that's not love.

18 only

[mandoloriancookie]

I need yelena x female reader

I love her.

Please send recommendations.

[metal-armed-muse]

SECOND CHANCES

congressman barnes x female med resident! reader

summary. one stolen night with congressman barnes leaves you with more than memories: a positive test and a man who's determined to prove he's worth a second chance.

word count. 19.5k warnings. age gap, accidental pregnancy, smut, MDNI, 18+, angst, bucky is an asshole for a second, pregnancy hormones, protected and unprotected pnv, pregnancy sex, oral (f receiving), no use of y/n. notes. reader is said to have a blocked lactation duct and one of the treatment options is manual suction. it’s a little embellished for plot.

READ ON AO3 (soon)

This is not your scene. The chandelier must have cost a fortune just to hang there and look pretty. You know this because you spent the better part of your first ten minutes staring up at it with your mouth slightly open, trying to calculate how many months of your salary it would take to even come close. You stopped at four years because it was getting depressing. Sarah had promised you open bar and good food. She had failed to mention that you’d feel like a fraud the entire time. “You look fine,” Sarah had said this evening, watching you smooth down the front of your dress in the mirror of her condo. You had gone back and forth for longer than you’d like to admit. The dress is nice. It’s the kind of nice where you’d wear it to a birthday dinner, maybe a date somewhere with cloth napkins. It is not, by any stretch, gala nice. The other women in this room are in floor-length gowns with jewellery that probably has names, and here you are in a midi dress off a sale rack. “You’re a guest of a congressman’s daughter,” She’d reminded you, fixing her own earring. “Nobody’s gonna care.” Nobody might care, but you sure do notice. There’s an ease to the way these people move around each other. There’s air kissing, the laughing at things that aren’t funny, the way they hold their champagne glasses by the stem like it’s second nature. You hold yours like you’re scared of dropping it, which you are, because you’re fairly certain the glasses alone are worth more than your monthly metro card. Still. Free champagne. That part, at least, Sarah had been right about. You’ve had two glasses and are working steadily on your third, which is making the whole scene considerably more bearable. The food is also ungodly good. You had swiped four of the little crab toast thingies off a passing tray and felt zero shame about it. You were coming off a forty-eight hour shift two days ago. You deserved the crab toasts. Sarah, for her part, has completely abandoned you. Her father is a congressman from Virginia and this is his world, so she knows everyone in a twenty foot radius of wherever she stands. It hadn’t taken long before she was absorbed into a circle of people you didn’t know.

She’d shot you an apologetic look over someone’s shoulder, and you’d waved her off.

You’re fine. You’re a grown adult. You can stand by the tall cocktail table near the windows and people-watch by yourself like a normal person.

The problem with people-watching, as it turns out, is that occasionally the people watch back.

He’s been drifting in your periphery for a few minutes now. You clocked him when he walked in, because he’s the kind of man you can’t not clock when he walks into a room.

Easy forties, maybe pushing further than that, with dark hair and the kind of jaw that belongs on something carved out of stone. He’s in a suit that fits him the way suits are supposed to fit, which is to say, perfectly. There’s a slight silver threading through the dark at his temples. His left arm is gloved, metal just barely visible at the cuff. You know who he is, vaguely. Congressman James Barnes. Before that, the Winter Soldier. You’ve seen him on the news twice and found him credible both times, which is not something you say lightly. Not that this is relevant. You’re just noting that he’s across the room. That’s it. Just noting.

What is relevant, however, is the man currently sidling up next to you, because the man currently sidling up next to you has had considerably more of the open bar than you have, and he smells like it. “Lovely evening,” he says, in the way that people say things when they are not actually talking about the evening. You give him the polite smile. The one that says I see you, and I’m too tired to be rude. “It is.” “You here with anyone?” “My friend,” you answer, with a pointed glance across the room in Sarah’s general direction. “She’s just over there.” He follows your gaze, disinterested, and then looks back at you. He introduces himself as something, and you honestly don’t catch it because your brain has already filed him under do not engage. He’s maybe mid-fifties, the kind of man who introduces himself at parties by his job title, and his eyes haven’t quite been at eye level this whole conversation. “What do you do?” “I’m in medicine,” you say, keeping it deliberately vague. In your experience, the vague answer is the one that ends conversations faster. It does not, in this case, end the conversation. In fact, it seems to invite more of it. His hand lands on the cocktail table next to yours, he leans in like you’d asked him to, and the smell gets considerably worse. “Beautiful and smart,” he says. “That’s dangerous.” Gag.

“Mm,” you say, which is not agreement, but which he takes as agreement. His shoulder shifts incrementally closer to yours, and your brain is already doing the math. How do you extract yourself from this without making a scene, because making a scene at a congressman’s fundraiser gala, at which you are a guest of a congressman’s daughter, feels inadvisable at best and catastrophic at worst. You can’t exactly do what you’d do at a regular bar, which would be to simply say not interested and walk away, because this is not a regular bar and these are not regular people and you’re suddenly very aware that the champagne glass you’re holding probably costs two hundred dollars. The man leans in further. “Can I get you a drink?” “I have one,” you say, lifting your glass, which is clearly almost empty, which he also clearly notices. “Let me get you another, then.” And that is when, for the second time tonight, you make eye contact with Congressman Barnes. He’s a little closer now, not by much though. He’s watching the scene with an expression that you can’t quite place. It’s not pity, exactly. Not amusement either. It’s more like someone who has correctly identified a problem and is turning over how to address it. You do the only thing that seems sane to you in this moment. You hold his gaze, and your expression says, if you speak even one word of fluent English right now I will owe you forever. He receives it. You can tell by the slight shift in his posture, the barely perceptible nod. Then he’s making his way over, like he’s just wandering and it happens to be in your direction. “Sorry,” he says, stopping at your side. Not to the drunk man. To you. Like he’s the one who’s late. “Got caught up.”

His voice is … nice. A lot different from TV. The drunk man recalibrates visibly. He looks at Congressman Barnes, recognises him the same way you did. There’s that small double-take of oh, him, and suddenly the lean is gone, the arm is pulled back, the proximity becomes appropriate. “Congressman,” the man says, in a completely different register than the one he’d been using on you. “Didn’t realize you two—” “Good to see you.” Congressman Barnes’ voice is perfectly pleasant, perfectly even. He extends his hand and the drunk man shakes it, quietly excuses himself to the bar, which is where he should have stayed to begin with. “Thank you,” you say, once he’s out of earshot. “I really didn’t want to make a thing of it.” “I could tell.” His eyes are blue. A shade darker than you’d expected, up close. “He giving you trouble for long?” “Long enough.” You take a sip of your champagne to have something to do with your hands. “I’m not really sure of the etiquette for telling a middle-aged man to leave you alone at a formal event.” “Usually just telling him works.” The corner of his mouth pulls up, barely. “But I get it.” He reaches past you for the appetizer that a passing server is offering, takes one of the small bruschetta thingies, and doesn’t immediately move away.

You notice that. He doesn’t immediately move away. “You’re Sarah’s friend,” he says. It’s not really a question. “Jackson’s daughter.” “Yeah.” You blink. “How’d you—” “He mentioned his daughter was bringing someone tonight.” A small lift of a shoulder. “I know Richard well. He’s a good man.” “He is,” you agree, which is true, having met Sarah’s father a grand total of three times. “She didn’t warn me that good meant—” you gesture vaguely at the chandelier, the room, the twelve-piece orchestra, “—all this.” His face looks like he found that funny, but he also looks like he doesn’t want to give you the satisfaction. “First time at one of these?” “That obvious?” “Little bit. He doesn’t say it unkindly. “You’ve been staring at the chandelier for the most part.” Your face does something embarrassing. “I was doing math.” “Math.” “About how long it would take me to afford it. On my salary.” You stop yourself, because that is possibly the most un-gala thing you could have said, and he is a congressman, and you are already wearing the wrong dress. “Which — never mind. I’m a resident. I don’t have the money for light fixtures.” He does laugh at that, quietly, more of an exhale than a real laugh, but it counts. “What kind of medicine?”

“Emergency.” You set your now-empty glass down on the nearest surface. “I’m in my third year.” “Long hours.” “Long doesn’t really cover it.” You glance sideways at him. Up, technically, because he has several inches on you and you’re in heels. “But I’m not going to complain at a gala. It seems rude.” “You can complain… I don’t care.” Something about the way he says it is disarming, and you weren’t expecting that. You’d expected… you’re not entirely sure what you’d expected. Polished, maybe. The kind of conversation that sounds like a conversation but is really just two people exchanging pleasantries until someone finds a more useful person to talk to. That’s what galas are, as far as you can tell. This doesn’t feel like that. “How long have you been doing this? The congressman thing.” “Six momths.” He picks up a glass from a passing tray. Water, not champagne. You notice that too. “Why?” “I saw a clip of you once. About pharmaceutical pricing.” You pause, aware that this is maybe strange to bring up. “You didn’t let him deflect.” He looks at you for a moment, and you can’t quite tell what he’s thinking. His face is not an easy read. “Most people don’t bring that up.”

“Most people here probably benefit from him deflecting.” Another one of those almost-laughs. You’re starting to like those unreasonably. “Fair.” He turns slightly toward you, weight shifting, and it’s the kind of body language that says I’m not going anywhere yet, which you are reading, as positive. Possibly incorrectly. “What made you go into emergency medicine?” “I like knowing the answer fast.” It is the honest version. “Other specialties… you wait for labs, wait for imaging, wait for rounds. Emergency, you have to think right now, decide right now. I like that. Also I’m bad at small talk, so at least in the ER nobody expects it from me.” “You’re not bad at it.” “I’ve been talking about chandeliers and my salary.” “I liked it,” he says, like that settles it, and the frankness of it catches you off guard enough that you don’t have an immediate response, which almost never happens to you. You tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. The orchestra has transitioned to something slightly livelier and a few couples have migrated toward the cleared floor at the center of the room. “Can I ask you something?”

How old are you?” The words come out before you can dress them up more politely, you wince slightly at the delivery. You’re three champagnes deep and apparently that’s what three champagnes does.

He doesn’t look thrown by it. If anything, he looks like he’s deciding how to answer, which is its own answer. “Forty-four or biologically a hundred and eight.”

You do the math without meaning to. The math is not small. “Right.”

“How old are you? Just so we’re both working with the same information.”

“Twenty-eight.”

He doesn’t look away from you. “So… age change anything for you?” His voice is quiet enough that it doesn’t carry anywhere.

Oh. We are going there straight. Okay. The warmth that works its way up your neck is something, that even the air conditioning can’t seem to help with. You look down at your empty glass and think about how Sarah is absolutely going to scream when you tell her about this tomorrow. “That’s—” you start. And then Sarah materializes at your elbow like she has a sixth sense for inconvenient timing, slightly flushed and smelling like champagne and grabbing your arm with both hands. “There you are! My dad wants to say hi, he knows you’re here—” She clocks Congressman Barnes. Her eyes go very wide and then very carefully neutral, which is the least neutral expression you’ve ever seen on a human face. “Congressman Barnes, hi, I’m so sorry to interrupt—” “You’re not,” he says easily, and he means it, you can tell, which is somehow worse than if he were being polite. He looks at you. “It was good talking to you.” “Yeah.” Your voice comes out smaller than you want it to. “It was.” He holds eye contact for exactly one beat longer. And then he nods, and turns, and Sarah is already dragging you in the opposite direction with her grip iron-tight on your wrist. “Oh my god,” she hisses, the second there’s enough ambient noise to cover it. “Oh my God—” “It was just talking.” “It was not just talking—” “Sarah—”

“He’s so hot,” she says, almost mournful. “He’s so hot and he was talking to only you for like twenty minutes and I need you to know that Bucky Barnes does not do that—” “Bucky,” you say, and your stomach does a small stupid thing. “His name is Bucky?” She stares at you. “Please tell me you got his number.”

You didn’t. You are, the longer you stand here being dragged toward Sarah’s father, increasingly annoyed about that.

You find him again by accident. That’s the part you’ll tell Sarah later. That it was an accident and she will not believe you, and she will be partially right not to.

Because when you excused yourself from the conversation with Sarah’s father after approximately nine minutes, you were not not looking for Congressman Barnes. You were getting another drink. Those are two different things that happened to involve the same direction.

The bar is less crowded, so there’s an actual open stretch of marble counter to stand at. You order a club soda because your limit is three champagnes and you reached it. You’re stirring it with the little cocktail straw and staring at the ice like it did something to you when someone stops next to you. Not just anyone. You know before you look, from the proximity, from the particular way the air in the vicinity shifts. “Club soda,” Bucky says, nodding at your glass. “Smart.” “I’m a doctor… In theory.” “In theory?” “I mean residency.” You glance up at him. He’s looking straight ahead at the bar, not at you, and yet every part of you is acutely aware of him. “I know my limits.” “Three glasses?” He sounds like he already knows. “How’d you— Were you watching me?” He doesn’t answer immediately. He signals the bartender for something and then he turns his head to look at you. The look on his face is the least congressman-like look you’ve seen from him all evening. It’s quieter than that. More direct. “Yeah… I was.”

The bartender sets his glass down. You notice that it’s water again.

But Bucky doesn’t reach for it yet. He’s still looking at you. You have been through four years of medical school and almost three years of residency, which means you have stood in front of attendings who looked at you like you were a problem they needed to solve, and you did not flinch. You are flinching a little now. Just a little. “You didn’t come find me,” you try to keep your voice even. “You were with Richard.” “For like eight minutes.” Something moves across his face. Not quite a smile but in the neighborhood. “Were you counting?” “I’m not answering that.” He reaches for his water, finally, and takes a drink. You watch his jaw because you’re only human. There’s a scar that runs just beneath his jaw. You have the reflexive urge to ask how he got it, which is the emergency medicine in you, and also probably something else. “I thought about asking for your number,” he says, and he says it the same way he says everything, like he just decided to set the thing down in front of you and see what you do with it. “What stopped you?” He considers you for a moment. “Didn’t want to do it in front of Sarah. Felt like a thing that shouldn’t have an audience.” “That’s—” you press your lips together. “That’s actually reasonable.” “I have my moments.” The orchestra finishes something and starts something else, slower, and the lights in the ballroom dim imperceptibly.

You should go back. Sarah is probably wondering where you are. You have a club soda to finish and heels that are beginning to make their unhappiness known and a 6 AM shift on Wednesday that is always at the back of your mind. His hand finds the bar just next to yours. The same way the drunk man’s hand had, earlier. Except nothing about it feels the same. Not even close. “I have a suite upstairs… I stay here when I’m in the city for these.” A pause. “I’m not— that’s not—” “I know what you’re saying.” He looks at you. “Yeah?” “Yeah.” His pinky finger moves. Just barely. Just enough to press against the side of your hand, the lightest possible contact, and you feel it everywhere. “Tell me if I’m reading this wrong.”

You look down at where his hand is next to yours. You look back up at him. And then you do the most impulsive thing you have done since you signed a lease on an apartment you couldn’t afford because it had good light. “You’re not reading it wrong.” He walks slightly behind you toward the elevator, which is not nothing. It is discrete, and you appreciate that without saying so. His hand presses briefly to the small of your back as you reach the elevator, guiding you left. Even through the fabric of your dress, the warmth of his palm is enough to make your brain go briefly offline. The elevator ride is quiet. It’s the kind of quiet that’s loud. He’s not looking at you. He’s looking at the floor numbers. You’re doing the same. The back of his hand grazes yours and neither of you moves away, and by the sixth floor you have resigned yourself to the fact that you are going to be completely useless. The suite is significant. Of course. You take approximately two seconds to register that the entryway alone is bigger than your apartment’s living room before you stop looking at the suite. He closes the door. Turns around. And the way he looks at you when it’s just the two of you, without a ballroom background, is different. There’s nothing measured about his eyes right now. “Hi,” you say stupidly, because your brain has officially handed in its notice. “Hi.” And then he’s crossing the room and his hands are on your face and he’s kissing you. It is hungry in a way that makes your knees register a complaint.

Both of your hands come up to grip the lapels of his jacket just to have somewhere to put them. He pulls back just enough to breathe. His thumbs are at your jaw. “Okay?” he asks.

“Very,” you manage. He kisses you again, slower this time but no less certain, and his hands slide from your jaw to your waist. He walks you backward until your shoulders meet the wall. You make a soft sound against his mouth that you are immediately embarrassed by. “Don’t,” he says against your lips. “Don’t what?” “Do that thing where you get embarrassed.” He pulls back to look at you, properly. “Don’t.” You open your mouth and close it. He’s still in the full suit — jacket, tie, the whole shebang — and you are suddenly very, very aware of that.

His hands find the zipper at the back of your dress. Watching your face the whole time like he’s making absolutely sure. The zipper gives and you feel the fabric loosen across your back, cool air reaching your skin. “Arms up,” he says. You raise your arms and he lifts the dress over your head, and sets it on the chair behind him like it matters, like he’s thinking about the fact that it’s the only dress you brought. Something about that short, practical gesture does more to you than it should. And then he takes you in. It’s for a long moment. His eyes move over you and there’s not a single thing performative about how he looks at you. It’s not the look of someone who is trying to make you feel good, it’s the look of someone who genuinely cannot help himself. You are standing in front of a congressman in a four-hundred-dollar-a-night suite in a bralette from Target and underwear that does not match it, and you are acutely aware of this fact. “These don’t match.” Your face goes hot. “I wasn’t exactly planning this.” “No?” “I was planning on eating canapes and going home by ten.” Your voice comes out more defensive than you intend. “So no, I didn’t— I didn’t put on a matching set, I just—” “Hey.” He says it gently, and his hand comes up to tip your chin. “I’m not complaining.” “You literally just pointed it out—” “Because it’s cute.” His thumb traces your jaw. “Because you’re standing there looking like you can’t decide whether to be embarrassed or annoyed, and it’s—” something moves through his expression, “—it’s really cute is all. And I’m flattered” You stare at him. “You’re a congressman.” “I’m aware.” “You give floor speeches.” “Also aware.” “You can’t just… say things are cute.” “Sure I can.” He’s guiding you back toward the bed, and the backs of your knees hit the mattress and you sit down. He doesn’t follow you down. He just stands there, looks at you, still fully dressed, tie still knotted, and goes to his knees. Oh.

Oh. His hands slide up your calves, and he watches you watch him. You’re gripping the duvet with both hands because he hasn’t even done anything yet and you already feel like the floor dropped out. “You don’t have to—” you start. He looks up at you, and his eyes are very, very dark. “I want to.” His fingers find the waistband of your underwear and pulls them down your legs with an efficiency that should not be as attractive as it is. Then his hands are on your inner thighs, pushing them apart. He looks at you one more time like he’s checking in, which he clearly is.

“Good?” “Please,” you say, which answers nothing and everything. He lowers his head. The first press of his mouth to your cunt makes you bite down on your lip hard enough that you taste something. He takes his time with it. There’s nothing hurried here, nothing obligatory, he moves against you like he has absolutely nowhere else to be and no interest in being there anyway. His tongue finds the bundle of nerves at your center and stays there, slow and devastating, and you have to press the back of your hand to your mouth to keep the sound in. “Don’t,” he says, again, pulling back just enough. His breath is warm against you and it’s its own kind of torture. “I want to hear you.” “There are other rooms on this floor—” “Thick walls,” he says, and then he’s back at it. You stop thinking about the other rooms. He’s good at this in the way that makes you forget your own name temporarily. His hands are on your hips, keeping you from squirming away when it gets to be too much, which it does, quickly, because he has apparently decided to be completely merciless about this.

You have your fingers in his hair now. His perfectly styled hair, which you’re currently ruining, but do not care. And you are saying his name at a volume that would embarrass you under any other circumstances. “James—” you breathe, and then, when he does that specific thing with his tongue, laving at your entrance, “—God, Bucky, please—” He makes a sound against you that you feel everywhere. His fingers find the slick of you, and he looks up at you from where he is, which should be illegal, the visual of this is going to live in your brain for years. “This okay?” he murmurs.

“Yes, please, yes—”

He sinks two fingers into you slowly, and your head drops back. He works them against your walls while his mouth moves on your clit and you grip his hair tighter and he doesn’t tell you to let go.

The tension builds fast. Faster than you’d like, because you’d like this to never stop. When it breaks it breaks completely, your whole body pulls tight and then releases, the sound you make is completely beyond your control. He works you through it. Every last second of it. His fingers slow but don’t stop, his mouth gentles but stays, until you’re twitching away from the sensitivity and pressing weakly at his shoulder, and only then does he pull back. He stands, and he looks… composed, almost, except for the flush at the collar of his very nice shirt, the slick in his beard and the way his hair is thoroughly destroyed.

He’s still in the full suit. The tie is still knotted. You are lying on his hotel bed having just come completely apart and he looks like he’s about to chair a subcommittee meeting. “That’s unfair,” you say to the ceiling.

“What is?”

“You.” You lift your head to look at him. “The suit. All of that.” Chuckling, he reaches up and loosens the tie, pulls it over his head, starts on the buttons of his shirt. You push yourself up to sitting, because if he’s going to do that, you are watching.

He shrugs out of the shirt and underneath is a white undershirt, and underneath the undershirt — well. You were not unprepared for the shoulders. You were unprepared for everything else. “Hi,” you say again. He should be tired of hearing it. He isn’t. He almost smiles. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket, and comes up with his wallet, and from his wallet— “You just… carry that?” you ask. “I was hoping,” he says.

Something about the admission makes your chest do a complicated thing. You reach for him as he comes down onto the bed, pulling him in. He braces his forearm by your head and kisses you and you can taste yourself on his mouth, which makes the complicated thing in your chest considerably worse.

“Tell me if anything’s—”

“I will… I trust you.”

He pulls back to look at you at that. Just for a second. Something moves through his eyes that you don’t quite have a word for.

“Okay.”

He takes his time. He works you back up with his hands first, until you’re arching into him and your nails are at his back and the patience of it is making you slightly insane, and when he finally rolls the condom on and shifts over you and pushes in—

The noise you make is entirely involuntary. Because he’s big. No, that would be an understatement.

“Still with me?” Right by your ear.

“More than with you,” you get out, and he exhales a short laugh into your neck and then starts to move, and you stop being capable of full sentences.

He’s thorough about it in a way that makes your brain melt clean out of your head. He learned what makes you gasp and then does that thing again. His hand slides under your ass and tilts your hips and hits something that makes you dig your nails in hard enough that he hisses.

“Right there,” you say, uselessly, since he clearly already knows.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t stop—”

He doesn’t stop. He does exactly that, again, and you’re gripping his shoulders with both hands and talking without fully knowing what you’re saying.

He’s got his face pressed to your temple and his breathing is not steady anymore, which is information you file away with tremendous satisfaction.

“You feel—” he starts, and stops, like he doesn’t finish that sentence with people often.

“Tell me.”

He pulls back to look at your face. His hips don’t slow. “Perfect,” he says, like it’s a simple fact.

Your whole body clenches around him at that and he groans. His rhythm shifts. Deeper, more insistent, and you have completely stopped worrying about the other rooms on this floor.

His thumb finds your clit and you cry out. He watches your face while he does it, and there is something about being looked at like that, while he’s inside you, while he’s taking you completely apart for the second time—

You come with your face buried in his neck and his name on your lips and his hand pressed flat to your lower back like he’s trying to keep you together while he undoes you.

He follows not long after with a groan against your temple, his whole body tensing.

Then he’s still, and the room is just the sound of both of you breathing.

He doesn’t move immediately. He stays where he is, most of his weight on his forearm, his other hand moving to push your hair away from your face. It’s a gentle thing, automatic, like he did it without thinking. Like it was just the natural next thing to do.

You stare up at the very expensive ceiling of the very expensive suite.

“I came here for canapes,” you say.

He laughs. A real one this tim. Not the almost-laugh from downstairs, an actual laugh, and it does something devastating to his face. “How’d that work out?”

“Better than expected.”

He presses his lips to your temple, and it’s soft. It lingers for a second, and when he pulls back he’s looking at you with that look again. The one you don’t have a word for yet.

He gets up to deal with the condom, comes back with a glass of water that he sets on the nightstand next to you, and gets back into bed like he does this, like this is just a thing he does, take someone apart completely and then bring them water after.

He’s pulled on his undershirt and his briefs and he looks unfairly good in both, and you’re in nothing, and neither of you seems to have a problem with this.

“Bucky.”

“Mm.”

“What actually made you come over? Downstairs. Earlier.” You turn your head to look at him. “Before that drunken guy. You were watching me before that.”

He’s quiet for a moment. He’s on his back, looking at the ceiling, and his jaw shifts slightly the way it does when he’s thinking.

“You were looking at the chandelier,” he says. “Everyone in that room was pretending they belonged there. You were just standing there, looking up, in the wrong dress. I liked that.”

You look at him for a long moment. “I got it on a sale,” you say.

“I like that too.”

You press your face into the pillow so he can’t see you smiling, and he doesn’t say anything about it, which is possibly the most considerate thing anyone has ever done for you.

Light is the first thing you register. It’s not the thin, grey light that seeps through your blackout curtain at home. This is different, the kind that comes from curtains that cost more than they should and don’t quite meet in the middle.

For a moment you don’t know where you are, which is a feeling you’re familiar with from overnight call, that brief horrible second of complete disorientation before your brain catches up.

Then it catches up.

The sheets are softer than yours. The room is too quiet. And the other side of the bed, when you reach for it without opening your eyes—

Empty.

You open your eyes anyway. On the off chance. The suite looks the same as it had last night except for the light, and the way the silence in it has a different quality now. A full kind of silence. The kind where someone has recently left.

His jacket is gone from the chair. Your dress is still on it, folded carefully over the back. So carefully, actually, that it takes you a second to really process the image. He’d folded your dress before he left. Which means he’d been here, moving around the room, and you’d slept through it.

The glass of water he’d set on the nightstand is still there, half full or half empty or whatever. You stare at it for longer than you need to.

You didn’t expect anything. That’s not entirely true; you’re a grown adult and you know the difference between what you expected and what you’d maybe hoped, and those two things are not the same thing, and it’s fine, it was one night, it was always going to be one night, you knew that going in.

Still. You look around the room. Almost wanting to find something. A note on hotel stationery, his business card under the water glass, anything.

Some small proof that it happened to him too, that you didn’t imagine the careful way he pushed your hair back.

Nothing.

You check the bathroom. The bathroom is pristine and smells faintly like whatever he’d used from the amenity shelf, and there is no note on the mirror, no nothing.

Of course there isn’t. He’s a congressman. He has a schedule. He was probably on a 7 AM call somewhere, probably has a driver waiting downstairs, probably has twelve things on his agenda and last night was just one of them. Item six, maybe, between a donor dinner and a briefing.

You sit back on the bed. You pick up the glass of water and drink the rest of it.

Fine.

You find your underwear, the mismatched ones, and even now that makes your cheeks do something. And then your dress, and your heels, and you check your phone.

Three texts from Sarah that escalate in punctuation, one from your roommate asking if you’re alive. Nothing from a number you don’t recognize.

Obviously.

The elevator ride down is considerably less charged than the one going up. The lobby is already busy, morning check-outs and businessmen with rolling luggage, and you walk through it in last night’s dress and last night’s heels with your chin up, because you are an emergency medicine resident and you have walked into much worse rooms than this.

The glass of water, though. He’d gotten up and gotten you a glass of water and now he was just… gone. Without a word.

That part stings a little. You’d be lying if you said otherwise.

Seventeen days later, you are standing in your kitchen at six in the morning counting backwards on your fingers, and the number you keep landing on is not the number you want.

Your period is late. Not a little late. Late enough that you’ve noticed, which takes something, because your cycle has always run regular, every twenty-eight days, reliable enough that you’ve never had to think about it.

You think about it now. You’ve been thinking about it for four days with increasing focus, telling yourself it was stress, it was the hours, it was the back-to-back overnight shifts that had wrecked your sleep, because that’s what happens to residents, your hormones get strange when your cortisol stays high, it happens.

Except.

Except that two weeks before your missed period, which would put it at about a week after the gala, you’d had spotting. You had noted it the way you noted things and filed it under irregular and moved on, because you’d had a fourteen-hour shift and the last thing you wanted to do was think about your own body on top of everything else. You’d thought mid-cycle spotting, stress, nothing.

And the fatigue. God, the fatigue had been something else, but again you’re a third year resident. Fatigue is the baseline. Fatigue is just Tuesday.

Except implantation spotting typically occurs six to twelve days after fertilization. Except you are standing in your kitchen doing obstetric math at six in the morning, and the number you keep landing on is seventeen days post-ovulation, which is—

That’s too late for it to be stress.

You know this. You know this the way you know things you don’t want to know yet, the way you knew a patient’s CT wasn’t going to be clean before the radiologist called. You just know.

You get to the hospital forty minutes early, which is easy enough to explain away to anyone who asks. You’re always early, everyone knows you’re always early.

You take a detour to the ground floor pharmacy. You stand in the family planning aisle for probably thirty seconds longer than a person who is confident about what they’re grabbing would stand there.

You take one off the shelf and tuck it under your arm, and take the stairs up to the third floor resident bathroom, which has a lock that works and more importantly, privacy.

The instructions are not complicated. You’re a doctor. You know what two lines mean.

You sit on the edge of the closed toilet lid you look at the water stain on the ceiling tile for the full three minutes.

There’s a crack in it that branches from the fixture in a way that looks like the course of the facial nerve in the middle ear. You have stared at this ceiling before during bad shifts, during the kind of nights where someone didn’t make it and you had to go somewhere quiet for six minutes, and it has never felt quite like this.

You turn the test over.

Two lines.

Both of them dark. Two unambiguous, immediate, definitive lines.

You sit with that for a long moment. The tile. The test.

You’re pregnant.

You are twenty-eight years old and you are a resident and you had a one-night stand with a congressman whose number you do not have and you are pregnant.

You turn the test face-down again. Pick it up. Put it in a cover at the bottom of your bag under your stethoscope, which feels insane but you’re not leaving it in the trash where someone could see it.

You look at yourself in the mirror. Your face looks the same as it always does. That’s somehow the strangest part.

You unlock the bathroom door. You have a shift to get to.

But one thing you’re sure about is that, you want this baby. Be it a maternal impulse, or whatever it is you don’t have a name for it yet. You want this baby. You need this baby.

Two days of carrying it around inside you like a stone in your chest, and by the third morning you’ve made the decision, or the decision makes you.

Either way, you’re sitting on your bathroom floor at midnight with your back against the tub and the thing is settled.

He needs to know. Whatever happens after that is not something you can fully think about yet, but the part where he doesn’t know is no longer something you can live inside of.

The problem is getting to him.

You try the obvious thing first. His official website has a contact form. For constituents, it says, and you are technically not his constituent, but you fill it out anyway and it autoresponds within thirty seconds with something about being committed to responding within five to seven business days, and you close the laptop.

Five to seven business days.

His office number is listed publicly and you call it the next day on your lunch break. It rings three times before someone picks up.

“Congressman Barnes’ office, how can I help you?”

“Hi.” You try to keep your voice level. “I’m — I’m trying to reach Congressman Barnes. It’s a personal matter.”

There’s a small pause on the other end. “The Congressman has a full schedule. Can I take your name and a callback number? Please describe the nature of your inquiry.”

Right. The nature of your inquiry. “It’s — it’s a private matter. I’d really need to speak with him directly.”

“Ma’am, any personal correspondence for the Congressman goes through his office. If you can describe—”

“I know him personally.” You are aware of how this sounds. You are aware that people who call congressional offices claiming to know the congressman personally are, in fact, not people who know the congressman personally. “I’m not a — I’m not a constituent with a complaint. I’m a personal acquaintance and it’s urgent.”

“I understand,” the woman says, in the tone of someone who does not entirely believe you. “I can pass your information along and someone will follow up.”

Someone. Not him.

“Okay.” You give her your name and your number. You know with complete certainty that you will not hear back.

You dissociate for a minute after you hang up, and then you text Sarah.

You : Hey. Random question. Completely unrelated to anything. How hard would it be for you to get Barnes’ personal number from your dad

Three minutes of silence, which for Sarah is practically geological time.

Sarah: why

You: Sarah please.

Sarah: whyyyy

You: I'll explain later. Is it possible?

Sarah: my dad would notice if i asked. but his phone’s usually just sitting on the counter when he’s in the shower soooo. give me 12 hours and a good reason

You: I promise I'll explain everything.

Sarah: oh this is GOOD. this is so good. okayy

You put your phone in your coat pocket and go back inside.

Sarah texts at eleven seventeen the following night, which means Richard Jackson apparently showers late, and the text is just a phone number and then:

Sarah: okay i need the full story. not a summary. the FULL story. what did you DO??????

You look at the number for a long time.

You: Thank you. I’ll explain everything soon I promise.

Sarah: are you okay??

You think about the test at the bottom of your bag. The ceiling tile with the crack in it. The empty side of the bed with the sheets still warm from him.

You: Yeah. I'm okay. Thank you Sarah.

You add the number to your phone. You just stare at the digits, and your chest is doing the complicated thing again, and you have no idea what you’re going to say when he picks up.

If he picks up.

The first time, it rings five times and goes to voicemail.

His voicemail. His actual voice, which you were not prepared for. You hang up before the beep because you don’t know what you’d say and you can’t practice it out loud yet. The words exist inside your head in a specific order that you’ve rearranged a hundred times since eleven seventeen last night, and none of the arrangements feel right.

You set your phone face-down on your kitchen table. You make coffee you don’t drink. You sit there for twenty minutes and then you pick your phone back up.

It rings three times. You are working out, specifically, how to begin. Not hi, too casual. Not hello, Congressman, too formal and possibly insane. Maybe just his name, just Bucky, like you have any right to—

“Hello.”

Just that. One word. And your heart does something it has absolutely no business doing.

“Hi. This is— It’s — we met at the fundraiser, I mean the gala. About three weeks ago. Sarah Jackson’s friend.” A pause, because you can’t tell if any of this is registering. “The one in the wrong dress.”

“I know who you are.”

Something in his voice. Something that is not nothing. You press your free hand flat to the kitchen table just to have something solid.

“Okay. Good. Hi.”

“Hi.” And there it is, threaded through the single syllable — a smile. The same almost-smile from downstairs at the bar. “It’s good to hear from you.”

You close your eyes for a second. You had not let yourself think about whether it would be good or awkward or somewhere cold in between, because thinking about it felt like jinxing it.

“I need to—” The arrangements in your head are all wrong again. “Is there any chance we could meet? In person. I have something I need to tell you, and I’d rather not do it over the phone.”

“Is everything alright?”

“Yeah.” The word comes out before you can think about whether it’s true. “I just — it’s better in person. I think.”

“I can do tomorrow. I am free tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow works.” Your voice is admirably steady, and you are giving yourself full credit for that. “Wherever’s easiest for you.”

“There’s a place on 54th. Briar something — Briar & Co. You know it?”

“I’ll find it.”

“Two o’clock?”

“Two o’clock,” you confirm. And then neither of you say anything for a second, and you don’t know who should end this.

“It’s good to hear from you,” he says again. Quieter this time, like maybe he’s saying it more to himself than to you.

You don’t know what to say to that. “Right. See you tomorrow.”

You hang up.

You sit back down at your kitchen table, look at your untouched coffee going cold. You breathe in and out very carefully for a minute, and you do not let yourself think about what it meant that he said it twice.

You’re not going to do that. You’re going to be a reasonable adult who goes to work and eats lunch and sleeps normal amounts, and tomorrow you are going to sit across from Bucky Barnes in a coffee shop and say the thing that needs to be said.

That is the plan.

You’re three minutes late. When you push through the glass door and scan the room you find him immediately, because he’s not a man that takes effort to find.

He’s already there. Of course he’s already there, he’s probably never been late to a thing in his life.

He looks like something out of a campaign ad, which is annoying, because you are in your off-duty jeans and the overcoat you’ve had since forever.

He’s at a corner table, which is a thing you file away and he’s got a coffee in front of him already.

He looks up before you reach him. Like he sensed it.

You pull out the chair across from him, sit down and unwrap your scarf. The whole time he’s watching you with an expression you cannot read, which is the same as before, which should not feel as familiar as it does.

“Finally,” he says.

You blink. “Am I late? I thought I was only — what time is it?”

“You’re not late.” The corner of his mouth pulls into a smile. “I’ve just been— Never mind.”

He said finally like he was waiting for you. But he wasn’t waiting long. Does that mean he meant that you finally called? But how would you call if he didn’t leave a number?

No. Nope. You’re not going there.

You look down at the menu you don’t need and tell yourself firmly that it doesn’t mean anything, that he is a politician and politicians are good at making people feel like the only person in the room, it is literally a professional skill.

You’ve rehearsed this. You’ve rehearsed it on the subway here, in the shower last night. You had a version that started with some context, that built up gradually, that eased both of you into it. That version is somewhere on the sidewalk because you don’t have access to it right now.

“I have to tell you something.”

He sets his cup down. “Okay.”

“It’s—” You press your hands flat to your thighs under the table. “It’s not a small thing.”

“Okay.” The steadiness of it is almost its own problem.

Just say it. Say the thing. Spit it out.

You have said hard things before. You have sat across from people and told them their person wasn’t coming home, you have held those conversations together with nothing but your hands and your voice, you can say six words to one man in a coffee shop on 54th Street.

“I’m pregnant.” The words land flat on the table between you. “It’s yours. It’s from — from the gala. That night.”

Silence. Absolute deafening silence.

Not the kind that means he’s gathering himself to respond, or the kind that means he missed it. You can tell from his face that he didn’t miss it. It’s a longer silence. The kind you have to sit with no idea what’s on the other side.

You watch his face. You had run through versions of this moment in your head. There’s shock, the obvious thing, or anger, or some careful measured political blankness.

But it isn’t quite any of those. His jaw is tight and his eyes are on you and he is… not here, quite. He’s somewhere slightly behind his eyes, somewhere you don’t have access to.

“Bucky,” you say, because the silence is going somewhere you don’t like.

He comes back. Just slightly. His hand around his coffee cup tightens and releases.

“Are you sure it’s mine?”

You hear the words. You take a second to make sure you heard them correctly.

“I wore a condom,” he says, and his voice has changed. It’s careful, like he’s walking on ice. “I just — I want to be sure that we’re—”

“Yes.” The word comes out sharp, which you didn’t mean, or maybe you did. “Yes, it’s yours. I’m sure.” You make yourself hold his gaze. “I haven’t slept with anyone else.”

Something shifts in his expression. You can’t tell if it’s belief or the beginning of it or something else entirely.

“We can do a paternity test,” you say, and your voice is admirably level and you hate that you have to say this, you hate that you’re sitting here offering this like it’s a reasonable next step. “If you want confirmation. That’s — that’s available to you. I understand.”

Then you both speak at the same time.

“I didn’t come here asking for anything,” you say.

“What do you want?” he asks.

If only you’d spoken a moment sooner.

Four words. They’re not unkind, exactly. But they land cold, because of what they assume, maybe, or because of what they don’t. What do you want.

As if the only reason you’d be here is because you want something from him specifically, as if this is a transaction he’s being presented with rather than a fact of his life, as if you’d spent three weeks carrying this alone and called his number and rearranged the words a hundred different ways just to want something.

You feel it move through your chest before you can stop it.

“Nothing… I don’t want anything.”

You can clearly see his face change. “That’s not what I—”

“I have to go.” You reach for your scarf. Your hands are steady and you’re glad for it. “I shouldn’t have — I thought you should know. That was the only reason. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

“That’s not—hey—” He’s half out of his seat. “That’s not what I meant—”

“It’s fine.” You stand. You loop your scarf once around your neck and your body is doing the automatic things while your brain is somewhere else entirely, somewhere a little removed and glassy. “I’ll be in touch about next steps. Whatever you want to do. If you want the test, just—” You stop yourself before you finish the sentence because your voice is doing something you don’t want it to do. “I’ll be in touch.”

And then you’re walking. Through the small tables, out through the glass door that lets in a rush of cold air that you are grateful for because it hits your face and gives you something to feel that isn’t this.

The sidewalk is busy, you merge into it and walk because walking is something you can do. You’re not going anywhere in particular. You’re just walking.

“Hey.” His voice is behind you. Close. “Just — stop.”

You don’t stop immediately. You take two more steps, which is honest.

“Please.” His hand closes around your arm, just above your elbow. There’s barely any pressure in his grip, but you stop because ‘please’ is not a word he uses easily, you’ve already gathered that, and the way he said it is not a politician’s please.

He’s standing there without his coat. He left it inside, apparently, didn’t stop to grab it. He looks like a person, suddenly. Not a congressman anymore.

“That came out wrong.”

“It’s fine.” It’s something you have said twice now, which is increasingly not true.

“It’s not.” He runs a hand through his hair. The same dark hair you’d pulled at in a hotel suite three weeks ago, but you cannot think about that right now. “I panicked. I said something stupid and it came out wrong and I— I’m sorry.”

“You asked me what I want,” you keep your voice low. “Like I was — like this was something I came to negotiate.”

“I —”

“I’ve been sitting with this for two weeks by myself.” You hadn’t meant to say that part, hadn’t meant to let him know, but there it is. “Two weeks of figuring out how to even find your number, two weeks of—” You stop. You are not going to do this on 54th Street, you are absolutely not. “I’m not asking you for anything. I just thought you deserved to know.”

He’s looking at you with an expression that you can’t name and have never seen on him before. Something stripped of the careful management, the controlled stillness.

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

The wind picks up and he doesn’t even flinch at it, no coat, and you look at him and you are… tired. You are so, so tired, and you don’t have the energy to hold onto any of this out here on the street.

“I have to get back. I have a shift.”

“Can we— Can we try this again? Somewhere. When you’re ready.” He holds your gaze. “I’d like to do that right. If you’ll let me.”

You look at him for a long moment. The sweater. The cold. The line of his jaw that you’d had your hand against on a different night in a different context. The fact that the two things are the same person is almost too much to hold at once.

“I’ll think about it.”

It is not a yes. It is not quite a no. He seems to understand this, because he doesn’t push.

You turn and don’t look back. You get half a block when your phone buzzes in your pocket.

Bucky: I’m sorry. I mean it.

The phone is an inconvenience right now. It’s him.

You stare at it for two full rings.

Then you pick up, because you are apparently a person who does that.

“Hey.” The same voice that said I’m sorry on a windy sidewalk six hours ago, except now it’s evening and you’ve been on your feet since noon and you have considerably less patience available than you did then.

“I’m in the middle of a shift,” you say, instead of hello.

“I know, I just— Have you eaten?”

You open your mouth. Close it. Look up at the ceiling for a moment, which is a habit you’re developing, apparently. Ceilings when you need a second to not say the first thing that comes to mind. “Bucky.”

“It’s a simple question.”

“It is not a simple question, it is a—” You lower your voice because a nurse just walked past and you do not need this. “Can you just not, please? I’m working.”

“Have you eaten?” he repeats, like he didn’t hear the second half of what you said, or heard it and decided it wasn’t load-bearing.

“I had lunch.”

“It’s 8 PM, I’m not asking about lunch—”

“I’m a resident. Having lunch is a privilege.” You hear an ambulance. “Gotta go.”

“I’ll —”

You don’t let him finish.

At eleven thirty, one of the nurses at the front desk — Maya — stops you in the hallway with an expression that is doing something specific.

“There’s a guy at the front desk.”

“…Okay.”

“He brought food.” She pauses. “A lot of food.”

You look at her. She looks back at you with the energy of someone who has decided this is the best thing that has happened on this shift and possibly this month. “He’s very—” She searches for the word.

“Maya.”

“He’s asking for you specifically.”

You close your eyes for exactly one second. Then you go to the front desk.

There’s a paper bag on the desk in front of Bucky and he’s talking to the security guard with the easy manner of a man who talks to people for a living.

When he sees you coming, his expression shifts into something that is not quite relief but is in the direction of it.

“You didn’t have to do this,” you say, before he can say anything.

“I—”

You don’t let him finish. “I’m working.”

“I’m not staying.” He nods at the bag. “It’s just food. You said you hadn’t eaten.”

You look at the bag. You look at him. Maya, behind you, is doing an absolutely terrible job of pretending to type something. “You didn’t have to drive here.” You keep your voice quiet enough that it stays between the two of you. “I’m fine. I can take care of myself.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then why are you here?”

His jaw does the tight-release thing. “Because after you left I felt like an ass… and I need you to know that I’m sorry. Not over a text. In person.” He pushes the bag slightly toward you. “And because you said you hadn’t eaten.”

You stare at the bag. Thai food, from the smell of it, something with lemongrass. Your stomach, which has been ignoring you all evening, suddenly has opinions.

“This doesn’t fix what you said.”

“I’m not trying to fix it. I’m trying to—” He stops himself, and you can see him editing, which is strange to watch on a man who normally seems to say the exact amount he means to. “I’m showing you I’m sorry. That’s all.”

The energy to process this is something you don’t possess now. You pick up the bag. It’s heavier than it looked. “Thank you.” It comes out stiff and you don’t have the bandwidth to soften it. “You should go home.”

“Right.”

“I mean it. You don’t have to — this isn’t something you have to do. Standing in hospital lobbies with Thai food isn’t gonna be your thing, okay? We’re not— that’s not what this is.”

He’s quiet for a second. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Get some food in you.”

“I was going to,” you say, which is not strictly true, and he seems to know it. But he doesn’t say so, which you are choosing to be grateful for.

He nods once, and walks back toward the entrance. You watch him go for exactly two seconds before you make yourself turn around and go back to work.

Maya spins her chair to face you the moment you’re within range. You point at her before she can speak.

“Don’t.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Maya.”

“He’s so—”

“I will give you a terrible evaluation.”

She turns back to her computer, failing entirely to hide her smile, and you take the bag to the break room and eat the whole thing. It’s very good, which you resent.

Six hours later, at ten past two, you come out of the hospital into the cold. Your brain is running on fumes, and the black car in the far corner of the parking lot does not immediately register.

Then the door opens.

“You have got to be kidding me,” you say, to no one in particular. To the night. To whatever version of your life this is.

He gets out slowly, like he hasn’t spent six hours in a parking lot. He’s in the same coat and he looks it. A little, around the eyes.

“Bucky.” Your voice comes out flatter than you intend.

“I—”

There’s a pattern developing here, the way you don’t let him finish talking. “You’ve been here this whole time.”

“I fell asleep for a bit.”

“In your car. In the hospital parking lot. Why?”

He stops a few feet from you. His face looks tired in a way it hadn’t the other night, something honest about it. “I wanted to make sure you got home okay.”

“I do that everyday… I’ve been doing that everyday for almost three years.”

“Right.”

“Then why—” You stop. You’re too tired for this. The cold is getting into your coat and your feet hurt and you are twenty-eight years old and you do not have the reserves for whatever this is. “Go home, Bucky. Please. Get some actual sleep.”

“Let me drive you.”

“I have my car.”

“You’ve been on your feet for—”

“I have my car.” You hitch your bag up on your shoulder. “Thank you for the food. I mean that. But you can’t just— sit outside my hospital all night, that’s not— you can’t do that.”

He’s looking at you with that expression again. The unreadable one that isn’t quite unreadable anymore, or maybe you’re just too tired to not see it. “I handled it badly yesterday… or today — I don’t know — I said something that I would take back if I could.”

“I know. You said that.”

“I’m saying it again.”

“Bucky—”

“I need you to understand that I’m not— I’m not the guy who says something like that and means it. What I said, the way it sounded. I need you to know that’s not— that isn’t who I am.”

You look at him for a long moment. The parking lot is quiet. A couple of birds somewhere. A car turning out onto the street.

“I know.” Because you do, or you think you do, or you’d like to. “I just need you to give me some room to figure out—” You gesture vaguely between you. “All of this. Okay? I can’t think straight when you’re standing in my parking lot.”

Something moves through his expression at that. He looks down at the ground and then back at you, and the corner of his mouth shifts. “Okay. I’ll go.”

“Thank you.”

He holds eye contact a beat. “Drive safe.”

“You too,” you say, which is automatic, which is ridiculous, and you turn before your face can do anything about it.

You think about him walking to his car in an empty parking lot, and you think about him falling asleep in there, and you don’t do anything with that. You file it somewhere.

You go home. You sleep for nine hours straight. It’s the best you’ve slept in three weeks.

He calls two days later.

You’re off shift, sitting on your couch with an unopened anatomy refresher on the cushion next to you because you’d told yourself you were going to be productive and had instead been staring at nowhere in particular.

You pick up on the second ring. “Hi.” His voice is the same, which isn’t entirely a good thing to your composure.

“Hi.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Tired, but that’s— that’s normal.”

“Oh?”

“The fatigue is normal first trimester. The nausea I’ve been managing, mostly… I’m not telling you this to update you, I’m just— you asked.”

“I’m glad you told me.” His voice is quiet. Careful in a way that doesn’t feel like walking on ice anymore, more like he’s choosing things with intention. “I want to know how you’re doing.”

When you don’t say anything, he continues. “I want to come to your appointment.”

You close your eyes. “Bucky.”

“Hear me out—”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I — I want to.”

“You said that in the parking lot too, about the food, and I told you—”

“This is different. This is— this matters. I want to be there. I know I gave you every reason to tell me to stay out of it. What I said at the coffee shop— I know. But I’m asking you to let me— I’m asking… please”

For some reason, you think about the hotel room. The folded dress. The empty bed. The water glass. You think about a parking lot at two past midnight and a man who fell asleep in his car because he wanted to make sure you got home safe.

“It’s at my hospital… next Tuesday. Eleven.”

“Eleven,” he repeats.

“And if you say anything—” You hadn’t meant to go there, but you’re going there. “If you say anything like what you said on that day, I will walk out. And that’ll be it. I mean that.”

“That’s fair.” Without hesitation. Like he expected it and meant to agree to it.

“I’m serious, Bucky.”

“I know you are. I know.”

You nod, even though he can’t see it. “Okay. Tuesday.”

“Okay… Thank you.”

You don’t say you’re welcome. You don’t say anything for a second.

“Get some sleep,” he says. It’s like the water glass. The automatic thing, the thing that comes out before he decides whether to say it.

“You too.” This time it doesn’t feel ridiculous.

You hang up and open the textbook on whim. You read four pages before you fall asleep on the couch with the lamp still on.

He’s standing at your door at ten thirty with peonies.

Actual peonies, fat and pale pink, the kind that look like someone made a decision.

You open the door in your coat already because you’d been about to leave, keys in hand, and the two of you look at each other for a second in the doorway.

“How do you know where I live?”

“Sarah.”

Of course. You make a mental note to have a word with Sarah, except Sarah will laugh at you and you both know it.

You look at the flowers and then at him and he has the decency to look slightly uncertain, which is the most uncertain you’ve seen him look, and it does something small and involuntary to your chest.

“You didn’t have to—”

He just holds them out, without saying anything.

You take them because leaving them in his hands would be strange. They smell like something expensive and vaguely like outside, and you stand there for a second not knowing what to do with them.

You turn back into the apartment and find a glass in the cabinet and fill it with water, which is not a vase but it will have to do.

Setting them on the counter, you look at them. White and pink against your very normal kitchen, and something about the image makes you feel things you don’t have the time or inclination to examine.

The waiting room at the OB practice is warm and aggressively neutral, the kind of beige that has been carefully selected to be soothing. It achieves the opposite.

You sign in at the front. Bucky sits beside you, and he doesn’t make small talk, which you’re grateful for. He’s looking at something on his phone with the focused stillness of a person who is trying to be unobtrusive, and you watch the fish tank in the corner for lack of anything else to do with your eyes.

Your name gets called and you both stand. There’s a second, while walking towards the exam room, where you’re very aware of him behind you and you don’t know what to do about that.

The room is what it always is. Exam table with the paper that crinkles, the blood pressure cuff on the wall, the small screen angled toward the bed. You hop up on the table without being asked.

The nurse takes your vitals and says the doctor will be in shortly. Then it’s just the two of you in the room.

Bucky takes the chair in the corner.

“You can sit closer,” you say, because the chair in the corner feels like he’s been sent there. “You don’t have to be all the way over there.”

He moves the chair, just enough, and sits back down.

“How are you feeling?” he asks. Same question as the phone call, except in person it is different.

“Okay. A little nauseous this morning but it passed.” You look at your hands. “I have to go back on in the afternoon so I’m hoping the appointment doesn’t run long.”

“I can have you back by one.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I want to.” Right. That’s his line.

You don’t argue with it this time.

Dr. Reyes comes in five minutes later and doesn’t react to Bucky’s presence in any visible way, which you appreciate, because you’d anticipated some version of aren’t you. Congressman Barnes or Winter Soldier.

You did not want to deal with that today.

She’s warm and efficient in the way of someone who has done this enough times, and she goes through the questions with you and you answer them like the doctor you are. Last menstrual period, no significant history. Bucky stays quiet in his chair and you don’t look at him.

Then Dr. Reyes reaches for the gel.

“This’ll be cold,” she says, and you nod. She picks up the transducer and you are doing the thing you planned to do. Stay clinical.

Except your resident-brain has never been on this end of a transabdominal ultrasound before and it turns out those are two different things.

The screen fills with the grey static of it. Dr. Reyes adjusts the angle, and—

There.

The flicker. Fast and insistent, one hundred and fifty beats per minute or close to it, the cardiac activity clear enough on the doppler even before she turns the sound on, but then she does turn the sound on.

It’s the sound that gets you.

You’ve heard fetal heart tones a hundred times. A thousand times. You’ve stood in rooms while other women heard this for the first time and you’ve read the chart and noted the rate and moved on, because it was clinical, because it was data.

Except right now your body is doing something entirely outside of your control, something warm moving through your chest without asking permission, and you press your lips together and breathe.

“Strong heartbeat,” Dr. Reyes says, with the particular quiet of someone who knows what this moment is. “Right around a hundred and fifty-four. Looking good.”

You nod. Your throat is doing something it shouldn’t.

From the chair beside you, you hear Bucky exhale. Like he’d been holding something and set it down.

You turn your head and look at him.

He’s looking at the screen, not at you, and his jaw is tight and his hands are braced against his knee. His expression is… soft. You know because it’s the same on your own face.

“Can I—” His voice comes out different than you’ve heard it. Rougher. He clears his throat. “Can I get a copy of that? The image.”

Dr. Reyes glances between you, and you nod. “Of course,” she says.

He looks at you then. Quick, like he’s checking whether that was okay. When you nod, he immediately turns back to the screen.

Dr. Reyes does the measurements. Everything is how it should be, and she gives you the due date. Mid-July. Which you’d already calculated, but hearing it out loud is its own thing.

She goes through the first trimester expectations with you and you listen to all of it with the clinical half of your brain taking notes while the other half is somewhere else, somewhere watching the flicker on the screen and not knowing quite what to do with itself.

When she hands you the printout of the image, you put it in your bag. She hands one to Bucky too, without being asked again, and he takes it with both hands and looks at it for a second before sliding it into his inside coat pocket. Like it’s something he doesn’t want to bend.

He drives you back. You sit in the passenger seat and watch the city go by.

Neither of you speaks for a while, which is fine. Which is easy, actually, and you resent that a little.

You’d like to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is useful.

“Thank you. For letting me be there.” He’s the one to break the silence.

“You asked,” you say. Which is true, but not the full answer, and you both know it.

He doesn’t push.

In front of your building, he puts it in park. “Do you need anything? For the apartment, or groceries, or I could pick stuff up—”

“I’m okay.” You’re already half out of the seat.

“Prenatal vitamins, or—”

“Bucky.” You pause with one foot on the curb. “I have prenatal vitamins. I ordered them the morning after I tested. I’m a doctor. I know what I need.”

He has a hand on the steering wheel and he’s looking at you, and there’s something in his face that isn’t quite hurt and isn’t quite frustration. More like a person who wants to do something and doesn’t know how.

“I know you do.”

“I’m not—” There’s a version of this that comes out wrong, and you navigate around it. “I’m not keeping you out of it. That’s not what this is. I just— I don’t need you to manage things. Okay?” You look at him. “I’ll call you when there’s something to call you about.”

He’s quiet for a second. “Okay.”

“The heartbeat. That was… yeah. It was good.” You don’t know why you said that, only you didn’t want that to be the last thing you told him.

You’re already inside your place by the time you hear his car pull away.

The peonies are still in the glass on your counter when you get back in, and you stand there looking at them.

You are a person who has her prenatal vitamins already ordered and her charting caught up and her shifts covered, and you are also a person who left a one-night stand’s flowers in a water glass because they were too nice to throw out.

You said no three times.

The first time was on the phone, two days after the appointment, when he called with what he’d clearly prepared as a reasonable proposition. He delivered in the tone of someone who has won arguments in rooms full of people who didn’t want to lose.

His apartment was twelve minutes from your hospital by cab. Your commute was forty, on a good day. The first trimester fatigue was going to get worse before it got better. He had a spare bedroom. It was just practical.

The second time was a week after that, in person, when he’d swung by your hospital on his way from somewhere official to somewhere else official. He’d shown up in your break room with a coffee you hadn’t asked for and had the conversation again.

He laid it out like he was briefing someone. The proximity to your hospital, the fact that his building had a doorman and a parking garage and an elevator, the fact that your building had none of those things and three flights of stairs that were already becoming a thing you noticed at the end of a long shift.

The third time was on a Tuesday when you’d gotten home at midnight and stood at the bottom of your stairs for longer than you’d like to admit before making yourself go up them.

You’d texted Sarah about it not entirely meaning to, and Sarah had apparently mentioned it to her father, and her father had apparently mentioned it to Bucky. Your phone had rung at twelve fifteen.

How does news travel so fast?

The fourth time you said no it was because you’d run out of actual reasons and had to fall back on principle, which he received with the patience of someone who understood the difference and was content to wait.

That patience, somehow, was the thing that wore you down. Not the logic of it.

He’d just set the option on the table and waited with his hands in his pockets while you turned it over and found fewer and fewer things wrong with it.

That time you’d said, “Fine. A month. We’ll see how it goes.”

His apartment is on the fourteenth floor of a building that has a lobby with actual plants in it and a doorman named Gerald who learned your name on the second day and now says ‘good morning’ like he means it.

The spare bedroom has a window that faces east, which you hadn’t expected to care about. But find that you do, when the morning light comes in early and clean.

The first few days felt like moving around a furniture arrangement that hadn’t fully settled. Two people with established routines in one space, both of you figuring out the other.

You learned that he woke up early, always, and that the coffee was made before you came out of your room.

You learned that he watched the news in the living room in the evenings with the sound low and that he didn’t talk during it. Which suited you fine because you had charts to finish.

You learned that he stocked the fridge with things you’d mentioned offhand once, twice, in passing.

The ginger tea appeared on the third day, on the shelf above your coffee mug. You hadn’t said you needed it. But you’d been slightly more nauseous every morning and apparently he’d noticed, because there it was, three boxes of it, like it had always been there.

You’re fourteen weeks now. Which means you’d started to show in the way that is noticeable if you know what you’re looking for, the small firm curve of it below your navel that your regular clothes are beginning to politely argue with.

Looking down at it in the mirror still does something to you that you don’t have a clean word for.

Bucky doesn’t comment on it. That might be the thing you appreciate most.

What he does is quietly rearrange things. The stuff on the highest shelves moved down without discussion. A non-slip mat appeared in the shower.

He started being in the kitchen when you came home late, putting something together, and there was always enough for two.

You’d tried to protest the first time and he’d handed you a bowl of whatever it was and said ‘sit down, eat’, and something about the directness of it had short-circuited your objection.

The dynamic between you had shifted in a way that was hard to articulate. He made you laugh twice last week, genuinely. Once about something on the news and once about something Gerald had said in the lobby. You’d felt the laugh leave your body and thought afterward, with some surprise, that you hadn’t been performing it.

You still felt the thing from the coffee shop, underneath. You didn’t think you’d stop feeling that for a while. It is something that won’t stop hurting when you think of it often, and you think of it often.

Tuesday morning, you’re off until noon.

Off, for a resident, means you slept until eight instead of five and only have emails to deal with instead of a full shift, but still.

You come out of your room in your robe and your thick socks, hair in the kind of chaos that only nine hours of actual sleep can produce, and you’re running through the schedule of the day in your head when you turn the corner into the kitchen and stop.

Bucky is at the stove.

In a towel.

Just a towel. White, knotted at his hip, his hair still damp against the back of his neck. He clearly just stepped out of the shower and he’s got the skillet on and he’s doing something with eggs, fully concentrated on it.

You should say something. You should announce yourself, the way a normal person would, and give you both a second to reorient.

You don’t.

You’ve seen him in suits, you’ve seen him in the sweater from the coffee shop, you’ve seen him in the dark of a hotel room. But this is different in a way that your body is entirely on board with and your brain is slightly behind on.

He’s solid, broad across the back and tapered down, and the towel sits low on his hips and the morning light in the kitchen is doing things you’d like it to stop doing.

His left arm, the metal one, catches the light differently than his right, the lines of it tracing the shape of a shoulder, a forearm, fingers curled around the handle of the pan.

You’ve always been a normal amount of attracted to him. You’ve been telling yourself that it was circumstantial. Hormones, proximity, those things. And that it would settle down, because that was the sensible thing for it to do.

It is not settling down.

You press your lips together and look at the ceiling briefly and remind yourself that you are a grown adult in her first trimester who is going to behave appropriately. The first trimester is notoriously unkind when it comes to this, your body does not always know what’s good for it.

“Morning,” you say.

He turns around. To his credit, he doesn’t look particularly thrown. A little caught, maybe, but he rolls with it. “Hey. Sorry… I was running late, I figured I’d just start breakfast before I—” He gestures vaguely at himself with the spatula, which you choose not to find charming. “Didn’t hear you get up.”

“It’s fine,” you say, and you get yourself to the coffee maker and give yourself something to do with your hands. “What time is it?”

“Eight-forty.” He turns back to the eggs. “I would’ve had it ready before you got up usually. Woke up late.”

“You know you don’t have to make me breakfast every single day.”

He shifts the pan off the heat. “I was making eggs anyway. Seemed wasteful not to.”

You look at his back. His very… whatever. You pour your coffee. “Are you going to put clothes on?”

“Yeah, I— are the eggs okay first or should I—”

“The eggs are fine,” you say, which possibly comes out with slightly more feeling than the eggs require, and you turn and look very deliberately at your mug.

He dishes the eggs onto two plates, sets yours on the counter in front of you with a piece of toast that has appeared from somewhere.

Then he takes himself and his towel situation to his room.

You sit at the kitchen counter and stare at your eggs and feel extremely normal about everything.

Hormones. First trimester. Completely explicable.

You eat your eggs. They’re good. They’re always good, which is its own kind of inconvenience.

He comes back in grey sweatpants and a t-shirt with his damp hair and sits across the counter from you with his own plate.

The thing about Bucky Barnes in grey sweatpants is that it is somehow worse than the towel because you cannot blame it on anything. You cannot say you were caught off guard.

He is just sitting there in normal clothes eating scrambled eggs and looking at his phone. This is just your morning now. This is what your mornings are.

“You have the afternoon appointment Friday?” he asks, not looking up from his phone.

“Two o’clock.”

He nods. Puts his phone down. Picks up his coffee. “I can drive you.”

“I can get there.”

“I want to be there.”

You consider pointing out that he says that a lot. You decide not to. “Okay.”

The scrubs have been sitting in the bottom of your bag for three weeks. The dark navy set, the ones you’d bought in your first year when you finally had enough shifts under your belt to feel like they were earned.

You’d packed them when you left your apartment and told yourself it was practical, that you’d need them before the end of your residency, that they’d still fit by then.

Today is the final week. Last stretch before your exams, before whatever comes after, and you’d woken up this morning with the particular weight of an ending sitting on your chest. The bittersweet kind, the kind that doesn’t fully resolve into either sad or glad and just sits there asking you to feel both.

You’d thought about your locker at the hospital, the mug you kept in the break room, the nurses who knew your name and your coffee order and the specific way you liked your charts organized. You’d thought about who you’d been when you started, which felt like another person’s life viewed through glass.

The scrubs had seemed right. Nostalgic. The way you might put on an old sweater, or drive past your childhood home. Just to remember what it felt like.

That was the theory.

In practice, you’re standing in front your mirror at eight in the morning and the scrub top is bunched at your midsection, stuck there, going neither up nor down.

Your stomach has done what stomachs do at nineteen weeks. It is present, unmistakably, the firm round curve of it that you’d spent weeks watching appear like something surfacing through water.

The scrub top, which had been fitted-ish even before, has no interest in accommodating it. The fabric is straining across your chest in a way that would be funny in a different context, because your chest has also done what chests do, which is become something you are still getting used to seeing in mirrors.

The whole picture is that the scrub is basically a crop top, currently. The bottom six inches of your stomach are exposed. It will not go down.

You already know. You knew the moment you got it over your arms.

Still. Something cracks anyway.

It’s not rational. You’re a doctor, you understand what’s happening to your body better than most people get to. You’d read the weekly summaries without sentimentality. You’d taken your vitamins and gone to your appointments and been, all things considered, fairly functional about the whole thing.

But there’s something about the scrubs specifically that you hadn’t accounted for. Three years of who you were, and they don’t fit. You cannot explain why that particular fact is the one that finds the crack, except that it does. And your eyes are burning before you’ve fully registered that they’re going to.

You pull at the hem once more anyway. Just to try. It doesn’t move.

“Hey—” Bucky, in the hallway, knocking twice before he pushes the door slightly open. He does that, announces himself before the door, which you’d noticed in the first week and filed away as a thing you appreciated without saying so. “Breakfast is—” He stops.

You’re not crying. You’re at the stage just before, the one where your face is doing something you can’t control and your eyes are bright and your throat has that specific tightness. And you’re wearing a scrub top bunched up to your ribcage with your stomach completely exposed and your bra visible and your hands still fisted in the fabric.

He comes into your room properly, and stands behind you. You look at him in the mirror. He looks at you.

“The scrubs don’t fit.” Your voice comes out steadier than you expected.

“Yeah,” he says. Like he’s agreeing with whatever the real sentence is underneath the one you said.

“I know they weren’t going to.” You let go of the hem. “I don’t know why I thought—” You press your lips together. The burning behind your eyes is doing what it wants to regardless, and you look up at the ceiling briefly and breathe.

“It’s the last week,” you say, after a second.

Bucky doesn’t say anything right away. Your eyes meet in the mirror and there’s nothing in his face that looks like he doesn’t understand.

“I know.”

The simplicity of it helps more than anything elaborate would have. You breathe again and feel the tightness in your throat ease a fraction.

His hands find the hem of the scrub top, and he looks at your face in the mirror first. When you give the smallest nod, he eases it up and over and off.

You stand there in your bra and maternity leggings.

In the mirror, his eyes make a trip south that he doesn’t intend you to catch. Quick and involuntary and immediately corrected, back to your face. But you caught it. The fraction of a second where they landed, where they stayed, before he pulled them back up.

You don’t say anything.

You’d spent weeks rearranging your sense of your own body, cataloguing the changes the way you would with a patient.

Maintaining the clinical distance had always been your competence.

But clinical distance has a way of not applying when someone’s eyes do what his just did.

This is not the hungry look from a hotel room. This is the helpless half-second kind. The involuntary kind. The honest kind, the kind a person can’t manufacture.

The fact that it was involuntary is the part that does something.

“Breakfast is probably cold,” you say, because you have to say something and the other things aren’t available yet.

“I can reheat it.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I’ll reheat it.”

You look at yourself in the mirror. You don’t look like yourself in the way you’ve always expected to look like yourself.

And you can’t tell yet whether that’s loss or just change, whether there’s even a meaningful difference between those two things.

“Bucky…. Thank you.” For the way he’d come in and just stood there and let the thing be what it was without trying to fix it or reframe it or promise you it would be fine.

The anatomy scan is at twenty weeks, which you know from the part of your brain that has been doing obstetric math since the positive test.

It is the one where they can tell you. If you want to know. If you ask.

You hadn’t decided, going in.

Bucky hadn’t asked whether you were going to find out, which you’d appreciated. He’d just shown up, same as always, jacket and the particular stillness that he brought into medical spaces with him.

The scan takes twenty minutes. You lie on your back with the transducer moving over your stomach while Dr. Reyes takes her measurements and narrates in the calm voice she has.

Bucky sits in the chair and watches the screen.

The anatomy is normal. All of it—the cardiac chambers, the spine, the cerebellum, the face. You listen to Dr. Reyes confirm each structure and your brain files it the way it always does, methodical.

Underneath the methodology there is something that is not methodology. something that has been building since the first scan, something that you have been calling various things and none of them have been entirely right.

“Do you want to know the sex?” Dr. Reyes asks.

You look at the ceiling. Then you look at Bucky.

He looks back at you. His expression says it’s up to you, the same way it said that about the apartment, about the appointments, about all of it.

He’d been very careful, the whole time, not to lean on decisions that were yours to make. You’d noticed. You’d been noticing for months.

“Yeah.”

Dr. Reyes smiles, and moves the transducer.

A girl.

You hadn’t had a preference, or you’d told yourself you hadn’t, but when she said it you understood something, like—oh. Oh, of course. Of course it’s her.

You don’t cry in the office. You make it to the elevator.

Its the sudden, quick kind. Two breaths worth, your hand pressed to your mouth, and then it passes.

You’re left standing in an elevator with your eyes bright, and Bucky is beside you looking at your face with the expression that isn’t unreadable anymore.

“Sorry,” you say, which is stupid, crying is a completely normal response to—

“Don’t.” He puts his arm around your shoulder and you let him.

By the time you’re in the lobby you’re fine, or close enough.

“A girl,” you say out loud, just to hear it.

“A girl.” Something in his voice makes you look at his face, and what’s there stops you. He’s looking straight ahead, jaw working slightly, and he looks like a man who has just understood the full size of something and is very quietly being changed by it.

His arm comes down from your shoulder but his hand finds yours briefly, just for a moment.

The first kick happens on a Thursday evening at twenty-three weeks.

You’re on the couch. You’ve been on the couch for an hour, which has become a thing you do now. Come home and decompose horizontally for a while before you can face anything requiring vertical effort.

Bucky is somewhere in his officr and you’re watching something on the television that you’re not fully watching.

It’s not what you’d expected. It isn’t a kick exactly, it’s more like something — someone really — turning over. A rolling flutter from the inside, unmistakable once it happens, unmistakable in the way that means you’d know it anywhere forever.

You go completely still.

It happens again. Clearer this time. More definite.

“Bucky.” You don’t mean to say it at volume. It just comes out.

Following footsteps, you see him. He reads your face immediately and crouches beside the couch without asking ‘what’s wrong’, because whatever your face is doing right now clearly isn’t wrong.

“She’s moving.”

His eyes go to your hands on your stomach. “Now?”

“Just now. She—” It happens again, and your face does something you’re completely not in control of. “There.”

He looks up at you and then at your stomach and then at you again. “Can I?”

“Yeah.” You take his hand and put it where yours is, your palm over the back of his.

For a moment nothing happens, and you think maybe it’s stopped, and then—

His face.

You’ve catalogued Bucky’s expressions for months. You know the almost-smile and the real one and the careful one and the behind-the-eyes one, but this is none of them.

This is something you haven’t seen before and can’t name, something stripped entirely of everything else, just… pure. Open in a way his face almost never is. His eyes are bright and he is looking at your stomach like it is the most astonishing thing he has ever encountered.

“That’s her.” His voice is not steady.

“That’s her.”

He doesn’t move his hand. You don’t move yours. The kick comes again. The two of you stay like that on the couch, with his hand under yours, her making herself known between you.

There are things between you still. Not resolved, the coffee shop, his words you seem to can’t get past.

But right now it’s quiet.

“She’s strong,” he eventually says. A little undone. Trying not to show it and not quite succeeding, which you love. Which you note, quietly, that you love.

He looks up at you and something passes between you that doesn’t need words, something that would have been impossible five months ago.

His thumb moves slightly on your stomach, a small unconscious thing, a hello from the outside. You let your head fall back against the cushion and close your eyes and feel her move again.

Today you notice that your left breast is tender in a specific way. Your colostrum has been leaking for the better part of five days.

Now there’s this localised tenderness. You press two fingers against it, and find the spot immediately.

Blocked duct. Clean and obvious. You’d diagnosed it in approximately four seconds.

The knowing doesn’t make it hurt less.

You get in the shower and let the hot water run directly on it, and you work at the tissue the way you know. Gentle, firm strokes toward the nipple, drained before it blocks further.

It helps a little. Enough to get dressed and eat breakfast and tell yourself it would resolve on its own by afternoon, which it might, which blocked ducts sometimes do when caught early.

By afternoon it hasn’t resolved.

By evening it’s worse.

Bucky makes dinner and breakfast and lunch. It’s something he took it upon himself, and no matter what you did, he insisted he wanted to. You decided that was the least he could do, since you’re already growing a whole human.

You’re on the couch when he brings you your plate, but don’t really eat it, which he notices. Because Bucky notices things. That is one of the more inconvenient facts about living with him.

“You’re not eating.” An observation.

“I’m eating.” You take a bite to demonstrate.

He sits down on his end of the couch, his own plate, and looks at you in the way he looks at things when he’s decided something. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.”

“You’ve been holding your left side since you sat down.”

You look at him. You hadn’t realized you were doing that. Your hand is braced just below your ribs on the left, the pressure of it a reflex you hadn’t consciously authorized. You move it to your lap.

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.” He eats a bite of his dinner. “What’s wrong?”

The repetition startles a short laugh out of you. “Bucky.”

“I’ve got time.”

You look at your plate. The thing about the past several months is that you’d stopped performing fine quite so much. You still did it sometimes. Habit, mostly.

But the effort of maintaining it in the face of someone who was going to sit there and wait it out had started to feel like more work than just saying the thing.

“Blocked duct.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means one of the milk ducts is… blocked”

“You’re… producing?”

“Yeah, for like five days. It’s normal. Don’t worry.”

“Normal? You’re in pain.”

“The milk part is normal. The blocked part is not normal even after delivery.”

“So, what do we do? What’s the treatment?”

Of course. Of course that’s the immediate question. You set your fork down. “Warm compress, massage, expression. In that order.”

“Have you tried all of that?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And it’s… helping. Some. Not fully resolved.”

He’s quiet for a second, and you can hear him thinking, which is a thing you’ve learned to recognize. “Do you want me to— I could help with the massage. If that’s— if it would help.”

Something happens to your body that you are immediately and completely dismissive of. You are thirty-eight weeks pregnant and you are sitting on a couch across from the man who is the father of your child and who is also just a person asking a practical question.

Your body’s response to that question is frankly embarrassing and entirely the fault of the third trimester hormonal profile.

“I’m fine,” you say, for the third time, which even you can tell is getting less convincing.

“You said that.” He puts his plate on the coffee table. “What else is there?”

“What do you mean?”

“For the duct. If massage doesn’t work, what else is there?”

Your face does something you are not responsible for. You think about how to answer this question, which should be simple, which is a medical question with a factual answer, and yet.

“Suction.”

“A pump?” He’s already standing with his not even half finished place. “I’ll go buy one—”

“It’s not the pump.” The words come out before you’ve decided to say them. You look at him.

He looks back at you.

“Tell me what it is.” His voice is even.

You hold his gaze for a second. There are thirty-eight weeks of something between the two of you, not all of it clean, most of it good, and you are in pain that has a solution that you are not asking for.

“Manual suction would be equally effective than the pump. It’s also direct. You don’t have to— I don’t need you to do anything. It’ll resolve.”

He’s very still. “Will it?”

“Probably.”

“Probably,” he echoes.

“Yes.”

He’s looking at you with the expression that isn’t unreadable anymore, hasn’t been for a while, the one that means he’s made a decision and is waiting to see if you’ll come to the same one. “You’re in pain.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve said that four times and eaten approximately one bite of dinner.” His voice is quiet and not unkind and leaves absolutely no room. “You’re in pain, and there’s something that would help, and you’re sitting there not asking for it. So I’m asking. Do you want me to help?”

“It’s not— This isn’t—”

“I know what it is and what it isn’t. I’m asking if you want me to help.”

The honesty of the question, the way he’s asking plainly if you want him to, does something to the knot of your refusal, loosens it.

“Okay.”

The bedroom lamp is on low, which you’re grateful for. You’re sitting against the headboard in just your tank top because bra is compression and compression makes the pain worse.

Bucky is sitting beside you. You’ve walked him through it in the voice you use for medical explanations. Impersonal, methodical, this is the direction of drainage, this much is the pressure we’re aiming for. He’d listened the way he listens to everything, completely, without interrupting.

“Tell me if I’m doing it wrong.”

“You’re not.” You’d watched his hands and the technique was right, working from the periphery inward the way you’d told him.

The heat of it was immediate, the specific relief of pressure moving in the right direction, and you let your head fall back against the headboard and breathe through it.

It hurts. It hurts in the way that relief sometimes hurts, the way that unkinking something that’s been kinked for too long. You press your lips together and exhale.

“Still okay?” he asks.

“Yes.” Your voice is not entirely steady. “Keep going.”

The blocked duct is stubborn in the way they get when they’ve been compressing for a day. The massage alone was never going to be enough, you’d known that, you’d known it since Wednesday morning and done it anyway because asking was harder.

But his hands are warmer than yours, the pressure more sustained, and the way his fingers glide over your swollen skin sends an unexpected shiver through you, the warmth pooling not just in relief but in a deeper, aching need between your thighs.

When his mouth closes over the nipple, the sensation is overwhelming at first.

The sound you make is entirely involuntary and you press your hand to your own mouth immediately.

His hand stills on your ribs. He doesn’t stop. The suction is careful and rhythmic and nothing about the way he’s doing this is anything other than what it is.

Yet your body does not seem to fully understand the assignment. The wet heat of his mouth envelops you, his tongue pressing softly against the sensitive peak as he draws gently, each pull sending a spark of unwelcome arousal straight to your core, making you clench involuntarily around nothing.

You tell yourself you’re not turned on by him relieving your pain. You’re wrong.

Just for a fleeting moment, you wonder, if it's affecting him too. If the intimate act of tasting you, feeling your body respond under his lips, is stirring something in him the way it's unraveling you.

With continued suction, the colostrum releases slowly, the hard cord of tissue beginning to soften under his hand. You feel the pressure shifting, the acute point of pain diffusing.

And your eyes fill without your permission, the specific relief of it after a day of something that just quietly hurt and hurt and hurt.

“There.” Your voice breaks on it, just slightly.

He pulls back. Looks at your face. And then without discussion he puts his arm around you and pulls you into his side carefully. His hand finds the top of your bump in the way he does sometimes without thinking and you let him.

“You’re okay,” he says into your hair. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

You breathe. The ache is fading and you are okay.

But the lingering warmth of his mouth on your skin, the ghost of his breath against your nipple, has left you throbbing with need.

There’s this heat in you that has nothing to do with pain or hurt or blocked ducts. And everything to do with him and his proximity. You don’t think you can blame it on your hormones anymore.

You’re focused on not doing anything more. Because you don’t know how he feels. Just because he’d offered to help doesn’t mean he’s into this. Into you.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

You don’t know what he is talking about.

You lift your head a little. “What?”

His hand moves slightly on your back, a small motion, like he’s deciding how to continue. “The morning after the gala.” He’s not looking at you directly. “I had an early call. I had to be out by 5.30. I didn’t want to wake you.”

That morning comes rushing back like it was yesterday. The empty side. The folded dress on the chair. The glass of water.

“I left my number on the hotel notepad, by the lamp. I thought— I thought you’d call.”

“What—”

“Left side of the lamp. I figured maybe you didn’t want to. And then weeks went by and I thought—” He doesn’t finish that sentence. He doesn’t have to. “And then you called. And I picked up and heard your voice and I thought, okay. Okay, she called.”

If only you’d looked properly.

You close your eyes. Your brain does the math. How close you’d been to something, how much the last eight months might have looked different… if only you’d looked properly.

“And then the coffee shop. I said something— I said something I would take back ten times over if I could. The look on your face.” He finally glances down at you, and his expression is the honest one, the one stripped of the management. “I’d been thinking about you for weeks, and then there you were, telling me something that big, and I panicked and I said the worst possible thing, and I’ve been—”

“Bucky…”

“I’ve been trying to show you that I’m not that… Since then. That — that isn’t who I am.”

“I know.” You mean it fully. “I know.”

His hand hasn’t stopped moving on your back and you’ve gone completely loose against his side.

You turn your face slightly into his shoulder. He smells like the same thing he always smells like.

Something clean, something his.

You look up. He’s looking down. At you.

”I looked, I searched… I — I am so sorry, Bucky.”

He shakes his head, “you have nothing to be sorry about.” His voice is a whisper, gently wiping something off your face, only then do you realise you’d been crying.

Later if you thought about it, you could not have said who moved first. Maybe it was you, maybe it was just the proximity and the angle and months and months of near misses.

But his mouth is on yours and it is nothing like the hotel room. Nothing at all like that.

That had been hunger and dark and mutual want in its simplest form, and this is something else, something that has been earned in increments. When you kiss him back you feel the whole weight of it.

His hand comes up to your jaw, the right one, and he kisses you the way he does things when he means them. Slow. Sure. Like he is not going anywhere and wants you to know it. This time there’s no tears.

When you pull back, his thumb is on your cheek and your foreheads are together and you’re both breathing.

“Hi,” you say, which is what you always seem to say when he takes you off guard.

Something changes in his expression. Soft and a little helpless and very, very him. “Hi.”

You kiss him again, slower, and his hand slides from your jaw to your neck, and when you shift against him you feel him go still.

“I don’t want to—” He pulls back enough to look at you, and his face is flushed, and he’s trying to be responsible about something and finding it difficult. His eyes go briefly, helplessly, to your stomach, and then back to your face. “I don’t want to hurt her.”

You look at him. Something warm and fond moves through you, which is perhaps not the most practical emotion for this particular moment, but there it is.

“Sex is not contraindicated,” you say.

His brow furrows slightly. “How do you—”

“Bucky.”

“I just—”

“It’s actively encouraged in the two weeks before the due date.” You hold his gaze. “Prostaglandins in semen help with cervical ripening. And orgasm stimulates uterine contractility, which—”

“Okay.”

“—can help initiate labour at term, which is why—”

“Okay.” He’s slightly flushed. “I get it.”

“Do you? Because I can explain the mechanism—”

“How do you know that?” He asks with the expression of a man who has already realized the answer.

You cock your eyebrow.

“Right. You’re a doctor.” He looks like he’s genuinely embarrassed, with the kind of blush you have never seen on him before in eight months of looking at his face. “Sorry.”

You press your lips together so you don’t smile too much, because this is not the moment for I told you so, except that it is a little. “It’s okay.”

“I just—I didn’t want to—”

“I know.” You put your hand on his jaw, the same way you’d put it on his jaw in a hotel room eight months ago in a completely different life. “I know. She’s safe. I’m safe. Okay?”

This is different from the hotel room in every way that matters.

“You’re beautiful.” He says it simply, like it’s the truth.

“I’m enormous.”

“Yeah.” He says it like those are the same sentence. Like enormous is included in beautiful, like the distinction doesn’t exist.

You pull his shirt over his head and he lets you, and then his hands find your tank top and he eases it off fully. His eyes move over you the way they’d moved that day in the mirror, except now there is nothing to look away from, and he doesn’t.

“Tell me what feels good. Tell me what doesn’t.”

“You’re going to make me talk the whole time?”

“I’m going to make you talk when I need to know something.” His mouth moves to your jaw, your throat, and his voice is warm against your skin. “Which will be often.”

Your hands find his hair and you hold on.

His hands learn it the way you’d watch him learn anything else. With attention, nothing half-done.

He finds your hip, your thigh, and his fingers trail up the inside of it with the unhurried patience of a man who is not going anywhere. When they reach the apex of your thighs and slip between your folds, finding you slick and swollen, he exhales slowly against your neck.

“Jesus.”

“I told you it was—”

“Not the physiology… Just— you.” His fingers part you gently, circling your clit with soft strokes, and your grip on his hair tightens. “This.”

You stop talking.

His fingers are gentle in a way that is its own undoing. He’s learning, finding the places that make your breath change and staying there, pressing and rubbing with just enough pressure to send heat pooling low in your belly.

You’re on your side, which is where he’d guided you with the easy practicality of someone who’d done their research and wasn’t going to make a thing of it.

His chest is warm against your back and his hand is over your hip and everything about the angle lets his fingers delve deeper, one sliding inside you while his thumb works your clit.

He keeps going until your thighs are shaking and you’re saying his name with your face pressed to the pillow and when his fingers slow, you make an undignified sound

“Don’t stop—”

“I’m not stopping,” he says into your shoulder. “Just changing.”

He shifts, settling behind you, and you feel the warm blunt pressure of his cock at your entrance, the head nudging against your wetness.

He pauses there. His hand is on your hip, his mouth is at your temple. “Okay?”

“Yes… Please.”

He pushes in slowly. All the way slow, inch by inch, stretching you, giving you time to feel every ridge and vein as he fills you completely. You exhale through it and he stays still when he’s fully seated, buried to the hilt. You feel his chest chest rising and falling against your back. “Okay?” he asks again.

“More than okay,” you manage, which makes him exhale a short, warm laugh against your neck.

He moves. The kind of pace that builds rather than rushes, his cock sliding out almost to the tip before thrusting back in. His hand on your hip holds you in place, and you feel every movement everywhere, the particular fullness of him inside you, pressing against that sensitive spot with each stroke, the particular closeness of his body wrapped around yours.

His hand slides from your hip to your stomach and just rests there and something about that, the fact that he thought to do that, his palm warm and open on the curve of your belly while his cock moves inside you, does something to you that is beyond physical.

“Bucky.” It’s not a request for anything, just his name in your mouth, just needing to say it.

“I’m here.” His arm tightens around you. “I’ve got you.”

His other hand finds your clit again, fingers slick with your arousal, rubbing in tight, slow circles that match the rhythm of his hips. You feel the tension building in slow long waves, nothing like the urgent snap of the hotel room, this is the accumulative kind, the kind that climbs and climbs, your walls clenching around him with each thrusts.

His mouth is at your ear and he’s saying your name, just your name.

When you come, you come with his name on your lips and his arms around you and his hand on your belly.

It moves through you like something warm breaking loose from somewhere it had been held for a long time, your body pulsing around his cock, drawing him deeper. You feel it in your chest as much as anywhere else.

His hips stutter and slow and he presses his face into your neck and follows you, spills inside you. His arm fully wraps around you, and then everything is still.

You lie there with his heartbeat at your back, fast still and slowing.

This time there’s no condom to dispose. But he does move, and comes back with a washcloth and a glass of water. A glass of water, again.

His hands are soft and his touch gentle when he cleans you, wiping away the mix of your release and his from between your thighs.

After a while, after he’s made you drink half a glass of water, and you’re settled into him, his hand moves on your stomach. “Hey,” he says. To her. Like a hello.

You press your hand over his.

Something moves under your palms and you realise it’s a hello back from the inside.

my masterlist !

extras. if this flops, i’ll cry. also why was this so long lmao 😭

permanent taglist. @devililithh @buckyfmd @sheriff-bodecker @honeysucklewatr @demiebarnes @solivagant-reverie @kqtholins @amoremarveloustime @colettebarnes @barnes-babydoll @miraclediviner @of-sanguine-eyes @biaswreckedbybuckybarnes @manly-man-whore @indigo123789 @wasa-bby @biggestfangirl @herejustforbuckybarnes @buckysbunnny @highhopes1008 @castielscaplan @ornateglass @grumpysunnybarnes @luvyoupxmimi @slutdier @yes-ilovetowrite @cautiouscas17 @astridphantom @delusionalwomsn @cinnamon-girl-writes @wherewinterblooms @stifflyspeedyquirk @sassandscribbles @marvelouslyme96 @stesha02 @floatingvalhallasea @goobers-mcgee @t1redphoenix @vickynguyennn @bluellamacheesecake-blog @serenityrjd @pitabread79 @galaxygoddess30 @biggestfangirl @chenoadouble-o7 @phoenix-in-writing @ceoofdisappointment @ladymiseryy @wherewinterblooms @avgdestitute @lunexiax @akthoughtss + to get added to the taglist!

[sassandscribbles]

The time when I drunkenly wrote letters to my boss and all hell broke loose

Pairing : congressman!bucky x assistant!reader

Summary : When you get drunk and accidentally confess all your wild fantasies to your boss via e-mail, it might be your biggest mistake. But good for you, your boss doesn't mind it all that much. In fact, he's quite elated.

Word Count : 5k

Warnings : confessing spicy fantasies via email, inappropriate professional behaviour, mentions of reader’s filthy desires (not specifying all of them here, it would ruin the fun), congressman barnes (he's the biggest warning of them all), Smut, 18+, MDNI, oral (f. recieving), fingering, hand job (if you squint), PinV, PWP, nasty language, bucky is already gone for reader even before receiving the letters, and reader, well….she’s down very bad.

A/N : full credit of this fic goes to @emmathefanficgal and her brilliant mind for coming up with this idea and for listening to me yap endlessly when i was losing my mind over this…..Love you a ton, emma

You swear you didn't put yourself in this situation on purpose. You had denied going to any parties tonight, wanting to just rot in bed with some nonsense movie and chinese takeout.

But your best friend cum roommate being the absolute menace that she is, dragged you out of your bed, chucked one of her dresses in your hand and pushed you into the bathroom to get ready.

Which is how you find yourself in the bar, surrounded by tens of her girlfriends, celebrating whoever’s bachelorette it is by downing your fifth shot of tequila.

“Another” you slam the small glass on the table with a lopsided smile, swaying slightly. The bartender eyes you, then your best friend, totally rethinking his life decisions.

Nat grabs hold of you as you sway dangerously and toddle towards the dance floor.

“That's enough. Were going home” she puts one of your arms across her shoulders to balance you. All while you try your best to drag her to dance.

“Noooo” you whine “I wanna dance”

“You're in no position to dance, girl” natasha scolds just as the music booms. And before she can react someone grabs your wrist to pull you toward the crowd.

Your eyes light up in drunken joy. “YES. MOVEMENT. I will out-dance my emotions.”

Nat scowls, fingers massaging at her temples as she watches you wobble like a drunk raccoon.

You last approximately thirty seconds before:

– tripping over your own foot

– laughing hysterically

– attempting to twirl

– and nearly colliding with a very confused stranger

Natasha immediately intercepts you like a linebacker. “Okay. Nope. That's it. We're done for today”

She starts to guide you out of the bar while you complaint about your heels and demand more vodka.

You both make it halfway down the block before you stop dead.

“Wait.”

Nat sighs in frustration. “No.”

“I need—”

You don’t finish the sentence as bile rises to your throat, and you lean over the sidewalk throwing up with the kind of dramatic betrayal usually reserved for soap operas.

Nat gathers your hair behind you and holds it in a makeshift ponytail as you retch.

“This was a bad idea” she mutters under her breath, wiping your mouth with her handkerchief as you stand back up and hug her with all the enthusiasm of a tiny panda.

She sighs, dragging you towards the car.

The car ride home is somehow worse. Mostly because you decide to ramble your way out of drunken haze.

You slump against the window, mumbling like you're confessing to the glass.

“I love when he says my name,” you murmur, eyes half shut. “Especially when he says it… like it matters. That’s illegal. He should be illegal in congress.”

Your friend drives with one hand and regrets with the other. “Stop blabbering and go to sleep. Hangover's gonna kill you tomorrow.”

“But…… daddy, I love him” you wail, leaning over the gear shift, wiping your nose on her dress and she grimaces, laying you back on your seat.

“I’m never letting you drink again”

—

You reach the apartment in pieces.

One heel is already missing by the time the door clicks shut and you stumble inside like a defeated knight, blinking at the familiar walls like they’ve personally offended you, brfore making a determined beeline—not for the bed, not for the couch—

For the desk.

Natasha drops the keys and groans. “No. Absolutely not. You are going to sleep.”

“I am going to… process,” you say solemnly, colliding with the chair and half-falling into it. “With words.”

Natasha watches as you fumble your bag onto the floor, squint at the laptop like it might escape, and open it with all the gravity of someone launching a missile.

“Go to bed,” your best friend insists, tugging at your sleeve. “You are drunk. You threw up. Your mascara is… abstract.”

“I am still literate,” you argue, expression serious, cracking your knuckles with purpose. “And deeply burdened.”

You open the document and type one line.

Delete it.

Type it again.

Nat leans over your shoulder. “What are you even writing?”

“A document of emotional significance.”

“That’s called a diary. And it lives offline.” she facepalms.

You sway in the chair, pointing at the screen. “This is… more official.”

“No, this is more dangerous.”

You straighten suddenly. “I have been quiet for too long.”

“You have been loud for three hours.”

You stare at each other.

Your best friend sighs, rubbing her face. “Fine. I’m going to shower. When I come back, you will be right here.”

She lifts a finger. “Do not move from this chair.”

You salute so hard you almost tip over.

“Aye aye.”

Nat pauses in the doorway. “Do not write anything.”

You salute again. “I will not… write anything inappropriately.”

The bathroom door shuts with nat mumbling something like, “She’s gonna get herself fired”

Subtle foreshadowing.

The apartment goes quiet except for the hum of the laptop.

You squint at the blank page.

“Dear Sir,” you whisper, testing it out loud.

Then nod, satisfied.

“That is… respectful.”

Your fingers begin to move.

Slow at first.

Then faster.

Posture miraculously perfect despite the sway in your shoulders.

You mutter as you type. “Subject line is important. One must always… set expectations.”

You type one, squinting suspiciously before changing it.

Subject: Concerning a Conflict of Interest (Personal)

You beam.

“Yes. That is… accurate.”

You lean closer to the screen, hair falling into your face.

“It is with considerable reluctance….” you murmur, squinting, “…and an alarming lack of judgment that I must inform you of a developing issue within my professional conduct.

Your head dips, but the words keep coming.

By the time the shower turns off, the document is three paragraphs long, formatted perfectly, margins aligned, tone immaculate.

You stretch, proud.

“Good,” You say softly. “That was very… contained.”

Subject: Concerning a Conflict of Interest (Personal)

Dear Sir,

It is with considerable reluctance and an alarming lack of judgment that I must inform you of a developing issue within my professional conduct.

Said issue involves an excessive awareness of your presence in shared spaces, including but not limited to conference rooms, elevators, and the general vicinity of your desk.

Upon further reflection, I regret to report that the aforementioned “distraction” has escalated into what medical professionals might classify as longing.

This manifests in involuntary behaviors such as: – memorizing the cadence of your footsteps – experiencing unreasonable satisfaction when you request coffee – developing a heroic desire to defend you from mild inconveniences

Your finger slips.

Not save.

Not draft.

Post.

You blink at the screen,smiling proudly.

Then promptly rest your forehead on the desk.

By the time natasha appears in the doorway again, you have fallen asleep on the desk, drooling slightly. The laptop screen is still glowing.

five emails sent to congressman barnes

She groans, wondering what you might have written in there, before wrapping a blanket around your shoulders and leaving the room.

And you? well, you sleep peacefully, unaware of the upcoming storm that you have deliberately thrown yourself into.

——

The office is still half-asleep when he arrives.

Lights off in most corridors.

Security nodding quietly.

The city outside his windows just beginning to breathe.

This is his hour — before meetings, before numbers, before decisions that weigh on other people’s lives.

He sets his coat on the back of his chair, loosens his cufflinks, and sinks into his chair.

For a moment, he just stares at the desk.

Files stacked in perfect alignment.

His schedule printed and clipped the way you know he likes it.

A pen placed parallel to the folder, because you once noticed he straightened it unconsciously.

He exhales.

You do this every night. Stay later than you need to. Prepares tomorrow before you leave today.

He blinks, loosening his tie, eyes drifting automatically to the small details you leave behind:

A faint floral scent in the air.

A sticky note reminding him to eat lunch.

Your handwriting in the margins of a report—small, precise, careful.

You.

He exhales slowly.

He notices everything about you. He wishes he didn’t.

The way you bite the inside of your cheek when concentrating. How chirp “good morning” like you didn't lose sleep last night on today's meetings.

It is inconvenient, this feeling.

Unwise.

Ill-timed.

You're too young for him. Too bright.

Too unguarded in the way only someone who still believes in effort and fairness can be.

And he is… not.

He has meetings that decide futures. Scars from past battles. A life made of careful choices and restrained wants.

You're brilliant. Efficient. Too young to be tangled in something as complicated as him. And technically, professionally, untouchable.

He presses his thumb against the edge of the desk.

But he still looks at you, he can't help but watch you.

The way you tilts your head when thinking.

How you say his name in that sweet bird like voice like the name belongs to you.

How you stay late without being asked.

How you never look at him when you laughs — as if afraid you might give something away.

And God help him, he is in love with you.

Quietly.

Carefully.

From a distance he pretends is enough.

He has rules for himself:

Do not stare.

Do not linger.

Do not want.

Especially not someone so young. so innocent.

Especially not someone who trusts him with her time, her career, her future.

“She doesn't think of you like that, bucky. For fuck's sake, get a grip,” he murmurs to the empty office.

If only he knew.

He shakes his head, ridding himself of his regular morning brooding session and turns on his laptop.

The screen glows to life.

Inbox loads.

He expects to see board messages, legal reminders, market reports.

What he does not expect—

Company-wide post:

“Concerning a conflict of interest (personal)”

That… is not a budget memo.

He frowns, clicking it open.

And the universe collapses directly into his chest.

Dear Sir,

It is with considerable reluctance and an alarming lack of judgment that I must inform you of a developing issue within my professional conduct…….

Your words.

Your tone.

Your formatting.

His heartbeat stumbles as reads and rereads.

Subject: Clarification Regarding the Severity of the Situation

Dear Sir,

It has come to my attention that my previous messages may have understated the gravity of my condition.

I do not simply admire you. I suffer from an ongoing preoccupation with the way your sleeves roll up when you are focused, and how your expression softens when you believe no one is watching.

This has resulted in a persistent desire to be nearer to you than professionally necessary, and an irrational disappointment when meetings conclude.

The said meetings are spent by me wondering how you might react finding me on my knees under your desk, mouth working meticulously on your cock while you try to lead the meeting.

Hence, should you notice increased efficiency in my work, please be advised it is fueled entirely by such improper fantasies, inappropriate affection and an alarming amount of emotional attachment.

With troubling sincerity, Your assistant (emotionally unsound)

His throat tightens. Another message appears.

Subject: Formal Notice of Want (Unprofessional Edition)

Dear Sir,

It is no longer possible to categorize my feelings as a minor inconvenience. They have evolved into a persistent craving for your attention, your approval, and, regrettably, the warmth of your proximity.

I find myself imagining being seated on your lap while your metal fingers explore me in the ways I am unable to explain. Coaxing the whines and moans out of me as my warm, wet walls envelope the said metal fingers.

It is essential for you to know that the desire I have to be on my knees before you and have your hands rest in my hair while I wrap my lips around your cock is irrepressible.

It is pre-eminent for me to hear you moaning my name as you hold me against the glass window of your office, cock pounding into me while you usher me to stay quiet. And having you shove your fingers in my mouth when i’m unable to do so.

Should you inquire, my other fantasies include but are not limited to, riding you until you pass out, making out with you in your office, being bent over your desk while you fuck me from behind.

Then another. His eyes are wide enough to pop out of the sockets as he takes in each filthy, agonizing detail you've written in your letters.

Subject: Final Report on My Emotional Collapse

Dear Sir,

I hereby confess that my professionalism is now held together by routine alone. Beneath it exists an unrestrained desire to be chosen by you in ways that extend far beyond quarterly objectives.

I wish to be the first person you see when you arrive and the last you speak to before leaving. I wish to be indispensable not only in function but in feeling.

It is vital for me to be fucked by you so as to be relieved of having to do it myself while imagining your cock instead of my hands.

I find it highly uncomfortable to not he able to kiss you when I want to and to sit on your lap like it's my assigned position.

If this sentiment is inappropriate, I accept full responsibility. If it is mutual, I will require several minutes to process the miracle.

I remain, disastrously yours in spirit, The assistant who has crossed several emotional boundaries

By the time he's done reading the last of the letters, his heart is thudding wildly in his chest.

His throat tightens at the raw vulnerability in each letter.

Each one worse than the last.

Each one more honest. More filthy.

Each one written like a confession wrapped in professionalism.

He leans back slowly in his chair, hand over his mouth.

You wrote this, he thinks. Drunk, probably. Brave, definitely. Not knowing what it would cost you.

And somehow the fact that hits him the hardest is that you wrote all this… about him.

Of all people.

He scrolls again, rereading it. Not because he needs to. Because he wants to.

Because every line sounds like something he has been forcing himself not to feel.

He thinks of your age. Of his position. Of the way the world would look at this.

Then he thinks of the way you look at him.

And for the first time in months, the rules feel… negotiable.

He eyes close themselves, a tender, mischievous smile blooming across his face as an idea plants itself in his head.

—

You wake up with no memory of last night and cursing at the alarm clock.

“Ughh” you groan, rolling over in your bed to hide from the bright lights peeping in from the curtains, except you're not on your bed.

The desk chair creaks as you try to roll over and fall to the floor with a loud thunk.

“I'm guessing you're awake” comes Nat's sarcastic voice from the kitchen.

“Shut up. It's your fault” you wince, getting up.

“But it wouldn't be my fault if you get fired for being late at work.” She shouts back and you glance at the clock.

“FUCK”

You rush to the bathroom, yelping when you stub your little toe against the bed in hurry.

By the time you're ready and on the way to capitol hill, you're already late by an hour.

You dash across the parking lot and through the reception, towards your desk. Hoping you didn't miss any early morning meetings or events that you had to remind bucky about.

God forbid he misses something important because of your foolishness and you'd lose this one thing you love doing.

Only if you remembered the stuff you pulled off last night.

Your anxiety almost makes you trip over a crate of water bottles when Jane, from reception catches your arm.

“Careful there, honey” she smoothes your coat, smiling amiably before adding “congressman barnes was asking for you in his cabin”

“For me?” You confirm. It isn't too rare of bucky to ask for you, you're his assistant. Of course he'll call you if he needs something.

But you can't get the feeling out of you that there's definitely something wrong. You brush it off, thinking its because you're late that you're feeling this way.

Jane intercepts your train of thoughts “Don't worry, it's not because you're late. He needs you to review some files”

“Oh thank god.” You sigh a breath of relief and hastily walk over toward bucky's cabin after thanking Jane.

You don't knock before entering. Knowing he can hear you approach anyway. And after working for years as an assistant for him, you've crossed the bridge of professionality to being friends.

“You asked for me, sir?” you chime as you walk in, smiling slightly as you watch him write something in his notepad.

“If I didn't know any better, I'd think you like me correcting you every time you call me sir” he looks up, eyebrows slightly raised, voice lace with his teasing lilt.

You giggle, making your way across the room and sinking in the chair in front of him. “Jane said you wanted me to review some files?” You question.

“Yeah. Here. Have a look at this.” He slides a leatherback folder across the table toward you, and leans back in his chair, smirking.

His eyes are bright like you've never seen before, almost mischievous, like he's….. up to something.

You open the folder and stop dead at the very first line that gets your attention…

I find myself imagining being seated on your lap while your metal fingers explore me in the ways I am unable to explain.

Your eyes trail upwards, reading the whole thing.

What the fuck! Is this your formatting? Oh…fuck yeah it is.

You turn the page and find another letter, then another, then another.

Each one filthy.

Each one highly Unprofessional.

Each one vulnerable and raw in a way that you'd never be if you weren't drunk.

Oh My God

The memories slam back to you like a freight train. Nat's party, the shots, the desk……the emails, all of it.

You look up, embarrassed to your very bones and wishing the earth would swallow you whole, this instant.

You're so fired

“So…” Bucky begins and you close your eyes, knowing what he'd say. Something among the lines of ‘this was very Unprofessional’ or ‘you're fired’ but the words that come out of his mouth are something you'd never even thought of in your wildest dreams.

“About that….” he leans towards the table, tapping a spicy nasty line in particular “….how would you like to proceed”

Your mouth falls open but no sound comes out.

Out of all the ways you expected this to go, this was not it.

Your cheeks burn red with embarrassment and anticipation as bucky gets up and stalks closer towards you.

You turn in your chair as he reaches you, stooping down so he's eye level with you. His eyes are tender now. Almost adoring.

“You aren’t supposed to love me like this,” he murmurs.

Then adds just as quietly, “…but I don’t think I can pretend I didn’t see it.”

You don't know what you see in his eyes that makes you want to tell the truth “I do” you nod “I really do”

His metal palm cups your face as you whisper “I love you bucky”

He leans in, close enough that your nose nudges his, close enough that you can feel his warm breath fan your face.

His eyes flick toward your lips, then back at your eyes, giving you all the time to pull away if you want.

You don't.

You tip your face up, closing the gap and meeting his lips in a slow, tremulous kiss.

His lip quivers slightly when your tongue sneaks out to lick at it. His mouth opens itself, letting you in, deepening the kiss.

Your tongues slide against each other, exploring, fighting for dominance.

His hand is tangled in your hair, yours holding on to his shirt for dear life.

Bucky's palms slowly make their way across your back, settling themselves around your thighs and hoisting you up from the chair.

You break the kiss with a yelp as bucky places you on his desk “you wanted to be fucked on my desk, didn't you?” He pecks your lips, smiling.

You nod, shy beyond measure.

“I need your words, baby” his fingers grab hold of your chin, tipping it up so your eyes would meet his.

“I want you to fuck me, bucky” you murmur, hiding your face in his chest as he chuckles, breathy and amused.

“Not yet, sweetheart” he mutters, dropping to his knees.

“Buck, what're you—” you start but he shushes you.

“I need to taste you, baby. Can I?….please” his eyes are dark with lust, restraint running thin, yet he asks so nicely, so patiently, how can you say no to him.

“Have at me, bucky” you reply

His hands slowly skim across your thighs, sliding your skirt up until its bunched at your waist.

He groans at the sight in front of him, before leaning in and pressing his nose to the thin material of your panties.

You gasp at the contact. “Fuck, sweetheart. You smell so sweet” he mumbles against you, kissing your inner thigh before sinking his teeth into the flesh then soothing it with his tongue.

“Take them off” you tell him, voice breathy. As he hooks his fingers into the waistband and pulls the panties down slowly, you push them away when they reach your ankles.

Gasping as bucky's mouth finds your wet core. “Aww baby, you get this wet from reading your filthy letters” he teases.

You frown “No. It's—um—it's because of you” you confess shyly.

He smiles, proud and smug, pressing a chaste kiss to your core. Before his tongue slips out, licking a thick stripe through your warm, wet heat.

You shudder at the feeling.

“Fuck, You taste even better.” He pulls away, looking up at you before diving right back in. Slow teasing licks that make you gasp and chaste kisses that leave you craving for more.

Your hips move on their own. Inching closer to him, chasing more of his tongue. His mouth. “Bucky, please” you whine in frustration as he laps at your pussy, avoiding your clit yet again.

“Begging already? I haven't even touched you properly yet” his voice is low and teasing.

Your eyes narrow at him, feigning annoyanace “Shut —Ahh” your insult is cut off as a moan tears through you when his mouth closes on your clit, suckling slightly.

Your thighs shake where they're held apart by him around his head.

“Bucky—Ahh—just like that” he doubles down at your praise. Pushing two fingers inside of you while he nurses at your clit.

His fingers curl slightly, brushing a spot that makes you see stars. You whimper, already trembling in his arms as bucky's hands find their way to your ass, pulling you closer to his face.

The sound you make is animalistic as bucky picks up the pace. Fingers thrusting faster, mouth suckling harsher.

“Bucky—I'm gonna—”

“Yes, come on my tongue, sweetheart. Let me feel it” he curls his fingers, pressing harder against the spot that makes your hips jerk.

Your orgasm washes over you like a tidal wave. Making every bit of your body shiver as your thighs tighten around his head and you come with a choked gasp.

You're still gasping when he comes up to kiss you. You taste yourself on his tongue and moan into his mouth.

You grab the collar of his shirt, tugging him closer. His hands land on your waist, swiftly sneaking under your shirt to feel the warmth of your skin.

Your fingers make quick work of the buttons of his shirt before letting it fall to the floor while you stare at bucky's bare chest in awe.

You trace your fingers over every ridge of muscle, every scar tissue, every bulging vein, with reverence.

He lets you explore. “Like what you see?”

“I do” you smirk before pressing your lips to the centre of his chest.

You feel a shiver run through his body as he tries to maintain his composure, his hard length pressing against your exposed core through his pants.

Your lips move upwards, tracing the path of your fingers before pressing a kiss to his jawline and closing around his Adam's apple.

He groans and you feel it in your veins like a zap of electricity. Your mouth trails farther, kissing and nipping at his collarbone. His hips rut forward, helplessly, grinding against you.

“I need you inside me bucky” you murmur against his neck, impatient.

“I thought you'd never ask” Bucky groans, pulling away to rid himself of his pants.

Your mouth goes dry when you see him. All of him. His cock is thick and flushed pink. Slightly curved towards his stomach, veins clinging across his shaft.

You reach for him. Stroking slowly. His eyes close, “Don't—don't do that, or this will be over before it starts” he warns when your hold tightens around him.

“Then don't wait.” You inch closer, lining him up.

“You're sure?” He confirms. You nod.

He shakes his head “Words, baby”

“I'm sure bucky. I think I'd die if you don't fuck me now” he chuckles that turns into a choked breath halfway as he eases himself in slowly.

His eyes flutter shut, pulse thundering against your hand where its pressed to his chest. “Fuck” he swears “fuck, baby. You're—you're so tight. I won't last”

“Who said you have to” your reply is earnest “I just want to feel you buck”

“You feel so good, sweet girl” he pushes in slowly “Fuck, never felt anything like you”

You feel the sting of his cock stretch you open and you hide your face in the crook of his neck as he pushes all the way in and stills.

His breath is heaving “I won't move until you say so” his fingers tremble when they get hold of your hand, intertwining with your fingers.

The sting slowly fades into a warm thrumming beneath your bones. You roll your hips experimentally and sparks of pleasure shoot down your spine.

“Move, bucky. Please” you grind harder against him, making him groan before he pulls out almost all the way and sheathes himself back in.

He doesn't find a pace, too lost in pleasure, in you. His thrusts remain ragged and erratic as he tries to hold himself for longer.

His metal palm wanders down to rub tight circles on your clit and you cry out at the sensation.

Your orgasm hits you like lighting. Sudden and overpowering as your vision whites out and you almost scream “James”

The sound that comes out of him is almost a whine when he hears his first name from your mouth. His thrusts grow shallow, breath heaving, heart thundering as he spills inside groaning your name.

By the time you both slump into his chair, your ears are still ringing.

You're nestled on his lap, as he palms your ass in quiet, reverent caresses. He presses warm and chaste kisses to your forehead. Your cheek. Your nose.

“You still with me, sweet girl?” He asks, voice laced with concern and love. You nod against his chest. Tired and boneless.

“You did so good for me” he praises and heat rises to your cheeks yet again. You top your head up, enveloping him a kiss that's sloppy and playful, yet loving all the same.

“I guess getting drunk is not so bad after all” you pull away, smirking slyly.

“Of course not if it ends like this” he agrees slapping your ass playfully. You squeak before breaking into giggles.

“But I have a complaint” bucky states, making you meet his eyes in a serious expression.

“What complaint?” You question

“Next time you want to confess your naughty fantasies, you don't need to write letters.” He winks “you can just tell me” then swiftly adds “we'll recreate it however you want”

You hide your face in his neck with a loud whine, although the way your eyes shine and your lips twitch in a smile, betrays you.

And you think, “Sometimes the dumbest detours are the ones that accidentally lead you straight to the best place.”

A/N : When I tell you I was SUFFERING while writing the smut, it's an understatement. I rewrote it four times and I still think I've done a shit job. I find all the dialogues cringy and the description just feels bleh to me.

I'm so fucking nervous and anxious. If this fic flops, I'm never writing smut again, thank you 😭

Dividers : @dividers-are-us

Tag list : @redstarleftarm, @sweetserendipity65, @sambuckystony, @nymphhbabiee, @darlingdenise, @quantumbarnes, @i-gotta-go-so-much-bigger, @bstan01, @phoenix-in-writing, @singulartoast, @danerb67

Comment or send an ask to be added to tag list

[metal-armed-muse]

If I didn’t know she’d be fucked by bucky by the end of it, I’d have had the utmost second hand embarrassment. But it all works out in the end kept me going 😩

Such a delicious piece Daisy!!!

[salty-tang]

✉︎♡‧₊˚ dear my darling reader - event masterpost

banner credit: @superbassbuck / divider credit: @earthsmightiestbenders

hello everyone & welcome to the dear my darling reader: valentine’s fic exchange 2026 masterpost !

this started as a small idea to make valentine’s day a little sweeter, and what came out of it is this collection of stories written with care, enthusiasm, and a lot of shared love for bucky barnes ♡⸝⸝

every fic below was written as a gift for someone specific. there's been a lot of excitement, nerves, and frantic typing involved... so, a BIG thank you to everyone who joined in, and to everyone reading now!! im honoured by your presence!!

warnings: as this is an event masterpost, themes, ratings, and content will vary from story to story. please check each author’s warnings and tags before reading ! caveat emptor !

without further ado; read lots, reblog lots, and have fun, my darling readers ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂)⸝♡

ps click here to see the most updated version of the masterpost!

! new ! ˚₊ · »-♡→ Sweet Tides @indigo-jungle

⤷ Bucky Barnes x Reader You strike up an unlikely friendship with a strange man who ruined your farmer's market stand. As you spend more time together, you find yourself drawn to him.

! new ! ˚₊ · »-♡→ Stand up guy @pinksplace

⤷ Bucky Barnes x Reader With your date no where in sight you’re preparing yourself for another night alone, ready to file the whole thing under your growing evidence regarding the death of romance enter Bucky Barnes, friend, obscenely hot neighbor, and *checks notes* savior?

! new ! ˚₊ · »-♡→ be my valentine? @buckybsdoll

⤷ tfatws!bucky barnes x fem!reader Bucky's been your valentine for 3 years in a row — a silly tradition, two best friends making fun of a holiday you claim to hate. This year, he's got a date...and you're left alone on his doorstep — a basket full of food and all the love you didn't know you held for him.

˚₊ · »-♡→ everything she wants @spdrveil

⤷ bucky barnes x shield agent!reader normalcy isn't something you've ever thought possible in the life of a shield agent, but for the first time in his life, bucky can see right through you and your desire for a future without blood and guns.

˚₊ · »-♡→ you belong with me @elliestwoleftfingerss

⤷ bucky barnes x neighbour!reader bucky is afraid to tell you about his true feelings, scared to ruin what you have going on between you. a mishap makes him realise what he could be for you.

˚₊ · »-♡→ On the Subject of Marriage @salty-tang

⤷ wedding-hater groomsman!bucky x planning-the-wedding bridesmaid!reader It was supposed to be simple: plan the wedding, survive the vendors, don’t strangle Bucky Barnes. But perfection cracks when an unexpected disaster hits, and in the quiet aftermath you discover the last thing you'd expect - that falling in love isn't exactly what friends do.

˚₊ · »-♡→ Last Minute Gift @carvedmyheart

⤷ Bucky x Cage!Reader After the longest day of working, you sneak to the kitchen to whip up a quick gift for your Valentine, the Bucky Barnes.

˚₊ · »-♡→ Not just your neighbor @its-in-the-woods

⤷ Bucky tfatw x you (male) You were his neighbor and friend. Then somewhere along the way, one Valentine's day, it became more.

˚₊ · »-♡→ The Shape of Home @navybrat817

⤷ TFATWS!Bucky Barnes x Female Reader Bucky's attempt at cooking your favorite meal in his apartment leads to an important and heartfelt conversation.

˚₊ · »-♡→ obsessed and in love @heldbybarnes

⤷ beefy!bucky barnes x reader a year on the run turns you and bucky into undefined, can’t-keep-your-hands-off-each-other lovers—until a new recruit flirts with you back at the tower, and bucky proves exactly who you belong to by fucking you loud enough for everyone to hear… then admits he’s obsessed and in love with you.

˚₊ · »-♡→ Back Soonest, My Love @quantumbarnes

⤷ soldier!Bucky Barnes x commoner!reader A lover with a sword in his hand and his heart in his eyes. A lover who promises and always fulfills. When James Barnes gets back from war, he shows you his love written in the sky.

˚₊ · »-♡→ Our Coffee Shop @buckysdecaflove

⤷ Congressman Barnes x F!Reader After a couple of encounters in your usual coffee shop with Congressman Barnes you realize both of you are getting fond of each other.

˚₊ · »-♡→ A Bouquet of Flowers @badbitchsincebirth05

⤷ New Avengers!Bucky Barnes x Wife!Reader Bucky Barnes has never missed a holiday. After Hydra, he wanted to celebrate every single one, especially once you came into his life. However, this year for Valentine’s Day, a mission pulled him away. Or did it?

˚₊ · »-♡→ The Start of Forever @dei-dreamz

⤷ Bucky x Cage!Reader You and Bucky tie the knot, let the honeymoon chaos begin.

˚₊ · »-♡→ Darling Mine @tw1sters

⤷ 40s!Bucky Barnes x F!Reader Your deep-rooted feelings for Bucky Barnes — beautiful and untouchable — were never meant to surface. However, when he kindly invites you to spend Valentine's Day with him, you also don't expect yourself to hope for more.

˚₊ · »-♡→ A misunderstanding @buckysdecaflove

⤷ Grumpy!Bucky Barnes x Sunshine!F!Reader From the first time Bucky sees you he realize you're something different, but maybe eavesdropping is not his best ally at the moment. Now he has to remind himself not everyone is an enemy.

˚₊ · »-♡→ a rose a day @juniebjonesin

⤷ thunderbolts!bucky x female reader as the thunderbolts’ overworked assistant, invisibility comes with the job—late nights, impossible schedules, no recognition. so the single red rose waiting on your desk feels like a mistake. until another appears. then another. each morning brings a quiet gift, easing the exhaustion you’ve learned to carry. by valentine’s day, your desk holds a full bouquet—and far too many unanswered questions.

˚₊ · »-♡→ Don’t Wait For the Sky to Clear @singulartoast

⤷ Farmer!Bucky x Popstar!reader A storm blew you off course and into his bed leaving an invisible string tying you to rugged farmer Bucky Barnes. Can he rodeo the red carpet while you write melodies in meadows?

loading...more fics incoming...!

[superbassbuck]

what an adorable event ☹️💗 love is in the air!! check out these amazing fics

[navasnook]

Thinking about how the fandom harassed them out of finishing one of the most iconic smut fics. I hope @no-droids is doing well.

[mandoloriancookie]

500 posts!

[biancodinera-deactivated2026011]

[wintersoldierfell]

[vampypandalover]

If you want to be added to the tag list, please comment here. Thank you 🫶🏽✨

A/N: This is a love triangle between reader, Bucky Barnes and John Walker. We will begin this story following most of the MCU timeline, starting with Civil War.

This will be written in the second POV like all of my fics, but reader will have a name, Mara Hart, her name won't be used often, but will pop up every now and then, especially her nickname, Em, her last name will make sense as we delve further into the plot.

LAST UPDATED: 12/31/2025

WARNINGS: Sexual content. angst, grief/mourning, post-Blip trauma, PTSD themes, depression/anxiety themes, nightmares/insomnia, emotional conflict, relationship strain, breakup/separation, love triangle, jealousy/possessiveness, manipulation by authority figure (Valentina), MCU-typical violence/injury, references to torture/war trauma, guilt/self-blame, heavy emotional themes. Includes canonical “dusting”/Blip (temporary character death vibes).

SUMMARY: You joined the Avengers to do good, to make a difference, to be the steady hands in a world that never stops shaking. Then you meet James Buchanan Barnes, and “steady” becomes something else entirely: running, hiding, holding on too tight, and learning to love a man the world keeps trying to turn into a weapon. When Wakanda becomes a refuge, you let yourself believe in quiet mornings and gentle touches. Then the universe breaks in half.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

[vampypandalover]

I got to playing with Canva recently, I forgot how much I enjoyed editing pictures and designing. I used to do a lot of photoshop in the past, but for some reason stopped. Anyway, I'm a little rusty still, but I updated the pic for my Fault Lines fic.

[superbassbuck]

super-soldier problems. — [bucky barnes x f!reader]

⚠︎ warnings: 18+ MDNI, smut, porn and absolutely no plot, hyperspermia, creampies, bucky doesn't believe in condoms, blow jobs, facials, bucky trying to be gentle and failing miserably, sensitivity and overstimulation, slightly dom!reader, aftercare, soft!bucky, dirty talk, praising, pet names: "doll" "sweetheart "baby"

a/n: very inaccurate depictions of what the super soldier serum would have an effect on when it comes to sex, but good thing this is all fiction! kind of an addition to my hyperspermia drabble. this is nothing but pure filth. i had to sit in the corner and think abt this one for a bit

word count: 4.6k masterlist

synopsis: After having a girlfriend, Bucky’s finally learning that there is much more that cums with the super-soldier serum than just muscle and strength.

Bucky never saw this coming.

After years of being a super-soldier, he thought he finally had it all figured out; the unlimited stamina, the lack of fatigue, and the sheer strength and muscle that the average person couldn’t obtain in two lifetimes of effort.

But Hydra’s serum never came with a handbook on side effects. Bucky never imagined he’d encounter anything like this—until he met you.

You were the first woman Bucky had dated since coming out of cryofreeze, and he was damn well going to make sure you were the last. Being with you made him open up both emotionally and physically. He let you into his heart and, well... you made the mistake of letting him between your legs.

The first few times you had sex, you assumed his uncontrollable trembling and heavy breathing were just nerves. After all, it had been decades for him. But even buried deep inside you, he always made no effort to move. His muscles strained and his face twisted into a grimace, as if it were taking every ounce of his will just to hold back.

Hold back on what, exactly?

At the time, you didn’t know yet.

“Bucky,” you whispered, resting both hands on his shoulders.

He hovered above you, eyes half-lidded, his bare chest heaving as his strong arms caged you against the mattress. “We don’t have to do this if you’re not ready. We can take our time. It’s okay.”

“No. It’s not that I’m not ready,” Bucky let out a low, agitated groan. “I’m more than ready, doll. I just—fuck. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

You frowned slightly, reaching up to brush a strand of hair from his face. “You’re doing great, honey. Just… move your hips. Create a little friction, like this—”

You began to rock your hips up against him. Bucky’s head dipped, his arms nearly giving out as he threatened to collapse on top of you. The feel of your tight, silky walls rubbing against him was clearly more than he could handle.

“Fuck—Jesus, baby!” he barked out, his hips twitching involuntarily as he rutted even deeper into you. “Careful—shit, I’m gonna cum if you keep moving like that—”

“I know, baby,” you encouraged. “I want you to cum.”

When your boyfriend—who’s a literal super-soldier—is a panting, trembling mess on top of you, eyes rolled back and babbling filthy words, how could you possibly stop?

Especially since, despite being together for a while, you had yet to actually see him cum.

Determined, you wrapped your legs tight around Bucky’s waist. The sudden movement caused him to lose his balance and topple fully onto you, his weight pressing you into the bed as his cock pushed even deeper. A broken moan tore from your throat as you felt him sink more inside, rocking your hips rhythmically against his.

“Shit, baby—this isn’t good—” Bucky babbled, his hips slowing their movement as he rocked lazily against you. “Fuck… I’m—”

You felt your heart leap into your throat. Every time Bucky was close to cumming, he pulled out at the last second and never let himself finish the job. He’d always excuse himself and run to the bathroom, never saying what for—but he’d always come back with his shoulders a little less tense.

It didn’t take more than one brain cell to piece together that he was finishing on his own in there.

But now, with your legs clamped tight around his waist, you weren’t going to give him the opportunity.

You squeezed your legs tighter, your cunt clenching around his shaft as you felt him pulse. Bucky groaned, his nose nuzzling into the crook of your shoulder as his whole body began to shudder and shake against yours.

“Baby, I—I can’t—” Bucky moaned. “I’m gonna cum inside you. I can’t… need to pull out!”

“It’s okay, Buck,” you reassured him against his ear, your hands rubbing up and down his broad back. “I’m on the pill. You can cum inside, baby.”

“Fuck—no, that’s not it…” Bucky grunted, his voice breaking as his breathing grew even heavier. “Fuck… baby. I can’t cum inside you—you can’t take it.”

“Bucky, just do it,” you groaned, ignoring his warning as you ground your hips up one more time.

You didn’t care about his excuses.

All you wanted was to finally feel him come undone inside you.

“Cum inside me, Bucky. I want to feel you. It feels too good to stop now.”

He let out a panicked, strangled sound, his metal hand clenching the bedsheets so hard the fabric began to tear. He tried to lock his arms to push himself up, desperate to pull out before it was too late, but you weren’t having it. You shifted your hips, tilting your pelvis just right to catch the head of his cock, locking your legs tighter around his waist and pulling him back in.

He moaned loudly as he sheathed back into you, the sensation of your tight cunt deliciously squeezing his shaft making his mind go dizzy.

“Wait—baby, no!”

Bucky arched his back as his cock pulsed and throbbed, his head snapping back as his eyes rolled into his head. The wet heat hit your cervix, making you gasp, but it didn’t stop there. He just kept coming, and coming, and your legs felt like jello around him as he kept pumping you full.

Bucky’s body spasmed, his muscles bunching and twitching as the super-soldier serum’s side effect made itself known. He was absolutely flooding you, filling you deep. You felt like you were drowning inside, the hot, thick weight of him filling every spare inch of you. It was too much for your body to hold—the excess began to spill out, slicking your thighs and the bedsheets beneath you as he continued to pulse and pour into you.

He let out a long, broken moan, finally collapsing against your chest as a trembling, sweaty mess.

He looked completely mortified, refusing to look at you as if he expected you to shun him or push him off in disgust.

“I told you,” he rasped, his voice shaky. “I… I’m sorry. Fuck. Let me grab a towel to clean you up—”

“Bucky, wait—”

Before you could even tell him to stay, he quickly scrambled off the bed. He fumbled for his boxers, pulling them up as he ran for the bathroom in a hurry.

While you waited for Bucky to return, you flopped back onto the bed and let out a disbelieving breath. You propped your legs up, tilting your head down to see the “damage” he was so painfully ashamed of—and your heart skipped a beat.

You were a total mess.

His cum was dripping down to your navel from when he had desperately tried to pull away, trailing down to your mound and between your folds. When you lifted your leg a little higher, your cunt made an embarrassing squelch as more of his seed trickled out of you, staining the sheets.

“Oh my god,” you gasped quietly, eyes going wide at just how much he filled you.

Your face went bright red over the fact that he could produce such a… massive load. It was a testament to just how much the serum had changed him, turning him into something more than human, yet vulnerable in the best possible way. Knowing that his body was capable of filling you so completely—of literally overflowing—was the hottest thing you had ever experienced.

Bucky returned, but he wouldn’t even look in the direction of the bed. He moved shamefully, his head hung low and his shoulders hunched as if he were trying to make himself smaller. He had a clean, damp towel in his hand, and he moved to the edge of the mattress without saying a word.

“Bucky…” you spoke softly, reaching out for him.

“Don’t. Just—don’t,” he muttered, his voice cracking. He gently spread your legs to get to the mess, but his eyes stayed fixed on the towel, never once meeting yours.

As he began to wipe you down, he just kept repeating the same words under his breath, like a mantra of shame. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, doll. God, I'm sorry.”

The towel was already becoming saturated, and he had to fold it over twice just to try and catch what was still sluggishly leaking out of you. Every time he moved the cloth, more spilled out, coating his fingers and the sheets. The more he cleaned, the more he seemed to sink into himself.

“Look at you,” he rasped, his face twisting with guilt. “You’re a mess. I... I literally drowned you in it. I told you that you couldn’t take it, and I still let it happen. I shouldn’t have let it get that far.”

He looked like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin, his movements frantic as he tried to clean you up. He was so caught up in his own head, so convinced that he had done something disgusting, that he didn’t even notice you weren’t looking at him with disgust at all.

You reached out, your fingers gently catching his wrist to stop his frantic movements. “Bucky, look at me,” you said, your voice firm yet soft. “It’s okay. I promise, I’m okay—”

“No, it’s not okay.”

Bucky ran a hand through his hair in frustration as he finally met your eyes. He swallowed hard, his gaze searching yours as if he were expecting you to judge him for what he was about to say.

“It’s the serum,” he confessed. “It doesn’t just make me stronger or faster. My metabolism, my recovery, even this. It’s like my body is constantly over-performing, and working overtime to produce more of everything. It doesn’t matter how much I try to hold back or how many times I go to the bathroom before we start… it’s always like this.”

He looked away, his jaw clenched with embarrassment.

“And it’s not just the physical part. The serum enhances every feeling that’s already inside you. Everything is louder. Every feeling is dialed up to fucking eleven. When I’m with you, and I’m… I’m horny,” he blushed, sheepish. “It’s not just a feeling. It’s feels like a goddamn command. My body just takes over.”

When he finally looked back at you, his blue eyes were watery with guilt, and it made your heart hurt.

“Especially because it’s you. I love you so much, and that love just feeds the serum. It makes me want you so bad I can’t breathe, and then my body reacts by… by doing this to you. I’m a super soldier, doll. I’m supposed to have discipline. But when I’m inside you, I’ve got none.”

You reached up, cupping his face with both hands and forcing him to keep eye contact. You didn’t care about the mess all over your body and the sheets; you just wanted him to see that there was nothing to be ashamed of.

“Bucky, listen to me,” you pressed, thumb swiping over his cheek gently. “I don’t want your discipline. I want you—all of you.”

You leaned in closer, your voice turning into a comforting whisper.

“And if you want my honest opinion, I think it’s incredibly hot. Knowing that you want me so much that your body literally overflows. It makes me feel wanted in a way I can’t even describe—”

Bucky flinched slightly, his face getting even redder. He broke contact by looking down at the sheets in denial. “You’re just saying that to be kind. You’re covered in me, doll. I ruined the bed. I practically drowned you. There’s nothing ‘hot’ about losing control like a—” he grimaced, “—pervert.”

“Okay…” you took a careful breath, trying for a different angle. “What if we found a way to make you feel more in control? Something to try to contain it?"

He glanced at you, wary. “Like what?”

“We could start using condoms,” you suggested softly. “The heavy-duty kind. It would catch everything, Bucky. It stays inside the latex, so there’s no mess, and no reason for you to feel like you have to run to the bathroom the second you’re done. Then after we have sex, we could just lay together instead of having to worry about staining the sheets. Would that make you feel more comfortable?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart.”

“We could at least try it?”

Bucky stayed quiet, his eyes drifting down to the towel in his hand. You could see the gears turning as he considered the idea of a physical barrier—something to keep his “situation” under wraps so he could focus on you instead of his own anxiety.

But the truth was—he hated that he even had to consider this.

Internally, every heightened cell in his body recoiled at the idea of a barrier—even if it was something as flimsy as a condom.

The serum didn’t just make him produce more; it made him feel more.

Every nerve ending made him sensitive, making the sensation of being inside you an all-consuming experience. His mind couldn’t fathom putting a layer of latex between himself and your warmth. He lived for the feeling of your tight walls clenching around him, the friction of skin-on-skin, and the way he could feel every internal pulse of your climax against his own. To him, a condom felt like a cage, a dulling of the one thing that made him feel truly alive and connected to his humanity.

But when he looked down at the towel—stained with the evidence of his own lack of control—the shame came roaring back harder.

He couldn’t keep doing this to you— drowning you, staining everything, making the room reek of sex, and then hiding in the bathroom like a pathetic, wounded animal.

“Yeah,” he lied, forcing a smile. “Yeah, doll. If that makes you feel better… if it keeps things cleaner… then we’ll use ‘em.”

He reached out and squeezed your hand, his metal fingers careful and gentle, hiding the fact that his body was already mourning the loss of the direct contact he craved. He’d trade his own pleasure for a bit of his dignity back if it meant he didn’t have to see you covered in his ‘freakish’ excess ever again.

“We’ll try it your way,” he whispered, leaning in to press a lingering, bittersweet kiss to your forehead. “Whatever it takes to keep me from making a mess out of you.”

A few days had passed, and the heavy-duty box of condoms sat on the nightstand like a silent mediator between his shame and your desire.

Now, with the lights dimmed, Bucky was over you again. But everything felt wrong. To his enhanced senses, the thin layer of latex felt like a suit of armor. He was moving into you, but the friction wasn’t the same. He couldn’t directly feel the small flutters of your muscles or the exact texture of your silkiness that usually drove him mad.

It was driving him towards a different kind of frustration—a sensory deprivation that made him groan in irritation.

“You okay?” you asked softly through a moan as he rutted into you.

“Fine,” he grunted, his thrusts diving deeper into you, desperate for that satisfaction.

Bucky grabbed your thigh, hiking your leg over his shoulder as he repositioned himself. One strong, flesh arm tensed next to your head while the other whirred in its vibranium casing. He angled your hip so he could fuck even deeper into you, your back arching as the tip of his cock hit your sweet spot.

“Oh, fuck! Bucky—!”

“Fuck,” Bucky rasped, his hips moving at an uneven, frantic pace. “If you keep crying out like that, I’m gonna cum.”

The condom suddenly felt excruciatingly tight, stretching to its limit as he felt himself begin to pulse. His body shuddered as his cum started to balloon the latex; the sensation of that extreme stretch made him panic.

He couldn’t stay inside. The pressure was simply too much.

The rubber wasn’t going to hold.

“Shit—I can’t—”

You felt his hips pull away, and you wrapped your arms tighter around his back, whimpering as you tried to hold him, but it was no use. “Buck—stay inside, please—”

And with a groan, Bucky pulled out at the last possible second.

He collapsed onto his knees between your legs, his breath ragged and hitching desperately. The condom was dangerously full, the reservoir tip engorged and already starting to seep at the base from just pumping it full.

He couldn’t stop. His hands flew down, his fingers—both vibranium and flesh—wrapping around himself over the slipping latex. He began to stroke himself with quick, heavy pumps, the sensation of cumming so much making him painfully sensitive—his body couldn’t help but crave more. His back arched, and he gasped as he watched his own seed continue to flood the condom, spilling over the rim and coating his knuckles as it dripped down on the bed.

You could only pant, watching him finish himself off right in front of you.

He looked like a wreck, his eyes rolled back and his chest heaving. Even with the latex in the way, the release was still so intense, it was dripping out of the condom and making the room smell like the musky scent of sweat and sex.

Bucky let out a long, jagged exhale that sounded more like a snarl than a breath.

“Fuck,” he rasped, irritated. He didn’t look at you—he just stared at his hands, watching the excess drip onto the sheets he had tried so hard to keep clean. “I knew it. I knew the goddamn condom wouldn’t hold.”

You swallowed hard, sitting up and reaching for him, but he pulled away. He didn’t seem sad this time. Instead, his shoulders were shaking with the frustration of himself and the entire situation.

“Honey, please—”

“I knew it wasn’t going to work,” he snapped. His blue eyes were dark, blown out with frustration. “I told you. I told you it was too much for a piece of rubber, and I just fucking embarrassed myself in front of you again.”

He gestured wildly at the mess—the leaking latex and the white streaks dirtying his vibranium fingers.

“I couldn’t even feel you, doll. I was suffocating in that thing, and I still ended up making a mess of everything anyway.” He let out an agitated sigh. “It’s a joke. The whole thing is a joke. I’m trying to make love to you like a normal partner should—trying to be a goddamn gentleman—and I just end up looking like a fucking animal jerking himself off on the bed because I can’t even stay inside my own girlfriend.”

You were starting to get tired of him apologizing for something that made your blood sing, tired of him treating his own body like a broken weapon instead of a source of pleasure. He was so busy being angry at the mess that he was completely missing the fact that you were practically fawning over him because of this.

Instead of arguing or trying to soothe his ego with words you already knew he wouldn’t listen to, you decided to show him exactly what you thought about his ‘problem’.

You sat up and crawled towards him, your legs finding his waist as you toppled yourself over him. Bucky was so caught off guard, so deep in his self-loathing, that he didn’t even resist as you forced him down against the pillows.

“Sweetheart—what are you—!”

“It’s always about what you think, Bucky,” you said.

Your hand reached down, your fingers sliding down his stomach and fingers grazing gently against his half-hard, half-soft, cock. “You’re so busy deciding for me that this is ‘disgusting’ or ‘wrong,’ but you never once stopped to even consider what I think.”

Bucky’s breathing grew heavier at the sight of you on top of him, his flesh hand coming up to hover over your waist, unsure if he should pull you closer or push you away. “Doll, look at me. I’m a mess.”

“Yeah,” you sighed wistfully, taunting. “But not nearly as messy as I want you to be.”

Your hands found the base of the condom, pulling it off in one quick swipe. It popped off the head of his cock, and his dick sprang free, sending the cum pooling out of the rubber and onto his shaft, his pelvis, his thighs, and the sheets.

“Jesus—baby! No! It’s getting everywhere!”

Without another word, you leaned down and took the head of his cock into your mouth, your tongue immediately swirling through the thick, salty cream of his seed.

Bucky’s entire body jolted at the feel of your warm tongue caressing his tip. A broken, high-pitched moan escaped his throat as his back arched off the bed. His fingers tangled into your hair—not to pull you away, but to hold you there in sheer disbelief.

You sucked him deep, your throat working to swallow the heavy pulsing of his cock, making it clear with every wet, hungry sound that you didn’t just want him—you wanted all of him.

Even the parts he was afraid of.

He was trembling underneath you, the frustration and shame finally melting away into helpless surrender.

“Fuuuck,” he whined, tossing his head back against the pillow.

The sound was a complete contrast to the angry, frustrated man he had been just seconds ago. Encouraged by his moans, you swirled your tongue around the sensitive veins of his shaft, lapping at the leftover seed from before.

Because he had just finished, his nerve endings were painfully sensitive and overstimulated. Every wet slide of your lips felt like an electric shock to his system. His metal hand clamped onto the headboard, the wood creaking under his vibranium grip, while his flesh hand stayed buried in your hair.

“Doll, it’s—too much,” he gasped, though his hips stuttered upward in a helpless, jerky motion. “I’m too sensitive... I just... god, I can’t breathe.”

He was hyper-responsive, his heart beating wildly in his chest. Despite his own pleas, he didn’t pull you away—and he didn’t want to.

The sensation of you worshiping the very thing he’d been ready to hide, and the feeling of your mouth swallowing every last remaining drop, was overwhelming his brain. Every time your lips hit the base of his cock, or your cheeks hollowed out to take it all in, it elicited a sharp, broken sob from his throat.

And when you looked up at him— your lips glistening and chin smeared with his seed—and gave him a slow, hooded stare, he felt like he was going to collapse right then and there.

“Shit, baby. Take it out… out of your mouth. Fuck.”

Bucky’s hands shook as they tightened in your hair, trying to tug you away, desperate to spare you from what was about to come. But you were determined, your hands locking onto his thighs to keep him in place.

You had made a silent promise to yourself to take every bit of him, and once the first thick pulse hit the back of your throat, Bucky’s protests instantly dissolved into a moaning mess.

He felt as if his entire body were on fire; his mind and vision spun in circles. The feeling of your wet lips suctioning around the base of his shaft and your warm tongue pressed against the heaviness of his cock was all too much.

He lifted his head off the pillow, watching your throat work rhythmically as you tried to keep up with his pace. Seeing you so dedicated to him—seeing your cheeks stretch and your eyes water as you refused to let a single drop go to waste—did something to his heart.

“Fuck… baby,” Bucky rasped. “Look at you… you’re taking everything.”

As he watched you through hazy eyes, he realized just then how good it felt to be taken like this.

To have his flaws not only accepted, but also devoured.

Eventually, the volume of his cum became too much. You gasped, pulling back as you began to choke on the thick, salty heat, and as soon as his cock was free of your mouth with a wet pop, the pressure sent his seed nearly spraying across your face. It painted your cheeks, your chin, and even caught your eyelashes as he continued to pulse.

Bucky was spent, his muscles twitching as his chest heaved. “Fuck.”

He should have felt ashamed for cumming too much again. He should have ran to the bathroom like he always did, grab a towel, and clean you up.

But as he watched his seed slowly trail down your cheek—a thick white contrast against your flushed skin—he couldn’t look away, even if he wanted to. You were panting, your lips parted and glistening, looking like a beautiful, sultry masterpiece he had personally painted himself.

“My god,” he breathed, his voice gravelly.

Bucky reached out with his flesh hand, his fingers trembling slightly as he cupped your jaw. His thumb moved slowly as he smeared a streak of his mark across your cheekbone.

For the first time, he didn’t want to clean you; he wanted to look at you like this for hours—covered in his love.

“I thought I was making a mess of you.” he whispered, his thumb grazing your bottom lip. “But you look... god, you look perfect like this.”

Bucky’s heart leaped in his chest as he watched you lick your lips, tasting him. Then you gave him a soft yet sultry smile that finally shattered what little defense he had left.

“I love it, Bucky,” you whispered. "I love every bit of you—especially the mess.”

You leaned back slightly, tilting your head as the light from the table lamp caught the white streaks on your skin. “Besides,” you teased, your a little playful and teasing. “Don’t I look so pretty, marked by you?”

Bucky’s breath hitched, a low groan rumbling in his chest at your words. He had never thought of seeing it this way, but witnessing the way you batted your lashes, your face dirtied with his release—it was as if the question had uncovered something dirty deep inside him.

The shy, apologetic man was gone, replaced by a man who wanted nothing more than to paint his partner with his love.

His vibranium hand came up to slide behind your neck, his cool fingers tangling in your hair to hold you steady as his eyes took in your debauched face. Meanwhile, his flesh hand cupped your jaw, giving it a firm squeeze as he watched your pearly lips pucker.

“Pretty doesn’t even cover it,” he rasped, his eyes dark and possessive. “You look like you belong to me. And if you’re tellin’ me you like it... if you’re tellin’ me you want this...”

He parted your mouth with his thumb, his own seed already slicking his digit as he pushed past your lips. Bucky let out a deep, shuddering exhale as he watched you instinctively twirl your tongue around his thumb, the way your cheeks hollowed out as you sucked on him.

“If this is what you really want, then I’ll give it to you, baby. Every time—I’ll give it all to you. And from now on, I expect you to take it all.” He pulled his thumb back slowly, watching the strand of saliva and seed stretch between his hand and your lips.

“And you will take it all, right?”

You nodded, eyes hazy with lust and love. “I will.”

no words. thank you for taking the time to read my work, and I hope you enjoyed!

I do not have a tag list. to get notified for fic updates, please follow @notify-superbassbuck and turn on notifications.

[stanmarvelous]

Idk how you do it every. Damn. Time. But I’m not complaining! Jfc

[itzzkaylaaa]

⋆｡˚ 𝐒𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐓𝐨 𝐘𝐨𝐮…

[snoopysupe]

tower fics are so back baby

[metal-armed-muse]

babydoll - part 1

pairing: Bucky x fem!reader

word count: 4.2k

spoiler free summary: Bucky subscribes to an OF page and becomes obsessed

summary with spoilers: you swore you could keep your two lives separate: medical intern by the day, faceless fantasy online by night. But then Bucky Barnes walks in for a check up... and later logs in to watch you strip. He knows. You don't. And the deeper he falls, the harder it is to keep both worlds from colliding.

warnings: age gap (reader is an intern ; probably not more than 25/26), highly suggestive themes, masturbation, MDNI, Bucky is kind of a perv, mention of reader being a camgirl. no use of y/n.

series masterlist || next part (coming soon)

Hospitals smelled like too much bleach and not enough comfort, and Bucky hated them for it. The fluorescent lights hummed with the kind of energy that could rattle a man’s teeth if he stayed too long beneath them. And the sterile white walls reminded him of too many nights spent under government watch. But apparently, getting stitched up required tolerating the atmosphere, no matter how much his instincts told him to walk out the door.

He shifted against the edge of the bed, broad shoulders hunched to fit in a space that was clearly built for men half his size, and tried not to fidget. Tried being the important word. His boots tapped against the floor before he forced them still. He could hear the shuffle of sneakers in the hallway—someone small and quick, light tread, probably not the doctor.

The curtain swayed open.

And there you were. The sight of you hit harder than any bullet had. Fresh, clean, unspoiled. A kid tossed into a den of men who bled on their paperwork.

What the hell are you doing here, sweetheart?

He should’ve been protective. Instead, his cock twitched like a compass arrow finding north.

“Hi,” you said, voice carrying that nervous-but-polite cadence of someone still finding their footing in a world where everyone seemed older, smarter, faster. The little badge clipped to your white coat marked you as Medical Intern. Baby Doctor. That explained the wide-eyed brightness in your gaze, the way you looked at him without flinching. Most people noticed the metal arm first, the scars, the sheer size of him. You… didn’t. Or if you did, you had the decency not to let it show.

You smiled. A professional smile. An innocent one. Bright enough to be taken for granted.

Bucky’s cock twitched. Again.

“Sergeant Barnes?” you asked, stepping closer with a clipboard hugged against your chest like a shield.

“Bucky,” he corrected automatically, voice rougher than he meant it to be. He cleared his throat. “Just Bucky.”

You nodded, tucking a stray strand of hair behind your ear. “Alright, Bucky. I’ll just be checking your vitals.”

Vitals. Christ. That word never sounded dirty until now.

Your fingers busied themselves with the blood pressure cuff, unwinding it in neat movements that were all practiced efficiency. You didn’t even look up when you added, “Left arm or right?”

The right, obviously. Except his brain supplied a flash of your small hands on cold vibranium and he nearly groaned aloud. He shoved the thought back, forcing his voice steady. “Right’s fine.”

You nodded again, stepping into his space, so close that he could smell the faintest trace of soap clinging to your skin. You smelled clean. Pure. God, you smelled pure. He hated how much his body reacted to it, a curl of heat spreading through his stomach like he’d been denied water for days and you were the first drop he’d tasted.

“Relax your arm for me,” you instructed softly, and your voice had no idea what it did to him.

Relax. Sure. As if his cock wasn’t already half-hard, pressed against the inside of his jeans with a stubbornness that only humiliation would solve. He let you guide his arm, the cuff snug around muscle you had no business touching, and tried to focus on anything other than the image of you straddling his lap with that same professional calm, taking your damn time.

Your hand steadied his wrist while you adjusted the cuff, your skin warm against his. He should’ve looked away. He didn’t. His gaze was locked on your face, on the way your lip caught between your teeth as you concentrated, on the faint flush blooming high on your cheeks under the hospital lights. Entirely too tempting.

The machine whirred to life, and your thumb pressed absently against the inside of his wrist, holding him still. Just a little touch. Barely there. But his world narrowed to that exact point, to the thrum of his own pulse racing under your fingertips.

He could feel it. The way his heart thudded too fast, too loud, betraying him. You felt it too—he saw the slight lift of your brow, the tiniest glance at the monitor, as if you noticed the numbers climbing higher than they should.

“Your heart rate’s… elevated,” you murmured, professional curiosity in your tone. You tilted your head, soft hair sliding across your shoulder as you studied the reading. “Are you feeling anxious?”

Elevated. Cute way of putting it. If you had any idea what you were doing to him, you’d run screaming for the exit. Anxious? Also not the word. Starving, maybe. Starving with a feast dangling just out of reach.

“I’m fine, doll,” he rasped before his brain caught up, the nickname slipping free like muscle memory.

Your eyes flicked up at that. Like you were startled, then immediately darting back down like you weren’t supposed to acknowledge it. The tips of your ears went pink.

He shifted in his seat, trying to angle his hips discreetly so his hardening cock didn’t become the most obvious thing in the room. His thighs tensed, fighting against the impulse to lean forward, to breathe you in. He was a grown man, a goddamn soldier, and here he was undone by a woman half his size with a stethoscope around her neck.

The cuff released its pressure with a hiss, and you gently unwrapped it, fingers brushing over his skin again. Too soft. Too careful. He wanted to grab your wrist, hold it there, press your palm lower until you realized what kind of mess you’d made of him. Instead, he forced his hands to stay on his lap, knuckles white, acting as if he’s fully in control.

Control. He had it on battlefields, in missions, in rooms filled with men twice his size and half his skill. But here? One little intern with her soft hands and oblivious eyes, and his control was circling the drain fast.

“Blood pressure’s normal,” you said quietly, scribbling something on your chart. “Pulse is… a little fast.”

He smirked despite himself. “Guess you got that effect on me.”

You blinked at him, eyes wide, lips parted like you weren’t sure if he was teasing. And then you gave a quick, polite laugh, the sound so light and unassuming it made his cock twitch all over again.

God, he was sick. Getting turned on by that kind of laugh.

“Let’s check your temperature next,” you continued, like you hadn’t just unintentionally edged him. You pulled a thermometer from your pocket and shook it once. “Open up.”

He raised a brow, and the corner of his mouth curved. “Careful, doll. You sure you wanna tell me that?”

Your head snapped up, startled, then you caught the smirk tugging at his lips. “You—oh. Right.” You rolled your eyes, but your ears burned brighter. “Mouth, please. Just the thermometer.”

Just the thermometer. Christ almighty.

The way the word ‘just’ left your mouth was obscene. He could picture you saying it with your knees spread, eyes wide—just the tip, please.

Words had no business sounding like that, but they did in your mouth. Soft, polite, clinical—and his brain twisted them into filth anyway. Vitals. Temperature. Pulse. Everything suddenly translated into the rhythm of your body pressed against his.

Bucky obeyed, slipping it beneath his tongue while you scribbled again on your chart. He caught himself watching your hands, slender fingers curled around the pen, imagining them wrapped around something else entirely. His cock strained against denim, shameless in its demands, and he shifted again, praying you didn’t notice.

The thermometer beeped, mercifully ending the torture, and you plucked it away. Your knuckles brushed his jaw in the process, and that simple contact sent another bolt of heat straight south.

“Normal,” you murmured, jotting it down. “Everything looks good.”

“Does it?” he muttered under his breath.

You glanced up, not catching the meaning, and gave him that professional smile again. Sweet and entirely unassuming. The kind of smile that made him want to ruin you, to see what it looked like when it twisted into something less innocent.

Your stethoscope shifted as you moved, catching his eye for the first time. A sleek, silver chestpiece gleamed against your coat, the tubing draped loose around your neck. Innocent little intern, holding an instrument that, in his mind, was suddenly far too easy to imagine in other contexts. Wrapped around your bare skin, dangling while you gave him a proper medical checkup.

He dragged his gaze away, biting the inside of his cheek.

“You’ll be seen by the doctor shortly,” you said, checking the last box on your sheet. “Do you need anything in the meantime? Water?”

Just you, his brain supplied.

Bucky shook his head, then caught himself staring at your wrist again, at the delicate flutter of your pulse beneath your skin. He didn’t think before he moved.

His fingers brushed your wrist lightly, stopping you before you could pull away. It was innocent enough—a graze of skin against skin, the kind of contact people forgot two seconds later. But not him. His thumb pressed just slightly, enough to feel that rapid beat thrumming there, and his breath caught in his throat.

So fast. So alive.

He looked up, found you staring at him, puzzled by the sudden contact.

“You’re good,” he murmured, voice lower now, as if it cost him something to say it. “Strong pulse.”

Your lips parted, confusion flickering before you gave a shy smile, as though assuming he meant nothing by it. “Uh… thank you?”

He let go quickly, covering the movement by raking a hand through his hair. “Just sayin’.”

You gave him a look—half professional patience, half flustered amusement—and jotted your final note before tucking the clipboard under your arm. “I’ll let the doctor know you’re ready. Have a good night, Bucky.”

The curtain swished shut after you, flimsy fabric standing between him and the only thing that had made this godforsaken hospital bearable. The scent of you still clung to the air, faint soap and skin, and it left him hard and aching like some pervert who’d gotten off on nothing but a smile and a stethoscope.

“Yeah,” he muttered under his breath, shifting uncomfortably on the exam bed. “Real good night.”

The hum of fluorescent lights filled the silence again, but all he could hear was the echo of your laugh and the rush of your pulse beneath his thumb.

The door clicked shut behind him with a weighty finality, the kind that told Bucky he wouldn’t be leaving the apartment again until he damn well wanted to. The city outside was loud, but inside his space there was nothing but the quiet hum of his fridge and the low creak of old floorboards under his boots. The place felt too small for him, like his own walls were pressing in just to hear what filth was rattling around his skull. He dropped his jacket over the back of the couch, tugged at the buttons on his shirt until they came loose, and muttered under his breath.

“Vitals my ass,” he grumbled, though the corner of his mouth twitched like he couldn’t quite shake the ghost of amusement.

His mind was still annoyingly full—filled with the image of a certain intern, the sound of a voice too sweet for the kind of filth that ran on repeat in his head the whole way home. He told himself it was nothing, just another pretty face in a city filled with them, but his cock hadn’t gotten the memo. The bastard had been hard from the hospital to his front door, pressed tight against denim like it had a grudge.

He swore he could still smell you on his skin, faint soap and something warmer that wasn’t really there. You followed him home, didn’t you? Not literally, but in his head. In his jeans. He squeezed himself harder, punishing grip for a ghost that didn’t even know what it did to him. You don’t belong here, not in this space where he usually kept things quiet, normal. But his brain dragged you in anyway, set you on his couch, in his lap, against the wall.

“Christ,” he muttered, giving himself a frustrated squeeze through his jeans as he kicked his boots off. “You’re relentless.”

The couch creaked when he dropped onto it, leaning back with a groan, one hand already sliding toward the buckle of his belt. A man was allowed his distractions. He deserved this much, didn’t he? A quick hand, a little p*rn, something to ease the ache crawling under his skin. Nothing complicated.

Except—

His phone buzzed.

He blinked down at it, brows knitting together. A link. From one of the guys he knew—no one important, not someone he’d even call a friend, but someone who thought they were being generous, apparently.

“Great,” he muttered, opening it anyway. “If this gives me a virus, I’m breakin’ somebody’s fingers.”

The screen loaded, and Bucky’s jaw went slack.

Well, hell.

It wasn’t the usual cheap, overlit p*rn site. No, this one was cleaner and darker, dripping with suggestive promise. OnlyFans. He’d heard of it, sure—everyone had—but he never thought he’d end up here. The profile on his screen was all curves and shadows, soft lips and sultry glances caught in the glow of low light. A woman who knew exactly where to put her hands, where to put the camera, how to make a man lean forward without realizing it.

He looked at the username.

babydoll.

That simple word did nothing to ease the tension of his already half-hard dick.

It wasn’t you, but it will have to do. His cock didn’t give a damn about logic. All it saw was a woman with the same tilt of her head, the same softness clinging to her lips, the same body language that made him imagine you beneath hospital lights. He soon imagined it was your face on that body. Pathetic. Can’t even jerk off without dragging you into it.

“Fuck me,” he breathed, thumb already swiping down to catch another clip, another still photo.

He wasn’t planning on this. But Christ, if he wasn’t grateful.

The first video he clicked was free—thank god for small mercies—and Bucky shoved a hand through his hair as it started to play.

She was kneeling on a bed, low light painting gold along the curve of her shoulders. A camisole clung to her, thin straps sliding down one arm as she leaned forward. Her lips parted in a slow, deliberate smile. What he really liked about it was there were no rush, no fake moans, no garish music. It was just the sound of her breath, the quiet hum of fabric sliding over skin as she adjusted, and then—fuck. Fingers pushing under the edge of the cami, revealing nothing and everything all at once.

“Jesus, doll,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “You’re really somethin’, huh?”

His belt clinked open. Jeans shoved down just enough, briefs tugged low. His cock sprang free, the head already flushed dark with need. He spat into his hand, wrapped it around himself, and sighed through clenched teeth at the first stroke.

Didn’t matter that it was his own hand. His mind had already made the swap. Those fingers on the screen were yours. That smile that wasn’t on the screen was yours. Every filthy stroke, every obscene sound, it all became you—sweet little intern who probably thought about textbooks before bed.

The video wasn’t long, but it was enough. She trailed her fingers up her thigh, nails glinting faintly, and his hand tightened instinctively, matching the rhythm of her movements. His hips jerked up into his fist, his breath ragged. But still he couldn’t look away.

“This site’s gonna kill me,” he muttered, jaw tight as he pumped himself faster.

The next clip played automatically—her, this time, sprawled on fresh white sheets, an oversized shirt slipping off her shoulder. She dragged it slowly, tantalizingly, down her arm, exposing the line of her collarbone before she tugged it across her chest. His cock twitched in his hand.

He jerked himself in long, steady strokes, twisting at the head, imagining the way her lips—no, yours—would part if you saw how hard he was, how red the tip had gotten under his fist.

He groaned low, hips lifting into his hand, precum slicking his palm. The ache in his balls was sharp, insistent, pulling another muttered curse from his lips.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Bucky hissed, hand moving faster. “Look at you. Know exactly what you’re doin’ to me, don’t ya?”

His thighs tensed, as he stroked himself harder, every movement desperate now. The room filled with the slick sound of his fist, the ragged drag of his breathing, and the faint echo of her moans from the phone’s speaker. He leaned forward, eyes glued to the screen, muttering filth like he couldn’t stop himself.

“Take it off, baby. C’mon. Show me. That’s it. Good girl,” he groaned, chest heaving.

The panties slid lower, slow enough to make him snarl under his breath, and he pumped his cock in time with the reveal, precum smearing over his fist, dripping down to his knuckles.

“Gonna make me fuckin’ come,” he muttered, voice tight. “So pretty, sweetheart. God, you’re perfect.”

He was close, too close, every nerve in his body wired hot and twitching. His cock was throbbing, and he fisted himself harder, hips jerking forward helplessly.

“Don’t stop,” he begged the screen, jaw locked, eyes burning with the effort to hold on. “Keep goin’, doll, keep—”

Her hand slid between her thighs, fingers disappearing out of view, and Bucky’s eyes rolled back. The sound she made—soft, breathless—was enough. He grunted, as his cock pulsed in his hand, thick ropes spilling across his stomach and chest in hot spurts.

“Fuck,” he groaned, pumping through it, milking every last drop until he slumped back against the couch, sweaty and spent.

His phone screen glowed, video still playing. He dragged a hand down his face, and barked a short, breathless laugh.

“Yeah,” he panted, staring at her frozen frame. “Definitely not anxious, sweetheart.”

He shut his eyes and saw your face again. The way you’d looked at him in that hospital room—polite, focused, not knowing you’d just rewired his whole damn night.

His cock twitched, already half-hard again despite the mess across his abs.

“Shit,” he muttered, grin tugging at his lips as he wiped his stomach with his shirt. “You’re gonna ruin me.”

Bucky should’ve stopped there. Should’ve closed the app, washed his hands, gotten himself a drink of water, maybe even a goddamn sandwich to replace the calories he’d just shot across his stomach. A rational man would’ve stopped.

But he wasn’t rational, was he? Not with his cock twitching again, sticky mess barely cleaned off, and her body frozen on his screen like an invitation. His cock wasn’t listening to logic. It was already stirring again, stubborn bastard twitching against his thigh as if to say, round two, soldier.

“Yeah, you knew exactly what you were doin’,” he muttered, thumb hovering over the glowing blue button on the screen.

Subscribe.

His bank account probably groaned. His cock didn’t.

The little lock icons disappeared with a flourish, opening a gallery that looked like paradise designed specifically to wreck him. Videos, photos, captions written like a wink.

And the smartest damn part of it? Her face was never visible. Not once. Not a slip, not even by accident. Every video cut off right at her chin, every photo stopped where lips might’ve been, every single piece of content scrubbed clean of identifying detail. Just shadows and curves, hands and hips, soft sighs and low moans.

It was genius. Frustrating as hell, but genius. He couldn’t put a face to the body, couldn’t tell if she was the girl from the corner bodega or the bartender at his favorite dive. Just a body and a voice that sounded like it belonged in his bed. But his mind still dressed her body with your face.

“Smart little thing,” he muttered, stroking his half-hard cock lazily as he scrolled. “Keepin’ yourself safe. Bet you drive a lotta guys nuts like this, huh?” He was not even ashamed of how he was just talking to himself for almost an hour now.

The first subscriber-only video loaded: her in nothing but an oversized shirt, perched on the edge of her bed, bare thighs pressed together. She giggled softly at the camera, tugging at the hem like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to pull it up or down.

His cock surged against his palm.

“Fuck, look at you,” he rasped, starting to stroke himself properly again. “Teasin’ me already.”

One video bled into another, then another. Some were slow, her voice lilting, playful. Others were raw—her fingers slick with her own arousal, her breath catching, hips arching against the sheets. Bucky’s cock didn’t stand a chance. He stroked himself raw, muttering low curses, grunting each time she moaned like she could hear him through the damn screen.

By the time he’d wiped himself down for the second time, sweat dampening his chest, he figured he was done. Tapping out, he told himself, reaching to shut it down.

And then he noticed it.

It wasn’t something deliberate. It wasn’t a prop or a part of the act. It was just a detail in the corner of the frame that most men would’ve ignored.

But he wasn’t most men. He was a soldier. He’d been trained to scan, to notice the background as much as the foreground. And once he saw it, he couldn’t unsee it.

A stethoscope.

Lying forgotten on the nightstand, the chestpiece catching the soft lamp glow. Just sitting there, plain as day.

Bucky froze, fist wrapped around his cock mid-stroke, staring like the damn thing had reached through the phone and grabbed him by the throat.

“…no fuckin’ way.”

His heart stuttered, pulse kicking hard in his throat. He zoomed in, as if that would make a difference, as if the resolution could confirm what his gut was screaming.

It looked exactly like the one he’d seen earlier that night.

At the hospital.

Around your neck.

He swallowed hard, heat prickling the back of his neck.

The stethoscope could be anyone’s. It’s not untrue that lots of people would have the same one. It’s a fairly common tool. And it was not a big deal.

Except it was a big deal, wasn’t it? His body reacted before his brain could shut it down, cock twitching with a surge of blood so sudden it made him grunt.

“Goddammit,” he hissed, dragging his hand down his face.

He tried logic. Plenty of girls leaned into the nurse-doctor thing. There were whole corners of the internet dedicated to that fetish. A stethoscope didn’t prove anything.

But his cock had been hard both times. At the hospital when you brushed his wrist, all innocent with your clipboard and nervous smile. And now, watching this faceless woman bend and moan on a bed with a stethoscope tossed carelessly in frame.

That wasn’t coincidence. That was his body recognizing something before his head wanted to admit it.

He pumped himself slow, eyes locked on the frozen image of that stethoscope. His mind wouldn’t stop overlapping—your soft laugh at the hospital, her sultry sighs into the mic. Your careful touch on his wrist, her fingers disappearing between her thighs. Both felt the same to him now.

“Fuckin’ cruel,” he rasped, hips rolling into his fist. “All sweet by day, and this at night. You’re a goddamn tease.”

The video resumed, her body arching, hand moving in a rhythm that had him jerking his cock harder, faster, precum smearing down his shaft. He bit his lip, chest heaving, eyes flicking between her movements and that glint of silver in the corner.

“Bet you don’t even know I’m sittin’ here losin’ my mind,” he groaned, pumping himself furiously now, thighs trembling. “Bet you’d blush if you knew how bad I want it.”

The overlap was too much—the intern’s gentle voice, the cam girl’s filthy moans, tangled into one woman who existed to wreck him. His balls drew tight and he stroked faster, groaning through clenched teeth.

He came hard, spilling across his abs again in hot, messy streaks, grunting as his hand milked every last drop. His cock pulsed, twitching, even as his body slumped back into the couch.

He was still staring at the phone screen like it might confess the truth if he glared long enough.

The stethoscope glinted back at him.

He huffed out a laugh. “Either I’m losin’ my mind,” he muttered, tugging his jeans back up, “or my dick just solved a mystery.”

next part (coming soon)

dividers by @strangergraphics and @cafekitsune — thank you!

tag list - @nonyabusinesswhatmynameis @loganficsonly @frostwitchandapples @buckybarnesmysaviour @opheliabbarnes @its-in-the-woods @herejustforbuckybarnes @muchwita @pretty-girl-rock-3 @jayayayaya @amethystbucky (if your username is in bold, I cannot tag you for some reason. i’m sorry!)

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[myfictionaldreams]

Feel free to delete this so so fast if it's not something you'd envision or simply dont like!! Would totally get that.

So...mafia!Stucky where one of Steve's enemies touches her wrong or tries to kiss/touch her at an unguarded moment and she really struggles with intimacy and closeness after it because she was so scared something else was going to happen. So Steve and Bucky just help her heal slowly until she can accept their touch again.

⁀➷ Taking Myself Back // Mafia!Stucky x F!Reader

Summary: You’re the heart of a dangerous mafia empire, but when someone violates that safety in a sinister way, the men who would burn the world for you must learn to hold you gently while you heal.

Requested by: Thank you for your request! I've tried to be sensitive with this request, so please read with caution, as lots of discussion regarding non-consensual kisses, the guilt and trauma that comes with this, etc.

Tags: 18+ readers only, smut, poly relationship, angst, non-consensual kiss, off-screen murder, discussion of trauma, slowburn recovery, therapy, panic, emotional healing, comfort, domestic bliss, emotional sex, size kink, slight pain kink, reader in control, aftercare

Words: 5.5k

my masterlist 📚 AO3 Link

The party sparkled like sin dressed in silver. It was hosted in one of Manhattan’s oldest, most prestigious hotels, where the walls were white marble, and the ceilings stretched so high they couldn’t have brushed the heavens. 

The chandeliers dripped crystal like champagne bubbles. The music was live, seductive and loud. Power hummed beneath every clink of glass, every sharp laugh, every hushed deal made between men in designer suits and women with diamonds heavier than their morals.

And in the centre of it all, you were one of the most protected partners, simply because you were theirs.

You could feel it in the way eyes turned when you passed. Not just because you were beautiful, though Steve always said you were. Not just because your dress shimmered like poured mercy – Bucky’s pick. No, it was because you were theirs. Claimed in every way.

Everyone here knows to whom you belonged. Not to approach a risk to their lives.

Steve Rogers, the name that’s been whispered around the room since you all arrived at the party. Leader of the most powerful Mafia groups on the East Coast.

Sharp jaw, sharper mind. In a black on black suit tailored to perfection, his broad shoulders commanded every room he entered. Golden hair slightly longer than usual, just about curling at the nape of his neck, blue eyes calm, for now.

Then, there was the man at his side. James Barnes, Bucky. Second in command and Steve’s shadow, enforcer and best friend since childhood and lover in their adulthood. Where Steve was calculated, having a powerful aura, Bucky to his enemies was chaos in a leather jacket. Shoot first, ask questions later.

Hair shaved to a buzzcut, stubble rough and eyes like winter, cold and brutal unless they were looking at you. Then they softened along with his entire personality.

To the world, they were terrifying. To you, they were just Steve and Bucky.

The men who made you tea just right. The men who let you curl up in bed between them with a book, crying about the latest plot twist. They were gentlemanly and always had you as their priority, even more than the job.

They had blood on their hands, so much of it, but never, ever yours.

So when you excused yourself for a drink that night, you weren’t afraid. You told Sam, your bodyguard and best friend, and he gave you a quick nod, eyes constantly scanning. He already had the guest list and names of every security guard in the building; it was supposed to be a safe event. 

But a crash came from behind the curtains near the far hallway. Sam swore under his breath, a hand on your shoulder giving a reassuring squeeze before darting off to see what was going on. Just for a second. Just enough. 

You never saw the man coming. One moment, you were reaching for a champagne flute. Next, a voice slid over your skin like oil.

“So this is the girl who made Rogers go soft.”

You turned abruptly, instincts flickering. Tall, Armani, Snake’s smile. You recognised him faintly, something about a gun shipment Steve had shut down last month. A name Steve refused today, always followed by ‘he’s nothing but a pest’.

You stepped back, trying to look out of the corner of your eye for Sam, Steve or Bucky. “I’m not interested.”

He followed your movement, now crowding you back against the wall. “I just wanted to see what the fuss was about. He lets you walk around unchained? Must not care that much.”

His hand snatched your waist. You gasped, trying to jerk back, but he was already leaning in.

“Don’t–”

“Relax, babe. You might just enjoy it.”

He kissed you. Slamming his chapped lips to yours, brutal and in a way to own. You tasted and smelled alcohol, cigarettes, and his cologne, stinging your nose. Then–teeth. Pain bloomed as he bit your bottom lip hard enough to split skin. 

You shoved at him, hands trembling, but he only smiled, licking his lips as he backed off.

“Bet they don’t kiss you like that.”

You didn’t move. Couldn’t. Not until his footsteps disappeared and you were left standing, stunning, body trembling from head to toe. You’d always thought, if ever in a situation like that, you’d be able to fight someone off, punch them, kick them, but it was over in seconds, before your brain was even able to comprehend what was happening; he was already biting your lip. It was only the pain that had brought you back to the disgusting moment. 

And now, you didn’t know what to do.

“Doll?” Bucky’s voice pulled you back.

He was walking toward you, leather gloves on, suit unbuttoned, tie loose from him, pulling at the discomfort of it. His smile faltered when he saw your face.

“Hey, baby girl.” Steve was beside him, standing just as tall, a steady behemoth of a man. “I’ve been looking for you. You okay?”

You blinked at them, hands by yourself, neither of them noticing the broken champagne glass behind you that you’d dropped during the altercation.

“I.. I was kissed.”

You meant to shout it. Yo, you barely whispered. The music swelled, some jazzy, smoky song, and they didn’t catch it. Bucky tilted his head. Steve stepped closer, his hand just starting to lift to your cheek, when he froze.

His eyes caught it—the blood.

“Your lip,” Bucky growled, his entire posture changing.

Steve’s whole body locked. He set the glasses down on a passing tray without breaking eye contact. “Who did that?”

Not a question. A death sentence.

You opened your mouth, but no sound came out—just a shallow breath. Steve’s hand slipped into yours, his thumb stroking gently.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Bucky lowered his tone, already flanking your other side. “Let’s get you home and safe.”

They moved like shadows, swift and terrifying. No one stopped them, no one would. You barely registered their arms wrapped around your back as they pushed through the crowd. White noise was ringing in your ears so that you couldn’t hear them shout for Sam.

The car was already waiting. You barely registered the click of the locks before you were inside. Steve knelt in front of you in the cramped space. Bucky took the seat beside you, tense but tender. You were still frozen.

“What happened?” Steve’s voice held a gentleness that drew you in, making you feel safe. He never sounded like this for anyone but you and Bucky.

You looked down at your lap, vision blurring. “He cornered me. Said… said you didn’t care because I wasn’t leashed. Said he wanted to know what all the fuss was about to make you so soft.”

Bucky swore under his breath, his grip on the door causing the metal to grind as he bent it in his fury.

“He bit me,” you whispered, feeling nauseous all of a sudden. “When I didn’t kiss him back.”

Steve’s hands closed around yours, calloused, big and warm. “You’re safe now. I promise you, baby.”

“I didn’t scream. I couldn’t scream. I didn’t even react until he pushed me. What is wrong with me?”

“Oh, baby…”

Bucky leaned in now, cupping your face between his gloved hands. “You did nothing wrong at all. You were in shock.”

“I didn’t stop him–”

“You got away. That’s all that matters now,” Steve said firmly. “Sam is going to take you home, okay? He’ll stay with you and Dodger. We’re going to take care of it. Unless you want us to stay with you?”

You shake your head, finding comfort in just being with Sam and needing to get as far away from this place as possible. A part of you also wanted them to take care of him, knowing what it meant, and for once, you didn’t want to stop them.

You sat up front with Sam, the heater on full, Bucky’s blazer over your lap. You ignored the drive home, only noticing when you got home.

The gates to the house opened, a soft glide of steel and security, letting the car through before they shut again with a cold, final thud. No one got in unless Steve Rogers authorised it.

Sam, sleeves rolled up, gun visible at his hip, still scanned the driveway as he approached the door, rolling the car to a stop. He jumps out of the car first, noticing you aren’t making any attempt to leave, so he dashes to the front door, opening it to let your fur baby out, Dodger. 

Your Rottweiler child ran to your side of the car, pawing against the door and whining to get to you. The moment the car door opened, Sam moved.

You didn’t remember getting out. You barely felt your heels touch gravel before your knees buckled slightly, and then there were strong arms around you. “Whoa there, Boss Lady,” Sam encourages gently, with a hint of worry. “I got you.”

He picked you up as if it were nothing, his strong arms supporting your body as he carried you into the house—your safe space. With guards lined up properly, even in the shadows, the camera tracked every angle, and steel shutters could lock down the windows at the tap of a button. 

But inside, it was filled with soft, warm lighting, polished wood, pillows, and throws on every surface. Family pictures cover the walls and countertops, and the faint scent of vanilla and pine fills the air from the numerous candles.

Sam nudged the door open with his foot and carried you straight to the oversized couch in the lounge. Dodger padded alongside, whimpering softly, knowing something was wrong. He rested his big head on your knee the moment Sam laid you down.

“There we go,” Sam said, crouching to slip off your heads. “These heels look like medieval torture. You need a new stylist. Don’t tell Bucky I said that.”

You didn’t answer. Just stared ahead. He took the pins and clips out of your hair next, his hands slow and unthreatening. One by one, they clinked into a bowl on the table. 

“Let’s get this fancy armour off, huh?” Sam asked in a vice-feather-light voice. “Can’t fight a war in sequins. Would you like me to grab your robe? Or hell, I’ll just cut this thing off. I’ve seen you wear Steve’s shirts before. Man’s got a closet the size of a panic room.”

Still no reply. Sam paused. His smile flickered, but he didn’t push.

He draped a soft throw blanket around your shoulders, smoothed it into place, and finally sat beside you, one hand rubbing Dodger’s ears, the other loosely resting on the back of the couch near you, just in case you needed to hold it.

“You’re safe now, y’know,” he tried to point out gently. “You got two pissed-off monsters with hearts of gold out there painting the city red for you. And me. Your favourite. Your handsome, emotionally available bodyguard. I mean, really, you got a dream team.”

You blinked, barely moving or acknowledging him.

Sam sighed, softer now. “You don’t have to talk yet. I'm not going anywhere.”

The silence that followed was deep. Too deep. It stretched between the flickering firelight and the long windows that overlooked the garden beyond, where shadows moved with the wind.

You didn’t cry or shake. You just sat there, blank and silent, your hands in your lap like you didn’t know how to move them anymore. 

It wasn’t long before the front door opened again. You didn’t hear it. But Dodger did. He lifted his head and let out a soft boof–not a bark—a greeting.

Sam looked up as the footsteps approached, heavy and slow. Steve appeared first, jacket gone, shirt sleeves rolled up. His knuckles were scraped raw, blood drying at the cuticle. His face was unreadable. Controlled. But his eyes were burning blue.

Bucky followed close behind, sweat evident on his temple, the vein in his neck thick and pulsing.

“Hey, baby,” Steve said softly, crouching in front of you. Bucky knelt beside you, metal hand twitching once before curling into a loose fist. You blinked at them both.

They were so beautiful, and here they were covered in someone else’s blood. “Are you–” Bucky started.

But the moment Steve reached out to brush his fingers against your arm, you flinched. Not hard or with a scream, just a tiny jerk of your body. The movement had Steve freezing on the spot and Bucky’s mouth closing as his jaw tightened.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Steve whispered, pulling his hand back. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

You looked at them both, wide-eyed and hurting, mouth slightly open like you wanted to speak but didn’t know how. “I didn’t mean to,” you said, and god, your voice broke around it. 

Sam stood quickly, as if he was struggling with his own emotions in the situation, but trying not to make it about himself. “I’ll give you guys some space.”

“No,” you say, panic rising for the first time. “Stay.”

That stopped them all. Sam nodded slowly, sitting right back down again. “Right here, Bossy Lady. Got nowhere else I’d rather be.”

Steve and Bucky stayed where they were, kneeling, hands still, hearts breaking.

Dodger nudged his head under your hand. You stroked him without thinking, fingers clutching his fur. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” you whispered.

“There is nothing wrong with you,” Steve said fiercely, and then softer, “You’re allowed to be scared. You’re allowed to heal.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Bucky confirmed firmly. “You don’t have to touch us until you want to. Just let us stay close. Let us keep you safe.” 

You looked at them both at the softness beneath all that blood. And you nodded, just once. That was enough.

~~~~~

It didn’t go away. The blood washed off. The lip healed. The bruised echo of his grip on your waist faded. But the way it felt, it stayed.

It crept in every time you looked in the mirror. When you felt their eyes on you. When you would suddenly remember his hand on your body, your body tensed like it was waiting for something, whether it be pain or shame. 

Every time Steve reached out to pass a glass. Every time, Bucky moved too suddenly from behind. Every time a hand brushed too close to your skin, you flinched, froze, or fled. You hated it. You hated the silence that lay between you, the warmth you could no longer reach.

And worst of all, you hated that they still looked at you like you were soft and good and theirs, even when you felt like a broken person that they should’ve thrown away.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Steve's voice is quiet, spoken from across the long, sunlit kitchen where he was slicing apples. He hadn’t looked up; he didn’t have to. He always knew what you were thinking before you could say it. 

“I let him,” you say, barely audible, staring into space.

The knife stopped. “You didn’t,” Bucky said firmly from the breakfast table, where he was sorting through files. His voice wasn’t cruel, though. “You froze. That’s not consent. That’s survival, Doll.”

“But–”

“Sweetheart,” Steve said, crossing the room now. He leaned down, not touching, just crouched enough to meet your eyes. “If it were me, or Bucky, if someone hurt us, would you think we’d asked for it?” 

Your throat tightened. “No. Of course not.”

“Then don’t do that to yourself,” Bucky assured.

Later that night, you stood at the doorway to your shared bedroom, staring at the bed like it was a trap. “I can’t,” you said, voice trembling. “I’m sorry. I want to, I do. I just feel wrong. Like if I sleep next to you, I’ll ruin everything.”

Steve stepped forward, calm and warm, and so tall, but never threatening. “You don’t have to explain, baby. If you need space, that’s okay.”

“I want to sleep alone,” you whispered, then added quickly, “but I don’t want to be without you. I just– I don’t want to wake up and not know where you are.”

Steve didn’t even hesitate. “We’ll sleep here, right next to you. We won’t go anywhere,” he said, nodding to the floor beside the bed.

“Guys, you don’t have to–”

Bucky was already grabbing pillows. “Yeah, we do. Trust me, the carpet is a hell of a lot more comfortable than some of the shit holes me and Stevie used to sleep back in the day, isn’t that right?”

Steve nodded along, grabbing a couple of blankets. “Absolutely. Why do you think I picked the thickest carpet available? I want to be able to sleep comfortably anywhere in our house.”

You opened your mouth to argue, but Steve was now taking off his jacket, preparing himself for bed. “You’re not alone, baby,” Steve continued. “Not for one fucking second.”

Dodger padded in, tail wagging as he jumped up onto the bed like he knew this was where he was supposed to be. His head rested near your feet, his body a silent comfort. 

You climbed into bed slowly. It felt too big without them beside you, but not empty. You looked over the edge.

Bucky was on his back, one arm behind his head. Steve was curled into his side, hand resting atop Buckys waist, looking in your direction.

“I’m sorry,” you said again, even though you weren’t sure for what anymore.

Steve’s eyes softened as he gave you a reassuring smile. “Stop apologising for healing.”

“Yeah,” Bucky added. “You’re doing this your way. We’re just along for the ride and to catch you when you’re ready.”

Your heart twisted. “I think I need help,” you finally admitted. “Like, real help. Not just from you. A therapist, maybe.”

Neither of them moved. Then Steve nodded once. “Okay.”

“That’s good, Doll. We’ll find someone. Whoever you need,” Bucky added.

“We’ll be there every step,” Steve nodded. “Even if we’re just waiting in the car. Even if you never want to be touched again, we’ll still be yours.” 

You bit your lip, tears welling.

“Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank us for loving you,” Bucky said softly. 

That night, you fell asleep with your hand dangling over the side of the bed, not even realising when Bucky’s metal fingers slowly curled around yours. He never squeezed or pulled, just held on. Just stayed. 

Maybe it was the fact that it didn’t feel like flesh that didn’t have you flinching and pulling away. But for the first time in days, you didn’t dream of being alone.

~~~~~

The car ride home was silent. Not awkward or cold. Just quiet. You stared out the tinted window, cheek resting against the cool glass, the therapist’s voice still swimming somewhere in your mind.

“What happened to you wasn’t your fault. You’re allowed to feel angry. And sad. And scared. You can take your power back in small ways. Let’s find what safety looks like for you.” 

You hadn’t cried. Not during the session. But now? You were so tired. Your bones ached in ways they shouldn’t. Your chest felt heavy. And as Sam pulled the car into the long drive, the right of the house, tall and bathed in the soft green of the massive garden, made something in you twist.

This was your home. You were supposed to feel safe here. Sometimes, you even did, but today, it felt too quiet.

Until you opened the door, the scent hit first: vanilla and cinnamon, the candle Steve always lit when you had a bad day. You blinked, confused for a moment. You hadn’t texted them yet. They didn’t know you were back.

Except, of course, they did.

Steve stood at the kitchen island, his sleeves rolled up, his hair a little messy from running his hands through it too much. He wasn’t pretending to be calm, you could tell. His jaw was right. His eyes were on the door the moment it opened.

Bucky was sitting at the breakfast table, tapping a pen against his knee, posture stiff with worry. His leather jacket was draped over your usual chair.

Both of them stood when they saw you.

“His,” you said, voice tentative.

Steve smiles just a little. “Hey, baby girl.”

Bucky moved first, but stopped a few feet away. “How’d it go?”

You dropped your bag. “Hard.”

“That’s okay,” Steve said gently. “It's supposed to be. You're doing the hardest part.”

“I don’t want to talk about it yet.”

“Then we won't,” Bucky said quickly. “Want tea? Food? =you want us to leave you alone or…?”

You stepped closer, “Just sit with me?”

They didn’t hesitate.

You sat on the couch with Dodger curled beside you, his weight a comfort against your thigh. Bucky sat on the floor, back against the couch, his hand resting on the rug near your feet but not quite touching. Steve brought you tea, your favourite, and then joined Bucky on the floor too.

None of you spoke. The fireplace crackled softly. After a few minutes, you reached out. Not much, just a few inches. But your hand brushed against Steve’s shoulders, and instead of freezing or pulling back, you let it rest there. Bucky saw it. His eyes softened, and he did not say a word.

The next few days came in waves. You started reclaiming control in little ways. You chose your own clothes again, rather than just oversized old shirts, and you began to wear their clothes for comfort.

You asked Bucky to cook your favourite breakfast. You asked Steve to walk with you through the garden. You even took Dodger out to the back grove one afternoon.

Each time, they praised you without smothering. “So proud of you. That was brave. You’re doing so good.”

And you were. You were building a version of yourself again, one that didn’t feel dirty or fragile or broken. You even held Bucky’s hand through a movie. His warm hand, the callused one that trembled when you reached for him, like he didn’t want to believe it was real.

But then, the kiss sent you right back to the start again.

It was small. It was supposed to be. You were sitting on the porch swing with Steve at sunset. The sky was bleeding gold, and he’d just made you laugh, a soft, breathy thing that felt unfamiliar in your mouth.

He turned to look at you, grinning, and you didn’t think. You leaned in—a small kiss on the cheek.

But before your lips touched his skin, something snapped. Your chest locked. Your stomach lurched. You recoiled so fast the swing creaked behind you.

“Shit–” Steve started, but stopped the moment he saw your face.

Bucky was at the door in an instant, coming to you, but not too close. You were breathing hard, hands shaking. You couldn’t stop blinking.

He didn’t even look like the man who hurt you. But your body didn’t care. Your brain had screamed, Don’t touch him, and you’d obeyed.

“I’m sorry,” you gasped. “I thought I could. I wanted to–”

“Hey,” Steve said slowly, crouching low. “Look at me. No apologies. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I was trying–”

“And you will,” Bucky said gently. “When you’re ready. Not because you feel like you owe us anything.”

You felt tears prick your eyes.

“I hate this,” you admitted, your bottom lip wobbling. “I feel like I'm taking two steps forward and ten back.”

“You’re not,” Steve said firmly. “You’re surviving. And something that means stumbling.”

“You don't have to be perfect ot be ours. We love you no matter what,” Bucky added.

You looked between them, both crouched at your feet like you were a queen on a throne and not a shattered girl in a t-shirt and slippers, trembling from a failed kiss. You nodded slowly, and they stayed.

~~~~~

They laughed, surprised even you. It slipped out, light and sweet, as Bucky cursed at the flour exploding across his shirt. He stood frozen, hands mid-whisk, apron now streaked in white. Dodger barked once in alarm before sneezing in the cloud of dust.

“Oh my god, Buckaroo,” you wheezed, hands on your knees. “You look like a piss-off Pillsbury ghost.”

Steve leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, watching you with the softest smile, the kind that crinkled the corners of his eyes.

“You laughing at me, Hot Mama?” Bucky teased, shaking out his shirt, using his favourite nickname for you.

“I'm absolutely laughing at you.” It felt good. It felt normal.

~~~~~

Therapy was still hard. Some days left you hollow, some made you cry, others filled you with a strange kind of peace. But the difference now was that you always came home to light. To warmth. To men who didn’t need you to be healed to hold space for you.

You’d startled letting them in again, piece by piece.

That afternoon, you reached for Steve’s hand first while walking through the garden. The way he looked at you, surprised, then relieved, made your chest ache in the best way.

That night, you curled into Bucky’s side on the couch whilst a film flickered softly across the screen. His arm slipped around you with care. You didn’t flinch or freeze. You just melted into his hold. 

He kissed the top of your head for a long second, “You’re doing so good, Doll.”

You still have bad days. But today wasn’t one of them. Today, you made jokes in the kitchen. You wore your favourite socks. You kissed Dodger’s nose and didn’t cry when Steve gently kissed your knuckles afterwards. You were starting to feel like you again, and for the first time in weeks, you believed it would get better.

~~~~~

The lights were all on. Warm with no shadows, no dark corners, no flickering candlelight to hide behind. Just the steady glow of the bedroom lamps, the faint hum of jazz through the speakers, and the quiet sound of your breathing as you stood in front of them.

Steve and Bucky sat on the edge of the bed, shirtless, sweatpants riding low on their hips. Neither of them moved. Neither spoke. They just looked at you, not hungry, not impatient, but waiting.

You had asked for this.

Weeks of healing. Weeks of slow touches, long talks, and safe distance. Therapy sessions that left your chest raw and your hands shaking. Nights when you fell asleep wrapped in their arms, fully clothed but safe.

But tonight, you wanted more, you needed to feel them, to see them. To let your body remember that their touch wasn't something to fear. You knew these men better than yourself; you knew there was only trust and love from them.

“Don’t touch me,” you asked quietly. “Not unless I ask.”

Steve nodded instantly. “Yes, ma’am.”

Bucky’s voice was steady, “Anything you need.”

You stepped forward, fingers slipping beneath the he of your oversized t-shirt. Slowly, you pulled it over your head, your bare skin heating under their intense gaze, but not shrinking.

You wanted them to see you. They stayed perfectly still, their eyes wide, their chests rising with restraint. You turned to Bucky first.

“Lie back.”

He obeyed immediately, spine against the pillows, arms loose at his sides. His cock was already half-hard under his sweats, thick and straining, but he didn’t reach for it. He just watched you climb onto the bed and straddle his waist.

Your knees framed his hips. Your hands braced against his chest.

His skin was warm, familiar, real.

“It’s you,” you tried to reassure yourself, ignoring the tremble in your fingers. “It’s just you.”

He sucked in a shaky breath. “Yeah, Doll. Always me.”

You reached between you and pushed his sweats down just enough. His cock sprang free, flushed and heavy, and god, it had been a long time. He was huge, the veins bulging, the tip darker than the rest of him, and already leaking.

You took him in your hand. He groaned.

“Don’t move,” you warned again.

Bucky’s jaw clenched, arms twitching with restraint. “I won’t.”

You sank slowly. The stretch was instant. You gasped, thighs trembling as the thick head of his cock pished into you. Your body fought the intrusion, the slick heat of him forcing your walls wide.

“Fuck–” you whimpered, halfway down, frozen.

Your breath stuttered. Your pussy fluttered, struggling to adjust.

“You okay?” Bucky rasped, voice tight.

You nodded, not because it didn’t hurt, but because it hurt good. The pressure, the burn, the delicious fullness that bordered on overwhelming, it grounded you.

You looked down at him. His face was wrecked. His fingers fisted in the sheets like he was in pain from holding back.

“You’re so big,” you gasped. “I forgot how much you stretch me out.”

Bucky groaned. “You’re perfect. You take me so well, baby. Always did.”

You breathed in deep, the scent of him, clean sweat and soap and safety, and slowly lowered yourself the rest of the way.

“Fuck,” you cried as your thighs met his hips, fully seated. “Oh my god.”

You stayed there, unmoving, cock pulsing deep inside, until the pain eased into need. And then, you started to move.

Slowly. Grinding more than bouncing. Just enough to feel the drag of him along your walls, the fullness that made your head spin.

Steve watched silently from the edge of the bed, eyes dark, jaw tight, his cock hard under the soft grey of his pants. But he didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

This was your moment.

“Don’t stop,” Bucky panted. “You feel– fuck, you feel so good.”

You rocked harder. Your clit brushes against his pelvis with every motion, sparks dancing up your spine. Your thighs trembled. Pleasure coiled in your belt, high and hot and close–

“Bucky–”, you mewled. “Please. I need your hands.”

His restraints snapped. Bucky sat up fast, arms wrapping around your waist, one hand gripping your ass, the other sliding between you to press firm, perfect circles against your clit.

“Cum for me, Doll,” he growled into your neck. “Let go.”

And you did. You shattered in his arms, body locking tight, pussy pulsing around his cock as you sobbed out his name, not in pain but in relief. 

He held you, thought it, rocking you gently, kissing your shoulder as he found his own release. “You’re okay. You did so well.”

You rested for a while. Tangled in his arms, heat slowing, hands twitching.

You kissed his cheek, soft and slow. And then, when your breath had returned, you looked to Steve.

“Your turn.”

Steve sat up slowly, eyes soft but blazing. His cock was bulging, hard and straining visibly under his sweats. You crawled over to him, chest flushed and thigh sticky with your orgasm and Bucky’s.

He let you climb into his lap. Let you kiss him deep and slow.

“I want you inside me,” you said softly. “But I need time. Our boyfriend has made me sensitive.”

Steve chuckled, voice strained. “We can take all the time you want, baby.”

Easing him from the confines of his sweatpants, you finally were able to lower yourself onto him.

The stretch was just as intense; your breath caught, your body resisted, and your legs trembled.

“You okay?” Steve asked, his hand twitching where it rested beside you.

“DOn’t move,” you panted. “Not yet.”

He was patient. Letting you take him inch by inch, Bucky’s cum helps to lube your cunt to take him more.

“You’re so fucking big, Steve.”

Steve groaned deep in his chest. “You feel so good, sweetheart. So fuckign tight around me. Taking me so well.”

When you were finally fully seated, he let out a strangled breath. “Fuck–look at you. So fucking brave, taking my cock all the way.”

Yu rode him slowly, lifting and lowering your hips with shaky precision, feeling everything—the drag, the fullness, the pressure building again.

And when you couldn't take it anymore–

“Please,” you begged. “Touch me. I need you.”

His hands snapped to your hips, guiding you down harder, his thumb pressed to your clit, sending you spiralling.

“That’s it, baby,” he groaned. “Give it to me.”

You came again, falling forward into his chest, shaking, crying out against his skin. Steve held you close.

“You’re safe. You’re ours and you're safe.”

It took several long minutes to catch your breath. Then they both cleaned you up gently. Bucky fetched water, and Steve wrapped you in one of his shirts. They didn't say much; they just touched you, held you, and breathed with you. 

Dodger returned to the room and curled around your feet at the bottom of the bed. 

You lie between them under soft blankets, your head on Steve’s chest, and Buck's arm wrapped around your waist. 

“I want to sleep here tonight. With you both, in our bed.”

Steve kissed your forehead. “You're home, baby. We aren't going anymore.”

Bucky kissed your shoulder, “We love you,” and for the first time since it happened, you believed them. 

[vividxpages]

😪 I'm sure many of you know her, but this queen just dropped another masterpiece and I am on my knees yet again ❤️🫶

(stayed up late so I wouldn't miss it hehe)

[thearticulateaardvark]

They stand there, don't they? With their perfect lives and their easy answers,

looking at you with that blank, uncomprehending stare, that infuriating, infuriating question in their eyes:

"Why. Are. You. Still. There?"

Like it's a choice you made on a Tuesday afternoon.

Like you woke up and thought, "Yeah, I fancy a bit of this."

"Why don't you just leave?" they chirp,

their voices like nails on a chalkboard to your shredded nerves.

"Why don't you just report it?" as if reporting it is a magic wand that makes everything disappear.

They see the bruises...maybe.

They hear the whispers.

But they don't see the heart-wrenching abuse that's a constant current

running through every single goddamn moment of your existence.

Mental.

Physical.

It's all the same to you now, just different flavors of acid.

And they call it loyalty.

Can you believe

the audacity?

This twisted, grotesque parody of devotion, born not of love, but of gut-churning desperation and the soul-deep rot of absolute exhaustion.

It's a dance, they say.

A bizarre, macabre ballet.

But you're not dancing.

You're just trying to survive in a cage where the only person who appears to save you is also the one meticulously, ruthlessly, actively, violently, destroying you.

Every single damn day.

Then come the vultures with their "advice."

Oh, the advice.

Dressed up in fake concern, but you see the judgment, raw and unmasked, in their eyes.

"It's so easy," they drone, their words a mockery of every shattered dream, every whispered prayer.

Easy? Easy?!

Have they felt the dread of an angry approaching step?

The terror of a raised voice?

The sickening lurch in your stomach when you know you've uttered the wrong words?

No. They haven't.

And unless you've been drowning in this particular hell, unless your skin has crawled with this specific kind of terror, you don't understand any of it.

NOT the burning, scalding embarrassment that makes you want to crawl out of your own skin and vanish.

NOT the pervasive, relentless, grinding hurt that lives in every cell, every breath.

NOT the suffocating, crushing loneliness that wraps around you even in a crowded room, a loneliness born

of secrets too ugly to share, too painful to bear alone.

NOT the constant, lingering fear

that tightens your chest until you can barely breathe, the fear of the next blow, the next word, the next accusation.

NOT the insidious, venomous guilt

that spatters in your ear that speaks of how you deserve this, that it's your fault.

NOT the paralyzing regret

for every choice you didn't make, every chance you missed because you were too broken, too afraid.

And certainly, God help them,

NOT the screaming, relentless, physical pain that is as real as the air you breathe, as constant as your pulse.

Why would you understand?

Why should you?

How could you understand the sheer, soul-crushing weight of it all?

You haven't woken up every single morning with a knot in your stomach,

wondering if today is the day the mask slips completely, the day your fragile existence shatters into a million violent pieces.

You haven't learned to read the subtle shifts in their eyes, the way their voice tightens, the micro-expressions, the sighs, the clenched fists, that signal

the coming storm, the impending doom.

You haven't had your self-worth systematically dismantled, brick by agonizing brick, until you believe the monstrous lies they feed you.

You haven't been forced to smile, to nod, to pretend, while inside you are screaming, bleeding, dying a thousand tiny deaths.

A million flinches.

Ten million tears.

Don't ever presume to know the depths of this abyss I'm forced to navigate.

You haven't walked this path with the monster I know.

[mandoloriancookie]

During dinner, that I made. He started to pick a fight with me because apparently the trash got full to fast.

I'm hiding out now.

[mandoloriancookie]

I still don't want to go on vacation with him.

Yesterday I was bringing down clothes to declutter. He thought I was actually showing I wanted to go.

[mandoloriancookie]

I think my husband realizes I'm actively avoiding him for the past 3 months.

Not engaging. At least I got a job.