doorway and looked at him. Not because you were unsure what to do, but because the sight of him like that always reached into something bruised and complicated inside you. Bucky carried himself with so much control in the daylight, so much deliberate stillness, all dry muttered humor and quiet restraint and that hard-won ability to make himself look solid even when the ground under him had every reason to give way.
But every now and then, usually in the middle of the night, when there was no mission to focus on and no immediate danger to cut through the noise, you caught glimpses of what lived underneath it. Not weakness. Never that. Just the kind of exhaustion that came from being turned into a weapon and surviving it. Something old enough to have settled into his bones.
You slid the door open.
The track gave a soft scrape. Bucky’s head lifted immediately.
Even half lost in whatever had dragged him out here, he still turned fast, still alert in that way that never really left him. His posture changed on instinct before his eyes found you—subtle, automatic, the ghost of a defensive response already fading by the time recognition softened his face.
“Sorry,” he said, voice low and rough with disuse. “Did I wake you?”
It was such a Bucky thing to say that it almost hurt. Sitting alone in the cold at an hour no one should have been awake, a cigarette burning itself to ash beside him, and his first concern was still whether he had disturbed your sleep.
You stepped out onto the balcony and let the door slide shut behind you until the two of you were left with the distant city and the whisper of wind between buildings. The balcony floor under your feet was freezing. You folded your arms loosely against the cold, more out of reflex than discomfort, and moved toward him.
“You weren’t in bed,” you said quietly.
Bucky watched you come closer, and something in his expression shifted—some small guarded thing tightening and loosening at once. His eyes were shadowed in the low light, bluer in the moonlight than they ever looked during the day, ringed by the kind of tiredness sleep didn’t fix. He looked devastatingly awake for someone who should have still been in bed.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said.
You stopped in front of him, close enough now to see the faint flex in his jaw, the way one thumb rubbed once across the side of his opposite hand and then stilled, like he’d caught himself doing it. Tiny tells.
Bucky was full of them if you knew where to look. The mistake most people made was expecting his distress to look dramatic. It almost never did. It was quieter. Straighter. More contained. Everything in him drew inward until the only evidence left was in the details: the sleepless eyes, the cigarette he wasn’t really smoking, the tension at the base of his neck, the way he kept his gaze fixed somewhere just past the railing like looking at you too directly might split something open he was trying to keep sealed.
You reached past him and pinched the cigarette out in the ashtray.
He made a faint sound that might have been a humorless little exhale.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Probably for the best.”
Then he leaned back just enough to look up at you properly. “You should be inside. It’s cold.”
You could have smiled at that, if the ache in your chest had left room for it. There he was again. Half frozen on the balcony in the dead of night, clearly unraveling in some private, disciplined way, and still trying to make sure you weren’t chilly.
Instead of answering, you moved closer until you stood between his knees. His gaze tracked you automatically. The city lights touched the edges of his face, caught along the bridge of his nose, the line of his mouth, the stubble that had come in a little darker by night.
“Hey,” you said, softer now.
Something flickered behind his eyes at the sound of your voice that close. Not surprise. Recognition. A yielding he didn’t always grant himself but gave you more readily than anyone else.
You lifted your hands and touched his face.
Just the pads of your fingers at first, brushing his cheeks, letting him feel you there before your palms settled fully against the sides of his jaw. His skin was cool from the air outside, but there was warmth underneath it, a pulse you could feel where your thumb rested near his temple. Bucky’s eyes shut for one brief, helpless second.
That tiny, involuntary reaction nearly broke you.
“You okay?” you asked.
He opened his eyes again, and for a moment you saw the instinctive answer rise—the automatic yes, the deflection, the practiced, manageable version of himself that had gotten him through years of surviving things no one should have had to survive. It reached his mouth, paused there, then died before he could give it shape.
His flesh hand came up instead, covering one of yours where it rested on his face.
“Not really,” he admitted.
The words were quiet. Controlled. But there was a nakedness to them that only made the restraint more painful.
You swallowed hard.
“Can I sit with you?”
Bucky looked at you like the question itself undid him a little. Like there was still some part of him, after everything, that expected to weather the worst nights alone unless someone explicitly chose otherwise.
“Yeah,” he said, almost immediately. “Yeah, of course.”
He shifted back in the chair, making room. It was a tight fit, the balcony chair not built for two people, but that hardly mattered. You settled sideways onto his lap, one leg tucked carefully along the outside of his thigh, the other bent at the knee against the edge of the seat.
The second your weight rested against him, Bucky’s arms came around you on instinct. Not as tightly as he held you when he was the one comforting you, not at first. There was a hesitation there, a fragility to the movement—as if he was trying not to need too much all at once.
You answered it by leaning fully into him.
Your chest against his. Your cheek near his temple. Your arms winding around his shoulders until there was no ambiguity left in the gesture. You felt the breath leave him. Felt the way his body gave, just slightly, the rigid line of his back easing by a degree as the contact settled into something real.
The wind threaded through the balcony railing in cool, intermittent currents. Far below, the city kept moving with the distant hush of tires and the occasional pulse of headlights crossing an intersection. Somewhere in another building, a television flickered blue against an unseen wall. The world went on, indifferent and ordinary, while you sat in Bucky’s lap in the middle of the night and felt the careful control in him slowly, reluctantly soften beneath your hands.
His face turned into the curve of your neck.
The movement was small. So small someone else might have missed the significance of it. But you felt it all the way through you—the way his forehead came to rest briefly against your shoulder, the way his breath hit your skin warmer than the night air, the way one hand spread over your back and stayed there as if grounding himself by the fact of you.
It was never easy, seeing Bucky like this.
Not because it made him less himself. If anything, it made him more. But because loving him meant learning the shape of all the things he carried, including the ones he didn’t have language for until they were already dragging him under.
It meant knowing that some nights the ghosts rose too close. That the body kept score in ways even he couldn’t out-stubborn forever. That beneath the training and the dry humor and the endless, exhausted competence was a man who had spent years surviving catastrophe after catastrophe and had somehow never learned how to believe he was allowed to simply fall apart in someone else’s arms.
You put your hand in his hair and stroked it back from his forehead.
“How long have you been out here?” you asked.
“A while.”
“That doesn’t answer me.”
He raised his head and let out a breath through his nose, looking out over the city like maybe the exact shape of the skyline might help him answer honestly. “Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” you asked.
Bucky’s grip tightened once at your waist, then loosened. His mouth moved back to brush your shoulder when he answered, words muffled against your skin.
“It’s stupid.”
“No, it isn’t.”
He let out a faint breath that stirred the collar of your shirt. “I know that’s the right answer.”
“It’s also the true one.”
That drew the barest huff from him, something dry and tired enough to almost qualify as amusement. Almost.
His silence stretched a little longer after that. You didn’t rush to fill it. Bucky needed space to reach for things in his own time. Pressing him too hard only made him retreat farther inside himself, not out of distrust, but out of habit.
“Just… one of those nights.”
The answer was so him you nearly laughed, if it hadn’t hurt.
One of those nights. As if there weren’t decades buried under a phrase like that. The snow. The train. Cryo fog and fluorescent lights. Russian in his ear. The names he didn’t know he remembered until they came back bloodstained. The things he had done with someone else’s hand on the back of his neck. The things done to him until choice had been peeled down to the nerve. Bucky had always had a way of making ruin sound smaller than it was, like if he kept his voice low enough it might not take up so much space between you.
“And what kind of night is it, exactly?”
His jaw moved once beneath his skin. “The kind where my brain decides I should’ve done everything differently.”
There it was.
Not the whole truth, not all of it, but a real piece. Enough to open the door.
His voice had gone flatter on the last word, not cold but tired, worn down by an argument he’d clearly already been having with himself for the better part of half an hour. You knew that tone. Knew the shape of the guilt that lived under it. Bucky’s ghosts were rarely the loud kind. They did not always arrive as vivid nightmares or violent wakeups. Sometimes they came as stillness. As silence. As the terrible calm of a man sitting out in the cold, replaying the things done to him, the things done through him, and all the pieces of himself he still couldn’t quite separate from the weapon they made.
You slid your hand from his neck to his cheek, turning his face toward you with gentle insistence until he looked at you fully.
The city light caught in his eyes, pale and far away. There was no deflection in him now. No muttered half-joke, no practiced flatness, none of that careful distance he sometimes pulled around himself like armor. You saw the moment he almost reached for it anyway. Then your thumb brushed beneath his eye, and whatever thin defense had started to lock into place went still.
“Do you want to tell me,” you asked, “or do you want me to just sit here and keep you company until your brain stops being an asshole?”
That got you something real.
Small, but real. A tired pull at one corner of his mouth, brief enough to vanish almost as soon as it appeared. His gaze dropped to your lips and back up again. “You make a compelling second option.”
“I know.”
His hand at your waist tightened slightly, not possessive, not restraining. More like he needed to feel something solid and chosen under his palm before he answered. When he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its flatness.
“I was dreaming,” he said slowly, as if deciding each word before he released it. “I was back in Siberia, except it wasn’t exactly. It was every place layered on top of each other. All of it wrong in that dream logic way where you know it doesn’t make sense and it still feels real.” He paused. “And I knew you were there somewhere. I could hear you, but I couldn’t get to you.”
Something tight and cold slid through you at that, but you kept your face open and your hands gentle.
His eyes dropped to the line of your shoulder, unfocused now, seeing something else. “Every door I opened led somewhere it shouldn’t. Every turn was the wrong one. And I kept being just a little too late.” The last four words came quieter. Rawer. “That part felt familiar.”
The understatement of it nearly broke your heart.
You let silence hold for a beat, giving the confession room to settle between you rather than rushing to patch it over. Bucky did not need false reassurance. He needed truth met with truth.
“And then you woke up,” you said softly.
He nodded. “And you were asleep. And for a second I just…” His throat worked. “I don’t know. I couldn’t shake it.”
The words thinned there, fraying around the edges, and you knew exactly what he meant. That first split second of waking had left something behind—something sharp enough that he’d gotten out of bed and come outside rather than risk lying in the dark beside you with it still climbing his throat. Maybe because he hadn’t wanted to wake you. Maybe because he hadn’t trusted himself to settle. Maybe because after a lifetime of associating love with danger, there were still nights when having something precious under his hand made the fear worse before it made it better.
He had probably laid there beside you, staring into the dark, trying to settle himself without moving enough to wake you. Trying to swallow it. Manage it. Handle it alone. Then finally given up and come outside instead, not because he wanted distance from you, but because he had wanted to contain the damage. Not to let the night touch you if he could help it.
The tenderness of that hurt. The stupidity of it hurt more.
You shifted just enough to take his face gently between both hands and draw him back so you could look at him.
Bucky let you, though the movement clearly cost him. His eyes met yours at last, and the sight of the strain there was almost unbearable. Not because he was crying—he wasn’t. Bucky’s pain rarely looked like that. It lived in the tension around his mouth, the exhaustion in his stare, the way he seemed to be holding himself together one deliberate breath at a time. But the emotion in him was no less fierce for being contained. If anything, the effort of containing it made it ache more.
“You didn’t have to come out here alone,” you said.
His gaze flicked over your face, searching it in that intensely attentive way of his, like he was testing for judgment, for pity, for anything that might make him retreat. He found none. After a beat, his expression changed—small, almost invisible. Something in him softened with a kind of weary disbelief.
“It was late,” he said, and the excuse was so weak you almost loved him for it.
A breath of incredulous affection escaped you. “Buck...”
A corner of his mouth pulled faintly, not enough for a smile. “I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
He leaned into your hand just a fraction, a motion so subtle it would have been easy to miss if you hadn’t been watching for exactly that. Then, as if some final line of resistance gave way, his forehead lowered until it rested against yours.
The position stole what little distance remained. Your breath mixed in the cold air. His lashes lowered. One of his hands slid up from your back to the nape of your neck, fingers spreading there, warm and steady despite the chill.
“I hate that you have to deal with this,” he murmured.
The confession sat between you, heavy with everything beneath it. Not just tonight. Not just the nightmare. The whole ugly web of loving someone whose life had been shaped by violence and loss, by years of being dropped into impossible situations and expected to keep moving afterward like survival alone was enough. Bucky’s guilt had always been like that—expansive, indiscriminate. He blamed himself for damage done with his own hands, even when those hands had never truly been his to command.
Your throat tightened.
“You are not something I deal with,” you said.
His eyes lifted to yours again.
You held his face gently, making sure he saw all of it. “You’re the person I love.”
The hand at his cheek slipped back into his hair again, fingertips scratching lightly at his scalp the way you knew he liked, the way that pulled the tension from him without forcing him to admit he needed it. His eyelids lowered halfway at once. The man was impossible. You wondered if he knew how transparently he betrayed himself in small comforts, in the way he leaned almost imperceptibly into the things that soothed him.
“You take care of me like it’s breathing,” you said quietly. “Like it never even occurs to you not to. And then the second it’s your turn, you act like making room for me in it is asking too much.”
He went still under that. Really still. Not rigid this time. Listening.
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
He looked at you for a long moment. When he answered, there was no self-protection left in it, only exhaustion and honesty worn raw.
“I spend enough of my life feeling like trouble follows me into every room,” he said. “I don’t want it following me with you too.”
The words landed with quiet force.
You stared at him, breath catching somewhere under your sternum. There it was. The heart of it. Not just guilt. Not just control. Fear. Not of his own pain, exactly, but of what it might do to the fragile pocket of peace the two of you had built together in this apartment, in this bed, in the ordinary domestic intimacy that both of you had earned the hard way and still sometimes looked at like it might vanish if held too tightly.
He thought he was protecting it by stepping away.
He thought he was protecting you.
Your hand slid from his hair to cup the back of his neck, holding him there, close enough that your noses almost brushed.
“Listen to me,” you said, and your voice came low and steady, leaving no room for him to turn the meaning aside. “The worst things that ever happened to us were never the nights we woke each other up.” His eyes did not leave yours. “The worst things were all the times we had to be alone in it.”
Something in his face changed.
It was small. A minute shift in the mouth, the brow, the stare he held on you like he was trying to absorb the shape of the sentence from every angle at once. But you felt it. The hit. The place where the truth had found him.
You stroked your thumb along the line just under his ear.
“I don’t care if it’s three in the morning,” you whispered. “I don’t care if you wake me up because you can’t breathe, or because you had a dream, or because your head won’t shut up and you need to hear something real. I don’t care if all I can do is sit with you on a freezing balcony in one of these terribly uncomfortable chairs.” His mouth twitched faintly at that, and you kept going before he could hide inside the almost-smile. “You do not have to try and be less heavy just because I love you.”
For one suspended second, he looked like he had forgotten how to breathe.
The hand on your thigh tightened. Enough to tell you exactly how hard he was holding himself together. Then he let out a breath so slow it seemed to drag out of him from somewhere much deeper than his lungs, and his forehead dropped against yours once more.
His eyes closed.
“Jesus,” he said quietly, the word more exhale than sound.
You felt the tremor in him then—a fine, internal shake that ran through his arm around your waist and into your ribs where you were pressed against him. The kind of tremor that came when the body finally stopped bracing quite so hard against being seen.
Your own throat tightened.
Without thinking, you shifted again and drew him down, one hand at the back of his head, guiding until he let himself fold into you as much as the awkward chair allowed. His face turned into the curve of your neck, breath warm against your skin despite the cold air around you. The position forced him to bend, broad shoulders crowding close, and there was something so starkly intimate in the sightless trust of it that your chest ached. Bucky was not a man who surrendered weight easily. Not physical weight. Not emotional. Yet here he was, head bowed into your shoulder, letting himself be held in the dark.
Your arms wrapped around him fully.
You held him the way he held you on bad nights: one hand in his hair, the other sliding slow and steady up and down his back. You could feel every line of tension there, muscles drawn tight beneath his shirt. You let the touch stay consistent. Grounding. Unhurried. The kind of care that asked for nothing except his continued presence.
The silence was not empty. His breathing was in it, gradually changing. The first few pulls were shallow, too high in the chest. Then deeper. Then deeper still. You felt his hand at your side start to move, not restless now, just tracing absent little paths over the fabric of the shirt you wore, as if reassuring himself by touch that you were really here, warm and living and within reach.
His other hand slid from your thigh around your back, settling there with a careful pressure that made the chair protest softly beneath you both. He was holding you now too. Not because he had to be strong again. Because comfort, with the two of you, had never been a one-way act.
The wind picked up just enough to stir your hair across his temple.
After a while, he lifted his head. His face stayed close to yours, not quite touching now, eyes open but softer than before. The distance in them had not vanished entirely—those things rarely did, not all at once—but it had eased. He looked more present. More here.
“You always know when I’m trying to pull that stoic bullshit,” he murmured.
A laugh escaped you then, quiet and a little wet around the edges. “You’re not as subtle as you think you are.”
He huffed a faint breath that almost resembled a laugh of his own. “That’s not what I hear.”
“That’s because everyone else is afraid of you.”
One brow lifted slightly.
You touched the crease between them with your thumb. “I’m serious. You do this whole brooding, emotionally-constipated, stare-at-the-wall-like-it-owes-you-money thing and people mistake it for mystery.”
That got you the closest thing to a real smile yet, brief and crooked and so achingly familiar it made warmth flood through you despite the cold. He dipped his head and pressed a kiss to the corner of your mouth.
“Emotionally constipated?”
“You heard me.”
“Wow.”
“You’ll survive.”
“I don’t know,” he said, dry now in a way that felt more like him, more daylight-Bucky creeping back in around the edges. “That one was brutal.”
You smiled in spite of yourself, but the softness in you never left. Neither did the ache. It sat there underneath the humor, the knowledge of what it had taken for him to open even this much. You brushed your lips to his cheek, then lingered there for a second, feeling the coolness of his skin and the faint roughness of stubble.
“You don’t have to be okay all the time,” you said into the space beside his mouth.
His eyes closed again at that. Not in pain. In acceptance of the thing he still didn’t know how to give himself, but maybe, slowly, could take from you.
“I know,” he said, and for once it didn’t sound like automatic agreement. It sounded like a man trying very hard to let the truth land somewhere it might stay.
Bucky’s mouth parted slightly, then closed again. His hand at your neck tightened, not enough to hurt, only enough to keep you close.
“C’mere,” he said.
You were already close enough to feel the shape of the word against your mouth, but you went anyway, and he met you halfway.
It was quiet, the first press of his lips. Careful in that way Bucky had when he was giving you something real. His metal hand settled more firmly at your waist, not pulling, just holding you there while his mouth moved against yours like he was trying to remember what it meant to stop bracing for impact. You felt the breath leave him, warm and uneven, felt the way he leaned in a fraction more when your fingers slid into his hair.
Something low caught in his throat.
You kissed him back gently, your hand at the nape of his neck, your thumb brushing skin still cool from the night air. He stayed close when it broke, forehead falling to yours again, breathing slow enough now to feel the difference.
After a moment, you said, “Your lips are freezing.”
That got a genuine, tired little exhale from him. “Says the person who came out here barefoot.”
You shifted one foot pointedly against the balcony floor. “And whose fault is that?”
That earned you the faintest ghost of a smile. There and gone, but enough to loosen something inside you. Enough to know he was coming back toward himself.
“I didn’t ask you to follow me.”
“No,” you said, brushing your nose lightly against his. “You just vanished in the middle of the night like a deeply concerning man.”
Bucky actually laughed then—quiet and brief, but real. It hit you with absurd force, relief moving through you so fast it almost made your eyes sting. He must have seen something of that on your face, because his expression softened immediately afterward, the humor fading into something warmer and deeper.
“Sorry,” he murmured, and you knew he meant for leaving the bed, for worrying you, for all of it.
You kissed him once more, quick and soft. “No apologizing. I think I’ve heard that somewhere before.”
His eyes narrowed a fraction in that sleepy, rueful way that told you he recognized his own words being handed back to him. “Using my own stuff against me?”
“Absolutely.”
“Cold.”
“You taught me that too.”
Another tiny, helpless smile. Then it slipped away as his gaze lingered on you, on your bare legs, your arms prickling in the night air, the fact that you had come out here without hesitation the second you realized he was gone. The look in his eyes changed with that realization—not guilt exactly, but something more fragile and more profound. A quiet wonder he’d never quite gotten good at hiding when the depth of your care caught him off guard.
He drew you closer until your chest pressed flush to his again and tucked his face into the side of your neck.
You sat with him in the cold and let the night pass around you. Your fingers moved lazily through his hair. His flesh hands slid beneath the hem of your shirt to rest warm against the small of your back, the touch intimate in its simplicity. You felt the gradual slowing of him there—the breaths evening out, the tension draining by fractions, the restless edge that had driven him from bed wearing down under the quiet persistence of being held.
Eventually, you drew back enough to brush your thumb over the crease between his brows.
“Come back to bed with me.”
Bucky looked out over the city for one last moment, as if checking whether there was anything left for him to outrun out here. There wasn’t. Not tonight. When he looked back at you, the sharpest edges in him had dulled.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
He stood with you still in his arms, steadying you automatically as your feet met the balcony floor. Before you could protest, he bent and scooped you up under the knees and back in one practiced motion. The sudden lift pulled a startled breath from you, and his mouth brushed the edge of your jaw.
“You’re cold,” he said simply, as though that explained everything.
“Bucky.”
“You can yell at me once we’re under a blanket.”
You huffed a laugh despite yourself and looped an arm around his neck as he carried you inside. The apartment was warmer the second the balcony door shut behind you, cutting off the wind and the noise. He locked it without even looking, all muscle memory and habit, then walked you back toward the bedroom.
The room was still dim, the sheets still half thrown back from where you’d woken. Bucky set you down gently on the mattress, then climbed in right after you, tugging the blankets up and around both of you until the trapped warmth began to gather again.
You turned into him immediately, one arm across his middle, your leg sliding between his. Bucky settled onto his side facing you, his hand spanning the back of your ribs, thumb moving in slow, absent strokes. Up close like this, the last traces of strain were still there in his face, but softer now, threaded through with exhaustion instead of active hurt. His eyes searched yours once, lingering.
“You okay?” he asked.
It was almost enough to make you laugh again. There it was. Even now.
“I’m okay,” you whispered. “Are you?”
He was quiet for a beat. Then he tipped his head in a small, honest half-shrug.
“Better.”
It was not a complete fix. Neither of you needed to pretend it was. The past didn’t vanish because the night had softened. Nightmares didn’t lose their teeth in a single hour. But there was something sacred in the smallness of that answer. Better. Not perfect. Not fine. Just better, because you had come looking for him. Because he had let you find him.
You reached up and smoothed his hair back from his forehead.
“Good.”
Bucky’s gaze moved over your face with that same impossible gentleness, and then he gathered you closer until your forehead tucked beneath his chin. His mouth brushed the top of your head. One kiss. Then another. The third lingered.
His breathing slowed.
You stayed awake a little longer, listening to it. Feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest against yours. The weight of his arm over you. The way his fingers, even half asleep, curled lightly into the fabric at your back as if some deep instinct in him needed to keep contact even in rest.
And when sleep finally began to pull at you again, softer this time, less sharp at the edges, your last clear thought was not of the empty bed or the cold balcony or the shadows he still carried.
It was of the way Bucky had let himself be held.
Of the way he had come back inside with you.
Of the fact that for all the things the world had carved out of both of you, this—your hand in his hair, his body warm around yours, the dark made bearable because neither of you was facing it alone—was still here.
And that was more than you could ever ask for.
no more taglists! tumblr’s @ limit said no 💔 follow @cheekybarnesupdates + turn on notifs for all fic drops!
Summary: You and Bucky both know what it means to wake up haunted after a nightmare. over time, taking care of each other through it becomes second nature.
MCU Timeline Placement: Thunderbolts-ish
Master List: Find my other stuff here!
Warnings: nightmares, panic attacks, vomiting, nausea, PTSD, flashbacks, HYDRA and Red Room-related trauma, implied past torture / past conditioning, smoking, kind of two parts smashed into one, angsty af but with lots of comfort, two idiots in love it’s borderline painful
Word Count: 10.6k
Author’s Note: HIIIIII <3 crawling out of my nearly six-month hiatus to throw this at the wall and scuttle away like a goblin. life has actually been really good, which is WILD, and somehow my brain said guess what we have time for again?? bucky barnes! honestly, writing fics again felt so refreshing and familiar and sweet, and i missed this more than i realized. love you all dearly, thank you for still being here :’)
Your knees hit the tile hard enough to sting, but the pain barely registered over everything else.
The toilet bowl blurred in and out of focus beneath you, white porcelain swimming at the edges of your vision as another violent spasm tore through your stomach. Your body folded in on itself with brutal, helpless force, one hand braced against the seat, the other slipping against the floor where cold tile had already gone slick beneath your palm.
Your throat burned. Bitter acid clung to the back of your tongue. Tears dripped hot and useless down your face, dragged there by strain more than grief, though the two had long since learned how to wear each other’s skin.
By the time the heaving slowed, your lungs felt flayed open.
You stayed bent over anyway, forehead nearly touching the rim, breathing in harsh, ragged pulls that wouldn’t quite fill your chest. The sound of it crowded the tiny bathroom, too loud in the middle of the night. Wet, ugly, shaking. Every inhale snagged like there was something lodged behind your ribs, some leftover shard of fear your body hadn’t realized was no longer lodged in blood and bone but memory instead.
You tried to swallow and nearly gagged again. Your stomach cramped, empty. A tremor ran through your arms so hard your elbow buckled, and your shoulder knocked the side of the vanity with a dull thud.
For one disorienting second, the cramped bathroom wasn’t a bathroom at all.
It was a concrete floor slick with something darker than water. It was the sterile burn of antiseptic threaded with iron and something sour beneath it. It was the sharp, echoing crack of a baton striking bone, the clipped Russian commands that never needed to be loud to be obeyed. It was the snap of a restraint at your wrist, the bite of it, the cold certainty that your body was no longer your own—but something trained, sharpened, used.
Things you’d never truly forget, no matter how many nights you slept in clean sheets with Bucky Barnes’ arm draped heavy over your waist, his breath steady at the back of your neck: boots against concrete, measured and unhurried, the kind that meant someone was coming for you—or worse, that you were being sent for someone else. The soft click of a chamber being checked. The silence just before a command was given, before you moved without thinking, before you became something you could never quite scrub out of your skin.
Your stomach lurched again on pure reflex.
Nothing came up this time, just a dry, painful wrench that bowed your spine and pulled a strangled sound out of you. You squeezed your eyes shut, but that only made it worse.
The dark behind your lids fractured into pieces. Broken glass. A blood-slick knife. White lights. Red orders. Your hands steady around a throat, a trigger, a blade. The shape of Bucky turning back for you when every instinct in the world should have sent him the other direction. The heat of his hand catching yours. Gunfire. Fire licking up the walls of a place that should never have existed.
You knew where you were.
You did. You knew the apartment. Knew the soft yellow light above the sink. Knew the curtains Bucky kept meaning to replace because the bottom hem had started to fray. Knew the towel hanging crooked because he always tossed it there instead of folding it. Knew the dark blue bathmat under your knees and the way the grout line by the baseboard had a hairline crack running through it.
But knowing and feeling had never been the same thing. Not on nights like this.
Your hands had gone numb. You curled them into fists anyway, then flattened them again, fingertips pressing into tile like you could anchor yourself by force. Your pulse hammered so hard it made your teeth ache.
The room felt too small. Your skin felt too tight. Something hot and frantic clawed up the inside of your throat, and before you could stop it, another sound broke loose—thin, raw, humiliated by how frightened it sounded in the quiet.
The bed creaked in the other room.
You heard it faintly through the rushing in your ears. Then the rustle of sheets. Then footsteps—quick, heavy, instantly awake in the way only Bucky ever seemed to be, as if some part of him never fully slept at all. The door creaked open. It was silent for all but a second.
“Hey.”
His voice came rough with sleep and immediate concern from the doorway, low enough not to startle, but there was already movement in it, already urgency. “Hey, sweetheart.”
You didn’t turn.
A fresh wave of nausea and panic hit at once, and you coughed hard over the bowl, one hand flying to your chest like you could physically hold yourself together. The bathroom light was suddenly brighter. Had you turned it on? Had he? You couldn’t remember. Your vision had gone watery again.
Bucky crossed the space in two quick steps and dropped to his knees beside you before you could protest, bare shoulders tense, dog tags shifting against his chest. His hair was sleep-mussed, face still soft with the remnants of rest, but his eyes were already sharp, already searching you for damage.
His hand landed first between your shoulder blades. Steady. Warm. Broad enough to cover half your back.
You flinched anyway, not from him, just from the overload of sensation, and his palm immediately softened, not leaving, just easing into slow, grounding pressure.
Your throat worked uselessly around words that wouldn’t form. The air still wouldn’t come right. You tried to drag in a breath and choked on it, lungs hitching into that horrible in-between state where you weren’t quite hyperventilating, but every inhale was getting thinner, shallower, feeding the panic instead of easing it.
Bucky noticed in seconds. He always did.
“Don’t force it.” His voice stayed calm, even as you heard him shift, turning more fully toward you. His other hand came up to cup the side of your face, cool vibranium cradling your skin with impossible care as he coaxed your head away from the toilet just enough to see you. “Hey, look at me.”
You couldn’t. Not really. Your gaze skittered somewhere near his collarbone, then the hollow of his throat, then the edge of his mouth. But it was enough for him to catch on to where you were, enough for him to angle himself more squarely in front of you, making himself impossible to miss.
“Good,” he said softly, like you’d done something far harder than simply lift your head. “That’s it.”
Another tremor wracked through you. Your eyes squeezed shut.
Bucky reached blindly for the flush, handled it one-handed, then leaned back in without complaint the moment it was done. His fingers slid from your cheek to brush damp hair back from your face. There was no disgust in him, no hesitation, no trace of the sharp awkwardness other people might have carried into a moment like this.
“Can you breathe with me?” he asked.
You let out something between a laugh and a sob, because if you could do that, you wouldn’t be on the bathroom floor shaking apart in the middle of the night. But Bucky only huffed the faintest breath through his nose, not quite a smile, not quite amusement. Just recognition. You’d both been here before.
“That bad, huh?”
His thumb stroked under your eye, catching at the wetness there. You nodded before you could stop yourself, small and miserable and angry at how quickly the motion made more tears spill.
“Okay.” He shifted again, arm sliding around your ribs, careful of the way your muscles were still seizing, gathering you in his arms. “Come here.”
There was no room for pride in the state you were in. No strength left for pretending to protest.
He pulled you sideways, away from the toilet, not in one jarring motion but gradually, giving your body time to follow. The tile was freezing beneath your bare feet as they dragged over it. Then you were half turned, then fully turned, and then Bucky sat back against the side of the tub and brought you with him until you ended up in the space between his legs.
He adjusted instantly, one arm around your waist, the other cradling the back of your head, guiding you down until you were tucked against his chest like he could fold his whole body around yours and wall the rest of the night out.
The second you felt the solid heat of him, something inside you cracked.
A sob tore loose, ugly and helpless and far too loud for the hour, muffled into his shoulder.
His heartbeat thudded against your ear, fast enough to tell you he was scared too, or had been when he first woke and found the bed empty, but his hold never tightened in a way that trapped. One palm flattened between your shoulder blades again, rubbing slow circles. The other stayed at the nape of your neck, thumb brushing there in absent, cold-soothing sweeps.
“I know,” he whispered into your hair. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”
You hated how much your body needed that. Hated and loved it in equal measure. The softness of his voice. The way he anchored every word like it could keep you from slipping under.
You pressed closer instead of fighting it, face buried against his chest, and the scent of him—soap, detergent, something warm and sleep-soft, and the faintest lingering trace of gun oil that never seemed to leave his skin entirely no matter how long it had been since his last mission—hit you with such fierce familiarity it made your lungs stutter again.
Only this time, the breath came.
Still shaky. Still broken around the edges. But it came.
Bucky felt it and adjusted to that too, his own breathing turning deeper, slower on purpose so you could borrow the rhythm if you wanted it. He never made a performance out of helping. He never talked to you like you were fragile glass or some skittish thing that might bolt if handled wrong. He just offered himself, over and over, in small physical certainties your body could understand when words became useless.
Your stomach churned once more. You tensed immediately.
“Still sick?” he asked quietly.
You nodded hesitantly against him.
He reached without fully letting go of you, snagging the wastebasket next to the toilet with one arm and setting it within reach near your knee. It was such a practical, ridiculous little act—so unromantic, so matter-of-fact—that fresh tears burned at the backs of your eyes.
Bucky, still half asleep, sitting bare-chested on cold tile in the middle of the night, dragging the trash can closer in case moving back to the toilet was too much. Bucky, who knew what it was to wake with someone else’s orders still clawing under his skin, treating your panic with the same seriousness he would a wound.
You swallowed hard and finally managed a hoarse, “M’sorry.”
His hand stilled for half a second, then resumed its slow path up your spine.
“For what?”
The question came immediate and flat in that way he had when he thought something you were saying was fundamentally absurd.
You couldn’t answer. For waking him. For being like this. For the mess. For the fact that the past kept reaching into your throat and pulling you out of bed by the ribs no matter how safe the apartment was, no matter how many nights ended with his lips on your temple and his arm heavy over your waist and a quiet promise that he was here.
Bucky exhaled softly through his nose, like he’d heard every apology you hadn’t said anyway. He tipped his head until his lips pressed against your hairline.
“None of that,” he murmured. “You hear me? Not for this.”
Your fingers tightened around him. His skin was damp now where your tears had fallen. He didn’t care.
For a while, neither of you said anything else.
The silence wasn’t empty. It was full of your breathing evening out by degrees, the hum of the vent overhead, the muted city noise filtering in through the apartment windows. Bucky kept touching you the whole time, never restless, never distracted. Slow circles over your back. A steady palm at your side when another tremor hit.
His thumb at the base of your skull, rubbing little arcs there that made some of the locked tension in your neck begin, reluctantly, to loosen. Every now and then he kissed your temple or the crown of your head, quiet little presses of his mouth that asked for nothing and gave everything.
When the worst of the shaking finally passed, the exhaustion underneath it crashed in hard.
It settled over you like wet concrete, thick and immediate. Your limbs felt hollowed out. Your throat throbbed. There was sweat cooling at the base of your spine.
The adrenaline that had ripped you awake was draining now, leaving behind a full-body ache and that awful raw vulnerability that always came after, when you were no longer actively drowning in the panic but still stranded in what it left behind.
Bucky eased back just enough to look at you.
His hair was a mess, dark strands falling into his eyes. His face still carried the softened edges of sleep, but worry had sharpened the rest of it into something painfully tender. There was no impatience there. No strain. Just the familiar crease between his brows and the kind of attention that made you feel seen all the way down to the bones, even when you wanted to disappear from your own skin.
“Can I get you some water?” he asked.
You hesitated, then nodded.
“Okay.” He brushed your cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Think you can sit on your own for a second?”
Under any other circumstance, you would have rolled your eyes at the question. Bucky could make shifting you off his lap on a bathroom floor sound as careful as disarming a bomb. But tonight there was no teasing in him, only sincerity.
“I can sit,” you whispered.
“Yeah?”
You gave the smallest nod.
“All right.”
He helped you move slowly, one hand steady at your waist while the other guided your shoulder until your back rested against the side of the tub instead of his chest. He waited there a beat, making sure you didn’t tip sideways, then rose from the floor.
The bathroom felt colder without him around you.
He filled a cup from the sink, rinsed it once, then filled it again. When he came back, he didn’t hover over you. He lowered himself right back onto the tile beside you, shoulder pressed lightly to yours, close enough that his warmth found you again.
“Small sips,” he said, holding the cup near your mouth instead of handing it over immediately.
You did as told. The water tasted metallic at first, your mouth still sour and stripped raw, but it helped. Cooled some of the acid burn. Gave you something simple to focus on. Swallow. Breathe. Swallow again.
“Better?”
“A little.”
He took the cup and set it back on the sink, then moved to pick up a washcloth hanging over the edge. He ran it under warm water, wrung it out, kneeled in front of you, and brought it to your face with a gentleness that nearly wrecked you again.
He wiped under your eyes first, then your mouth, then the damp skin at your throat where sweat and tears had dried sticky-cold. The cloth was warm enough to coax a shiver out of you. Not from discomfort. From relief so deep it hurt.
You watched his hands because you couldn’t bear not to. Flesh and vibranium. Knuckles scarred, plates shifting soft and quiet when he moved. Capable of terrible things. Capable of this too. That was what ruined you most, how the same man who had been made into a weapon, who knew exactly what blood looked like under his own hands, could sit on a bathroom floor at three in the morning and clean your face like gentleness had always belonged to him.
When he was done, he set the cloth aside, gathered you back into his lap, and curled both arms around you again.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
The question stayed soft, neutral. No pressure either way.
You let your head tip against his shoulder and stared at the wall for a moment, at the shadow of the towel rack cast under the bathroom light. Pieces of the nightmare still clung like cobwebs, not a coherent story so much as a collage of every worst thing your body had cataloged and refused to forget. Fear rarely cared about chronology. It only cared about finding old wounds and pressing until they split.
“It was everything,” you said finally, voice scraped thin. “Not one thing. Just… all of it.”
Bucky went very still in the way he did when he was listening with his whole body.
“The room,” you whispered. “The lights. Somebody reading out orders like they were grocery lists. Girls screaming behind walls you couldn’t get through. Me with blood on my hands and no idea whose it was supposed to be.” Your throat tightened hard enough to hurt. “You turning around when you shouldn’t have. Over and over again.”
His hold on you changed in some subtle way, not tighter, exactly, but deeper. More deliberate. His jaw brushed your temple when he rested his cheek against your hair.
“I was always going to turn around.”
The words were so simple they lodged under your ribs.
You shut your eyes. “That’s not comforting.”
A faint breath left him, the closest thing to a tired little laugh. “Yeah. I know.” His mouth touched your temple again. “Still true.”
Something in your chest ached at that—at the awful, inevitable certainty in him. Bucky had never been good at preserving himself when someone he cared about was on the line. You knew that. He knew that you knew it. There was no use pretending otherwise. But there was something wrenchingly honest in the way he said it.
You turned your face into the line of his neck, pressing there until his skin warmed under your mouth.
“I hate when it follows us here,” you said, so quietly the words almost vanished.
His hand slid up to cradle the back of your head again. “Me too.”
That, more than any grand reassurance, made your eyes sting fresh. Because he didn’t lie to you. Didn’t tell you it was over in ways either of you knew weren’t real. Didn’t promise that the nightmares would stop for good if you just wanted hard enough. He met you where you were and stayed there.
After a moment, he shifted carefully and rose to his feet, bringing you with him before you could protest. One arm hooked under your knees, the other around your back, lifting you off the floor as if the effort cost him nothing. A startled breath caught in your throat.
“Bucky—”
“I know you can walk,” he said, already stepping out into the dim hallway. “Let me do it anyway.”
His voice had gone that little bit firmer, not unkind, just decided. Protective in a way that made warmth spread weakly through the cold aftermath inside you.
You were too wrung out to argue. Your arm slid around his neck instead, and he adjusted your weight closer to his chest.
The apartment beyond the bathroom was different in the dark, softer at the edges. The bedroom door stood open, the lamp on the nightstand casting a low amber pool across tangled sheets. Your side of the bed was still thrown back from where you’d bolted out of it. Bucky had clearly turned the lamp on when he went looking for you. The sight of that—evidence of his immediate search, his immediate response—hit something tender in you.
He carried you to the bed and lowered you onto the mattress with a care that still had the power to undo you, one arm behind your shoulders, the other under your knees until your head found the pillow. He pulled the blankets back, eased them over you, then climbed in beside you.
The mattress dipped under his weight. He gathered you in almost before his own head hit the pillow. One arm went under your neck. The other crossed your waist, pulling you flush against him until your face was tucked against his chest and one of his thighs bracketed yours. He was warm everywhere. Solid. The weight of him, the familiar architecture of his body around yours, made the room feel more real.
His fingers threaded into your hair and began smoothing it back from your face in slow passes.
“You cold?” he asked after a second.
“A little.”
He tugged the blanket higher around your shoulders, then reached back to snag the extra throw bunched at the side of the bed and draped it over both of you. The movement shifted him just enough that you could hear his heartbeat again when he settled, still slightly faster than normal, still not entirely come down from the rush of waking to find you gone and hurting. That frightened, fiercely controlled part of him never quite disappeared on nights like this. He just refused to let it become your problem.
Your body gave one last, exhausted shudder. Bucky’s hand immediately moved down your spine.
“Easy,” he murmured. “You’re okay.”
You stared at the hollow of his throat in the lamplight, at the faint shadow of stubble there, at the old scar just visible near his collarbone. The world had taken so much from both of you. It had left marks everywhere. Some visible. Some not.
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
There it was again, the apology you couldn’t seem to stop offering, though this one came softer now, less frantic. Just tired.
Bucky tipped your chin up enough that you had to look at him.
“Hey.” His voice was quiet, but there was steel under it now. “You don’t have to apologize. Not tonight. Not ever.”
The force of that hit you so hard your throat closed.
He must have seen it happen, because his expression changed instantly, the firmness melting back into warmth. His thumb traced once over your cheekbone. “Come here.”
You were already there, but you went anyway, pressing closer until there was no space left between you. His mouth touched your forehead, then lingered. Not a quick kiss. A long, deliberate press, like he was sealing something in place.
The silence that followed was different from the bathroom silence. Softer. Heavier with sleep. Your body still buzzed unpleasantly in places, adrenaline residue and lingering nausea and the deep ache of old fear reawakened, but it was no longer swallowing you whole.
His hand kept moving in your hair.
After a while, he said, very quietly, “You want me to talk?”
You knew what he meant. Sometimes, on nights when the nightmares left too much room in the dark, he’d fill it for you. Not with reassurance, but with small, ordinary things. The kind of details that pinned you back to the present.
He’d tell you about the coffee he meant to buy tomorrow, or the neighbor’s dog that had barked at him from the elevator last week, or the awful movie he’d half watched on a hotel television months ago and still hadn’t finished. Mundane things. Gentle things. Proof that life had continued after all the blood and terror, however unevenly.
You nodded.
So Bucky talked.
He told you he needed to get groceries because the two of you had somehow managed to end up with five different hot sauces in the fridge and nothing you could actually make for dinner. He told you the plant by the window was still alive, which he said in a tone suggesting he considered this a personal triumph, even though you were the one who remembered to water it. He told you he’d finally call the landlord about the kitchen light that kept flickering because if it shorted out while one of you was cooking, he was pretty sure that would be the stupidest possible way to survive everything else and die in your own apartment.
A weak, real sound escaped you at that. Not quite a laugh, but close.
Bucky’s mouth curved against your hair.
“There you are,” he murmured.
You kept listening.
He talked until your breathing had fully lengthened and the tight clench in your stomach eased into something survivable. Talked until your fingers loosened against his skin. Talked until the fear no longer felt like something standing over the bed, only a bruise left behind by a thing that had passed through.
His voice stayed low and rough and close, vibrating through his chest into your cheek. Sometimes he paused to kiss your temple. Sometimes his words blurred together as sleep began to pull at him again.
At some point, your eyes slipped closed.
The darkness was still there behind them. Of course it was. Memory did not vanish because you were tired enough to stop fighting it. But now there was the warmth of Bucky’s arm over your waist, the slow drag of his thumb just above your hip, the rise and fall of his breathing under your ear. There was the bed. The apartment. The lamp still glowing low on the nightstand. The familiar scent of laundry detergent and his skin. There was the shape of his promise, unspoken now because he had already proven it.
I’m here.
Your last waking thought was not of the nightmare.
It was of the way Bucky’s hand had found yours beneath the blankets and held on, even as his own breathing finally began to deepen, like some part of him refused to sleep unless he knew you had made it back too.
You woke to absence before you woke to anything else.
It was not a sound that pulled you up out of sleep, not at first. It was the shape of missing warmth beside you, the place in the bed where Bucky should have been and wasn’t, the subtle but immediate wrongness of sheets cooled too quickly in the dark.
Your hand moved before your mind did, sliding across the mattress in a half-conscious search for his chest, his shoulder, the easy, familiar weight of him. Your palm met only wrinkled cotton and a dip in the bed that had already started to rise. That alone was enough to sharpen you.
Your eyes opened to a room washed dim and blue by city light bleeding through the curtains, and for one disorienting second your heart kicked hard enough to hurt.
The apartment was quiet.
Too quiet in the particular way the middle of the night always was, when every ordinary sound seemed louder. The refrigerator humming in the kitchen. A pipe ticking faintly in the wall. The distant hiss of tires on wet pavement far below. The bedroom door stood cracked, the narrow slice of hallway beyond it dark, and the stillness pressing in around that darkness made something old and defensive stir under your ribs before you could stop it.
You pushed yourself up slowly, blankets dragging down into your lap, and let your eyes adjust.
Bucky’s side of the bed was empty down to the flattened pillow. He had been gone long enough for the heat to leave but not long enough to have done it quietly enough to fool the part of you that had learned, over time, exactly how his absence felt. There was a glass on the nightstand with water halfway gone. His phone lay face down beside it. He would not have left it there if he had gone anywhere beyond the apartment.
You listened harder.
There was no television. No running water. No cabinet doors in the kitchen. No soft scrape of his steps on hardwood. His shirt from earlier in the day had been draped over the chair in the corner. His belt lay half-looped through the top of his jeans where he’d dropped them.
You slipped out from under the blanket and stood, the floor cool beneath your feet. The apartment’s shadows shifted around you as you moved. You didn’t bother with the lamp. A pale wash of city light filtered through the curtains, enough to keep you from stumbling as you stepped into the hallway.
The bathroom was empty. Door open. Light off.
The kitchen too, when you reached it. The counters were dark. The sink was empty except for the two mugs you’d left there before bed. One cabinet stood open an inch, not enough to suggest he’d been rifling through it recently, just the normal lazy forgetfulness of your shared life together. A thin stripe of moonlight cut across the tile from the living room, and a breeze caught your arm.
The balcony door was cracked open.
Only by a few inches, but enough for the curtain beside it to stir in the night air. Enough to let in a ribbon of colder wind that made the fine hairs on your arms rise.
You crossed the living room quietly, heartbeat beginning to thud harder for reasons you didn’t entirely want to name. The city beyond the glass spread out in muted lights and dark shapes, buildings stacked in shadow, distant lone cars threading gold and white through the streets. And there, just outside, was the silhouette of Bucky.
He sat in the chair near the railing with his elbows braced on his knees and his hands clasped loosely between them, head bowed. He had thrown on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants sometime after leaving the bed, but neither seemed to be doing much against the cold.
The line of his shoulders was rigid, tension drawn tight and inward, every muscle held under a lid that looked deceptively calm from a distance. Moonlight caught in the dark mess of his hair, turning the edges pale where it fell loose around his face, bent at the crown where he’d probably dragged a hand through it too many times.
A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray on the little metal table beside him—nearly gone, burned down more than smoked, the ember at the tip pulsing red every few seconds in the dark.
Bucky didn’t smoke anymore.
Not at all. Certainly not often. Not unless something had him by the throat.
He should have heard you already. Bucky heard everything. The fact that he hadn’t turned yet meant he was farther gone than he wanted to be.
The thought made something deep and aching soften in your chest.
For a moment, you just stood in the doorway and looked at him. Not because you were unsure what to do, but because the sight of him like that always reached into something bruised and complicated inside you. Bucky carried himself with so much control in the daylight, so much deliberate stillness, all dry muttered humor and quiet restraint and that hard-won ability to make himself look solid even when the ground under him had every reason to give way.
But every now and then, usually in the middle of the night, when there was no mission to focus on and no immediate danger to cut through the noise, you caught glimpses of what lived underneath it. Not weakness. Never that. Just the kind of exhaustion that came from being turned into a weapon and surviving it. Something old enough to have settled into his bones.
You slid the door open.
The track gave a soft scrape. Bucky’s head lifted immediately.
Even half lost in whatever had dragged him out here, he still turned fast, still alert in that way that never really left him. His posture changed on instinct before his eyes found you—subtle, automatic, the ghost of a defensive response already fading by the time recognition softened his face.
“Sorry,” he said, voice low and rough with disuse. “Did I wake you?”
It was such a Bucky thing to say that it almost hurt. Sitting alone in the cold at an hour no one should have been awake, a cigarette burning itself to ash beside him, and his first concern was still whether he had disturbed your sleep.
You stepped out onto the balcony and let the door slide shut behind you until the two of you were left with the distant city and the whisper of wind between buildings. The balcony floor under your feet was freezing. You folded your arms loosely against the cold, more out of reflex than discomfort, and moved toward him.
“You weren’t in bed,” you said quietly.
Bucky watched you come closer, and something in his expression shifted—some small guarded thing tightening and loosening at once. His eyes were shadowed in the low light, bluer in the moonlight than they ever looked during the day, ringed by the kind of tiredness sleep didn’t fix. He looked devastatingly awake for someone who should have still been in bed.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said.
You stopped in front of him, close enough now to see the faint flex in his jaw, the way one thumb rubbed once across the side of his opposite hand and then stilled, like he’d caught himself doing it. Tiny tells.
Bucky was full of them if you knew where to look. The mistake most people made was expecting his distress to look dramatic. It almost never did. It was quieter. Straighter. More contained. Everything in him drew inward until the only evidence left was in the details: the sleepless eyes, the cigarette he wasn’t really smoking, the tension at the base of his neck, the way he kept his gaze fixed somewhere just past the railing like looking at you too directly might split something open he was trying to keep sealed.
You reached past him and pinched the cigarette out in the ashtray.
He made a faint sound that might have been a humorless little exhale.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Probably for the best.”
Then he leaned back just enough to look up at you properly. “You should be inside. It’s cold.”
You could have smiled at that, if the ache in your chest had left room for it. There he was again. Half frozen on the balcony in the dead of night, clearly unraveling in some private, disciplined way, and still trying to make sure you weren’t chilly.
Instead of answering, you moved closer until you stood between his knees. His gaze tracked you automatically. The city lights touched the edges of his face, caught along the bridge of his nose, the line of his mouth, the stubble that had come in a little darker by night.
“Hey,” you said, softer now.
Something flickered behind his eyes at the sound of your voice that close. Not surprise. Recognition. A yielding he didn’t always grant himself but gave you more readily than anyone else.
You lifted your hands and touched his face.
Just the pads of your fingers at first, brushing his cheeks, letting him feel you there before your palms settled fully against the sides of his jaw. His skin was cool from the air outside, but there was warmth underneath it, a pulse you could feel where your thumb rested near his temple. Bucky’s eyes shut for one brief, helpless second.
That tiny, involuntary reaction nearly broke you.
“You okay?” you asked.
He opened his eyes again, and for a moment you saw the instinctive answer rise—the automatic yes, the deflection, the practiced, manageable version of himself that had gotten him through years of surviving things no one should have had to survive. It reached his mouth, paused there, then died before he could give it shape.
His flesh hand came up instead, covering one of yours where it rested on his face.
“Not really,” he admitted.
The words were quiet. Controlled. But there was a nakedness to them that only made the restraint more painful.
You swallowed hard.
“Can I sit with you?”
Bucky looked at you like the question itself undid him a little. Like there was still some part of him, after everything, that expected to weather the worst nights alone unless someone explicitly chose otherwise.
“Yeah,” he said, almost immediately. “Yeah, of course.”
He shifted back in the chair, making room. It was a tight fit, the balcony chair not built for two people, but that hardly mattered. You settled sideways onto his lap, one leg tucked carefully along the outside of his thigh, the other bent at the knee against the edge of the seat.
The second your weight rested against him, Bucky’s arms came around you on instinct. Not as tightly as he held you when he was the one comforting you, not at first. There was a hesitation there, a fragility to the movement—as if he was trying not to need too much all at once.
You answered it by leaning fully into him.
Your chest against his. Your cheek near his temple. Your arms winding around his shoulders until there was no ambiguity left in the gesture. You felt the breath leave him. Felt the way his body gave, just slightly, the rigid line of his back easing by a degree as the contact settled into something real.
The wind threaded through the balcony railing in cool, intermittent currents. Far below, the city kept moving with the distant hush of tires and the occasional pulse of headlights crossing an intersection. Somewhere in another building, a television flickered blue against an unseen wall. The world went on, indifferent and ordinary, while you sat in Bucky’s lap in the middle of the night and felt the careful control in him slowly, reluctantly soften beneath your hands.
His face turned into the curve of your neck.
The movement was small. So small someone else might have missed the significance of it. But you felt it all the way through you—the way his forehead came to rest briefly against your shoulder, the way his breath hit your skin warmer than the night air, the way one hand spread over your back and stayed there as if grounding himself by the fact of you.
It was never easy, seeing Bucky like this.
Not because it made him less himself. If anything, it made him more. But because loving him meant learning the shape of all the things he carried, including the ones he didn’t have language for until they were already dragging him under.
It meant knowing that some nights the ghosts rose too close. That the body kept score in ways even he couldn’t out-stubborn forever. That beneath the training and the dry humor and the endless, exhausted competence was a man who had spent years surviving catastrophe after catastrophe and had somehow never learned how to believe he was allowed to simply fall apart in someone else’s arms.
You put your hand in his hair and stroked it back from his forehead.
“How long have you been out here?” you asked.
“A while.”
“That doesn’t answer me.”
He raised his head and let out a breath through his nose, looking out over the city like maybe the exact shape of the skyline might help him answer honestly. “Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” you asked.
Bucky’s grip tightened once at your waist, then loosened. His mouth moved back to brush your shoulder when he answered, words muffled against your skin.
“It’s stupid.”
“No, it isn’t.”
He let out a faint breath that stirred the collar of your shirt. “I know that’s the right answer.”
“It’s also the true one.”
That drew the barest huff from him, something dry and tired enough to almost qualify as amusement. Almost.
His silence stretched a little longer after that. You didn’t rush to fill it. Bucky needed space to reach for things in his own time. Pressing him too hard only made him retreat farther inside himself, not out of distrust, but out of habit.
“Just… one of those nights.”
The answer was so him you nearly laughed, if it hadn’t hurt.
One of those nights. As if there weren’t decades buried under a phrase like that. The snow. The train. Cryo fog and fluorescent lights. Russian in his ear. The names he didn’t know he remembered until they came back bloodstained. The things he had done with someone else’s hand on the back of his neck. The things done to him until choice had been peeled down to the nerve. Bucky had always had a way of making ruin sound smaller than it was, like if he kept his voice low enough it might not take up so much space between you.
“And what kind of night is it, exactly?”
His jaw moved once beneath his skin. “The kind where my brain decides I should’ve done everything differently.”
There it was.
Not the whole truth, not all of it, but a real piece. Enough to open the door.
His voice had gone flatter on the last word, not cold but tired, worn down by an argument he’d clearly already been having with himself for the better part of half an hour. You knew that tone. Knew the shape of the guilt that lived under it. Bucky’s ghosts were rarely the loud kind. They did not always arrive as vivid nightmares or violent wakeups. Sometimes they came as stillness. As silence. As the terrible calm of a man sitting out in the cold, replaying the things done to him, the things done through him, and all the pieces of himself he still couldn’t quite separate from the weapon they made.
You slid your hand from his neck to his cheek, turning his face toward you with gentle insistence until he looked at you fully.
The city light caught in his eyes, pale and far away. There was no deflection in him now. No muttered half-joke, no practiced flatness, none of that careful distance he sometimes pulled around himself like armor. You saw the moment he almost reached for it anyway. Then your thumb brushed beneath his eye, and whatever thin defense had started to lock into place went still.
“Do you want to tell me,” you asked, “or do you want me to just sit here and keep you company until your brain stops being an asshole?”
That got you something real.
Small, but real. A tired pull at one corner of his mouth, brief enough to vanish almost as soon as it appeared. His gaze dropped to your lips and back up again. “You make a compelling second option.”
“I know.”
His hand at your waist tightened slightly, not possessive, not restraining. More like he needed to feel something solid and chosen under his palm before he answered. When he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its flatness.
“I was dreaming,” he said slowly, as if deciding each word before he released it. “I was back in Siberia, except it wasn’t exactly. It was every place layered on top of each other. All of it wrong in that dream logic way where you know it doesn’t make sense and it still feels real.” He paused. “And I knew you were there somewhere. I could hear you, but I couldn’t get to you.”
Something tight and cold slid through you at that, but you kept your face open and your hands gentle.
His eyes dropped to the line of your shoulder, unfocused now, seeing something else. “Every door I opened led somewhere it shouldn’t. Every turn was the wrong one. And I kept being just a little too late.” The last four words came quieter. Rawer. “That part felt familiar.”
The understatement of it nearly broke your heart.
You let silence hold for a beat, giving the confession room to settle between you rather than rushing to patch it over. Bucky did not need false reassurance. He needed truth met with truth.
“And then you woke up,” you said softly.
He nodded. “And you were asleep. And for a second I just…” His throat worked. “I don’t know. I couldn’t shake it.”
The words thinned there, fraying around the edges, and you knew exactly what he meant. That first split second of waking had left something behind—something sharp enough that he’d gotten out of bed and come outside rather than risk lying in the dark beside you with it still climbing his throat. Maybe because he hadn’t wanted to wake you. Maybe because he hadn’t trusted himself to settle. Maybe because after a lifetime of associating love with danger, there were still nights when having something precious under his hand made the fear worse before it made it better.
He had probably laid there beside you, staring into the dark, trying to settle himself without moving enough to wake you. Trying to swallow it. Manage it. Handle it alone. Then finally given up and come outside instead, not because he wanted distance from you, but because he had wanted to contain the damage. Not to let the night touch you if he could help it.
The tenderness of that hurt. The stupidity of it hurt more.
You shifted just enough to take his face gently between both hands and draw him back so you could look at him.
Bucky let you, though the movement clearly cost him. His eyes met yours at last, and the sight of the strain there was almost unbearable. Not because he was crying—he wasn’t. Bucky’s pain rarely looked like that. It lived in the tension around his mouth, the exhaustion in his stare, the way he seemed to be holding himself together one deliberate breath at a time. But the emotion in him was no less fierce for being contained. If anything, the effort of containing it made it ache more.
“You didn’t have to come out here alone,” you said.
His gaze flicked over your face, searching it in that intensely attentive way of his, like he was testing for judgment, for pity, for anything that might make him retreat. He found none. After a beat, his expression changed—small, almost invisible. Something in him softened with a kind of weary disbelief.
“It was late,” he said, and the excuse was so weak you almost loved him for it.
A breath of incredulous affection escaped you. “Buck...”
A corner of his mouth pulled faintly, not enough for a smile. “I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
He leaned into your hand just a fraction, a motion so subtle it would have been easy to miss if you hadn’t been watching for exactly that. Then, as if some final line of resistance gave way, his forehead lowered until it rested against yours.
The position stole what little distance remained. Your breath mixed in the cold air. His lashes lowered. One of his hands slid up from your back to the nape of your neck, fingers spreading there, warm and steady despite the chill.
“I hate that you have to deal with this,” he murmured.
The confession sat between you, heavy with everything beneath it. Not just tonight. Not just the nightmare. The whole ugly web of loving someone whose life had been shaped by violence and loss, by years of being dropped into impossible situations and expected to keep moving afterward like survival alone was enough. Bucky’s guilt had always been like that—expansive, indiscriminate. He blamed himself for damage done with his own hands, even when those hands had never truly been his to command.
Your throat tightened.
“You are not something I deal with,” you said.
His eyes lifted to yours again.
You held his face gently, making sure he saw all of it. “You’re the person I love.”
The hand at his cheek slipped back into his hair again, fingertips scratching lightly at his scalp the way you knew he liked, the way that pulled the tension from him without forcing him to admit he needed it. His eyelids lowered halfway at once. The man was impossible. You wondered if he knew how transparently he betrayed himself in small comforts, in the way he leaned almost imperceptibly into the things that soothed him.
“You take care of me like it’s breathing,” you said quietly. “Like it never even occurs to you not to. And then the second it’s your turn, you act like making room for me in it is asking too much.”
He went still under that. Really still. Not rigid this time. Listening.
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
He looked at you for a long moment. When he answered, there was no self-protection left in it, only exhaustion and honesty worn raw.
“I spend enough of my life feeling like trouble follows me into every room,” he said. “I don’t want it following me with you too.”
The words landed with quiet force.
You stared at him, breath catching somewhere under your sternum. There it was. The heart of it. Not just guilt. Not just control. Fear. Not of his own pain, exactly, but of what it might do to the fragile pocket of peace the two of you had built together in this apartment, in this bed, in the ordinary domestic intimacy that both of you had earned the hard way and still sometimes looked at like it might vanish if held too tightly.
He thought he was protecting it by stepping away.
He thought he was protecting you.
Your hand slid from his hair to cup the back of his neck, holding him there, close enough that your noses almost brushed.
“Listen to me,” you said, and your voice came low and steady, leaving no room for him to turn the meaning aside. “The worst things that ever happened to us were never the nights we woke each other up.” His eyes did not leave yours. “The worst things were all the times we had to be alone in it.”
Something in his face changed.
It was small. A minute shift in the mouth, the brow, the stare he held on you like he was trying to absorb the shape of the sentence from every angle at once. But you felt it. The hit. The place where the truth had found him.
You stroked your thumb along the line just under his ear.
“I don’t care if it’s three in the morning,” you whispered. “I don’t care if you wake me up because you can’t breathe, or because you had a dream, or because your head won’t shut up and you need to hear something real. I don’t care if all I can do is sit with you on a freezing balcony in one of these terribly uncomfortable chairs.” His mouth twitched faintly at that, and you kept going before he could hide inside the almost-smile. “You do not have to try and be less heavy just because I love you.”
For one suspended second, he looked like he had forgotten how to breathe.
The hand on your thigh tightened. Enough to tell you exactly how hard he was holding himself together. Then he let out a breath so slow it seemed to drag out of him from somewhere much deeper than his lungs, and his forehead dropped against yours once more.
His eyes closed.
“Jesus,” he said quietly, the word more exhale than sound.
You felt the tremor in him then—a fine, internal shake that ran through his arm around your waist and into your ribs where you were pressed against him. The kind of tremor that came when the body finally stopped bracing quite so hard against being seen.
Your own throat tightened.
Without thinking, you shifted again and drew him down, one hand at the back of his head, guiding until he let himself fold into you as much as the awkward chair allowed. His face turned into the curve of your neck, breath warm against your skin despite the cold air around you. The position forced him to bend, broad shoulders crowding close, and there was something so starkly intimate in the sightless trust of it that your chest ached. Bucky was not a man who surrendered weight easily. Not physical weight. Not emotional. Yet here he was, head bowed into your shoulder, letting himself be held in the dark.
Your arms wrapped around him fully.
You held him the way he held you on bad nights: one hand in his hair, the other sliding slow and steady up and down his back. You could feel every line of tension there, muscles drawn tight beneath his shirt. You let the touch stay consistent. Grounding. Unhurried. The kind of care that asked for nothing except his continued presence.
The silence was not empty. His breathing was in it, gradually changing. The first few pulls were shallow, too high in the chest. Then deeper. Then deeper still. You felt his hand at your side start to move, not restless now, just tracing absent little paths over the fabric of the shirt you wore, as if reassuring himself by touch that you were really here, warm and living and within reach.
His other hand slid from your thigh around your back, settling there with a careful pressure that made the chair protest softly beneath you both. He was holding you now too. Not because he had to be strong again. Because comfort, with the two of you, had never been a one-way act.
The wind picked up just enough to stir your hair across his temple.
After a while, he lifted his head. His face stayed close to yours, not quite touching now, eyes open but softer than before. The distance in them had not vanished entirely—those things rarely did, not all at once—but it had eased. He looked more present. More here.
“You always know when I’m trying to pull that stoic bullshit,” he murmured.
A laugh escaped you then, quiet and a little wet around the edges. “You’re not as subtle as you think you are.”
He huffed a faint breath that almost resembled a laugh of his own. “That’s not what I hear.”
“That’s because everyone else is afraid of you.”
One brow lifted slightly.
You touched the crease between them with your thumb. “I’m serious. You do this whole brooding, emotionally-constipated, stare-at-the-wall-like-it-owes-you-money thing and people mistake it for mystery.”
That got you the closest thing to a real smile yet, brief and crooked and so achingly familiar it made warmth flood through you despite the cold. He dipped his head and pressed a kiss to the corner of your mouth.
“Emotionally constipated?”
“You heard me.”
“Wow.”
“You’ll survive.”
“I don’t know,” he said, dry now in a way that felt more like him, more daylight-Bucky creeping back in around the edges. “That one was brutal.”
You smiled in spite of yourself, but the softness in you never left. Neither did the ache. It sat there underneath the humor, the knowledge of what it had taken for him to open even this much. You brushed your lips to his cheek, then lingered there for a second, feeling the coolness of his skin and the faint roughness of stubble.
“You don’t have to be okay all the time,” you said into the space beside his mouth.
His eyes closed again at that. Not in pain. In acceptance of the thing he still didn’t know how to give himself, but maybe, slowly, could take from you.
“I know,” he said, and for once it didn’t sound like automatic agreement. It sounded like a man trying very hard to let the truth land somewhere it might stay.
Bucky’s mouth parted slightly, then closed again. His hand at your neck tightened, not enough to hurt, only enough to keep you close.
“C’mere,” he said.
You were already close enough to feel the shape of the word against your mouth, but you went anyway, and he met you halfway.
It was quiet, the first press of his lips. Careful in that way Bucky had when he was giving you something real. His metal hand settled more firmly at your waist, not pulling, just holding you there while his mouth moved against yours like he was trying to remember what it meant to stop bracing for impact. You felt the breath leave him, warm and uneven, felt the way he leaned in a fraction more when your fingers slid into his hair.
Something low caught in his throat.
You kissed him back gently, your hand at the nape of his neck, your thumb brushing skin still cool from the night air. He stayed close when it broke, forehead falling to yours again, breathing slow enough now to feel the difference.
After a moment, you said, “Your lips are freezing.”
That got a genuine, tired little exhale from him. “Says the person who came out here barefoot.”
You shifted one foot pointedly against the balcony floor. “And whose fault is that?”
That earned you the faintest ghost of a smile. There and gone, but enough to loosen something inside you. Enough to know he was coming back toward himself.
“I didn’t ask you to follow me.”
“No,” you said, brushing your nose lightly against his. “You just vanished in the middle of the night like a deeply concerning man.”
Bucky actually laughed then—quiet and brief, but real. It hit you with absurd force, relief moving through you so fast it almost made your eyes sting. He must have seen something of that on your face, because his expression softened immediately afterward, the humor fading into something warmer and deeper.
“Sorry,” he murmured, and you knew he meant for leaving the bed, for worrying you, for all of it.
You kissed him once more, quick and soft. “No apologizing. I think I’ve heard that somewhere before.”
His eyes narrowed a fraction in that sleepy, rueful way that told you he recognized his own words being handed back to him. “Using my own stuff against me?”
“Absolutely.”
“Cold.”
“You taught me that too.”
Another tiny, helpless smile. Then it slipped away as his gaze lingered on you, on your bare legs, your arms prickling in the night air, the fact that you had come out here without hesitation the second you realized he was gone. The look in his eyes changed with that realization—not guilt exactly, but something more fragile and more profound. A quiet wonder he’d never quite gotten good at hiding when the depth of your care caught him off guard.
He drew you closer until your chest pressed flush to his again and tucked his face into the side of your neck.
You sat with him in the cold and let the night pass around you. Your fingers moved lazily through his hair. His flesh hands slid beneath the hem of your shirt to rest warm against the small of your back, the touch intimate in its simplicity. You felt the gradual slowing of him there—the breaths evening out, the tension draining by fractions, the restless edge that had driven him from bed wearing down under the quiet persistence of being held.
Eventually, you drew back enough to brush your thumb over the crease between his brows.
“Come back to bed with me.”
Bucky looked out over the city for one last moment, as if checking whether there was anything left for him to outrun out here. There wasn’t. Not tonight. When he looked back at you, the sharpest edges in him had dulled.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
He stood with you still in his arms, steadying you automatically as your feet met the balcony floor. Before you could protest, he bent and scooped you up under the knees and back in one practiced motion. The sudden lift pulled a startled breath from you, and his mouth brushed the edge of your jaw.
“You’re cold,” he said simply, as though that explained everything.
“Bucky.”
“You can yell at me once we’re under a blanket.”
You huffed a laugh despite yourself and looped an arm around his neck as he carried you inside. The apartment was warmer the second the balcony door shut behind you, cutting off the wind and the noise. He locked it without even looking, all muscle memory and habit, then walked you back toward the bedroom.
The room was still dim, the sheets still half thrown back from where you’d woken. Bucky set you down gently on the mattress, then climbed in right after you, tugging the blankets up and around both of you until the trapped warmth began to gather again.
You turned into him immediately, one arm across his middle, your leg sliding between his. Bucky settled onto his side facing you, his hand spanning the back of your ribs, thumb moving in slow, absent strokes. Up close like this, the last traces of strain were still there in his face, but softer now, threaded through with exhaustion instead of active hurt. His eyes searched yours once, lingering.
“You okay?” he asked.
It was almost enough to make you laugh again. There it was. Even now.
“I’m okay,” you whispered. “Are you?”
He was quiet for a beat. Then he tipped his head in a small, honest half-shrug.
“Better.”
It was not a complete fix. Neither of you needed to pretend it was. The past didn’t vanish because the night had softened. Nightmares didn’t lose their teeth in a single hour. But there was something sacred in the smallness of that answer. Better. Not perfect. Not fine. Just better, because you had come looking for him. Because he had let you find him.
You reached up and smoothed his hair back from his forehead.
“Good.”
Bucky’s gaze moved over your face with that same impossible gentleness, and then he gathered you closer until your forehead tucked beneath his chin. His mouth brushed the top of your head. One kiss. Then another. The third lingered.
His breathing slowed.
You stayed awake a little longer, listening to it. Feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest against yours. The weight of his arm over you. The way his fingers, even half asleep, curled lightly into the fabric at your back as if some deep instinct in him needed to keep contact even in rest.
And when sleep finally began to pull at you again, softer this time, less sharp at the edges, your last clear thought was not of the empty bed or the cold balcony or the shadows he still carried.
It was of the way Bucky had let himself be held.
Of the way he had come back inside with you.
Of the fact that for all the things the world had carved out of both of you, this—your hand in his hair, his body warm around yours, the dark made bearable because neither of you was facing it alone—was still here.
And that was more than you could ever ask for.
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this is so sweet, thank you 🥺 i’ve definitely been pretty off in the void, and i’m still not totally sure how much time or energy i can give tumblr right now, but messages like this really do mean a lot to me. i really appreciate you thinking of me so kindly 🫶🏻
