Knight of Briars (#1)
Pairing: Knight! Bucky Barnes x Female Reader
Tags: Time travel. Medieval AU. 50's AU. Slight Angst. Fluff. Smut.
Warnings: Mild Violence. Maybe I'll add more in the future.
Summary: A knight from another century crashes -literally- into a florist’s life and turns her world upside down.
Word Count: 4.2k
note: This is a silly time-travel story written purely for entertainment and to get out of my author's block. I won't be diving into complex timeline theories here. Let's not overthink the logistics and just enjoy the ride(?)
The tournament grounds were quieter now.
The crowd that had packed the stands since dawn -merchants, nobility, smallfolk who'd bartered half a week's wages for a decent vantage point- had dissolved into the taverns and banquet halls of the city, chasing warm ale and the joy of retelling someone else's violence over a good meal.
The field itself was a ruin of churned mud and discarded favor ribbons, the occasional lost boot. Someone's gauntlet, bended and forgotten near a fence post. The detritus of spectacle.
Sir James Buchanan Barnes walked through it like a man who wanted very much to be somewhere else.
He was limping. A gift from the third bout, when Sir Aldric Thornwall had gotten a lucky angle with his shield and introduced it firmly to Bucky's ribs.
The impact had knocked the air from his lungs with an audible crack that he'd felt more than heard. He'd finished the match anyway. He'd finished all of them. He'd placed second, which in any reasonable accounting of the day should have felt like something.
It didn't feel like much of anything.
Just the persistent throb beneath his ribs with every breath. Just the weight of mail he hadn't bothered to shed yet, still bearing the afternoon's sweat and dust.
The banquet, he thought, scowling.
Lord Castellan Morrow had made it clear, through three separate messengers, that his presence was expected at the celebration feast. That the competitors were guests of honor. That it would reflect poorly on a man of his standing to absent himself.
Bucky's standing, such as it was, had survived worse reflections.
So he just kept walking.
The city proper closed around him as he left the tournament grounds. Cobblestones replacing mud, the noise changing from open-air echo to the compressed warmth of torchlit streets.
Wintermouth at night had a specific smell: woodsmoke and river damp. He knew these streets well enough to navigate them half-asleep, which was approximately his current condition.
A pair of knights from the eastern circuit fell into step beside him for a while, their breath wine-sweet and celebratory, clapping him on the shoulder with the camaraderie of men who hadn't taken a shield to the ribs. He felt the impact reverberate down through the bruise, sharp enough that his vision whited at the edges.
"Hell of a final bout, Barnes."
"Could've taken him," the other offered generously. "Aldric fights dirty."
"Aldric fights to win," he said, which was the only response that was both true and didn't require him to have feelings about it. His voice came out rough, abraded by thirst and the dust he'd swallowed every time he'd hit the ground.
They took the hint, or something close enough to it, and peeled off toward the sound of music spilling from an open tavern door, lute strings and off-key singing and the particular roar of men determined to enjoy themselves.
The next interruption came two streets later, in the form of two scarcely clothed women leaning against the warm stone of a bakehouse wall, still radiating the day's stored heat.
Their exposed skin gleamed amber in the torchlight, deliberate and inviting. They tracked him with the experience of people who had learned to read a man's evening prospects at a glance.
"Sir Knight," one called, with a smile that had worked on better men than him. Her voice was honey-slow, practiced. "Shame to spend a victory night alone."
"First runner-up," he said, without stopping. The mail clinked with each step, a sound he'd long stopped hearing.
"Close enough."
It wasn't, but he didn't have the energy to explain the difference. He kept walking.
The maester caught him at the corner of Chandler's Row. Plump, earnest, clutching a satchel of medicines with both hands as it might escape. His robes were too clean, his face unlined. Fresh from the Citadel, probably. Still believed healing mattered more than politics.
"Sir Barnes." He was slightly out of breath, which suggested he'd been following for a while, trying to work up the nerve to address him. "Lord Castellan Morrow sends his regards and requests that you allow me to examine your injuries before the feast-"
"I'm not going to the feast."
A pause. The maester's throat worked. "He anticipated you might say that. He asked me to convey that your attendance is-"
"How's your handwriting?" Bucky interrupted.
The man blinked. "My- adequate, ser. Why?"
"Good." Bucky stopped walking, turned just enough to face him properly. Watched the maester straighten reflexively under the attention. "Here's what happened: you found me three streets back, examined me thoroughly despite my objections, and determined I've got at least two cracked ribs and a possible concussion. You ordered me to bed with strict instructions not to drink, feast, or make any sudden movements for the next three days."
He held the maester's wide-eyed stare. "Your professional opinion is that my attendance at tonight's festivities would be, and I'm quoting you here, 'medically inadvisable and potentially dangerous to Sir Barnes's recovery.'"
The maester's mouth opened. Closed. His gaze flickered down to Bucky's left side, where he'd been favoring it, where the mail sat wrong.
"You..." The man's voice was uncertain. "You do likely have cracked ribs, ser."
"There you go. Not even a lie." Bucky's smile was brief and sharp. "You write that up for your Lord, attach your seal to it, and you've done your duty. He gets his excuse in writing, you get to have actually helped someone today, and I get to go home. Everyone wins."
He could see the man working through it, the truth of the injury versus the falseness of the examination, the political cover versus the medical accuracy.
"I... suppose that would be acceptable," the maester said slowly. Then, with a hint of spine Bucky hadn't expected: "But you should let me examine you properly. Cracked ribs can shift, puncture-"
"I've had worse."
"That's not the reassurance you think it is, ser."
Despite everything -the ache and the exhaustion- Bucky felt something in his chest. Not quite a laugh, but close enough.
"Tomorrow," he offered, and meant it more than he'd meant most things today. "You can poke at me all you want tomorrow."
The maester nodded, satisfied or at least willing to accept the compromise. "I'll have the letter sent within the hour."
"Appreciated."
----
His lodgings were modest by deliberate choice. A single room above a cooper's workshop on the quieter end of the merchant quarter, rented by the week during tournament season. No servants' quarters. No one to report his comings and goings to anyone who might have opinions about them.
This had its advantages.
He catalogued the disadvantages the moment he stepped inside and faced the cold hearth, his breath still misting in the chill air.
Right.
He set the heavy tournament satchel down with a dull thump, rolled his left shoulder experimentally -the socket grinding in a way that spoke of old breaks poorly healed- and decided that feeling was overrated.
The fire wasn't going to light itself. The armor wasn't going to unlace itself. The evening was shaping up to be a prolonged exercise in doing everything the hard way, which was, at this point, so consistent as to be almost comforting.
Almost.
He got the fire started on the third attempt. The tinder was damp, -because of course it was- and then stood in its growing warmth and began the specific misery of removing plate armor without assistance.
The tabard first, then the gorget, useful as it was, he hated the damn thing; removing it felt like relief. Then the pauldrons, working the straps with fingers that were more cooperative on the right side than the left.
The scarring along his left forearm pulled when he reached a certain angle, the old tissue going taut. It always did. He'd stopped noticing it the way you stopped noticing a crack in a familiar wall; it was simply part of the room now.
The breastplate hit the floor with a sound like an argument ending, the impact reverberating through the floorboards.
There.
What remained was a man in a sweat-dampened gambeson with a bruised ribcage, a mild headache, and absolutely no interest in examining either. The padded underarmor clung to him, cold now that the mail was gone, the fabric stiff with salt and exertion.
He took off the gambeson and dragged the wooden chest from his satchel, the one the tournament steward had pressed into his hands with excessive ceremony, and set it beside the fire. The brass fittings caught the light, over-polished. Performative.
The lock was simple. Inside: coin, as expected. A satisfying weight of silver stacked in neat columns, some gold beneath. He'd need it. The estate his father had left him was four walls and a burned-out shell, courtesy of the same people who took him hostage and left their mark on his arm.
Rebuilding wasn't cheap. Timber, thatch, labor, it all required the kind of funds you didn't earn through valor or skill, just the slow accumulation of tournament prizes and some service contracts.
Glory didn't buy roofing.
He picked up a brooch set with garnets -gaudy, impractical, the kind of thing you pinned to a cloak if you wanted to be robbed- and looked at it for a moment. The stones were decent quality, at least. It would fetch a reasonable price from the right jeweler.
He set it aside with the others. A necklace of amber. A pair of silver clasps. All destined for the same fate: the jeweler's scale, melted down or pried out and reset for someone who actually wanted them.
He had no use for adornments. He wasn’t fond of them, as most of the nobility, and also, he had no one to give them to.
The war had seen to that.
He reached back into the chest, fingers brushing past velvet pouches, and found something else.
A ring. Silver, heavier than it looked. He drew it out into the firelight and turned it between his fingers. The stone was a ruby, deep red, cut into the shape of a star.
He stared at it.
Red stars on grey and black.
His colors.
He turned it slowly, watching firelight slide across the facets. The star was crude, the points uneven, the kind of work you got from a jeweler with more ambition than skill. It was, objectively, the ugliest ring he had ever seen. Garish. The sort of thing a merchant's son wore to his first banquet, desperate to prove he belonged.
Bucky, who wore his father's signet ring only on scarce occasions because selling it felt wrong, even if the man was never a paragon of paternal love, felt the particular pull of a terrible idea.
Just to see if it fits.
It was small for his right hand, so he tried the left, mostly out of stubbornness… and it slid on. The fit was perfect. Uncannily so, as though it had been sized for exactly this finger, accounting for the slight deviation where the bone had set wrong.
The ruby flared.
Not like firelight reflecting, but light from within, red and sharp and pointed, like something had woken up inside the stone and found him looking.
The ring burned. Seared against his skin, hot enough that he felt it in his teeth, a bright line of pain circling his finger.
What-
He grabbed for it with his right hand, trying to twist it off, but his fingers passed through something that wasn't air and wasn't quite resistance.
The room tilted.
No. The room disappeared.
The fire went first, snuffed like a candle, leaving no smoke, no ember-glow. Then the chest, the coins. The ceiling with its water-stained beams. The floor beneath his feet.
All of it went, between one breath and the next, and what replaced it was falling.
His stomach lurched, and the burning in his finger became the only solid thing in a world that had stopped being solid.
He tried to breathe and couldn't find air.
The darkness swallowed him whole and the last thing he registered, distant, wrong, was the smell of plants and humidity.
Then nothing.
----
She stood on the sidewalk in front of The Sweet Briar with her hand buried to the wrist in her purse, fingers closing around lipstick, a crumpled handkerchief, what felt like a receipt that she really ought to throw away, and absolutely nothing key-shaped.
The morning was grey and cool for early spring, the kind of damp that sank into your coat and stayed there. The street was quiet, too early yet for the lunch crowd, the shops on either side still dark. A truck rumbled past, leaving the smell of diesel and wet pavement in its wake.
Just when she thought she might have actually forgotten the keys -left them on the kitchen counter next to the bread box, maybe, or in yesterday's coat pocket- her fingers finally closed around the key ring at the very bottom of the purse, underneath everything else, because of course they were.
The lock stuck.
She jiggled it once, patiently, the same way she had jiggled this exact lock approximately four hundred times and had not yet called the locksmith, because she only ever remembered the lock was broken when she was standing directly in front of it, key in hand, and by the time she got inside she'd forgotten again.
The metal resisted, then gave with a sound like a small complaint. She pushed inside.
The front of the shop was an obstacle course.
Mr. Thomson from the supply house had delivered very late yesterday afternoon, because apparently a union picket line two blocks east had backed up half the city's delivery routes. By closing time, she didn’t have the energy to do anything about the results: buckets of early flowers stacked three deep against the counter, their blooms still tight-furled and smelling faintly of earth.
Two flats of fern she hadn't priced yet, the fronds already drooping from a day out of soil. A box of wire and ribbon spools that had no business being in the middle of the floor but was there anyway, and somewhere underneath all of it, allegedly, the new ceramic pots she'd ordered in February and assumed were lost.
She picked her way through it with careful steps, her heels clicking against the wood floor, and made it to the back without incident.
The stockroom was small and currently in a state that she chose to call organized chaos and not a problem she had to solve today.
More deliveries back here too: boxes stacked along the left wall, the worktable barely visible under brown paper wrapping and tissue. The air smelled like potting soil and the green, living scent of the spider plants hanging near the window, their runners brushing the top of a stack of terra cotta. She reached up and pulled the cord on the single overhead bulb.
The light swung once, twice, and settled.
She saw the legs first.
Long legs, stretched across the floor between a toppled flat of begonias and the base of the shelving unit, attached to a man who was very much present and very much not conscious, sprawled at an angle that suggested he had not chosen to be on the floor so much as arrived there.
Her breath stopped.
For one crystalline second, her brain refused to process what she was seeing -legs, boots, a body where no body should be- and then her heart kicked hard against her chest.
There was a man. In her stockroom. On the floor.
He'd taken out a good portion of the new stock on his way down. The begonias were scattered, soil spilled across the floorboards in dark trails. A ceramic pot in sage green -the one she'd specifically ordered and waited two months for- was in three neat pieces beside his left arm. The pothos she'd been propagating had been knocked from its perch; the vines lay crushed beneath his shoulder.
She stood very still for a moment, one hand still on the light cord, the other pressed flat against her chest where her heart was trying to break through.
He wasn't moving.
His chest was -she watched for a second, barely breathing herself- yes, his chest was moving. Shallow, but steady.
So. Not dead.
She still hadn't decided if that was good or bad.
Her gaze darted to the back door: still closed, the bolt still thrown from the inside. The window was latched. No broken glass. No signs of forced entry.
So how-?
Her hand moved without conscious thought, reaching back toward the worktable, fingers closing around the wooden handle of a trowel. Not much of a weapon, but the edge was solid steel, the point designed for breaking hard soil. It would do.
She took a step closer, the trowel held low at her side, ready to strike.
His clothing was strange. The shirt was wrong, off-white and loose, the kind of fabric that looked hand-woven, rough in a way she couldn’t describe. The collar was laced instead of buttoned, the ties loose and askew.
The trousers were the same, tucked into boots that had absolutely no business existing in 1955: tall, dark leather, worn in the way that took years and hard use, not a factory.
Over all of it, a belt of heavy leather, studded and wide. And attached to it, running down each thigh -she tilted her head slightly- what appeared to be straps, buckled and reinforced, holding padded cushioned sheaths flat against his legs.
Like something out of a medieval fair, except those fairs didn't come through this city, and even if they did, the participants didn't break into a flower shop in full costume and collapse on the begonias.
She took another step closer, careful to avoid the broken ceramic.
His face was-
Well.
A face that had seen better days was her first thought, and her second was that even roughed up as he was, it was a remarkable face to have stumbled into her stockroom.
Strong jaw, straight nose, the kind of bone structure you saw in magazine advertisements for razors or cologne, the ones that made you look twice even when you weren't in the market.
A bruise was already darkening along his left cheekbone, deep purple spreading toward his temple. There was a cut above his brow that had bled and dried, the blood a rust-brown line trailing toward his hairline.
The beard was a few days past deliberate.
And the hair -she paused on that- dark brown, long enough to brush his shoulders, pushed back from his face and thoroughly disordered, tangled with mud and sweat.
It was long for a man. Longer than any man she'd seen outside of a history book or painting.
She straightened up slowly, the trowel still in her hand.
Alright, she thought, forcing her breathing to steady. Think.
Option one: he was a vagrant who'd somehow gotten through a locked door -the damn lock, God help her- and passed out on her stock.
Possible. Unlikely, given the boots alone probably cost more than her monthly rent, but possible.
Option two: he was a veteran. There were men, she knew -the whole city knew, even if nobody said it plainly- who hadn't come back from the war quite right in the head.
Shell-shock, they'd called it in the first war. Combat fatigue now, as if giving it a softer name made it easier to carry.
Except that didn't explain the kind of clothes.
Option three: he'd gotten blind drunk somewhere in the vicinity, wandered in through a door she knew she'd locked, and the outfit was theatrical. A costume. There was a theatre district six blocks south. Strange things happened near the theatre districts. Actors were weird.
Except that the door had been locked. And bolted.
She looked down at him again.
At the slow rise and fall of his chest. At the ring on his left hand, silver with a red stone that caught the light strangely, still faintly warm-looking even in the dim stockroom.
At the begonias, crushed beyond saving.
The telephone was on the opposite wall. She edged past him, keeping the trowel between them out of some vague instinct that felt less vague with every step. Her heel caught on a scatter of soil, and she steadied herself against the doorframe, not taking her eyes off him.
He still wasn't moving.
She picked up the receiver with her free hand, the trowel still raised in the other, and dialed zero, the rotary clicking back into place.
The line hummed and returned a busy signal.
Dammit.
She clicked the hook and tried again, her gaze locked on the sprawled figure.
Busy. Again. It was a challenge to get to an operator these last few weeks. It was the third time this month she needed to make a call, and the lines were occupied.
She leaned her hip against the wall and tried a fourth time, watching him over her shoulder out of an abundance of caution that was starting to feel less abundant and more barely sufficient.
Okay. If she could just get through to the operator, get a squad car over here -or an ambulance, depending on what exactly was wrong with him- she could have this sorted before her first customer arrived at nine. It was a reasonable plan. It was perfectly reasonable-
The fifth attempt produced a busy signal and also, from somewhere behind her, a sound. The distinct scrape of ceramic against concrete, and then a longer drag, like weight shifting.
Her breath caught.
She turned around slowly, the receiver still pressed to her ear, the busy signal droning against her brain.
He was sitting up, propped on one hand with the other braced against the shelving unit, head bowed forward like it weighed too much to lift. The dark hair fell across his face in tangled strands. His shoulders rose and fell with breaths that looked like they hurt.
She didn't move. Her fingers tightened around the trowel handle until the wood bit into her palm.
For a moment he just sat there, motionless except for the breathing. Then his head lifted slowly, and he blinked at the stockroom with the heavy, confused expression of a man whose surroundings were not what he'd been expecting.
His gaze tracked left: shelves, boxes, the window with its spider plants. Right: more shelves, the worktable, the spilled soil.
Then his eyes found her.
A nice pair of steel blue eyes.
That was the completely irrelevant thing her brain produced, and she hated that it did, because those steel blue eyes were currently fixed on her with a frown that was more baffled than threatening, but he was large.
She could see that now, even sitting down he had the kind of shoulders that spoke of labor or violence or both- and he was between her and the back door, and she did not know him, and she was alone, and-
Her mind didn't finish the thought. She crossed the distance between them in three steps, raised the spade, and swung.
She didn't account for his reflexes.
One moment she was bringing the flat of the blade down toward his head, and the next, her wrist was caught mid-arc in a grip like iron, the world tilted sideways, and she was on her back on the stockroom floor with approximately two hundred twenty pounds of confused stranger pinning her there.
The impact knocked the air from her lungs. Her shoulders hit concrete, her head just barely missing the leg of the worktable. The trowel clattered away, skittering across the floor into the scattered soil.
He'd moved fast. Too fast for someone who'd been unconscious thirty seconds ago. Too fast for someone who'd struggled to sit up.
His hand was still locked around her wrist, holding it flat against the floor above her head. His other forearm was braced beside her shoulder. His knee was between hers, his weight distributed in a way that kept her pinned without crushing her, like this was something he'd done before. Many times before, in fact.
When she pulled at her wrist -once, testing, her breath coming in sharp gasps- he simply held it, not tightening, not letting go, like the question of her leaving hadn't seriously occurred to him as a variable.
Her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat, behind her eyes. She could smell him: leather and sweat and something else, something like smoke and metal and old wool.
She could count his eyelashes.
The blue eyes she'd noticed before were a lot more striking at this distance, and a lot less groggy. Whatever fog had been in them when he'd first sat up had burned off fast into something sharp and assessing.
He was looking at her the way she imagined soldiers looked at enemies in the dark. His chest rose and fell against hers with each breath. She could feel the heat of him through her blouse, through his strange linen shirt.
Get off get off get off-
She opened her mouth to scream, to say something, to demand he let her go-
And then he lowered his face toward hers by one deliberate inch, eyes narrowing and demanded, low and very even:
"State your intentions, witch."
Next Chapter
dividers by: @/honeyluvsw
A knight/50s au where the reader is a florist!? I’m sat.
