Tags: soft!bucky, fem!reader, fluff, established relationship, reader is drunk, no use of yn, petnames, reader wears makeup, loverboy bucky, both of them are down horrendous
Summary: It’s hard to conceal your affections when you’re drunk. Luckily, your boyfriend is just as afflicted.
Word count: 0.7k
── .✦
There's a big, beautiful man leaning over you, and he's got his warm paw of a hand cupped to your cheek.
His eyes are so blue. Like a slice of the sky, ringed by thick lashes—piercing. Focused. Your bones turn to noodles, palms slipping on the sheets, your back meeting the stack of pillows behind you.
Bucky's brows gather into a frown, but it's not a serious one. It easily collapses, wrinkles giving way to the smallest upward tick of his mouth.
"'S'the matter, Sergeant?" You slur, wriggling your legs around until you can get them around his hips, knees pressed to either side of his waist.
Bucky lets out a small breath, half sigh as he grabs one of your thighs. "Stay still, I need you to stay still. Can you stay still?"
"I dunno, can I?" You laugh. You don't really know what's funny. He's just too pretty and the cotton pad he's pressing to your cheek is too cold and you're too drunk and oh, he's just… dreamy. Yours. You swoon, a flush warming your face as you tilt your chin up and tug him down, closer, to brush your lips against his.
Soft. The prickle of his stubble sends shivers all over your spine, goosebumps littering your skin. Bucky rubs a soothing hand over them.
"Doll," he murmurs, flush against your mouth, "let me just finish this."
"Why?" You mumble.
"'Cause you'll be real fucking mad at me in the morning if I let you sleep with your makeup on. Come on, it'll just take a second, yeah?"
You huff but close your eyes nonetheless.
"Good girl," he murmurs, "thank you."
Heat bubbles through you. Bucky starts swiping the cotton pad over your eye, gently rubbing off your makeup; a cool brush of metal sweeps absently over your waist, through your clothes. All of it pools in your stomach, a burst of butterflies sweeping through, making you squirm back onto the pillows. You can feel the soft puffs of his breath on your face.
"You can't be like this," you say lamentingly.
"Like what?"
"Pretty." You sigh. "And polite and perfect and—"
"Wow, that's an alliteration." You can hear the dry smile in his voice. He laughs, and it wafts over your cheekbone. "Impressive. Go on, sweetheart."
Your eyes flutter open, disturbing his work. So close, he's so close. Barely, you manage to stumble out, "P-annoying."
Bucky shakes his head, tiny smile tugging at his mouth. "Now that's a lie," he says, saccharine sweet, drawled low next to your ear. God almighty. You melt.
It's unfair it's unfair it's unfair—
"James," you mumble, half sigh.
He perks up, dog with a bone, always when you say his name. The skin beside his eyes goes wrinkly, crows feet digging in. "Yeah, hon."
"I like you too much."
Your only salvation is his small, shyish smile, a flash of red darting over his cheeks and ears. The color deepens as he ducks his head, and something tumbles in your chest, an aching, aching fondness.
You're a desperately weak human being.
James manages to compose himself. It thrills you more than you can admit; his hand trails up your side, squeezes, then he's back to swiping the makeup off your face.
You're starting to regret all the glitter.
"I like you too much," he says softly, "so we're in the same boat, I think." You sit in the quiet dark for a little, then: "How much is too much?"
Your lips tug. "Now you're just fishing, Barnes."
"No," he promises, and it's so close to your mouth that he takes it, presses a slow, sweet kiss that has your knees skirting up his sides. He's hard and firm against you, all heat, and you feel like a helpless feather blown away in a breeze. "I'm just trying to figure out if I'm in any danger."
Your fingers tangle in his hair. "I think you are, Sarge," you whisper, matching his tone. His stubble grazes your cheek, and you nuzzle a kiss onto his scruffy jaw. "Think I am, too."
"'S'not so bad, is it?"
His voice rumbles through your skin, low, honey poured over gravel. You tug at the silky strands between your fingers, use them to bring his cheek closer to your lips.
My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.
I am pleased by people messaging me telling me that after adding a carb or protein to their snacks or meals they feel more satisfied all day. Yes, my plan is working. People are getting through their days with less hangry.
❝ thunderbolts!bucky x PR!assisstant!reader ❞
── when the new avengers' image needs repairing after the new york incident, you're tasked with organizing a massive coney island charity carnival. (un)fortunately, one forgotten booth assignment lands bucky barnes in the event's most popular attraction: the kissing booth.
⤷ tags: post thunderbolts (lowk is this a tower fic?), kissing booth, carnival/fair, slow burn, friends to lovers, coworkers to lovers, overworked reader, grumpy x sunshine, he falls first AND he falls harder, mutual pining, idiots in love, semi forced proximity, one sided pining until it isnt, some emotional constipation, accidental date, the date was real though, touch starved bucky barnes + soft bucky barnes, domestic yearning, office romance, workaholic!reader, author has journalism geek speak, career burnout, acts of service love language, what if someone noticed as a love language, softness after survival, brief mentions of trauma/ptsd, feelings confession, lots of kisses (its titled accurately) fluff with a happy ending ⋮ warnings: 18+ MDNI! valentina is a toxic boss #freemygirlmel, coercive workplace environment, eventual smut, p in v, unprotected sex, thunderbolts bucky is a softdom ill die on this hill, reader is a pillow princess #notsorry, specific tags to be added in each part!
˗ˏˋ ꒰ june’s note ꒱ ˎˊ˗
── BDAY FIC!!!! you guys dont understand... i LOVE this bucky i was literally like so obsessed with him i dreamed about him i thought about him while looking at the sunset i want to marry him forever and ever and ever. i hope you like it and as always thank you for reading!
── chapters + extras
💋 part one ⋮ one for the money...
💋 part two ⋮ two for the show...
💋 part three ⋮ three to get ready... now go, go go!
Summary: When ruthless mafia don Bucky Barnes hears the enchanting voice of a beautiful lounge singer and rescues her from brutal abuse, his dangerous obsession turns into fierce protection and all-consuming love, pulling her from the shadows into his opulent, violent world until she willingly becomes his forever.
Paring: (Mafia) Bucky x Reader
word count: 8000+
warnings: NSFW, SMUT, fluff
A/N : Hello friends! Here is chapter 18! 5 more chapters to go! Thank you for reading!
Masterlist
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Chapter 18 - Table For Two
Bucky lay awake in the quiet dark, the only light a thin silver ribbon slipping between the heavy drapes from the moon outside. The mansion was silent except for the soft, even rhythm of your breathing against his chest. You were curled into him—naked, warm, utterly spent—your head tucked under his chin, one leg draped over his thigh, your hand resting open on his ribs like you’d fallen asleep reaching for him even in dreams.
He hadn’t moved since he’d pulled you into his arms after the last shuddering wave of your release. His body still hummed with the aftershocks—muscles loose but electric, skin slick where you’d pressed against him, the faint scent of sex and your perfume clinging to the sheets. His cock, soft now, rested heavy against his thigh, still sensitive from how many times he’d spilled inside you. Cum leaked slowly from between your legs, warm and sticky against his skin, a quiet, intimate reminder that he’d marked you in the most primal way possible.
He stared down at your sleeping face—lashes dark against flushed cheeks, lips parted and kiss-bruised, hair a wild tangle across his pillow. This was what obsession looked like when it finally won.
Months of watching you from shadowed booths.
Months of sending flowers and paying debts and orchestrating break-ins just to pull you closer.
Months of jerking off alone in this very bed to the memory of your voice, your smile, the way your hips moved when you sang.
Months of restraint—of almost-kisses, of brushing your hair back, of holding you too long after a hug—because he knew if he moved too fast you’d run.
And now here you were.
In his bed.
Naked.
Fucked raw and full of his cum.
Asleep in the cradle of his arms like you belonged there.
His ruthless side—cold, calculating, the part of him that had buried bodies in the Pine Barrens and burned rival families to ash—stirred beneath his skin. It whispered the same vow it always did when something precious was threatened:
No one touches her. No one comes near her. No one even looks at her the wrong way. I’ll burn this city to the ground before I let anyone take her from me.
He pressed his lips to your forehead—soft, reverent—and tightened his hold just enough to feel your heartbeat against his chest.
You were his now.
Completely.
Irrevocably.
And he would kill to keep it that way.
You woke slowly—warm, heavy-limbed, wrapped in muscle and cotton sheets that smelled like him. Sunlight had crept past the drapes, painting thin gold lines across the bed. Bucky was still there—awake, propped on one elbow, watching you with that quiet, intense gaze that made your stomach flutter even now.
His hair was a mess—long strands falling across his forehead, one lock caught in his lashes. His chest was bare, tattoos stark against tanned skin, faint red marks from your nails still visible across his pecs. He looked softer in daylight, but no less dangerous.
You smiled sleepily, stretching against him.
“Morning,” you murmured.
He leaned down and kissed you—slow, lazy, morning-soft. Then another kiss on your cheek. Your nose. Your eyelid. Your temple. A constellation of gentle presses that made you laugh under your breath.
“How are you feeling?” he asked against your skin, voice still rough from sleep and last night.
You shifted, feeling the pleasant ache between your thighs, the faint soreness in your muscles. “Good. A little sore… but good sore.”
He hummed—pleased, possessive—and nuzzled into the crook of your neck, lips brushing the spot he’d marked last night. “Good sore means I did my job right.”
You giggled, squirming as his stubble tickled. “Stop—you’re tickling me.”
He didn’t stop. He nosed deeper, growling playfully against your throat. “I want to spend all day in this bed with you. Just like this. Fucking you over and over until you can’t walk straight.”
“Bucky!” You laughed harder, shoving at his shoulder—half-hearted, delighted. “You’re terrible.”
“I’m serious,” he murmured, nipping your earlobe. “I’ve got nothing planned. No meetings. No calls. Just you. Naked. Under me. On top of me. Against the wall. Wherever you want.”
Your cheeks burned, but you couldn’t stop smiling. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Only with orgasms,” he promised, kissing the corner of your mouth. “Lots of them.”
You laughed again—bright, unguarded—and he drank the sound like wine.
Time passed in a soft, golden blur.
Mornings became lazy—coffee in bed, his head in your lap while you read, your fingers combing through his hair. Afternoons were quiet—walks on the mansions grounds (his coat around your shoulders, his arm around your waist), or you playing piano while he worked in the next room with the door open so he could hear every note. Evenings were dinners by candlelight—sometimes in the formal dining room, sometimes on trays in his bed—and nights were his.
He took you again and again—slow and reverent one night, rough and possessive the next. He learned your body like a map he’d memorized in dreams—every gasp, every shiver, every place that made you arch and beg. You learned his too—the way his breath hitched when you kissed the scar on his ribs, the way his control frayed when you whispered “please” against his throat, the way he held you after like you were something fragile and priceless.
He bought you things constantly.
Every time you tried to protest—“Bucky, you don’t have to—” he’d silence you with a kiss and a quiet, “I want to. Let me spoil you.”
You were always grateful—always kissed him thank-you, always hugged him tight when he came home. When his car pulled into the drive you’d run to the foyer barefoot, throw your arms around his neck, and kiss him like he’d been gone years instead of hours.
He lived for those moments.
This was what he’d wanted from the second he saw you on that stage—your voice, your smile, your softness. You in his home. In his bed. In his arms. Safe. Loved. His.
One Tuesday evening he came home late.
You heard the front doors open—heard the low murmur of his men, the heavy tread of his boots. You were in the kitchen, barefoot in a pretty floral dress, hair loose, sleeves rolled up as you plated the steak you’d made yourself. The cooks had the night off at your request. You wanted to do this for him.
The scent of garlic and rosemary clung to the air, a warm, domestic blanket over the mansion’s cold, polished edges. You were plating the steak, the seared crust gleaming under the low kitchen lights, when the hallway doors swung open.
Bucky stepped into the open-plan living space, his presence a physical shift in the atmosphere. He didn’t just enter; he occupied. The tailored black suit he wore was a second skin of authority, but it was frayed tonight—tie loosened, top button undone, faint creases at the elbows from a long day. A faint, almost metallic scent clung to him—not blood, but the cold, resolved energy of the city’s underbelly. His blue eyes, usually so sharp, were softened by fatigue, yet they pinned you as soon as they found you.
He stopped in the doorway, taking in the sight of you—barefoot, dress swaying around your knees, hair loose and catching the warm light, standing at his kitchen island like you belonged there.
“What’s all this?” he asked, voice low and warm with surprise.
You turned with a smile that felt deliberately light. “Dinner. I told the cooks to take the night off. I wanted to cook for you.”
He crossed the room in three strides—came up behind you, arms sliding around your waist, pulling your back to his chest. His lips found the side of your neck.
“You’re too sweet to me,” he murmured, nipping gently at your earlobe. “Always so thoughtful.”
You laughed—soft, delighted—as his hands roamed. One slid up to cup your breast through the dress; the other drifted lower, cupping you between your legs. You squirmed, half-laughing, half-moaning.
“Bucky—dinner’s almost ready.”
He pouted against your skin—playful, exaggerated. “But you’re already ready for me.”
You pushed his hand away gently, giggling. “Stop. Food first.”
He groaned dramatically but stepped back, hands raised in mock surrender. “Fine. But after dinner, you’re mine.”
Dinner was candlelit—candles flickering on the long oak table, wine poured into crystal glasses, steak and roasted vegetables you’d made yourself. You sat side by side instead of across from each other. He held your hand the entire time—thumb stroking your knuckles, lifting your fingers to his lips between bites, kissing them softly.
A ghost of a smirk touched his lips. He shed his suit jacket, hanging it with a care that belied the violence the fabric might have witnessed. His shirt, a crisp white, was unbuttoned at the collar, revealing the strong column of his throat. He moved to you, not to embrace you immediately, but to stand close enough that his heat radiated against your back. His hands, those famously lethal hands, settled on your hips, his thumbs pressing into the dip just above your pelvis.
“This dinner is so good,” he said, his voice a low rasp that bypassed your ears and went straight to your spine.
“It’s just steak,” you replied, turning with a smile that felt deliberately light. “You look like you’ve been wrestling heaven’s darker angels.”
“Only the ones who deserved it,” he murmured, his mouth near your ear. His breath was warm. “Now I’m home. With you.”
You felt the claim in his tone. It wasn’t a statement of fact; it was a reassertion of territory. You were his territory. You let him steer you gently to the dining table, a massive slab of dark oak, and you sat beside him, not across from him. The proximity was a game you both played—a game of simmering control.
The dinner began in a quiet hum. You ate, you talked about nothing consequential, your knees brushing under the table. His gaze, however, was a constant, slow-burning pressure. It tracked the movement of your hand bringing a fork to your lips, lingered on the pulse point at your neck, dropped to the swell of your breasts under your simple, knee-length dress.
His own eating was methodical, powerful. He cut his steak with precise motions, but his attention was splintered. After a sip of wine, he set his glass down and let his hand fall to your thigh. Not a grab, but a possession. His palm lay flat on the silk of your dress, his fingers a loose cage over your flesh.
“Thank you for cooking dinner for me, my love,” he said, his voice dropping into a private register. “You are so thoughtful."
“You're welcome. I’m always thinking about you,” you answered, keeping your tone even. You took a bite, chewed slowly, letting him watch.
His fingers began a slow, upward migration. They traced the seam of your dress along your thigh, climbing toward the hem. “What did you think about?”
You swallowed. “That you’d be hungry.”
“I’m always hungry,” he countered, his fingertips now brushing the edge of the fabric, a millimeter from touching the bare skin of your inner thigh. “For this. For you.”
A flush, deep and warm, started in your core and spread outward. You shifted slightly, not away from his touch, but into it, a subtle arch of your spine that offered him more. “The food’s getting cold, Bucky.”
“As much as I love the food,” he said, his voice thickening. His other hand left his fork and came to your face. He turned your chin toward him, his thumb stroking your lower lip. “I care a lot more about this mouth. About what it says to me. About what it does to me.”
You met his gaze, letting a challenge spark in your own. “It’s saying you should eat your dinner.”
He smiled, a real one this time, sharp and predatory. “It’s lying.” He leaned in, his lips a whisper from yours. “It wants to be fucked. It wants my cock in it. It’s thinking about that right now, while you’re trying to play this cool little game.”
Your breathing faltered. He was right. The game was a veneer over a lake of need. You didn’t pull away. Instead, you let your own hand drift from your lap to his. You found the hard, defined ridge of his abdomen under his shirt, and you pressed your palm against it. “Maybe I’m thinking about what’s under this shirt. Maybe I’m thinking about tracing every fucking muscle with my tongue.”
His eyes darkened, the blue becoming a stormy sea. His thumb on your lip pushed inward, gently parting your lips. “Then do it. Stop teasing me.”
“You’re teasing me,” you whispered, your own fingers now working at the buttons of his shirt. You popped the first one, then the second. The stark white fabric parted, revealing a glimpse of his chest—tanned, scarred in places, sculpted with a brutal, beautiful precision. “You come home smelling like power and violence, and you sit here touching me like I’m a fucking artifact. Take what you want, Bucky. Or don’t. I can wait.”
That was the trigger. A low, rough sound escaped his throat, not a moan, but a growl of surrender. The game broke because you refused to lose it; you made him break it.
“Fuck waiting,” he snarled.
In one fluid, violent motion, he stood, his chair scraping back. His hands gripped your waist and hauled you up, not onto the floor, but onto the table itself. Plates clattered, the wine glass tipped, spilling a ruby stain across the oak. He didn’t notice. He pushed you back until you were sitting on the edge, your dress rumpled around you. His hands went to the hem, and he pushed it up, gathering the silk in his fists until it was bunched around your hips, exposing your legs, your thighs, and finally, the simple black lace of your panties.
“These,” he said, his voice guttural. “These are for me. Only for me.”
He didn’t remove them with care. He hooked his fingers into the sides and pulled, the lace stretching then giving way, tearing a little at the seam. He flung the scrap of fabric aside. And then he was looking, his gaze a physical weight on your exposed cunt.
It was the first time he’d seen you like this in this light, in this context. Your pussy was laid bare under the dining room’s ambient glow. The lips were a full, dusky pink, parted slightly in the cool air. They were smooth, hairless, a deliberate choice you made for him. The inner folds glistened with a faint, natural moisture, a sheen of your own anticipation. The scent of you—clean, musky, intimately female—rose between you. He stared, his jaw tightening, his nostrils flaring as he inhaled it.
“Mine,” he breathed, the word a vow.
He didn’t ask. He moved. He bent, his hands spreading your thighs wider, his head dipping between them. His mouth, those famously cynical lips, found you. Not a kiss, but a claiming.
His tongue was hot, broad, and relentless. It didn’t explore; it conquered. It slid along the entire length of your slit, from the top of your clit to the entrance of your cunt, coating itself in your taste. You cried out, a sharp, unfiltered sound, your hands flying to his hair. You gripped the dark strands, not to push him away, but to anchor yourself.
“Bucky…” you gasped.
He answered by deepening his assault. His tongue focused on your clit, circling the swollen bud, then flattening against it, applying a pressure that made your vision blur. He alternated—flicking, sucking, then driving his tongue lower, into the very opening of your cunt. He tasted you there, deep, his nose nudging against your sensitive flesh. The sounds were obscene: the wet, slick noises of his mouth working on you, your own ragged breaths, the soft thud of your heel against the table leg as your body jerked.
His hands held your thighs open, his grip firm, almost painful, but the pain was a bright thread in the tapestry of pleasure. You could feel his own need radiating from him; the hard ridge of his cock pressed against his trousers, a relentless bulge against your calf.
He pulled back for a moment, his lips glistening with your wetness. His eyes, hazy with lust, locked with yours. “You taste like you’ve been thinking about this all day. Like you’ve been fucking dreaming about my mouth on you.”
“I was,” you confessed, your voice shaking. “I dreamed about your cock, too. About it filling me up right here, on this table.”
A fierce, possessive grin split his face. “Then get it for me.”
You pushed at his shoulders, urging him up. He rose, his body towering over you. Your hands went back to his shirt, yanking the remaining buttons free. The fabric fell open, revealing his entire torso—a landscape of hard-earned muscle, of old scars and new strength. Your palms swept over his skin, feeling the heat, the texture, the powerful flex of his abdomen as he breathed. You pushed the shirt off his shoulders, letting it drop to the floor.
His belt was next. You unbuckled it with frantic fingers, the leather giving way. His trousers, you unzipped, and then you shoved them down along with his boxer briefs. His cock sprang free, and you drank in the sight.
It was thick, veined, and fully erect, the head a dark, flushed crimson. It curved slightly upward, a proud, demanding arch. Pre-cum beaded at the tip, a clear promise of what was to come. You reached for it, your fingers wrapping around the base. It was hot, almost feverish, and solid as steel. You stroked him, once, twice, feeling him pulse in your hand.
“You’re so fucking hard for me,” you whispered, awed.
“Only for you,” he gritted out. His hands framed your face, pulling you into a kiss. This wasn’t the gentle brushing from before. This was a sloppy, desperate merger. His tongue plunged into your mouth, tasting himself on your lips, mixing with your own flavor. It was a feedback loop of desire. You kissed him back with equal hunger, your teeth nipping at his lip, your tongue battling his.
He broke the kiss, breathing harshly. “On the table. On your back. Now.”
He helped you, his hands guiding you to lie flat on the oak surface. The wood was cool against your bare shoulders, your back. Your dress was still bunched at your waist, your legs spread for him. He stood between them, his cock poised at your entrance. One hand gripped your hip, the other went to your cunt, his fingers parting your lips, spreading your wetness, ensuring you were open for him.
“Look at me,” he commanded, his voice a rough stone.
You obeyed. Your eyes found his, and you saw the storm there—the love, the violence, the absolute need. It was all for you.
He didn’t ease into you. He owned you. With a single, powerful thrust, he drove his cock into your cunt.
The penetration was a stunning, full-bodied event. He was big, and he filled you with a sudden, breathtaking pressure. Your inner walls stretched to accommodate him, a delicious, burning ache that instantly blossomed into a wave of pure pleasure. You cried out, a sound that was half pain, half ecstasy, your nails scratching at the table’s surface.
“Fuck… Bucky, you’re so deep…” you moaned.
He held himself there, buried to the root, letting you feel every inch of him. His eyes never left yours. “This cunt is mine. This body is mine. You are mine. Say it.”
“I’m yours,” you gasped, the words a truth you’d never deny.
He began to move.
His fucking was a declaration. He pulled back almost entirely, then slammed back in, each thrust a measured, powerful stroke. The rhythm was relentless, each impact sending a jolt through your body, rocking you against the hard table. The sounds were a crude symphony: the slap of his thighs against yours, the wet, rhythmic squelch of his cock plunging into your soaked channel, your own escalating moans.
One of his hands remained on your hip, anchoring you. The other traveled upward, over your stomach, to your breast. He pushed your dress down further, exposing your bra. He didn’t bother with the clasp; he pulled the cup down, freeing your breast. Your nipple, hard and sensitive, met his palm. He squeezed, not gently, a possessive pressure that made you arch off the table.
“You love this,” he grunted, his thrusts never faltering. “You love being fucked by me like this, like a fucking possession.”
“I love it,” you sobbed, the pleasure coiling tighter inside you, a spring being wound. “I love your cock in my cunt. I love how you fuck me. Fuck me harder.”
He obliged. His pace intensified, his hips driving into you with a faster, more brutal cadence. The table creaked under the force. Your head tossed back, your vision filled with the ceiling’s blurred lines. You were lost in the sensation—the thick, hot invasion of his cock, the rough grasp of his hands, the raw words pouring from his mouth.
After a few minutes of this, his rhythm changed. He slowed, withdrawing almost completely, leaving you empty and gasping. “Turn over,” he ordered, his voice thick with urgency. “Hands and knees on the table. I want to see that ass. I want to fuck that cunt from behind.”
You scrambled, your body slick with sweat and desire. You turned, getting onto your knees, your hands planted on the table for support. Your back was to him now, your ass presented to him. You felt the cool air on your exposed skin, felt the vulnerable, open position you were in.
His gaze was a hot brand on your back. You knew what he was seeing: the curve of your spine, the swell of your ass cheeks, and between them, your cunt, now glistening and gaping slightly from his previous fucking. Your pussy lips were flushed darker, swollen from use, the entrance slick and inviting. Above it, the small, shadowed pucker of your asshole was visible, a forbidden temptation.
He didn’t speak. His hands landed on your ass, spreading you wider. His thumbs pressed into the soft flesh, parting you fully for his view. He leaned in, and you felt his mouth again, not on your cunt this time, but higher. His lips pressed a hot, open-mouthed kiss against the curve of your ass cheek, then his tongue traced a wet line down the crease between your cheeks, towards your cunt.
“So fucking beautiful,” he muttered, his voice muffled against your skin. “This ass. This cunt. All mine.”
Then his cock found you again. From behind, the angle was different, deeper. He guided himself into your wetness, and the entry was a smooth, profound slide. He filled you up, his pelvis meeting your ass with a solid impact. One hand stayed on your hip, the other moved lower, between your legs.
His fingers found your clit.
As he fucked you, his thumb circled the swollen bud, applying a perfect, matching pressure to his thrusts. The dual stimulation was overwhelming. Each drive of his cock into your cunt was paired with a pulse of pleasure from his touch on your clit. Your moans became continuous, a stream of sound that you couldn’t control.
“You’re gonna take my cum,” he growled, his thrusts becoming faster, more urgent. “You’re gonna take it deep in this cunt. I’m gonna fill you up until you’re dripping with me.”
“Yes,” you begged, your body trembling on the edge. “Give it to me, Bucky. Fill me up. I want it.”
His hand on your hip moved to your hair. He gathered the strands at the back of your head, gripping them, not pulling painfully, but holding you firmly, controlling your posture. It was a possessive gesture that sent a fresh spike of submission through you, tightening the coil of your climax even further.
His fucking became erratic, a desperate, final sprint. His breath sawed in and out, his body slamming into yours with a force that shook the table. His fingers on your clit pressed harder, faster.
“Come for me,” he commanded, his voice ragged. “Come on my cock. Now.”
The command, the sensation, the sheer ownership broke you. The climax detonated, not a wave but a chain reaction of white-hot pulses radiating from your cunt and clit outward, searing through your belly, your legs, your fingers. You screamed, your body locking rigid for a moment before convulsing in release. Your cunt clamped around his driving cock, milking him, demanding his own finish.
He felt it, and he lost his last shred of control. With a final, deep roar, he drove into you, burying himself as deep as he could go. You felt him swell inside you, felt the hot, sudden flood of his cum erupting into your depths. It was a series of pulses, a hot, liquid jetting that filled you, marking you internally. He held himself there, grinding into you as he emptied himself, his grip on your hair tightening, his other hand still working your clit through your own climax.
He turned you gently, pulling you against him, your back to his chest. His arms wrapped around you, holding you on the table. His lips found your shoulder, and he nipped at the skin, a gentle, possessive bite.
“You’re mine,” he whispered again, the vow now a satisfied truth.
The room fell quiet except for the soft crackle of the fire in the hearth and the slow, shared rhythm of your breathing. Bucky eased out of you with careful gentleness, a warm trickle following, but he never let you go. He gathered you against his chest—strong arms wrapping around you like armor—pulling the thick duvet over both of your bodies. His lips found your forehead, your temple, the corner of your eye, pressing soft, lingering kisses there as if sealing every inch of you with his devotion.
You nestled closer, cheek against the steady thud of his heart, fingers tracing idle patterns over the ink on his chest. The world outside the mansion—the threats, the blood, the endless power plays—felt impossibly far away. Here, in this bed, in his arms, there was only warmth, safety, and the quiet certainty that you belonged to each other. He had you now—completely, irrevocably—and the ruthless king of New York finally had everything he’d ever truly wanted: you, safe, loved, and his forever.
You had it all. The man you were going to marry, the beautiful home you planned to move into, the bookstore days away from grand opening. Life with Steve Rogers was perfect. Until it all came crashing down. So what happens when your soon-to-be husband passes away unexpectedly and you’re left to pick up the pieces alongside his best friends, one of whom you can’t stand… right? Oh and one more thing, he was hiding a devastating secret that changes everything in an instant.
Loosely based on the movie Catch and Release. Somewhat slow burn, enemies to friends to eventual lovers, angst, smut, female reader.
Buckle up for this one!!
TW: mentions of depression, anxiety, panic attacks, death, and grief
Previous Chapter
James and I hadn’t spoken to each other in person for a few weeks. By the time I’m up, he’s already gone for the day and comes back late at night. Sam and Tony can feel that we’re avoiding each other like the plague but decide it’s best to not ask. He would text me brief updates on the status of things like with Sarah and the money, but nothing else. It’s easier this way.
Business has been booming, and Wanda and I have had our hands full with order requests and event collaborations. We knew that a bookstore was what the town had wanted but didn’t realize the commodity it would become. Keeping busy gave me an escape from reality and a distraction from several feelings.
As I got ready for the day, I noticed the house was quieter than normal. I walk into the kitchen and see a note from the boys letting me know they had to go out of town for the day to pick up supplies from their manufacturer. Barnes had been long gone and I had the house to myself. It felt eerie how empty it was without their presence. I wish Sam and Tony would have told me. I could have gone along. It was my first day off in a while and I wanted to spend some time with them. Instead, I choose to spend the day doing a little shopping to occupy my mind. I make a list of the items I want to purchase and head out.
Making my way outside, I see a gorgeous woman with red hair holding a young boy’s hand. I stop dead in my tracks. It can’t be. Why is she here?
I make a beeline for my car and here her call after me. “Um excuse me! Hi excuse me!” Nows your chance Y/N make a run for it! I sigh as I watch her speed walk toward me in her heels, kid in tow. “Hi so sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Bucky Barnes, do you know where he is?”
Damnit Barnes, always the thorn in my side. “Sorry, I’m not sure where he is.”
“Well, is anyone home that can help me? I’m Natasha Romanoff. Bucky left me a message about Steve a while back and I scrounged up what I could to get over here,” she sighs. Her son begins to pull her arm to keep walking. She struggles to calm him and looks flustered, apologizing for his behavior. Anger begins to bubble inside of me. Does she not know who I am? Did Steve not mention me at all? If they were simply co-parenting, would he not have mentioned his fiancée who he came back home to after every trip?
I look at her in this state and realize the woman who I crafted in my head isn’t her at all. At least not this version. She has visible bags under her eyes and stress lines along her face. Her outfit, hair, and makeup are all put together but the cracks are farther below the surface, most likely from the hardships of motherhood. A pang of guilt hits me as I realize what it must have taken to travel all this way.
Swallowing my pride I decide against revealing who I am. “Sorry no one’s home at the moment. I could leave a message?”
“Who are you anyways?” She asks hesitantly.
“Oh I’m the housekeeper,” I lie through my teeth.
“Um yeah a message would be great. Could you just tell Bucky that I’m here and need to talk to him as soon as possible? Let him know we’re staying at the Crystal Waters Inn just down the road.”
“Yeah I’ll let him know.” I promise.
“Thank you so much you’re a gem.” She begins to walk away when an intrusive thought leaves my head and rushes out.
“Your son. He’s not six is he?” I question, scared that I know the answer already.
“He’s about to be four! He’s getting so big,” she smiles. “Thank you again for being so kind. Hope to see you around!”
I wait for them to leave my line of sight and bolt back into the house. This can’t be happening. What the fuck? I could accept that Steve had lied about something before me, but this changes everything. We had already been dating when they got together. The room begins to spin, and I lean against the wall, sliding down onto the kitchen floor. I can’t stop the sobs that are leaving my body. I feel a heavy weight crushing my chest, and my vision goes blurry. Somehow I manage to pull out my phone to call for help. Choosing the first person I can think to call. The phone rings a few times before the other line answers.
“Hello?” a confused voice answers.
“Bucky,” I sob out.
“Y/N, what happened? What’s going on?” He asks in a worried tone.
“I- I can’t breathe. Everything is so fucked. Why did you lie? Why did Steve lie?!”
“I’m on my way, sit tight. Talk to me doll. What’s going on?” He asks again.
“I saw her James. She’s here with her son. They’re here.” I whisper. It dawns on me that I’m crying to Barnes of all people and he’s dropped whatever he was doing to come help me. He’s never dealt with me in this state before.
Bucky bursts through the door with a panicked look on his face. He sees me, a sobbing mess, on the floor and crouches down. “Fuck, Y/N I’m so sorry. This wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
The reality of the situation and how agonizing this all is sets in, and my breathing speeds up. I’m having a full-blown panic attack.
Barnes’ eyes widen and he isn’t sure what to do. “How do I help you? Please, Y/N you have to take deeper breaths.”
“Cold shower,” I say between staggered breaths. Whenever I’ve had an anxiety attack, a cold shower was the only way to shock my body out of it. Bucky rushes to scoop me up off the floor and into my bedroom. He turns the shower on and makes sure it’s as cold as possible. Hesitating for a brief moment, he removes our shoes and places both of us in the water.
The water shocks my system and instantly throws me out of my panicked state. I manage to calm my breathing a bit and take in the scene before me. Bucky is holding my face between his hands and telling me to breathe. His clothes are soaking wet and his hair clings to his face. I’m sure I look no better. We stare at each other for a brief moment, the only sound coming from the running shower.
“You owe me the truth, Barnes. Not some bullshit lie to protect Steve.” I demand, water still running down my back.
“I know, and I’m sorry. Can we maybe get out of this bathroom first?” He asks. I turn the water off and we ring out our clothes as much as we can. Throwing Bucky a towel, I briefly watch as he tries to dry himself off. His black shirt clings to his chest and accentuates the muscle carved out on his body. He catches me staring and I look away embarrassed.
We part ways for a moment to change into dry outfits. James knocks on my door before entering again. He sits on the chair at my desk facing me. The room in the air turns awkward.
“I’ll take care of this. I can fix this.” He attempts to promise.
“You can’t just fix all of his mistakes James! He made them and he’s not here to explain himself. I just want the truth. I know the kid’s younger than you had said. He cheated, didn’t he?”
“He is younger, yes. And Steve did meet her when you were already in his life. But he didn’t cheat, not technically.” Bucky answered.
I look at him confused. We had been together at that point for at least a year.
“Do you remember that first big fight you guys had? It was about his mom and the way she was treating you. Steve didn’t know how to please both of you and was afraid of speaking up to her.” He questions.
“Yeah we got into it pretty bad. I had mentioned his mother quite a few times. At that point we both didn’t know how to fix things. We broke things off for a bit and realized that we loved each other more than we hated the problems.”
“That break was really hard for him. He came to visit me and I took him out. The rest of what I shared was the truth. When he won you back, he freaked when Nat told him about the baby. He was so afraid that you’d call it quits for good that time.” James explains.
I stand up angry at the thought of the mess this all caused. I walk over to James and stand in front of him. “So you’re telling me, when I was a mess crying over that man he was with someone else? And when we got back together and he told me I was all he could think about he had been with her?! What kind of sick shit is that?” I yell, poking Bucky’s chest. He stands up and towers over me.
“I know you’re angry Y/N. I don’t blame you. He made his choices and they weren’t always perfect. All I know is that he thought he was doing it out of love.”
“And you went along with it. With all of the lies and secrets. You didn’t see anything wrong with it?!” I shove his chest but he doesn’t budge. This makes me angrier and I try to shove him again.
Bucky grabs my wrists and pleads for me to stop. He gently pushes me against a wall, wrists pinned above my head. He tries to calm me down, worried I may have another panic attack. My chest is heaving, but not from anxiety. His deep blue eyes stare into mine and we both find ourselves frozen. The tension thick enough to cut through. Before the moment can be ruined, I push my body closer to his. He takes this as an invitation to make the move we both had been waiting for and crashes his lips onto mine. We pour all of the anger and need into the kiss, unsure if we will ever get a chance to spill our feelings again. I throw my hands into his hair, pulling at the brown strands. He groans and bites my lip. Pleasure bursts through my body at the sound. His hands are gripping my waist, steadying me from falling over from our rash movements. We melt into each other with ease, as if this is natural for us.
I walk us over to my bed, and he pushes me down. He works quickly to remove my shirt and takes in my physique, studying the map of my body. Our lips find each other again, moving in sync. He begins to remove my pants, slowly unbuttoning them. I whimper at his slow pace, and he groans again. “Fuck, doll.”
His words snap me out of the daze I am in and I realize how far we have taken this. I grow stiff and look at him with wide eyes. Bucky emerges from his trance as well and quickly sits up.
“Sorry, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have- we shouldn’t,” he stammers.
“It was a mistake, you’re right. We can just forget about this,” I assure him. I quickly find my shirt and put it back on. We stare at each other in bewilderment, cautious to not scare the other off.
“I’m going to talk to Natasha. I’ll take care of things,” he promises. Bucky rushes out of the room, leaving me to ponder the events that just transpired. I try to shake the images of him staring at me with lust-filled eyes. Throwing myself back down on the bed, I huff in frustration. It was just the heat of the moment, nothing more. My body aches at the thought of what would have happened if we had continued. I can’t think about that.
Trying to find something to distract myself, I find my journal and begin to write out my thoughts.
Steve,
Guess the cat’s out of the bag, huh? I’m so beyond devastated that you kept this from me. I wish you could explain why you did. Was the foundation of our relationship built on a lie? Did you truly think it was better to deceive me than come clean? I’m sure this ate you up inside. But it’s tearing everything I believed about us apart. I try to think about moments that you might have wanted to tell me the truth and only one comes to mind.
It was when we took a drive up the coast. The trip was so beautiful. The green on the mountains never made me feel so alive. I always felt me best when I was with you and this day was no different. I had just decided to leave my job and fully invest my time in Book It. You were so proud of me you decided a trip was the best way to celebrate. We packed up the truck, stopped by for some sandwiches from Willy’s and left the real world behind for a moment. It was a perfect day. On the drive back, you said you needed to tell me something. I asked if what you needed to tell me was going to ruin this untouchable feeling and you said yes. So I said Don’t tell me. And we smiled at each other. I never thought about what you had to tell me again, and you never brought it up. That was over two years ago.
I think a part of you wanted to come clean Steve. So I understand. But I don’t think I can forgive you. Not yet, anyway. I hope you can understand that. You chose yourself in deciding to keep this hidden. Now I have to choose me in not letting you hold this power over me. I wish I could let this all go, but I’m in the thick of it because of you.
My phone goes off and I see a text from Bucky. I close my journal and read his message.
James: Talked with Natasha and we’re going to get it all sorted. I’m sorry if I pushed things too far. I’m going to find a hotel to stay at and get out of your hair. As soon as this is sorted you won’t have to deal with me again.
A pain hits my chest at the last sentence. Shouldn’t I be happy to not have to deal with him?
series summary: you're steve's sister, and bucky barnes' girlfriend. and maybe also a supersoldier from the 40s
chapter summary: the tour, the tights, and the news that stops everything
chapter warnings: sexism (period-accurate and infuriating), unwanted attention from strangers, a proposal, an unsent letter, canon-typical war content, angst, death (the Rogers' twins' dad).
A/N: i have a goddamn math test that i am VERY unprepared for so like good luck to me im locking in after this. 5.6k words so buckle up youre in for a wild ride.
series masterlist ♡ masterlist ♡ next chapter
The formula died with Dr. Erskine.
You learned that officially two days later, in a briefing room that smelled like burnt coffee and worse news, when a very tired man from Washington explained, in the careful voice of someone delivering a eulogy, that the vial recovered from the Hydra agent's coat had shattered beyond recovery, and that Erskine's real notes — the ones that mattered — had gone into the same fire that took him.
Which meant there were two of you. Just two. The first and the last.
"So we study them," Colonel Phillips said, the way he'd said it once already, except now there was nowhere else for the sentence to go. No formula meant no next batch of soldiers. No next batch meant the two supersoldiers currently sitting on the other side of that door were the only data anyone was ever going to get.
"They're not specimens," Agent Carter said, in the flat, dangerous voice you were coming to recognize as the one she used right before she made someone regret something.
"They're the only two supersoldiers on the planet, Agent Carter. Call it whatever helps you sleep."
You didn't hear the rest, because Steve had his hand on the door, and you both knew exactly what waited on the other side. A locked wing. Blood draws. Reflex tests run by men in white coats who looked at you the way Erskine never had. Like a result, not a person.
Steve, ever your brother, ever incapable of sitting still while someone else made the decision for him, was gone before you'd finished lacing your boots the next morning. You found him in a tent that smelled like typewriter ink and cheap cologne, already deep in conversation with a senator.
--
Senator Brandt had the smile of a man who'd never once lost an argument, mostly because he never had them — he simply waited for you to agree with him and called that a conversation.
"The Army's not letting either of you near a battlefield until they know this serum wasn't a fluke," he said. "Which means you've got two choices. Sit in a room and let men in coats poke you with needles for the rest of the war — or you go where the needles can't reach you. Stages. Radio. Newsreels. You'll sell more war bonds in an afternoon than this whole camp could raise in a year, and nobody in Washington's got the nerve to lock up the man selling them."
It was, you had to admit, a better offer than the one behind door number one. Still.
"And her?" Steve asked, nodding at you, the way he'd been doing since the two of you were children and he'd decided, without ever asking you, that your interests and his were permanently and irrevocably the same thing. Good thing he usually was right.
Brandt's eyes flicked to you then, properly, for the first time. Calculating. "Now that's a picture, isn't it? Your best girl, right up there beside you, both of you strong enough to lift a jeep. Folks'll go wild for it."
You thought about Erskine's chamber, the gold light, the way he'd told you you are not an experiment, you are hope, and about how quickly hope became a poster.
"Fine," you said, before Steve could argue on your behalf again. "I'll do the shows. But I want it in writing that the second the Army needs nurses at the front, I go."
Brandt's smile didn't waver. "Sure thing, Miss Rogers."
He wrote nothing down.
--
By the third city, you had a routine, and the routine went like this: you smiled until your face ached, you kept your knees together the way the wardrobe girl kept reminding you, and you tried very hard not to notice the way certain men in certain rows looked at you like you were part of the merchandise.
You were, technically. That was the whole problem.
The studio had taken one look at supersoldier, five-foot-nothing before the serum, decorated Army nurse, sister of the man they'd already decided to build an empire around and decided, collectively, that what America needed from you wasn't your strength. It needed your legs.
The costume shrank with every city, and it stopped being a nurse's uniform entirely somewhere around the second week. What replaced it was, in the wardrobe department's own words, "Columbia brought to life" — the old poster-goddess made flesh and sent out to sell bonds. A breastplate molded to look like burnished gold, striped in red and white where it dipped low across your ribs. A star pinned at your collarbone the size of a dinner plate. A skirt cut from deep blue and scattered with white stars that ended, scandalously, above the knee, paired with a flowing cape that was more theater than fabric, meant to catch the stage lights and billow dramatically every time you turned. They gave you a laurel-and-liberty circlet for your hair instead of the nurse's cap, and a prop torch to hold aloft in the finale, because apparently the actual Statue of Liberty had not been quite on-the-nose enough for the marketing department. You looked less like a woman and more like a monument that had wandered off its pedestal, which, you supposed, was rather the point. You'd stopped being Miss Rogers, the woman who'd carried grown men off a battlefield. You were "Columbia" now, gleaming and gold and built to be looked at, waving that torch on cue while Steve did the actual demonstrating.
"Sock him, soldier boy!" someone would shout during Steve's number, and Steve would sock a very convincing-looking Hitler, and the crowd would roar.
"Give us a twirl, sweetheart!" someone would shout during yours, and you would twirl, because the choreographer had built the whole number around it, and the choreographer did not care that you could, if you wanted to, put your fist straight through the stage floor.
You brought it up to the director exactly once. "I went through the same procedure he did," you said, keeping your voice level in the way you'd learned worked better than shouting, as a result of your days handling drugged-out soldiers in the hospital. "I can lift a car. I can outrun a train. Why am I singing instead of fighting?"
He looked at you with the patient, faintly pitying expression of a man explaining something obvious to a child. "Sweetheart, folks don't want to watch a girl throw a punch. They want to watch her hand her fella a rifle and wave him off to war. That's the picture that sells bonds."
You hadn't hit him, which you considered, afterward, a heroic act of restraint.
It wasn't only the shows, either. The Army had decided, with the same efficiency it applied to everything it didn't fully understand, that a woman who could lift a jeep was nonetheless best deployed convincing other women to rivet airplane wings. You were sent to factory floors in Pittsburgh and Detroit, posed beside women in coveralls and headscarves, told to smile and say something inspiring about doing your part.
It was on one of those factory floors that the campaign people found their poster.
They'd already picked their girl, as it turned out — a real riveter, a Michigan girl named Rosalind who went by Rosie, who'd been photographed months earlier with her sleeve rolled up and her jaw set, flexing over a rivet gun for a magazine spread nobody outside Detroit had paid much attention to. She was supposed to be the face of the whole "We Can Do It" push. Then someone in Washington saw a newsreel of you lifting an engine block clean off a stalled truck outside the plant gates, one-handed, laughing about it afterward like it hadn't cost you any effort at all, and decided the campaign needed a bigger name than a Michigan girl nobody had heard of.
You met Rosie exactly once, in a hallway outside a studio office, both of you there for what you'd assumed were separate appointments. She was smaller than you expected and steadier than anyone had a right to be, given what you were fairly sure was happening to her in the room she'd just walked out of.
"They're putting your face on it instead," she said. Not a question.
"I didn't ask them to," you said, which was true, and felt useless the second it left your mouth.
She looked at you for a long moment — not unkindly, just measuring — the way you imagined she measured a piece of sheet metal before she put a rivet through it. "Figures," she said. "Real girl works the line for eleven hours a day, and they still want a supersoldier wearing a bandana instead." She didn't say it cruelly. She said it like a fact she'd already made peace with, which somehow made it worse.
You thought about offering to fight it, to tell the campaign people you wouldn't do it unless they used her, and then thought about how little that offer was actually worth coming from someone with no say over her own costume, her own schedule, or her own photographs. "I'm sorry," you said instead, because it was the only honest thing you had.
"Don't be sorry," Rosie said. "Be good at it. At least then it wasn't for nothing."
They put you on the poster three weeks later — sleeve rolled up, fist raised, the same slogan stitched above your head that had been meant for her. You kept a folded copy of the original magazine spread, the one with Rosie's actual face on it, tucked into your trunk for the rest of the tour. You never told anyone why.
It was, you had to admit, the only part of the tour that didn't make you want to scream entirely — there was something almost bearable about standing shoulder to shoulder with women who were actually building something, even if the country had decided, in the end, that it would rather look at you doing it.
"They don't know what to do with you," Steve said one night, on the train between cities, watching dark countryside slide past the window. "You're not a soldier on paper. You're not really a nurse right now either. You're just-"
"A picture," you finished. "I know."
He was quiet a moment. "For what it's worth, I think you'd be better in the field than half the men Phillips has actually got there."
"Tell that to Phillips."
"I have," Steve said grimly. "Repeatedly. He has a lot of very creative ways of telling me no."
You couldn't go home anymore, not really. Your old Brooklyn apartment, the one with the too-low doorframe you'd both learned to duck for, the desk you no longer fit at, was quietly shut up not long after the tour began, once someone in Washington decided the sister and brother currently plastered across every newsreel in the country probably shouldn't be living somewhere any reporter with a phone book could find. You moved with the tour instead, city to city, hotel to hotel, your whole life packed into two trunks. It should have felt glamorous. It just felt like you were stripped of your past life: watching Steve pace around the tiny home after being rejected from the army once again, and Bucky dropping you off after your date, standing on the porch with you and doing everything but saying goodbye, long enough that Steve would open the door to say it to him. That wasn't going to happen anymore. Now you were ushered into a hotel room across the hallway from your brother's, shut in until your wake-up call the next day.
--
The photographs were, in a way, worse than the shows, because at least onstage there was a script, blocking, a director calling out when to stop. The photographs were just you, standing still, while strangers decided how close was close enough.
You learned to read the shift in a man's posture before he made his move — a kind of animal awareness the serum had sharpened along with everything else. The too-long look. The hand that found the small of your back or your waist for a photograph that didn't require it. The reporter in Ohio who'd leaned in to "get a better angle" and gotten close enough that you could smell the whiskey on him at two in the afternoon.
Steve had a way of appearing in those moments that you were fairly sure wasn't accidental. He'd drift over mid-photograph, all easy smile and effortless height, and simply put himself where a shoulder or an arm had been a second before, so smoothly that most men never quite registered they'd been moved. "Careful," he'd say pleasantly, to nobody in particular, "she's stronger than she looks," and somehow that was always enough to send the offending hand somewhere else.
"You don't have to do that every time," you told him once, after a rally in Albany where he'd wedged himself between you and a state senator's son for the third photograph in a row.
"I know I don't have to," Steve said. "I want to."
"I could break his hand before he finished the thought."
"I know that too. Doesn't mean you should have to."
You didn't have an answer for that, so you let him keep doing it.
--
You wrote to Bucky between shows, on hotel stationery, on the backs of programs, on anything you could find. Your handwriting was still new to you — bigger, bolder, more sure of itself than the careful, painstaking letters you'd sent in the first weeks after the serum — but it was yours now, every word of it, and that alone made every letter feel worth sending.
They've got me in a skirt that would make Ma faint, you wrote him in July. Steve says I look ridiculous. Steve is right.
They put my face on a comic book, you wrote in August. I have abs now, apparently, in the drawing. I do not have abs like that in real life. I checked.
In September, you sent him a photograph — the only formal one that existed of the two of you in costume, taken by an Army photographer in Philadelphia and paid for out of some publicity fund, since your own salary didn't stretch to portraits. In it you were mid-laugh, caught off guard by something Steve had said just before the shutter clicked, one gloved hand on your hip, the ridiculous little cap pinned at its ridiculous angle. You almost didn't send it. It felt strange, mailing him proof of the version of you that existed in magazines instead of the version that had grown up beside him.
His reply came to the hotel you'd been staying at in Cleveland, courtesy of the schedule you sent him so he'd know where to send his letters to.
Doll, he wrote, I have shown this photograph to every man in this unit whether they asked to see it or not, and I would like it on record that Dum Dum Dugan actually said the word "wowza" out loud, in front of witnesses, and then had to sit down. I have never been prouder or more furious in my entire life, sometimes within the same sentence. You look like trouble. You have always looked like trouble.
Also — and I say this with love — whoever decided you should be twirling around in that costume instead of doing whatever terrifying nurse things you're actually capable of has clearly never seen you set a bone. Their loss. My gain, I suppose, since I get to be the only one who knows what you're really capable of.
Keep the photographs coming. I'll take whatever pieces of you I can get out here.
You read it standing in a hotel hallway in Cleveland and laughed out loud, alone, for the first time in weeks.
--
His next letter came in October, thicker than usual, and you knew before you'd even broken the seal that something in it was different.
--
My Dearest Y/N,
I've started this letter more times than I can count, which you'll know is unusual for me, seeing as I've never had trouble telling you exactly what's on my mind. But this one's different. This one I want to get right.
Dum Dum's been ribbing me for a week straight because he caught me practicing what I'm about to write, out loud, to absolutely no one, in a tent full of men who now think I've lost it entirely. Maybe I have. It happens, apparently, when you love somebody the way I love you.
I keep coming back to that photograph. There you are, up there four thousand miles from where I'm standing, being brave and stubborn and impossible in exactly the way you've always been. Serum or no serum. I'd have loved you exactly the same if you'd stayed five-foot-nothing for the rest of your life. None of what happened to you changed a single thing about what I feel. It just meant the whole world finally got to see what I already knew.
So here's the part I keep practicing and keep getting wrong, so I'm just going to say it plain, the way you'd want me to.
I don't want to wait until the war's over to ask you properly. I know it's not the way it's supposed to be done — I don't have a ring, I can't get down on one knee where you can see me, I can't take you to that little Italian place on the corner where the owner used to slip us extra bread when we were too broke to order dessert. I've got a muddy field and a stub of pencil and about four minutes before I'm needed on watch. It's not romantic. It's not what you deserve.
But I'm not waiting anymore, Y/N. I've watched too many good men run out of time to say the things they meant to say.
Marry me. When I get home — and I am getting home, I've decided, so don't you dare argue with me about it from all the way over there — marry me. Let me build you that too-small house with the porch you keep drawing in the margins of your letters. Let me be boring with you. Let me spend the next sixty years finding out what colour your eyes really are in every different kind of light, because I have a feeling I could look for sixty years and never get tired of it.
I already know what you're going to say. I just need to see it in your handwriting. The real one. Yours.
Yours, completely and always,
Bucky
(Tell Steve I said hello, and that if he lets one more reporter call you "the Star-Spangled Man's kid sister" instead of using your actual name, I will personally deal with it when I'm home.)
--
You read it three times standing in the wings of a theatre in Cleveland while the stagehands called ten minutes, and by the third read you weren't crying so much as simply leaking, quietly and without any particular decorum, while a very confused wardrobe girl tried to hand you your boots.
You wrote back that same night, still in the ridiculous cap, ink smudging under your palm because you couldn't make your hand slow down enough to be neat about it.
--
My James,
Yes.
I want that to be the very first word you see, before you have to wade through anything else, because I know you, and I know you'll read the whole thing twice looking for it if I bury it in the middle.
Yes. A thousand times yes. I would have said it when I was seven years old and you shook my hand like I was somebody worth knowing, if anyone had thought to ask a seven-year-old her opinion on the matter.
You don't need a ring, and you don't need the Italian place on the corner, though I fully expect you to take me there the second you're home, extra bread and all. I've had the only thing that ever mattered since we were children. Everything else is just details.
I keep thinking about that too-small house. I want the porch. I want the boring Sundays. I want to watch you get old and cranky and still somehow more handsome every single year, which is deeply unfair to the rest of us, and I have decided to forgive you for it in advance.
They've got me doing another show tomorrow, another twirl, another crowd that cheers for a version of the war that doesn't look anything like the one you're actually fighting. I hate it more than I've let myself say out loud. I miss having a real bandage in my hands instead of a paper flag. But I keep thinking about you reading this, wherever you are, and it makes the whole ridiculous costume worth it.
I don't have a diamond to send you either, so here's my promise instead, the realest thing I own: wherever you are, whatever's happened, I am coming to find you. I mean that plainly, not romantically. If this war doesn't bring you home to me, I will come to wherever you are and drag you back myself. I have the arms for it now. Ask Steve.
Come home, James Buchanan Barnes. Come home and marry me and let me spend the rest of my life proving that everything you just wrote about me is true.
I love you. I have loved you since before I understood what the word meant, and I will love you long after either of us has any business still being alive to say so.
Yours. Completely and always yours,
Y/N
(P.S. Steve says hello back, and also that he will absolutely still be calling me his kid sister when we're both ninety, so you'll have to take that up with him in person.)
--
You sealed it, addressed it, and walked it to the mail drop yourself before you could talk yourself out of any of it, humming something you didn't have a name for, lighter than you'd felt in months.
It made it as far as a mail depot outside London before the news came through that made every letter addressed to the 107th Infantry Regiment redundant.
--
The show that changed everything happened five miles from the front, in Italy, in a tent that smelled like mud and antiseptic and wet canvas instead of the perfume and hairspray of every venue before it.
You should have known the moment you walked out from behind the curtain. The audiences back home were a blur of clean uniforms and eager faces, boys who hadn't shipped out yet, wives and mothers who wanted something to believe in. This crowd was different in a way you felt before you understood it — too many arms in slings, too many faces gone the particular grey color you recognized from every cot you'd ever knelt beside. Bandages that hadn't been changed recently enough. A man near the front with his eyes fixed somewhere past the stage entirely, somewhere you couldn't follow him to.
You performed anyway. That was the job.
They didn't want it. Not the twirl, not the song, not Steve's rubber-jawed Hitler taking his nightly beating.
"Where's the real war, sweetheart?" someone called out, halfway through your number, and it wasn't friendly.
"Bring back the girls with the good song!" another shouted over Steve's opening lines, and someone else laughed, too loud, at something you couldn't hear, and you caught the shape of the word chorus girl thrown at Steve's back like a weapon, which, considering what he'd actually wanted to be doing with his life since he was seventeen, it was.
You saw it land. You saw the exact second something in Steve's face went hollow, watched him keep smiling through the last verse anyway because the show didn't stop just because the star had stopped believing in it, and underneath the noise you found yourself doing what you always did now without meaning to — cataloguing the crowd the way a nurse catalogues a ward. Fresh dressings. A man favouring his left side. Another with two fingers missing and a stare that didn't track you across the stage. Whatever these men had come from, they'd come from it recently, and they'd come from it badly.
Backstage, in the mud behind the tent, Steve sat on an overturned crate, a piece of paper forgotten in his hands, not saying anything at all. You'd have gone to sit beside him if a familiar figure hadn't come around the tent flap first.
"Agent Carter," you said, surprised. She looked entirely out of place among the mud and canvas in her sharp coat, and entirely unbothered by that fact.
"Officially," she said, "I'm not here." Her eyes found Steve. "That was quite a performance."
"You should see the version with the twelve-year-olds," Steve said, not looking up. "Better audience."
"I don't imagine either of you noticed who you were playing to tonight," she said, and something in her voice made you go still. Not cruelty. Care, badly disguised as procedure. "I'd rather you hear the rest of it from me than piece it together from a casualty list."
Steve set the paper down.
"Schmidt sent a strike force against a Hydra weapons position near Azzano three weeks ago," Carter said. "Two hundred men went in. Fewer than fifty came back." She let that sit, watching both of you, and you understood, with the particular clarity your new eyes gave you for everything except this, that she was choosing her next words very carefully. "The men you performed for tonight — the ones in that tent, the ones who booed you off a stage they'd earned the right to boo you off of — that was what was left of it. The 107th Infantry."
The number hit you like something physical, a full second before your mind caught up to why.
You knew that number. You had known it long before it belonged to a war Bucky was fighting in, long before it belonged to Bucky at all.
--
You were seven years old the last time that regiment took someone from you.
Your father had come home from the first war with a cough that never fully left him — a wet, rattling thing that lived in his chest year-round, that got worse in winter and worse again every winter after that, until it stopped sounding like a cough at all and started sounding like something scraping its way out of him. He'd been gassed crossing the Hindenburg Line in the autumn of 1918, one week before the armistice, one week before it would have stopped mattering. Mustard gas, the doctors said, when your mother could get one of them to say anything plainly at all. It didn't kill him outright. It just started killing him slowly, and kept at it for eight patient years, while he worked the docks with lungs that had been turned to lace and told you and Steve, every single night, that he was feeling stronger.
You didn't understand, at seven, what any of that meant. You understood that your father smelled like the eucalyptus rub your mother mixed at the stove every evening, that his hands shook when he thought no one was watching, that some mornings he couldn't get out of bed and other mornings he insisted on walking you to school anyway, slower than the other fathers, stopping twice to catch a breath that never seemed to quite replenish him. You understood the sound he made in the night, through the thin apartment wall, better than you understood your own multiplication tables, which — given the way letters and numbers had always swum and traded places for you — was not saying very much.
You remembered the last night with a clarity that had nothing to do with the serum, because some memories didn't need enhancing to stay sharp. Steve, eight years old and already too stubborn to cry where anyone could see him, sitting on the floor outside your parents' room with his knees pulled to his chest. Your mother's voice, low and steady, reading something aloud to your father in the dark — a psalm, maybe, or just something to fill the space where his breathing used to be easier. You, too small to be any real use, standing in the doorway with a cup of water no one had asked you to bring, because it was the only thing you'd been able to think to do.
He'd asked for you specifically, near the end. You remembered that. You remembered climbing onto the bed beside him, careful of the tubes and the smell of camphor, and him smiling at you like you were the only bright thing left in the room.
"There's my girl," he'd said, which was the same thing Bucky would say to you, years later, in a hospital bed of his own when you'd reunited a few years ago, and you had never once let yourself notice the echo until this exact moment, standing in a mud-floored tent in Italy with Agent Carter's careful voice still hanging in the air.
"Steve's going to need you to be brave for him," your father had told you, his hand — thinner than you remembered hands being allowed to get — finding yours on the blanket. "He doesn't know how to be small yet. You do. Teach him."
You hadn't understood that either, not then. You understood it a great deal better now, having spent the last decade of your life doing exactly that.
He died before morning. The paper the doctor left behind — the death certificate, the one with complications of gas exposure sustained in service, 107th Infantry Regiment, A.E.F. typed across it in careful black letters, because even eight years later the war still got the credit for finishing what it started — sat on the kitchen table for two days before your mother finally asked Steve to read it aloud, because you couldn't, because the words had scrambled themselves into nonsense the way they always did, and you remembered sitting at that table with your hands over your ears, not because you didn't want to know, but because some small, seven-year-old part of you had already understood that once Steve said the words out loud, they would be permanently, unchangeably true.
When you became a nurse, you told people it was because you were good with your hands, good under pressure, unafraid of blood. All of that was true. None of it was the whole truth. The whole truth was that you had knelt beside your father's bed at seven years old with a cup of water you didn't know what to do with, and had promised yourself, in the specific, absolute way only children can promise things, that you would never again be the useless one in the room while someone you loved disappeared in front of you. Turns out, you started losing them when you were far too distant to help them. First, your mother. Now...
--
The world narrowed down to that number. Fewer than fifty came back.
You thought of the man near the front with his eyes fixed on nothing. You thought of every bandage you'd catalogued without letting yourself understand why you were doing it.
"The 107th," you said, and your voice came out steadier than you felt, because saying it plainly was the only way you knew how to keep standing. "That's Bucky's unit."
You didn't remember deciding to move. One moment you were standing in the mud with Steve's hand finding your elbow; the next you were both walking, fast, toward the command tent, toward Phillips, toward anyone who might have a casualty list with a name on it that wasn't the one you were already bracing for.
Phillips was hunched over a field table covered in paperwork when you pushed through the flap, and he didn't look up right away. "If it isn't the Star-Spangled Man and his best girl," he said, tired rather than sharp. "Little late for a show, isn't it."
"The list from Azzano," Steve said. "We need to see it."
"That list isn't for civilians, son, no matter what you're wearing on that shield."
"Please." You hadn't meant to say it that quietly. "Sergeant James Barnes. 107th. I just need to know if his name's on it."
That got Phillips to look up.
Something moved behind his eyes — not surprise, you realized. Recognition. The specific, weary recognition of a man who'd already had this exact conversation in his head and had been hoping he wouldn't have to have it out loud. He set down his pen. He was quiet long enough that you could hear your own pulse, too fast, too loud, the way it hadn't been since before the serum, since before your body had learned not to be afraid of anything.
"I've signed more letters like that one than I'd care to count today," he said finally, and for the first time since you'd met him, there was nothing gruff in it at all. "Barnes. Sergeant. Yeah." A pause that lasted a lifetime. "Name's on the list. I'm sorry."
The tent didn't tilt. The ground didn't give way. Some small, distant part of you had almost expected it to, had braced for it the way you'd braced for the letter about your mother — and instead the world simply kept being exactly as solid and exactly as unbearable as it had been one second before.
pairing: bucky barnes x avenger!fem!reader
genre: kinda fake enemies to lovers | heavy smut on purpose | oral sex | rough sex | spanking | heavy overstimulation | consensual choking | very dominant!bucky | brat!reader | power dynamics | forced proximity | emotional tension | aftercare | trauma references | hydra and red room mention | protective undertones | angst | non consensual confinement | psychological torture | audio-based manipulation | emotional manipulation | memory based distress | mind control | torture fully described like in a movie | pain | blood | waterboarding (torture)
word count: 69k
summary: Y/N and Bucky are the best at what they did, but couldn’t stand each other and now they’re forced together on a dangerous mission.
gummygunk
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
discoholicmusic
snowghoul
