𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐘: Clark & you shack up in a rundown motel for a stakeout. Like the gentleman he is, he takes the floor to make sure you get a good night's rest. Unfortunately for both of you, the next-door neighbours had different plans.
𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆/𝐂𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐆𝐎𝐑𝐘: Explicit/F!Reader
𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐒: smut, pwp, explicit, voyeurism themes, comedy, banter, p-in-v, creampies, clark covers your mouth to shut you up, making out
𝐖/𝐂: 1.8k+
It went on for days.
Rythmic. Insistent thuds coming from the wall adjacent to the bed. Your eye mask sat half pushed up your eyes, as if waiting for a —
Thud!
Right on cue, the muffled moan seeps through the paper-thin walls. Your palms curl to a tight fist around the pillow covering your ears, far surpassing your very last straw.
"Clark."
His shoulders twitch, but he doesn't say anything. You jerk upright. Swinging your pillow toward his sleeping form on the carpeted floor, next to the bed.
"Clark!"
He stiffens like a board, bouncing up and blinking at you, all alert, his hair sleep-mussed. Glasses sat crooked on his nose, likely from putting them on in haste. Clark's gaze turns intense for a second, scanning the room for any immediate danger.
"W-huh?! What's wrong?" He manages, voice raspy with sleep. The thumping across the wall doesn't miss his ears. Clark frowns, looking toward it.
"Did you hear something? Is someone in…" He doesn't wait for you to finish, but the sleep-stricken bliss on his face dissipates to a scarlet hue, reddest at the tip of his ears. "…danger."
"Are you kidding? The only thing in danger is my ability to get a decent hour of sleep!" Your face slumps into your palms with a dramatic whine.
It was impossible to ignore it now that it'd been recognised. High-pitched squeals and thumps, paired with the sound of their headboard hitting against the drywall so hard you felt your own frame rattle.
"Unbelievable. Is the wall there as a suggestion?"
Clark can only stare at the flimsy drywall, taking a heavy gulp in an attempt not to just…look. "They're…passionate?" He points out, questioning, only to be met with a withered glare.
"No woman would ever make those noises for a man unless they're being paid to." You refute.
"I…see." Clark clears his throat, holding a loose finger up to point at the offending noise. "Do you think it's a…"
"Hooker? Yes. Great one by the sounds of it."
"Right. I didn't realise there was a baseline." His statement hangs in the air, heavy with his genuine and innocent observation.
"In what sense?" You pry, the noises from across turning far less interesting now.
"Uh. I don't know. The louder a lady is when…you know. The better the intercourse is?" Clark looks up to the ceiling thoughtfully. Shaking his needless curiosity away.
"You're thinking about something."
The broad-shouldered man jolts, turning to face you in the wake of your blunt statement. "I…I'm not sure what you mean."
"You've got that look on your face," you say simply. Then, playfully whip your sleep mask at him — it lands against his chest with a thud, a mocking noise as his heart rate picks up. "Spill."
"I — gee," Clark relents with a sigh, slowly standing up, albeit unsteadily, before plopping onto the bed next to you. The motion sends the mattress dipping low under his heavy weight, forcing you to slide closer to him.
"It's not so much a thought…but an observation."
When he turns to you, your gaze is already on him. All wide and curious. His head snaps away from your innocent stare, "when you and I…are intimate."
He continues after a beat, "you're sort of…loud," then, his hand comes up to loosely point to himself, "so... that means you feel good. With me."
The words land as a brief shock to you. Not at the implication, but that Clark had actually formed that specific thought just from an off-handed comment.
Your answer came in the form of a gentle swat to his hand, paired with a shy, honest look, "…don't do that. Makes you look dorky."
Clark's lips break out into an easy smile, his head bowed to chase your eyeline. "Aren't you going to ask me what I'm thinking about now?"
"Not interested." Your rejection comes swiftly, punctuated with a dramatic slump onto the comforter. Though the quirk at the corner of your lips gives your actual thoughts away.
"Oh, come on," Clark's voice drops to that familiar, negotiating lilt. The bed dips further, with his elbows secured over the pillow you hid your face in. His warmth behind you inched closer. "Ask me."
You look over your shoulder suspiciously, "hurry up before I change my mind."
His lips curl into a wide, dimpled smile.
.
.
.
'Let's see how honest you can be without making a single sound.'
It was a stupid, impulsive challenge thrown out there. One that was potentially dangerous to their cover. Possibly — no, completely unnecessary for two people who were only in a motel room to stake out an elusive contact.
The logic was hard to fight. It was a bet to be quiet. So the pact was formed in the wake of the soft rustle of sheets, the gentle hold of Clark's palm at the base of your lower back. You bit down on your lip hard at a tug that forced you flush against Clark's chest, with your thighs draped over his thicker ones. Instinctively, you arch into him.
His gaze tracked your movements, intently raking over your twitching thighs. Clark's head lowers, his lips searching for a spot — a spot he knew would incite a shiver from you. The kiss beneath your ears did just that, squirming helplessly to the mercy of his teasing touches.
A whimpered sound choked on the way out of your lips as his hands slid beneath the fabric of your bottoms, a whisper of the fibres gracing the heavy, hot air in the room. His warm, bigger palms still at the outside of your thighs, urging your hips upward.
"You're doing a really good job," he comments, reverence felt in the manner his nose still chased the curve of your jaw.
The springs of the motel bed squeaked at the shift, adding your sweats to the pile that was Clark's makeshift bed on the carpeted floors. He doesn't make it easy for you in the slightest. His mouth finds purchase on the column or your throat, and toward your pulse.
"Mm'tryin' to keep — ugh — quiet!" Your voice is barely above a rasp, trying to nudge his face away in a weak attempt, "don't…"
Your soft whine was the very first crack in your resolve, in your promise to keep quiet. It only seemed to spur Clark on even more, his mouth clumsily finding yours, catching the corner of your lips before they slot just right.
The quiet room filled itself with the urgent, wet smacks of your combined desperation, whimpers that spilt into each other's throats. Clark's free hand slid up your ribs, his thumbs skirting beneath the curve of your breasts. Deliberately, his thumbnail rake over where your nipples slowly hardened.
"Ah!"
The sound spills from your lips before you can stop it, and you turn to bury your face in the pillow. "Nnh. Not bein'…fair." You mutter, petulantly, with your face squirmed into softness.
He laughs suddenly, warm against your pulse.
"Who said anything about being fair?" Clark's nips at your earlobes, placing open-mouthed kisses unabashedly despite your squirming.
You writhe beneath him, frustrated. With a determined tug, you pull him down more. In a soft tone, barely there, you whisper his name into the shell of his ears. It'd run louder than any whine or moan you'd given in an ode to your pleasure.
The reaction was instantaneous. His rigid body, which was once intent on teasing grinds, melted into you. The hard lines of his erection stiffened in a demanding manner, urging you to spill all your little whimpers into his ears.
"Just…like that." He pleads, eyes fluttering shut when your tongue drags past the shell, probing into the soft curve.
"Clark…Clark. Clark."
Each whispered whine of his name threatened to unravel him entirely. Clark's deftly shucking his trousers off just enough to free his aching cock, resting the hefty weight of it on your bare cunt, soaking with arousal that he pulled from you painstakingly.
"You…You have to be actually quiet. Okay?"
You nod sharply, steadying your hold onto his biceps.
Clark's careful.
At first.
Easing his thick, hard cock into your eager walls was the easy part. Especially with how easily you opened up for him, sucking him in — begging for more.
But then he snaps his hips into you. His length disappears deep into your belly, making you feel so fucking full and overwhelmed at the same time that you squeal.
Clark's palm spans over the lower half of your mouth. Muffling the ends of your whine. "Oh, sweetheart —" he coos, his voice cracked in remorse. You blink up at him, hazily and uncoordinated, looking at him like he'd given you blue balls.
"You can't — …" Clark shakes his head slowly. His hold is unrelenting over your soft lips. "Breathe through your nose. Okay? Trust me."
Your stifled whimpers are efficiently muted by the warm press of his palm, subjecting you to the controlled thrust of his hips. Each one met with the creaky protests of the mattress. Clark's breath comes out gradually ragged against your neck, the sweat from his skin mingling with your own.
It seemed to be doing something to him on a chemical level. Feeling the warm vibration of your needy grunts into his nerve endings, paired with the rhythmic pulse of your cunt that was the only other indicator of how turned on you were.
Clark's eyes are scewed shut, as though every one of his senses were attuned to the noises. To the sounds of your arousal, to the ones of the sticky, hot connection below. Your cunt clenched around his length, harder with each stroke of his thick thip in your twitching walls.
His head pulls back in time to meet your fucked out gaze as he's met with the telltale signs of your oncoming release, "shit. I'm — please." He manages, pulling his palm away from your reddened lips, where a slight string of your drool clings to him.
He brings his dampened palm down to your clit, rubbing you in idle circles.
"Ngh! Clark!" You squeak, digging your nails into the taut muscles of his arms. That gave you the tip you needed before your body arches off the bed, into him, in a quivering intensity, coming hard around his cock.
Clark follows suit, his own body seizing, shuddering gutturally as he takes on the wave of pulses from your walls, filling your belly with his hot, potent cum.
You lift your head up, only barely, lips chasing the warmth of his pulse, blissed out in an undeniable wash of addicting pleasure that the man above you pulled from you successfully.
It's short-lived, though. Especially when an insistent, loud bang resounds from the walls above both of you.
summary: you have always been multiple things to frank langdon; the girl next door, his best friend's little sister, his friend. but when you ask to stay with him in pittsburgh, the impending doom that he feels at the idea of admitting to all of his wrongdoings starts to convince him that you've always been a little more than that.
pairing: brother's best friend!frank langdon x girl next door!reader
tags: afab reader, slight (a lot of) character study of young & present day frank langdon, a couple of flashbacks, lots of mentions of drugs / addiction / rehab, mentions and descriptions of anxiety (frank), divorcee & dog dad!frank langdon, kind of angst & kind of fluff depending on who you ask, feelings confession, frank is way too soft for it all.
word count: 7.2k
notes: i really went crazy turning frank langdon into my own ken doll to be whatever i wanted him to be. based on a request here.
please reblog if you enjoy! also, check out my masterlist!
Looking back at his childhood, Frank wonders how he ended up the way he did.
Back then, when his hair was always unruly and he hadn’t even considered being a doctor yet, everything seemed to come easy to him. He was consistently active outside of his house, going on runs or heading to the park or playing sports, and the amount of friends he had seemed neverending. His social life was at an all-time high, a consistent revolving door of friend groups and girlfriends and people who knew of him without actually knowing him.
Over the last year and a half or so, he has felt himself become more of a recluse. On the nights without Tanner and Penny, he sits in the emptiness of an apartment he’s yet to fully call home, his mind coming up with sounds to try and fill the empty hollow space. Many nights are spent alone on his couch, fingers combing through the downy fur of Petunia.
At least he had gotten to keep the dog in the divorce.
He spends a lot of time on his phone these days. Scrolling through his camera roll and letting the corner of his lips twitch in amusement at the numerous photos he keeps of Tanner and Penny, flicking through social media and slowly feeling his brain rot away, whatever it takes to keep his mind busy and away from his situation.
Tonight, he lays on the couch, Petunia tucked into the crook between his outstretched legs despite how large she has gotten in the past year. The weight of her against his body is reassuring – a reminder that he’s still loved despite it all, even if it was mainly by his spur-of-the-moment dog. One hand drags a soothing line along the crease between her eyes while the other scrolls through social media, half-lidded in that weird liminal space between boredom and mildly entertained.
Just as he’s about to finally set the device down and let his brain wash away with Survivor re-runs, his phone buzzes with a singular text, peaking his interest again. The name on the message is what has him sitting up so fast that it startles the golden retriever on his lap.
If he looked back on any time in his past, Frank would find you. He had been great friends with your older brother, especially since your family had lived next door for as long as he could remember. He had spent a lot of time at your house or at social mixers that your parents tended to throw for the neighborhood, smiling at the side of your brother as you had bickered as siblings do.
It wasn’t like you had spent a lot of alone time together. A quick conversation in the kitchen as he came down for a snack, a playful taunt from his lips when you had tried a new outfit or hairstyle, splashing you with the hose when you were just watching them gallivant outside during the hot summers.
One of the last times Frank saw you, you were still a teenager. Wide-eyed and yet still believing that the entire world was against you, friendship bracelets littering your wrists and a streak of red in your hair from when your mother had finally allowed you to add just one color.
You had sat behind the shoulder of your brother, arms crossed over your chest as both of your families and numerous friends from the neighborhood crooned their sadness that he was leaving for college. The entire day of his going away party, you had stayed quiet and compliant, although you had never attempted to leave.
That night, as the crowd dwindled and everyone started cleaning up, you had curled one arm around his waist like you were afraid to touch him and murmured an “i’ll miss you” into his ribcage. He had simply pulled you closer until you were forced to add your other arm around him, squeezing you closer and whispering the secret right back into your hair.
You’ve talked every now and then since he left. Your parents are still close to his own, which means he tends to see you every time he visits his family, although the two of you never mention the night he left. Sometimes, you’ll send him a quick text asking a medical question.
How do you know if your sunburn is sun poisoning?
What’s an emergency-room level fever?
My finger is swollen but I can move it. Is it broken?
He always entertained the small bits of conversation he could grab from you, even when he had been with Abby. When she had asked about you, he had just called you his childhood friend’s younger sister, even if it made something churn in his stomach.
And now, after a few months of no medical inquiries hitting his inbox, there you are.
YOU: i have a question
FRANK: you always do
YOU: this isn’t about my health
FRANK: didn’t know you could ask questions that weren’t about your health
YOU: ha ha
YOU: listen
YOU: hold on. can i call you?
Frank sits up a little taller, passing an apologetic glance towards Petunia when she lets out an annoyed groan at how much he’s fidgeting. He looks around his apartment like you’re going to be able to see his cluttered living room through the phone before responding with the most nonchalant yes he can muster.
His phone rings only a few moments later, a young photo of you filling his screen from your contact. He answers after letting it vibrate once against his palm, clearing his throat before the microphone turns on. “Hello?”
“Frank!” His name comes out in a squeak. “Uh, hey. How are you?”
He can’t help the small smile that blooms, looking around his empty apartment. You weren’t filled in on his divorce yet, he assumed. “Peachy,” he lies easily. “What’s up?”
There’s rustling on your side of the line before a heavy sigh. “Hey, I need to ask you a favor. It’s big, and it’s okay if you don’t have an answer right now, but I just… I don’t know.” Your words are rushed, nervousness seeping through every word.
“Hey,” he coos calmly. “Stop freaking out or you’re gonna make me think you need help hiding a body.”
“Ha-ha.” A sarcastic response just like the one you had texted him. He grins again at the thought. “Okay. I’ll cut to it.”
Another heavy sigh seeps through the speaker, crackling in his ear. “Is there any way I can stay with you for a week? I know that you have Tanner and Penny, plus I don’t know how Abby will feel about it, but I’m waiting for my new place in Pittsburgh to open up, but my new job needs me to start this week and it won’t be available until Tuesday at the latest and I don’t really know how many nights at a hotel I can afford or mentally stand.”
Frank’s eyebrows raise so high on his forehead that he’s sure they’ve integrated themself into his hairline. His lips part, then close, then part again as he runs your rushed words through his head over and over. Then, he swallows, shaking his head. “You’re moving to Pittsburgh? I thought you were living with a boyfriend or something, a few minutes from home.”
“Uh, yeah.” You laugh, although it sounds strained. He can imagine you now, twirling a strand of hair around your pointer finger as you paced. He saw it a lot during the teenage years, watching you try to convince your parents through the phone that you really wanted to go to a friend’s sleepover, even though you were actually trying to sneak out to some house party. “No boyfriend anymore. No boyfriend, no home. Bye-bye. To Pittsburgh, I go, seeking employment opportunities.”
He’s quiet again for another moment, mulling it over. His thoughts run so fast that he finally peels himself off of his couch, taking a page out of your book and pacing along the line of his rug.
He must’ve been quiet for way too long, because you speak again. “You can take your time to give me an answer. I’ll drive down there at the end of this weekend, so there’s a few days to think it over. I just wanted to ask in advance rather than show up on your doorstep.”
And thank God you didn’t. You’d find your way to “his” house and be greeted by his ex-wife, who still says his name with a slice of distaste. You’d find out from her about everything that’s happened in the past two years of his life – drug addiction, rehab, divorce, custody agreements, consistent loneliness minus man’s best friend, Petunia.
“Uh,” he says stupidly.
Everything he could say turns into dust on his tongue, unable to get out a single word. How does he explain all of this? That the charming teenager you once knew, who was consistently surrounded by good friends that were always willing to celebrate him, had lost his college sweetheart in a messy divorce after throwing his back out, getting addicted to benzos and almost losing his job?
Lord knows Frank has lost all of his ego at this point in his life, other than his promise of being a good doctor, but he can almost ensure that you liked who he was as a teenager. His childhood and teenage years were filled with your wide eyes, asking him to open jars for you or to drive you to some friend’s house. When your first boyfriend had broken up with you, he had been the one who had picked you up from his house, ignoring the squeeze in his chest at the sight of your red eyes as he promised not to tell your brother.
“Can we talk about it? When you come in on Sunday?” He asks.
Three days. Three days is all he has to figure out what exactly he’s going to tell you. Three days to come to terms with the fact that you may never see him the same ever again.
He isn’t sure why he cares so much. His parents knew of his divorce, of his ten-month stint in rehab. It’d been hard enough to tell them, and he had survived, but telling you feels like an entire weight sitting on his chest.
Your next words come out too hopeful. “Yeah! Okay!” Then, with a grin so wide he can hear it without seeing your face, you make a last minute addition. “At least I get to see you once, even if Abby ends up saying no to me staying.”
Abby, Abby, Abby. Why did you feel the incessant need to bring her up? Even if he was still married to her, he had known you way before she had even existed, had had numerous conversations about topics that didn’t include her.
Instead of being annoyed about it, he chooses to instead stick to the happy feelings that you being excited to see him gave him. “Yeah. It’ll be good to hang out again,” he responds. “Can update me on what Adrian did to have you runnin’ from him.”
“Adam,” you correct. He knew that, of course, but he feels warm at the laugh that shortly follows. “I’ll happily get into that. My brother doesn’t allow me to talk about him much anymore, so I have a lifetime worth of bad stories and ruined memories and icks to rant about.”
Now, it’s Frank’s turn to laugh. “Noted. I will happily listen.”
“I know you will. You always did.” Your voice gets softer as you trail off.
Warning bells go off in his head at the first fluttering beat of his heart. Oh, this is wrong. So, so wrong.
Before you can say anything else and mess with his head more, he lets out a heavy sigh. “Alrighty, sunshine, I have to get to bed so I can get to my shift in time tomorrow. Text me on Saturday and we can figure out a place to meet, okay?”
You let out a soft groan into the phone, probably evidence of a late-night stretch. “Okay, Frank. Talk to you Saturday.”
“See you Sunday,” he responds in a murmur.
He’s not the one that hangs up.
For all of Friday, your name does not grace his phone. He checks every free moment that he gets during his shift, but each time he is met with a blank notification screen. If it wasn’t for the fact that you sat at the top of his messages and call log, he’d be able to convince himself that he made the whole situation up. You weren’t moving to Pittsburgh, you weren’t asking to stay at his apartment, he didn’t have to finally owe up to all of his transgressions.
Every time Frank reminds himself of the fact, an uncomfortable feeling crawls up his spine until it settles in his chest, pressing down on his lungs until he is aware of every heartbeat. He feels foolish for the way he digs the heel of his palm into his sternum, pressing his eyes closed and trying to will his body to stop punishing him for his brain’s doing.
He’s never been good at being vulnerable. As a child, he’d split his knee open falling off of his bike just to get up a moment later, laughing until he wheezed despite the dull ache in his leg and the blood trickling down his calf. As a teenager, he’d met heartbreak and hard times with a persistent need to show how well he was doing despite it all, even if he was just proving it to himself.
And now, as an adult, he goes the route of just ignoring it. Letting himself indulge in the things that he knows he shouldn’t, not allowing anyone to see past the mirage he has set up. He’s Frank Langdon, MD, an excellent emergency medicine resident with a confidence big enough to outweigh any Olympic athlete.
Unfortunately, with you, he cannot act like everything is okay. He knows that the second he looks into your wide eyes, staring into a memory of what he used to have and what he used to be, everything will fizzle up like the spark at the end of a detonating cord. You’ve always brought out his honesty, a personal truth serum in the form of billowy hair and flavored lipgloss.
Saturday morning, it rains in Pittsburgh. He doesn’t get to see it much due to being in the hospital all day, but the smell of petrichor seeps in the ambulance bay and water droplets cling to the hair of everyone who comes through the doors. Whenever he gets a free chance, he sits in the bay, listening to the rain hit the concrete and letting his mind dull for a moment.
It’s late, moonlight filtering through dark clouds to barely illuminate the flooded street. The thunderstorm that’s been threatening to arrive all week has finally decided to make its dramatic entrance, just in time to add upon Frank’s soured mood.
His mother would throw a fit if she saw what he was doing now. Clothes soaked and stuck to his skin, his hoodie doing absolutely nothing to keep the cold out, perched on his family’s roof. It’d been too easy to climb out of the window in his bedroom, especially with everything in his head screaming at him to just get out of the house.
Now, he sits in the rain, arms wrapped around his knees as he watches the raindrops glide down the shingles and into the gutter. All the collected water pours out into his yard, creating a larger and larger puddle as the night goes on.
He’s not sure how long he’s been out here, listening to the soft patter of the rain and the frequent booms of thunder. His mind has been more occupied by other things, such as the heavy scolding he had gotten from his coach after tonight’s game, or the passive-aggressive brush-off he had gotten from his girlfriend when he had tried to invite her out to the diner afterwards.
It was stupid, how much the sport controlled every aspect of his life. He had no intention of becoming a D1 athlete, and the only reason he had committed to the team in the first place was due to the need for a social life and perhaps the chance at a scholarship. Instead, it had affected everything else in his life. His classmates and teachers opinion of him, his father’s pride, his schedule, his own self-esteem.
“You’re gonna catch a cold! Or get struck by lightning!”
Frank barely hears the yell over the downpour, head turning and eyes squinting to try and look through the mist. Your bedroom light sticks out like a lighthouse on the shore, backlighting your silhouette from where you lean out your window.
His brow furrows. “It is way past your bedtime!” he calls back. It’s all an assumption. He has absolutely no idea what time it is.
Rather than respond, you disappear away from the window. He’s just about to turn around and pretend you had never been there when your outline appears again, now in a thick coat. Before he can even think about what you may be doing, your foot peeks out of your window, finding the thick branch of the tree that stretches between your houses.
“Hey! No!” He scolds. Either his voice is carried away by the storm or you choose to ignore him, because a few minutes later, your boot-covered feet are atop his roof.
As soon as you find solid footing, you unfurl an umbrella that he hadn’t been able to see before. You clutch something to your chest as you slide over to where he sits, thigh pressing against his as you settle.
“Here,” you say. “I brought you a new sweatshirt so you don’t turn into an ice cube. It’s one of my brother’s, I think.”
You hold the umbrella up and pass the hoodie over to him. He palms it for a moment, stealing the warmth before glancing at you in his peripheral. “How am I supposed to change into this?”
“I won’t look, if that’s what you’re worried about. But, just a fair warning, I’ve already seen your bare torso plenty of times in the last years we’ve known each other.” The remark is deadpan, but even in the dark, he can see the amusement in your eyes.
He rolls his eyes, reaching over to gently nudge you in the side. Without another word, he reaches down to pull off his drenched hoodie, setting it beside him. His chest is bare for just a moment before he tugs the new hoodie on, arranging his body so that he doesn’t accidentally stick his now-dry sleeve back into the rain.
After he has it situated, Frank turns back to you. “Thank you,” he murmurs.
You squirm to make sure the both of you fit comfortably beneath the umbrella, pressing closer to Frank. If you notice the way you’re practically tucked into his side, you don’t give any inclination, and he’s not exactly itching to bring it up.
“Don’t mention it,” you reply sheepishly. “You look sad enough without the wet dog look.”
A cold wind breezes over the two of you, a shudder wracking your body. Without thinking about it too hard, he raises his arm to drape it over your shoulders, fingers pressing into your bicep as he rubs up and down to create friction. Rather than fight, you sink into the touch, relaxing beneath his touch.
This was fine. This is what friends did, he lies.
“Why are you choosing to torture yourself with this weather?” You ask, forehead leaning against his chest. “We could be cozy in bed right now.”
You pause, then quickly add, “Our own beds. In our separate houses.”
He laughs, giving you a soft squeeze. The sound fades out slowly as he thinks more about your question, eyes looking out upon the neighborhood again. “Had a hard day.”
A knowing hum is your answer, plucking at the ends of your sleeves to keep your hands busy. “Because of the game?” You guess.
Now that you’re not shivering anymore, he drops his arm, palm flattening on the roof behind your hips. He’s not exactly ready to uncurl himself from you, but there had to be a bit of distance, for his sake. “Something like that.”
Your lips twitch in dissatisfaction at the answer, brow furrowing as you look up at him. As soon as he finally catches your eye, your palm covers his knee, ignoring the way his jeans stick to his skin. “You can talk about it if you want, Frank. Or even if you don’t want to and it’s just that it’ll help.”
A smile unfurls on his lips before he can stop it, a fond look eclipsing over his face. He wraps his arm around your waist, pulling you in for a hug and letting out a relieved sigh when you prop your chin on his shoulder. “I don’t need to but thank you, sunshine. I‘m glad you came out here.”
Your nose presses into his skin, breath brushing against the side of his neck. “Of course. Couldn’t let you catch a cold all on your own, you’d get lonely.”
After a moment, you finally pull back, lips spreading into a grin. “Wanna come over? We can watch a movie if you’re still not able to sleep.”
“I am not climbing across a tree into your room,” he immediately responds. Your face falls and he scrambles to add, “but you can come over to mine?”
Immediately, that grin is back, making him laugh. He pats at your arm playfully before grabbing the umbrella from you, gesturing towards his window. “Go ahead. I’ll keep you dry.”
Frank’s interrupted from his reminiscing by a few buzzes in his pocket, pulling out his phone with a hefty sigh. Almost like he’s summoned you, his screen is littered with multiple texts from you.
YOU: it is saturday
YOU: we need to plan a place to meet tomorrow
YOU: and by we, i mean you. i don’t live there
YOU: what do you suggest?
He responds quickly with the location of some diner he used to frequent when he just got out of rehab, his second text a simple thumb’s up emoji and a question mark. The less words he used, the better, especially with the way all of his emotions tend to go on overdrive talking to you.
You respond quickly. It’s simple, an agreement and a note about how you were excited to see him, but it still makes his chest tighten.
That night, alone in his apartment yet again, Frank sits down on his couch with a journal on his lap. It’s still wrapped in the plastic, purchased brand new on his way home from work alongside the pack of pens resting next to his thigh. He glances down at Petunia, who’s draped herself over his feet in the exhaustion lingering from her nap, chewing on the inside of his cheek in thought.
Finally, he presses his thumbnail into the plastic until it gives way, ripping the rest of it off soon after. He cracks open the pens next, curling his fingers around one and leaving the rest in the package.
He had journaled a lot during his time in rehab. His therapist had brought it up after he’d stonewalled her during his first few appointments, retreating into an invisible shell as he went through withdrawal and felt the dull pain in his back for the first time in what felt like ages. She’d ran the pad of her finger over the outside of the journal as she explained to him that it’d be good for him to get all of his feelings out, even if he continued to ignore her in person.
At first, he thought it was stupid. Writing until his hand cramped wouldn’t take back the fact that he was an addict, or that he craved these stupid pills that he thought he was only taking for a persistent pinched nerve, or that his wife had looked at him like some kind of criminal as she tucked a crying Tanner behind her back when he said goodbye. The cramps wouldn’t cover up the persistent ache in his chest that everything he had ever worked so hard to have and to keep had been wiped away by a stupid mistake, something that he could’ve controlled if he was even an ounce of a better man.
It started as letters to Abby. She never answered the ones that he actually sent, so he decided to stop embarrassing or restraining himself. He filled up page after page with his crimes and confessions, writing about their good memories in hopes of trying to push away the present. At the end of each letter, he’d tally up how many times he had written out an apology and try to push to add more the next time he wrote, as if any condolences would be enough to cover up what he had done.
Then, he branched out. He wrote to Dana and Robby and his parents, keeping all of the words hidden and safe and locked in his journal. Within the pages he could confirm that none of his words would be twisted by those who already thought negatively of him. He could just be the Frank Langdon he knew himself to be, even if his opinion got a bit shaky sometimes.
He wrote to you. After he had scrawled your name on the page in his doctor handwriting, he stared at it for a while, wondering what had possessed him to think of you in a time like this. Admittedly, he hadn’t remembered the last time you had crossed his mind and it wasn’t because you had shown up at a family event with a new boyfriend and a new hair color.
Rather than stop himself, he let himself write whatever came to mind. He wrote about all the times he had helped you out and you had said “I’m sorry,” until he pinky-promised you that he didn’t mind. A subconscious smile pulled at his lips when he wrote about the time his father had burnt the hot dogs on his grill for the fourth of July and you had still eaten the entire thing, even if he could see the grimace on your face with every bite.
He talked about how it was now his turn to apologize to you. For not thinking of you as often now that he had moved away and gotten out of medical school. For all the times he had secretly judged you for all of your vices, such as your need for constant change or your inability to find your boyfriends interesting after a few months. For not being the perfect guy you always saw him as.
Frank’s newly eighteen. He sits on his roof, the same spot he’s gone to every single time he finds his mind to become a bit too much. It’s become a sanctuary without walls since that night you had crawled out here and sat with him, even if it ended in the both of you waking up with a cold when the morning light came in. Some nights, you still come out and join him, limbs pressed together as you both acted like they weren’t.
Like clockwork, you join him about ten minutes after he’s settled onto the shingles. You don’t even grace him with a greeting. You just sit down, pulling your knees to your chest and trying to find what his eyes have decided to focus on.
“The cardinal over there?” You guess.
He nods without looking at you. He doesn’t need to look at you, not when the wind brings your perfume to him like an offering and your body heat seeps through his clothes despite how cold your hands always tend to be.
The both of you are quiet for a moment, listening to the sounds of the cars driving through the neighborhood or the planes flying overhead. Every once in a while, he catches you trying to find what he’s looking at, like a curious child.
You break the silence with a heavy sigh, head turning to look at him. He finally allows himself the grace to look at you, giving you a soft smile to show that he’s okay.
“I’m going to miss you,” you confess. “While you’re away at school.”
Frank nods again, even though it’s not really a rebuttal to what you had said. Realizing his lack of response, he reaches out to wrap his fingers around your forearm, giving it a soft reassuring squeeze. “I’ll come back,” he promises. “I’m not gonna leave this place in the rearview mirror.”
Now it’s your turn to smile, eyes following his hand as he returns it back to his lap. “Good,” you reply. “Who else is gonna pick me up from bad dates and sneak me cigarettes?” That mischievous grin that you wear like a second skin, or like an armor depending on the conversation, pops up.
“Some other sucker,” he retorts.
That silence returns when your giggle ends, hanging over the both of you. Unable to sit in the silence, you break it with another confession.
“I always thought you were too cool for anything when I first met you.” Your thumb brushes over your kneecap, wrinkling and smoothening the fabric of your jeans. “Even as young as we were, you seemed like you didn’t want to hear anything from anyone. Always your way or the highway. And then you became friends with my brother and you were everywhere and you were such a nerd.”
You laugh at his eye roll, passing him a look that tells him to wait for your point and not say anything. “I realized you weren’t too cool very quickly. Your limbs were too lanky and you fumbled over your words and you overcompensated by holding onto that same oozing confidence I had seen the minute we had moved in.”
Your teeth dig into your bottom lip for a moment before you continue. “But even if you’re not as untouchable as I thought you once were, I still think you’re perfect, Frank.” Despite the raw way the words come out, you say them louder than your murmured confessions, sporting a wide grin. “I hope you remember that when you’re becoming a big hotshot doctor.”
Frank sighs as he runs his fingers over the fresh pages of his brand new notebook, listening to the sound of paper fluttering. He grips the pen in his hand tighter, finally cracking the spine of the journal as he peels it open on his lap.
For the first time since he left rehab, he writes.
On Sunday morning, Frank arrives at the diner half an hour early. As he settles into the booth, his fingers tighten around the bag he carries, glancing around like you’d pop up out of nowhere.
While he waits, regretting his decision to have come in early in order to avoid the awkwardness of an introduction, he finishes two glasses of water and asks for another refill. His body feels unbelievably hot and he feels fidgety, adjusting his position in his seat multiple times and squirming at the crack of leather that follows every time he moves.
Five minutes after the time the both of you had agreed upon, the bell above the door chimes. His head turns so fast that a tendon pops, eyes landing upon you.
He wasn’t expecting you to look the same. Every time he sees you, no matter how long or short your time apart has been, there’s something different about you. A new color added to your hair or a complete change, a new style of outfits, another decorative piercing. A new tattoo if you were feeling extra adventurous in some foreign country.
Even knowing that, his breath catches at the sight of you. His blue eyes are wide when you finally look at him, your face brightening while he looks like a deer in headlights. He tries to match your smile, but it’s very obviously shaky.
When you get closer, he finally stands up, hand propped on the back of the booth as he greets you. “Hey, stranger.”
He can not find a single trace of anxiety on your features as you grin, reaching out to jab your finger into his chest. “Says you,” you tease. You slip into the opposite side of the booth, palms flattening on the table. “You’re the one who’s too busy to come home these days. It’s been, what, two years or so?”
Frank’s chest tightens again. He sits down to hide the tremble in his knees, exhaling so hard that a napkin flutters. “It’s been, uh, a busy two years,” he responds. “Would’ve come out if I could.”
You grab a menu, already feeling at home in this diner you’ve never been to. “With what? Saving lives? Or is Abby keeping you busy?”
There’s her name again, falling off her lips as if you get a dollar for every time that she’s mentioned. He grabs his own menu to try and hide the shaking of his hands, holding it up to hide his face.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.
“Abby and I aren’t together anymore,” he admits. He lets the words drop off of his tongue rather than trying to say them gently. He had tried the gentle approach with everyone else he has told and it had only ended up one of two ways – they either pitied him until he couldn’t take it anymore or felt disgusted by the fact that he let himself cave into his addiction.
He spares a glance at you again once there’s enough quiet to suffocate him. You stare at him, your menu now laying flat on the table, and he decides to just keep going while you’re stunned already to rip off the bandaid. “We divorced after I went to rehab.”
You physically recoil in surprise, blinking your eyes as you try to put together all of the information. “Okay.” You draw out the word, trying to fill the space as if you were afraid he’d suddenly drop another bomb. “That’s not what I was expecting out of this catch-up. I thought you were just going to tell me fun stories about working in an emergency room.”
To his surprise, you thread your fingers together, resting both of your elbows on the table and holding his eyes. “Do you want to explain, or leave it at that?”
Frank’s shoulders lower more and more as he spills it all. Now that the harsh facts are out there, it’s easier for him to let everything else spill out. The back injury, the benzos addiction, the fallout at work, the rehab and the divorce. He tries not to let the emotions of them seep through, tries to stick to just the facts, but there’s a few things that slip through the cracks.
It’s easy to spill his guts to you. His own personal truth serum.
When he finishes, he clears his throat, suddenly bashful. “And there’s one more thing.”
He finally reaches into the bag he brought along, fingers closing around the journals inside and pulling them out. Before he can second guess it, he slides them across the table, watching as your hands move to keep them from falling off.
“Diaries?” you guess lightheartedly.
“Kind of.” Frank chuckles, reaching up to scratch at the back of his neck. “I wrote a lot in rehab. My therapist recommended it. There’s a, uh, letter in there. For you. It’s where the tab is.”
His fingers flick at the sticky note that’s just peeking out from the pages, glancing up at you through his eyelashes. “I trust that you won’t dig through the entire thing, but it’s okay if you do. Just know you’ll probably know more about me than you want to.”
You beam up at him before rifling quickly through the pages, taking brief glances at the scrawlings on the pages before letting it shut again. “Are you sure, Frank? This seems really personal.”
He shrugs, leaning back in the booth and crossing his arms over his chest. “Well, you’re about to stay with me, aren’t you? You’ll see enough of my bad moments this week, so we might as well start now.”
His flaws are completely forgotten as you lean forward, somehow brightening more. The glow of the sunlight through the window is nothing compared to the way you look right now. “Really? You’ll let me stay with you.”
A laugh bubbles out of him before he can stop it, shaking his head. “You’ve bugged me for most of my life, we can’t ruin the tradition now.”
With a huff, you grab the wadded up piece of paper from his straw before tossing it at his forehead, grinning like a madwoman. “Jerk.”
For the rest of the day, Frank helps you move whatever you need into the spare bedroom of his apartment. The both of you pick up where you left off the last time he saw you, bickering over who gets to pick up the larger items and bigger boxes – you because of Frank’s bad back or Frank because he wants to be a gentleman.
After a shared dinner of takeout and him watching you coo over Petunia for half an hour, he finally admits to you that he needs to sleep for work the next day and retreats to his bedroom. With a pep in his step from finally spending a night socializing instead of staring at meaningless social media posts, he showers and gets ready for bed, forcing his dog to roll over onto her side of the bed before settling beneath the duvet.
He’s halfway asleep when there’s a couple knocks at his door. Fatherly instincts have him immediately shooting up, startling Petunia awake. “Yeah?” He calls out tiredly as he runs his fingers through the dog’s fur, soothing her back to sleep.
The door opens to reveal you, donned in soft pajamas and hair pulled up out of your face. The sight of his journal in your hands has him leaning over to click on his bedside lamp, illuminating his room and you in a warm glow. “What’s wrong?”
You hover in the doorway for a moment, lips parted when no words come out. Your mouth closes as you step closer, sitting down on the edge of his bed near his legs. He doesn’t move.
“You didn’t need to apologize,” you finally say. “For all of it.”
Frank runs a hand through his hair, the other still petting Petunia to try and calm the heavy beating of his heart. “I felt… feel like I needed to,” he admits sheepishly.
You prop one knee up on the mattress, somehow getting even closer to him. He tries not to squirm at the familiarity of it all. “None of what you’ve gone through the last couple of years has been your fault, Frank,” you murmur. “Addiction is a disease, not something someone willingly puts themselves through. You did the work through rehab and therapy, which is an apology enough for me.”
Your fingers brush against his duvet, tracing shapes next to his covered knee. “Your letter was sweet.” You continue, watching your fingers. “I’d forgotten about a couple of those things. It was nice to be reminded. I’m surprised you remembered.”
“I’ve been known to have a freakishly good memory,” he muses awkwardly.
That makes you finally look at him, giving him a soft grin. Your hand moves to curve over his knee, a shiver moving down his spine at the contact. “Imagine my surprise when I get to the end, my eyes hurting from squinting at your doctor handwriting, and I find out that –”
“ – that I wanted to kiss you.” He finishes the sentence before you can say the words. “The night of my going away party, when you told me that you were going to miss me again. I wanted to kiss you, because most people hadn’t even told me once and you had told me three times. I wanted to kiss you that night because I had wanted to kiss you many nights before that and never had.”
Frank sits up, hand finally leaving Petunia to grab yours and pull it away from his knee. His other hand moves to cup your cheek, giving a small smile when you lean into his palm. Your cheeks are warm beneath his touch, like only your hands are destined to be cold. Maybe it’s because they’re meant to be held by him, he thinks.
He leans forward until his nose brushes against your cheek. “No boyfriend?” He whispers against your skin. Just checking.
“No boyfriend,” you breathe out.
As soon as the last syllable leaves your tongue, he kisses you, seizing the opportunity of your lips still being parted. He kisses you like he’s trying to steal the air from your lungs, hand curling around the back of your neck to pull your lips closer.
He only pulls away when Petunia nudges at his elbow, jealous of the attention not being on her anymore, laughing breathlessly. He presses his forehead against yours. “You’re wrong to say that I didn’t need to apologize. I have to apologize for not kissing you sooner.”
You copy his breathless laugh, leaning back to breathe some of your own air. “I’ll take that apology,” you respond. You press your lips together to try and hide your giddy smile, staring at him for just a moment.
This is everything he’s ever wanted, he thinks. You’re beautiful like this, freshly kissed by him and euphoric, bathed in the aureate light of his lamp. Being here with you won’t fix any problem that he’s created, but it is the first thing that’s felt right in a very long time.
Then, in the blink of an eye, you stand, still clutching his journal in your hand. “Okay. I’m going to bed.”
Frank scrambles at your sudden pull away, sitting up further, much to the chagrin of the dog laying her head on his thigh. “You’re going to bed? Your bed?”
You stop at the doorway, turning to grin at him. “I’ve bugged you all of your life. We can’t ruin the tradition now,” you mock.
With that, you give him a small wave, closing his bedroom door behind you.
He lets out an amused scoff at the click of his door, staring at it for a few moments to make sure you were serious and not just pulling his leg. When he faintly hears the sound of your bedroom door shutting, he groans, falling back onto his pillow and letting Petunia drape herself back over his torso. Then, he laughs, raising his hand to pinch at the bridge of his nose.
And when you tell him that your future living arrangement fell through due to a mold infestation, leaving you homeless in Pittsburgh, he’s quick to tell you to stay.
ꜱᴜᴍᴍᴀʀʏ: You know your boss likes you. His gestures go well beyond the normal professional relationship, but he’ll deny it all the way to the damn bank. That is, until you play a little game and see just how far you can push him…
ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢꜱ / ᴛᴀɢꜱ: 18+, MDNI, kinda angst, smut, pretty much PWP, there’s some plot but it’s negligible, NSFW (literally), politics but it’s brief, age gap (reader in her 20s, Bucky is ancient), age-related references (Bucky calls you ‘kid’ once and you internally refer to him as ‘old man’), nicknames (‘doll’, mostly), taboo relationship, mirror-play, fingering & oral (f!receiving), inappropriate use of a desk, high heel kink if you squint, unprotected p in v (wrap it before you tap it, folks), creampie (why not), Bucky is sorta mean but also a gentleman, makeshift gag, decryphilia for like a second, semi-public sex, big dick!Bucky, rough sex, reader’s clothes are described, slight objectification of reader, and maybe coercion???
ɴᴏʙʟᴇ'ꜱ ɴᴏᴛᴇꜱ: A delayed thank you for 400 followers!! This is kind of a rewrite of a prior fic of mine, or at least it started that way. Really just needed to scratch that Congressman Barnes itch. I spent so much time on this and scrapped it like three times. Beta credit to @laufeydottirs-writings . Uhh…And if this flops I’ll just never post again. :) Cheers!
Divider credit goes to @/cursed-carmine!
It wasn’t like you really tried to fall head over heels for your boss, who also just so happened to be one of the hottest politicians in D.C. Seriously, who would do that? Okay, maybe a few people came to mind - but, you swore that you weren’t one of them!
You were fresh out of college and in need of a job - really any job - and he was…Well…Lifetimes ahead of you comparatively. But, lately, he was becoming increasingly less subtle about his preference for you - and, it was kind of hard to ignore. Of course, he wouldn’t come out and say it to your face because Congressman Barnes wasn’t a man of very many words, but it was the little gestures that did all that sweet-talking for him.
It was the way he smiled at you so warmly when you brought his coffee straight to his desk each morning - just a splash or two of cream and a dash of sweetener was how he liked it. It was the way his sparkling baby-blues would flit across your silhouette like a lion sizing up prey - especially when he particularly enjoyed your outfit that day. And, if you were lucky enough, he’d give you a short, “Lookin’ sharp, kid. How are those surveys coming?” And the intense glint in his eyes as he spoke with that low Brooklyn drawl is what gave away the true infatuation hidden beneath his words.
That’s how it all started. Small gestures that were just barely noticeable, unless you were around him as often as someone in your position was - you were, after all, his personal assistant. His one, true tether to the Earth. And, given adequate time, these small gestures appeared to escalate.
A year into your humble employment, it developed into a subtle brush of his warm, calloused hand against yours while you were trying to explain something important. It became the way that same large palm would find the small of your back with such ease and his fingers began to splay across the fabric of your blouse possessively as he started walking you to your car each evening. You quickly realized he wasn’t doing any of it for you - he was doing it for himself. To make sure you were safe because if he didn’t try hard enough, then he wouldn’t be able to sleep.
If you’d been having a particularly hard day, he’d excuse himself a little early for lunch and then return an hour afterwards with a small bouquet of your favorite flowers from the florist just down the street, and your latte made exactly how you liked it. He often referred to it as a ‘morale boost’, but you saw through that excuse after it became less of an occasional treat and more of a frequent one.
You were slowly coming to the realization that this grumpy old man didn’t go out of his way for very much, but he certainly went above and beyond if it involved you.
“Late night, huh?” His gruff voice startled you, even though the only thing you could think about was how the words on your laptop screen were beginning to blur into a mess. Cohesive thoughts and bright ideas had left your brain a few hours before.
You blinked, glancing to your left where he’d entered his office in that scarily quiet way he had a habit of doing.
He’d noticed when you flinched, and he laughed softly. “Sorry, doll. I know. Need to get better ‘bout announcing myself.”
You smiled, tight but polite. “By now I think I should know you have a habit of materializing out of thin air, Houdini,” you teased.
You let out a heavy breath, one you hadn’t realized you’d been holding, and closed your laptop with a soft ‘click’ - having a short break from the screen would surely do you some good. “Also, it’s not a late night until it’s past midnight, remember? It’s only eleven.”
Bucky’s gaze darted up to the standard-issue clock ticking away just above his desk. “And so it is,” he confirmed, shooting you a half-smile before he walked over to inspect the numerous files you’d left atop his desk. “You still shouldn’t be here so late, you know. You never know who’s roaming these halls.”
You rolled your eyes. “Well, your speeches aren’t going to write themselves, and I certainly don’t think anyone nefarious is sneaking about a heavily-secured government office. Unless you’re talking about yourself.”
That squeezed yet another dry laugh out of him. “The only thing nefarious about me right now is my appetite,” he admitted, picking up one of the various navy blue folders you’d set atop the polished mahogany throughout the evening. His eyebrows furrowed and his tongue jutted out just past his blushed lips as he fanned through the top document.
His look of absolute concentration was so amusing to you, especially since most of the time you still needed to explain all of the political jargon to him. But, you appreciated his efforts to learn, in the very least. “There’s something you should take note of on page five,” you piped up.
The stiff papers rustled as Bucky flipped back through the pages, and he appeared even more confused. “Am I blind or…?”
“Oh!” You quickly shifted your laptop onto the coffee table across from you as you jumped to your plush-socked feet. You grabbed a sticky note and pen from the table before flitting over to his side. “My bad, it’s been a crazy day…”
You were wearing plaid pajama pants and an oversized tourist shirt you’d picked up from a girls trip to Vegas. You were casual on these late-night stints - and, as long as you got your job done, Bucky didn’t really seem to mind.
You gently plucked the file from his hands and hunched down over his desk as you skimmed through the bill to find the clause you wanted to highlight. As your finger danced over the black ink, your hand was visibly shaking from the sheer amount of caffeine you needed to drink in order to stay awake as long as you had.
You immediately froze when you felt his hand slide up against your lower back - steady, warm, heavy - and then heard his voice, something low and soft that you had maybe only ever heard once before. “You’re shaking, doll. I think it’s time to call it a night.”
You swallowed thickly - your tongue suddenly felt too big for your mouth and your heart was skipping beat after beat…And it certainly wasn’t from the caffeine this time. “I’m fine,” you assured him curtly, trying to keep some level of professionalism alive between you two - but, that was becoming increasingly difficult under the weight of his piercing blue stare.
He hummed, like he was thinking it over but not really. “I’m sure whatever it is can wait another seven hours for you to come back in the morning.”
You sighed, slapping the sticky note down onto the paper and then scribbling out a small notation for him. “There,” you said, like he hadn’t just given you his explicit blessing to stop. You glanced up towards him - his eyes were still boring into yours.
“I’m being serious,” he murmured, his gaze momentarily flicking down to the file and then back up to yours again. “That’s an order. Go home.”
Coming from literally anyone else, you likely would have been offended at how strongly he was coming off. But, this was Bucky. This was…Kind of normal.
You chewed on your bottom lip, pulse hammering loud in your ears. You could feel the heat radiating off his body, he was pressed so damn close to you - and the direct touch of his palm was hot enough to melt away the icy chill of the office on that autumn’s night. Finally, you gave up - you nodded and closed the file. “Alright.”
You turned to gather your laptop and your bag, but he was already doing it for you. You felt your cheeks flush hot. “Sir, really. You don’t have to-“
“Sir?” he interrupted with another laugh - wow, three in one evening. You were on a roll. “Aren’t we way past the formalities?” He cocked an eyebrow as he held your coat out to you.
Neck, cheeks, and ears dusted pink and on fire, you took the coat and shrugged it on before you reached for your bag. “Uh-uh,” he tutted with a small smile. “Let me carry this for you and I’ll walk you out to your car.”
Right. Once again, anyone else and this would have been plain creepy. But no, this was just good, old-fashioned Bucky Barnes who couldn’t stand to let chivalry die.
“Fine. But just so you know, I’m coming in early in the morning just to spite you,” you muttered, giving him a quick once-over.
If you had to be honest, he looked as if he’d just wrestled with a bear and lost. Your lips gravitated into a frown as you took a quick step towards him. You reached up, not hesitating to take the delicate, blue silk of his tie between your fingers. “Did you try to redo this yourself?” Your eyes flicked up to meet his. This pitiful knot certainly wasn’t your workmanship.
Right then, you swore that in the dim, golden light of the ancient desk lamp, you saw dark pink bloom across the apples of his cheeks. “Perhaps…” he mumbled, jaw ticking as he glanced off to the side.
You worked the tie off with ease, and you could feel your heartbeat racing under the influence of his constant stare. He definitely had a problem with that, the whole staring thing. But, you’d learned to not mind it so much. “Next time, come to me first,” you said quietly, making quick work of fixing the knot and then taking a step back to admire your work.
Bucky, who was trying very hard not to be visibly flustered by the gesture, just nodded. “Noted.”
The next morning, your heels were clicking against the polished marble as you marched your way back towards Bucky’s office. The gray light of the dawn was beginning to seep through the dusty window panes, painting the halls in a pale glow.
You weren’t much of a high heel girl yourself, but today was a rather important press conference and you knew that the Congressman always gave you a few more glances than usual when you wore them. Just for the satisfaction of making him hot and bothered, you were willing to set aside your personal qualms with one of the most heinous footwear designs ever invented.
You paused at his door, knocking exactly three times so he knew it was you - this was something you’d agreed upon within your first week once you learned he had a habit of ignoring just about anyone who bothered to knock. “Come in!” You heard faintly through the aged, wooden entrance.
You turned the tarnished, brass knob and shouldered the creaky door open all while balancing his coffee and yours, along with several binders and your purse and laptop bag. You weren’t afraid of multitasking - no, multitasking was afraid of you.
You tossed him a polite, cheery little smile. “G‘Mornin’, Congressman,” you chirped, tossing your purse and laptop bag down on an ornate armchair before you piled the binders high on his desk and promptly held his coffee out to him. “You can take the girl out of work, but not the work out of the girl,” you said as he huffed in annoyance at the binders.
“I take it that you didn’t sleep?” He took the coffee from you as his eyes searched your face for signs of adequate rest - or, the lack thereof.
You shook your head. “Not until a few hours ago. I was really engrossed in those speeches…” You pouted and perched yourself up on the edge of the solid mahogany desk. You crossed your legs over one another out of politeness only, since you were wearing a short, black pencil skirt.
You couldn’t miss the way his eyes tracked the satiny flow of your midnight blouse, or the way they followed the gentle curve of your body downwards to how the skirt hugged your ass so nicely and the lace of your stockings peeked out from just underneath the skin-tight fabric. They settled on your heels, a sharp exhale coming from his nose before his eyes flicked back up to your face.
You tilted your head. “Yes?”
His jaw ticked because he knew he couldn’t say anything. Well, he could but he was risking an HR complaint if he did. “Nothing. You look ready for the press.”
You beamed. “Oh! Do I?” You giggled. “I tried my best. You know I always do.” Your voice was honey and velvet and everything so sweet and tempting to him…
He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing as he did. “Right,” he said, clearing his throat and then pushing the new pile of binders aside. “I was reading over the press conference address this morning…”
You cocked an eyebrow in silent question.
“Am I…It doesn’t feel right to be taking this harsh of an opposing stance to something that feels…” He trailed off, trying to find the right words. Once again, political jargon was not his forte.
“Mostly bipartisan?” You interrupted with that sickly-sweet smile.
He nodded. “Yes, that.”
You took a rather pensive sip of your coffee. “Bipartisan doesn’t always translate to ‘good’, Congressman,” you quipped, and then reached across to flip through the speech pages yourself.
“Mmm, you see here?” You quickly pointed to a clause on the bill he’d be opposing. “This right here is some pretty…Sneaky business.”
He hummed, his gaze flicking between your delicate finger, the words on the paper, and your glossy lips. The tension that settled in the air between you two felt thick enough to cut with a knife…And that’s when you were rudely interrupted by your first phone call of the day.
“Congressman Barnes’ office, how may I direct your call?” you answered, sliding off the desk. Teasing him would have to wait, although as you glanced back over your shoulder to check, you could see his eyes were still making a meal out of you and your little skirt.
The press conference was a whirlwind as you’d expected it to be.
Before all the lights and the cameras, you’d stood behind him in the mirror, smoothing down the sleeves of his suit jacket with careful attention. You could tell from his stiff expression that he was uncomfortable with the level of professionalism he needed to maintain as your hands just so casually ran along his biceps. “I think navy is more your color than black,” you muttered, stepping around in front of him as you moved to fasten his cuff links in place.
He was trying to look anywhere but directly at you, but it was so hard when you looked so pretty and the aroma of your perfume was dancing dreamily about the air. “Are you saying I wear too much black?” he asked, still staring straight ahead.
You shrugged. “Maybe. But I’m not your stylist. I’m just the one who buffs out the rough edges before it’s showtime.”
You straightened his tie and then took a step back. “Go on and get ‘em, Bucky.” With a satisfied grin, you gave him a little wink and the most chaste, polite peck on the cheek you could give. Then, you left him standing there as you made your way to the media room.
In his office, Bucky stood in a silence that felt too heavy to breathe in. He was…Stunned. Every nerve in his body felt alive and buzzing with electricity - and it wasn’t because of the televised address. No, it was because he could still feel the softness of your lips lingering against his stubbled cheek; and, he could kick himself for just letting you leave after that.
During the conference, you tried to ignore the way he was staring at you more than the cameras, but he was making that awfully hard. You crossed your legs, one atop the other, and squeezed your thighs together as you desperately wished you could disappear. And, before you could even think about making a clean escape from the media room, a gloved vibranium hand was wrapped around your wrist and tugging you back from the double doors. “Prep room. Now.”
He didn’t leave room for protest as he nearly dragged you along to the back briefing room. Once the door clicked shut, he let go of your wrist, mumbling a quiet ‘sorry’ like he’d realized he was being a bit too rough. “What was that?” he questioned.
You blinked. “What was what?”
He sighed. “Before the conference?”
“I…Adjusted your tie?”
“No. You kissed my cheek.”
You couldn’t help the way your cheeks turned crimson and sold you out before you even had a chance to defend yourself. He took that as enough of an answer, beginning to pace the length of the room.
“I should fire you for that,” he said, hands clasped behind his back and his eyebrows furrowed in thought as his gaze stayed glued to the government-issued blue carpeting.
You leaned back against the conference table and crossed your arms over your chest. “But you won’t.”
That stopped him in his tracks, mid-stride. His eyes snapped over to you, piercing and icy. But the threat fell flat. “How do you know?” he huffed.
“Because if you were really pissed enough, I wouldn’t be standing here alone with you. You have a team that handles anything and everything you could need, myself being one of them. I’d have been sent home from the audience if you so wished.”
Bucky’s jaw ticked. He knew you were right. He didn’t really tolerate nonsense, in fact there wasn’t much he did tolerate. A few people. Select members of the press. Last you’d heard he was still struggling to accept therapy. He didn’t deal with things that he didn’t want to deal with, not since being freed from the mental prison of being the Winter Soldier - which, you knew very little about but just enough.
“You’re not one for a power-trip, but you also don’t put up with bullshit,” you continued, eyes meeting his as you cocked an eyebrow. “I could ask you the same question about the flowers. The lattes. Walking me to my car-“
“That’s just called bein’ nice, doll,” he said, tongue darting out across his bottom lip.
“Not when your hand is on my back. Not when I can feel you practically eye-fucking me every time I wear something nice. Which, news flash, is almost every day in this industry,” you argued back.
You watched as big, bad super soldier Bucky Barnes’ cheeks turned pink. Bright pink. And there was that tick of his jaw again.
You pushed yourself off the conference table and grabbed him by his tie, tugging him down so close you could smell the coffee and wintergreen mint on his breath. His eyes widened. “You could tell me to stop,” you whispered. “But I know damn well you won’t.”
You released the hold on his tie and walked back towards the briefing room door. “You have thirty minutes before the vote. I suggest you get going,” you called over your shoulder, smile in your voice as you flung the door open and - once again - left Bucky Barnes too stunned to speak.
The days that followed were…Long and dull and irritating. The old man was somehow grumpy all the time, seemingly moping about how you’d called him out on his little stunts. No flowers, no coffees, no offers to walk you out.
The routine was simple - you’d hand him his coffee and he’d grunt out a very half-hearted ‘thanks’. His eyes - the same ones that used to shamelessly stare - would avoid you at all costs, even if it meant gazing into blank space. He spoke only when absolutely necessary, and you continued to do your work on your laptop while quietly nestled in the armchair across from him. The tension was heavy.
Finally, you’d had enough. You turned up to work on a gloriously sunny Friday morning in your very best dress, tights, and godforsaken high heels. You appeared to be dressed for the most important press conference of your life, except not even a low-level briefing was scheduled for that day. In fact, nothing was scheduled for that day and that was exactly the point.
You set the paper coffee cup down on his desk, fingers lingering around the cardboard sleeve before retreating. “G’Mornin’, Congressman,” you greeted in your usual cheery tone, not like it mattered that much recently.
“Thanks,” he grumbled, reaching for the cup. And as he did, his eyes caught sight of your dress. For the first time in nearly a week, he gave you a quick once-over that ended in an expression of confusion. “Did I miss something on my itinerary?”
You smiled sweetly and shook your head. “Oh, no,” you assured with a little shrug, batting your eyelashes.
His brows furrowed. “Then…What is all of this?” he questioned, gesturing to your outfit.
You looked down at yourself, playing stupid even though you knew exactly what you were doing. “This?” you asked with a small laugh. “Oh, I have a lunch date. Figured I’d get a little dressed up.”
You watched with satisfaction as his jaw ticked. You’d struck a nerve. His eyes narrowed. “Didn’t even know you had a boyfriend,” he remarked, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest.
“First date.”
“Lunch for a first date?”
“Why not?”
“That’s not a very good impression.”
“And what is?”
Bucky’s tongue darted out to wet his lips, annoyance flickering behind his eyes. “I think a nice dinner would be suitable,” he muttered, and then hunched back over his desk as he pretended to shuffle some papers around. “What’s he like?”
You were a little taken aback that he was so invested in your lie, but you supposed it helped to sell the point. “He’s older. Stubborn. A little hard to talk to, but he’s hot so…”
He huffed. “Good luck with that. You’ll need it.”
Oh, yeah. You’d definitely need it…
Your lunch date ended up being between yourself and a disgustingly healthy salad from the cafe across the street, eaten quietly in the comfort of your car as you watched an episode of a sitcom.
Once the hour had gone and passed, you returned to Bucky’s office. And the second you sat back in the armchair and reached for your laptop, he was questioning you. Prying.
“How was the date?”
“It was…Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Eh…Men. You know how it goes, I’m sure.”
His piercing blue gaze was boring into you, you could practically feel it. But you paid him no direct attention as you navigated to a spreadsheet. “Oh, I’m sure. Just like I’m sure you didn’t actually go on a date.”
You felt your mouth run dry and your heart skip a beat. Your eyes flicked up from your laptop. You cocked an eyebrow. “And how are you so sure about that, Barnes? Don’t think I’ve got a line of suitors a mile long?” You really didn’t, but he definitely didn’t know that.
He chuckled, something dark and low and gravelly - honey flowing over jagged stone. “Doll,” he drawled. If you hadn’t been seated, you were sure your knees would have buckled beneath you. “I’m sure you do. But we need to start being honest with ourselves.”
You tried incredibly hard to play it cool, but you were losing it - especially over the fact he was turning this into a ‘we’ situation instead of a ‘me’ situation. You’d long since accepted that you were in love with him - it was he who needed to be honest with himself.
“And what is that supposed to mean?” you snapped back, arms folding across your chest defensively. “I’m not the one wallowing in denial.”
Bucky’s jaw did that little tick-and-set that you knew damn too well and had become awfully acquainted with over the last week in particular. Except, this wasn’t a tick of defiance. You could see it in his eyes - his resolve was crumbling, slowly but surely.
“It’s not right.”
His words sat in the air for a moment, heavy and hard to ignore. Of course he’d be obsessed over thinking through whether something was right or wrong…You knew him. He wanted to do whatever was right.
“Just because it’s not right, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” you replied. “Plenty of wrong things exist that we can’t just ignore and push away.”
He sighed, closing the folder he had opened before tossing it aside on his desk and scrubbing a hand down his face. He looked…Exhausted. Clearly you meant something to him in a way he couldn’t control, and the lack of control was eating him alive.
You closed your laptop, slowly unfolded your legs like you were giving yourself an extra second to back out, and then you made your way over to his desk. You propped yourself up against the corner, a finger hooking just beneath the Congressman’s chin and gently bringing his gaze to yours.
“What do you want?” you murmured, searching his face for answers. “Tell me…”
You didn’t expect it. Not in the very least - not with how conflicted he seemed. But he stood up from his chair, towering over you and leaving your hand hanging in the negative space. Then, his palms were on your cheeks - large, warm, calloused…Comforting. And he stooped down, lips colliding with yours.
He didn’t even need to use words - the kiss expressed it all. It was firm, confident. Reverent and gentle like you were a precious treasure for the taking. He pulled back just briefly, just long enough to whisper, “You.”
His lips were back on yours before you even had a chance to react - rough, claiming, and messy. It was like he was trying to make up for lost time, devouring every bit of you that he could. The kiss suffocated you and gave you life in the very same breath, and everything that followed was uncoordinated chaos.
Without breaking the kiss, his hands reached behind you and shoved everything off the desk - he sent papers, pens, binders, folders, paper clips…Everything tumbling to the floor. Luckily, the carpet muffled most of the sound.
His tongue was slipping into your mouth now, entangling itself with your own as you both moaned into the kiss. His hands grabbed roughly at your waist, picking you up and setting you down on the dead center of his desk - cold mahogany bit at the backs of your thighs through your stockings as he impatiently nudged his chair out of the way with his hip.
Although reluctant, he finally broke the kiss and knelt between your legs - he wasted no time rucking your tight dress up over your thighs. He couldn’t help himself - Lord knows he tried. He audibly groaned just at the sight of the silver garter clips biting into the delicate, black lace frill of your stockings, and how they squeezed at the plump flesh of your upper thighs just slightly. “Smart girl,” he murmured, tongue darting across his bottom lip as his eyes traced gradually upwards to where you were already soaking through your matching lacy panties. “You know what I like, don’t you?”
Your cheeks flushed dark crimson - guilty as charged! And you figured you didn’t need to actually answer that question seeing as you were already wearing the bastard child of all the clothing items that had ever gotten his attention.
Looking up for just a moment, breath hitching in your throat, you noticed the full-length mirror set just behind Bucky’s desk - the exact one you’d convinced him to get so he could keep better tabs on his appearance. And, right now, reflected back at you was a most scandalous image of yourself with Congressman Barnes nestled between your legs and your red-bottom heels dangling over his broad, muscled shoulders.
He noticed the way your breath caught and how you tensed beneath his touch, and his gaze followed your awe-struck stare to the reflective surface. A small smirk tugged at his lips. “Mmm…I see,” he said, plotting. “Wanna watch while I make a mess of you?” His voice was low, quiet.
You nodded, coming off more eager than you’d intended. “Y-Yes…” you managed to stammer out, brain still stuck two minutes ago on the kiss and the confession.
He hummed in approval, and then you felt his fingers hooking into the lace of your panties - you began to feel the soft, slow drag of the thin fabric as he guided them down your legs and left them hanging off the pointy toe of your left heel - it was like he was displaying a trophy, soaking wet and glistening in the dim light.
You watched as he shifted himself barely off to the side and tugged you closer to the edge of the desk. Now, displayed proudly in the mirror, was your dripping heat. You swallowed hard, throat running dry as Bucky watched your reaction through reflection. “She’s pretty, huh?” he cooed, bringing his flesh hand up and gently spreading your folds apart with two fingers - he was touching you like glass, something fragile.
You saw how you clenched around nothing at just his words - needy and involuntary like your body knew exactly what and who it wanted - no, needed. “She’s cryin’ f’me already,” he drawled, voice slurred in lustful wonder. “Beggin’ for somethin’…Don’t ya think?” He tilted his head, stormy blues flicking up towards you. “Look at me and answer me, doll.” He was almost pleading.
You managed to peel your gaze away from the mirror and gaze directly down at him, seeing those once icy orbs turning dark as blown pupils swallowed nearly all signs of brilliant color. “Y-Yes,” you whispered. “N-Need it…”
“Need what?”
You could feel a shameful heat blooming up your neck and across your cheeks to the tips of your ears. “Y-You…Y-Your fingers…”
“Mouth too?”
You whined and nodded, so eager yet again.
“Greedy…” he muttered, but he didn’t protest any further as he leaned in and licked a long, slow stripe up your exposed cunt.
You shuddered at his delicate touch, his breath fanning warm against your skin as he circled the tip of his tongue teasingly along your clit and then trailed back down to your entrance. You gasped, hands flying up and finding purchase in that perfect raven hair.
You hung your head back and then felt him pull away, drawing a whimper of protest from you. “Want you lookin’ over there f’me,” he said, nodding towards the mirror. “Don’t you be closing those pretty little eyes on me now.”
He leaned up and kissed you, soft and chaste but just long enough to get a good taste of yourself on his lips. And, as he sat back, you felt him slowly push a finger inside you. You moaned - soft and breathy - while glancing into the reflection across from you and watching as his digit slowly disappeared inside you. Your legs trembled a little as you felt him crook that finger up, burying even deeper against your fluttering walls. “Fuck…” you sighed out.
“That’s it, doll. Beautiful. Think you can handle one more?” he murmured, kissing at the side of your neck - wet and sloppy - as he slowly moved his finger in and out in a rocking motion that was borderline hypnotic.
“Mmm…Mmhm,” you whined, gasping as you felt him immediately slip a second finger in right beside the first. You continued to watch the obscenities play out in the mirror as his fingers stretched you open, pumping in and out of your weeping cunt - slow and deep.
“Got a tight little pussy…She’s greedy, not wantin’ to let me go…” he teased, and you swore you saw stars as he shoved them in even deeper and curled them up right against that soft, spongy spot that had your back arching towards him. He seemed pleased with that reaction. “Is that it? That where ya need me, doll?”
You nodded almost frantically, crying out as he started to bully his fingers into that spot over and over and over. “Yes! Yes! Buck-“ He quickly clapped his metal hand down over your mouth.
“Quiet, doll,” he warned, shaking his head, “Don’t wanna get caught…”
You swallowed hard, tears gathering at the corners of your eyes from the blinding hot pleasure building inside you. “B-Bucky…” you mumbled against his hand, watching as his fingers fucked in and out of you, curling deep and scissoring apart to stretch you open for him.
“Atta girl…C’mon…Just let go f’me…” he encouraged, pupils blown as he glanced between you and the mirror. “Let me see how gorgeous you are when you cum f’me…”
And so you did, screaming out against the cold vibranium vice across your mouth as you felt yourself clench down tight around his fingers. The rolling tide of your orgasm washed over you - a warm, electric wave that left you breathless and panting and pulsing around his digits.
After coaxing you through your high, Bucky slipped his fingers out and held them up in front of him as he watched your glistening slick drip down the length of them. He licked his lips. “Look at that,” he breathed, not breaking eye contact as he popped the soaked digits in his mouth and moaned as he sucked them clean.
You whimpered. God, he was so fucking hot. The salt and pepper of his beard was also coated in you, shining golden in the lamplight. Watching how his eyes fluttered shut as he savored the taste of you on his skin…
He pulled his fingers out, wiping them dry on your dress before diving in head-first and beginning to lap up all the sweet release that coated your cunt.
“A-Ah~! B-Bucky…” you gasped out, chewing down hard on your bottom lip as he made the most obscene sounds while he licked and sucked you clean - devouring you like it was his last meal.
“Sweetest little pussy I’ve ever tasted,” he mumbled against you, voice sending vibrations straight through your ruined core.
As he stood back up, you couldn’t help but feel intimidated by the way he was absolutely towering over you. You were entirely in his shadow and at his mercy.
He shrugged his suit jacket off, tossing it onto the nearby chair and then he slipped off his tie, balling it up in his fist. He looked at you with dark eyes, but there was a softness peeking through that contrasted so heavily with the words he spoke. “Open up, doll,” he drawled, low and slow. “Gotta make sure the whole of Congress doesn’t hear ya now.”
You obediently parted your lips, mouth almost being shoved open as he stuffed the balled-up silk into your mouth. You tried to moan, just to see how you’d sound. It was muffled, but just loud enough that he could still get the satisfaction of hearing it.
Then, metal clinked softly against metal as he slowly undid his belt and threw it over the chair where his jacket lay discarded. He popped open the button on his dress slacks, pulled down the fly, and then unfurled himself from inside his boxers. He wasn’t trying to put on a show, but that didn’t stop you from staring the entire time.
You weren’t sure you’d ever seen such a delicious sight in your life, let alone the glaring fact that he was huge. His cock stood, curved slightly at attention and flushed red - aching and already leaking incessantly at the thought of being buried inside your tight cunt.
Bucky took a step towards you, almost completely closing the gap between his pelvis and yours, save the length of his throbbing dick. Flesh hand wrapping around the base, he teasingly guided the fat tip of his cock up and down your folds, lubing himself up before just notching himself at your entrance.
You whined through the gag, the corners of your eyes already damp with tears.
“Hmm? I didn’t quite catch that, doll,” he murmured as he began to push himself inside inch by agonizing inch.
And it wasn’t agonizing in the sense that it hurt. No, it was agonizing because all you wanted was his entire cock sheathed between your walls, but all he was doing was feeding it to you little by little. The stretch burned, but in a way that once again had your back arching off the damn desk and your toes curling in your heels as you locked your ankles around his waist.
Once he bottomed out, hips pressed flushed to yours, his hands roughly gripped at the flesh of your thighs as he carefully pulled out and then slammed his hips back against yours. You moaned out, voice muffled by the tie. Your eyes screwed shut, tears of pleasure tracking black trails of mascara down your cheeks.
“Uh-Uh,” he grunted. “C’mon, sweet thing. Open those pretty eyes f’me again. Don’t close ‘em now…”
You whimpered at his words, but obeyed like your life depended on it - like you were tethered to him and existing there just to grant his every lustful plea. Your eyelids, although heavy, fluttered back open and you gazed up at him through wet lashes.
The pace he set was brutal and breathtaking, and it had you moaning and sputtering around the makeshift gag as he dragged out to his tip and then slammed back in so your body was flush to his. You could feel the way his cock so perfectly nudged against that soft spot inside of you, leaving your thighs trembling in his grasp.
“Perfect little pussy is takin’ me so well,” he breathed out, head dropping down by your shoulder and soft grunts falling from his lips as he continued to pound into you. “Want me to fill ya up? Hmm?” he growled. “C-Cum f’me, doll. I can feel it…Know ya want to…”
Every merciless intrusion of his cock sent sharp, white-hot sparks of pleasure straight to your core. And it didn’t take very long before you were trying - and failing - to scream his name through the spit-dampened tie. Drool was running down the corners of your mouth and dribbling onto your tits from your chin - and, your cunt clenched down around his cock as your body shook and your fingers white-knuckled the edges of the desk.
Bucky followed shortly afterwards, your name rolling off his tongue so effortlessly and entangled in sweet praises. “That’s it, doll…Mmph~ Give it all to me…” He buried himself in as deep as he could, his cock throbbing and filling you up completely with his thick, warm release.
After a moment where the two of you were catching your breaths in the electrified silence, he suddenly slipped out and tucked himself back into his slacks. You squeaked a little in shock when you felt your combined releases leaking all over the dark mahogany of the desk in pearlescent, white streaks.
Bucky looped his belt back on and then reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket to retrieve a large, embroidered handkerchief - of course he had one of those. “You made such a mess, doll,” he scolded softly, taking a corner of the soft, cotton square and dabbing up your hot, inky tears and pathetic drool before folding the hanky over itself and wiping up the cum that was still lazily dripping from your entrance.
Once you were clean enough, he retrieved your panties from the toe of your heels and helped you slip them back on. Only then did he take the tie back from your mouth.
“I expect you to have that speech done by six,” he said, like he hadn’t just fucked you right there in his office. “And then I want you to go home. You have a long day ahead of you tomorrow.”
You were shaking as you wobbled on your heels and tried your best to fix your mussed dress and hair.
As you turned to walk back to the armchair, head still floaty and fuzzy and warm in the afterglow, his hand caught your shoulder and you turned around.
“But don’t forget to let me walk you out tonight, okay?”
You could almost laugh. Bucky Barnes, always a goddamn gentleman.
summary — jack has seen you leave a trail of broken hearts and bad dates, and he’s determined to prove to you that you’re looking for love in all the wrong places.
warnings — 12.6k words. age gap (jack’s around 50; reader’s a 4th year resident, so 20s), attending/resident power dynamic; mentor/mentee relationship, idiots in love maybe?? yearning!jack, jealous!jack, jack ‘i’ll pay for it’ abbot strikes Again!!!! hurt + comfort (one instance of jack being an ass, but he smooths it over during the same shift - they can’t stay mad at each other), mild angst, patient death, jack’s leg - reader helps him adjust the prosthetic and takes care of him during a long shift, canon-typical medical scenes and probably lots of inaccuracies (i’m an english major reddit is my best friend) ; on-page patient death, reader performing compressions, reader DATES DATES and may be unprofessional (affectionately she just wants to find love and her entire life revolves around the hospital who can blame her), reader’s written to have hair she brushes and can pin up, she also gets on her toes to kiss him but that can be ignored i just liked the image jack basically bribes her into a date, no smut but they’re So very much thinking about it, rushed-ish ending i think?
notes — wrote this in a slump it took so Unbelievably long and i’m not even sure i like it but i wanted to post something before i give up on writing anything ever again!!!!
It was midnight and a peds nurse was lingering by the ambulance doors, and Jack knew that he wasn’t meant to be there. Lewis was his name, maybe, but Jack couldn’t even be sure of that — and knew he had no reason to be sure of it, because the guy wasn’t meant to be there. Running the ER in the middle of the night, with all of the day’s patients handed off, and the night’s still finding their way through triage, was difficult in itself, and he didn’t have the energy to also babysit Ryan-or-Lewis-or-whoever hovering there like a little boy waiting to be picked up from school.
“Is he meant to be here?” Jack asked, closing the space toward the desk where Lena was pointing something, jutting his thumb in the direction of the guy.
Lena flattened a printout on the desk with two fingers, hardly sparing him a glance.
“Him. Peds. Why is he there?” he tried again.
“Couldn’t tell you,” she said, but the corner of her mouth had flicked up, proving that she was simply choosing not to tell him.
“He’s off his unit,” he said. He knew he sounded just slightly silly stating the obvious.
“Seems so.”
“Send him back, then,” Jack drawled, incredulous, hands finding his hips. “There’s enough shit going on here.”
“You send him back,” she retorted, amused just slightly. “If you’re so concerned.”
Jack looked up at the ceiling, shaking his head as his hands went to rest on his hips. When he looked back down, he found you walking toward the nurse and it suddenly made complete sense.
He let out a sigh. “This has to be a joke.”
His eyes, as they did more often than was appropriate, caught on you, hair coming down loose from where you’d pinned it, the scrubs lopsided at one hip, riding lower than where they’d started at the beginning of the night. You turned to say something to the guy quickly, and the movement caught the slip, your scrub top moving up half an inch, and Jack’s eyes went there before his brain could tell him that was wrong, some groove in him that noticed you before it noticed anything useful. He had a second of pure, unhelpful distraction before his brain reminded him that he was an attending and had things to do.
“I actually think it’s funny,” Lena said, shrugging.
Of course it had something to do with you. He should’ve figured it out the second he saw the guy standing there with his hands in the pouch of his scrubs, rocking heel to toe like the floor was just too exciting to be standing on. Nobody loitered around the ambulance bay at midnight for good reason. People came through those doors bleeding or they didn’t come through them at all, and this guy had shown up with nothing wrong with him, except maybe a case for some lovesickness.
“I’m gonna make this stop,” Jack said, already pushing himself away from the nurse’s station.
Lena’s eyes widened slightly. “Don’t say anything that gets you sat down with HR.”
“She can goddamn try me,” he said, and went. Also because Jack was fairly sure you would never report him to HR.
He crossed the floor and caught the tail-end of your conversation as he closed in.
“ — just tell me when you’re free, that’s all I’m asking,” the guy was saying.
You were already half-turned, already gone as you waved a hand loosely beside you. “I don’t know, I just don’t think we should try again.”
Jack blew out a breath, standing a few feet short of you, your back facing him. Why was he not surprised? He’d been keeping tally without meaning to, and he knew that was embarrassing. There was the radiology fellow who’d started hand-delivering films that very well could’ve gone through the system; the travel nurse who’d washed through in six weeks and left the floor faintly weird in his wake; the anaesthesia resident who now took the long way around the department if he saw you at the end of it, as though he were a dog who’d learned the fence was electric. And now this one, apparently, Peds with his whole hopeful heart hanging out in Jack’s department.
“You’re so sweet for coming down here,” you practically crooned at him, shifting on your heels, eyes flicking down to the form in your hand. “But I really do have a whole long night ahead of me, and I know my answer’s not gonna change, so I won’t make you wait around for it, okay?”
Jack fought the urge to roll his eyes when you said the words with the upward lilt of a woman sending a toddler back to his mother. He wanted to laugh a little when he saw that the guy had taken it standing up like it was a gift.
The hell of it was that Jack understood the man. He understood every last one of them because he stood next to you fifty hours a week, had been doing so for three years, and whatever the department thought of him after his consistent therapy, he was not carved out of stone.
Jack was afraid that if he hadn’t been your attending these last four years and a little younger, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he’d have been eating out of the palm of your hand.
You gave the guy a there-there pat, and it was only then did his eyes land on Jack, who he probably knew was your fucking attending. You turned then, and immediately said, “Oh, Dr. Abbot, I’ve got the guy in six’s labs back, the potassium —”
“Mhm.” Jack’s hands came up and landed on your shoulders before you’d finished the sentence, squaring you off the spot where you stood and turning you bodily back toward the floor like you were a gurney.
“It is four-point-nine, but the EKG’s good, so I was gonna recheck in —”
“Let’s recheck it now,” he said. He kept you moving, his palms broad through the cotton of your scrubs, steering you a few feet till your own feet caught onto the idea.
You grumbled something under your breath, and once he’d stopped you right in front of six, you turned to face him with your brows raised.
“Say something?” he asked, tipping his chin down.
“You seem like you’re mad at me,” you said.
“Huh. I do?” He let go of your shoulders — noticing, distantly, the exact second his hands came off and suddenly felt too empty — and reached past you to pluck six’s chart off the tray, more to have something to do with them than needing it. “You’re right. You should recheck in ten minutes.”
“You’re mad at me,” you said again, crossing your arms over your chest.
He blew out a breath, and suddenly felt just a little silly at getting worked up over a nurse by the doors when there was a large, glowing board behind him full of names that needed his complete, undivided attention.
You were a senior resident, after all, four years deep, one of his sharpest — you’d treated the guy in six, hadn’t you, you’d flagged it and called for the EKG and made the right call on the recheck before he’d even asked, all while dismantling some man’s hopes. Somehow, your mess and competence ran on the same current. You never let the first touch the second. He’d have loved, some nights, to have an excuse to be mad — a missed lab, a blown line, anything he could write up and point at — and you kept declining to hand him one. All of this meant he was left with this vague swampy irritation, and Jack wasn’t the sort of mentor who liked to hound upon that.
“No, sweetheart, I just love it when you get random men hanging around the department,” he settled on saying, feeling his shoulders visibly loosen a fraction.
You winced, eyes darting over to the emptiness in front of the doors now. “Sorry.”
“You’d say it won’t happen again, but we both know better.” He shrugged. Then, he reached out his hand — he wasn’t sure why, except that it just happened naturally — and patted you once on the shoulder, then on the second turned you to face the curtains leading to your patient. “Doctor up.”
And you did, the loose, embarrassed shape of you being replaced in the space of a single breath, being replaced by something Jack had watched grow into you over the years and still hadn’t quite gotten used to.
Trauma called it in nine minutes later, an MVC, unrestrained driver, GCS dropping in the field. Jack was working on a laceration in four when he heard the crackled warning, and by the time he’d looked up out the curtains, you were already moving, gowned and at the head of the bay calling out assignments like you’d been doing this for a decade.
“I need two units O-neg before he rolls in,” you said, voice pitched high enough to carry without yelling, cutting clean through the perpetual noise of the department. “Somebody get me a second eighteen-gauge ready, and I want an ultrasound in here.”
Donnie and Mateo were already moving, and so were the people around you, falling into your orbit like the room had easily reorganized itself around your voice the second it went up. Jack stood by the curtain, gloves from the lac still on, and found he couldn’t make himself move just yet.
The doors banged open. EMS wheeled the stretcher through fast, calling out vitals over each other, and you were already on the patient’s side before the gurney had fully stopped moving, hands moving on his neck, chest, eyes scanning his pupils in a matter of ten seconds. He began walking over, catching your voice as you called out your reads as someone hung the blood and someone else prepped the ultrasound wand. “Page neuro now.”
“On it,” Mateo said, already moving.
You had both hands on the patient, running the primary survey quickly, confirming, checking, discarding possibilities out in short, clipped sentences Jack recognized as the sound of your brain running six steps ahead of your mouth. Sweat had started on your hairline. You called out for OR to be on standby, eyes flickering around the room and landing on Jack. “OR, please,” you said, aimed at him, brows going up.
“On it,” Jack said, because there was no way he was going to let you be wrong about needing something and didn’t make sure you got it.
The next six minutes went by fast and loud, in bursts and then suddenly quiet, the room narrowing down on functionality. You stood at the center of it; you called it and ran it. You got the man upstairs stable enough that Walsh didn’t sound worried for one second, and that was a compliment from her.
Jack watched the whole thing from four feet back, arms crossed, and chipping in when your brain had snagged. He was feeling a heat in his chest helplessly and entirely unprofessional, it was always present when he was able to see, in real-time, how far you’d come from your first day of residency when your hands were a second too slow on the central line and how your voice would pitch up at the end of every read, asking for permission every time instead of stating it like a fact, eyes finding him across the room each time, checking.
There was none of that left in you now, he realized, had done so a long time ago. He thought, watching you now, that this was the closest thing he’d let himself do to falling in years, standing uselessly riveted as he watched a woman he’d taught outgrow the need for him in real time, and finding that instead of the loss he’d expected to feel when the day finally came, all he felt was warm and terrifying and too much like pride.
When the room had started clearing out, he watched your mouth drop open as you let out a heavy breath, eyes going over to him. The second he watched you realize he was still there, your face shifted, the relief turning into something sharper.
“Why didn’t you jump in?” You crossed the floor toward him in four hard strides, gloves already peeled off and balled tight in one fist, snapping the second one free with a motion that looked terrifyingly like it wanted to be aimed at him. “His pressure tanked for thirty seconds and you just watched.”
“You had it.”
“You didn’t know that,” you said, voice going up an octave, adrenaline still thrumming through you, hands coming up the gesture at the blood-streaked floor. “I could’ve missed something. You’re the attending, Jack, you’re supposed to catch if I missed something —”
“I would’ve,” he interrupted, stepping in close enough that you had to tilt your head back to keep glaring at him properly. “The second you needed me, I would’ve stepped in. I wasn’t gonna take it from you before you did.”
“You can’t gamble like that with a patient —” Your chest was rising and falling fast, gloves now crushed in your fist, and he could see the fear catching up now that everything around you had gone quiet enough to let it, something that looked more like fear of yourself than for the patient. “What if I’d frozen —?”
“I knew you wouldn’t.” He reached his hand out, thumb catching a smear of the blood at your jaw you’d accidentally smeared on yourself, wiping it off carefully with the pad of his thumb, and felt you go still under it. “You don’t trust my judgement?”
“You know I do. You just could’ve said something.”
“I could’ve. He dropped his hand from your jaw only to catch your wrist instead. “Didn’t wanna interrupt you being brilliant. Kinda liked watching it happen.”
Your mouth opened, surely to let out some unnecessary retort, and died there when he pressed one slow stroke of his thumb against your wrist, raising a brow.
“Relax,” he said, voice going rough as he leaned in a little, forcing you to meet his eyes properly. “Just take the win. That’s an order.”
“Now you wanna give orders,” you mumbled.
He barked out a short laugh, letting go of your wrist. “Only when you’re being stubborn for no reason.”
It was sometime during the second year of your residency when he’d started catching your drift. It had started with a random Friday shift. He’d seen you at the station, elbows on the counter, telling Lena something conspiratorially. Jack was meant to be reading a chart but couldn’t help how his ears had perked up. Anything to get through the shift, he supposed.
“ — no, but he was perfect on paper,” you were saying, “kept his house clean and everything. He told me he kept his plant alive for six years —”
“So, what happened?” Lena said flatly, like she already knew what you were going to say but wanted to hear anyway.
“He wanted to take me bowling on the second date,” you said through a sigh. “I know how it sounds, but you’ve gotta hear me out —”
“I’m genuinely not going anywhere.”
“ — for the first date, bowling’s fun. But he took me to a nice dinner the first time, he set a standard, and then the second date he goes bowling, which means the effort’s already —” You created a little downward slope with your hand. “And if it’s already sliding on date two, where’s it at on date two hundred? I can already see my marriage with him and it’s bad.”
It seemed you had a criteria, Jack learned then. It was proven even more when he’d heard you talk about your other failed dates, seen them, and learned — without ever wanting to — what they were, to an extent.
He knew you couldn’t stand a man who ordered for you without asking. He knew you’d written off a fellow for the way he talked about his mother, and another one — an accountant, a rare specimen who had no clue what an EKG was — over a text message you’d read aloud to Ellis in a voice of complete horror, though Jack had never caught what it actually said, only your face while you read it. He knew you gave people precisely three dates, that this was a rule you held if the first and second date went well, three apparently being the magic number at which a person could no longer hide the demon they were going to turn out to be (your words).
He knew, too, that you only allowed one kiss after the first date, if even that. It was never up for negotiation, no matter how beautifully the night had gone, for you never wanted to end up “emotionally overdrawn on an account you hadn’t even opened yet.”
He knew you a man lost real points if, over the three dates, if it involved drinks, he ordered the same one. He knew a man gained them, silently and instantly, for being able to sit in a lull without narrating his way out of it, and that you considered this the single rarest trait in modern dating.
He knew you were looking for something you had no name for and would recognize on sight, which struck him as a hell of a way to run a search.
He’d have told you, if you asked, that he tuned most of the station chatter out as a matter of survival, for while he enjoyed the occasional gossip, he couldn’t very well absorb everyone’s business. And that was true about everyone’s business but yours, apparently, because yours came in clear.
Your business he retained against his own better judgement, and he realized — once, during a slow shift — that he could’ve drawn you a better map of your taste than you seemed to carry yourself. He could’ve told you, if you asked, exactly the kind of man who’d finally clear your bar, and exactly why he had yet to show up.
It was almost nice, some nights, watching you try anyway. The ER was a place where everyone was kept tethered to the world by a thread, and everyone who worked in it long enough to develop some version of the same calluses. Jack had grown his years ago, and he wore them invisible, occasionally aching, and had come to terms with it being permanent.
Love, for Jack, had stopped being a real noun before you’d shown up, somewhere between things he used to want and things he’d decided weren’t for him anymore.
You still believed in it. You’d watched this place take everything soft out of grown men twice your seniority and somehow walked through the same fire hopeful, still convinced, against every scrap of evidence, that somewhere there was a person worth all that hoping.
For that reason, he had decided to not interrupt your endeavors, not until now, when he noticed you during hand-off before your night shift with him started, in front of Robby, of all people.
While Jack loved Robby like a brother, he had a documented, department-wide, actuarially reliable seven-week expiration date on every woman he charmed out of this building. He’d heard intra-departmental gossip about him. There was, Jack was fairly sure, a running joke about it that predated your residency by years.
He knew you definitely were not finding love in his best friend. But Jack felt the buzzing in his mind go quiet and mean watching how you with him.
You laughed at something and Jack lost, for one humiliating second, the thread of what he’d walked over to say. It happened sometimes, more than he’d admit to anyone. Ordinary noises out of you hit him somewhere in his chest before the better part of him flagged it as a problem, and he had to physically clear his throat before finding his footing again.
“ — Italian’s always good after pulling a double,” Robby was saying. “But I do love some microwave ramen, too, when I’m missing my med student days.”
“Oh, so your standards have been raised being chief?” you said, and Jack could hear the smile and wariness in it.
“For sure —”
Jack let out a huff, something resembling a laugh, as his feet planted him between the two of you. He was close enough that his shoulder nudged yours and you had to step back to keep your balance. He felt your weight land for a second against him with a satisfaction he had no, absolutely no business feeling for something so small. So childish.
He turned to Robby, spreading his hands wide, mock outrage. “My resident.”
Robby looked mildly amused, unbothered, so Jack added, before he could respond, “Go home before I report you to HR.”
“You’d do that to me?”
“In a heartbeat. Have some shame.” Jack kept his shoulder where it was still angled half in front of you, an old, unexamined instinct keeping the line drawn even though Robby had already backed off.
He tipped his head toward the doors, toward the gold light coming up in them, the day shift draining out around you both. “There’s a whole rich life waitin’ for you out there.”
Robby just smiled and pushed off the counter, giving you a small wave before he left.
Jack turned to you then, brows furrowed. “Seriously?”
You let out a short laugh. “Work hard, play hard?”
“Soundin’ a lot like a frat brother right now. Never have those words been said in an ER,” Jack said.
“I wasn’t actually going to do it,” you said, rushing the words out with something more honest in them. “For the record. I know what — he’s got a reputation.” You picked at the counter. “I was just talking to him. He’s funny.”
Jack had to recalibrate for a second. “You were talkin’ sweet to him.”
“I talk sweet to everyone.” You lifted a shoulder, completely unbothered. “You should try it sometime.”
He rolled his eyes at that. He reached over for your cup of coffee sitting between you — closer to his elbow than yours — and drank a sip, eyes going up to the ceiling at the sheer volume of syrup you’d decided you needed in your bloodstream today. “The hell?” he muttered, turning the cup slightly as if that would help. “Are you trying to embalm yourself?”
“Give it back.”
“In a minute.” He took a second sip, slower this time, and watched you over the rim of the cup. Then, he set it back a few degrees off how you’d had it, just to see your jaw tick.
You pulled the cup back in, thumbed it around until the lid faced you again, and drank from it without breaking your explanation. “I’m offended you think I’ll get wine and dined by the chief attending.” You tilted your head. “Give me some credit here. I won’t be his seven weeks.”
“Huh.” He rubbed the back of his neck, which was warm. “Well, good. Don’t think he’ll clear your bar anyway.”
“See, you get it,” you said, pointing a finger at him. “At least someone around here does.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, tipping his head slightly forward that even he hadn’t realized that he had shifted the distance just slightly. “Better than most.”
Your eyes widened slightly at that, and Jack took that as his cue to step back, clear his throat, as he jerked his chin toward the board.
“Alright, time to work. Stop the play,” he said, trying to get his voice the right level. “Go look at chest pain on three.”
“So bossy,” you said, but you were already turning around to go to three.
Well, that’s what he was, wasn’t he? For some reason, he had to remind himself that.
It was what he had to remind himself as his hands hovered your trembling ones as you tried to pump air into Mrs. Foley’s lungs, knowing she was already gone — had been for a while now, if he was honest — longer than it took you to admit. He knew it, he’d grown the grim ability to recognize when a body stopped being a patient and being someone you were performing compressions on for the family’s sake, for your own need to have done everything.
He’d let it run anyway, because you hadn’t accepted it yet, and he’d wanted to give you that extra minute to arrive at it on your own.
Mateo had come up to Jack’s side, snapping his gloves off, the sound of it overshadowed by your own heaving.
“She has to call it,” he murmured. “You want me to —”
“No.” Jack’s eyes, he felt, could not move away from your distress. “I’ve got her.”
Mateo looked at him for a moment longer than the moment warranted, and then he stepped back and let Jack be. You were still going, your compressions had gone harder, faster, less like genuine medicine and more like you were pleading with Mrs. Foley herself now. Sweat had gone to the hair at your temple. Your jaw was set in a clench Jack recognized all too well, and for a moment, Jack wished that he didn’t have to be so acutely tuned into watching what the job did to others, the same way it did to him.
He stepped in behind your shoulder, close, and brought his hand down over yours where they were locked on the old woman’s chest.
“Look at the clock,” he said quietly into your ear.
“One more round —”
“You’ve done plenty.” He pressed, gently, until your hands stilled under his, and felt your entire body resist it. “You know she was gone before we could’ve even done anything —”
“She’s been my patient for years —”
Jack knew then that while you may have been an excellent doctor, his senior resident that had bloomed under his mentorship but still could’ve gone without him and done just the same, it wasn’t a good feeling to wonder if the job would dim you the way it had him.
“I know.” He kept his hands over yours with enough pressure so as to not let you drive them down again. “That’s why it’s yours to call. But you’ve gotta call it, Doctor.”
Your breath hitched as you turned your neck to face him, and there was a pool brimming on your lashline that you kept at bay, nodding. Your hands under his stopped straining upward, and he felt the exact second you accepted it, for it moved through your shoulders and down your spine and left you a little smaller standing there, the fight trickling into the moment after, which Jack always thought was worse.
“Time of death,” you said, forcing your voice back into the procedural tone, “oh-three-forty-one.” You peeled your gloves off finger-by-finger.
His hand found the small of your back after taking the minute, leading you to the little family consult room with the boxed tissues and fake ficus with a couch that had absorbed more bad news since longer than you or he had worked there. He shut the door with the flat of his hand and let the floor’s noise cut to a hum through the drywall.
You stood in the middle of the room with your arms crossed, holding yourself, and stayed silent.
Jack propped himself against the table, arms folded, as he breathed out a small sigh through his nose. He knew you weren’t a talker after the bad ones. Some residents came out of a loss with their mouths running, narrating it into something survivable, and some went quiet and small and had to be waited out, and you were the second kind. So he waited.
You broke it eventually, like he always knew you would have. “I’ve got a butterscotch she gave me seven months ago in my locker still,” you murmured, craning your neck so you were looking at the ceiling. You wiped under your eyes with the heel of your hand roughly.
“Think I’ve got one, too,” he murmured, wincing as he tried to shift his weight.
It had been building up for the past few hours, a hot ring of wrong down below the knee where the socket had gone slick and furnace-warm because it was past hour fourteen, when he’d sweated the fit and never changed the liner because there’d been no window that wasn’t already accounted for. He shifted his weight off it, trying again, and reached down to thumb the release, breaking the seal.
He let out a short, punched out sigh as he pulled himself down onto the chair behind him, one hand balancing himself on the table. “Sorry,” he gruffed out, jaw clenching.
Your eyes flickered down to the prosthetic limb he was balancing against the pole of the table and you were already moving before he could finish apologizing. You never asked if he needed a hand. You’d learned sometime during your second year that asking him gave him a chance to say no, and you’d quit handing him that chance sometime during your second year, so now you just came. You went down on one knee at the pole of the table.
“Don’t say sorry,” you mumbled, eyes not meeting him.
His jaw stayed tight and he didn’t fight it, fight you. That was a formality and you both knew it, a thing he did with his shoulders and not his hands, but he watched the top of your head and thought — like he always did, each time, and never said out loud — there was no one else on god’s green earth he’d let do this in the way you did. Not the prosthetist, who did it clinically. Not the VA, who did it tired. You did it each time like it was nothing and everything at once, as though this something not worth remarking on.
He very badly wanted to thank you, despite how small he always felt when you did this. He wanted to tell you that you were, without question, better at this than anyone who was paid to do it.
Your fingers found the socket and went for the liner because you knew the fit went bad and the sweat before it went bad anywhere a person could see, knew he’d have to run it slick and furnace-hot than spend the fourteen minutes off the floor. You rolled it back with the flat of your thumb, easing the trapped heat out of it, and he felt the pressure of the ring of raw below his knee and had to clench his jaw to not let the relief show on his face. You spared him anyway by keeping your eyes down where they’d been.
“You’ll strip your skin doing this,” you said conversationally, the roughness still present in your voice from the code. “You know that. You keep running it past twelve and one of these nights it’s cellulitis and I’m admitting you.”
“If only I could be so lucky.”
He ducked his head slightly, a part of him wanting to catch the reaction, and he saw how one corner of your lip was barely turned up.
You thumbed a line of red where the socket’s edge had bitten in, checking it, and your touch went careful around there. “This is new. The edge is catching higher than it was.”
“Went to a new liner last month,” he said, voice low. “Not broke in yet.”
“Then you break it on your days off. Not on a fourteen hour.” You finally looked up at him, shaking your head with this flat, fond expression he’d come to realize was your favorite way to look at him. “You’d write me up for less.”
“I’d write you up for a lot less,” he agreed, thinking back on the time you’d fought him tooth-and-nail over staying through a migraine, refusing, point-blank, to hand off a soft rule-out chest pain at eleven when the migraine had started very visibly began creeping up on you.
He’d caught you before you’d said a word about it because you’d begun squinting at the numbers and pressed the heel of your hand against one eye for a moment too long between patients, thinking nobody was watching. He was, he realized, always watching you in some way.
“Go home,” he’d said quietly, catching you by the elbow outside the curtain. “That’s not a request.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve got a migraine.”
“I’ve got a job.” Your jaw had clenched, stubbornly, and Jack had thought that even if he’d put all his strength into it, he wouldn’t have been able to unclench it for you. “I’m not handing off a chest pain because my head hurts. This guy has waited long enough for a bed. I’m not the priority here.”
He’d wanted to tell you that you were, actually, that you were exactly the priority, and watching you white-knuckle forms with your pupils blown different sizes from pain scared him more than any board full of critical pains ever had. But he’d just pulled down the light two notches, told the nurses to shadow eleven’s discharge, and put a bottle of water and two Tylenol on your desk without a word. And thank god, you’d taken the Tylenol and finished the shift standing up because sitting made the room tilt worse, and only taken on non-critical cases. You’d refused until the end that you should’ve gone home three hours earlier.
Now, you huffed something that was nearly a laugh, your first real once since the code, and went back to setting. And Jack sat there with his arms crossed in the dark with your hands on the worst-guarded part of him and the door shut against the whole floor, and thought about how he believed nobody deserved you. People were vile and sucked and cut in line and let doors swing shut behind them, and you handed out three dates to men who wrote sonnets in your voicemail and couldn’t clear a bar you’d never once lowered for anyone. He’d thought, more nights than he liked to admit, that these people had no idea what they were auditioning for.
His eyes snagged on you because there was nothing else in this small room worth looking at. There was still salt dried in your lashline from the code. You were a wreck and you were fixing his leg anyway, still half-shaking from a woman you couldn’t save, and it hadn’t occurred to you to stop and put yourself back together first. It never did. Jack had seen the care run out of you before you ever decided to spend it.
“I’m sorry about Mrs. Foley,” he said.
You shook your head, face still angled down, thumb pausing mid-motion. “I’ll be okay,” you murmured, lifting up one shoulder. “I just hate that she couldn’t get here sooner.”
“You did nothing wrong,” he said plainly. “Family said she’s been feeling off for two days now.”
“I know.” Your voice cracked, betraying the flatness you were trying to present. “Doesn’t make it easier.”
You lifted your head for a moment, then, looking at him with a sad smile he knew you were painting on to get him to stop talking.
He nodded stiffly, tipping his chin down. “Alright. Finish my leg and we’ll run this floor together.”
Up in radiology a few nights later, Jack had gone himself to sort out a reading that had been sitting long and he’d cornered a tech and got what he needed and was already halfway out the door, jacket sleeves still rolled from the last set of compressions, when he saw the guy standing off by the light boxes.
Younger. A resident, he supposed, in scrubs a size too crisp for someone who’d actually been on the shift long enough to earn wrinkles in them. He’d been watching Jack the whole time — Jack could feel it, the itch of being observed — shifting his weight heel to toe against the linoleum floor.
“Somethin’ on my face?” Jack said flatly because he really did have to get back to the floor.
“You’re — sorry, you’re Dr. Abbot, right?”
“Last I checked.”
The guy’s hand came out of his jacket’s pocket, and there was a piece of folded paper in it. Jack looked at it like it was a spider, hoping — no, praying — it had something to do with work.
“Could you give this to her?” the guy asked, and Jack’s hope died, as he stepped closer. “The senior resident on your shift. She’ll — she’ll know who it’s from.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack murmured, brows pulling in together. “You ever heard of texting, kid?”
“I did,” he said, and Jack could practically feel the heat radiating off of him. “She stopped answering, so I figured, maybe on paper, she’d actually —”
“Take the hint,” Jack grumbled, snatching the paper out of his hand. Then, as he turned to the door, he said, “You know I work in the ER?” When the guy only nodded quickly, he added, “You know she works in the ER?”
“I — yeah. Obviously.”
“Then you know she doesn’t need this.” He held up the paper between him and the guy. “She’s got enough on her plate without some guy too chicken to call her handing me a note like I’m her mailman.”
The guy opened his mouth, nose scrunching at Jack’s words, but nothing came out.
“Yeah.” Jack was already walking, note tucked in his pocket, done with the conversation. “Try calling next time. Or don’t.”
The guy looked at least a little sheepish, a little ashamed, and Jack thought good, he should feel ashamed. He wasn’t sure what the protocol in dating was now — he’d been just a little rusty and out of the stretch for a stretch of years he preferred not to count in single digits — but he was fairly certain that whatever the rules had curdled up to, this could not possibly be inside them.
He rode the elevator down with the note in his pockets, and he could feel the small stiff square of another man’s hope pressing over the outside of his thigh.
He found you at your desk, hands running restlessly through your hair as you spoke into the microphone, charting. The words were coming out of you bluntly, mechanic and after saying the same variation a thousand times over. There was a pen behind your ear you’d forgotten about and the residue of a lab value gone blue across the back of your hand where you’d scrawled it hours ago and never washed off.
He stood there for a second before you noticed him, and thought — not for the first time and with the same low irritation he always felt about it — that he had no earthly business being the man this got routed to.
Jack leaned down so his head hovered beside yours, scanning your work on the screen, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed yours, head tilted to read your screen at an angle that had nothing to do with actually needing to see it.
“The man wants an espresso martini?” he asked, furrowing his brows as he read over your notes, right by your ear.
You jumped just slightly and swivelled on your stool to face him, then back at the screen. “Shit — Jack. Announce yourself.” You scanned the words on your notes, shaking your head and already backspacing. “No, that was me talking to myself. Stupid mic picked it up.”
“Long as it’s just the one,” he drawled, staying there in your space a little longer, watching the side of your face instead of the screen now. “Those things sneak up on you.”
“Speaking from experience?” You turned on your stool to face him fully, chin tilting up to meet his eyes, something playful and a little challenging in it.
“I’ve got a couple decades on you. Everything’s snuck up on me.”
You held his gaze a little longer, then looked away first, tongue coming out over your lips for a second. He took a small satisfaction in not being the one who blinked first.
He blew out a breath through his nose, remembering, with reluctance now, what he’d actually come here to do. “Speaking of sneaking up.” He pulled out the note from his pocket. “I got something to deliver to you —”
You furrowed your brows when he handed it to you. “Secret admirer?” you asked jokingly.
He barked out a short laugh. “Nothin’ secret about it. You ignoring some radiology fellow?”
You grimaced, opening the note and scanning over the words quickly. He could’ve left, but stayed instead and watched you read it. The frown only pulled deeper, and he saw your eye twitch once as you scanned the words.
Against his better judgement, he murmured, “That bad?”
“Uh — no, it’s okay.” You shrugged stiffly.
“Huh,” he breathed out, studying you outright now. “Wonder what you’re doin’ to these guys to get them so wound up.”
You chuckled, mostly to yourself. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
His chest tightened at that. It was unfair how you could make anything to him sound like something he’d been waiting to hear. He swallowed. “Suppose I would.”
“That an offer, Dr. Abbot?”
“Might be,” he said, shrugging one shoulder.
You laughed — surprised, the tension in your shoulders breaking slightly — and shook your head, folding the note back up. “You’re ridiculous. Well, thank you for getting it to me. I’m sorry he bothered you with this —” You swivelled, placing the note on your desk before picking up your phone. “That’s really weird.”
“That’s one word for it,” Jack said, and left it there, because you’d already turned and had your phone in one hand and the microphone in the other. The small furrow was back between your brows, and he’d learned there was a point past which pushing you got him a brighter, smaller version of whatever you were covering.
He drifted toward the far end of the station where Mateo was crouched at the crash cart running his palm along the drawers, checking seals, restocking and checking the fact of it on slower nights like this.
“She okay?” Mateo asked, snapping the drawer, seemingly having caught the interaction.
“Oh, you know.” Jack leaned a shoulder into the wall, arms crossing. “The belle of our ball. Can’t clock in without collecting a proposal.”
Mateo huffed. “She loves love.”
“That she does.” Jack watched you across the station, the phone lit against your ear now. “Don’t know why she keeps doing that to herself, though.”
“She’s an optimist.” Mateo clicked a seal into place, then moved down the cart. “Thinks someone’s gonna turn out different.”
Jack hummed, then, because the question had been sitting low and unlovely for a couple hours, he asked, “You two give it a run ever?”
Mateo turned his neck to look up at Jack. “Me and —” He jutted his thumb behind him to vaguely gesture at you. “Her?”
“Mhm.” Jack kept his eyes on you. “You’re close.”
“Nah.” Mateo went back to the cart, shaking his head as he chuckled softly. “I don’t think I’d pass a single one of her tests. Besides, I got my eye on someone.”
“Apparently I don’t make the list either, I guess,” Jack murmured.
Mateo laughed through his nose, eyeing Jack with something new now. “You want to?”
Jack caught it, reaching his palm and smacking it against Mateo’s curls with no force. “No. Now, do your job.”
“I am —” He laughed through the words, eyes scanning over Jack’s stiffened posture now. “It’s good you don’t, then. Couldn’t handle her anyway.”
“Sure, I could,” Jack said immediately.
Mateo’s head turned again, lips curving upwards at Jack’s words, and he felt momentarily blindsided by his own mouth, entirely too honest for something that had started as a joke.
“Sure, you could,” Mateo teased, drawing out the words.
“Shut it.” Jack grabbed a box of gloves off the cart and set it down two shelves lower than it needed to go, purely to do something with his hands that didn’t involve reaching for Mateo’s collar. “Wasn’t a real question.”
Couldn’t handle you? As if he didn’t know, without having to think about it, that you took the stairs two at a time instead of the elevator when you were annoyed and needed somewhere to put your extra energy, or that you’d started drinking your coffee black on nights a patient reminded you of someone, syrup and cream abandoned, like sweetness felt wrong to have that shift. As if he hadn’t noticed, months ago, that you hummed the same four off-key notes from a jingle neither you nor Jack could place when a chart was boring you to death, or that you double-checked every single IV line now, ever since one bad mistake in your first year. He could very well handle you, he simply hadn’t been given the chance to do so.
Most of the time, Jack was fine with watching your love life play out in 3D. More often than not, he knew they’d never work out. You were just too good for anyone who came sniffing, and there was a grim comfort in that, in knowing the fellows and the nurses would wash through and out and leave you exactly where he found you, three feet down the counter from him, close enough to keep.
Tonight the comfort wasn’t coming. Mateo’s accidental interrogation had rubbed Jack wrongly, somewhere he had yet to fully locate yet, and was sitting in his chest like a splinter he kept forgetting was there until he turned the corner over the night, saw you, and noticed it was there. He should’ve let it stay as nothing, but his brain had apparently decided three hours later was the correct time to relitigate the whole exchange, turning it over at odd intervals between patients like a tongue worrying a chipped tooth.
It was the bad sort of slow in the ER, the sort that let his brain fill up with things he’d have no time for on a real night. Ellis had wandered over to your desk with two energy drinks and placed her arms loosely beside your computer.
Jack was distantly aware he had misplaced labs to hand back to you because they’d gotten lost in the system, and he told himself that was the whole reason his body had started moving in your direction.
“I got a rundown from Marge,” Ellis said, dropping into an empty stool beside you. “Apparently he wrote it out of the OR.”
“You’re joking,” you muttered. “I don’t understand it.”
Jack stood there with the labs in his hand, close enough to hear it.
“I’m still wondering if I should respond,” you were saying, half into your hands. “Is this romantic? This one’s never happened before.”
Ellis laughed slightly with you, and the two of you had built one of those small pockets that slow nights sometimes allowed, thirty seconds of being people instead of clinicians.
Jack set the labs down at the edge of your keyboard harder than he meant to, the papers slapping flat against the desk, and both of you looked up at him like he’d grown two heads. Fuck — had he? It sure felt like he was operating off of whatever chemical cocktail his brain had whipped up for nights like this, some ugly little compound of jealousy and exhaustion. He was fairly sure if you pulled his labs right now they’d look like a man in the middle of a bad reaction to something not yet figured out in the scientific world.
“Labs on eight got lost.” His palm stayed on the sheet for a few seconds too long, some instinct telling him to keep his hand on something solid before the rest of him did something stupid. “You’ll want to recheck the trop.”
His eyes cut, against every ounce of better judgement he had left, to the note still folded in your hand, the same one he’d carried down like it was radioactive, the same note that had clearly done something for you that four years of Jack standing next to you clearly hadn’t. An unreasonable, low feeling creeped up behind his ribs at the sight of it, hot and out of proportion to a piece of folded-fucking-paper.
Ellis’s smile went uncertain as he felt her gaze snag on him.
You blinked up at him, and whatever had been sitting easy in your face a second ago curdled itself away, the corners of your mouth retreating. He knew this same retreat, had watched you recalibrate your muscles, swiftly, built to be unreadable against anyone who hadn’t spent four years learning your face.
His stomach dropped and heat climbed up the back of his neck, jaw tightening on its own. He hated that his body had learned to answer you the way it answered a motor alarm. He hated more that some raw, cornered part in him — still smarting about Mateo’s offhand comment and sore from that folded note — felt it wasn’t soothed.
You blinked up at him, and the laugh faded off your face, and you said, easily, warm, “Yeah — course. I’ll get right on that.”
He shrugged up one shoulder, lips pressing into a thin line. He turned, already walking away. “Whenever there’s a gap on your social calendar, I guess.”
He heard the small silence that opened behind him, and he could practically imagine you and Ellis looking at each other. Then, he heard you push back from the desk, the stool wheels catching, and your footsteps coming after him like he’d known they would, because you were the last person to let something like that go.
“Hey.” You fell into step beside him, voice pitched low, still giving him more benefit than the doubt had earned in the last ten seconds. “What was that about?”
“Nothing.” He tilted his neck up slightly to do a quick scan of the board, some stubborn muscle in his neck refusing to let him meet your eyes. “Got a department to run.”
“And you’ve been running it great. You just became weird right now.” He could feel you working it over beside him, shifting on your feet as you toed the line between resident and the hard-won territory neither of you had ever named. “Jack.”
“You want to laugh about your shitty dates, that’s your business,” he said instead of letting it go, sounding too far from the man who’d had his hands hovering over yours an hour ago, watching you put in a chest tube, telling you that you’d done well. “Do it a little quieter. This is an ER, not a lunch table.”
His words stopped you for half a step. Jack kept walking, an ugly, cowardly momentum carrying him three more steps before you caught back up.
He heard you recalibrate your voice in real time when you said, “I was charting on a slow shift,” carefully. “You’ve made worse jokes when it’s even more busy. What’s this about?”
“It’s about you treating this place like it’s your dating pool and not your place of work.” The words came out much uglier than he meant, and he didn’t have it in him to call them back. “It’s not professional. It reflects on the department. Reflects on me. Somebody’s gotta say it, and apparently that’s me, since you clearly enjoy it too much to stop.”
You stopped walking altogether this time. He turned to face your stillness whole, then, and found your eyes narrowed at him, looking like you’d been hit from a direction you hadn’t been completely guarding against.
He let out a breath, fingers going up to his forehead to wipe at sweat that wasn’t there. “I’m just saying what —”
“I’m sorry,” you said, voice going level and courteous, as you nodded quickly. “You’re right. You’re my attending, it reflects on you. I’ll keep my personal life out of work.”
“That’s not —” he tried, but you were already turning away, shoulders squared and chin level, professional armor snapping into place just like he’d told you to. It should have made him feel better to watch you take it so cleanly, to not make a big deal out of it. All it made him feel was like something had been surgically removed from him.
“Stop —” he tried again, to your back now, and the sentence died somewhere between his teeth and the air. That was okay. There was no end to the sentence that didn’t sound worse than the beginning anyway.
He blew out a sharp breath through his nose, standing in the middle of the floor with his hand still half-raised toward you, fingers curling back into his palm when he realized you weren’t there to reach. Jack felt, distantly, uselessly, like the only thing standing still in the entire building.
“Great going,” he heard Lena say, trailing past him, a tray tucked against her hip, not even breaking stride. “You got rid of the one entertainment we’ve got around here.”
His shoulders stiffened, and he caught up with her in three steps, jaw working around words that wanted to spill out defensively and came out simply tired. “It’s not entertainment if she keeps getting hurt,” he grumbled. “She’s not a show. Stop treating her like one.”
“Didn’t look like she was the one getting hurt tonight,” she said, rounding a corner and leaving him standing there.
Jack let out a low groan, running a palm down the lower half of his face, and dropped his hand only when he’d scrubbed enough friction into his jaw to feel it sting a little, which was at least a sensation he’d chosen, at least tonight. He stood there a second longer, staring at nothing in particular. His hands found his hips on reflex.
“Fuck,” he muttered to himself, and dragged both hands back through his hair, gripping once at the roots before letting go.
He rolled his neck, felt it pop unsatisfyingly, and pushed off the wall he hadn’t even realized he was leaning against. His leg fucking ached, the burn starting behind his knee. He ignored it like he always did and started walking anyway, jaw still held tight, hands shoved deep into his pockets like he could physically hold himself together with the seams of his own black scrubs.
It was by the lockers after hand-off that Jack saw you next. Both of you had conveniently managed to work over-time; he because there was nothing to get home to, and you — he’d heard through the grapevine — because one of your patient’s little sister was coming in toward close, and you simply wanted to talk with her instead of handing the situation off to one of the day residents.
Usually, nobody had asked you to stay when you did. Most times, there was no version of staying that showed up in your favor; he and Shen were gone, so there was no attending grading you on it; no hours that counted. It was just for a kid who was going to get bad news from a face she’d seen before, so you cost yourself hours of sleep you most definitely needed to be the soft spot for a stranger’s little sister, and hadn’t mentioned it to a soul, and he knew you would’ve been embarrassed if he brought it up.
He found you using the little mirror inside your locker to apply some kind of pink-tubed gloss with one hand while the other ran its fingers through your hair. Jack pursed his lips, eyeing you from the doorway, because he was pretty sure you’d done something different to it in the last ten minutes.
“Look nice,” he tried, biting the bullet and walking toward his own locker. “Goin’ somewhere?”
You caught his eyes in the mirror instead of turning around. “Just breakfast,” you said, and there was none of the earlier lilt in it, the warmth that you’d always aimed at him gone functional. You capped the gloss with more force than it needed and dropped it into your bag.
Jack stood there a second too long with his hand over his own locker without opening it. He’d expected — and he knew he was more optimistic than usual for doing so — your easy back-and-forth, his slip-up from earlier forgotten. He wasn’t sure what to do with the quiet or you not looking at him properly, hairbrush working through your hair in short strokes.
He’d saved around thirty lives tonight, and that was what he was good at. He was not good, and had never claimed to be good, at the aftermath of hurting a person he’d have put his own body between a stretcher and wall for, without meaning to, over something that had never been about the radiology fellow at all.
He opted out of opening his locker and chose instead to lean his bicep against the locker, eyeing you in front of him. “Mad at me?” he murmured.
You let out a short breath, shaking your head, and he tracked all your micro-expressions through the mirror. “On the clock?”
“Well, we’ve both been off it for a while now,” he said, watching the shape of your mouth in the mirror, waiting for it to give something away. It didn’t. “But no. Asking as your —” He stopped himself, because ‘friend’ seemed not to be the honest word though it was the first one that popped up. “Off the clock. Whatever I am to you right now.”
You set the hairbrush down on the little shelf with more care than the moment needed. “It’s okay, Jack,” you said, shaking your head.
“Don’t think it is. Try again.”
You watched him for a second in the mirror, then you turned.
“It’s just embarrassing,” you said, and the words came out smaller than anything he’d heard out of you in years. You crossed your arms over your chest. “I respect you and I hate that you’d think for one second I don’t take this place seriously.” Your voice cracked on the last word, just barely, and you pressed your lips together. “So, yeah. It’s embarrassing to have my attending confirming I’m exactly what people think I am.”
He was shaking his head before you could even finish the sentence. “Nobody thinks —”
“You do,” you said, voice rising slightly. “So, off the clock, I’m embarrassed, and tonight, I’m going to be your resident. Because I agree with you. It’s been unprofessional of me to keep dating within the hospital —” You threw your arms up halfway by your side, and you let out a short laugh that came out dry and wrong. “And I hate that you’ve probably been thinking it for four years.”
“I haven’t,” he said too fast. God, he’d come here to make tonight better for you, not to make you re-evaluate all your years working with him. “Sure, I thought it was none of my business how you spend your good nights off. Didn’t stop me from thinking they didn’t deserve ‘em.”
You rolled your eyes. “You’re just saying that now ‘cause you feel bad.”
“Wish it were that simple,” he said, and chose to leave it unelaborated because it wasn’t that simple and he had no intention of explaining exactly why. “Half the time, you know it’s not gonna work out. You’re breaking my heart by making me watch you break yours.”
You blinked, and he watched the fight loosen out of you by inches. “It’s just a free breakfast, Jack. Nothing to get your heart broken over.”
Jack let out a huff through his nose, mouth opening to say what, he didn’t know. “Is that all? ‘Cause I can get you free breakfast for the rest of your life.”
You laughed, disbelieving, through your nose, some of the night’s weight finally cracking off of you. “You’ve got a weird way of apologizing.”
“Just to my favorite resident.” He pointed his index finger at you, lazy, and pushed himself off the lockers. His shoulder blades left a faint dust-print on the metal where he’d been leaning. He thumbed in the combination without looking at the dial — muscle memory, years of the same locker — and the door swung open with a rusted squeak. He pulled out his bag. “So?”
“So what?”
“You ditch the fellow.” He slung the bag up over his shoulder, close enough now that he caught the tail-end of the perfume you’d lightly spritzed over yourself. “I buy.”
You looked at him for a second too long, lips pushing to one side, as though you were gauging whether this was a bit or not, another line he’d tossed and wanted to let die on its own. He stood there, jaw set and features relaxing to show you he did mean it, more than he wanted to admit, if he was being honest with himself.
“You’re serious.”
“Do I look like I’m not?” He nodded once at your locker, your bag sitting on the shelf. “Grab your stuff. We’re going.”
“Fine,” you said finally, reaching over and zipping your backpack all the way before throwing it over one shoulder. “Can you drive? I’ve been taking the subway.”
“Why?” he asked drily. “You’ve got a car.”
Jack realized, as he watched you slide in across from him and folding both hands around the coffee before it was all the way poured, that he’d never once been on a date where the woman had no idea it was one.
It wasn’t lost on him what that made him, a man old enough to know better, letting a thing be one thing on his side of the table and another thing entirely on yours, saying nothing to square the difference. But he’d meant what he’d said, and he was going to feed you.
You ordered a short stack, eggs, hash brown, decaf on loop. She wrote it down, definitely having heard worse from better.
“Thanks for the treat, Jack,” you said when Dina left, bringing the rim of your cup to your lips. “Don’t think I could’ve done another breakfast to let him down gently.”
“We have to make some changes to your lifestyle,” Jack replied, voice rough, as he eyed you.
“Oh, yeah?” you murmured. “We?”
“Well, I did have to deliver a note to you today. In all my life working here, that’s never happened.”
You laughed around the rim of your cup. “In my defense, I don’t think anyone’s wrote me a note out of an OR either. That’s a first for both of us.”
“Glad we share the experience.”
Dina came by with a pot and topped you off without being asked, and placed the food in front of you. Jack watched you reach for the salt before your fork had even touched the eggs, shaking it twice over the plate.
“You’re gonna give yourself a stroke by forty.”
“You’re gonna give me a stroke right now if you comment on my food.” But you set the shaker down after the third shake, which he noticed and had to bite back a smile.
Dina dropped his plate in front of him — bacon, eggs, no pancakes — and you were reaching for it with a piece of your fork before she’d even finished setting his fork down. He gave you a faux-frown, picking up his fork and, without looking, spreading a piece of your hashbrown off the opposite plate in trade. He wasn’t sure when the two of you had started stealing bites and sips off of each other’s stuff, only that it’d started somewhere and calcified into something neither of you mentioned.
“Rude,” you said, mouth already full.
“Learned it from you,” he muttered, nudging his plate an inch closer to your side of the table, which you took full advantage of.
Dina’s radio crackled through something twangy and close-to-familiar behind the counter, competing with the clatter of a skillet somewhere in the back, the whole place smelling like batter and grease soaked into decades of countertop, syrup that had dried a hundred small amber rings nobody had ever fully scrubbed off.
“I’ve never been here before.” You absentmindedly cut the hashbrown in half as your eyes raked over the place. “This a regular spot for you?”
“Since before you joined,” he said easily, but his brows furrowed as he realized he’d been coming here alone for years. He was in the same booth when he could get it, ordered the same order, and it struck to him only now, watching you eat your hashbrowns, how much smaller and less lonely a booth felt with you taking up the other half of it. “Used to be the only quiet I got on some weeks.”
You hummed. “And now?”
“Guess the quiet’s pretty negotiable.” He shrugged. “I can go without it.”
You smiled down at your plate, something easy working at the corner of your mouth. A thread of syrup had gathered at the seam of your lips — you hadn’t noticed, too busy considering his answer — and before he’d cleared the impulse with the rest of himself, his thumb was already moving, catching it at the corner quickly, no different than when he swiped under your lashline for salt after a bad night.
You stayed still, having gotten used to his hands somewhere during your residency.
“You’re a mess,” he said, wiping his thumb off on the paper napkin folded under his elbow.
“You’ve got coffee on your scrub top,” you said, eyes flicking down to his chest. His brows furrowed and he looked down, and you were right. “Pot, kettle.”
He’d been about to say something else, he could’ve sworn it, but had lost every word of it watching you smile so unguarded, free enough to let him look at you. He had to reach for his coffee just to have something to do with his hands.
When the check came, folded in its little plastic tray, you both reached for it at once. Your hand landed flat over his knuckles. Neither of you moved it for a second, for his hand stayed exactly where it was, broad and unmoving under yours, and something unspoken passed through the two inches of fornica between your faces as he raised a brow at you. He slid the tray out from under you slowly.
“Said I’m buying,” he said, shaking his head slightly.
The drive back had been quieter than the one there had been. It was nearing ten in the morning, and he knew both of you had stayed up longer than intended, especially for two people who had to clock back in in a shorter amount of time than he deemed plausible to reset completely.
He’d cracked the window down an inch, and the air coming through carried the smell of wet pavement and the sound of a garbage truck grinding its gears three streets over. Your neighborhood, he was learning, woke up slow; there was a paperboy on a bike, a guy in scrubs different from yours locking up his own car after a shift that wasn’t at the PTMC, and Jack drove through it with two fingers loose over the wheel. Neither of you had bothered with the radio.
You’d gone somewhere billowy around your third cup of decaf, all the sharp edges of the night replaced with something looser and sleepier, and you gave him directions in a voice gone thick from exhaustion as you were likely starting to feel it behind your eyes.
He pulled his car along the curb and let it idle, one shoe braced against the floorboard, watching the numbers of your building.
“Gonna sleep?” he asked.
“Gonna try.” You were already working the bag strap over your shoulder, hair falling loose out of the knot you’d put it up in at some point at the diner, strands of it catching the early light. “I’ve got no idea how you do this then take SWAT calls.”
“You’d be able to do it, too, if I put you on the field.”
You mumbled something, letting your head drop against the window for a second, before picking itself back up. “Stop threatening me, Jack.”
He watched you fight your eyelids, his mouth pulling up at the corners at the sight. “C’mon. Get inside before I gotta carry you up.”
You snorted, half-hearted. “You can’t. You’d throw your hip out.”
“Try me.” He was already rounding the hood before you’d gathered your bearings, boots loud on the quiet street, and you let out another laugh and let him get there first, too tired to argue about who gets to open what.
He walked you up the cracked path, palm settling at the small of your back, and you leaned back into it, half your weight given over without you noticing it.
At the door, you fumbled with your keys out from under a granola wrapper and a capless pen, missed the lock twice, and gave up trying on the third. You turned to face him instead with your back against the frame and your bag slowly sliding off one shoulder.
“Thank you,” you said, words coming out loose and filtered by the exhaustion even as you tried to meet his eyes head-on. “For the — everything. The explanation. And the breakfast.”
Jack felt his lips curve up, fingers flexing at his sides. “Anytime.”
“And for driving me there — thank you. And for the drive back.”
“Uh-huh. You gonna go inside?” he said, voice going quieter as he looked down at the ground, at how the toes of your shoes were almost touching. “Or keep thanking me until you fall asleep standing up?”
You cocked your head to the side, your lips moving upwards into a fuller smile. His own mouth curved as he shifted on his feet slightly, closing the barely-there inch between his shoes and yours.
“Jack?”
He hummed, and you went up slightly onto your toes before he’d finished deciding what to do with you. Or maybe he’d moved in first, or maybe there was no real order to it at all. His mouth found yours somewhere in that uncertainty, slowly despite it, because he’d already worked out every version of this moment and this one had simply appeared in front of him.
His hand came up to cradle the side of your jaw, thumb settling into the soft hollow just beneath your ears. Your skin was warm despite the cold snap in the air, much softer than he’d let himself imagine, and he felt the exact second your breath caught against his mouth, a small stutter that made his fingers curve around your jaw, index resting against your cheekbone.
He kept it slow, it was the only thing he had any real control over right now, the pace of it instead of the fact of it. He used what little he had left, dragging his mouth against yours, like he could somehow make up for four years of nothing by refusing to rush the first thirty seconds of something. His other hand found your waist, and his palm felt how your back curved into him, the hitch of your ribs on an inhale, and he pressed you back the last inch against the doorframe more to ground himself.
Your fist found the front of his canvas jacket, dragging him in the last stubborn space he’d been too careful to close himself, and a sound came out of his chest that embarrassed him a little. He felt you smile against his mouth, and his entire body felt warm at having been caught enjoying this entirely as much as he was.
He tilted his head so his forehead pressed against yours and pulled his mouth away. His lips jutted out slightly, feeling suddenly empty and unwilling to put the full distance back between the two of you.
Your eyes were still shut, and you were breathing unevenly. “Thank you,” you murmured.
He huffed a short laugh, and in it, realized how breathless he, too, was.
You tipped your chin back up, already chasing him.
Jack felt the want knot up inside him, greedy and unreasonably leaning back in to meet you halfway before the rest of him had caught up and made him stop. He made a small sound in his throat and pinched his eyes shut, letting you get right up to the edge of it, breath already tangling with his, wanting so badly to just let it happen, before his finger came up between you, pressed light against your bottom lip to stop you a hair short. It was more for his own sake than the words he remembered you telling someone years ago ringing in his head.
“Ah-ah.” His voice came out rough with want, entirely at odds with his actions. “Your rule. Only one kiss after the first date. I’m trying —” he exhaled hard, almost dramatically, “— trying real hard here to make it to the second.”
“Huh?” Your eyes peeled open. “This was a date?”
“Best one you’ve had I’m guessing, with the way you’re breaking your rules.” His finger stayed right where it was, and he watched your eyes struggle to focus, still glassy from the kiss. He could feel the warm huff of breath breaking unsteady against his fingertip, could feel your mouth soft and parted underneath it, waiting on him.
You pressed a peck against his finger instead, your mouth barely dragging against his skin as a shy smile formed behind it that he felt more than saw. “Maybe.”
“Well, good.” He smiled, despite himself, and pushed himself off your forehead, opting instead to press his lips there. “Get some sleep,” he murmured against your hairline, lips lingering a little longer there. “Might be able to get a full seven hours.”
“Will you?”
“Doubt it.” He pulled back enough to look at you properly, thumb tracing a line along your cheekbone — his touch feather-light, tracking the exact curve of it, memorizing the route — before he made himself drop his hand entirely, fingers curling loosely at his sides because suddenly he had no idea what to do with them without you under them. “Kinda got a lot on my mind now.”
“Yeah?” You bit back a smile, still not quite steady on your feet. “Anything you wanna share with the class?”
“Not a chance.” He bent a fraction and hooked two fingers under the strap of your bag where it’d slid down to your elbow, dragging it slowly back up to your shoulders, knuckles grazing your arms the whole way. “You’ll find out. Eventually.”
He forced himself to step off the mat — one step back, then the second, putting real distance between you now — forcing ease into his expression that he definitely wasn’t feeling. He stopped a few feet away from you anyway, unable to fully commit to walking away, watching you stunned and still in your doorway, mouth a little kiss-soft. He felt so completely helpless and pleased at the sight. “Text me when you’re up and I’ll get to planning date two.”
You raised a hand into a wave, fingers curling in the air.
“Bye, Jack,” you said, and his name came out of your mouth softer than you probably meant it to, smooth and cushy the way it never sounded on shift.
He lifted his chin up at you once and made himself turn, finally, finding the path back to his car. He made it to the curb before he looked back again, and you were still standing there, one hand braced on the door, watching him go with an expression he was sure he was going to think of the entire drive home.
$ log - a sultry reunion at the bar with your childhood best friends, cpt. rogers and sgt. barnes: post-serum steve's so sensitive, it's delicious! all of you work somewhere on the base, but steve planned to catchup tonight with his two best people!
$ warn --nsfw --gn!reader --dom!reader --dom!top!bucky --sub!bot!steve --darkfic --dubcon --praise --humiliation --objectification --groping --dry-handjob --sensory overload --semi-public-play --power-imbalance --childhood-friends-to-lovers(twisted) --power-play --1940s-brooklyn
$ wc -w 3.2k
$ cd masterlist
$ echo "playing w steve's sense of duty was lowk fun to explore" > authors-note.txt
The air in the base bar was thick enough to choke a man, a heavy blend of stale tobacco, spilled rye, and the sweat of soldiers trying to forget the war for a few precious hours.
But in the corner booth, tucked away from the raucous laughter of the main floor, the atmosphere was different. It was stifling, charged with a predatory sort of heat that had nothing to do with the summer night.
Steve sat between you and Bucky, looking like a god carved from granite. The serum hadn't just fixed his lungs and his stature; it had turned him into a fucking masterpiece. His shoulders were broad, straining against the fabric of his uniform in a way that made your mouth go dry.
He was talking something about the strategic importance of the next sweep through the Ardennes but his voice sounded strained, an octave higher than the steady, rhythmic baritone you remembered from the old Brooklyn streets.
You didn't care about the Ardennes. You cared about the way his chest rose and fell with every heavy breath.
You let your hand slide from the table, your fingers tracing the hard, unyielding line of his pectoral muscle through the thick wool of his jacket.
Beside you, Bucky was just as relentless, his hand resting heavily on Steve’s thigh, his thumb tracing slow, suggestive circles just above the knee.
"And the unit... they've been... performing well," Steve stammered, his eyes fluttering for a fraction of a second as your palm pressed firmly against the center of his chest, feeling the frantic, powerful thud of his heart.
Those muscles seemed to be stretching the seams of his uniform until the fabric looked ready to burst.
"Is that so, Steve?" you murmured, leaning in closer until the scent of his clean, masculine skin mingled with the whiskey on your breath.
You let your hand wander lower, your fingers hooking into the waistband of his slacks, feeling the heat radiating from his core. "You seem a little distracted. Is the mission really that taxing, or is it us?"
Bucky let out a low, gravelly chuckle, his grip on Steve’s thigh tightening, his fingers digging into the dense muscle there. "Don't let us stop you, Steve," Bucky teased, his voice a sultry velvet. "We're just catching up. It's been a long time since we've seen you looking quite this... impressive."
Steve swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing convulsively. He tried to fix his gaze on the half empty glass in front of him as if he could find any solace in the amber liquid.
But his eyes kept betraying him, darting toward your hand as it wandered with increasing boldness, or flickering toward Bucky’s predatory grin.
You leaned in even closer, your lips brushing the shell of his ear, your voice dropping to a filthy, conspiratorial whisper that cut through his military discipline like a knife.
"America's sweetheart? More like America's poster boy," you purred, your fingers finally finding their mark, palming the heavy, solid swell of his groin through the thick fabric of his slacks. "I bet you could last a whole night on that stamina, couldn't you, Steve? All that strength... just waiting to be put to use."
Steve let out a choked, strangled sound, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the edge of the table. His face was flushed a deep, burning crimson, and for a moment, the legendary Captain America looked completely undone.
Bucky's hand slid further up Steve's inner thigh, his touch possessive and unyielding, mirroring the way you were currently kneading the heavy muscle of Steve's groin. The Captain was caught in a vice of sensation, his breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches that betrayed the sheer effort it was taking to remain seated in a public bar.
He looked like a man teetering on the edge of a precipice, caught between the duty of a soldier and the primal, desperate needs of a man being hunted by his oldest friends.
"I... the missions... they require focus," Steve managed to choke out, though his eyes were glazed, half lidded with a mounting, undeniable lust. He tried to straighten his posture, to reclaim some semblance of the hero the world saw.
But as you leaned in to nip playfully at his earlobe, his head fell back slightly, exposing the vulnerable, pulsing line of his throat.
"...and the infantry... they've been... remarkably efficient in the latest sector," Steve stammered, his voice hitching precariously as your palm pressed firmly against the heavy, solid swell of his groin through his slacks.
He squeezed his eyes shut for a second, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the edge of the wooden table, trying to anchor himself to reality while the sensation of your hand kneading him sent jolts of pure electricity straight to his spine.
Just as he tried to swallow the groan rising in his throat, Bucky leaned in, his lips grazing the sensitive, pulsing curve of Steve's earlobe. Bucky’s breath was hot, a low, teasing hum against his skin that made Steve’s entire frame shudder.
"What's gotten into you today, Steve?" you asked, your voice dripping with a mock innocent sweetness that contrasted sharply with the heavy, rhythmic pressure of your hand against his crotch.
You gave his jaw a playful, sharp smack with your fingertips, a little sting to snap him back to the conversation. "It’s a little rude to leave us hanging. You were telling us about the new unit commanders."
Steve let out a sound that was halfway between a gasp and a whimper, his head lurching back slightly as Bucky’s tongue darted out to lick the shell of his ear. The super soldier serum had turned his nerves into live wires; every touch was a goddamn explosion.
He felt like he was vibrating, his skin humming with a sensitivity that made the simple friction of his uniform feel like a caress.
"The... the commanders..." Steve managed, his voice dropping an octave, thick and strained. He tried to pull himself together to reclaim some semblance of the hero the world saw.
But his body was betraying him with every frantic, shallow breath. He tried to focus on the mission reports, on the tactical advantages of the terrain, on anything that wasn't the feeling of your fingers curling possessively around his groin or Bucky’s teeth grazing his neck.
"The commanders... they're... they're quite strict," he choked out, but the sentence died in a broken whine when you leaned in, your teeth catching his earlobe and tugging just hard enough to make his hips jerk involuntarily against your palm.
"Strict? You sound like you're having trouble focusing, Stevie," Bucky teased, his voice a low, predatory rumble near Steve's temple. His hand slid from Steve's thigh to his back, pulling him even tighter into the corner of the booth, effectively pinning him between the two of you. "Maybe you're just a little distracted by the company?"
Steve let out a strangled, pathetic little sound, his forehead dropping toward the table as he fought the urge to just unravel right there in the middle of the bar.
The experiment had made him a god, but it had also made him a slave to sensation; he could feel the heavy throb of his own blood, the way his skin burned where you touched him, and the agonisingly slow crawl of Bucky’s fingers up his spine.
"I... I'm fine," he lied, the words coming out as a breathless, desperate rasp. He tried to straighten his shoulders, to look the part of the Captain, but you weren't having it.
You leaned in, your lips brushing his jaw as you whispered, "You don’t have to be fine when you're acting so damn shy," you purred, your hand shifting from a knead to a slow, deliberate stroke that forced a sharp, jagged gasp from his lips. "Tell us more about those duties, Steve. Tell us how much stamina you really have."
You didn't stop. Instead you leaned into the cruelty of it, your hand moving with a slow, rhythmic, and utterly shameless pressure. You weren't just touching him anymore; you were giving him a heavy, clothed handjob, your palm sliding up and down the rigid length of him through the thick fabric of his slacks.
You could feel the frantic, hard throb of him against your palm, a pulse so strong it felt like it might burst through the seams.
Bucky’s mouth was a constant, searing heat against the side of Steve’s neck, his hands roaming Steve’s broad shoulders and chest, pinning him into the very centre of your combined lust.
"You going to be good for us, Stevie?" you whispered, the old nickname tasting like a delicious sin on your tongue. You leaned in, your eyes locking onto his glazed, blown out blue ones, watching the way he struggled to even keep his head upright. "Are you gonna let us do this to you? Or are you too busy being the big, brave Captain?"
Bucky let out a low, mocking hum against Steve's skin, his fingers digging into the muscle of Steve's thigh. "He looks a little overwhelmed, sweetheart. Maybe the hero needs a little help finding his footing."
Steve’s eyes were blown wide, the blue of his irises nearly swallowed by his pupils as he stared at you, his jaw working fruitlessly. He was caught in a brutal, beautiful tug of war.
On one hand, the serum was screaming at him to surrender, to let the pleasure crash over him like a tidal wave, to finally let go and spill himself right there in your hand.
On the other, the soldier in him — the man who had become a symbol for an entire nation — was fighting a losing battle to maintain his dignity. He could feel the dampness of his own arousal, the terrifying possibility of ruining his pristine, honorary slacks in the middle of a crowded base bar.
"Just… just... it's not... the right place..." he managed to choke out. Though the protest was utterly ruined by the way his hips bucked upward, seeking more of your relentless, rhythmic pressure.
You leaned in, your eyes glinting with a wicked, teasing light as you watched him struggle. You didn't soften your touch; instead, you increased the speed of your hand, your palm working the heavy length of him through the fabric with a shameless, unhurried intensity.
"Not the right place? But Stevie, you're the Captain. Surely you can handle a little excitement without losing your composure," you purred, using that old childhood nickname just to watch the way his eyes fluttered in a mix of nostalgia and pure, unadulterated lust.
"Yeah, Stevie," Bucky added, his voice a dark, velvet taunt as he leaned in to nip at Steve's jawline, his hand on Steve's thigh squeezing with a heavy, possessive rhythm that made Steve’s entire frame shudder. "Or maybe you're just scared you won't be able to keep that 'Captain America' face on once you finally break."
Steve’s breath was a series of broken, high pitched hitches, his hands clenching the edge of the wooden table so hard the grain groaned under his strength. He was teetering on a razor's edge, the sensation of your hand working him so firm, so rhythmic, so utterly unconcerned with his reputation driving him toward a precipice he wasn't sure he could survive.
The friction was maddening, a slow burn torture that made his vision swim. He could feel the heat pooling, the desperate, heavy ache in his groin that demanded release, yet the thought of the mess, of the sheer, unmitigated scandal of the great Captain Rogers coming in his uniform in a corner booth, held him back with a white knuckled grip on his own self control.
He was a man caught between two worlds: the disciplined soldier who stood for everything pure and unyielding, and the raw, hyper sensitized man who was currently being driven to the brink of madness by the two people who knew him best.
Every time your palm slid up the length of him, he felt a jolt of electricity that threatened to shatter his very bones, and every time Bucky’s teeth grazed his skin, his resolve crumbled just a little more.
"Look at him," Bucky teased, his voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial growl as he watched the sweat bead on Steve's forehead. "He's practically vibrating. You think he's gonna hold it, honey? Or is the Captain about to lose his war?"
You leaned in, your face inches from his, your eyes dancing with a cruel, beautiful mischief. You slowed your hand down, making the friction agonisingly light, a teasing, feather light drag that made Steve's entire body lurch as if he'd been struck.
He let out a strangled, high pitched sound, his eyes snapping shut as he fought the urge to thrust his hips into your hand. "Don't be a tease, Stevie," you whispered, your voice a sultry command. "Show us how much of a man you've become."
The heat in his groin was a physical weight, a heavy, pulsing ache that demanded he just give in, let the dam break, and ruin those expensive slacks for the sake of a single, glorious moment of release.
The dam finally broke. Not a dignified surrender; rather a violent, shuddering collapse of every ounce of discipline Steve possessed.
As your hand tightened its grip, delivering one final, heavy, and unapologetically rhythmic stroke, Steve’s head snapped back against the booth with a muffled cry. The world flooded into a blinding white haze of pure, unadulterated sensation. He felt the heat bloom, the heavy, pulsing release flooding his slacks, a warm, messy testament to his total defeat.
He slumped forward, his forehead resting against the cool wood of the table, his breath coming in ragged, broken gasps that sounded more like a sob than a triumph.
The shame hit him immediately, the heat of his own release soaking into the fabric, the sheer, unmitigated scandal of it all but it was quickly drowned out by the overwhelming, heavy lethargy of the serum induced afterglow.
He felt undone, stripped of his Captaincy, left as nothing more than a man who had been thoroughly, shamelessly conquered by the two people who knew his soul better than anyone.
But as the initial shock of his vulnerability settled, the cruelty of the teasing melted into something far more tender.
You and Bucky didn't mock his mess; instead, you leaned in, your movements softening as you provided the aftercare he so desperately needed.
Bucky’s hand, which had been so predatory moments ago, now moved with a gentle, rhythmic grace, smoothing the hair back from Steve’s sweat-dampened forehead like he was soothing a wounded puppy.
Steve was still shivering, his eyes half closed and glazed with a mixture of relief and lingering, heavy lidded shame. You leaned in, your voice a soft, honeyed purr that vibrated against his ear. "You did so well, Stevie," you whispered, your hand moving from his groin to lovingly stroke his hair, smoothing the golden locks back from his flushed face. "Such a good, obedient soldier."
Bucky let out a low, rumbling chuckle, his lips grazing Steve’s cheek as he added his own praise, his voice thick with a playful, cruel edge.
"Yeah, look at you. All that power and all that muscle, and you couldn't even handle a dry handjob without coming undone like a damn amateur," Bucky teased, his thumb tracing the line of Steve's jaw with a tenderness that stood in stark, jarring contrast to the filth of his words. "Poor thing. You'd be a real mess if we actually got you out of these clothes, wouldn't you?"
You let out a soft, melodic laugh, your fingers lingering in his hair, petting him like a prized, well behaved puppy even as you whispered the next barb. "He really would, Bucky. Our big, strong Captain, completely helpless under a little bit of attention. It’s almost a crime how much of a toy you are, Steve."
Steve could only let out a weak, humiliated huff of a laugh, his face buried in the crook of his arm, too exhausted and overstimulated to even attempt a proper protest.
He knew he should feel insulted, but there was a profound, grounding comfort in the way you both looked at him not as a god, not as a symbol, but as the same Steve he had always been, just... more.
He let himself sink into the sensation of your hands, accepting the beautiful, twisted duality of your affection. You loved him, but you also loved to break him, and in the quiet, hazy aftermath of his release, he realised he wouldn't have it any other way.
You both are his two closest people ever, always by his side, even hen he was roughed up on the streets, and you two even agreed for this little bar reunion tonight too — why would he ever want to pull away?
"We'll leave you to clean up your little accident, Cap," Bucky murmured, his voice softening one last time as he pulled away, though his eyes still danced with mischief. He stood up, tossing a few crumpled bills onto the table, making sure to leave an extra handful of coins specifically for Steve’s ride home.
You followed suit, leaning down to press one last, lingering kiss to Steve's heated temple. "Don't think this means you won't be paying for this later," you whispered, your eyes twinkling with a promise of even more delicious torment the next time you were all alone.
As the two of you stood up, the heavy, boisterous laughter of the bar seemed to swell around you two, but for Steve, the world was still quiet, centred entirely on the heavy throb of his pulse and the lingering warmth of your touch.
He watched through half lidded, dazed eyes as you and Bucky sauntered toward the exit, two beautiful, chaotic forces of nature who had just completely dismantled the most powerful man in the world and then walked away laughing like you hadn't just committed a goddamn crime.
He sat there in the dim light, the scent of you and Bucky still clinging to his skin, feeling the damp, heavy reality of his ruined slacks against his thighs.
But as he sat there in the dim light, the scent of you and Bucky still clinging to his skin, he realised he had never felt more alive. He was the Captain, the hero, the man of iron, and he was a complete, beautiful wreck and he wouldn't trade a single second of it.
[afab] collateral-damage.txt
// you're the director of damage control, and your most unfortunate assignments are steve and bucky — sure, they save the city, but there's always rubble and citations trailing behind them. tonight you'll decide if there are other, more hands-on ways of settling the bill.
[dark][gn] duties-and-debauchery.txt
// a sultry reunion at the bar with your childhood best friends, cpt. rogers and sgt. barnes: post-serum steve's so sensitive, it's delicious.
[dark][afab] last-night-of-freedom.txt
// during his bachelor's party, cpt rogers is pushed to his limits by manipulative teasing of his two best friends. he always knew you liked to dance, and that sgt. barnes loves to rough-house with him.
-- sfw
[gn] put-in-your-notice.txt
// you tell the avengers you've accepted a summer internship. somewhere else, not with them. steve rogers begins a formal inquiry into his own leadership!
[gn] you-shaved-your-bush.txt
// the avengers reactions to your new, shaved look.
18+ smut. p w no plot lol. fingering. multiple orgasm (2). reader fake hates bucky. light choking. teasing. breeding kink if you squint with whimsy. pnv. they always loved each other.
2.2k
older reupload from a blog no longer around. hehe makes me wanna do more roommate bucky hehe. enjoy!
You had shared an apartment with your roommate for almost a year, needing someone to share the rent with but not having many friends yourself besides people you knew through your best friend, Nat. Somehow, she knew everyone and she liked to play match maker in the process.
“Come on, I think you two would be great together.” She nudged your arm with hers, pressing how great you and Bucky would be together. But you despised everything about him. He was cocky, arrogant, he had a mouth on him where he never shut up. You couldn’t stand him.
“Bucky? Oh god, no. I can’t stand him.” You groaned at even saying his name, you didn’t want anything to do with him.
“Like you have any other better choices.” She laughed and you sighed. She was right, you didn’t have many friends and you mainly kept to yourself in classes because you wanted to focus on your education. You decided that you would give it a try, you needed to save money afer all.
And here you were, standing in the kitchen doing last nights dishes that mainly belonged to Bucky. You hated how he never cleaned up after himself, that you were usually the one to do it. You had brought it up to him a few times but he would just laugh and shake it off and then leave the house to go out to god knows where.
“Ugh!” You threw a bowl into the sink that was filled with bubbles, frustrated.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” You shivered at the sound behind you, knowing it was Bucky. You rolled your eyes and turned around, wiping your wet hands on your jeans.
“You’re what’s wrong, Barnes. Can’t even clean up after yourself.” He chuckled and walked towards you, setting his coat down on the countertop. He looked you up and down, licking his bottom lip before smirking. You sucked in a breath, not really sure what he was doing and why he was getting so unusually close to you.
“Can I help you? Why are you so close to me?” You tried to back away, but your lower back hit the edge of the countertop, his arms holding onto the edge to box you in.
You were inches away from his face, noticing the specks of blue that danced through his eyes, the look of lust overwhelming his face. You had to admit, as much as you hated Bucky, you had to acknowledge that he was attractive as all hell. You knew that he was attractive from far away, but up close you were tempted to kiss his soft pink lips.
“Let’s not act stupid here, doll. We both know that I can hear you at night when you think I’m asleep, touching yourself to the thought of me,” He inched closer, his lips finding their way to your jaw line pressing an open mouth kiss to your skin. “The way you moan my name when you reach your edge.”
Your breathing hitched, shuffling your thighs together to get some kind of friction. The way he was talking to you, how close he was, he knew you were turned on and you couldn’t decide if you loved him for it or hated him even more.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You trailed off as he hummed against your skin, trailing down to your neck and nipping the skin softly, the vibrations of his hum running through your whole body right to your core. You wanted to push him away, wanted to continue to hate him. But you knew that he had you right in his trap, and you weren’t really sure if you wanted to escape.
“Don’t play dumb with me, sweets. Do you know how long I have waited to rest between your legs and feast?” His hands found their way to your hips, gripping tightly as he found his way back up to your lips, pressing a kiss to the corner of your lips. You fought the urge to reach out and wrap your arms around his neck, not wanting to be putty in his hands.
“Just admit it, pretty girl. You imagined what it would be like to be fucked by me.” He let out a low growl as you reached your arms around his neck and pulled him to your lips, kissing hard. He closed the space between the two of you, grinding his hips against yours as you kiss passionately. He bit your bottom lip, pulling it softly as you gasped, giving him permission to slip his tongue into your mouth. You tasted mint, and a faint taste of cinnamon from the cereal he had this morning.
He groaned as you rolled your hips against him harder, reaching to grab the backs of your thighs as you jumped up into him. He carried you, his lips never leaving yours as he brought you to his bedroom, kicking the door with his foot. He carried you over to his bed and laid you down, pulling away and hovered above you.
He looked all over your face, admiring your features and reveling in the fact that you were allowing him to kiss you.
“God, you’re beautiful.” He murmured as he ran his fingertips over your skin, feeling how thin the fabric was and annoyed that it was in the way of feeling all of you. He took your shirt off, noticing that you didn't have anything underneath. He smirked, knowing that you did that for him whether you wanted to admit it or not.
“I can’t tell you how long I have waited for this. All those nights hearing you moan my name, what it would feel like that I was the one making you do it.” He kissed down your neck, your hands finding their way to his hair, gripping gently. He left open mouth kisses on your skin and met your nipple, sucking softly. You gasped quietly and felt Bucky groan as you made a noise.
“No, baby. I want to hear you.” He sucked harder, twirling his tongue over your nipple as you moaned at the feeling. You could feel him smirk as he parted from your nipple and gave the other the same attention. His fingers danced above your clothed core, teasing you as his mouth worked wonders on your nipple.
“Buck..”You breathlessly gasped as he rubbed your clothed clit, wanting to work you up and edge you for making him hear you moan his name when you pleased yourself. He wanted to take his time, but he also wanted to just ruin you.
He grew impatient and ripped your panties off, revealing your slick folds before him. He smirked up at you as he ran a finger through your folds and slightly opening his mouth as you moaned under his touch.
“Such a needy whore, aren’t you?” You moaned as he spoke dirty to you, loving the feeling of his fingers as he played with your folds before pushing two fingers in, curling his fingers in you, you clenched around his fingers, as he moved against the mattress hoping to relieve the tension in his pants. Him pleasuring you, pleasured him.
“Fuck, another, please..” you groaned as he pushed a third finger in you, feeling full but at the same time empty because it wasn’t what you really wanted. You heard his gasp as you clenched tighter, knowing that you were close.
“Make a mess on my fingers, doll.” You felt the feeling in your stomach as he continued to work his fingers in you, pushing in and out rather fast helping you chase your release. He pressed his thumb on your clit and worked all his fingers at once, making you moan loudly as you came all over his fingers. Your legs trembled as he pressed kisses onto your thighs, pulling his fingers out and making eye contact with you as he sucked on his fingers, moaning at how you tasted.
You leaned your head back on his pillows, as he traveled up to you, pressing a kiss against your lips and you grabbed his face with your hands. He took his jeans off in one quick motion, boxers with them and lowered his hips to yours, feeling his hardon against the inside of your thigh.
“For the record, I still hate you.” You looked over his face as he smirked, grabbing himself and stroking slowly. He knew the second he pushed inside of you, you wouldn’t be hating him anymore.
“I’m not so sure about that, doll.” You rolled your eyes as he lined himself up with you, looking into your eyes as you bit your lip. Without any warning he rammed into you, bottoming out quickly and letting out a loud moan. The feeling of being full with his cock made you moan as you wrapped your legs around his waist.
“Fuck, that feels so good, Buck..” he thursted into you harder, bringing his metal hand up to your throat and gripping sftoly enough to make you moan. You looked up to his eyes and made a smirk, wanting to see him go feral.
“I’m going to fuck you so good that you forget what it is like to hate me.” He gripped your neck tighter, his hips meeting yours and the obscene sound of skin slapping against skin made you turned on even more. His other hand gripped your hip, pulling you closer to him as he fucked you into the mattress, watching as your breasts bounced with each hard thrust.
“Please don’t stop..” You breathed out as he let go of your neck, gripping your hips and trailing a hand down to your clit, rubbing incircles to get you closer to your high with him.“You’re taking my cock so well, sweetheart. Tell me, have you thought about what it would feel like for me to fuck you this good?” He smirked as he felt you clench around him, the overstimulation from him working your clit, the feeling his cock thrusting inside you, was no match to your vibrator and own hand. Not only did you find him attractive, but he knew how to fuck.
“I..” You breathed out as you felt a feeling in your lower stomach once more. You couldn’t focus on answering his question as he rubbed your clit furiously, wanting to chase your high. He grunted as you didn’t answer, removing his hand and slowing down his thrusts, to a slow and sensual pace.“I can’t hear you, my love.” You groaned as you felt his entire length slowly enter you, exit and enter again. You could feel the vein traveling up his cock, as he fucked you slowly. He pulled out and flipped you over, ass up and face in the sheets.
“Please, Buck..” He teased his tip with your folds, grabbing a handful of your ass and massaging it until he striked your ass hard, hoping to leave a handprint.
“I said, use your words.” He smacked your ass once more as you moaned, biting your lip when you felt his hand travel down your spine and to the base of your neck, pressing you further into the mattress.
“I have, Buck. I have, please fuck me..” You whined as he teased you for a second more and pushed inside of you, moaning curse words at the warmth around his cock.
“Fuck.. that’s it, doll. All mine, you’re all mine you hear me?” He rammed into you and picked his pace up once more, slapping your ass occasionally. You wanted to reach between your thighs to rub your clit, but he was one step ahead of you as he reached around and rubbed your clit.
“Come for me, my good girl. Make a mess all over my cock and I’ll fill you up, all for you.” You both moaned loudly as you clenched around his cock one more time, your legs feeling weak as he used his other hand to keep you up, hips snapping against yours. You felt the feeling in your stomach as he took you from behind, releasing all over his cock.
“Good girl, fuck.” He grunted as his thrusts became messy, his breathing became hitched as he came inside of you, the warmth of him filling you up, and spilling out along the inside of your thighs. He stopped, and rested for a second, pulling out and watched as his cum spilled out of you, running down your legs. He ran a finger through your folds, pushing a finger into your sore pussy along with him cum.
“Buck.. please no more.” You whined as you felt his finger leave, letting you fall over on his bed before he got up and went to the bathroom to grab a towel and cleaned you up. He cleaned himself up and crawled into bed behind you, pulling you close to him.
You knew you couldn’t hate him anymore, you knew that there were feelings there between the two of you, and you didn’t know how to say it. Thankfully, Bucky knew what you were thinking.
“Be mine?” You chuckled as you turned over and met his gaze, pressing your lips against his and feeling him smile against your lips.
summary: Every psychic and every tarot deck tells the same story: love isn't meant for you. Every reading ends the same way—until one skeptical customer pulls three cards that were never meant to belong to him. Suddenly, the future you've spent years trying to outrun refuses to leave you alone.
word count: 11.3 k
warnings: sort of enemies to friends to lovers, meet ugly, tarot, soulmates, slow burn, mutual pining, hurt/comfort, fluff, happy ending.
a/n: based on The Prophecy by Taylor Swift, been 7 weeks stuck in my drafts, I hope you like the outcome as much as I liked writing it for you! Beta read by @kileyking & @buckysdecaflove ❤︎ | dividers by @strangergraphics
read on AO3
Your family doesn't mean to hurt you. They just do.
It's the same every reunion, somebody's hand landing warm on your shoulder. When are you going to bring someone for us to meet? Are you ever gonna get married? That boat's sailed, hon. You missed your shot.
And their newest addition, just now: So, when's your turn? We really thought you'd be the next one walking down the aisle.
You're in your thirties now. Two cats, an apartment that's exactly how you want it, and you learned a long time ago to deflect, to laugh, to change the subject before anyone got too invested in your answer.
But those words stung.
Because god knows you've tried dating. You wanted the thing everyone kept asking you about, but you couldn't seem to hold onto it. Somewhere along the way you accepted that maybe you weren't meant to, just like the cards said once.
When the answer your cards gave you wasn't good enough, you tried something else: the oracle, rune-casting, pendulum, palmistry. You even ran the extra mile and paid someone to read your matrix destiny, but the answer remained the same: Not for you.
Apparently, the person meant for you was born over a hundred years ago, it wasn't meant to be in this life. Or at least, that's what the woman interpreted for you, it wasn't your line of work, but that night you pulled the cards alone and they confirmed it.
Your mom leans over, snapping you out of your thoughts. "They want you to say something."
You already knew this, you prepared days ago sitting in your apartment with your cats. You wrote and rewrote on your phone, trying to keep your words light and genuine.
"I've known Sarah since we were kids," you say. "She was always the one who knew exactly what she wanted. Not confused like the rest of us, not second-guessing. She just knew."
You can see her smiling, David's hand rest on her shoulder. You take a breath, your eyes are swelling with tears, but that's fine. That's normal at weddings.
"Sarah, David… you deserve each other, and you deserve the whole beautiful future you're about to have together. I hope you know how lucky you are, how blessed you are." Your voice wavers just slightly on that word. "Not everyone gets this, not everyone finds someone who loves them the way you love each other."
You're looking at Sarah and you mean every single word, even though it's cutting into you.
You raise your glass, trying to keep your hand steady despite the awful feeling sitting on your stomach. "To Sarah and David, and the future you deserve."
Later, when you're home at the outskirts of the city, with your cats curled on either side of you, you let yourself cry. Not angry tears, just the deep kind that come from watching someone else get the thing you've accepted you never will.
You think about the cards, about the woman who read your destiny and the words that have chased you since you were seventeen: The person meant for you was born out of time.
And your cousin's husband was born exactly at the right moment, in the right place, in the right life.
You're happy for her, you really are.
You're just so tired of helping everyone else find the life the cards promised would never belong to you.
The fair comes to the edge of your small town every spring, and you've been here for three years now. Your shop is small—just enough room for a folding table, two chairs, and the cards that you've been reading since you've been a teenager and decided to expand the gift you've inherited from your great grandmother.
The bell above the shop door chimes on a slow afternoon, and you look up from the velvet cloth you're arranging to find a couple standing in the doorway. The woman sees your altar in the corner, the crystals and the candles and her face lights up.
"Oh, this is perfect," she says, turning to him. "See? I told you we'd find someone authentic."
The man—dark hair, broad-shouldered, pierced-blue eyes and a very defined jawline— gives you a polite, slightly uncomfortable smile.
"Hey," he says. "She's been talking about you for weeks."
"Come in," you say, standing. You wipe your hands on your skirt. "Welcome to The Velvet Oracle, do you have an appointment?"
"I called yesterday," the woman says, stepping forward, hand extended. "I'm Hazel, this is Bucky. I want a couple's reading, we've been dating for four months and I just thought, you know, let's see what the future holds for us."
You gesture to the chairs across from you. "Sit, let's see what the cards have to say."
Hazel settles in, leans forward eagerly. Bucky sits back with his arms crossed. You don't let yourself look at him too long, because every time you do it you feel your stomach dropping, like when you miss a step in the dark.
You shuffle the deck, the familiar worn edges of the cards grounding you against your palms.
"Alright," you start. "For a couple's reading, I usually pull a few cards for each person individually, and then we'll look at the relationship as a whole. Sound good?"
Hazel nods enthusiastically, but Bucky's expression is somewhere between polite discomfort and outright skepticism.
"I gotta be honest," he says, glancing around the tent at the crystals and candles, "this isn't really my thing."
"I know, baby, but it'll be fun." Hazel tugs at his sleeve until he relents, uncrossing his arms. "Just let her do the reading, okay? For me."
He doesn't look convinced, but he nods and his expression softens for her. You don't know why, but that somehow makes you wanna cry.
You focus on Hazel, spreading the deck in a smooth arc across the velvet. "Go ahead and pull three cards when you're ready."
She leans forward, her fingers hovering dramatically before selecting. The first card makes you nod slowly—the Ace of Pentacles. A seed planted in rich soil. The second is the Empress, all abundance and growth. The third one is the World.
"Completion, fulfillment, a cycle coming to a close in the best possible way."
Hazel beams. "That's good, right?"
"Very good," you gesture at the Ace of Pentacles. "Pentacles are earth energy—practical, grounded, built to last. This is a new beginning with a solid foundation. The Empress suggests growth and nurturing, maybe even family, and the World is a major arcana card of fulfillment. Whatever you're building toward, the universe is supporting it."
"I'm a Taurus!" Hazel claps her hand together. "That's an earth sign. This is so accurate, oh my god! Earth energy for an earth sign, that has to mean something."
"It suggests alignment," you say carefully, because you've learned not to over-promise."The path you're on has stability written into it."
Hazel turns to Bucky with bright eyes. "See? I told you she was the real deal."
Bucky shifts in his chair, unmoved. "Great, so what about the rest of it?"
"Your turn," you say, trying to keep your voice light. "Three cards, same as before."
He looks at the deck like it might bite him. "I don't really believe in this stuff."
"It's just cards," you say. "They only have the power you give them."
Something shifts in his expression—not quite interest, but maybe a grudging willingness. Hazel nudges him with her elbow. "Just do it, Bucky. For me."
He sighs, leans forward and taps three cards with a soldier's precision. One, two, three. No hesitation, like he wants it over with.
You turn the first card: The Lovers.
Your breath catches. You force yourself to keep your expression neutral, but your fingers have gone cold against the velvet.
"The Lovers," you say, and your voice comes out steady, despite the static in your ears. "This card is about significant choices. A crossroad in a relationship or a deep connection that requires a decision."
Hazel practically squeals with excitement. "That's us! A deep connection!"
Bucky doesn't react. His eyes are on the card, but his face gives nothing away.
You turn the second card. The High Priestess.
The card you've pulled for yourself more times than you can count since you were seventeen. Intuition. The veil between worlds. The woman in the card stares at you from the table, and for a disorienting second you swear the woman on the card has your eyes.
"The High Priestess represents hidden knowledge," you manage. "Things beneath the surface, secrets, intuition… the parts of ourselves we don't fully understand yet."
"What does that have to do with Bucky?" Hazel asks, frowning slightly.
"I'm not sure yet," you lie, because you're suddenly horribly sure of exactly what's happening, and you want to sweep the cards off the table and pretend you never touched them.
You flip the third card with a trembling hand. The Ace of Cups.
The card of new love, emotional awakening. The beginning of something that fills the heart. It's the same card that you've always pulled up reversed for yourself every single time you ask the universe if there's anyone out there for you.
Now here it is, on his spread… along with your arcana.
"A new emotional beginning," you say after a moment of silence. "The Ace of Cups is the start of something in matters of the heart. It's a very powerful, personal card."
Hazel turns to Bucky, her earlier enthusiasm dimming. "Is that about us? Wait— water and earth complement each other, right? Bucky's a Pisces, that's a water sign, I'm earth. That's good isn't it? They balance."
"Water and earth can be very nurturing together," you say, because it's true, even if the cards aren't saying that. "But these cards feel more like a personal message for Bucky, something individual, not necessarily about the relationship."
You don't remember what you say after that. Something about water signs and intuition, something about the cards reflecting individual journeys within partnerships. You're very good at small talk, at telling people something they might want to hear while the cards tell you something else entirely.
Hazel pays you in cash, and she leaves with her hand tucked into Bucky's elbow, already chattering about dinner reservations. He lingers in the doorway for half a second, looking back at you with an expression you can't read. Then the bell chimes, and they're gone.
You sit in silence for a long time, staring at the three cards, still laid out on the velvet. You gather them up with shaking hands and slip them back into the deck, but you can feel them there, warm against the others, like embers buried in ash.
That night, you pull your own cards for the first time in months. You stopped asking about love a year ago, because the answer never changed—the reversed Ace of Cups, Ten of Swords, the Tower. But tonight, you need to know if you imagined it, if the shop was too warm, if you simply wanted something so badly your mind bent the cards to fit.
You shuffle the deck until your fingers ache and cut the deck three times before pulling: The Lovers. The High Priestess. The Ace of Cups.
Exactly the same spread from earlier.
You throw the deck across your kitchen table and watch the cards scatter like birds. You don't read them, you don't need to.
The dreams start three nights later.
You're in the shop, but once you pay enough attention you realize it's not your shop—it's larger, older, with windows that look out onto a street you've never seen, snow falling in thick, silent curtains. Bucky is there, sitting across from you, but he's different. Younger, somehow, though you can't explain how you know that. He's smiling at you, and he reaches across the table to take your hand.
You wake up gasping, your sheets are twisted around your legs, your heart hammering against your ribs.
The second time you dream of him, you're dancing. You're not able to see if it's anywhere specific. It's a dark room, there is music playing from somewhere distant, his hand on your waist, his cheek pressed against your temple. He smells like cedar and leather. You can feel the calluses on his fingers through the fabric of your dress. When you wake up, you can still feel them.
You start drinking chamomile tea before bed. You burn sage. You place an amethyst under your pillow and a black tourmaline at your door, but nothing works. The dreams continue, threading themselves through your sleep like a second life you're living in parallel, and in every single one, he seems like the answer to a question you've been asking for a very long time.
You don't tell anyone. Who would believe you? What would you even tell them? I had a tarot reading go wrong and now I'm psychically stalking my client's boyfriend in my dreams. You'd sound insane. Worse, you'd sound desperate.
You don't hear from Hazel or him again. You tell yourself it's a good thing. You tell yourself the dreams will fade, that the thread between you dissolves with distance and time… except they don't fade, they get worse.
In your dreams you're now in Brooklyn, walking down streets lined with brownstones, and he's beside you, close enough that your shoulders brush. He's telling you about his day, about his past, and you listen until his words start to fade. When you wake up, you can smell his cologne in the air.
You start taking walks in the afternoon, though you don't know why. You pull your cards again, desperate for something—anything—to change.
The Tower. The Star. The World.
Disaster, then hope, then completion. The cycle you've been trapped in for years, except this time the Tower doesn't feel like another heartbreak waiting to happen. It feels like change—the kind you can't stop even if you wanted to.
You don't sleep that night. You sit on your kitchen floor with your cats weaving between your legs, and you rearrange the cards in every configuration you know: Celtic cross, three card spread, relationship spread, past-present-future. Every single time, the same arc emerges: something is ending, something is beginning. And whatever comes next will leave you irrevocably changed.
Your aunt Margaret—Maggie, as you've called her since you were little—tells the family that she has broken her hip on the cellar stairs, that the surgery went fine, but she doesn't want a nurse or a help aide. She wants someone from the family who can come stay with her or she'll manage alone.
The call gets passed down through the entire family, but nobody offers to go take care of her. Your cousins have husbands, kids, mortgages, school pickups… Meanwhile, you have two cats and a tarot shop you can shutter for a season, and nobody says it out loud, but everybody means it: you're the one with nothing to leave behind.
You arrive on a Tuesday with your two cat carriers, three suitcases and the deck wrapped in a scarf at the bottom of your tote. Maggie is waiting in the front room of the brownstone, sat in a wingback chair with a cane across her knees.
"There she is, I knew you would come," she says. "Come kiss me."
You oblige before setting the carriers on the floor and opening them to let your cats wander around and recognize the place you'd be staying for a few weeks.
"I got two rules," Maggie starts, taking off her reading glasses. "The thermostat stays where I put it, and no cards in my house."
"Maggie—"
"I know what you carry around, I have enough ghosts in this old apartment, so there's no way I'm letting you welcome more through…that."
"They're just cards."
"Then it won't kill you to leave them in the bag," she settles back into the chair and picks her crossword up off the side table, and that is the end of it. "The kettle's on, you can take the room at the top of the stairs."
You know arguing with her would be useless, so you go and install yourself in that cramped old room and decide you'll read when she's asleep.
It becomes a ritual within the first week: you wait for the apartment to go quiet, wait for her snoring to even out and you sit at the kitchen table with the deck and a single candle as if you were a teenager sneaking cigarettes. Your cats take turns supervising from the counter, but you keep one ear on the ceiling the whole time, just in case.
Every single time, the same cards you pull at your shop with Bucky keep coming.
The Lovers. The High Priestess. The Ace of Cups.
The dreams don't fade with the distance from home, they sharpen. Now the businesses have names, because you've walked past it every time you go run errands for your aunt Maggie. The stoop where he sat beside you, close enough that your shoulders touched, you know it. You've seen the exact iron railing, three blocks east. In one dream he laughs at something, and you wake up missing something you haven't even seen in real life.
You try to build a reasonable conclusion: You've been here previously, you know this neighborhood. You just did one reading to a ridiculous handsome man eight months ago and your lonely, overworked brain latched on, and now it's trying to dress a crush in destiny because it's something you've been trying to change your whole life. That's all this is. A simple crush and a reader's block. It happens sometimes to some people, right?
At least that's what Reddit said last time you checked.
You've almost convinced yourself by the third Saturday in October, which is when you see him at the green market, standing at a fruit stall with a paper bag in one gloved hand. You stop so fast a woman with a stroller clips your heel.
Eight months and four hundred miles, and he's right here, wearing a canvas jacket with his hair shorter than you remember, frowning at the fruit, and your first coherent thought is run, but your feet are refusing to move.
He must've felt your eyes on him, because he looks up.
"You," he says it flat.
"Hi," your voice comes out steadier than you expect, and you silently thank god, the universe and every existent deity. "Bucky, right?"
He crosses the few feet between you, and up close you notice a tension in him that you don't remember from the shop. "What are you doing here?"
"Buying some groceries." You lift the bag as evidence. "I'm here taking care of my aunt and—"
"Right, so now your aunt happens to live here. Funny."
"You can come with me and check if you don't believe me," the bite gets into your voice before you can stop it. "Is there a problem?"
He laughs once, but there's no humor in it. "Is there a problem, you ask? Why don't you pull your cards and figure it out?"
"Okay—"
"Hazel broke up with me," he watches your face while he says it. "Three weeks after that reading, you want to know why?"
The market noise keeps going around you, crates and gulls and a vendor calling out prices, but everything is reducing to background noise while you feel the cold coming up from through your boots.
"She couldn't let it go," he continues. "You said something about a new beginning, some big personal message and she turned it over until there was nothing left. Every conversation we had circled back to it, who is she? When did it start? The cards don't lie. Four months, gone, because you laid out three stupid pieces of laminated paper and made it sound like some stupid prophecy."
"That isn't what I said— "
"Well, it's what she heard."
"I told her those cards were about you, individually. I was careful—"
"You were vague," he says, "which is the whole trick, isn't it? Say something soft enough to fit any shape, take the cash, let people destroy themselves filling in the blanks… there's a word for that." He shifts the bag of groceries to his other hand. "You're a fraud. The polite version is intuitive, a fraud with esoteric words."
You should let it go. He's a stranger, he's grieving a relationship, the market is crowded and you have other things to do, but you don't let it go.
"I didn't make those cards come up." You step in instead of back, and something flickers across his face—surprise, maybe, that you didn't fold. "I shuffled, you pulled three cards, it was your own hands, no hesitation. I read what was on the table and I softened it more than I should have, for her sake. What she did with it afterward isn't mine to carry, and neither is what you do with it."
A muscle moves in his jaw. For a second neither of you says anything, and you notice—stupidly, uselessly—that his eyes are exactly the color they are in your dreams.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry about Hazel."
"Yeah, you sure do." He steps around you. "Enjoy Brooklyn and stay the hell away from me."
You stand there with your own groceries until your hands stop shaking.
That night you don't pull cards. You lie awake instead, replaying it, building better arguments hours too late, and when you finally sleep, he's there—sitting across a kitchen table that doesn't exist, pushing a cup of coffee toward you, smiling at you the way he has never smiled once in real life.
You wake up furious at your own mind.
The radiator in the front room dies the last week of October, the same week the temperature does.
You find Maggie in her wingback with a blanket over her knees and the phone already against her ear. "It's the front one again," she's saying. "It clanks like the devil and gives nothing… No, don't be silly, after lunch is fine. You'll eat here anyway." She hangs up before whoever it is can argue.
"I could've called someone," you say. "There's a service the pharmacy recommends—"
"A service?" She huffs a laugh, like you've said something completely irrational. "I have James, he does the whole block—the Russo's gutters, Mrs. Ferreira's stairs… he won't take a dime, but I tuck it in his jacket when he isn't looking."
"James," you repeat.
"You'll like him," she says, returning to her crossword. "He's a serious boy, it's good with hands, single…"
The doorbell rings at one. You open the door and there he is, on your aunt's stoop, a tool bag over his shoulder, and you watch the exact moment his face goes through the market all over again.
"You gotta be shitting me," he mutters.
"Yeah, well, I'm not excited either, but I told you I was taking care of my aunt."
From the front room, your aunt's voice: "James! Don't let the heat out, it's the one radiator still working in here!"
You look at each other and there's a long moment where you genuinely cannot tell whether he's going to turn around and walk back down the steps, and then he exhales through his nose and crosses the threshold, being painfully obvious at avoiding brushing your shoulder in the narrow hall.
What follows is the strangest two hours of your autumn. Because the man at the market and the shop doesn't appear. With your aunt, he's somebody else entirely—patient, dry, gentle in an odd way for the way he's treated you. He kneels on the floor and bleeds the radiator and lets her direct him with her cane without complaining. Asks about her hip, and actually listens to the answer.
You stay in the kitchen, mostly. You make the coffee she orders you to make and when you bring it in, Nova—the bolder of your two cats—has installed herself on the tool bag, paws tucked underneath him, supervising, and for your surprise, Bucky is working around her rather than moving her.
He glances up when you set the cup down near him, just out of his way.
"Thanks," it's dry, but it's not nothing.
"You take your coffee black, right?" you say, and then bite your own tongue off, because you don't know that. You've been dreaming of that.
He pauses with the wrench mid-turn. "Lucky guess."
"Well, you look like a man who likes to keep it simple." You say it lightly and walk away before your face can do anything stupid, and behind you, Maggie says something about you reading people, and then you hear the small clank of metal as something in his hands slips.
He doesn't stay to eat, despite your aunt's best efforts. At the door, shrugging the tool bag back up, he stops with his hand on the frame. He doesn't quite look at you.
"Her hip," he murmurs. "If she needs anything lifted, or any errands to run, whatever… Maggie has my number."
"Okay."
"For her," he clarifies.
"I understood you the first time," you say sweetly and shut the door on whatever his face does next.
In the front room, Maggie has watched this entire exchange over her glasses.
"You didn't tell me you know James."
"Barely."
"Mm." She picks up her pen. "It seemed like more than barely to me. But if that's how you treat men no wonder why you're still single."
You gasped audibly and she winked an eye at you before going back to her crossword.
You start running into him in an almost daily basis. The neighborhood is small—twenty thousand people and somehow the same six faces every single day— and now that you know he's in it, he's everywhere. Outside the hardware store with a length of pipe over his shoulder. At the pharmacy counter, when you go pick up Maggie's medications and he's talking to an Asian man. Across the green market, where you both pretend with great commitment that the other one is invisible.
But there's no real conversation until now.
You've misjudged the sky and the distance, so you're hauling two grocery bags and a sack of cat litter up Pierrepont when the cold drizzle turns serious. You stop under sycamore to redistribute everything you're carrying, water running off the end of your nose, and a shadow falls over you. You lift your gaze and he's there, hood up, his hand already out reaching for you.
"What? Your cards didn't tell you there would be a storm?"
"Ha-ha. Very funny."
"Give me the litter."
"I've got it."
"You're going to put your shoulder out being stubborn. I said give me the damn litter."
You could protest, but you know it's pointless to fight with him, so you give him the litter and walk the last two blocks side by side without speaking, rain hissing on the pavement, his boots and your boots out of step.
He sets the sack on the second stair of your aunt's gate, but he doesn't leave immediately.
"At the market," he murmurs, to the gate rather than to you. "When I— when I said those things to you… I was out of line."
"You were rude."
"I was out of line," he repeats.
"You called me a fraud, and you said my intuition was exactly that, a fraud with esoteric words."
"Well, if you were so intuitive, wouldn't you have known about the rain?" It takes you a second to hear it, the dry shift under the flat delivery, and you laugh before you decide to. He looks surprised, like he wasn't expecting the sound either.
"Go home, Bucky," you say. "You'll catch a cold."
"Is that a prediction?"
You rolled your eyes. "There's no need for that, it's logical."
"Tell Maggie I left the wrench in the bin by the door… for the sink." He's already turning. "Don't let her do the sink herself, she'll try."
"I know my aunt."
"Then you know she'll try." And he's gone into the rain, shoulders up, and you stand at the gate watching him go for longer than you should.
That night you dream of him again, except the dream is just this: the two of you under a sycamore, rain coming down, but this time he's laughing—really laughing, head tipped, the whole architecture of his face rearranged by it— at something you can't hear yourself say.
You wake before dawn with your heart going hard and the echo of his laugh still in your ears.
It's a crush, you remind yourself staring at the ceiling.
Then why does your heart feel so heavy?
By November, your aunt has invented a maintenance schedule that no brownstone in history has ever required. The storm windows, the cellar light, a cabinet hinge you're fairly sure she loosened herself, because you watched her test it with her cane the day before she called him.
"You're matchmaking," you accuse, setting her tea down.
"I'm maintaining my property." She doesn't look up from the crossword. "Seven across, six letters. Foreseen by the stars."
"Fated."
"That's five."
"Destined is eight. Fated is five." You count it on your fingers. "What's six?"
Maggie hums thoughtfully and writes something down where you can't see it.
Bucky comes back on Thursday to check the storm windows. It's the fourth time, not that you're counting, and something has shifted in the dynamic between you—the hostility has burned down to a kind of wariness, and that wariness keep springing leaks.
He lets you hold the frame steady while he drives the screws, close enough that you can smell the cedar on his jacket. He answers your aunt's interrogation about his week in actual sentences. When Nova bolts for the open window, Bucky catches her one-handed without looking, absorbs the betrayed yowl and deposits her on the sofa with a flat "No". You expect retaliation, but Nova—who has never once obeyed you—stays.
"Traitor," you tell the cat.
"She respects the chain of command."
Maggie goes up for her nap at three with a theatrical yawning that should embarrass her. Bucky's packing up the drill in the kitchen and you're making coffee because it's cold and the radio on the counter—her ancient radio, permanently tuned to an AM station that plays classics—is murmuring under everything.
And you go still.
It takes you a moment to realize, and another to find why: he's humming. Barely, under his breath, and the song sounds pretty familiar.
The mug slips, you catch it against the counter, there's coffee slopping over your knuckles, and the burn makes you realize that song was playing in the dream where he danced with you in a dark room. You've never heard it awake in your life until right now. You don't know its name either, you only knew the next three notes after he hummed them.
"You okay?" He's looking at you now.
"It's nothing," you run your hand under the tap. "Just… wanted to heat my hands a little bit."
It's just an old song, it's an old radio station. Men hum old songs; it's logical. You repeat it in your head twice but your hands don't believe any of it. And god forbid you, you neither.
When you turn around, he's leaning against the counter, watching you with an expression you can't quite read.
"I've been meaning to ask you," he starts. "About the cards. Why do you do it? And I don't want the speech, I want the real answer."
You dry your hands slowly, deciding how much truth he's earned.
"My great grandmother read cards," you start, leaning against the counter across from him. "She read for people in her village back in the old country. My mom said she could look at someone and see the shape of their life, like… like they were made of glass. She tried to teach my mother, but the gift skipped her and landed on me instead."
You take a pause, watching the radio, the floor, anything but him.
"I was seven the first time I saw something I couldn't explain. I touched my grandmother's deck and I knew things about her neighbor who was sitting at the kitchen table. That she'd lost a baby the year before, that her husband was sleeping with her sister, that she was going to leave him by spring." You swallow. "I said all of it out loud, like an idiot child, because I didn't know you weren't supposed to just say those things."
Bucky's quiet. You can feel him listening, like he's cataloguing every word.
"My mother was horrified. My grandmother on the other hand wasn't. She said the cards chose me, and that I should learn to read them properly so I'd stop blurting out unfiltered truth at dinner parties." A small, humorless laugh leaves you. "So I learned. By the time I was a teenager, I was pulling cards for friends, for strangers, for anyone who asked. And most of the time, it's just… pattern recognition and intuition working together. The cards are a tool, not a magic trick, but sometimes—"
"Sometimes what?"
"Sometimes they show you something that doesn't fit any pattern you know. And you have to decide whether to believe what you're seeing or pretend you didn't see it."
The radio changes songs.
"Is that what happened with my reading?" he asks quietly.
No, you think. It's worse than that.
"I read what was on the table," you say instead, because it's the truth, even if it's not all of it. "I didn't make it up, Bucky. I've never fabricated a reading in my life. The cards that came up for you were clear… unusually clear. And I softened them because Hazel was sitting right there and I didn't want to hurt her, but I didn't lie."
He studies you for a long moment, and you can see the war happening behind his eyes—the part of him that wants to believe you fighting the part that needs to think you're a con artist, because the alternative is harder.
"Okay," he says finally.
"O—Okay?"
"I'm not saying I believe in it. I'm saying I believe you believe it, and that's… different."
It's the most generous thing he's said to you since the market, and it lands somewhere under your ribs.
It's a Tuesday in late November, and Maggie has sent him to fix a leak under the kitchen sink that you both suspect she caused by hitting the pipe with her cane. He's on his back under the counter and you're handling him tools, trying not to notice the way his shirt rides up when he reaches for the wrench.
When he slides out, wiping his hands on a rag, he looks at you for a while.
"There's a place two blocks over. They make decent coffee, if you're done pretending you don't need a break."
"That's the worst invitation I've ever heard. You're just observing that I look tired."
"You do look tired."
"Wow, thank you. A true gentleman."
His mouth twitches. "Do you want coffee or not?"
You want to say no, because saying yes feels too much like stepping off a cliff, but the word comes out before you can stop it. "Fine, but only because you're paying."
Maggie, from the front room calls out: "Take your time! I'm perfectly fine!"
You both know she's been listening to every word.
The walk to the café is silent.
The place looks cozy—it's small, warm and smells like cinnamon and cardamom. He orders black coffee and you order a latte and a slice of walnut cake. You sit t a table by the window where the afternoon light comes in, and for a few minutes neither of you says anything.
It should be awkward, being here without Maggie or your cats between you, but it isn't.
"Would you mind if I ask you something?"
"You're going to ask whether I say yes or not."
"Smart man." You turn the cup slowly. "Why do you do this? The handyman thing… Maggie says you work for the whole block. But you don't charge, you won't take money—"
"I take money, I just don't like to ask for it, besides, Maggie always invites me to eat."
"She tucks money in your jacket while you're not seeing."
"She's not as subtle as she thinks." He takes a sip of his coffee and ten looks at you. "I like fixing things, always have. When something's broken, there's a right way to fix it, and when it's done, it's done, it's done. You can see the result, it's not…"
"Ambiguous?"
"Yeah, exactly. It's not ambiguous."
You understand suddenly why he hated the reading and everything related to it. You gave him a puzzle with no solution, a fix with no steps… you made him sit with something unfixable.
The conversation moves easier after that. He tells you about the neighborhood, about Mrs. Ferreira, about Yori—the Asian man you saw the other day who feeds pigeons from his window, about the old man on the fourth who swears at everyone in Italian. You tell him about your shop, about your cats—Nova and Salem, about the time you accidentally read cards for a man who turned out to be an undercover cop investigating a psychic scam two towns over, and how you spent forty-five minutes proving your cards weren't marked.
You see him laughing, not the polite sound from always, but a real one. You drink your coffee and eat your cake and try to not think about the dreams.
It becomes a thing. He finishes a repair at Maggie's or passes by to eat and you end up at the café, or walking the two blocks to the park where the benches face the water, or simply sitting on her stoop in the last cold light of the afternoon while you both drink coffee.
You learn things about him in pieces. He's from Brooklyn—born and raised, he says, but the tone on his voice tells you it's partly a lie. He has a best friend named Sam who's a pain in the ass. He doesn't talk about his family, but you don't push. He served in the military, a long time ago.
He learns things about you too, like the fact you talk with your hands when you're passionate about something, or that you hum when you're thinking and that hum is always off-key. He learns about your habit of reading strangers on the street and narrating your observations under your breath.
The first week of December arrives with an ugly wind that rattles Maggie's windows and makes your cats burrow under the blankets. Maggie has graduated from the cane to limping short distances without it, which means she's mobile enough to meddle full-time.
Bucky comes by Wednesday to check a draft Maggie swears she can feel coming from the baseboards. You both know there's no draft, but he comes by anyway.
You open the door and he's standing on the stoop with his hands in his jacket pockets, his tool bag over one shoulder, and there's snow in his hair—not much, just dust, but it's there, melting against the dark of it—and your heart does something complicated because of how good he looks.
"Maggie's napping," you say.
His hand comes out of his pocket. He's holding a folded napkin, and he holds it out to you like it's a wrench.
"I made reservations," he murmurs. "At Valentino's, this Friday, seven o'clock."
You stare at the napkin. "Did you just… write it on a napkin?"
"I didn't have a paper." He shifts his weight. "Sam says you're supposed to give the person a specific time and place, so… there it is."
"You asked your friend how to ask someone on a date?"
"Well, he tells me a lot of things, more of it is useless." He's looking at the doorframe while he speaks, then he glances at you. "This part seemed right."
You unfold the napkin. His handwriting is surprisingly neat—small, precise letters. Friday, 7 pm- Valentino's on Henry St. —B
"Is this because Maggie put you up to it?" you ask, because if this is charity or pity or Maggie's matchmaking you'd rather know now and bleed later.
"No. She might take credit for it, but no. I was going to ask you at the café last week, but then you started reading people and I lost my nerve."
Bucky lost his nerve.
"So, Friday… at seven."
"Is that a yes?"
"That's a yes."
He nods once, and you can see his shoulders drop half an inch. You want to laugh, or cry, or both, so you just fold the napkin carefully and put it in your pocket.
"Are you going to come in and check the nonexistent draft, or…?"
"Might as well, just to keep the appearances."
He brushes past you in the doorway, and unlike the first time, he doesn't avoid your shoulder.
When Friday night comes, you don't understand why you're so damn nervous, but here you are, changing your outfit twice before settling with a blue dress and a pair of boots that Maggie claims make your legs look like they go on forever. You're halfway down the stairs when the doorbell rings.
He cleans up well. That's the first thought you have when you open the door. He's wearing a dark jacket over a sweater, and his hair is pulled back in a way that shows the sharp lines of his face, and he smells so good you have to resist the urge to lean closer and breathe him in again.
"You look nice," he says when you open the door.
"You too." You grab your coat from the hook. "Don't wait up, Maggie."
"Go. Don't come back before ten, I have a television program."
"We're going to dinner, Maggie, not—"
"Door will be locked before ten o'clock," she insists, and shuts the door on your face before you can answer, letting you at the bottom of the stairs.
You turn to face Bucky and the way he looks at you makes you forget every argument you've ever had with yourself about why this is a bad idea.
"Ready?" he asks.
"It depends. Are you going to accuse me of fraud tonight?"
"Not tonight."
"Then I'm ready."
Valentino's is tucked between a laundromat and a bookshop. The hostess greets Bucky by name and leads you to a corner booth where the candlelight flickers against the red-checkered tablecloth.
"Fancy," you tease.
"I said it wasn't fancy."
"Exactly," you unfold your napkin and look around—warm brick walls, fairy lights strung along the ceiling, and and old man at the bar arguing with the bartender about baseball. "I like it."
He orders wine for the table without asking, but it's the good kind, the kind that tastes likes blackberries, and when he catches you watching him over the rim of your glass, he doesn't look away.
You're talking about the shop—what you'll do when you go back, whether you'll reopen at all—when he leans back in his chair and takes a deep breath. "I want to ask you something, but I don't want to fight."
"That's a promising start."
"Why do you believe in it? The cards, destiny, all of it. You're smart. You read people like they're open books. How do you also believe that pieces of cardboard can tell the future?"
It's not hostile. It's genuine curiosity, and that's worse, because you owe him a real answer. You down the rest of your wine for a bit of liquid courage.
"When I was seventeen," you start, and your voice is careful, like you're walking on ice, " my great grandmother died. She'd been sick for a while, and when I went to see her in the hospital she… she told me she'd been reading my cards since I was born. That she'd asked about my future every year on my birthday, the way she did for everyone in the family. And every year, the same cards came up."
The restaurant noise fills the silence—the clink of glasses, a murmur of conversation from the next table—but you're hyper aware of him.
"She said love wasn't meant for me." You trace the rim of your glass with your finger. "I didn't believe her, I was seventeen, I thought she was a dramatic old woman who loved tragedy, or that maybe she was way too high on her meds. So I started reading for myself, I pulled my own cards every week, every month, every time I met someone I thought could be something. And every single time, the same answer. Reversed Ace of Cups. Ten of Swords. The Tower. Not for you, not in this life."
You laugh, but it comes out humorless.
"I even paid a woman to read my destiny matrix, I tried runes, I tried everything because I wanted so badly for the answer to be different; but it never was. I tried dating, I did. I wanted so bad to be loved. Apparently, the person meant for me was born over a hundred years ago, and I was born now, so the timing was wrong, and that's it."
Bucky is very still across the table. He hasn't moved, hasn't reached for his glass, hasn't done anything except listen with an intensity that makes your skin prickle. The silence between you stretches. He's looking at you with an expression you can't decode.
"Bucky?"
He exhales slowly, and his jaw works twice. Then he leans forward, resting both forearms on the table. "You don't have any idea of who I am?"
"Should I?" you ask, confused.
He stares at you for a long moment like he's looking for some sign that you're joking. "You really don't."
"Bucky, you're freaking me out a little. Are you in the mob? A famous musician? Because I have to be honest, I don't really follow the news, and history was never my strong subject. I know the major stuff, but—"
He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet, sliding something across the table toward you.
It's his driver's license. You pick it up, squinting at the tiny photo—he looks exactly the same, of course he does, that hot bastard—and then your eyes drop to the birth date.
March 10, 1917.
You read it three times, but the numbers don't change. You look up at him, and he's watching at you with an expression you can't read.
"I was born in 1917," he says quietly. "Here in Brooklyn. I went to war in '43 and… I didn't come back the way I left. They did things to me, changed me. I don't age the way normal people do, and there's a lot of years in between that I'd rather not talk about in a restaurant."
Your hands are shaking. You set the license down on the table between you like it might burn you.
"The matrix destiny," you whisper. "It said a hundred years ago. You were born a hundred years ago."
"Yeah." He leans forward. "And here's the thing. I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in stars writing our stories for us, because if I did—" His voice breaks, just slightly, and he catches it. "If I did, then I'd have to believe that what happened to me was determined. That the things that I did, the things that were done to me, they were written in stone before I was even born. And that's too cruel, that's a crueler god than I'm willing to worship."
He's breathing harder now, and you realize with a start that he's scared. Bucky Barnes, who caught your cat mid-air and argued with you in the rain, is scared of what you might say next.
"But you," he continues, softer now. "You showed up in my neighborhood reading cards and talking about things you shouldn't know. And I kept seeing you everywhere, and I kept telling myself it was a coincidence, that Brooklyn is small and you were just… there. But there's something here. I feel it every time I'm in the same room as you, and I don't know if that's fate or if it's just—" He stops, running a hand over his face. "I don't know what it is. But I know I haven't wanted to spend time with someone like this in a long time. And if that means the stars finally decided to do something kind for once, then maybe… maybe I'm not as angry at them as I thought."
You don't know what to say. The pasta arrives and sits cooling between you, forgotten. You think about every card you've ever pulled, every spread that ended in the same lonely answer, every time you accepted that love wasn't meant for you. And now, he's sitting across from you, born in 1917, a hundred-year-old soul in a young man's body, and the math is so simple it makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.
"You're quiet," he says.
"I'm not quiet," you manage, but your voice sounds like it's coming from very far away. "I'm just… I don't know what to say. You don't— you don't just drop 'I was born in 1917' into a conversation and expect someone to have a response ready."
The corner of his mouth twitches. "Fair."
"You fought in World War II."
"Yeah."
"And you're telling me you don't believe in fate, but you just handed me proof that the answer I've been getting my whole life wasn't wrong."
"I'm telling you that I don't care what the cards said," he reaches across the table, his hand hovering over yours for a moment before he covers your fingers with his palm. His skin is warm, calloused, and you feel it everywhere. "I care that you're here, right now. And I'm here. That's enough for me."
You look down at your hand under his, at the candlelight pooling in the hollow of his palm, and you think about the High Priestess card, the one you've pulled for yourself a hundred times. Hidden knowledge, the veil between worlds, secrets.
Maybe the secret was that you weren't waiting for a ghost after all.
You eat eventually, though you barely taste it. He tells you about Sam, about the boat they worked on together, about the neighborhood changing and staying the same all at once. You tell him about your cats, about the way Maggie pretends to be asleep every time he comes over so you'll have to answer the door alone.
But mostly, you sit in the candlelight and let yourself have this. Whatever this is.
He insists on walking you home. It's not far—five blocks, maybe six—and the December air is sharp enough to make you tuck your hands into your coat pockets. He walks on the outside of the sidewalk, closest to the street, the way men used to do when he was young, and something about that makes your chest ache.
"You okay?" he asks as you turn onto Maggie's block.
"Yeah." But you're not, not really. You're overwhelmed, full of things you don't know how to say. You want to tell him that you've dreamed about him, that you've known the shape of his laugh before you ever heard it, that you pulled his cards in your kitchen and you threw the deck across the room because it was too much to believe. You want to ask him if he feels it too, this gravity, this sense of falling into something you never expected to find.
But you don't say any of that. You just walk beside him in the dark, and when you reach Maggie's stoop, you turn to face him.
The streetlamp behind him casts a halo around his shoulders. You think about all the years he's lived, all the winters he's seen, and you can't believe any of them led him here. To you. To this moment in your aunt's cracked concrete steps.
"I had a good time," he says.
"Me too."
He steps closer. You can smell the wine on his breath, the cedar of his jacket, the cold night air clinging to his air. He's close enough that you have to tilt your head back to look at him, and his eyes are darker in the shadows.
"I don't think I need to." Your voice is barely above a whisper. "I think I already know how this goes."
"Yeah?" His hand finds your waist, tentative, asking permission. "How's it go?"
And then he kisses you.
It's soft at first, careful, like he's giving you time to pull away. But you don't pull away. You reach up and curl your fingers into the front of his jacket, and he makes a sound against your mouth before deepening the kiss. His hand slides to the small of your back, pulling you closer, and you can feel the warmth of him through every layer between you that suddenly feels like too many.
He tastes like red wine, and his jaw is rough under your palm, and when you break apart you're both breathing hard, foreheads pressed together.
"Okay," you whisper. "Okay."
"Okay," he repeats, and he sounds almost drunk with it. He kisses you again, lighter this time, on the corner of your mouth, your cheek, your temple. His lips brush your ear as he murmurs, "I don't care about fate. But if you want to tell me what the stars said, I'll listen."
You laugh, a little watery, and push at his chest. "Go home, Bucky. It's cold."
"I know." But he doesn't move. He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, his fingers lingering against your jaw. "I'll see you tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow."
He finally steps back, down one step, then two. He's smiling, the kind that reaches his eyes and rearranges his whole face into something boyish and new. "Night, then."
"Night."
You watch him walk down the block, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders relaxed in a way you haven't seen before. You watch until he turns the corner and disappears, and you stand there for a long moment with your fingers pressed to your mouth, trying to remember how to breathe.
The front door opens behind you.
"You're welcome," Maggie says.
You jump so hard you nearly fall off the stoop. "Jesus, Maggie!"
She's standing in the doorway in her robe and slippers, her crossword in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. She looks entirely too pleased with herself.
"You were watching!" You accuse.
"I was observing, there's a difference." She steps back to let you in. "I told you he was a good boy, serious, good with his hands." She winks. "And now you know for sure."
"Maggie!"
"Don't 'Maggie' me. I didn't raise you to be ungrateful." She shuffles toward the stairs. "You can thank me properly at breakfast. And don't think I didn't notice you sneaking cards at my kitchen table for three months straight. I may be old, but I'm not blind."
You stand in the hallway, coat still on, cheeks burning, and listen to her cackle all the way up the stairs.
Your cats appear from the front room, twining around your ankles, and you bend down to scoop Nova up, burying your face in her fur. She purrs, loud and indignant, and you laugh against her soft orange head.
"Okay," you whisper to him, to the empty hallway, to no one in particular. "Okay."
You don't know what happens next. You don't know how any of this works, a tarot reader and a century-old soldier, two people the universe apparently decided to throw together just to see what would happen.
But as you climb the stairs to your cramped little room, you think about the spread you pulled the night before you left for Brooklyn. The Tower. The Star. The World.
Disaster, then hope, then completion.
Maybe The Tower wasn't heartbreak after all. Maybe it was just the world rearranging itself to make room for something you never dared to ask for.
You fall asleep that night without pulling any cards, without any dreams at all, and when you wake up in the morning, the first thing you hear is Bucky's voice downstairs, asking Maggie if she takes one sugar or two, and the sound it's better than any spread you've ever read.
June.
The summer breeze at Coney Island smells like salt and fried dough, and you were wearing the jacket Bucky lent you because you misjudged the wind off the water. It's still too big, the sleeves past your knuckles, and he keeps reaching over to roll them back up for you, his thumb brushing your wrist every time.
You can't remember whose idea it was to come here. Maybe yours, maybe his. Maybe it doesn't matter, because Bucky's hand is wrapped around yours. You've been official since January, though the line between before and after has blurred into something that feels like it started long before either of you were brave enough to name it.
The boardwalk is crowded with families and couples and teenagers laughing too loud, but Bucky moves through them like he was made for this—for cotton candy and carnival lights, for the easy joy of a Brooklyn summer night. He fits here, you realize. He fits now. A hundred-year-old soul learning how to be young again.
"Step right up! Test your luck!" A barker's voice cuts through the noise, and you follow it to a row of old arcade machines tucked beneath a stripped awning. Skee-ball, claw machines, a racing game with a faded steering wheel—and then you see it.
A fortune teller machine.
It sits in the corner like something out of another era, which, you suppose, it is. Madam Zola's Mystical Fortune Cards, the peeling gold paint reads. Insert coin. Receive Your Destiny. The mechanical woman inside has painted glass eyes and a silk scarf draped over her plastic hair, and her hand rests on a deck of cards that probably haven't been mystical a day in their life.
Bucky follows your gaze and laughs. "You're kidding me."
"I'm absolutely not kidding you." You're already digging in your pocket for a quarter. "Madam Zola and I are colleagues, I need to know if she's legitimate."
"She's made of plywood."
"So judgmental." You find two quarters and press one into his palm, your fingers lingering against his. "For you, professional courtesy."
He looks down at the quarter, then back at you, and something softens in his expression. "Alright," he says. "But if this thing tells me I'm gonna die alone, I'm blaming you."
"Fair."
You drop your quarter in first. The machine whirs to life with a dramatic creak. Madam Zola's hand moves across the cards in jerky, mechanical motions, and after a moment, a small white card drops into the brass tray below.
You pick it up. It's not a real tarot card—just cardstock, cheap, the edges already soft from humidity—but the image printed on it makes your breath catch. Two hands clasped, reaching across a starfield. Beneath it, in gold script: The Lovers.
And underneath that, smaller: You've found the one. Don't waste time doubting it.
You stare at it. Bucky leans over your shoulder to read it, and you feel him go still.
"Huh."
"Your turn!"
"I don't need a card to tell me—"
"Your turn, Barnes."
He huffs, but he drops in the quarter you gave him. The machine grinds and another card falls. He picks it up. You don't see it at first, but you see his face—the way his jaw loosens, the way his eyes soften at the corners.
It's the same image, but the text beneath reads: What was written in the stars has come to pass. Trust the path, trust your heart.
The noise of the fair fades to a distant hum. You look up at him, and he's already looking at you.
"Bucky—"
"I don't care if it's rigged. I don't care if every card in that thing says the same thing. You're—" He stops, swallowing thickly. "You're it for me. You know that, right?"
Your heart is doing that complicated thing again, the thing it does every time he looks at you like you're the only person in the world.
"I know," you whisper. "Me too."
He kisses you then, right there in front of Madam Zola and half of Brooklyn, his hand cradling your jaw like you're something precious. When you pull apart, you're both breathless, and someone's wolf-whistled from the skee-ball line, but none of you seem to care at all.
"Come on," he says, lacing his fingers through yours. "I saw a ring toss on the way in, I need to win you something."
It takes him four tries and an embarrassing amount of money, and by the end he's swearing at the rigged bottles while you laugh so hard you have to lean against the counter for support. But on the fifth throw, the last ring catches, and the barker hands over the prize with a grudging nod.
It's a ridiculous bear, oversized and caramel-colored, wearing a tiny red bow tie. Bucky presents it to you as if he was handing you over the Holy Grail.
"For you. I was gonna go for the giant panda, but this one looked like it needed you more."
You crush it against your chest, burying your face in its soft synthetic fur. "I love him. I'm naming him James."
"You're not naming him after me."
"I'm absolutely naming him after you. Look at him, he has your expression."
Bucky stares at the bear's blank button eyes and then at you, and then he laughs, tilting his head back and you want to take a picture of him like this—careless, happy.
"Let's go to the photobooth," you demand, grabbing his hand. "Before the light changes."
"Bossy."
"You love when I'm bossy."
He doesn't agree, but he doesn't deny it either.
The photobooth is tucked behind the funhouse, a vintage four-strip model with a faded red curtain and a sign that flashes OUT OF ORDER every third flicker. But when you slide your money in, it whirs to life, and the first bulb flashes before you're ready.
"Wait—" you laugh, still adjusting the bear on your lap.
Too late. The first picture capture you mid-laugh, Bucky leaning in with his mouth open, probably saying something sarcastic.
"Okay, okay, be serious," you say, turning toward him.
"Serious," he repeats, but his eyes are dancing.
The second flash catches you pressing a kiss to his cheek, his hand coming up to rest on your waist. The third finds him turning his head at the last second so your lips meet his instead, his fingers threading into your hair. The fourth flash finds you both laughing into each other's mouths, your foreheads touching, the bear crushed between you. You don't remember who kissed who, but you don't care.
When the strip slides out of the machine, you hold it up to the light, watching the images develop in slow motion. Four tiny windows into a perfect moment. You look at them, and you think about al the cards you've ever pulled, all the lonely spreads and reversed cups, all the years you believed love wasn't meant for you.
And here you are. Here he is. A love out of time.
"I'm putting these on the fridge," you say. "When we get back to the apartment."
"Our apartment," he corrects and your heart flips.
You're moving in together next month. You found a place in Brooklyn with a windowsill wide enough for two cats and a fire escape that gets morning sun. He's already planning on building a spare room for your appointments, and built a shelf for your cards. You told him he didn't have to, that you'd find another place to do your readings and keep the cards in the closet if he wanted, and he looked at you like you'd suggested drowning a kitten.
"It's your gift," he said. "Why would I want you to hide it?"
Later, when the moon is high and the fair lights are starting to dim, you sit together on the boardwalk with your shoes off, toes buried in cool sand, sharing a funnel cake.
"We should get home," you say, but you don't move. "Salem and Nova are probably destroying something."
"They're fine, Nova's probably sleeping on my tool bag, and Salem's judging her from the windowsill."
"How do you know that?"
"Because that's what they do every time I'm there." He licks powdered sugar off his thumb. "Those cats have a very established routine. Nova loves me, Salem tolerates me… it's a good system."
You smile, leaning your head on his shoulder. "Salem tolerates everyone, that's just his personality. Nova loves anyone who gives her attention. They're not a good benchmark."
"Okay." He pauses. "Then you love me. And you're a much better benchmark."
You go still. The word hangs in the air between you, but he doesn't take it back. He just turns his head and looks at you, waiting, his eyes reflecting the last of the carnival lights.
"I do," you whisper. "I love you."
His smile is small and yet so full of hope it makes your chest ache. "I love you too. I think I started loving you the day you shut the door on my face."
"You have terrible taste."
"Must be the century I was born in, we liked 'em feisty."
You laugh, pushing at his chest, and he catches your hand and presses a kiss to your knuckles. You sit like that for a long time, watching the tide come in, his thumb tracing slow circles in your palm. Eventually, he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out the fortune card from Madam Zola's machine.
"Do you think it's true?" he asks quietly. "The whole destiny thing. Do you really believe we were supposed to find each other?"
You look at the card, then at him—the man who was born over a hundred years ago, who fought a war and survived things you can't imagine, that sometimes admit not knowing how to do any of this, but that tries anyway for you.
"I believe," you start, "that the cards pointed me in a direction. They told me to wait, to not settle for something that wasn't right." You turn his hand over, tracing the lines of his palm—his life line, long and unbroken; the heart line, deep and sure. "But I don't think they made this happen, Bucky. I think we did. I think you showed up at my shop and you were rude and impossible and I couldn't stop thinking about you anyway. I think we let Maggie manipulate us into falling in love. The cards didn't do that, we did."
"Okay," he says. "I like that better anyway."
"Me too."
He folds the car again and tucks it back into his pocket, over his heart. "I'm keeping this, though. As evidence."
"Evidence of what?"
"That sometimes the universe gets it right."
You don't pull cards that night, haven't done it for a while, because you don't need to. You fall asleep with Bucky's heartbeat against your back, Salem purring at your feet, Nova curled on the pillow between you like a furry chaperone, and you dream of nothing at all—just the deep, peaceful dark of a life that's finally exactly where it's meant to be.
The White Wolf’s Sub Club; The soft glow of the white neon wolf is what catches your eye first as you near the club, the pathway fairly empty for a Monday evening. It’s second nature for you to look over your shoulder as you reach for the door, looking one way then the other before you’re pulling it open, the cold air of the club hitting you instantly.
Stark Hub After Dark; Stark Hub x SPN Crossover
Mini Series;
Series;
Stark Hub; A COLLECTION OF ONE-SHOTS SET IN AN AU WORLD WHERE THE BOYS ARE PORN STARS WORKING FOR STARK ENTERTAINMENT.
Warnings: MINOR DNI 18+ (Oral Male Receiving, Praise Kink, Spit Kink, Cum) Its Porn With little Plot.
Author's Note: Our introduction to the Soldier and Eden Ivy! While this will still be the same soldier we saw in the OG StarkHub I'm also giving you all the Soldier I wish I would have written. I want him filthy, possessive and obssessed, I hope you all enjoy the first taste..
STARKHUB - EXCLUSIVE FIRST EDEN IVY GETS HER FIRST TASTE OF THE SOLDIER
He had a hand twisted in her hair and the other gripping her hollowed cheeks as she swallowed him down. A walking wet dream dressed in a maroon satin set that leaves little to the imagination of what she was trying so poorly to conceal.
She was such a good girl, and he let her know just how good she was for taking his cock.
“That’s it, good girl,” he grunts fucking into her mouth in shallow thrusts. “Such a good fucking girl, taking my cock, letting me fuck this pretty mouth. Whose mouth does this belong to hmm?”
He tugs her head back till she pulls off with a wet ‘pop’, he demands a verbal answer. She grins up at him, tongue running out to lick up the mess he’s made of her face. “It belongs to you sir.”
“Fuck,” he breathes under his breath. “you’re absolutely right, belongs to me, and only me.” He tugs at her hair a little harder half expecting her to wince but she moans pushing back into his hand, wanting more. “Please,” she whines inching forward on her knees.
“What is it? You want more?” he breathes, lips dropping open on a moan when she goes against the pull of his hand to kitten lick at the head of his cock. Any other girl and he might have pulled her head back punished her for taking something he didn’t say she could have, but he lets her have this watching as she goes further, her tongue running along the underside of his shaft. She moans hungrily, eyes locked on his practically begging him for whatever he’s prepared to give her. “Oh, she wants more does she?” he husks, lips pulling up into a smirk at her “yes please sir.”
He bites back his growl, “Greedy little thing can’t get enough, can she? Don’t worry baby I’ve got you.”
He adjusts his slack grip on her hair, a groan of pleasure bubbling in her chest, he brings his other hand back to her cheek thumb running along her parted lips. “Open for me – good girl,” he praises when her lips drop open, tongue falling out for him. He moves into her space again, leather shoes kissing her knees as he feeds her just the tip. The hand that held her cheek slips down, resting against her neck, he doesn’t squeeze, no not yet he needs her relaxed if she’s going to take all of him, and she will. Or this could be the last time. He runs his thumb soothingly along her neck, “gonna feed my greedy girl more, need you relaxed if I'm going to do that,” he murmurs as he guides your head down further.
She follows his lead, jaw falling slack to accommodate his size, his length, her hands finding purchase on his clothed thighs the further down his shaft he guides her. “That’s it baby, take it so well, made for sucking dick weren’t you?”
She moans around his length at the same time he hits the back of her throat, her lips spread out at the base of his cock, nose pressed up against his pubic bone. “Fuck,” he grits head falling back exposing the neck of his column, her hands run up his thigh cupping the parts of him she can’t reach with her mouth. He’s brought out of his pleasure filled haze, hungry darkened gaze falling on her watery ones, the lone blackened tear rolling down her cheek is almost enough to make him fall apart then.
He really loves when they cry.
“M’gonna fuck this pretty little mouth now, give you what you deserve.” He slips his hand up the expanse of her throat, finding purchase on the back of her head as he holds her still for him. She relaxes her jaw further, giving complete control over to him, control that he takes. He pulls back till only the tip is in her mouth giving her no warning before he dives back into her wet heat setting a quickened pace. Her garbled choked sounds spur him on, each quick snap of his hips bringing tears to her eyes as she tries to swallow down all he gives her.
His cock fucks steadily into the wet warmth of her mouth, drool pooling around her lips, slipping down her chin, dripping into the valley between her breasts soaking the material of her satin set. “You cry so pretty for me baby,” he moans thumb finding your cheek smearing the dark streak. He hasn't taken his eyes off her, to be fair she hasn’t either, his darkened gaze seems to spur her on taking everything he gives her. It’s how he likes them. Compliant, willing to give all control.
He pulls her off when he feels the tightening in his abdomen, the pleasure that would all but consume him – he's not ready for this to be over. He’s not done with her yet, he wants to play a little more, see how much she’s willing to take, see just how dirty she’s willing to get for him. “The mouth on you,” he groans gaze drawn to her swollen spit slicked lips, his thumb finds her mouth pushing down her bottom lip, opening her up again for him. “Tongue out.” she listens, so obedient he thinks as he leans down spitting right onto her awaiting tongue. She moans, eyes closing, “swallow it baby, be a good girl for me.” Her tongue slips back into her mouth, lips closing as she swallows what he’s given her, she moans hips rocking into the floors set.
He can’t help himself; he needs a taste; he’s honestly surprised he’s held out this long. He leans down capturing her mouth with his parting her lips with his tongue as he delves in, tasting her, tasting himself. He drinks down her moans, he could grow addicted to this, to her taste. She’s leaning into his touch, preening at it, “please,” she breathes into his mouth, tongue licking at his lips. “You want my cum?” he husks, “coat your tongue, give you a pretty pearl necklace?”
She’s nodding her head sweet pleas leaving her lips as he straightens himself, but not before licking into her mouth once more. He would think it impossible to get any harder then he already is but seeing her lips part for him, tongue waiting for him, well he could cum just from the sight alone and that would be a first – the soldier cumming untouched.
His hand fists around his cock squeezing at the base as if that will do anything to fight off the inevitable, it'll have to because if he was cumming, he was cumming in that pretty mouth of hers. He prided himself on his self-control while on set but it was almost embarrassing how quick he lost it the second he thrusted into her awaiting mouth.
“Fuck,” he groans head thrown back hips pistoning into her wet heat with little to no self-control, “this isn’t going to last very long baby, you’re fucking mouth is heaven.” he moans. It spurs her on, her mouth taking over as she focuses on bringing him to his end. “God fuck,” he grunts, hand finding her hair, curling, he’s pulling her off thought it's the opposite of what he wants, his other hand is on his dick stroking to fruition, “where do you want it baby?”
Her tongue slips out so easily, breasts pushed up, “F-fuck!” he shouts pulling her closer so his cum can paint her tongue, her pert breasts. He gives her everything, making sure every last drop is given to her. He stumbles back, letting Clint slide in for his money shot, and if he wasn’t so shaken with pleasure, he would have gotten hard again watching her clean up his cum from her skin, licking her fingers clean for the camera, swallowing it like such a good fucking girl.
Clint steps back with a single nod to him, he’s almost tempted to tell him to kill the film there, she had done her job, had done it well, gone above everyone’s expectations, but he’s curious. He’s curious to see how far she’ll go for him. So he steps back into her space, kneeling till he’s eye level with her, “you’re such a good girl,” he murmurs pausing to really take you in. There's only one person he’s ever asked this of and she was always a willing participant; Sharon lived for pleasing the soldier, so she’d do just about anything, but would you?
He speaks before he can overthink, “but it looks like you made a mess baby,” her eyes drift down with his settling on the spot just below her parted legs, her wetness seems to have seeped through her flimsy thong straight onto the floor. Your eyes glide back to his, he watches waiting, “I’m sorry sir,” is all she breathes before she’s knocking his own breath from his chest. He watches her scoot back, gaze never averting from his as she leans down and does the one thing he’s only ever seen from one other person here at StarkHub. He doesn’t even give her a chance to straighten after licking up her mess from the sets floor before he’s on her, his tongue delving into her mouth as he seeks out that sweetness.
“Fuck,” he hums into her lips, “you dirty fucking girl.”
She’s smiling into his lips, tongue seeking out his, “only for you sir.”
And he was going to hold you to that, The Soldier had gotten a taste of you and he already wanted more.
pairing ۶ৎ childhood best friend!bucky barnes x childhood best friend!reader.
summary ۶ৎ in which, a butterfly flies liberated from its cocoon, absorbing what the world has to offer. it soars through life, but it’s wings gradually grow tiresome, and has no cocoon to safely return to.
warnings ۶ৎ angst, reader has a terminal illness, time skips ( one scene when they’re kids, the rest when they’re adults ), mentions of war, medical treatments ( not completely accurate since i wasn’t alive in the 1940s, but i did some research ), pda, fluff, pet names ( peach, baby—f!receiving, darling—m!receiving ), kissing, allusions to spiciness ( not explicit, just mentioned in a couple sentences and a small convo about it ), timings may have been altered to fit with my plot, reader has hair that can be braided/plaited, reader has a surgery scar on her chest, letters are in italics, no use of y/n.
a/n ۶ৎ there are parts i love, parts i’m unsure about, but either way i’m happy i finished this!! i proofread this really quickly so if there’s any mistakes, i apologise!
word count ۶ৎ 10.4k | divider creds ۶ৎ @/diviniyae
JULY 19TH, 1926
“You don’t have to carry me, Bucky.”
“Yes, I do. I need to show off my strength.”
At nine years old, you’ve learnt not to take life for granted. It’s why, every moment you’re blessed with, you consume everything, snapping a mental picture of the scenery, inhaling the smells, and basking in the company.
The verdant field stretches on for miles, tall grass weaving with splashes of white and yellow: daisies. The sun pulses amongst the clear, blue sky, but your frilly hat blocks it out.
The aroma of fresh floral is welcomed into your senses, a contradiction to the powerful medical scents you’re accustomed to smelling while staring at the same mundane walls. The company you acquire is favourable too. Instead of sick patients coughing away, informing you that could be your fate one day, you’re graced with the crickets of grasshoppers and your best friend who’s carrying you on his back.
You giggle, your little arms around his neck tightening slightly, “There’s no one else around, who are you showing off to?”
“I thought you were smart.”
“I am smart!”
“Then how can you not see I’m tryna show off to you?”
Shyness creeps into your bones, making them feel light and fuzzy, and you bury your face into his neck. A laugh, so childlike and blissful, escapes him. It’s contagious, encouraging a smile to spread across your mouth.
He has no obligation to flex around you. You already comprehend he’s the utmost wondrous person to walk on this earth.
Your parents are at work despite it being a weekend. Your mother a waitress and your father off mining coal. They need the money to pay for medical bills and your diagnosis’s. Your family isn’t poor. You have a nice home with nice things. Your father engraves that into you when the kids at school mock you for wearing handmade clothes your mother stitched herself.
Yet, you’re defective and it’s high-priced.
“Where are we going anyways? Your mom said not to go too far.” You ask curiously as you lift your head, scanning the surroundings. His house is in the distance, and you can faintly view the outline of little Rebecca Barnes through the window, playfully tugging on Winnifred’s hair.
You’re not worried though. You know Bucky will never take you somewhere an adult isn’t able to reach you quickly in case something bad happens.
“It’s a surprise.”
“Bucky, tell me.”
“No.”
“Bucky.”
“Don’t say it like that!” His resolve always crumbles around you, “You sound like a weepin’ puppy and I love puppies.”
“And me. You love me too.” You teasingly quip.
There’s no hesitation when Bucky answers, “More than a dog with its bone.”
“You’re strange.”
Before he can reply with something witty, something to knock the cotton socks off your feet, he reaches the top of the hill and halts.
Your eyes widen.
An oak tree stands, so vast and beautiful it appears as though it’s from a fairytale. Spirally, green leaves wave hello on the thick branches that loop and intertwine with others. Acorns form a group in every nook and cranny while its bark wears age lines. Dandelions sprout from the dirt beside the stump, swaying gently under the shade it’s protected by.
“Cool, right?” You can hear the grin his voice, eager to have shown you this, “Reminds me of the front cover of that book you’re always readin’.”
Cheeks flushing at his memory, you slide off his back and grab his hand, dragging him into the bed of grass and soil.
It’s usually been like that. Wherever your feet step, his does too.
Time passes, the dirt blemishing the hem of Bucky’s shirt that’s become untucked proof. Your fingertips are stained with pollen from linking daisies together, creating a crown.
“Here, lemme…” Bucky gently takes the completed flower chain from you and sets it upon your head, “…there,” he grins triumphantly, “You’re just missing a ring.”
“A ring?” You tilt your head in confusion.
He plucks another daisy, it’s stem tall, and ties it carefully around your finger.
"Yeah. The crown is your veil, and this is the ring. Now, we're married." He says simply, as if it's the easiest decision he's ever made.
Laughter bubbles within your chest, “That’s not how it works, Bucky.”
“Pretend then.”
“Okay, husband.”
“Okay, wife.”
Your cheeks ache from smiling incessantly. You part your lips, words on the tip of your tongue, but your eyes flit towards a low branch that quivers mildly.
A chrysalis stands out amongst the greenery, and a gasp escapes you at the sight of a wing emerging, ocean waves swirling with black accents. The faded blue of the lower wings that appear suddenly glint off the sunlight.
A beacon of new life.
Then, it flies away elegantly.
“Bucky, Bucky, look!” You excitedly exclaim, swiftly rising from the ground.
You don’t give him a chance to turn his head, you just begin chasing after it, ignoring the scuff of his shoes and his worried yell.
“Wait— you’re not supposed to run fast!”
You run through the field, your eyes set on the creature. You laugh as it swirls in the air, and it almost seems like it’s inching closer with each moment. The grass tickles your legs, the gentle breeze letting wisps of your hair dance.
You keep following it like it’ll lead you to a covert cove that’ll unveil a magical world, and, just for a moment, you wonder if this is what it’s like to experience a normal childhood.
“Bucky, come on!” You call back, “It’s… it’s…”
Your words are stolen as your lungs feel as though they’re being stretched then compressed, closing in second by second as your ankles radiate pain, an invisible rope tightening around your skin, leaving a burning ache.
You slow down.
The butterfly soars further.
The ringing in your ears is faint.
Are you coughing?
Your legs give out.
And, through the heaviness of your eyelids, the butterfly disappears.
Before you can hit the ground, arms tuck under yours and gently lowers you with him, your back against his knees. Your heart thumps swiftly. Harshly. You’re sure the organ wants to jump out of your chest and nestle in another body—a healthier, fitter one.
Bucky settles your hat aside so he can see you better, his hands hovering in the air, unsure and hesitant, “Hey, hey, you’re breathin’ funny again. Should I go fetch my Ma?” He tries his hardest to sound calm, but the slight crack in his tone reveals the inner-panic.
No!
If he gets his mother then she’s going to call yours at work and she’ll take you home. You can’t be the reason she loses pay or worse: fired.
You cause her enough trouble already, and you want more time with Bucky.
You shake your head frantically against his stomach, eyes wide and breathing stertorous. Your body is hungry for air, yet it’s not being served.
Until his hands carefully cups the back of your neck, his thumb a feathery motion soothing over your pulse point.
It jumps back into place.
“Okay, okay,” he reassures, “How does it go again? Uhm— relax your neck and shoulder.”
You focus on his touch, his voice, the way his face blocks out the rest of the world as you gaze up at him. His fingers are soft, not hardened by the working universe yet. He’s upside down in your vision, a crease in his forehead that shouldn’t be there for someone so young.
Gradually, your limbs grow slack.
“Good… good. Now, breathe in through your nose for two counts.”
The fuzziness clouding your mind is pierced while you repeat his instruction. You remember what to do, so you purse your lips and exhale slowly through them to the count of four.
Minutes pass, but the air no longer rejects you. Your chest rises and falls into a steady rhythm, your heartbeat returning to as regular as it can be, and all that remains is the fatigue.
The world comes back into motion, and a tranquil silence surrounds it. A peaceful apology for the disruption of your fun.
“That butterfly wasn’t worth it,” Bucky states, breaking the quietness, “Y’know how scared I was for you just now?”
Guilt glazes over your eyes, your bottom lip wobbling. You can bear the weight of your episodes, and you can handle the medicine you’ll no doubt be ingesting tonight instead of cookies and milk other kids receive.
But, you can’t handle him upset because of you.
“Sorry.” You whisper, voice slightly scratchy.
His shoulders lower, the crease hiding away until another moment like this occurs. You witness him soften like snow melting under the sun.
“Just… don’t do that again, okay? Please. I don’t wanna lose you,” he quielty and pleadingly says, “You’re my best friend.”
A beat passes.
“Bucky?”
“Yeah?”
“You reminded me of that butterfly.”
“I reminded you of an insect?”
A small smile graces your face at the amusement in his tone, the atmosphere shifting back into place like nothing happened.
“Not like that,” you softly say, rubbing your eyes gently, “Butterflies represent good luck sometimes. And, when I’m with you, I’m lucky.”
“How’re you lucky?” Bucky questions, the light in his eyes shining as bright as a firefly.
“I can breathe with you.”
SEPTEMBER 21ST, 1935
The autumn air nips at your nose, the bustling noise of cars in the distance intertwining with the sound of a rake scraping against the cobblestone to rid the mahogany nature from being stepped on.
Ten minutes have been swept away, but it‘s akin to a year for you. Everything’s slowed, every little noise muffled. Your eyes are glued to the ground as you’re perched upon a ledge outside the hospital. To anybody passing by, they’d assume you’re watching the earlier morning rain residue that’s stuck between the pavement and the road.
To you, however, you’re thinking. And, right now, alone, that’s a dangerous place to be.
Your mind feels like it’s been split into two, battling against each other to infiltrate every nerve in your system.
One side is a maddening, heavy flurry. It’s concrete crumbling as the hammer swings down on it. Future plans are gone, abandoned in a pile of rubble.
The opposite side is light. A relieving sensation that the carry-on of your body working overtime has finally been identified.
Heart valve disease.
That’s what you’ve been diagnosed with.
The balance between crying and smiling rages within you, but luckily you don’t have to focus on it for too long as a voice, as warm as honey, encourages your head to rise.
“Hey, honey,” Mrs. Rogers, clad in her nurses uniform, greets kindly. Her bouncy, blonde curls frame her features, an angel in disguise that roams through the hospital halls, offering comfort to anyone in need, “Do you need a lift home?”
You choose to smile, because why dampen someone else’s day?
“That’s okay, Mrs. Rogers. I’m just waiting for a friend, thank you though.”
“How long have you known me, hm? Six years and you still call me that. Sarah will do just fine.” She says, voice tinged with a hint of playfulness.
Before becoming best friends with Steve Rogers on the playground, there was his mother. A sweet soul who sat with you when your parents conversed in a hush discussion with the doctors. She would never ask how you’re doing, but instead inquired about your interests and favourite foods, making you feel like an actual human being and not just a patient.
A knowing glint shines in her sky-blue eyes, “Say hi to Barnes for me, will you, hon? And that he owes me a batch of lemon squares.”
The mere mention of him has your heart skipping, a small laugh tumbling from your mouth. The memory of him ‘taste testing’ one lemon square at Steve’s ended up turning into accidentally eating them all, while sneaking their golden retriever some crumbs, is still fresh in your mind.
“Will do, Mrs— I mean, Sarah.”
She gifts you one of those fond, mothering gazes before walking away.
The light at every corner of the earth dims again. Flickering. Waiting.
Yet, the dullness fighting to accompany you loses at the sight of Bucky jogging over. You smile at the sight of his trousers damp at the hem due to working at the docks.
“Did you go swimming in your clothes?” You quip, swaying your legs back and forth gently.
“Hm?” His chin tips downwards at himself, then chuckles, “Oh, right. I was searching for pearls to give to you.” His flirtatious, oceanic eyes meet yours, and everything stabilises.
“Any luck?”
He shakes his head and clicks his tongue at the roof of his mouth, perching beside you, shoulder brushing against yours, “I didn’t look hard enough.”
Are you imagining the hint of disappointment in his voice?
“My mind was too preoccupied with how you’re doing.” He says, tranquil yet worried.
You don’t respond. You can’t. There’s a thick lump in your throat that’s forbidding the words to roll from your tongue.
How do you tell the boy you’ve watched grow into the purest form of a gentleman that you have a life-threatening disease?
It’ll tone down his laughter. It’ll sprout worst case scenarios into his mind until they’re suffocating every cell in his brain. It’ll puncture his amiable heart until it eventually mirrors yours.
…Right?
“Hey,” Bucky murmurs, your silence hurting his ears, “You don’t have to tell me right away, peach. I can wait.”
For the moment, all of the weight you’ve been carrying dissipates, replaced by a gooeyness.
His calloused hand lays upright in the air and you instantly intertwine your fingers with his. Gently squeezing your hand, he tucks them both away into his toasty pocket.
“Peach?” You repeat the nickname he called you, brows raised.
“Yeah,” he nods adamantly, “You’re a little bruised, but the marks on the outside don’t define the sweetness inside. Like a peach.”
A beat passes.
“Couldn’t just stick with ‘doll’?”
“Too common nowadays,” Bucky brushes it off, “‘Sides, you deserve your own nickname.”
You take a moment to just gaze at him.
Raven locks, mussed as though he ran his fingers through them endlessly. You appreciate how he didn’t brush his hair before arriving. That he just let himself be with you. You count the faint creases by his eyes—there from illuminating the world with his smile when the sun hides from the fog.
His lips, a shade of maroon under the golden rays of autumn, are a pair you won’t dare kiss, because they’re probably stained with someone else’s.
Clearing your throat quietly, you slip your hand away from his, goosebumps rising to plead with the bitter air.
“How was your date last night?”
You don’t sound jealous. You have no right to be. However, a sense of longing wraps around your words. A yearning for what you forbid yourself from having.
You force yourself to ignore the way his brows knit together when you pulled away. How his fingers left his pocket and twitched towards you, but stopped.
“It wasn’t great,” he exhales a long breath. “Terrible, really.”
Concern strikes you like a lightning bolt, pupils dilating, “Why? What happened?”
“She wasn’t you.”
She. Wasn’t. You.
Three words that can spark a generator back to life.
But you make it stall.
For years, Bucky has been confessing his feelings for you like it’s the only thing he knows. If he’s not outright saying it, then he’s slipping sweet notes into your bag as he walks you to the Library where you work, or he’s attempting to draw butterflies for you that you stow in your purse.
His love is loud, whereas yours is quiet.
It wasn’t thrusted into your palms, but it was something that brewed throughout the years. Slow, delectable, with time mastering it until your thoughts became enshrouded with him.
Yet, you’ve always shut him down. Guilt gnaws at you, the fabric of yourself growing threadbare. You know you’re letting him down. You’re aware you’re crushing him despite the unruffled demeanour and boyish grin he wears after.
You just can’t condemn him to a life of misery.
You clutch the edge of the ledge tight, “Why do you think they have cobblestone as a path to the hospital?” You ask, changing the subject, “They should really replace it with a flat walkway.”
“You can’t avoid me, this—” Bucky gestures between the two of you with his index finger, “—us forever,” his voice softens, “I won’t let you anymore.”
Frustration becomes your defence despite no attack taking place.
“I don’t understand you sometimes, Bucky.” You mutter, hopping onto the ground and dusting your hands on your coat.
“Why not, huh?” He mimics your movements and falls into step with you as you begin embarking down the path, “I make myself clear everyday how I feel about you.”
“Well, then, maybe you should stop.” You firmly say.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“…Yes.”
He laughs humourlessly, grasping your elbow gently and halting you both, “You’re a terrible liar.”
You falter by his warm touch, but you shrug yourself from his grasp, forcing yourself to put space between you, “I refuse to hold you back in life, Bucky.”
Stilling and shoulders tensing, Bucky blinks in bewilderment, “Hold me back in life? You know I could listen to you for hours, but what are you talking about? And will ya—” his chest rises and falls with a pained breath, “Will you quit pulling away from me, please?”
“You need someone fresh,” your wavering voice betrays the confidence of your tipped chin and feet firm against the pavement, “And that’s not me. I’m a wilting flower. Not enough sun or water is going to keep me alive for long.”
The pain of not merely today, but your past and future, is infused into a singular tear that trickles down your cheek.
“I’d just be a burden to you.”
The sky fades into mesmerising swirls of pink and orange, a dusk worshipping the pumpkin patch behind the nearby cafe. It’s bell hanging on the door dings faintly, muffled noises of greetings flowing into your ears.
And Bucky stands there.
Quiet. Calm.
No fisted hands, no clenched teeth, no darkening eyes.
His breaths are steady and gentle, and a part of you selfishly wishes his oxygen could hug you.
Then, he speaks, his voice a soothing wave that laps at your ankles, inviting you deeper into the ocean. His ocean, “Why don’t we get a drink, okay?”
“Now who’s avoiding talking.” You cross your arms, looking away.
“I’m not avoiding us, peach,” Bucky says, achingly soft, “I just don’t want you standing in the cold anymore.”
You close your eyes momentarily, exhaling through your nose, and nod feebly as the world is revealed to you again.
A brush paints the canvas of his face in relieved colours, and his steps fall in rhythm with yours as you embark slowly towards the cafe, granting you enough time for your head to clear.
Opening the door for you, Bucky follows you inside, warmth caressing your skin and the aroma of coffee wafting into your nose. Muted, checkered tablecloths layer over evanescing, wooden tables that waitresses weave around. A radio poses underneath crinkled parchments of posters hung upon cobweb-collected, brick walls.
Harmonies of jazz plays tenuously in the background, interlacing with Bucky’s voice, “Go sit. I’ll order for us.” He murmurs, but he doesn’t meet your gaze.
He’s lost somewhere.
As thought it’s muscle memory, you slip into the booth by the window, your ankles sighing in relief. They’ve been swelling all day, caged as a prisoner beneath the straps of your shoes.
Not much time passes until Bucky’s returned, setting your favourite drink in front of you, and a black coffee for him as he settles opposite.
His fingers interlock around the mug, pads of his skin tapping against it.
This is unbearable.
“Can you say something, please?” You softly ask.
Finally, his eyes flit to yours. A world of emotions on display, yet the strongest of all is what you’re afraid of.
“Do you honestly believe that I’ll agree with everything you said?” He rhetorically questions. “That I think of you like that?”
He’s calm as he speaks, and you’re beginning to wonder if he brought you here so you’d remain calm in front of others too. Not just for his sake, but for yours also, because arguing with him are like needles pricking under your skin until eventually the sharpness bursts through.
And he knows you’d bleed for him.
You part your mouth to converse, but close it, knowing now is Bucky’s time to talk.
“You’re grieving something—us—while we’re still breathing.”
The truth of his words makes you look down. You won’t deny it. You’ve already picked up a shovel and began digging deep into the dirt, ready to bury dreams and hopes you won’t experience. Maybe one day someone else would uncover it and have it as their own.
But Bucky won’t allow that. He’s taking the shovel from you and guiding you away from the wreckage, with your future still cradled to your chest.
Your vulnerable defences are slipping.
Sitting up straighter, his thumb and forefinger grip you chin, tilting your head up to face him. The hitch in your throat wasn’t unnoticed by him—his eyes momentarily darting down to your neck, and he soothes his thumb under the curved of your bottom lip.
“To me, you are so strong. Storms will pass by but you stay firmly planted in the ground. And that strength is admirable, peach,” he earnestly says, “I want to be by your side throughout it, even on the worser days so you can lean against me. In sickness and in health.”
James Buchanan Barnes’ loyalty is greater than the cosmos. Cowards shrivel up under in his presence, his shine burning them, and other men aspire to be a star like him.
His loyalty to you is locked tight. Nothing can break through it. Not the plans God has, not the course of turbulence expected to come, and definitely not your stubbornness.
“You’re acting as if we’re married, Bucky,” you say, “Not that we could afford that with all my medical bills.”
One last humoured try.
A mix of fondness and miff rolls around in his eyeballs, “For richer for poorer, peach,” he responds, “I’d spend my entire life’s worth of earnings if it means you’ll get better.“
He lowers his hand, grasping yours and stroking your ring finger. Your heart stutters as he traces a daisy, the same one that you wore until it wilted on your finger when you were kids. You never informed him you kept the petals in a small pouch under your pillow.
“I take vows very seriously,” he winks with a smirk, “And, when we were nine, I declared I was going to marry you. Nothing is ever going to change my mind about that.”
Alone in your bedroom, when you’d picture marrying someone, Bucky always sprung to mind. But your coughing would quickly turn your imagination to grey until it disappeared.
Now, it’s glowing bright. Staying.
Your lips turn upwards.
“You’re not proposing to me in a coffee shop.” You state, and he chuckles.
“Of course not, but I am plannin’ on kissin’ you in front of all these people.” He grins, achingly sweet your suprised his teeth haven’t rotted.
Your mug, raised to your mouth, quakes slightly at his sudden declaration.
Probably how you’ll be feeling in a minute.
“Wha—”
Before you can react properly, he sets your drink down and slides out of the booth, wrapping an arm around your waist and gently tugging you up.
Everything moves too fast until it slows down when he quietly asks, “Can I?”
You nod immediately.
His lips connect with yours. Slow and tentative. He’s giving you a chance to pull away.
You don’t.
Your arms snake around his neck while his palm sends ripples of warmth through your clothing. He presses into your lower back, inching you closer, chests brushing.
His lips feel like the finest of silks against your lips, velvety and warm. You yearn to be wrapped in him forever, keeping you safe from the coldest of evenings. The dash of bitterness you taste from his coffee grounds you from getting lost in the moment—remaining with him.
You can feel the thumping of his wild heart, the passion in his movements, the adoration he’s pouring out and into your mouth.
It’s raw and undeniable. A poet’s love confession floating down your throat and resting beneath your ribs, healing where once was an ache.
“Aww’s” from kind voices and “get a room” from grumpier one’s sound out over your mingled, soft breaths, but you and Bucky simply grin against each other’s mouth before parting for air.
Nothing else matters but this.
Your touch soothes the goosebumps that have risen on the nape of his neck, your lovesick gaze matching his, “I love you, Bucky.” You whisper, only for his ears.
He cups the back of your head, fingertips sifting through your hair, and guides your forehead to his lips, his words seeping through your skin and becoming the forefront of your mind.
“I love you too, peach.”
Butterflies dance and cheer in your stomach. They don’t just represent luck, but new beginnings too.
DECEMBER 23RD, 1941
Every night, when you drift off into the realms of sleep, you relive your wedding. It’s not a dream. You’ve done enough dreaming for it to finally come true. It’s Polaroid photos projecting off your eyelids, and you flick through every single one, studying carefully, never missing a detail.
A pathway of petals trailed to the oak tree, bushy leaves parting for golden rays to gleam upon you and Bucky standing front-centre of the trunk. The flowers and grass settled behind, amongst the guests, silently commending.
The neckline of your wedding dress was a scoop, fitting the high-back. Your collarbones were bare, for you desired them not to be marked with jewellery, but the summer air’s congratulations. A waterfall of white cascaded to your ankles—pure, ivory linen with net lace protecting it. You requested your mother to embroider florals around the upper chest and sleeves that reached your elbows.
He didn’t waste a dime on his suit, not a missing piece, needing to be complete. Trousers that fit like a glove, a collar waistcoat, and blazer, all executed in the smoothest of grey fabric, with a white shirt and navy tie. A daisy peered out from his chest pocket too.
His feet were clad in the shoes his father wore when he wed Winnifred ( which were stored away in her attic ). They were vintage and decrepit, not enough polish to make them proper, but they were meaningful, and it reminded you of the tree’s aging bark.
Slicked-back hair you were desperate to run your fingers through, his gaze fixated on you the entire time.
Enamoured, zealous, proud.
You saw him in a different glow, and it was heavenly.
His vows held buckets of emotion it began welling in his eyes. His touch was incredibly tender as he slipped the ring on your finger.
But the kiss? Oh, it was passionate. It felt like pouring every ounce of yourself onto a love letter.
The branches shook their leaves in applause while others clapped, the sunlight burned brighter, failing to out-do you two, and the coldness of his ring against your cheek was a sighing relief against the air’s humidity.
It wasn’t a grand wedding, but it was yours.
Before another moment your sleep-induced mind can spectate, it costively flickers then disappears upwards as your eyes open by a light weight against your head.
Blinking a few times to rid the bleariness of exhaustion, your husband is crouched by the bed, stroking your hair lullingly. The decorative bulbs on the Christmas tree filter through the open door and into the darkened bedroom, enlightening his features.
“You were smiling in your sleep again,” Bucky says, before a teasing lilt takes over, “Dreaming of me?”
You shift so your face isn’t half-covered by the pillow, “Our wedding day.”
“Oh, so you were dreaming of yourself?” He grins, “‘Cause you were the brightest there. No one could even look at me.”
The giggle that escapes you is frangible. If you reached out to touch the sound, it’d crack.
Bed rest. That’s what the doctors prescribed you ever since tornados of dizziness struck you. Black pixels would invade your vision, closing in, making your feet sway until you’ve hit the ground. Yet, overtime, you’ve learnt to carry yourself to the couch.
When you’d return to reality in a cold sweat, a headache would arrive, pounding like an incessant drum within the left side of your head.
You continue carrying on with life, picking up the odd few jobs since you were laid off by your work, but lying in the haven of your bed has been occurring more frequently than not recently.
“What’s the time?” You quietly ask.
“It’s six, baby.”
“Six?!” You spew out too quickly, coughs following soon after that you cover with a frail hand. Bucky rubs your back soothingly, “I’ve been asleep for six hours… I haven’t even started dinner yet.”
“Hey, hey, hey. Don’t beat yourself up about it, okay?” He soothes, “It’s fine, peach. You must’ve needed the sleep. ‘Sides, we can cook together now.”
He’s so understanding it hurts.
You hum languidly. Then, slowly, your brows knit together.
“If it’s six, you should’ve been home an hour ago.”
A smirk graces his devishly handsome face, “I was doing some last minute shopping.”
“Bucky…”
“I know, I know,” he holds his hands up in mock defence, “You said you didn’t want anything, but I’m going to give you everything you don’t ask for anyways.”
Shaking your head with a feeble smile, you muster the energy you always reserve for him and grasp his collar, pulling him onto the bed and slowly slotting your lips against his as you recline against the pillows. His body hovers over you, and you feel as though you may become one with the plushness of the mattress.
Bucky’s hand cups the back of your neck, tilting your head so he can delve deeper into the velvet walls of your mouth. Meanwhile, you grip his waist, urgent he moves closer, needing him to consume you whole. You don’t care if you lose any air, or if your heart can’t candle the exertion. If kissing him is the last thing you do, you’ll kiss him like you’re marching into battle.
You’re so lost in the precious whirlwind of him, you don’t feel your hair being brushed to the side, nor the sound of something skilfully clipping around your neck until a chilled weight rests on your chest.
Gasping when you break the kiss, you glance down as he tattoos your skin with his lips against your temple, cheek, and finally the corner of your mouth.
“Merry early Christmas, baby.” He whispers against your mouth.
A delicate chain glints off the celestials peeking through the window, and, in the centre, sits a butterfly charm.
“James.” You whisper in awe.
He props himself up with his arm by your head, “You couldn’t catch that butterfly, so I thought I’d buy you one.”
Describing love is tough, because there's not enough words in the dictionary. But you know how it feels. You know that your illness has become bearable, almost forgettable at times, all because of Bucky.
Carefully, as though it’ll crush under your touch, you trace the ridges and lines of the wings.
“It’s beautiful. Thank you,” you whisper, pressing a chaste kiss against his cheek. You lightly pat his chest, “Sit up, I have something for you too.”
Raising an inquisitive brow, he obliges, “Yes, ma’am.”
Your limbs protest as you sit up before he can help you, wanting some form of independence that keeps you sane. After turning the bedside lamp on with quivering fingers, you rummage through the bottom drawer of the nightstand and grasp an envelope, extending it to him.
“What’s that?” Bucky curiously asks, taking it, letting his fingers linger against yours.
“A pigeon,” you sarcastically murmur, “It’s a letter, darling.”
He shakes his head, smiling at your regular self making an appearance.
It’s rare nowadays.
“I know it’s a letter, but what kind? A cheesy love one?”
“No, I only send those to Steve.”
He lightly pinches a space of your calve that isn’t littered with bruises and you yelp.
Inspecting it as he turns it over, noticing it’s already been opened, he takes the paper out, and you nervously analyse how his eyes scan the inked words.
How his breath hitches.
How his fingers grip the paper tighter.
How the world shifts.
“Surgery?” He swallows thickly, eyes slowly darting to yours, a sheen of water glossing over.
“I’ve been put onto a waitlist,” you carefully admit, “They don’t know how long it’ll be, but I have a chance to get better. To be me again.”
His Brooklyn accent is prominent as his voice wavers, “You’ve always been you, peach. You just had some obstacles in the way.”
“…Bucky?”
“The survival rates are low, baby.”
He rubs at his chest like his words have physically injured him.
“Since when did you look on the bad side of things?” You inquire worriedly.
“Since this letter is saying a surgeon is going to jam their finger into my wife’s heart,” concern poisons his words as he stabs his own finger against the parchment, “What if they make a mistake, hm? What if this doesn’t help, but makes it worse?”
“Bucky, listen to me,” you cradle his face in your hands, “There are numerous what-if situations. The only one I’m thinking about right now is what if this makes me healthier? I could finally work again, I could breathe normally, I could live instead of survive.”
Bucky rests his forehead against yours, seeking solace, “You truly want this?” He asks quietly.
“I do,” you honestly, pleadingly, say, “I’m so tired. I can’t walk for more than thirty minutes without feeling like I’m going to collapse. I just want to be normal.”
It’s evident that your words strike a chord in him, coaxing a tear to trickle down his face which you wipe away.
“Okay, baby,” he whispers, wrapping his arms around your waist and gently pulling you onto his lap, “So damn proud of you.”
Relief courses throughout you. He buries his face into your neck and presses a kiss to your pulse point.
“We’re going to be okay.” You whisper, gliding your hand up and down his back, feeling him melt under your touch.
“I know we are, peach. You’ve always been strong enough for the both of us.”
You don’t comprehend how true that is until two days later and Bucky’s own future is being determined by a letter.
Drafted into the Army.
JUNE 14TH, 1943
“Bucky, I’m recovering from surgery, not incompetent.” Your laughter, a sound full of life, bounces off the walls.
Four months has passed since your surgery took place, a scar on your chest to prove the events. Within two of those months, you remained at the hospital for recovery, medication pumped into your system and therapies to coax your body into regular movements flowing.
Every day, Bucky was by your side. Holding your hand and replacing the vase of flowers with fresher ones. He voiced his contemplation of quitting his job just so he could spend more time with you, to which you gave him a firm no as a response.
You can’t be more thankful to have him in your life, to be so lucky that he stayed throughout the whole journey.
You returned home three months ago. The process of healing is long, but gradually, your limbs are no longer bruising, but clearing up. And your heart is beating normally. No more of those random skips, no more of it feeling like it was being dropped from a mountaintop.
For once in your life, you’re happy with your body.
Make-up, hair products and handed-down jewellery are spewed across the bed which you’re perched upon, the bright evening sky casting light into the bedroom.
“I know, but this is my last night until being shipped off, and if I wanna take care of you, I’m gonna take care of you.” Bucky asserts with a cheeky smile.
“There’s a difference between taking care of me and dolling me up.” You joke, smiling knowingly.
You’re aware of why he’s being like this—why he’s determined to ensure you won’t lift a finger right now. It’s not because he thinks you’re delicate, and it’s certainly not because he thinks you can’t do things for yourself.
Bravery is mustered from experiencing fear, and apart of his brave-self, there’s cracks of fear that he won’t have the chance to do anything like this with you again.
So you let him, because he’s entering a place where his life will be risked every second.
He’s done your make-up surprisingly well due to watching you apply it throughout the years. You only needed to touch it up a little, but the lipstick is faded—most likely from him kissing it off.
Next is…
“Hair,” he scratches the back of his neck, “I only know how to braid hair from Becca.”
You shrug, “You can braid my hair.”
Swivelling around, your back to him, you gaze towards the open window, allowing the slight breeze to wash over you. The air is a sweet relief to your lungs, poison ivy no longer tightening around them until its bitterness has bled through.
His fingers entangle in your hair, weaving and letting his fingertips brush the back of your neck. It’s a simple action, but every stroke of his touch feels like he’s connecting to your soul.
“You’re going to be tripping all over my feet.” Bucky teases, his breath fanning the back of your head and encouraging wisps of your tresses to dance.
“Are you doubting my dancing skills?” You ask, feigning hurt.
“Baby, you haven’t danced in nearly three years.” Bucky points out.
A beat passes.
“I have a good memory. It’ll be fine.”
“Hmm, and if my feet are bruised by tomorrow, I’m blaming you,” he lovingly tugs on your completed hairstyle, “There. Now, I’d like my payment in the form of a kiss.”
Facing him, a grin hurting your cheeks, you slowly dive in for a kiss, before swiftly turning and kissing his cheek.
“Tease.” He mumbles.
You rise and approach the tall mirror, admiring your braid and emphasised features, “You could run a salon, you know.” You compliment while beginning to undress.
“And ruin my street cred?”
“Street cred?” You raise your brows, “You mean punching people in alleyways.”
You can recall the generous amount of times he’s returned home with bruised knuckles you’ve cleaned up.
“Punching douchebags in alleys.” He corrects slyly.
Rolling your eyes jokingly, you slip on the dress that was hung on the mirror. You reach around to do the zipper, but fall short, sighing quielty.
“Bucky?”
“Already on it.”
He towers behind you, zipping the back of your dress antagonisingly slow. You watch him through the mirror, watch as he ducks his head and kisses your shoulder, feel how his hand glides across your shoulder, down to your arm, then wraps both of his around your midsection.
“Your wings are growing, peach.” He quietly praises, swaying you both side-to-side in a steady rhythm.
Your body melts into his warmth, your back against his chest, your head against his collarbone.
“We can always stay home if you’re not feeling up to tonight,” Bucky offers, “I’d still be just as happy as long as I’m with you.”
“I know, Bucky. But my body is itching to dance, okay?”
“That’s my girl.”
۶ৎ
Dancing was made for you and Bucky. You spun together like everyone else disappeared into thin air. You laughed together in harmony of the music. Where your steps went, he followed. When your hands intertwined, so did the ocean meeting the shore.
You didn’t dance in the shadows, but front and centre, under the gleaming yellow lighting. You were a whirlwind of starlight, dazzling in every movement, and Bucky was by your side, burning with merriment.
It had been so long since you let yourself be carefree, and you had never felt more beautiful.
The loud of the night fades as you enter your home, shutting the night away as Bucky closes the door and locks it. Immediately, your arms snake around his neck as he turns, crashing your lips against his. He stumbles momentarily, before pressing his hand’s against your lower back, melding you closer together.
Your heart bucks wildly, gallivanting in ways you didn’t think possible. Fingers sift through his hair in rhythm with his sliding across and caressing your waist in burning strokes.
The kind of burn inside of you that you enjoy.
You half expect him to move this forwards as your mouths reconvene the dance your bodies did earlier, but as he departs from the kiss… he doesn’t.
A loving brush of his lips against your forehead and a light, almost apologetic, squeeze of your hip is all you receive, then he trudges off into the kitchen, putting distance between you physically.
Your shoulders slump dejectedly, mirroring the downturn of your lips. You can’t recall the last time he carried you to bed and undressed you with a fervour of lust. Perhaps on your wedding day? It’s not a necessity you’re desperate for—his profound love is more than enough. Yet, as you stand alone while the faint sound of cupboards closing and pill bottles rattling reaches you, insecurities invade your mind.
‘Did I become too sick to be looked at in that sense now?’
‘Is he repulsed by me? Worried I’ll ruin it by having a coughing fit?’
The thick layer of hurt stuck to the roof of your mouth is a harsh swallow, but you do it anyways and venture to where your husband is, desperately needing to quarrel these intrusive thoughts of yours.
You don’t believe them—you’re making yourself not to believe them, but him turning away at any given opportunity is beginning to toy with your head.
Stepping into the homely kitchen and rounding the counter, you poise near the sink, where Bucky is turning off the tap. A light thud and the drip of excess water reverberates after he sets a glass beside your medication.
But those pills can’t help the mental storm brewing inside you.
He parts his mouth to speak as his head raises to meet yours, but his features instantly change at the sight of your hurt expression, “Hey, what’s wrong?” He asks, taking a concerned step closer.
Exhaling steadily, you cross your arms in attempts to appear confident when all you yearn to do is fall into his chest. But you can’t always rely on him. You need to do this for yourself.
“James,” you begin, tone forcefully even, “I’ll respect your decision if you don’t want to touch me, okay? I just need to understand why. Do…” Ignoring his perplexed, widened eyes, you continue, “…do I disgust you? Has my appearance changed—”
"Peach."
"—changed for the worse? Is this something you've been carrying for a while? Do you need my permission to go off with other—"
Before you can feel the tears stinging your eyes, his lips collide into yours, silencing you. The impact is harsh at first, knocking your breath away, but as it achingly softens, your heart restarts.
So does your head.
Your arms grow slack by your sides, and his large hands smooth up them, skating across your shoulder blades and cupping the nape of your neck. His thumbs press into either side of your jaw, tilting your head up further so there's barely any space between you.
"I'm sorry," he whispers against your mouth, nudging his nose against yours tenderly, "I just had to stop you from speaking about yourself like that."
"James." Your voice finally wavers.
Your plea must have flowed into his mouth, because he bitterly chews on it that his jaw trembles and squeezes his eyes shut briefly.
"God, baby, I'm so fucking sorry for putting those thoughts into your head," his voice is thick with guilt and regret, "I've been so busy worrying about how sex might affect you physically, I overlooked how me pulling away must've been messing with this beautiful mind of yours."
His thumb rubs circles into your temple while slowly opening his eyes. They're consumed with emotions a man wouldn't normally share in this day and age, but he does because he isn't like any other man.
He's yours, and with you, he can express himself liberatingly.
"What if it gets too much and your heart can't take it, hm?" The question leaving his mouth breaks into tiny pieces, yet you cradle each one so you can mend the outcome together.
"My heart can't take this distance, Bucky." You whisper, a tear sliding down your cheek.
Bucky catches it with the tip of his thumb instantly, and you turn your face ever-so-slightly and brush your lips against his skin.
The collapse of his shoulders is enough to inform you the guilt of potentially harming you has been haunting him for a while.
Carefully, you cradle his hand and slowly guide it down. You press the warmth of his palm where your heart lays beneath the surface of yourself and feel his fingers expanding to touch more of you.
"It's beating to its fullest potential because of you," you earnestly admit, "Yeah, I had surgery, but I couldn't have survived this long if you weren't by my side."
"Peach..." He trails off, doubt burdening his tone.
"It's true!" You exclaim, the corners of your swollen mouth upturning, "I'm alive because you, my husband, have been my biggest supporter since we were kids. You have been my lifeline, darling, and as long as you're alive and happy, then so am I."
This time, his care for you is expressed in a globule escaping the corner of his eye after blinking. You watch it slide down his cheek before you poise on your tip-toes and kiss it away.
Your lips linger against his face long enough for his breathing pattern to change. It remains steady, deliberate, but peeking between each exhale is a quivering hunger that went into hiding, now coaxed out by your deep devotion.
Pulling back your face, your small and nimble hand covers the back of his against your chest, "You told me my wings are growing, and they are, but they flourish with you.”
"I love you," Bucky confesses for the umpteenth time, though now it’s layered with his insecurities bare and open, "I love you so damn much that I don’t even think the word love is strong enough to describe how damn mad I am over you."
His thumb and index finger pinches your chin, inching your faces closer, breaths becoming one. Both of your cravings are edged further, and you lock your fingers between the gaps of his, trailing his hold on you further down until a heat strokes your lower abdomen.
"Then show me,” honey drips from your voice, sweet and addictive, “Show me how much you love me, Bucky."
Your encouragement beholds an undeniable strength, alleviating the hesitance inside of him. He carries you to your shared room, he cradles you ever-so protectively, and he unveils every pent up desire in caresses and strokes—in edges of lust that are softened with his undying love.
Every sound coaxed from the depths of your chests—breathy and low and extremely unfiltered—have become your new favourite melody. Every passionate movement between yourselves, wrapped in each other’s embraces, is the epitome of comfort and pleasure rolling around together. Every reassuring word spoken, or kiss peppered against your scar, gifts you the most safest crescendo one can possibly experience.
Throaty laughter arrives afterwards, rippling through the haze of serenity. Bucky smoothes his palm over every inch of yourself, leisurely gliding over bumps and crevices, checking for anything amiss, but all that remains is your blissed-out self and his proud grin.
And when the dreaded day of his departure reaches, he disembarks from the very docks he helped build, carry the memory of the night before closest to him.
Because it marks the night you finally started soaring.
AUGUST 2ND, 1943
Two months have slipped by without the warmth of your husband by your side. All that remains is the ghost of his presence wherever you venture, the letters stacked neatly in a wooden chest, and the sneaky, hushed telephone calls.
Closing the front door behind you, you waste no time in tearing the seal apart and unfolding the crisp parchment. His handwriting coaxes a smile on your face, the bold strokes carefully crafted despite his cursive being a tad bit sloppy.
Your eyes begin ingesting the words he’s unleashed from the depth of his soul. The last time you heard his voice, it was muffled through the terrible signal of the General’s telephone.
Now? Now, it echoes clearly in your ears, so close you can almost feel his presence.
My love,
The camp is bleak and pitiful, hope ebbing away the further we advance to the front lines. I try my hardest to maintain morel and uplifting the other soldiers, but even my struggle is becoming noticeable the more I’m away from you.
I wake up on this stiff cot, facing the roof of the tent, and being reminded of where I am. I close my eyes in the few moments I have to myself and picture us sprawled out in the field we claimed as ours. The image of the sun casting golden rays against you remains vivid in my mind. All seasons compliment you, peach, but summer bathes you in a newfound light.
How is Brooklyn’s Summer this time around? Is it warm enough for you? You know I’m not the religious type, but I pray each night you’re able to fall asleep without any trouble. I know how the steam from the scolding roads used to affect your breathing.
You were fighting a war every day, and you came out victorious. It’s your unyielding strength and bravery that encourages me to lead myself and my infantry into battle.
I will win this war, peach. I’m not winning it for my country anymore, I’m winning it for you: my beautiful, one of a kind wife who I love more than a dog with its bone.
Your darling,
James.
Exhaling shakily, you press the paper to your chest, as though the ink will bleed off the page and sink into your heart.
Bucky Barnes has been your crutch for as long as you can remember, and while you’re his too, you just wish it was under different circumstances—not the fear of death looming over him every second he’s separated from you.
Thoughts spark in your mind, each one illuminating another idea of how to make sunshine pour into your letter so his bleak whereabouts will have a bit of shine.
You take a step towards the living room when a searing pain slices through your chest, reopening what was mended.
A pained whimper rips from your throat as your nails dig into your chest instinctively. Your feet stumble. The letter drifts onto the floor as your other hand uses the coat hanger for stability.
Everything rotates fast. You squeeze your eyes shut, denying the dizziness of its foggy, enclosing effects. You’re still standing, two feet firmly planted into the floor.
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” You choke out through laboured exhales.
The technique of settling your strenuous breathing slips back into place with ease, and you familiarise it for a few moments before you’re stable enough to slowly crack your eyes open.
The ache in your chest fades, replaced by a hollow dread. You shove it down immediately. It’s just high emotions physically pulled out from Bucky’s sentimental letter, that’s all….
It’ll pass soon.
Everything will return to normal when he’s home.
OCTOBER 17th, 1943
The campsite is peculiarly quiet this evening, no alarms shrieking nor any barked orders making the weeds flinch. While his comrades have ventured to town, gulping down what could be their last drink, Bucky stayed behind.
Something off has been accumulating in the pits of his stomach all day.
It could be nothing. It could simply be the enemy inching closer each day, as that’s become the normal nowadays, but his mind wanders to you and your most recent letter.
Shoulders hunched and perched on the edge of his cot, he grips the paper firm enough so the gust of wind drifting through the tent won’t snatch it.
It’s still your enchanting words, each stroke of ink letting him in on a glimpse of warmth. However, overtime, your handwriting has grown noticeably shaky, no longer appearing neat and barely readable.
He manages too, anyways, because he’d be damned if a letter of yours isn’t deciphered like it’s full of important codes.
Determining he’s just overthinking, he sighs and shakes his head. You’re a woman made of iron that's been hammered and molded into something even stronger.
He swaps your letter on the rickety nightstand for the polaroid of you he’s kept close. The glow of the lantern illuminates your gorgeous features, but a photo can only do so much. It doesn’t capture the playful melody of your teasing, and it doesn’t play your dance movements.
Luckily, every moment spent with you was unforgettable. A picture can only do so much, but it can also evoke memories that stretches a smile across his mouth.
In a feather-light motion, his thumb traces every curve and crevice of yourself, worshipping you even when your physical self is nowhere in sight. The entrance of the tent flaps in defence of the force of nature picking up, but if he just pinpoints his focus on the image of yourself, he can almost hear the thrum of your heartbeat.
Almost.
Quickly replacing it is a rough clearing of a throat, though Bucky’s brow perks up at a second one following. Softer, perhaps sympathetic, trying to override the first one.
He lifts his head and straightens up at General Smith entering. A solemn expression is written into his face, rubbing out the typically guarded one he equips.
Bucky rises to salute him, but is stopped halfway by a slow raise of Smith’s palm, “Sit, Sergeant.” He orders calmly.
For a man who usually reeks of confidence, hesitance conflicts Bucky’s senses as he slowly sits back down.
“Sir?”
Marching the front lines seems dauntingly in front of him.
“Bucky… hell, there’s no easy way to say this,” General Smith sighs and shifts uncomfortably, “Your mother-in-law rang.”
Rocks have piled onto Bucky’s tongue, his next three words managing to slip out through the cracks, “Is everything alright?”
“No, son,” he replies in a fatherly tone, “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you…”
Bucky pales.
“Your wife passed last night.”
Those five words don’t reach his ears correctly.
They’re blocked out, muffled by the pounding of his heart while yours apparently lays still.
No.
Nonononononono.
He watched you wave him off at the docks. He listened to you converse about your day through the phone. Your heart was fine then. Cracked from his departure, but thumping healthily.
Speaking suddenly feels like the most strenuous action he can do, “She— ah…” his voice breaks, “She had a successful surgery. She can’t… she can’t have…”
A life without you doesn’t make sense.
Pain shoots through his chest, but he can’t see any bullets flying around.
His vision blurs with unshed tears. His lungs are too tight to accept breath properly.
The General’s voice remains a faded cadence, fragments piercing Bucky’s soul deeper.
‘Failed surgery.’
‘Couldn’t retain enough oxygen.’
‘Wasn’t alone.’
Head hanging low, eyes reddening swiftly, a broken noise is tugged from his throat. It doesn’t reach the sound-waves just yet, trapped in the confines of his aching self.
“It’s not true. It’s not true. It’s not true.” He mumbles repetitively and brashly cards his fingers through his hair.
The hollow pit inside his stomach fills with nausea.
You were suffering and he was unaware.
Angels recruited you and left him behind in the trenches… a place fit for a guilty man like him to be buried in.
OCTOBER 26TH, 1943
Rage never correlated with Bucky Barnes. His emotional intelligence didn’t let it simmer for long, but you were the one feeding him knowledge. Without you, the fury arose to the extremity of public humiliation.
At the time, he didn’t care when he stormed into the hospital, a body functioned by grief spitting at the ones who should’ve done more to save you.
Because they failed you.
He failed you.
No one flinched at his outburst, except for your father who heartbreakingly dragged him outside. To the medical workers, it was if that’s an every day occurrence and your death’s just another percentage in the charts.
He’ll go back and apologise later, comprehending how unfairly he directed his blame onto them. It takes the remains of his willpower not to blame you either for your stubborn mouth that was sealed tight throughout the months of his departure.
A weekend off was granted to him to get his head ‘straight.’ His teeth grind at the thought of returning to a place with hollowed men and no one yelling his name during mail-calls anymore.
Being drafted stole the time he had left with you, so a weekend to himself is a generous gesture.
Except, no one writes a manual on how to grieve properly. He’s transitioned into a new part of life without his permission, leaving him utterly lost and unable to cope.
Bucky’s legs forbid him from entering the Barnes home. The closest he reached was the door, thudding his bag to the ground in sync with the collapse of his knees.
An unopened letter of his, curled at the corners and dampening from his downpour of tears, taunted him from the welcome mat.
Now, he ventures where his heart navigates.
The oak tree slouches on the faded hill, silently battling against the invisible pollution that’s accumulated due to the war. The leaves are paralysed and the acorns have sorrowfully dropped, buried beneath layered of time and dirt. Weeds surround the stump like soldiers guarding their barracks, forbidding anyone from trespassing.
His boots are heavy against the cracked soil. A thick lump shapes in his throat and he forces it down. A ghost of vows and daisies flicker before him, but the grief rips it apart.
Bloodshot eyes roam the aging tree, noticing the lines in the bark have grown profusely. Maybe if his heart were to be x-rayed, there’d be jagged strikes too.
A sudden gust of wind pushes against him, or perhaps it’s trying to envelope him in a hug he’s unconsciously rejecting. The tickle of the breeze coaxes a twitch from his reddened nose, and his eyes drop to the ground as something featherlight sways in the air.
Immediately, Bucky glances upwards to the branch you once gazed at with child-like wonder, then drops his eyes to what’s fallen before him.
An envelope.
Shaky cursive writing.
James.
His hands tremble beside him.
You knew he’d visit.
He crouches down to pick it up, but it slips from his grasp.
“Shit,” he curses, vigorously wiping the specks of dusty soil off it.
When he’s sure it’s safe in his grasp, he slowly lowers himself to the ground, the bark brushing against his back like a reassuring pat.
After rubbing his eyes with his thumb and pointer finger, clearing any tears so he can read clearly, he expels a forced, steady breath. He doesn’t wish to have a heavy conscience when your literacy can float inside his chest instead.
My darling James,
A choked sound claws from his throat already.
He looks away, the taste of salt poisoning his lips as trails of pain dampen his face. It takes every bit of strength in him to return to reading.
My darling James,
I remember when you first introduced me to the oak tree. I had never felt so special in my life. I had already felt rejected by the world, barely scraping by, but you carried me outside and showed me there’s still hope and beauty out there.
That’s a feeling I’ll never be able to repay, no matter how much you say my love is enough, and I’m so sorry for the heartache I’ll leave behind when I’m gone.
I couldn’t tell you the surgery had failed. Selfishness took over; I didn’t want our final months together to have the impending grief looming over us. I was terrified it’d affect your sanity out there, and I needed you focused so you won’t lay to rest like me.
I lived longer than I expected. I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but I know loving you gave me a purpose and I was clinging onto that for as long as my heart could. Being with you made the pain bearable. I even forgot it at times when you’d hold my gaze with eyes the colour of the butterfly I chased.
You never left me, but I’m afraid if you’re reading this, I have left you. Butterflies are doomed with a small lifespan. I can relate to that a bit too closely.
When I pass, I will no longer experience that crushing sensation in my lungs. I’ll be light, soaring with my fully-grown wings, only feeling the comfort and safety you gave me.
I know it’s a lot to ask—you’ve done so much for me—but please keep that bravery inside of you pumping. Please live for me as I lived for you.
I love you with my entire being.
Goodbye, James.
Your love, peach.
Everything’s quiet.
The word has stopped to mourn you with him.
Yet, something foreign flushes throughout his body, lulling his aching bones. Closure’s arrival isn’t loud; it creeps in, slow and steady, and will take time to grow, but it’s a brave start, and he promises to forever be brave in your honour.
A slow, fluttering melody drifts into the environment. Landing on the parchment, littered in tiny damp splotches, is a butterfly.
A butterfly.
For the first time in days, Bucky’s lips curve upwards.
⚠︎ -> angst/sensitive topics (likely on-screen violence for titus)
☆ -> personal favorite
Series
Mrs. Danforth (Ongoing)
Series Summary: As Titus Danforth's sugar baby, you don't know much of his secretive, wealthy lifestyle. But when he accidentally gets you pregnant with a potential Danforth heir, it's decided that you'll be joining the family. There's no manual as you're plunged into their world of extravagance and violence.
Chapter One: A Well-Trained Companion (14.1k) ♡
Summary: After finding out you're pregnant with his child, Titus must secure his family's approval in order to make you a unique proposal: Become the new Mrs. Danforth.
Chapter Two: How, Why, and Other Unanswered Questions (4.0k)
Summary: As you prepare for your social debut in the Danforth world, Titus leaves you home alone for the first time to test you.
Chapter Three: Trivial Recommendations (7.3k) ♡
Summary: You accompany Titus to the Governor's Ball, your first major social outing as a member of the Danforth social hierarchy, and it marks an unspoken shift in your relationship.
Chapter Four: Winner (3.8k) ♡
Summary: You and Titus find out the sex of your baby and he finds himself more and more enamored with you.
ꜱᴜᴍᴍᴀʀʏ › some phone calls remind you to pick up your dry cleaning before closing. some phone calls split your life into two versions: before and after. you convince yourself that solitude is enough after it all, that you can hide from it all by the sea. but sometimes life has a way of finding you anyway.
ᴘᴀɪʀɪɴɢ › bucky x female reader
ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢꜱ › mature themes, character death (readers mother), grief & bereavement, discussion of fatal car accident (non descriptive), anxiety/panic attack, lots of emotional distress, loneliness and self isolation, themes of depression, 5+1 with a twist, five stages of grief + one stage of love, stage one: denial, not beta read we die like... everything.
ᴡᴏʀᴅ ᴄᴏᴜɴᴛ › 6.1k
ᴀᴜᴛʜᴏʀꜱ ɴᴏᴛᴇ › starting off with a... depressed bang! oops! i mentioned in the masterlist that a lot of this is from my own heart vault and while thats true i did jazz it up for the sake of the fic so while itll be sad for a little there will still be some entertainment, i hope LOL. i hope u enjoy and as always thank you for reading!
ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ
The city moved fast enough that sometimes you forgot there was a world outside of it.
That was one of the first things you'd learned after leaving home, that there was no room for stillness here.
No room for lingering over coffee while the sun climbed above the horizon. No room for long walks on the beach collecting shells simply because they were pretty. No room for sitting on the porch with your mother listening to the waves roll in and out while she read one of her mystery novels and occasionally pointed out a pelican diving offshore.
The city demanded motion and somewhere along the way, you'd become very good at giving it exactly what it wanted.
Your phone buzzed before the elevator doors had even fully opened onto the thirty-second floor.
You answered without breaking stride.
"Hello." A pause. "Check your email."
Another pause.
"Because you asked me to review it last night."
The call ended with a sheepish thank you and you smiled despite yourself. Typical.
By the time you crossed the open-concept office, three more people had stopped you. One needed approval on a furniture selection, one wanted reassurance before a client presentation, the last simply needed help finding a file she'd somehow misplaced. You handled all three before reaching your desk. Your unofficial title around the office was the final boss. Every design proposal eventually landed in your inbox. Every presentation passed through your hands before reaching a client. You caught mistakes no one else noticed, fixed problems before they became disasters.
Most importantly, you never said no.
Need someone to stay late? You. Need someone to cover a meeting? You. Need someone to fly across the country on two days' notice? You. You'd spent years becoming indispensable. Sometimes you wondered if anyone would notice if you stopped, but the thought never lingered around long enough to stir anything up.
Your assistant appeared beside your desk.
"Car's ready for you in ten."
You glanced at the clock, right, the Henderson project at the Hilton Conference. After there's a lunch meeting downtown for a proposal for a new client. Another presentation. Another polished smile.
"Got it."
You gathered your tablet and notebook before following a group of coworkers toward the elevators. The familiar rhythm settled around you immediately. Discussion of budgets, fabric samples, projected timelines, and somebody debating lighting fixtures. You contributed automatically, barely needing to think, everything had become muscle memory at this point.
The elevator carried everyone toward the lobby. Your reflection stared back from the mirrored walls. Tailored blazer with comfortable heels, phone already in hand. You looked like someone who was successful, someone who looked like she belonged here. And that was the goal after all, wasn't it?
The doors opened as the group spilled into the lobby and headed toward the company car waiting outside. You were halfway across the marble floor when your phone rang again. You glanced down, expecting another coworker, instead, an unfamiliar number flashed across the screen.
Your steps slowed.
The area code punched a small, unexpected hole straight through your chest.
Home. Not New York. Not work. Home.
That tiny beach town you'd left nearly a decade ago after growing up on that beach that washed everything away. That town where everyone knew everyone, where there wasn't a path you could walk without picking up a handful of sand with you. That town where your mother still lived.
For a moment, the noise of the lobby faded as the ringing continued. Beside you, your coworkers kept walking toward the revolving doors while you stared at the screen. Maybe it was spam. Maybe someone dialed the wrong number. Maybe—
Something uneasy curled low in your stomach.
The phone rang. And rang.
You swiped to answer.
"Hello?"
The word came out distracted, automatic and professional. There was a pause, a breath, then a voice you didn't recognize said something close to your name. And suddenly, for reasons you couldn't explain, the world didn't feel quite so steady beneath your feet anymore.
"Hello?"
The revolving doors swept open as you stepped outside. Warm city air rushed up to meet you, carrying the familiar sounds of honking cars, distant sirens, and hundreds of conversations blending into one endless hum.
"Am I speaking with—" The woman on the other end said your name clear as day.
"Yes, this is she."
"Hi. My name is Marlene Johnson. I'm the medical examiner at Sunset Shores Hospital in San Vyranda."
You frowned.
Sunset Shores. San Vyranda. Home. A strange knot formed in your stomach.
The woman hesitated, the pause lasted less than a second but it was long enough to change everything.
"I'm sorry that this is the first time we're speaking."
Your steps slowed to a sluggish drawl, the echo of your heels dulling against the pavement. Your coworkers continued walking ahead toward the company vehicle, someone laughed about something, someone opened a car door and the world carried on.
"We received your contact information from your mother's emergency records,"
Your mother's name left the woman's mouth and for a moment, it didn't mean anything. Just a collection of syllables, a familiar sound, something your brain recognized but refused to process.
"She was involved in an accident yesterday morning."
You stopped walking entirely.
People streamed around you on the sidewalk. A businessman even bumped your shoulder, you didn't react.
"There was a truck—" The woman's voice crackled. Or maybe that was inside your head. "—intersection—" Static. "—driver failed to stop—" Thrumming. "—I'm so sorry for your loss."
Loss.
The word floated somewhere distant, meaningless and impossible. Your mother couldn't be dead, you'd just spoken to her three days ago. She'd been standing in her kitchen making blueberry muffins complaining about her neighbor's lawn, asking whether you were eating enough vegetables.
Dead people didn't do those things.
"Miss?" The woman was still talking.
You realized several seconds had passed without you responding.
"I understand this is overwhelming." Overwhelming. That seemed like a ridiculous understatement. "—need you to come down as soon as possible."
You stared at the traffic moving through the intersection. Red light. Green light. People crossing. Everything operating exactly as it always had.
"—confirm identification—" A horn blared somewhere. "—funeral arrangements—" Someone brushed past your arm. "—next of kin—"
You couldn't feel your fingers, couldn't feel your feet, couldn't feel much of anything. The city suddenly seemed very far away.
"Miss?"
"Okay." The word slipped out automatically, small and hollow. It felt nothing like your own. Nothing like the voice that had commanded the office floor no more than an hour ago. "Okay."
The lady ended the call shortly afterward, or maybe you ended it, you weren't entirely sure. The phone remained pressed against your ear long after the line went dead.
"Hey."
A hand touched your shoulder, you jumped more than necessary. The entire world around you snapping back into motion as if no time had passed at all.
One of your coworkers stood beside you with concern written across her face.
"You okay?"
The question seemed absurd. You looked at her, opened your mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Your tongue felt too large, your thoughts too slow, too scattered.
"I have to go home."
"What happened?"
"I don't… feel good." You weren't even sure the words made sense, only that they were easier than the truth.
Your mother is dead.
Your mother is dead?
Your mother is dead.
The sentence refused to settle anywhere inside your head, racketing and echoing off the walls with a shaking disbelief. Your coworker offered to call someone. You declined. Another suggested taking you to urgent care when they saw the shake of your hands. You declined that too. You just turned and started walking. At some point you reached your apartment, the space between those events simply vanished. Later, you'd remember flashes. The subway. An elevator. Your keys falling twice before fitting into the lock.
But mostly there was nothing, just blank space, missing time.
You sat on the couch still wearing your blazer, still holding your phone. Sunlight crawled slowly across the hardwood floor as hours passed. Then darkness with the glinting shine from the moon. Then morning. The city continued outside your windows, cars honking, people beginning their commute, the construction over on twelve that's been going on for three months.
Life. Buzzing and beating around you.
You sat perfectly still. Waiting for reality to catch up. Waiting for someone to call and explain there had been a mistake. Waiting for your phone to ring with your mother's name across the screen.
It never did.
Days blurred together afterward. Your coworkers checked on you constantly, their worry of any sickness overrun with condolences when you had told them the truth of your disappearance. Missed calls filled your phone screen, apologetic voicemails, and wilted flowers began to crowd every corner of your apartment next to takeout containers accumulating in the kitchen. You slept in fragments, and woke disoriented. Forgot what day it was, whether you'd eaten, forgot entire conversations. And then, little by little, the words started sticking. Your mother. The accident. The funeral arrangements. Gone. Gone. Gone. The true realization arrived in pieces, each one cutting deeper than the last.
You found yourself functioning on instinct. Not like the autopilot you had been able to tap into for work. This one was lethargic and unsteady. Thoughts either sticking in your head on repeat or fading into the fog the second you'd heard them. You had written out the most important things on sticky notes on your fridge. Plane tickets. Funeral home. Death certificate. Insurance paperwork. Hotel reservations for family members. Endless forms. Endless signatures. An endless nightmare you'd never thought you'd have to live.
You tried to keep it all at arm's length, to complete them all without thinking. As if handling someone else's tragedy, as if you were merely assisting with a project. Another deadline. Another checklist. Another task that needed doing. Your brain yearned for the familiar. Soon the time came and your manager approved your leave immediately, told you to take however much time you needed. Coworkers sent more flowers, cards, and meals. You thanked all of them, but you couldn't remember a single thing you said past that.
The night before your flight, you stood alone in your apartment. Suitcase packed beside the door, silence filling every room. Your eyes drifted toward your phone sitting on the kitchen counter, for a long time, you simply stared at it. Then, with shaking hands, you opened your contacts, scrolled and found her name.
Mom.
Your thumb hovered over the call button. You already knew what would happen but you pressed it anyway. The line rang once, twice, the endless trilling echoing in your ear. Then her voicemail answered.
"Hiya, you've reached—"
The sound of her voice shattered something inside you. And for the first time since the phone call, you cried. You cried until your chest ached and eyes burned, then you cried some more.
The drive into town from the airport felt shorter than you remembered. Or maybe grief simply swallowed distance whole. One minute you were staring blankly out the airplane window as clouds drifted beneath the wing. The next, you were pulling onto familiar roads lined with sea oats and weathered beach fences.
Everything looked exactly the same and completely different. The faded welcome sign, the bait shop on the corner, the ice cream stand that somehow survived every hurricane season. You recognized all of it yet it felt like looking at someone else's memories. Like peering through fogged glass. The ocean appeared between buildings as you drove. Blue, endless and unchanged.
Your chest tightened.
The sight should have felt like coming home, instead it felt like arriving too late. The funeral passed in much of the same way, a blur or a faded dream. Like you'd stepped out of your body and was watching something happening to someone else.
You remembered standing beside the casket. Remembered staring at polished wood because looking anywhere else felt impossible. People approached in waves. Old neighbors and former teachers, friends of your mother you'd known your entire life. They all said variations of the same thing.
"She was wonderful."
"She talked about you constantly."
"I'm so sorry."
"If you need anything..."
You nodded and thanked them. Accepted hugs, condolences and casseroles wrapped in aluminum foil. You couldn't recall a single face afterward. Only fragments of perfume, the scent of lilies, a hand squeezing yours and someone crying. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a voice kept insisting this was temporary. That eventually your mother would appear from somewhere and laugh about the misunderstanding.
The service ended, the people left, the flowers remained. And your mother stayed where she was.
The reality of that never fully landed, not then, not yet. A week later, you were back in the city. Back in your apartment, back in the life you'd built. At least physically, mentally, it felt as though some essential piece of you had been left behind. The apartment greeted you with silence, not peaceful silence. Wrong silence, the kind that seemed to stretch into every corner.
You dropped your suitcase near the door and waited. For what, you weren't sure. Maybe for your phone to ring. Maybe for your mother to ask if you'd gotten home safely. She always did, even after ten years, even when you reminded her you were a grown woman. Especially then. You stood in the foyer for several minutes before remembering why she wouldn't call. The realization hit like a fresh bruise, tender, immediate and cruel.
Your mother was supposed to grow old.
The thought had entered your mind and wouldn't leave, compounding itself onto every fired neuron in your brain. She was supposed to complain about her knees, supposed to start forgetting where she left her glasses, supposed to become the eccentric old woman feeding seagulls from her porch despite repeated warnings not to.
There was supposed to be more time.
Years of it. Decades.
Not this. Not an intersection. Not a truck. Not a stranger's mistake. Not a phone call in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.
The following weeks slipped apart around the edges. Texts arrived, you ignored them. Coworkers checked in, you answered with vague responses. Friends invited you out, you declined every time. Work became something you endured, you still showed up, still attended meetings and reviewed presentations but the spark that once drove you had vanished.
People eventually noticed, you knew they did but nobody said much. Everyone seemed afraid of saying the wrong thing. You appreciated that and hated it all at once. Some afternoons you found yourself staring at a design board for twenty minutes without absorbing a single detail. Colors blurred together, furniture layouts became meaningless.
The things that once mattered suddenly felt very small.
You stopped cooking, stopped grocery shopping regularly. Most nights consisted of takeout eaten standing at the kitchen sink, the containers piled up faster than they should have. You'd kept promising yourself you'd throw them away tomorrow. Tomorrow kept moving.
Sleep became impossible in your bedroom. The bed felt too large, too empty. It was strange. You had never noticed it before but now it felt that there was an internal tie cut within you, and everything felt so one sided. So lonely. Things you had often, if not always, done on your own, felt empty. Even the apartment felt too hollow, the walls in your bedroom echoed differently now. So you migrated to the couch with one blanket wrapped around your shoulders, the television on low volume as lights from the city filtered through the windows.
It wasn't comfortable, but it was easier. Everything became easier when you stopped caring, like the voicemails.
The voicemails remained unheard in your phone, seven messages to be exact.
The number had burned itself in the back of your mind, a tiny red number you couldn't bring yourself to clear. They were the last parts of your mother that were left unscathed by all this. You knew most were likely ordinary, your mother reminding you to call her, telling you about a recipe she'd tried, asking if you'd seen some news story she'd forgotten to send.
The final voicemail sat at the bottom of the list, untouched. Untouched because once you listened to it, there would never be another one and as long as it remained unheard, some irrational part of you could pretend her voice was still waiting. Still alive. Still there.
Some mornings your hand reached for your phone before you were fully awake. You'd see something funny online, find a new coffee shop, see a bookstore she'd love have a sale and instinctively think: I should call Mom. The thought happened dozens of times, every day, a reflex that built over years. Each time reality followed seconds later. A delayed collision. A fresh impact. She isn't here. You'd lower the phone, swallow hard and continue with your day. Until the next time. And the next. And the next.
One rainy Thursday evening, you found yourself standing in the cereal aisle of a grocery store, frozen, staring at a box your mother always bought. Without thinking, you pulled out your phone, your thumb moved automatically, scrolling through your contacts until you found it.
Mom.
You pressed it before your brain could catch up. The line began ringing. Once. Twice. Three times. Then her voicemail answered. You hung up immediately, heart hammering, breath caught somewhere in your throat. Around you, people continued shopping comparing prices, pushing carts, living their lives. You stood motionless beneath fluorescent lights and finally understood something terrifying.
The world had not stopped when your mother died, only yours had.
You turned and left the grocery store that second, your cereal and basket of food abandoned as you darted for the the nearest exit and went back home.
Back to being alone.
The typical silence of your apartment greeted you with a bitter chill. You found yourself suddenly restless, arms unable to stay at your side, legs buzzing to break free from where they stood still. You had to do something, anything. It didn't take long for your eyes to catch onto a target and lock in on it. Soon you were kneeling beside an overstuffed bookshelf you'd been meaning to organize for months before… now it had become a monstrous pile that claimed ownership of the better half of your hallway.
The apartment had become a reflection of you. Untended, and half-finished. Stuck.
A thin layer of dust coated the shelves as you sifted through, tossing donations into a pile near the laundry-occupied armchair in the corner. The television murmured softly in the background, providing noise you weren't actually listening to.
You pulled a book free and a postcard fluttered to the floor, you almost ignored it, but then you recognized the image. The beach. Home.
You stared at it for a long moment before picking it up. The edges were worn, sun-faded and old. On the front, the ocean stretched endlessly beneath a summer sky. The very same stretch of shoreline you'd spent your childhood exploring. The same beach where your mother used to wake you before sunrise with a thermos of hot chocolate and a promise that the dolphins were out this morning.
Old memories flooded your mind as you held the cardstock in your fingers. You remembered sand sticking to your ankles, the smell of sunscreen, the weight of seashells collected in your pockets, your mother's laughter carried away by the wind. You remembered sitting beside her on the porch after long days at the beach, both of you wrapped in oversized sweatshirts watching the waves disappear into darkness talking about everything and nothing.
Back then, you'd thought those summers would last forever. Back then, your mother had seemed immortal.
The postcard trembled slightly in your hands. Without warning, something inside you cracked. In one fell swoop, enough to let everything spill through as you sank against the wall, the postcard clenched in your fist. The apartment suddenly felt suffocating, the walls too close, the city too loud. The life you'd spent years building suddenly looked unfamiliar, as though it belonged to someone else. You glanced around the room at the expensive furniture, the carefully chosen decor, framed certificates. The polished version of yourself you'd spent years creating. None of it mattered. Not anymore.
The thought arrived quietly, then rooted itself deep. What am I still doing here?
The answer never came, instead another thought followed, simple but dangerous. If I leave everything behind, maybe none of this has to be real.
You didn't examine it too closely, didn't question the logic, didn't even give yourself time to. Because if you did, you might realize it wasn't healing you were after, it was escape. The decision happened quickly after that. Three days later your manager stared at you across the conference table with your letter of resignation laying between you.
"You don't have to make any permanent decisions right now."
You understood what he meant, that grief wasn't the time for life-altering choices, right next to tattoos or drastic haircuts. People always said that. You smiled politely, then quit anyway.
Furniture disappeared next. A couch purchased after your first promotion, the dining table you'd spent months saving for, bookshelves, artwork, decorative pieces. One by one, strangers carried them out the door. Each departure left the apartment looking less like a home and somehow that felt like relief. You donated bags of clothing, kitchenware, boxes of things you'd once convinced yourself were important.
The pile that remained grew smaller until eventually your entire life fit into three boxes. Ten years condensed into cardboard in the back of your trunk. You stood outside your apartment for a long while, looking up at the windows that shed so much light into your life over the years. It should've felt more ceremonious. Instead you just shrugged into the car and drove away.
The drive home took nearly twelve hours. You spent most of it staring at the road, not even the radio turned on. The silence felt appropriate. By the time you crossed the town line, evening had begun settling over the coast, the sky glowed orange and gold as the ocean flashed between buildings.
It felt familiar, almost patient as if something in the blue crashing waves could sense you were back, could sense the ghost haunting you. You refused to look at it for long, instead, you focused on the road or on the steering wheel, or on anything else.
Soon the beach cottage appeared at the end of a narrow lane, exactly as you remembered. Weathered cedar siding, white trim, a wraparound porch softened by years of salt air, the porch swing your mother refused to replace despite its constant squeaking. Your chest tightened and for a moment, you considered turning around, driving away and finding a new city to start back over, pretending none of this had happened. You swallowed thickly and put the car in park, hands twitching as you unbuckled your seatbelt. Silence greeted you as you stepped from the car, no porch light humming, no music drifting through open windows, no mother waiting inside.
Just stillness.
The key turned easily in the lock, the door opening with a familiar creak and suddenly you were standing inside your childhood home. Everything remained exactly where she'd left it. A mug beside the sink, a cardigan draped over the back of a chair, reading glasses resting atop a stack of books. The house looked less like someone had died and more like someone had stepped out for groceries and simply hadn't returned yet. Frozen and waiting.
You carried your boxes inside and set them in the living room, then stopped. You couldn't bring yourself to unpack, not really, not yet. A toothbrush in the bathroom, a few clothes in a dresser. Essentials, nothing permanent because permanence meant acceptance. And acceptance remained impossible. This wasn't forever. You told yourself that repeatedly. Just a few weeks, a month, maybe. Long enough to figure things out, to catch your breath, to decide what comes next. Not forever. The lie settled comfortably inside your chest. You avoided the hallway as you walked further into the house, specifically one door, your mother's bedroom. You passed it without looking, passed it the next day too, and the day after that. The door remained closed and you remained unwilling.
Outside, waves rolled endlessly against the shoreline.
You could hear them through the walls as you laid on the couch, the sound should have been comforting, instead, you shut every window and closed every curtain. Blocked out every glimpse of blue water, every reminder of childhood, every reminder of her. The cottage grew dim and shadowed as days passed, then more. You rarely ventured into town, rarely spoke to anyone. The grocery store clerk received brief answers, neighbors received polite waves, nothing more. Connection required energy and you had none left to give so your world became very small. Just you, the house, and the beach beyond it.
A life narrowed down to its simplest form.
You stood on the porch one evening as the sun disappeared behind the horizon. The ocean stretched endlessly before you, beautiful, the type of scene you see movie proposals filmed in or a romantic fervent confession of long withheld feelings. You stared at it for only a second before stepping back inside, closing the door and locking it.
As though keeping the world out might somehow keep your grief out too. As though both weren't already living inside the house with you.
By the seventh day, you were running out of excuses. The refrigerator contained half a carton of milk, questionable leftovers, and a bottle of ketchup that had probably survived three presidential administrations. The pantry wasn't much better, bearing a sleeve of crackers, instant coffee and a can of soup. You'd spent the whole week moving between the couch, the porch, and every room in the cottage except one.
The walls had started feeling closer, the silence heavier so when you finally grabbed your keys that morning, it felt less like an errand and more like surrender.
The town looked exactly as it always had. Sun-bleached storefronts with flower boxes beneath windows. Locals sitting outside the diner with coffee mugs in hand. Everything familiar and unchanged. You hated it a little for that. How dare the world stay the same?
The grocery store came first. You moved through the aisles quickly avoiding conversation, and eye contact, and Mrs. Patterson from three streets over who've you known you since kindergarten. You escaped with two bags and a brief wave. The hardware store came second. The front porch light had burned out two days ago and one of the kitchen cabinet hinges had started pulling loose, plus the screen door stuck every time you opened it. Your mother would've fixed all three before breakfast.
You bought supplies you weren't entirely sure you knew how to use as the teenage cashier wished you a nice day. You nodded and walked out, the warm ocean air greeting you and for the first time all morning, you felt almost accomplished. You'd left the house, you'd bought groceries and nothing terrible had happened. Maybe tomorrow wouldn't feel quite so impossible.
Balancing two bags and a cardboard box against your hip, you climbed into your car, started up the engine, adjusted the mirror and took three deep breaths. Sometimes being in the car made you sick, not the kind where you'd lose your lunch, the kind where you'd lose your mind if you thought about all the possibilities for a second too long.
You let out your last breath and shifted into reverse.
Crunch.
The sound froze your blood and you slammed on the brakes. For a moment, everything went completely still.
No.
No, no, no.
Slowly, dread pooling in your stomach, you looked into the rearview mirror and saw a motorcycle crookedly the ground behind your bumper. It looked big, and big most likely meant expensive.
Your eyes squeezed shut, head hitting the headrest behind you.
"Shit." The word escaped in a whisper.
You threw the car into park and climbed out to inspect the damage. It wasn't catastrophic, the motorcycle had fallen on its side, a scrape on the fender, a fresh dent where one definitely hadn't existed five minutes ago. You'd managed to survive the worst months of your life only to immediately become the kind of person who backed into parked vehicles.
Fantastic.
You crouched beside it as if staring hard enough might somehow reverse time when a voice murmurs behind you.
"Please tell me that's not mine."
You closed your eyes and took a deep breath. Right. The owner. Straightening, you turned to the voice. The man stood several feet away carrying paint supplies beneath one arm. He was tall, bearing a faded henley rolled up on one side. Broad shoulders with dark hair that was once cropped short and now it looks like it can't tell if it wants to be longer or not.
The expression on his face suggested he'd already decided this interaction was going to be annoying, and you couldn't entirely blame him.
"You're the owner?"
He glanced between you and the motorcycle. "Depends."
You stared. He stared back.
"Depends on what?"
"Whether you're the person who hit it."
The irritation in his voice immediately sparked your own, because somehow you were already exhausted by this conversation.
"Well, I wasn't aiming for it."
His eyebrow lifted. "Oh, good."
You blinked. "What?"
"Just checking."
You exhaled sharply, the sound could've almost been a laugh, almost. Instead it emerged somewhere closer to annoyance.
"Look, I'm sorry." You offered vexed, trying to extend the first branch of peace. "I genuinely didn't see it."
"That makes me feel much better."
"Would you stop doing that?"
His brow furrowed. "Doing what?"
"Being sarcastic. I said sorry."
His gaze dropped to the motorcycle, the dent and scraped fender, then back to you.
"Somebody backed into my bike."
You scowled. "By accident."
"Still happened."
Your jaw tightened and that familiar irritation that had followed you since the funeral immediately surfaced. Too close to the skin, too easy to access. You knew he wasn't actually the problem, but grief had a way of turning every inconvenience into a personal attack.
"Fine." You grumbled as you pulled out your phone and opened up a payment app. "I'll send you my insurance and pay for whatever repairs it needs."
The man looked surprised by how quickly you offered, only briefly, then the expression vanished.
"Don't worry about it."
"What?"
"It's cosmetic."
You stared and he just shrugged.
"Not worth the paperwork."
Several seconds passed and neither of you spoke. The parking lot buzzed quietly around you. A truck pulling into a nearby space, someone loading lumber, wind carrying the distant scent of saltwater. You suddenly realized this was the longest conversation you'd had with anyone all week.
A depressing thought.
"Well then," you shoved your phone back into your pocket. "Sorry."
The man nodded once. "Try not to hit any more vehicles on your way home."
There it was again, that dry sarcasm. Couldn't go two seconds without it, it seemed.
You narrowed your eyes. "Try to park them where people can actually see them."
One corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile but it was close enough to annoy you. You turned immediately toward your car. Conversation over, interaction complete. Exactly how you preferred it. As you adjusted your supplies next to you, you could feel his eyes on you, or maybe you imagined it, either way you refused to look back. You climbed into the driver's seat, started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. Only once you'd turned onto the main road did you realize something.
You hadn't gotten his name.
Not that it mattered, you weren't staying long, you weren't here to make friends or meet people. You were here to be alone.
By the time you got home, the sun had begun its slow descent toward the horizon, golden light spilled across the water turning the ocean into something molten, something alive.
You carried your groceries inside, put away what needed refrigeration, and left the hardware supplies in a neat pile beside the kitchen table. It should have felt normal, domestic. Instead, every movement felt rehearsed, like you were following instructions someone else had written.
The cottage settled around you with familiar creaks, wood expanding and contracting with the changing temperature. The distant hum of the refrigerator. The rhythmic crash of waves beyond the shore.
Life continuing. Always continuing.
After a while, you found yourself stepping onto the porch. A mug of coffee cooling between your palms, the evening breeze carried the scent of seaweed and sunscreen from somewhere down the coastline. The town looked different at this hour. Softer, almost, the sharp edges worn smooth by the sunset. Below, the diner glowed warmly against the darkening street, its neon sign flickered to life casting pink and blue reflections across parked cars.
And there, just near the curb you spotted it immediately. The motorcycle. Sleek, black, and large, impossible to miss.
You frowned, not because you cared. Because apparently now you recognized random strangers by their vehicles, a deeply concerning development. The memory irritatingly resurfaced, the dent, the sarcasm, the aggravating twitch of amusement he'd worn the entire conversation. Your mouth pulled into something dangerously close to a smile, brief and unintentional and gone the second it formed.
Still, the interaction lingered. Not because it had been pleasant, but because it had been different. For ten minutes today you'd thought about something other than your dead mother. And somehow that felt wrong. You stared out at the water as the waves rolled endlessly toward shore, one after another, steady and predictable.
Your mother used to say the ocean was proof that life kept going. You'd hated that phrase growing up. Whenever something upset you, she'd say it. Whenever a friendship ended, a bad grade ruined your week, or your first boyfriend broke your heart.
"The tide keeps coming in, sweetheart."
As though that explained everything. As though the ocean somehow agreed with what she was talking about.
Your throat tightened and without thinking, you reached for your phone, the movement happened automatically. You unlocked the screen, opened your contacts and pressed call. The phone rose to your ear as your gaze remained fixed on the horizon. You didn't even bother to wait for the voicemail.
The words came easily. "You'll never believe what happened today, Mom. I backed into someone's motorcycle."
A wet laugh escaped, soft and shaky.
"The guy was such an asshole about it too." The ringing on the other end stretched, you kept talking anyway.
"He acted like I committed a federal crime."
A wave crashed against the shoreline, the breeze shifted and then—
"Hiya, you've reached—"
Reality caught up, brutally. The words died in your throat as you let phone fall from your ear, the screen illuminated in your hand.
Mom.
The contact photo stared back at you and your stomach dropped, feet frozen in place. Unable to move. Unable to breathe. Unable to hang up. Because somewhere deep inside, some stubborn, broken piece of you still expected her to answer.
Still expected her voice.
Still expected—
The voicemail went on, and you couldn't take it anymore, you ended the call so fast your phone nearly slipped. The porch disappeared behind a sudden blur.
No. No. No.
The phone trembled violently in your hands as a sound escaped you, small and broken. You didn't recognize it as your own. The ocean continued moving, the breeze still blowing, the world hadn't changed.
Only yours. Again.
You stumbled inside before you realized you were crying, the front door slammed shut behind you. The cottage felt too quiet, too empty, too full of things she should have been filling. Your mother's mug still sat in the cabinet, her favorite blanket remained folded over the armchair, her books lined the shelves. Evidence everywhere, proof of a life that had existed, proof of a life that no longer did.
You sank onto the couch. The same couch you'd occupied nearly every evening since arriving, phone still clutched tightly in your hand. Tears came harder this time. Not the neat, silent tears you'd cried at the funeral, not the restrained grief you'd carried for weeks. This hurt was messy and raw. The kind that left your chest aching, the kind that made breathing feel impossible. Because for one brief, careless moment you'd forgotten. You'd forgotten she was gone. You'd forgotten there wasn't anyone waiting on the other end anymore.
And somehow realizing it all over again hurt just as much as the first time.
You cried until darkness swallowed the room whole. The phone remained in your hand the entire time, her number still sitting at the top of your call history.
hey emo girl! ( 0.6k / sfw ) emo!kara zor-el x gn partner!reader.
your emo girlfriend <3 art /crowloverbrof (twt) + masterlist.
emo!kara who fell in love with the subculture during one of her stints on earth. she's in love with it, the angst, the cathartic vocals, the guitar work. she even experiments with the emo fashion style, traveling off-planet in order to dye her hair a beautiful black that matches her nails.
emo!kara who looks to amy lee for hair inspo whenever she doesn't want to simply wear it down. sure, evanescence is alternative/nu metal, whatever. kara's focused on the looks right now. she also always has one eye, typically her right, covered somewhat by layers of black strands.
emo!kara who collects her favorite emo albums on cassette tapes and plays them wherever she goes, sometimes completely oblivious to people talking to her due to the fact that she's focused on a song. it's not rare to see her bobbing her head out of nowhere, suddenly inspirited with the urge to move to the beat. she absolutely forces (begs) you to go out to thrift stores and vintage shops in hopes of expanding her cassette collection.
emo!kara who hates that she can't mosh at an emo concert on earth. there's not a lot of emos in space, if you can imagine it! it doesn't have to be the violent thrashing or kicking of a hardcore show; she'd be happy just to jump, push, and run in circles to burn out the energy that the music generates. unfortunately, with her strength, it'd require a lot of restraint to participate in a human moshpit. they're bad enough with regular people happening to push and knock you around— imagine what the damage a kryptonian would do!
emo!kara who also, to a lesser and almost secretive extent, really enjoys dad rock. like, loser divorced dad rock. every now and then, she'll stare out into the distance while settled in your home, eyes clouded over with something you can't describe (something kara hopes you never come to understand). sometimes a woman is a divorced dad, too.
emo!kara whose obsessed with the sight of her short (cut them down while off earth), chipped black nails gripping the soft skin of your thighs and pressed against the side of your neck. there's something so aesthetic about it. sometimes while cuddling, she'll start to grip you just to see it. this is especially true if your aesthetic is different from hers.
emo!kara who does your eyeliner if you wear it, steals your silver rings if you have them, and definitely "borrows" any of your black or grey shirts. she means to give the shirts back, promise! it's not her fault it caught fire or got torn during her adventures. don't worry, she's always more than willing to make it up to you with a shopping trip.
emo!kara who bites her lip when nervous. ever since first noticing it, you've been drawn to her lips, oftentimes picking up on when they're chapped, bitten raw, kiss-bruised, cut, etc before she even notices. one day, while glancing at her lips, you notice something silver inside as she opens her mouth. your eyebrow raises until she chuckles and shows off her first ever piercing, a beautiful silver piece glinting under the light as it rests against the midline of her tongue. "don't tell clark," she says immediately after, grinning mischievously, "i wanna see how long it takes for him to notice, too."
emo!kara who's always so amused by people's reactions to being saved by someone like her. "heroism isn't about looks," she says, then cringes because she sounds just like clark. gross! "anyways, you're welcome."
emo!kara who, if she had the time, would learn bass guitar. i can just see her sitting you on one knee while her bass rests in the other, the neck inches out from your abdomen as she plays a few loose chords. "stop distracting me," she mutters at one point, even though you aren't really doing anything. you just look so good, sat like that! kara knows you're not doing it on purpose... but it's easier to blame you for distracting her than to admit she's that whipped for you.
meet amelia's newest obsession: emo!kara. emo kara next to her country ahh cousin clark at the family reunion (it's just them). her having huge ass spa/self-care days off earth so that she can change her appearance LOL i know she's sick of it. also modified my writing layout yet again. also hoping to post pt2 of dirtydoctor.com soon!!!
tagging! @nozhdyved, @voidsuites, @jadoremars, @sheriff-bodecker, @chronic-fangirl-222, @neve-naoki, @ft-winnow, @jiji2827, @futuremrscameron, @f4lin3, @hisfavoriteweepingangel, @fangpires, & @petrolprettyplease ✩ click here to be added!
I have written for Bucky Barnes, Agatha Harkness, Carol Danvers, Natasha Romanoff, and Sam Wilson.
I have WIPs for Yelena Belova, too.
My stories may have adult themes. You are responsible for your own media consumption.
Multi-Character Pairings
One Shots
Birds of a Feather (Bucky Barnes x fem!reader x Sam Wilson x Joaquin Torres)
You and Bucky were already in a committed relationship when you both fall in love with Sam. What happens when Joaquin comes into the picture and starts questioning his sexuality?
Bucky Barnes
One Shots
Beautiful Mess
Bucky tries to cook you a food you’ve been craving. It goes wrong, but it also goes right.
Almost Kisses
Bucky's kisses have become a daily part of your life together, but it wasn’t always that way.
All These Things That I've Done
In which Bucky leaves behind a loving note every time he goes on a mission. But what happens when you stumble on a letter not meant to be found… yet?
In Another Life
Bucky is certain you only see him as a friend. It only took him travelling to a different reality to realise otherwise.
Comfortable and Easy
You are the only person Bucky could ever spend a domestic evening with.
Bloodstains and Daydreams
You and Bucky fantasize about starting a family while tending to each other’s wounds.
Under my Skin
Bucky is always ready to give his girl cuddles.
Hot Chocolate?
Bucky wakes up from a nightmare and can’t find you.
Do Humans Dream of Normal Sheep?
Generations ago, your family was cursed to never sleep. Now that the curse is broken, Bucky helps you rest by telling you a bedtime story.
Of Black Ink and White Lillies
Bucky wants to get a tattoo, so he asks you for advice.
Morning Coffee
A short fic in which he makes you coffee every morning, without fail.
The Great Wave
Bucky would do anything to make his girl happy. He would even risk his life to get you the perfect gift.
Altar Ghosts
While on a mission with Bucky Barnes, you’re forced to confront your ex-fiancé, who left you at the altar. Bucky helps you realize you deserve far better than the man who broke your heart.
Happily Ever Eventually
Sam and Yelena are helping you and Bucky plan your wedding.
Love in Full Bloom
Bucky thinks everything he touches dies, but the plants in your apartment prove otherwise.
Dangerous Game
Bucky Barnes is dating a trigger-happy antihero, and she has him wrapped around her finger. She’s just Bucky’s pretty girl, and he lets her get away with everything.
Temple
Bucky Barnes is struggling to say ‘I love you,’ so he says other things to make sure you know he cares.
Breaking Point
You and Bucky had always hated each other. When Bucky gets injured during a mission, you start wondering if the hatred was just masking something else.
Strays
Bucky has a soft spot for strays.
Soft Lights
A short fic in which you and Bucky get high together.
Kickoff
A short fic in which Bucky tries supporting your favourite football team.
Hypothetically: Version 1 / Version 2
The Thunderbolts* crew gossip about Bucky's love life / Your ragtag group of supernatural superheroes gossip about your love life. (A one-shot told in two perspectives!)
Sleeper
When Bucky falls in love with the antihero he’s sleeping with, he offers her a place in the Thunderbolts*.
Match
You finally found your intellectual match in Bucky Barnes.
Full Throttle
Bucky thinks he hooked up with a really pretty mechanic.
The Catalyst
In this universe, you and Bucky are happy. In other universes, it might not be that simple.
Portals
You teach Bucky how to open portals using a sling ring. Turns out, he’s a menace with that thing.
Getaway
No one knows Bucky is dating an F1 driver until you show up in a getaway car for mission extraction.
Papercuts
You, a mutant loyal to Magneto, gets transported to a world where mutants don’t exist. As you fall in love with Bucky Barnes, you start questioning Magneto’s views and start embracing the ideas of your old teacher, Charles Xavier.
The Art of Thieving
Bucky starts investigating a series of art thefts… and starts helping the thief.
Back on Track
After a brutal crash during a race, Bucky won’t leave your bedside.
Word of the Day
A short fic in which you teach him modern slang words.
Depths
Bucky is an open book and you don’t trust anyone enough to reveal your past. What happens when Bucky insists you don’t have to go through it alone?
Armed and Dangerous
A short fic in which he gets an upgraded arm and it gives you (dirty) thoughts.
Alpine and the Alien
Your and Bucky’s cat, Alpine, fucks around and finds out.
Snow
You love the snow. Bucky can’t stand it, but he can’t bring himself to tell you, either.
The Land Shark
A short fic in which Bucky gets attached to Jeff the Land Shark.
Loose Ends
Your husband, Bucky Barnes, finally meets your multiversal best friend, Wade Wilson.
Swipe Right
You matched with Bucky Barnes, your teammate, on a dating app.
Golden
Bucky watches the Golden Globes with you, only to be adorably jealous when your celebrity crush, Sebastian Stan, wins an award.
Irresistible
Falling in love with Bucky Barnes is a little complicated when you also happen to be Yelena’s ex-girlfriend.
Devil's Backbone
When you fall in love with Bucky Barnes, you start hunting down anyone who has ever wronged him. What happens when he finds out?
Dinner and Diatribes
Bucky has a crush on you… and your knives. Who knew weapons turned him on?
Autobot Dad
Bucky’s daughter loves the Transformers cartoons. She asks Bucky if he’s an autobot.
Bloody Mary
When you inherit a criminal empire from your father, Bucky Barnes decides to investigate you. He hadn’t expected you to be so… charming.
Perception
Congressional Candidate Bucky Barnes starts sleeping with his campaign manager. What happens when he wants more than just sex?
Princess
You fall for Bucky Barnes, the Avenger assigned as your bodyguard. When a photo of the two of you kissing leaks to the tabloids, your clients start questioning your company’s integrity.
All American All-Star
Falling for the club’s American striker, Bucky Barnes, was never part of the plan— especially since your father happens to own the club. (Football/soccer au)
Better Man
Trapped in an abusive relationship, you cross paths with Bucky Barnes. Maybe, you deserve a second chance at love.
The Congressman's Secretary
Bucky forgets his birthday. You, his secretary, remember.
Menace
A short fic in which he showers with one arm (and with you).
Smitten
Sam finally meets Bucky’s girlfriend, though you’re not who he thinks you are.
Midnight Zoomies
Your super soldier husband always gets a burst of energy after a mission.
Cheer Up, Barnes
When you go undercover as a Professional Cheerleader, Bucky’s thoughts become filthy.
The Lady, or The Tiger?
Bucky is in love with you, but he doesn't even know what you really look like. What happens when he finds out?
Sanctuary
Bucky needs to vent, and you’re there to listen. One day, you both try a powerful sex magic ritual that blurs the line between healing and love.
Siren
Bucky is obsessed with you. He is insanely, hopelessly, unhealthily obsessed with you.
Praise
Bucky realises he has a praise kink after getting a tattoo.
Jackass
Everyone is horrified that Bucky is flirting with a married woman, but then they realise there's a reason why.
Simplify
Bucky falls in love with his best friend's ex-girlfriend.
Spare Parts
Your boyfriend gets used to life with one arm.
Hypersonic Missiles
Congressman Barnes falls in love with a fiercely progressive senator. What happens when he starts regretting going into politics at all?
Have We Met Before?
America Chavez says that you and Bucky are together in every universe.
Don't Touch the Tech Girl
Sam told Bucky that you, his new tech engineer, was off-limits. But that just makes Bucky want you more.
Frostbites
Bucky found you injured in the middle of a snowstorm.
Hold On
Bucky has trouble holding hands until he meets you.
Small Circles
Bucky Barnes is still getting used to modern dating… and hates that you have to work with your exes.
The Beholder
Bucky Barnes struggles with intimacy. Perhaps, he just needed to see himself through your eyes.
Kindred Spirits
Bucky starts courting you, a woman out of time.
Today, of All Days
You were self-destructing. Then, you found Bucky.
Structural Integrity
Congressman Barnes has to move into your office because there’s a leak in his.
Only Fools Rush In
Bucky accidentally ruins a big surprise, and you take it into your own hands.
Series / Multi-parts
Of Heroes and Heartstings Masterlist (Completed)
Bucky Barnes develops a crush on the researcher who interviewed him.
Waste a Moment Masterlist (Completed)
Bucky had always kept his distance, but seeing you get hurt on a mission changed everything. For the first time, he has a chance to start over with you.
Dark Necessities Masterlist (Ongoing and Paused)
You drink Bucky’s blood out of necessity and accidentally form a primal bond that has the ability to unlock an ancient ritual magic.
My Own Soul's Warning + Supporting Stories Masterlist (Ongoing)
This is a series of one-shots that revolve around you, a cosmic entity who falls in love with Bucky Barnes and sacrifices everything.
In Her Corner (completed)
Bucky had already found the love of his life in the 1940s— a boxer, just like him. But as a woman in a male-dominated sport, your success looks different from his. In the present day, Sam offers to help Bucky track your family down… never imagining you might still be alive.
Super Soldier Support Group (completed)
Sam Wilson starts a Support Group for Super Soldiers. You and Bucky sit next to each other during the sessions.
Spoils of War (ongoing)
Your father, the God of War, trained you to be his executioner— his weapon. When he assigns you a mission on Earth, you encounter Bucky, who helps you see yourself as more than a weapon. He offers you refuge and helps you go into hiding. Knowing that his favourite child has gone rogue, your father sends your half-brothers, Phobos and Deimos to bring you home.
Agatha Harkness
One Shots
To be Loved
A short fic in which Agatha makes sure you can never die.
Perfection
You and Agatha are on a perfect picnic date when its started raining. Why not dance in the rain?
Safe and Sound
You have been cursed. Agatha will stop at nothing to destroy the witch that cursed you.
Winter of 1984
Agatha always makes sure you fall asleep safe and warm in her arms, even as the coldest winter in generations raged on outside.
Natasha Romanoff
One Shots
Muse
You are an artist, and your greatest muse is an assassin.
Pirouette
Steve and Sam set Natasha up with a professional ballerina, but they already know each other.
Sam Wilson
One Shots
The Future's Overdue
A year after breaking up with Sam Wilson, he shows up at your doorstep.
Use Somebody
It’s Valentine’s Day and neither you nor your best friend Sam has plans, so he invites you over for movie night.
Carol Danvers
One Shots
Peace and Quiet
A short fic in which Carol always seems to run off to save a distant galaxy before breakfast.
Johnny Storm
One Shots
Desk Light
Johnny Storm has a very obvious crush on a very oblivious diplomat.
Various blurbs and ideas!
Bucky, Steve, and Sam as dads
Bucky has a light up arm
Sub!Bucky headcanons
Happy and Bucky spend Christmas together
You're dating Bucky and also Olivia Walker's Best Friend
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
andulkaphoto
areudirty
vaporwave
ellievsbear
