summary: some loves begin bright red. yours deepened into something darker, stronger, something that stayed.
word count: 2k
⁀➷ thea’s note: hello my beautiful bucky lovers, i know im not as active, please forgive me. life has been rough lmao, between work and my faculty and getting into another faculty i barely had time to see anything or anyone. this was written a long time ago and i wanted to post it. if yall still remember me, i wanted to thank you for 600 followers!! i can’t believe we’re here!! love ya mwah mwah mwah
❝ check me out: maroon ❞
𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 ﾒ૦
Morning arrives slowly in the Avengers Compound.
It slips through the curtains in thin, pale lines and spills across the bed, across the sheets twisted around your legs, across the broad stretch of Bucky’s chest where your head is resting. The world outside is still quiet, the kind of quiet that exists only before everyone else wakes up, before missions and briefings and the constant hum of saving things that are always on the verge of breaking.
You lie there listening to him breathe.
Slow. Deep. Steady.
His arm is wrapped around you, heavy and warm, metal fingers curved loosely against the small of your back. Even in sleep he holds you like that, like something instinctive inside him refuses to let you drift too far away. The vibranium is cool against your skin, but the rest of him is warm, impossibly warm, and you fit against him the way you always have, like the space was made for you long before either of you knew it existed.
You tilt your head slightly, just enough to look up at him.
His face is softer in sleep. The sharp edges of his expression disappear when he’s like this, the lines between his brows smoothing out, his mouth relaxed instead of guarded. His hair falls messily over his forehead, brushing your temple every time he exhales.
Sometimes you watch him like this and it still surprises you.
The quiet of it.
The peace.
Because there was a time when loving him never felt this still.
Your fingers drift absently across the fabric of his shirt, tracing the faint wrinkles in the cotton, and your mind moves somewhere else without asking permission. It slips backward the way memories do when you’re not holding them in place.
You remember red.
Not the gentle red of sunrise creeping across the bedroom floor, but the darker kind, the kind that spreads quickly and stains.
It had been a party at the tower. Loud music, too many people, Tony insisting everyone needed to “relax for once” like that was something the Avengers knew how to do. You’d ended up in the kitchen with Bucky, tucked away from most of the noise, leaning against the counter while he told you some quiet story about Brooklyn that he only half remembered.
Someone bumped your shoulder then. A glass tipped. And suddenly the deep red wine in your hand was everywhere.
It splashed across his chest in a dark burst, soaking into the white of his shirt, blooming outward in a slow spreading stain.
Burgundy, you remember thinking. So dark it was almost brown at the edges.
You had stared at it in horror for exactly one second before your brain caught up with the situation and you lunged forward with a handful of napkins, apologizing so quickly the words tangled together.
“Buck—shit—I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”
Your hands had barely reached the fabric when his fingers closed around your wrist.
Not tight. Just enough to stop you.
“Hey.”
You’d looked up then. And the way he was looking at you had done something strange to your chest.
The wine was still spreading across his shirt, the stain darkening the cotton, but he didn’t seem to care about it at all. His eyes were on you, steady, blue, quiet in a way that made the rest of the room feel distant.
Your cheeks had gone hot. Not just warm. Not just embarrassed. Hot in that sudden, rushing way that climbs up your throat and settles beneath your skin until you can feel it pulsing there.
Scarlet.
You remember thinking, absurdly, that if anyone looked closely enough they’d probably see the color of it written all over your face.
“It’s just a shirt,” he had said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
But he hadn’t let go of your wrist yet.
His thumb had brushed lightly against the inside of it, a small absent motion that probably didn’t mean anything to him and somehow meant everything to you.
And you remember laughing then, breathless and nervous and a little too loud, because suddenly it felt like the air between you had changed.
Like something had tilted.
That night was the first time you realized loving Bucky Barnes was going to be dangerous.
Not because he was the Winter Soldier. Not because of Hydra or the ghosts or the war carved into his bones. But because the way he looked at you felt like standing in the middle of something powerful enough to ruin you both.
Back then everything was bright.
Messy and loud and alive in the way early love tends to be. You would end up in the kitchen at two in the morning dancing barefoot to music playing faintly from someone’s phone, Bucky’s hands warm on your waist while he pretended not to know how to dance. You’d steal his shirts because they smelled like him and he’d grumble about it while secretly pulling you closer every time you wore them.
The world was still sharp around the edges, still full of missions and bruises and exhaustion, but when he looked at you it felt like something steady existed in the middle of all that chaos.
Like a place you could land. But love doesn’t stay bright forever. Sometimes it deepens. Sometimes it darkens. Sometimes it bruises.
You don’t remember exactly when things started to change, only that one day the air between you felt a little heavier than it used to.
Bucky would come back from missions quieter than before, something shuttered behind his eyes that he wouldn’t explain no matter how gently you asked. You had your own shadows too, the kind that creep up behind you when you’re already tired, whispering things that make you doubt the good parts of your life.
At first it was small things. Missed calls. Half-finished conversations. Long pauses where words used to live.
You’d stare at your phone some nights wondering if you should call him again or just wait, wondering if the silence meant something or nothing at all.
Rust creeping slowly along the wire between two people who used to talk about everything.
It never meant the love disappeared. If anything, it felt heavier because it was still there. Still pressing against both of you. Still demanding to be held.
But neither of you had ever learned how to carry something that fragile without dropping pieces of it along the way.
The worst night came quietly. No explosions. No dramatic breaking point.
Just a hallway outside your room in the compound and the feeling that the ground beneath everything you’d built together was suddenly very thin.
Bucky stood at the end of the corridor when you opened your door.
He looked exhausted in that hollow way that comes from fighting too many battles in your own head. His shoulders were tense, his hair damp from the rain outside, his eyes fixed on the floor like he wasn’t sure how to start whatever conversation had dragged him here.
You had been fighting for days already. Small arguments that kept circling the same painful center.
Why won’t you talk to me.
Why won’t you understand.
Why does loving you feel like trying to hold onto smoke.
Your chest already hurt by the time you stepped into the hallway.
“How did we lose sight of us again?” you asked, your voice breaking in the middle of the sentence.
Bucky flinched like the words had landed somewhere physical.
“Don’t do that,” he muttered.
“Do what?”
“Make it sound like I stopped trying.”
The frustration sitting inside your ribs cracked open.
“I’m not saying you stopped trying,” you said, the words shaking on their way out. “I’m saying we’re falling apart.”
That was when you noticed the flowers in his hand.
Red carnations.
Their petals were crumpled slightly from where his fingers had been gripping the stems too tightly.
You stared at them for a long moment, a strange hollow feeling opening in your chest.
For a second you wondered if he thought they were roses.
If somewhere in his mind he believed something that simple could fix what had already started breaking.
“That’s us,” you said quietly.
His brow furrowed.
“What?”
You swallowed.
“Carnations you thought were roses.”
The words didn’t make perfect sense even as you said them, but the feeling behind them did.
Something almost right. Something beautiful in a way that still hurt.
Bucky’s shoulders sagged.
He dragged a hand down his face before sinking onto the bench against the wall, elbows on his knees, head dropping into his hands like the weight of everything had finally caught up with him.
“You think I don’t know I’m screwing this up?” he said hoarsely.
You didn’t answer right away. Because the truth was you knew he did know. That was the worst part.
The silence stretched between you until it started shaking.
You remember crying then. Not quiet tears. The kind that tear out of your chest like something breaking open.
Bucky didn’t look up.
Just sat there with his face buried in his hands while the sound of it filled the hallway.
And in that moment it felt like the ending of something you weren’t ready to lose. You slept alone that night. The bed felt enormous. Cold in a way that made your bones ache.
You kept expecting to feel him there beside you, his arm heavy across your waist, his breath warm against your shoulder, but the space stayed empty.
You stared at the ceiling until the sky outside your window started to lighten and wondered how two people could love each other so much and still come so close to letting it die.
A shift beneath you pulls you back to the present.
Bucky’s chest rises under your cheek as he takes a deeper breath, his fingers moving slowly along your back like he’s tracing something invisible into your skin.
You realize your eyes have filled with tears.
One slips down your temple before you can stop it.
“Hey.”
His voice is still thick with sleep.
You lift your head and find him looking at you now, blue eyes soft but immediately alert.
His hand comes up to cup your face.
“Why’re you crying?”
You shake your head, wiping quickly at your cheek.
“Just thinking.”
“About what?”
You hesitate.
Then you whisper, “Us.”
Something flickers across his expression.
Concern. Memory. You can see him walking the same path through the past that you just did.
“We almost didn’t make it,” you say quietly.
The words sit between you for a moment.
Then Bucky pulls you closer, his arms tightening around you until there’s barely any space left between your bodies.
“Yeah,” he murmurs.
The word is rough.
“But we did.”
His forehead presses gently against yours.
And the way he’s looking at you now, God, it’s the same look from that kitchen years ago. The same quiet intensity. The same careful wonder, like he still can’t believe you chose him.
“I love you,” he says.
Not casually. Not like something he’s said a thousand times before. More like a promise he’s still trying to keep.
Your chest aches with the weight of it.
“I know.”
His thumb brushes your cheek slowly.
“You scared the hell outta me back then,” he admits.
“You scared me too.”
A faint smile pulls at the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He studies your face for a long moment.
Then he pulls you fully against him again, tucking your head beneath his chin like he’s protecting something fragile.
The world outside the bedroom is starting to wake up now, distant footsteps, the faint clatter of someone in the kitchen, but inside the room everything still feels suspended in that quiet early light.
Your love isn’t bright the way it used to be. It isn’t careless or easy or untouched by the things that almost broke it. It’s deeper than that now.
Darker.
The color of something that bled and healed and stayed.
it’s time for annabelle haters to realise seb is never going to fuck you. quite literally let’s do reality check. no matter how much you hate her it won’t change the fact that he chose her and she’s the mother of his (unborn) child. no amount of misogyny will change that. y’all must be ugly inside and outside to hate on a woman simply because she in relationship with a man you’ve claim to be a fan of.
leia’s note: first dex fic hello how are you? no one asked and i delivered. headcanons? a drabble? i don’t even want to know
dex doesn’t smile often, not at strangers anyway. he glares, because that is impersonal, default emotion to him. it takes seventeen muscles to smile, therefore why would he engage so many muscles to form an expression for someone not worthy? if someone in a store drops something near him, he will of course pick it up, if it’s convenient, and while the opponent fumbles an apology, a smile doesn’t even begin to tug on his lips, he just stares and hands them whatever item was discarded.
dex has that kind of expression on his face that leaves people wondering if they did or said something wrong. whereas he disagrees, complains even, when you start to teach him how to smile softly — appropriately for public outings. how his indifferent facial expressions could be considered rude.
dex isn’t much different being out with you. while you feel your safest, dex is tense and alert. following the sidewalk rule, he is also very particular about holding your hand or having you wrap your arm around his. physical touch is something he learned to like, with you of course. not only for your protection, but also as an existent confirmation that you’re real and you’re with him. and it means to him more than any love confession could ever say.
surprisingly into sentimental things, such as matching coffee mugs or keychains. those would either have to be identical or of two correlating things. ocd meds can do so much, after all.
everything around your shared apartment is neatly arranged, not a spec of dust where it shouldn’t be. dex realised he’s royally fucked when the empty space he called his apartment started to feel wrong without your presence. which, he didn’t invite you to often, not that he had anything to hide, but a couple of spreadsheets of every single thing you mentioned liking in passing, list of movies you once referenced and got slightly upset he had no idea existed, two pictures — one you asked to take because the sunset looked nice, which he sent to himself from your phone while you weren’t looking, second one is a picture of you and your former best friend, who hurt you beyond repair you had to seek therapy, not that you told him a lot about it. he found said picture for science, obviously. we shall not discuss how he found it.
gets off on getting slapped in the face when you argue. it happened once in the heat of the moment, you lost control of yourself and up to his cheek your palm went. realisation came moments later and your attempt to apologise was cut short by dex talking over you, “do it again.”
“what?” you uttered in confusion. a sly smile spread on his face, "i've misbehaved. tell me how can i fix this, please?"
it wasn't so much about the argument anymore, more so people have always walked out on dex, and now that he has someone as irreplaceable as you, he'd rather you take it out on him, throw your firm fists at him, yell until it rings in his ears, anything but hear you footsteps dissolve into nothing for the last time.
like a needy child he would follow you everywhere around the apartment, scoffing in disbelief if you dare to close the door while you shower. it’s not controlling to have the need to always know where you are. merely a safety precaution. but you weren’t born yesterday and you notice things maybe just as well as he does. how dex somehow always used to end up in a place where you were, whether it was downtown or godforsaken bar in hell’s kitchen. even before you started seeing each other, frankly this description of an early stage of your relationship would cause distress to dex. you were not just “seeing each other” — you were already his, even if you didn’t know it. he’d try so hard to win you over — always say the right thing, open the door for you, memorise the quickest route to your apartment in case you need him, have access to your building’s security cameras…
in a grand scheme of things you liked whatever’s wrong with him.
tag list: @kqtholins @sheriff-bodecker @metal-armed-muse @i-gotta-go-so-much-bigger @pughsbelova @colettebarnes comment to be added!
dex drinking that disgusting banana milkshake. literally out of every flavour on god’s green earth he chose banana. i can excuse murder but i draw the line at liking banana flavoured things
