VITALS: Millennial | INFJ | British | South Asian🕉️ | Cancer♋ | Healthcare girl⚕️
BESTIE ALERT: Go give @scoonsalicious all the love—her work is chef’s kiss!
ABOUT ME:
I'm quiet by nature, loud in my head. A little tired, a little tender. I write at night, between shifts and daydreams, usually with tea gone cold beside me. I write mainly for the man with too much past and not enough peace. For the ghost who wants to be held like he’s real. Bucky Barnes found a quiet place in my head and my heart and never left. So I tell stories— for him, and for the softness he deserves.
I love hearing from readers— your thoughts, your feels, your favourite lines. This little corner of the internet is ours, really.
Please note: I will not interact with you if you do not have an age in your bio.
MAIN BLOG: I follow from @skittle479 and often reblog here!
AO3 ACCOUNT: skittle479
MOST RECENT FICS:
☆ The Long Way Home - You fell through time by accident — and now you're stuck in 1943, watching Bucky Barnes charm every woman in the room but you. So you start to wonder: did the man you left behind ever really want you, or just keep what was convenient? He's about to answer that. He just doesn't know it yet.
☆ Eternal Sunshine of the Immortal Heart - She decided he was safe. And trust is the one thing he never learned how to stand in. Two times he wanted to feed on you. And the one time he did.
☆ The Fifth of July - It's your birthday. Bucky remembered a comment you made three months ago about a restaurant. He found a necklace in Steve's things and thought of you. He wrote you a card and admitted he hates motivational posters.
☆ The Space Between Us - It didn't start as an argument. No raised voices, no slammed doors. Just two people slowly convincing themselves that reaching out would only make things worse — until it wasn't just a theory anymore
☆ Skittle's Smutlets ☆
☆ Bucky Barnes Long Fics ☆
☆ Bucky Barnes Smut Fics☆
☆ Bucky Barnes Oneshots ☆
☆ Steve Rogers Oneshots ☆
☆ Imagines & Drabbles ☆
☆ Rafael Barba (Law&Order:SVU) Fics ☆
MINORS DNI. This blog is 18+ — please respect that.
WHO I WRITE FOR:
☆ Bucky Barnes
☆ Steve Rogers
WHAT TO EXPECT:
Fluff | Angst | Smut | Comfort — most likely I will write a happy ending (because I’m a sucker for hope, okay?)
WHAT I DON’T WRITE:
No dubcon/noncon | No real people fics | No heavy BDSM | No racism | No explicit sexual abuse/assault
You fell through time by accident — and now you're stuck in 1943, watching Bucky Barnes charm every woman in the room but you. So you start to wonder: did the man you left behind ever really want you, or just keep what was convenient? He's about to answer that. He just doesn't know it yet.
◌⃘ Pairing: 1940s!Bucky Barnes x nurse!Reader and present!Bucky Barnes x scientist!reader
◌⃘ Word count: 2.5K
◌⃘ Warnings: angst, because I don't feel well and this is how my brain works when I'm sick.
The small dance hall in Brooklyn smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, and you had been standing against the back wall for the better part of an hour, watching the man you loved fall in love with everyone but you.
Not that he knew you. That was the cruel logic of it all. To Sergeant James Barnes, you were nobody. Nothing but a nurse he'd been introduced to twice, and forgotten both times. A face in a crowd of pretty faces, but by no means the prettiest.
You had stopped being able to feel your own face somewhere around the third song, no longer pretending to smile.
"You gonna dance, or you gonna be a wallflower all night?"
You turned. One of the girls— Doris, or maybe it it was Lilian, you weren't paying attention— was smiling at you with the social grace that women in this time seemed to possess effortlessly. They belonged in a way you never would. You gave her something that was probably a smile.
"I'm alright watching."
"Watching him, you mean." She followed your gaze to where Bucky stood in his dress uniform, left arm braced against a pillar as he leaned down to murmur something into the ear of a redhead who laughed like he'd hung the moon. "Half the room's watching him. Don't feel bad, sweets. He's real generous with the old charm."
Generous! You laughed to yourself, that was certainly one word for it.
You'd been in 1943 for eleven days. Eleven days since the machine in your lab had done whatever it was that it did. There had been a surge of power, a blinding flash of light and the smell of ozone that still hadn't left your nostrils. You had woken up staring at a strange sky, in an alley between two buildings you didn't recognize.
Eleven days later, you had talked your way into a nursing post with the competence that only came with training from a program that wouldn't exist for another sixty years.
The first time you had seen him, you hadn't been able to move. You almost walked past without a backward glance. The thing that had gotten your attention wasn't how he looked, it was his voice. It hadn't changed. What had changed was how freely he laughed
It was all you could think of as you lay on a narrow rented bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking: He's here. He's alive and whole and here, and he has no idea who I am.
You'd thought seeing this version of him would be a comfort.
You'd been so stupid.
So there you were, contemplating your existence, a woman out of your own time. And you realized that the thing nobody told you about time travel was that it was mostly waiting.
You had managed to track down a physicist— a nervous, but brilliant scientist who was well ahead of his time and happened to work for Stark Industries and liked to carry out experiments in his basement.
When you'd described the machine, he had gone very pale and very quiet and then become very interested. He offered to help you. He thought it would take weeks. He speculated a great many things, and every one of them required you to stay close to the war effort, close to the base, close— by fate or by accident— to Bucky-freaking-Barnes.
You should have quit, but you needed the money and a place to stay. So you saw him. Constantly. At the mess, in the corridors, at these godforsaken dances the other nurses dragged you to. And every time, the same knife went in.
Because Bucky Barnes flirted with everyone.
You watched him do it like a case study you had a vested interest in. In a way, you did.
He flirted with Lilian and Doris and Elizabeth, with Marian and Margaret and even Sandy. He flirted with the girl who sold cigarettes and the middle-aged woman who ran your boarding house who flushed like a school girl every time he tipped his cap.
He flirted with the same energy that other men breathed— unconsciously, effortlessly and with enthusiasm. With the whole world except you.
With you he was polite. God, the politeness was utterly devastating. Every 'ma'am.' Every 'miss.' Every nod.
Once— and only once— he caught you looking at him for too long across the mess hall and you had noticed a flicker on his face. It wasn't interest, no you knew his expressions well enough, it was something closer to confusion. Almost as though he couldn't quite figure out why this particular nurse kept staring at him like she was drowning.
You'd looked away so fast you'd spilled your coffee.
So here's the thing you could quite wrap your head around. It was the splinter which kept digging it's way deeper. He was still Bucky. Before the fall. Before seventy years of ice and torture. Before his free will had been ripped away. It was still him. The same kind man you loved.
And this man had looked at you and felt nothing.
"You look like you're thinking too hard," Lillian said. "Never a good idea at a dance."
"Sorry." You forced a smile and made yourself relax. "Long shift," you lied with a shrug.
She patted your arm sympathetically and drifted off in the direction of a corporal who had been eyeing her from across the hall. And then you were alone. Again. Listening to Bucky laughing at something across the room, his eyes crinkled and nose scrunched. You had to close your eyes.
In the present, you told yourself, he loves you.
But did he?
This thought was the poison of the past, the reason the past eleven days had hollowed you out and given you reason to doubt. Because you'd met your Bucky broken. You'd met him after— after the Soldier, after the torture, after the long slow work he had done to put himself back together, with therapy and effort and the kind of hard-won stillness that made his rare smiles feel earned. Your Bucky was quiet. He was careful. He loved you the way a man loves the shore after a shipwreck— grateful, fierce, like something he'd been afraid to hope for.
When you thought back, this stillness had always felt like the depth in your relationship. That his quiet devotion was the shape of a man who had survived far too much to be careless with his heart. That when he reached for you in the dark, when he said your name with reverence, when he told you that he loved you, it was the truest thing in him.
Only now you'd seen the before.
Now you'd seen who he was when the world hadn't broken him yet.
And that man— that carefree, radiant, flirtatious man— he wouldn't have looked at you twice. That man had a type, and you were watching him charm her across the dance floor right now, and it most decidedly wasn't you. It was never you.
So what did that make what you had back home?
It was the ugly thought. The one that had been circling your brain in different iterations for the last eleven days.
He's with you because you were there.
Because you'd been kind to him at the worst point of his life.
Because you were willing, and steady, and you'd stayed when staying was hard.
Because a drowning man doesn't check whether the hand pulling him up is the one he'd have chosen.
He grabs what's offered.
You were what was offered. Convenient. Present. Undemanding.
Not chosen. Settled.
You believed it completely, while standing in that dance hall. It sank deep into your bones, like the weight of something you'd always half-known and finally let yourself see.
"You're that nurse."
You startled so badly at his voice that you knocked your purse off the table. Bucky was standing in front of you— right in front of you, close enough that you could smell the pomade and the wool of his uniform. And he was looking at you with that faint, puzzled crease between his brows. He bent down and retrieved your purse without a second thought.
"I— yeah. Sorry. Yes. I'm a nurse."
Brilliant. Very cool. Totally nailed that response. You mentally face palmed yourself.
"You keep looking at me." He said it plainly, without judgement. "All week. At the mess, and now here." He paused, studying your face. "Do I know you? From somewhere? I feel like I oughta, and it's drivin' me half crazy tryna figure it out."
You don't know me yet, was the thought didn't say. You won't know me for another eighty years.
"No," you managed in a flat tone. "You don't know me."
He studied you. And for one horrible, hopeful second you let yourself imagine that something would spark between you. That he would recognize something buried deep inside himself, the one who would one day become the man you loved. That he'd feel it, the way you felt it. The impossible gravity that existed between you.
He didn't. You watched him not feel it. He just gave you a small, courteous, sorry-can't-place-you smile and the last shred of hope shattered in it chest.
"Well," he said. "You alright? You look a little—" he gestured vaguely at all of you, "—pale. Rough night on the ward?"
You laughed dismally. "Something like that."
"You want some air? You look like you want some air."
And there it was. Not attraction. Kindness. The reflexive decency of a good man toward a woman who looked unwell. He'd have offered the same to Doris or Evelyn, to the redhead or the blonde, to anyone really. You knew it, and you took it anyway, because you were weak and you loved him and this was the closest he'd stood to you in eleven days.
Outside, the night was cold and wet and smelled of the harbor. Bucky lit a cigarette, offered you one, seemed unsurprised when you shook your head. For a while neither of you said anything.
"You got somebody?" he asked finally, and your heart lurched dangerously. "Back home, I mean. You got that look. Like half of you is somewhere else."
You laughed and it came out wrecked.
"Yeah," you said. "I've got somebody."
"He treat you right?"
He loves me like a man loves the thing that saved him, you thought. And I don't know anymore if that's the same as loving me for me.
"I don't know," you said honestly. "I used to think so. Now I'm not sure he'd have picked me. If things had been different. If he'd had… options. I think maybe I was just… the one who was there."
Bucky was quiet a moment. When you looked at him he was frowning— not the usual puzzled frown, it was something more thoughtful.
"That's a helluva thing to carry," he said. "You wanna know what I think?"
He looked at you, barely waiting for you to answer before he continued.
"I flirt with every dame in that room. You've seen me, don't pretend you haven't." He gave you a rueful half-smile. "It's easy. Don't cost me a thing. You smile, they smile, everybody has a nice night, nobody gets hurt. It's—" he searched for the right word, "—it's cheap. You understand? It's the cheapest thing I got."
You stared at him.
"You know what's not cheap?" he went on, looking out into the night. "The stuff that costs you something— and that's not the girl you charm across a dance hall. That's the one you'd still want around when there's nothing charming left in you. When you're scared, or sick, or done things you can't take back."
He exhaled smoke. "A fella who's had it easy, he'll flirt with anybody. Don't mean anything. But a fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person—" he shrugged, "—seems to me that's the only kind that counts. The rest's just… noise."
You couldn't breathe.
He didn't know how deeply what he'd said had resonated with you. He couldn't have. He was just a kind man being kind to a sad woman outside a dance hall, offering the accidental wisdom of someone who'd one day live every word of it. But he'd reached across eighty years and removed the splinter from your heart.
A fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person.
That was your Bucky. Not a drowning man grabbing for the nearest hand. A man who had been through the absolute worst the world could do. A man who had every reason to be closed and cold and careful with the little warmth he had left. And instead who spent it, deliberately, expensively, on you.
Not because you were convenient. Because when everything cheap had been burned out of him, you were what remained. You were the thing that counted.
The flirtation you'd been grieving wasn't the love you knew. It never had been. It was the noise. And your Bucky had gone silent with everyone else in the world and still turned, in the dark, toward you.
"Thank you," you whispered.
Bucky looked faintly bewildered. "For what? I didn't do anything."
"You'd be surprised," you said, tears slipping down your cheeks before laughing at the way he was hastily patting his pockets for a handkerchief with the flustered gallantry of a man way out of his depth
And for the first time in eleven days the ache in your chest had somewhere to go.
The scientist sent for you nine days later. You had pulled yourself away from the pub, one last glance at the Sergeant before you scurried away under the cover of darkness.
The machine hummed and the basement reeked of ozone. Suddenly your heart was pounding and you were looking back at the strange world you were leaving. At the war that hadn't broken him fully yet. At the still charming boy who would become, through unspeakable years, the quiet man who loved you.
I'm coming home baby, you told him, across the space-time continuum. I finally understand what I'm coming home to.
With that vow, you stepped into the light.
When you opened your eyes it was day and you were back in your lab, surrounded by your things and there— there was already someone crossing the room toward you at a dead run. Someone with a metal arm and a face raw with grief and terror that lasted twenty days. Someone who caught you and held you like the shore holds the shipwreck.
"You're back," Bucky said into your hair, over and over, wrecked and reaching only for you. "You're back, you're back, you're back."
"I'm back," you said. "I know exactly where I am."
You fell through time by accident — and now you're stuck in 1943, watching Bucky Barnes charm every woman in the room but you. So you start to wonder: did the man you left behind ever really want you, or just keep what was convenient? He's about to answer that. He just doesn't know it yet.
◌⃘ Pairing: 1940s!Bucky Barnes x nurse!Reader and present!Bucky Barnes x scientist!reader
◌⃘ Word count: 2.5K
◌⃘ Warnings: angst, because I don't feel well and this is how my brain works when I'm sick.
The small dance hall in Brooklyn smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, and you had been standing against the back wall for the better part of an hour, watching the man you loved fall in love with everyone but you.
Not that he knew you. That was the cruel logic of it all. To Sergeant James Barnes, you were nobody. Nothing but a nurse he'd been introduced to twice, and forgotten both times. A face in a crowd of pretty faces, but by no means the prettiest.
You had stopped being able to feel your own face somewhere around the third song, no longer pretending to smile.
"You gonna dance, or you gonna be a wallflower all night?"
You turned. One of the girls— Doris, or maybe it it was Lilian, you weren't paying attention— was smiling at you with the social grace that women in this time seemed to possess effortlessly. They belonged in a way you never would. You gave her something that was probably a smile.
"I'm alright watching."
"Watching him, you mean." She followed your gaze to where Bucky stood in his dress uniform, left arm braced against a pillar as he leaned down to murmur something into the ear of a redhead who laughed like he'd hung the moon. "Half the room's watching him. Don't feel bad, sweets. He's real generous with the old charm."
Generous! You laughed to yourself, that was certainly one word for it.
You'd been in 1943 for eleven days. Eleven days since the machine in your lab had done whatever it was that it did. There had been a surge of power, a blinding flash of light and the smell of ozone that still hadn't left your nostrils. You had woken up staring at a strange sky, in an alley between two buildings you didn't recognize.
Eleven days later, you had talked your way into a nursing post with the competence that only came with training from a program that wouldn't exist for another sixty years.
The first time you had seen him, you hadn't been able to move. You almost walked past without a backward glance. The thing that had gotten your attention wasn't how he looked, it was his voice. It hadn't changed. What had changed was how freely he laughed
It was all you could think of as you lay on a narrow rented bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking: He's here. He's alive and whole and here, and he has no idea who I am.
You'd thought seeing this version of him would be a comfort.
You'd been so stupid.
So there you were, contemplating your existence, a woman out of your own time. And you realized that the thing nobody told you about time travel was that it was mostly waiting.
You had managed to track down a physicist— a nervous, but brilliant scientist who was well ahead of his time and happened to work for Stark Industries and liked to carry out experiments in his basement.
When you'd described the machine, he had gone very pale and very quiet and then become very interested. He offered to help you. He thought it would take weeks. He speculated a great many things, and every one of them required you to stay close to the war effort, close to the base, close— by fate or by accident— to Bucky-freaking-Barnes.
You should have quit, but you needed the money and a place to stay. So you saw him. Constantly. At the mess, in the corridors, at these godforsaken dances the other nurses dragged you to. And every time, the same knife went in.
Because Bucky Barnes flirted with everyone.
You watched him do it like a case study you had a vested interest in. In a way, you did.
He flirted with Lilian and Doris and Elizabeth, with Marian and Margaret and even Sandy. He flirted with the girl who sold cigarettes and the middle-aged woman who ran your boarding house who flushed like a school girl every time he tipped his cap.
He flirted with the same energy that other men breathed— unconsciously, effortlessly and with enthusiasm. With the whole world except you.
With you he was polite. God, the politeness was utterly devastating. Every 'ma'am.' Every 'miss.' Every nod.
Once— and only once— he caught you looking at him for too long across the mess hall and you had noticed a flicker on his face. It wasn't interest, no you knew his expressions well enough, it was something closer to confusion. Almost as though he couldn't quite figure out why this particular nurse kept staring at him like she was drowning.
You'd looked away so fast you'd spilled your coffee.
So here's the thing you could quite wrap your head around. It was the splinter which kept digging it's way deeper. He was still Bucky. Before the fall. Before seventy years of ice and torture. Before his free will had been ripped away. It was still him. The same kind man you loved.
And this man had looked at you and felt nothing.
"You look like you're thinking too hard," Lillian said. "Never a good idea at a dance."
"Sorry." You forced a smile and made yourself relax. "Long shift," you lied with a shrug.
She patted your arm sympathetically and drifted off in the direction of a corporal who had been eyeing her from across the hall. And then you were alone. Again. Listening to Bucky laughing at something across the room, his eyes crinkled and nose scrunched. You had to close your eyes.
In the present, you told yourself, he loves you.
But did he?
This thought was the poison of the past, the reason the past eleven days had hollowed you out and given you reason to doubt. Because you'd met your Bucky broken. You'd met him after— after the Soldier, after the torture, after the long slow work he had done to put himself back together, with therapy and effort and the kind of hard-won stillness that made his rare smiles feel earned. Your Bucky was quiet. He was careful. He loved you the way a man loves the shore after a shipwreck— grateful, fierce, like something he'd been afraid to hope for.
When you thought back, this stillness had always felt like the depth in your relationship. That his quiet devotion was the shape of a man who had survived far too much to be careless with his heart. That when he reached for you in the dark, when he said your name with reverence, when he told you that he loved you, it was the truest thing in him.
Only now you'd seen the before.
Now you'd seen who he was when the world hadn't broken him yet.
And that man— that carefree, radiant, flirtatious man— he wouldn't have looked at you twice. That man had a type, and you were watching him charm her across the dance floor right now, and it most decidedly wasn't you. It was never you.
So what did that make what you had back home?
It was the ugly thought. The one that had been circling your brain in different iterations for the last eleven days.
He's with you because you were there.
Because you'd been kind to him at the worst point of his life.
Because you were willing, and steady, and you'd stayed when staying was hard.
Because a drowning man doesn't check whether the hand pulling him up is the one he'd have chosen.
He grabs what's offered.
You were what was offered. Convenient. Present. Undemanding.
Not chosen. Settled.
You believed it completely, while standing in that dance hall. It sank deep into your bones, like the weight of something you'd always half-known and finally let yourself see.
"You're that nurse."
You startled so badly at his voice that you knocked your purse off the table. Bucky was standing in front of you— right in front of you, close enough that you could smell the pomade and the wool of his uniform. And he was looking at you with that faint, puzzled crease between his brows. He bent down and retrieved your purse without a second thought.
"I— yeah. Sorry. Yes. I'm a nurse."
Brilliant. Very cool. Totally nailed that response. You mentally face palmed yourself.
"You keep looking at me." He said it plainly, without judgement. "All week. At the mess, and now here." He paused, studying your face. "Do I know you? From somewhere? I feel like I oughta, and it's drivin' me half crazy tryna figure it out."
You don't know me yet, was the thought didn't say. You won't know me for another eighty years.
"No," you managed in a flat tone. "You don't know me."
He studied you. And for one horrible, hopeful second you let yourself imagine that something would spark between you. That he would recognize something buried deep inside himself, the one who would one day become the man you loved. That he'd feel it, the way you felt it. The impossible gravity that existed between you.
He didn't. You watched him not feel it. He just gave you a small, courteous, sorry-can't-place-you smile and the last shred of hope shattered in it chest.
"Well," he said. "You alright? You look a little—" he gestured vaguely at all of you, "—pale. Rough night on the ward?"
You laughed dismally. "Something like that."
"You want some air? You look like you want some air."
And there it was. Not attraction. Kindness. The reflexive decency of a good man toward a woman who looked unwell. He'd have offered the same to Doris or Evelyn, to the redhead or the blonde, to anyone really. You knew it, and you took it anyway, because you were weak and you loved him and this was the closest he'd stood to you in eleven days.
Outside, the night was cold and wet and smelled of the harbor. Bucky lit a cigarette, offered you one, seemed unsurprised when you shook your head. For a while neither of you said anything.
"You got somebody?" he asked finally, and your heart lurched dangerously. "Back home, I mean. You got that look. Like half of you is somewhere else."
You laughed and it came out wrecked.
"Yeah," you said. "I've got somebody."
"He treat you right?"
He loves me like a man loves the thing that saved him, you thought. And I don't know anymore if that's the same as loving me for me.
"I don't know," you said honestly. "I used to think so. Now I'm not sure he'd have picked me. If things had been different. If he'd had… options. I think maybe I was just… the one who was there."
Bucky was quiet a moment. When you looked at him he was frowning— not the usual puzzled frown, it was something more thoughtful.
"That's a helluva thing to carry," he said. "You wanna know what I think?"
He looked at you, barely waiting for you to answer before he continued.
"I flirt with every dame in that room. You've seen me, don't pretend you haven't." He gave you a rueful half-smile. "It's easy. Don't cost me a thing. You smile, they smile, everybody has a nice night, nobody gets hurt. It's—" he searched for the right word, "—it's cheap. You understand? It's the cheapest thing I got."
You stared at him.
"You know what's not cheap?" he went on, looking out into the night. "The stuff that costs you something— and that's not the girl you charm across a dance hall. That's the one you'd still want around when there's nothing charming left in you. When you're scared, or sick, or done things you can't take back."
He exhaled smoke. "A fella who's had it easy, he'll flirt with anybody. Don't mean anything. But a fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person—" he shrugged, "—seems to me that's the only kind that counts. The rest's just… noise."
You couldn't breathe.
He didn't know how deeply what he'd said had resonated with you. He couldn't have. He was just a kind man being kind to a sad woman outside a dance hall, offering the accidental wisdom of someone who'd one day live every word of it. But he'd reached across eighty years and removed the splinter from your heart.
A fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person.
That was your Bucky. Not a drowning man grabbing for the nearest hand. A man who had been through the absolute worst the world could do. A man who had every reason to be closed and cold and careful with the little warmth he had left. And instead who spent it, deliberately, expensively, on you.
Not because you were convenient. Because when everything cheap had been burned out of him, you were what remained. You were the thing that counted.
The flirtation you'd been grieving wasn't the love you knew. It never had been. It was the noise. And your Bucky had gone silent with everyone else in the world and still turned, in the dark, toward you.
"Thank you," you whispered.
Bucky looked faintly bewildered. "For what? I didn't do anything."
"You'd be surprised," you said, tears slipping down your cheeks before laughing at the way he was hastily patting his pockets for a handkerchief with the flustered gallantry of a man way out of his depth
And for the first time in eleven days the ache in your chest had somewhere to go.
The scientist sent for you nine days later. You had pulled yourself away from the pub, one last glance at the Sergeant before you scurried away under the cover of darkness.
The machine hummed and the basement reeked of ozone. Suddenly your heart was pounding and you were looking back at the strange world you were leaving. At the war that hadn't broken him fully yet. At the still charming boy who would become, through unspeakable years, the quiet man who loved you.
I'm coming home baby, you told him, across the space-time continuum. I finally understand what I'm coming home to.
With that vow, you stepped into the light.
When you opened your eyes it was day and you were back in your lab, surrounded by your things and there— there was already someone crossing the room toward you at a dead run. Someone with a metal arm and a face raw with grief and terror that lasted twenty days. Someone who caught you and held you like the shore holds the shipwreck.
"You're back," Bucky said into your hair, over and over, wrecked and reaching only for you. "You're back, you're back, you're back."
"I'm back," you said. "I know exactly where I am."
You fell through time by accident — and now you're stuck in 1943, watching Bucky Barnes charm every woman in the room but you. So you start to wonder: did the man you left behind ever really want you, or just keep what was convenient? He's about to answer that. He just doesn't know it yet.
◌⃘ Pairing: 1940s!Bucky Barnes x nurse!Reader and present!Bucky Barnes x scientist!reader
◌⃘ Word count: 2.5K
◌⃘ Warnings: angst, because I don't feel well and this is how my brain works when I'm sick.
The small dance hall in Brooklyn smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, and you had been standing against the back wall for the better part of an hour, watching the man you loved fall in love with everyone but you.
Not that he knew you. That was the cruel logic of it all. To Sergeant James Barnes, you were nobody. Nothing but a nurse he'd been introduced to twice, and forgotten both times. A face in a crowd of pretty faces, but by no means the prettiest.
You had stopped being able to feel your own face somewhere around the third song, no longer pretending to smile.
"You gonna dance, or you gonna be a wallflower all night?"
You turned. One of the girls— Doris, or maybe it it was Lilian, you weren't paying attention— was smiling at you with the social grace that women in this time seemed to possess effortlessly. They belonged in a way you never would. You gave her something that was probably a smile.
"I'm alright watching."
"Watching him, you mean." She followed your gaze to where Bucky stood in his dress uniform, left arm braced against a pillar as he leaned down to murmur something into the ear of a redhead who laughed like he'd hung the moon. "Half the room's watching him. Don't feel bad, sweets. He's real generous with the old charm."
Generous! You laughed to yourself, that was certainly one word for it.
You'd been in 1943 for eleven days. Eleven days since the machine in your lab had done whatever it was that it did. There had been a surge of power, a blinding flash of light and the smell of ozone that still hadn't left your nostrils. You had woken up staring at a strange sky, in an alley between two buildings you didn't recognize.
Eleven days later, you had talked your way into a nursing post with the competence that only came with training from a program that wouldn't exist for another sixty years.
The first time you had seen him, you hadn't been able to move. You almost walked past without a backward glance. The thing that had gotten your attention wasn't how he looked, it was his voice. It hadn't changed. What had changed was how freely he laughed
It was all you could think of as you lay on a narrow rented bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking: He's here. He's alive and whole and here, and he has no idea who I am.
You'd thought seeing this version of him would be a comfort.
You'd been so stupid.
So there you were, contemplating your existence, a woman out of your own time. And you realized that the thing nobody told you about time travel was that it was mostly waiting.
You had managed to track down a physicist— a nervous, but brilliant scientist who was well ahead of his time and happened to work for Stark Industries and liked to carry out experiments in his basement.
When you'd described the machine, he had gone very pale and very quiet and then become very interested. He offered to help you. He thought it would take weeks. He speculated a great many things, and every one of them required you to stay close to the war effort, close to the base, close— by fate or by accident— to Bucky-freaking-Barnes.
You should have quit, but you needed the money and a place to stay. So you saw him. Constantly. At the mess, in the corridors, at these godforsaken dances the other nurses dragged you to. And every time, the same knife went in.
Because Bucky Barnes flirted with everyone.
You watched him do it like a case study you had a vested interest in. In a way, you did.
He flirted with Lilian and Doris and Elizabeth, with Marian and Margaret and even Sandy. He flirted with the girl who sold cigarettes and the middle-aged woman who ran your boarding house who flushed like a school girl every time he tipped his cap.
He flirted with the same energy that other men breathed— unconsciously, effortlessly and with enthusiasm. With the whole world except you.
With you he was polite. God, the politeness was utterly devastating. Every 'ma'am.' Every 'miss.' Every nod.
Once— and only once— he caught you looking at him for too long across the mess hall and you had noticed a flicker on his face. It wasn't interest, no you knew his expressions well enough, it was something closer to confusion. Almost as though he couldn't quite figure out why this particular nurse kept staring at him like she was drowning.
You'd looked away so fast you'd spilled your coffee.
So here's the thing you could quite wrap your head around. It was the splinter which kept digging it's way deeper. He was still Bucky. Before the fall. Before seventy years of ice and torture. Before his free will had been ripped away. It was still him. The same kind man you loved.
And this man had looked at you and felt nothing.
"You look like you're thinking too hard," Lillian said. "Never a good idea at a dance."
"Sorry." You forced a smile and made yourself relax. "Long shift," you lied with a shrug.
She patted your arm sympathetically and drifted off in the direction of a corporal who had been eyeing her from across the hall. And then you were alone. Again. Listening to Bucky laughing at something across the room, his eyes crinkled and nose scrunched. You had to close your eyes.
In the present, you told yourself, he loves you.
But did he?
This thought was the poison of the past, the reason the past eleven days had hollowed you out and given you reason to doubt. Because you'd met your Bucky broken. You'd met him after— after the Soldier, after the torture, after the long slow work he had done to put himself back together, with therapy and effort and the kind of hard-won stillness that made his rare smiles feel earned. Your Bucky was quiet. He was careful. He loved you the way a man loves the shore after a shipwreck— grateful, fierce, like something he'd been afraid to hope for.
When you thought back, this stillness had always felt like the depth in your relationship. That his quiet devotion was the shape of a man who had survived far too much to be careless with his heart. That when he reached for you in the dark, when he said your name with reverence, when he told you that he loved you, it was the truest thing in him.
Only now you'd seen the before.
Now you'd seen who he was when the world hadn't broken him yet.
And that man— that carefree, radiant, flirtatious man— he wouldn't have looked at you twice. That man had a type, and you were watching him charm her across the dance floor right now, and it most decidedly wasn't you. It was never you.
So what did that make what you had back home?
It was the ugly thought. The one that had been circling your brain in different iterations for the last eleven days.
He's with you because you were there.
Because you'd been kind to him at the worst point of his life.
Because you were willing, and steady, and you'd stayed when staying was hard.
Because a drowning man doesn't check whether the hand pulling him up is the one he'd have chosen.
He grabs what's offered.
You were what was offered. Convenient. Present. Undemanding.
Not chosen. Settled.
You believed it completely, while standing in that dance hall. It sank deep into your bones, like the weight of something you'd always half-known and finally let yourself see.
"You're that nurse."
You startled so badly at his voice that you knocked your purse off the table. Bucky was standing in front of you— right in front of you, close enough that you could smell the pomade and the wool of his uniform. And he was looking at you with that faint, puzzled crease between his brows. He bent down and retrieved your purse without a second thought.
"I— yeah. Sorry. Yes. I'm a nurse."
Brilliant. Very cool. Totally nailed that response. You mentally face palmed yourself.
"You keep looking at me." He said it plainly, without judgement. "All week. At the mess, and now here." He paused, studying your face. "Do I know you? From somewhere? I feel like I oughta, and it's drivin' me half crazy tryna figure it out."
You don't know me yet, was the thought didn't say. You won't know me for another eighty years.
"No," you managed in a flat tone. "You don't know me."
He studied you. And for one horrible, hopeful second you let yourself imagine that something would spark between you. That he would recognize something buried deep inside himself, the one who would one day become the man you loved. That he'd feel it, the way you felt it. The impossible gravity that existed between you.
He didn't. You watched him not feel it. He just gave you a small, courteous, sorry-can't-place-you smile and the last shred of hope shattered in it chest.
"Well," he said. "You alright? You look a little—" he gestured vaguely at all of you, "—pale. Rough night on the ward?"
You laughed dismally. "Something like that."
"You want some air? You look like you want some air."
And there it was. Not attraction. Kindness. The reflexive decency of a good man toward a woman who looked unwell. He'd have offered the same to Doris or Evelyn, to the redhead or the blonde, to anyone really. You knew it, and you took it anyway, because you were weak and you loved him and this was the closest he'd stood to you in eleven days.
Outside, the night was cold and wet and smelled of the harbor. Bucky lit a cigarette, offered you one, seemed unsurprised when you shook your head. For a while neither of you said anything.
"You got somebody?" he asked finally, and your heart lurched dangerously. "Back home, I mean. You got that look. Like half of you is somewhere else."
You laughed and it came out wrecked.
"Yeah," you said. "I've got somebody."
"He treat you right?"
He loves me like a man loves the thing that saved him, you thought. And I don't know anymore if that's the same as loving me for me.
"I don't know," you said honestly. "I used to think so. Now I'm not sure he'd have picked me. If things had been different. If he'd had… options. I think maybe I was just… the one who was there."
Bucky was quiet a moment. When you looked at him he was frowning— not the usual puzzled frown, it was something more thoughtful.
"That's a helluva thing to carry," he said. "You wanna know what I think?"
He looked at you, barely waiting for you to answer before he continued.
"I flirt with every dame in that room. You've seen me, don't pretend you haven't." He gave you a rueful half-smile. "It's easy. Don't cost me a thing. You smile, they smile, everybody has a nice night, nobody gets hurt. It's—" he searched for the right word, "—it's cheap. You understand? It's the cheapest thing I got."
You stared at him.
"You know what's not cheap?" he went on, looking out into the night. "The stuff that costs you something— and that's not the girl you charm across a dance hall. That's the one you'd still want around when there's nothing charming left in you. When you're scared, or sick, or done things you can't take back."
He exhaled smoke. "A fella who's had it easy, he'll flirt with anybody. Don't mean anything. But a fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person—" he shrugged, "—seems to me that's the only kind that counts. The rest's just… noise."
You couldn't breathe.
He didn't know how deeply what he'd said had resonated with you. He couldn't have. He was just a kind man being kind to a sad woman outside a dance hall, offering the accidental wisdom of someone who'd one day live every word of it. But he'd reached across eighty years and removed the splinter from your heart.
A fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person.
That was your Bucky. Not a drowning man grabbing for the nearest hand. A man who had been through the absolute worst the world could do. A man who had every reason to be closed and cold and careful with the little warmth he had left. And instead who spent it, deliberately, expensively, on you.
Not because you were convenient. Because when everything cheap had been burned out of him, you were what remained. You were the thing that counted.
The flirtation you'd been grieving wasn't the love you knew. It never had been. It was the noise. And your Bucky had gone silent with everyone else in the world and still turned, in the dark, toward you.
"Thank you," you whispered.
Bucky looked faintly bewildered. "For what? I didn't do anything."
"You'd be surprised," you said, tears slipping down your cheeks before laughing at the way he was hastily patting his pockets for a handkerchief with the flustered gallantry of a man way out of his depth
And for the first time in eleven days the ache in your chest had somewhere to go.
The scientist sent for you nine days later. You had pulled yourself away from the pub, one last glance at the Sergeant before you scurried away under the cover of darkness.
The machine hummed and the basement reeked of ozone. Suddenly your heart was pounding and you were looking back at the strange world you were leaving. At the war that hadn't broken him fully yet. At the still charming boy who would become, through unspeakable years, the quiet man who loved you.
I'm coming home baby, you told him, across the space-time continuum. I finally understand what I'm coming home to.
With that vow, you stepped into the light.
When you opened your eyes it was day and you were back in your lab, surrounded by your things and there— there was already someone crossing the room toward you at a dead run. Someone with a metal arm and a face raw with grief and terror that lasted twenty days. Someone who caught you and held you like the shore holds the shipwreck.
"You're back," Bucky said into your hair, over and over, wrecked and reaching only for you. "You're back, you're back, you're back."
"I'm back," you said. "I know exactly where I am."
☆ The Long Way Home - You fell through time by accident — and now you're stuck in 1943, watching Bucky Barnes charm every woman in the room but you. So you start to wonder: did the man you left behind ever really want you, or just keep what was convenient? He's about to answer that. He just doesn't know it yet.
☆ Eternal Sunshine of the Immortal Heart - She decided he was safe. And trust is the one thing he never learned how to stand in. Two times he wanted to feed on you. And the one time he did.
☆ The Fifth of July - It's your birthday. Bucky remembered a comment you made three months ago about a restaurant. He found a necklace in Steve's things and thought of you. He wrote you a card and admitted he hates motivational posters.
☆ The Space Between Us - It didn't start as an argument. No raised voices, no slammed doors. Just two people slowly convincing themselves that reaching out would only make things worse — until it wasn't just a theory anymore
☆ Ditch Days and Daffodils - Bucky skips out on his Congress duties to spend his birthday with you in a field full of flowers.
☆ Sertraline Nights - Bucky helps you through difficulties achieving orgasm because of your SSRI and it’s because of him that you have your first orgasm in ages.
☆ Tastes Like Heaven - Bucky's so obsessed with going down on you that he gets off just from the taste and sounds while rutting against the bed.
☆Glow-in-the-dark Valentine - Could you please write Bucky coming home super late from a mission covered in glowing green alien goo, apologizing for ruining your romantic Valentine's plans. You're sweet about it and then later you help clean/maintain his vibranium arm socket because it's sensitive and he trusts only you with it?
☆ Bare Instincts - Bucky loses control and takes the condom off mid-sex.
You fell through time by accident — and now you're stuck in 1943, watching Bucky Barnes charm every woman in the room but you. So you start to wonder: did the man you left behind ever really want you, or just keep what was convenient? He's about to answer that. He just doesn't know it yet.
◌⃘ Pairing: 1940s!Bucky Barnes x nurse!Reader and present!Bucky Barnes x scientist!reader
◌⃘ Word count: 2.5K
◌⃘ Warnings: angst, because I don't feel well and this is how my brain works when I'm sick.
The small dance hall in Brooklyn smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, and you had been standing against the back wall for the better part of an hour, watching the man you loved fall in love with everyone but you.
Not that he knew you. That was the cruel logic of it all. To Sergeant James Barnes, you were nobody. Nothing but a nurse he'd been introduced to twice, and forgotten both times. A face in a crowd of pretty faces, but by no means the prettiest.
You had stopped being able to feel your own face somewhere around the third song, no longer pretending to smile.
"You gonna dance, or you gonna be a wallflower all night?"
You turned. One of the girls— Doris, or maybe it it was Lilian, you weren't paying attention— was smiling at you with the social grace that women in this time seemed to possess effortlessly. They belonged in a way you never would. You gave her something that was probably a smile.
"I'm alright watching."
"Watching him, you mean." She followed your gaze to where Bucky stood in his dress uniform, left arm braced against a pillar as he leaned down to murmur something into the ear of a redhead who laughed like he'd hung the moon. "Half the room's watching him. Don't feel bad, sweets. He's real generous with the old charm."
Generous! You laughed to yourself, that was certainly one word for it.
You'd been in 1943 for eleven days. Eleven days since the machine in your lab had done whatever it was that it did. There had been a surge of power, a blinding flash of light and the smell of ozone that still hadn't left your nostrils. You had woken up staring at a strange sky, in an alley between two buildings you didn't recognize.
Eleven days later, you had talked your way into a nursing post with the competence that only came with training from a program that wouldn't exist for another sixty years.
The first time you had seen him, you hadn't been able to move. You almost walked past without a backward glance. The thing that had gotten your attention wasn't how he looked, it was his voice. It hadn't changed. What had changed was how freely he laughed
It was all you could think of as you lay on a narrow rented bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking: He's here. He's alive and whole and here, and he has no idea who I am.
You'd thought seeing this version of him would be a comfort.
You'd been so stupid.
So there you were, contemplating your existence, a woman out of your own time. And you realized that the thing nobody told you about time travel was that it was mostly waiting.
You had managed to track down a physicist— a nervous, but brilliant scientist who was well ahead of his time and happened to work for Stark Industries and liked to carry out experiments in his basement.
When you'd described the machine, he had gone very pale and very quiet and then become very interested. He offered to help you. He thought it would take weeks. He speculated a great many things, and every one of them required you to stay close to the war effort, close to the base, close— by fate or by accident— to Bucky-freaking-Barnes.
You should have quit, but you needed the money and a place to stay. So you saw him. Constantly. At the mess, in the corridors, at these godforsaken dances the other nurses dragged you to. And every time, the same knife went in.
Because Bucky Barnes flirted with everyone.
You watched him do it like a case study you had a vested interest in. In a way, you did.
He flirted with Lilian and Doris and Elizabeth, with Marian and Margaret and even Sandy. He flirted with the girl who sold cigarettes and the middle-aged woman who ran your boarding house who flushed like a school girl every time he tipped his cap.
He flirted with the same energy that other men breathed— unconsciously, effortlessly and with enthusiasm. With the whole world except you.
With you he was polite. God, the politeness was utterly devastating. Every 'ma'am.' Every 'miss.' Every nod.
Once— and only once— he caught you looking at him for too long across the mess hall and you had noticed a flicker on his face. It wasn't interest, no you knew his expressions well enough, it was something closer to confusion. Almost as though he couldn't quite figure out why this particular nurse kept staring at him like she was drowning.
You'd looked away so fast you'd spilled your coffee.
So here's the thing you could quite wrap your head around. It was the splinter which kept digging it's way deeper. He was still Bucky. Before the fall. Before seventy years of ice and torture. Before his free will had been ripped away. It was still him. The same kind man you loved.
And this man had looked at you and felt nothing.
"You look like you're thinking too hard," Lillian said. "Never a good idea at a dance."
"Sorry." You forced a smile and made yourself relax. "Long shift," you lied with a shrug.
She patted your arm sympathetically and drifted off in the direction of a corporal who had been eyeing her from across the hall. And then you were alone. Again. Listening to Bucky laughing at something across the room, his eyes crinkled and nose scrunched. You had to close your eyes.
In the present, you told yourself, he loves you.
But did he?
This thought was the poison of the past, the reason the past eleven days had hollowed you out and given you reason to doubt. Because you'd met your Bucky broken. You'd met him after— after the Soldier, after the torture, after the long slow work he had done to put himself back together, with therapy and effort and the kind of hard-won stillness that made his rare smiles feel earned. Your Bucky was quiet. He was careful. He loved you the way a man loves the shore after a shipwreck— grateful, fierce, like something he'd been afraid to hope for.
When you thought back, this stillness had always felt like the depth in your relationship. That his quiet devotion was the shape of a man who had survived far too much to be careless with his heart. That when he reached for you in the dark, when he said your name with reverence, when he told you that he loved you, it was the truest thing in him.
Only now you'd seen the before.
Now you'd seen who he was when the world hadn't broken him yet.
And that man— that carefree, radiant, flirtatious man— he wouldn't have looked at you twice. That man had a type, and you were watching him charm her across the dance floor right now, and it most decidedly wasn't you. It was never you.
So what did that make what you had back home?
It was the ugly thought. The one that had been circling your brain in different iterations for the last eleven days.
He's with you because you were there.
Because you'd been kind to him at the worst point of his life.
Because you were willing, and steady, and you'd stayed when staying was hard.
Because a drowning man doesn't check whether the hand pulling him up is the one he'd have chosen.
He grabs what's offered.
You were what was offered. Convenient. Present. Undemanding.
Not chosen. Settled.
You believed it completely, while standing in that dance hall. It sank deep into your bones, like the weight of something you'd always half-known and finally let yourself see.
"You're that nurse."
You startled so badly at his voice that you knocked your purse off the table. Bucky was standing in front of you— right in front of you, close enough that you could smell the pomade and the wool of his uniform. And he was looking at you with that faint, puzzled crease between his brows. He bent down and retrieved your purse without a second thought.
"I— yeah. Sorry. Yes. I'm a nurse."
Brilliant. Very cool. Totally nailed that response. You mentally face palmed yourself.
"You keep looking at me." He said it plainly, without judgement. "All week. At the mess, and now here." He paused, studying your face. "Do I know you? From somewhere? I feel like I oughta, and it's drivin' me half crazy tryna figure it out."
You don't know me yet, was the thought didn't say. You won't know me for another eighty years.
"No," you managed in a flat tone. "You don't know me."
He studied you. And for one horrible, hopeful second you let yourself imagine that something would spark between you. That he would recognize something buried deep inside himself, the one who would one day become the man you loved. That he'd feel it, the way you felt it. The impossible gravity that existed between you.
He didn't. You watched him not feel it. He just gave you a small, courteous, sorry-can't-place-you smile and the last shred of hope shattered in it chest.
"Well," he said. "You alright? You look a little—" he gestured vaguely at all of you, "—pale. Rough night on the ward?"
You laughed dismally. "Something like that."
"You want some air? You look like you want some air."
And there it was. Not attraction. Kindness. The reflexive decency of a good man toward a woman who looked unwell. He'd have offered the same to Doris or Evelyn, to the redhead or the blonde, to anyone really. You knew it, and you took it anyway, because you were weak and you loved him and this was the closest he'd stood to you in eleven days.
Outside, the night was cold and wet and smelled of the harbor. Bucky lit a cigarette, offered you one, seemed unsurprised when you shook your head. For a while neither of you said anything.
"You got somebody?" he asked finally, and your heart lurched dangerously. "Back home, I mean. You got that look. Like half of you is somewhere else."
You laughed and it came out wrecked.
"Yeah," you said. "I've got somebody."
"He treat you right?"
He loves me like a man loves the thing that saved him, you thought. And I don't know anymore if that's the same as loving me for me.
"I don't know," you said honestly. "I used to think so. Now I'm not sure he'd have picked me. If things had been different. If he'd had… options. I think maybe I was just… the one who was there."
Bucky was quiet a moment. When you looked at him he was frowning— not the usual puzzled frown, it was something more thoughtful.
"That's a helluva thing to carry," he said. "You wanna know what I think?"
He looked at you, barely waiting for you to answer before he continued.
"I flirt with every dame in that room. You've seen me, don't pretend you haven't." He gave you a rueful half-smile. "It's easy. Don't cost me a thing. You smile, they smile, everybody has a nice night, nobody gets hurt. It's—" he searched for the right word, "—it's cheap. You understand? It's the cheapest thing I got."
You stared at him.
"You know what's not cheap?" he went on, looking out into the night. "The stuff that costs you something— and that's not the girl you charm across a dance hall. That's the one you'd still want around when there's nothing charming left in you. When you're scared, or sick, or done things you can't take back."
He exhaled smoke. "A fella who's had it easy, he'll flirt with anybody. Don't mean anything. But a fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person—" he shrugged, "—seems to me that's the only kind that counts. The rest's just… noise."
You couldn't breathe.
He didn't know how deeply what he'd said had resonated with you. He couldn't have. He was just a kind man being kind to a sad woman outside a dance hall, offering the accidental wisdom of someone who'd one day live every word of it. But he'd reached across eighty years and removed the splinter from your heart.
A fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person.
That was your Bucky. Not a drowning man grabbing for the nearest hand. A man who had been through the absolute worst the world could do. A man who had every reason to be closed and cold and careful with the little warmth he had left. And instead who spent it, deliberately, expensively, on you.
Not because you were convenient. Because when everything cheap had been burned out of him, you were what remained. You were the thing that counted.
The flirtation you'd been grieving wasn't the love you knew. It never had been. It was the noise. And your Bucky had gone silent with everyone else in the world and still turned, in the dark, toward you.
"Thank you," you whispered.
Bucky looked faintly bewildered. "For what? I didn't do anything."
"You'd be surprised," you said, tears slipping down your cheeks before laughing at the way he was hastily patting his pockets for a handkerchief with the flustered gallantry of a man way out of his depth
And for the first time in eleven days the ache in your chest had somewhere to go.
The scientist sent for you nine days later. You had pulled yourself away from the pub, one last glance at the Sergeant before you scurried away under the cover of darkness.
The machine hummed and the basement reeked of ozone. Suddenly your heart was pounding and you were looking back at the strange world you were leaving. At the war that hadn't broken him fully yet. At the still charming boy who would become, through unspeakable years, the quiet man who loved you.
I'm coming home baby, you told him, across the space-time continuum. I finally understand what I'm coming home to.
With that vow, you stepped into the light.
When you opened your eyes it was day and you were back in your lab, surrounded by your things and there— there was already someone crossing the room toward you at a dead run. Someone with a metal arm and a face raw with grief and terror that lasted twenty days. Someone who caught you and held you like the shore holds the shipwreck.
"You're back," Bucky said into your hair, over and over, wrecked and reaching only for you. "You're back, you're back, you're back."
"I'm back," you said. "I know exactly where I am."
#bucky barnes#oh lord#you know what i haven't been the same since the first whir whir thing his arm did in catws#all the way back in 2014#AND THIS??????? does this even have the right!!! to be as sexy as it is!!!!!!#no sir i think not!!!!!#*SCREECHES BANSHEE STYLE* @rillils
The first whir of the arm, and that backwards slide down the freeway. Be still my.. everything.
You fell through time by accident — and now you're stuck in 1943, watching Bucky Barnes charm every woman in the room but you. So you start to wonder: did the man you left behind ever really want you, or just keep what was convenient? He's about to answer that. He just doesn't know it yet.
◌⃘ Pairing: 1940s!Bucky Barnes x nurse!Reader and present!Bucky Barnes x scientist!reader
◌⃘ Word count: 2.5K
◌⃘ Warnings: angst, because I don't feel well and this is how my brain works when I'm sick.
The small dance hall in Brooklyn smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, and you had been standing against the back wall for the better part of an hour, watching the man you loved fall in love with everyone but you.
Not that he knew you. That was the cruel logic of it all. To Sergeant James Barnes, you were nobody. Nothing but a nurse he'd been introduced to twice, and forgotten both times. A face in a crowd of pretty faces, but by no means the prettiest.
You had stopped being able to feel your own face somewhere around the third song, no longer pretending to smile.
"You gonna dance, or you gonna be a wallflower all night?"
You turned. One of the girls— Doris, or maybe it it was Lilian, you weren't paying attention— was smiling at you with the social grace that women in this time seemed to possess effortlessly. They belonged in a way you never would. You gave her something that was probably a smile.
"I'm alright watching."
"Watching him, you mean." She followed your gaze to where Bucky stood in his dress uniform, left arm braced against a pillar as he leaned down to murmur something into the ear of a redhead who laughed like he'd hung the moon. "Half the room's watching him. Don't feel bad, sweets. He's real generous with the old charm."
Generous! You laughed to yourself, that was certainly one word for it.
You'd been in 1943 for eleven days. Eleven days since the machine in your lab had done whatever it was that it did. There had been a surge of power, a blinding flash of light and the smell of ozone that still hadn't left your nostrils. You had woken up staring at a strange sky, in an alley between two buildings you didn't recognize.
Eleven days later, you had talked your way into a nursing post with the competence that only came with training from a program that wouldn't exist for another sixty years.
The first time you had seen him, you hadn't been able to move. You almost walked past without a backward glance. The thing that had gotten your attention wasn't how he looked, it was his voice. It hadn't changed. What had changed was how freely he laughed
It was all you could think of as you lay on a narrow rented bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking: He's here. He's alive and whole and here, and he has no idea who I am.
You'd thought seeing this version of him would be a comfort.
You'd been so stupid.
So there you were, contemplating your existence, a woman out of your own time. And you realized that the thing nobody told you about time travel was that it was mostly waiting.
You had managed to track down a physicist— a nervous, but brilliant scientist who was well ahead of his time and happened to work for Stark Industries and liked to carry out experiments in his basement.
When you'd described the machine, he had gone very pale and very quiet and then become very interested. He offered to help you. He thought it would take weeks. He speculated a great many things, and every one of them required you to stay close to the war effort, close to the base, close— by fate or by accident— to Bucky-freaking-Barnes.
You should have quit, but you needed the money and a place to stay. So you saw him. Constantly. At the mess, in the corridors, at these godforsaken dances the other nurses dragged you to. And every time, the same knife went in.
Because Bucky Barnes flirted with everyone.
You watched him do it like a case study you had a vested interest in. I'm a way, you did.
He flirted with Lilian and Doris and Elizabeth, with Marian and Margaret and even Sandy. He flirted with the girl who sold cigarettes and the middle-aged woman who ran your boarding house who flushed like a school girl every time he tipped his cap.
He flirted with the same energy that other mean breathed— unconsciously, effortlessly and with enthusiasm. With the whole world except you.
With you he was polite. God, the politeness was utterly devastating. Every 'ma'am.' Every 'miss.' Every nod.
Once— and only once— he caught you looking at him for too long across the mess hall and you had noticed a flicker on his face. It wasn't interest, no you knew his expressions well enough, it was something closer to confusion. Almost as though he couldn't quite figure out why this particular nurse kept staring at him like she was drowning.
You'd looked away so fast you'd spilled your coffee.
So here's the thing you could quite wrap your head around. It was the splinter which kept digging it's way deeper. He was still Bucky. Before the fall. Before seventy years of ice and torture. Before his free will had been ripped away. It was still him. The same kind man you loved.
And his man had looked at you and felt nothing.
"You look like you're thinking too hard," Lillian said. "Never a good idea at a dance."
"Sorry." You forced a smile and made yourself relax. "Long shift," you lied with a shrug.
She patted your arm sympathetically and drifted off in the direction of a corporal who had been eyeing her from across the hall. And then you were alone. Again. Listening to Bucky laughing at something across the room, his eyes crinkled and nose scrunched. You had to close your eyes.
In the present, you told yourself, he loves you.
But did he?
This thought was the poison of the past, the reason the past eleven days had hollowed you out and given you reason to doubt. Because you'd met your Bucky broken. You'd met him after— after the Soldier, after the torture, after the long slow work he had done to put himself back together, with therapy and effort and the kind of hard-won stillness that made his rare smiles feel earned. Your Bucky was quiet. He was careful. He loved you the way a man loves the shore after a shipwreck— grateful, fierce, like something he'd been afraid to hope for.
When you thought back, this stillness had always felt like the depth in your relationship. That his quiet devotion was the shape of a man who had survived far too much to be careless with his heart. That when he reached for you in the dark, when he said your name with reverence, when he told you that he loved you, it was the truest thing in him.
Only now you'd seen the before.
Now you'd seen who he was when the world hadn't broken him yet.
And that man— that carefree, radiant, flirtatious man— he wouldn't have looked at you twice. That man had a type, and you were watching him charm her across the dance floor right now, and it most decidedly wasn't you. It was never you.
So what did that make what you had back home?
It was the ugly thought. The one that had been circling your brain in different iterations for the last eleven days.
He's with you because you were there.
Because you'd been kind to him at the worst point of his life.
Because you were willing, and steady, and you'd stayed when staying was hard.
Because a drowning man doesn't check whether the hand pulling him up is the one he'd have chosen.
He grabs what's offered.
You were what was offered. Convenient. Present. Undemanding.
Not chosen. Settled.
You believed it completely, while standing in that dance hall. It sank deep into your bones, like the weight of something you'd always half-known and finally let yourself see.
"You're that nurse."
You startled so badly at his voice that you knocked your purse off the table. Bucky was standing in front of you— right in front of you, close enough that you could smell the pomade and the wool of his uniform. And he was looking at you with that faint, puzzled crease between his brows. He bent down and retrieved your purse without a second thought.
"I— yeah. Sorry. Yes. I'm a nurse."
Brilliant. Very cool. Totally nailed that response. You mentally face palmed yourself.
"You keep looking at me." He said it plainly, without judgement. "All week. At the mess, and now here." He paused, studying your face. "Do I know you? From somewhere? I feel like I oughta, and it's drivin' me half crazy tryna figure it out."
You don't know me yet, was the thought didn't say. You won't know me for another eighty years.
"No," you managed in a flat tone. "You don't know me."
He studied you. And for one horrible, hopeful second you let yourself imagine that something would spark between you. That he would recognize something buried deep inside himself, the one who would one day become the man you loved. That he'd feel it, the way you felt it. The impossible gravity that existed between you.
He didn't. You watched him not feel it. He just gave you a small, courteous, sorry-can't-place-you smile and the last shred of hope shattered in it chest.
"Well," he said. "You alright? You look a little—" he gestured vaguely at all of you, "—pale. Rough night on the ward?"
You laughed dismally. "Something like that."
"You want some air? You look like you want some air."
And there it was. Not attraction. Kindness. The reflexive decency of a good man toward a woman who looked unwell. He'd have offered the same to Doris or Evelyn, to the redhead or the blonde, to anyone really. You knew it, and you took it anyway, because you were weak and you loved him and this was the closest he'd stood to you in eleven days.
Outside, the night was cold and wet and smelled of the harbor. Bucky lit a cigarette, offered you one, seemed unsurprised when you shook your head. For a while neither of you said anything.
"You got somebody?" he asked finally, and your heart lurched dangerously. "Back home, I mean. You got that look. Like half of you is somewhere else."
You laughed and it came out wrecked.
"Yeah," you said. "I've got somebody."
"He treat you right?"
He loves me like a man loves the thing that saved him, you thought. And I don't know anymore if that's the same as loving me for me.
"I don't know," you said honestly. "I used to think so. Now I'm not sure he'd have picked me. If things had been different. If he'd had… options. I think maybe I was just… the one who was there."
Bucky was quiet a moment. When you looked at him he was frowning— not the usual puzzled frown, it was something more thoughtful.
"That's a helluva thing to carry," he said. "You wanna know what I think?"
He looked at you, barely waiting for you to answer before he continued.
"I flirt with every dame in that room. You've seen me, don't pretend you haven't." He gave you a rueful half-smile. "It's easy. Don't cost me a thing. You smile, they smile, everybody has a nice night, nobody gets hurt. It's—" he searched for the right word, "—it's cheap. You understand? It's the cheapest thing I got."
You stared at him.
"You know what's not cheap?" he went on, looking out into the night. "The stuff that costs you something— and that's not the girl you charm across a dance hall. That's the one you'd still want around when there's nothing charming left in you. When you're scared, or sick, or done things you can't take back."
He exhaled smoke. "A fella who's had it easy, he'll flirt with anybody. Don't mean anything. But a fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person—" he shrugged, "—seems to me that's the only kind that counts. The rest's just… noise."
You couldn't breathe.
He didn't know how deeply what he'd said had resonated with you. He couldn't have. He was just a kind man being kind to a sad woman outside a dance hall, offering the accidental wisdom of someone who'd one day live every word of it. But he'd reached across eighty years and removed the splinter from your heart.
A fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person.
That was your Bucky. Not a drowning man grabbing for the nearest hand. A man who had been through the absolute worst the world could do. A man who had every reason to be closed and cold and careful with the little warmth he had left. And instead who spent it, deliberately, expensively, on you.
Not because you were convenient. Because when everything cheap had been burned out of him, you were what remained. You were the thing that counted.
The flirtation you'd been grieving wasn't the love you knew. It never had been. It was the noise. And your Bucky had gone silent with everyone else in the world and still turned, in the dark, toward you.
"Thank you," you whispered.
Bucky looked faintly bewildered. "For what? I didn't do anything."
"You'd be surprised," you said, tears slipping down your cheeks before laughing at the way he was hastily patting his pockets for a handkerchief with the flustered gallantry of a man way out of his depth
And for the first time in eleven days the ache in your chest had somewhere to go.
The scientist sent for you nine days later. You had pulled yourself away from the pub, one last glance at the Sergeant before you scurried away under the cover of darkness.
The machine hummed and the basement reeked of ozone. Suddenly your heart was pounding and you were looking back at the strange world you were leaving. At the war that hadn't broken him fully yet. At the still charming boy who would become, through unspeakable years, the quiet man who loved you.
I'm coming home baby, you told him, across the space-time continuum. I finally understand what I'm coming home to.
With that vow, you stepped into the light.
When you opened your eyes it was day and you were back in your lab, surrounded by your things and there— there was already someone crossing the room toward you at a dead run. Someone with a metal arm and a face raw with grief and terror that lasted twenty days. Someone who caught you and held you like the shore holds the shipwreck.
"You're back," Bucky said into your hair, over and over, wrecked and reaching only for you. "You're back, you're back, you're back."
"I'm back," you said. "I know exactly where I am."
It was a few days later when the words finally came spilling out. The two of you were in bed together— a place the two of you had spent a lot of time since your return.
His vibranium arm was heavy across your torso and the TV in your room was murmuring softly in the background to no one in particular.
You had already explained about the basement science you'd enlisted from a slightly creepy man for eleven days, which had brought a disgruntled expression to his face. But you'd been careful around the part that mattered, and Bucky, who noticed everything, had noticed that too.
"You saw me," he said finally. It wasn't a question. "Back then. You tell your story right up to it and then."
You went still in his arms.
"What was I like?"
He tried to keep his tone relaxed, but there was something mixed into his voice that you didn't expect. Not curiosity… dread. His thumb had stopped moving against your knee and was pressing into your skin harder than he realized.
"I don't—" He stopped, then started again, quieter. "I don't remember a lot of before. Just pieces. So whatever you saw, that's more than I've got." He paused, taking a breath. "Was I— was he someone you liked?"
And you understood, then, what he was really asking. Not was I charming. Not was I hot in the uniform. He was asking whether the man he used to be— the whole, unbroken version, the one the war and the ice hadn't gotten to yet— measured up to the ruin she'd come home to. Whether you'd looked at the original and wished you'd gotten that one instead.
You almost laughed. If he only knew.
"You were charming," you said, and felt him flinch, just slightly. "God, where you charming. You flirted with every woman in Brooklyn. The redhead, the cigarette girl, the landlady— everyone." You watched his jaw tighten even though your voice was light and playful."
"Yeah?" He breathed.
"Yeah, with everyone 'cept me. You didn't look at me twice."
"I— I'm… sorry," he said roughly, and he meant it, absurdly, apologizing for a man who perished eighty years before.
"Don't be." You caught his hand, laced your fingers through the cool metal of his. "You know… I stood there hating it. Eleven days. That's how long I watched you charm the whole world and skip right over me, and I thought— that's who he really is. That's the real Bucky. And the real one wouldn't have picked me."
His eyes came up to yours, dark and stricken, but you continued. "I was afraid that you only loved me now because you were different when you found me. Because I was there… and willing… and you grabbed the nearest hand."
"That's not—" His voice cracked. "That's not—"
"I know." You pressed your forehead to his. "I know it's not. You wanna know how I know?"
He didn't answer. He was barely breathing.
"Because he told me. Outside a dance hall, one cold night, not knowing who I was— he told me the flirting was the cheapest thing he had. That the stuff that counts isn't the girl you charm across a room. It's the one you'd still reach for when there's nothing charming left in you."
You felt him go rigid. "He told me a man who's been through the wringer and still reaches for one particular person— that's the only kind of love that counts. The rest is just noise."
The silence stretched out between you and when you pulled back to look at him, his eyes were wet.
"I said that?" he whispered.
"You said that."
"To you?"
"To a sad stranger you'd never see again." You smiled, and it wobbled. "You reached across eighty years and fixed the exact thing that was breaking me, and you didn't even know you were doing it. You always do it, Buck. The charming one skipped over me. This one —" you pressed his metal hand flat against your chest, over your heart, "— this one ran across a room and held on like I was the only fixed point left in the world. I don't want the one who flirted with all of Brooklyn. I never did. I want the one who counts."
He made a sound, half broken laugh, and pulled you into him, face buried in your hair, arms locked around you like he was afraid you'd fall through time again if he let go.
"I'd skip over the whole world," he said into your neck, wrecked and certain. "Every time. I'd skip over everybody but you."
The bar smelled of spilled whiskey and stale smoke. From your position at the back of the bar, you saw him before he saw you.
Bucky came through the door like he owned the place, which he didn't, but you'd never once seen him walk into a room as though there was and doubt about it. His suit was new. His tie was knotted too tight, the way it often was when he'd dressed in a hurry because he was stressed about something.
His hair was combed back flat, you could practically smell the pomade from where you were stood. What most people didn't noticed that after a long day, it had started coming loose at the temple, one dark strand deciding to do its own thing. You thought— not for the first time, and never out loud— that it was a crime for a man to look that handsome on a Tuesday.
He scanned the room. Not nervous. More careful. There was a difference, and you'd learned it watching him over the last six months. His jaw was set, mouth flat, eyes moving from face to face with the unhurried attention of someone looking for one face in particular.
Then he found you.
Something in his shoulders eased by a fraction, so small you'd have missed it if you didn't know the whole vocabulary of him by now. He didn't smile. This wasn't a smiling kind of night. But he tipped his chin, ever so slightly, and started moving toward you through the crowd. In that moment every other man and woman in that bar may as well have stopped existing.
"You shouldn't be here," he said when he reached you, low, close enough that you felt it more than heard it.
"Neither should you."
His mouth twitched. Nearly a smile, then. "Yeah," he admitted. "Well." He glanced back at the door, and his hand found the small of your back. "Stay close to me."
“Be careful, Steve. You might not want to pull on that thread.”
My take on the Winter Soldier file because I’m a terrible person and I like to make myself sad. Obviously the file would be much longer and contain all of Bucky’s missions and assassinations over the years but I already spent too long working on this, so let’s pretend this is an excerpt. All the text is just filler since I’m neither a writer nor do I speak Russian. References used courtesy of gettyimages and sebastianstan-daily.
Could you please write something where Bucky completely loses his shit when you stop him and take the condom off mid-sex?
Bare Instincts
Word Count: 2,956
Warnings: 18+ MDNI, explicit sexual content, smut, unprotected sex (wrap it up in real life, folks), creampie, breeding kink, dirty talk, possessive behavior, light choking (consensual and gentle), rough sex, multiple orgasms/rounds, praise kink, Bucky Barnes x Reader, super-soldier stamina, aftercare mentions. All consensual.
A/N: making this a twofer, answering the ask and taking part in @mercurial-chuckles Vivifying Valentine's Atelier
It had been a long night for Bucky. He hadn't known at the time if it had been intentional. But the way he had stumbled back into the apartment after the godforsaken Valentine's gala, he couldn't care less.
For you, it had been deliberate. The moment he stepped into your apartment, your decision had been made. He looked like sin in his black tailored suit. The way it hugged his broad shoulders and tapered down at his waist had been a test of your control.
“Tease me and see where that’ll get you,” you murmured in his ear with your hand high up on his thigh.
The growl that rumbled low in his throat at your whispered promises told you that you'd have him eating from the palm of your hand. The possessive pressure of his metal digits on your thigh told you everything you needed to know. And by the time you had him pushed up against your front door, he was rock hard, his normally serene blue eyes were dark and stormy with desire.
“You’re killin’ me here, darlin’” he groaned, his thick Brooklyn accent more prominent in his aroused state.
You smirked, slipping your keys into the front door and releasing the catch. He whisked you inside without a word— so fast that you weren’t sure your feet had touched the ground. Even in his haste, he made sure the front door was secure before you reached the bedroom— nothing was more important to him than your safety.
In the bedroom, you found yourself shoving him onto the bed, climbing on top and straddling his hips. His hands acted instinctively, both flesh and vibranium roamed your body as you stripped him down. His jacket came first, followed by his shirt, leaving skin on display. His muscles flexed, rippling under your light caresses, his scars telling the stories of battles won and lost. His pants took a little longer, a struggle between co-ordination and need.
Pants gone. All that was left are his boxers, the thick outline of his cock straining dangerous against the thin fabric. You could see him practically twitching, making your mouth water. Instead you ground against him, relishing the friction on your pussy as be bucked into you with a soft curse on his lips.
“Fuck, darlin', please,” he whined, tugging on your arms until your mouth met his. “Need you,” he muttered against your lips before he pressed his to them in an almost bruising kiss.
The second your mouth parted in a gasp was— to him— merely an opportunity for his tongue to invade your mouth. Hot and demanding. Hungry and wanting. You let yourself get lost in the embrace of your lips as his fingers worked off your dress. It wasn’t long before he was pulling your dress over your head with practiced ease. The heat coming off his super-soldier body was making you ache. Your pussy throbbed with anticipation of him. Waiting eagerly to be filled.
You were both naked in seconds, skin on skin as you sat on his hard length, coating him in your slick. You reached over to the nightstand, grabbing a condom because, well, old habits die hard. Bucky watched with hooded eyes as you shuffled down enough to roll it over him, his cock jumping in your hands. You bit your lip with concentration, taking your time to appreciate the long, thick, veined length. He was huge and it made your cunt clench needily.
It was like he could sense your urgency, because he had you flipped on your back and was settled between your thighs with a low growl. “Gonna feel so good inside you!”
There wasn’t an ounce of hesitation as he pushed into you. Slow at first— he wasn’t a monster, he was James Bucky Barnes after all. Inch by inch, he stretched you with deliberate and delicious precision. A shuddering moan left your lips as your fingertips dug into his forearms.
“Bucky... oh Gods, yes!”
Finally he bottomed out with a groan, stilling for a moment with his forehead pressed lightly on yours.
“So tight, sweetheart. Feel so fuckin’ perfect.”
With that, he started moving inside you. Deep thrusts that had your back arching off the bed. Mind-blowing, despite the condom dulling some of the sensations. He knew how to make you moan, with his steady rhythm, each powerful stroke hit that perfect spot inside you that made stars burst behind your eyelids.
“Yes, baby, just like that.”
Your legs snaked around his waist so you could meet his thrust and the room was filled with the wet sounds of skin slapping skin, your moans and his soft grunts. Sweat slowly slicked your bodies, and he buried his face in your neck, sucking dark marks onto your skin.
“Mine,” he whispered harshly, one hand steadying his weight over you, the other at the base of his cock. “All fuckin' mine.”
His words stirred something inside you. You were his, and he yours. The two of you had been together for almost six months, an exclusive relationship and it was now that it struck you that the thought of feeling him bare was exhilarating. The idea of nothing between you ignited a fire in your core that burned hotter than anything you’d felt that evening.
Bucky had just pulled back and was about to thrust his cock back into you when you put a hand on his chest to stop him.
“Baby… stop.”
He froze instantly. A flash of concern crossed his face despite the haze of lust he had just been lost in. Super-soldier or not, he was always acutely attuned to you and your needs.
“You okay? Did I hurt you?”
You shook your head immediately followed by a whispered ‘no baby.’ You propped yourself up on your elbows while his cock was still half-buried inside you. You could feel him throbbing needily.
“I just... I want to feel you. All of you.” Your hand floated up to his elbow, before trailing softly along his skin down to where you were joined, fingers brushing the base of his sheathed length.
His eyes widened, pupils dilating as his brain registered the meaning of your words. “You mean... b-bare?”
You nodded, biting your lip. Bucky looked like his brain had short-circuited. But you weren't reckless.
“Before we do, I need to know... are you clean? Like, STDs and stuff? I trust you, but… I have to ask.”
The look of raw hunger softened slightly with a look of patience and a hint of adoration. He brought his palm up to cup your face with a gentleness befitting a summer breeze. He stroked your cheek with his thumb.
“Yeah, sweetheart. I'm clean. Serum takes care of a lot— quick healing, immunity. But Sam told me to get tested anyway… last month. Negative on all ‘counts. You?”
“Same here,” you whispered, a wave of relief and excitement washed over you. “Last check was clear. And I'm on the pill.”
He let out a shuddering exhale which sounded like a laugh at the end. Meanwhile his cock twitched with far more anticipation than his face betrayed. “Fuck, darlin'. You sure? Once we do this…”
“I'm sure,” you said quietly, eyes filled with earnestness.
He pulled out of you and you reached down, gripping the condom at the base and with an element of reverence you slid the latex off his glistening length already slick from his arousal. Bucky hissed at the sensation, hips jerking involuntarily at your touch and the cool air hitting his bare skin.
“Shit,” he groaned, looking down to where your hand was now wrapped around his cock, pumping once… twice. His heat swelled in your grasp, veins pulsing in your fingertips. “Sweets, that's... fuc-.”
You maneuvered your hips over his until his cockhead was lined up to your entrance. Teasingly, you brushed the tip through your folds, coating him with your essence.
“Please,” he begged, voice utterly wrecked. His lips trembled, breath hot against your ear. “Need to be inside you raw.”
You sank down on him in one smooth motion, taking him right up to the hilt, no barriers. The difference was electrifying. It was immediate. It was ecstasy. Hot. Skin on skin. You could feel him. Every ridge. Every vein. They dragged against your soaked walls.
Both of you cried out in pleasure. Your head fell back with a moan.
“Fuuuuck,” Bucky roared, hands clamping on your hips so hard you knew you’d bruise. “So wet, so tight— Jesus Christ sweetheart, I can feel everything. Your pussy's grippin' me like a vice.”
This was what having an epiphany would have felt like. The proverbial lightbulb moment. Except it was the feeling of Bucky’s massive dick buried deep inside your pussy. You started riding him. Slow at first. Savoring the intensity. No rubber muting the sensation. You didn’t know. How could you know? Pure. Electric. Intoxication.
“Bucky... oh my God, you feel so good. So big without it.”
He thrust right up to meet you. Picking up the pace. There was something wild in his eyes that you had never seen before. And it was all for you. “Yeah? You like that, huh, sweetheart? Feelin' my bare cock stretchin' you out? Gonna fill you up, mark you inside.”
Filthy words fueled by fire spilled from his lips and you bounced harder— breasts jiggling with every buck of his hips, his gaze fixed firmly on you. Then he said something that surprised you. It wasn’t the words exactly, it was more the tone. Deep. Commanding.
“Touch yourself, baby. Wanna see you finish on my dick.”
Your fingers slipped under the hood easily. No additional prompting needed. You circled the swollen nub as he pounded into you. Over and over as the room filled with the scent of sex. A sweet mixture of sweat and arousal and the faint metallic tag of his arm.
“Bucky, baby, please, I'm close... don't stop.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sweets. But I think I can make it better,” he smirked under you.
You stopped bouncing, paused chasing your climax so you could hear him out, fingers never once leaving your clit. He lifted your leg and helped you turn around, his cock not leaving its rightful place in your needy pussy. He sat up until you were on all fours and he slammed into you from behind. Much deeper now. Making you whine when his cock hit your cervix.
“Take it, baby. Take every inch. This perfect pussy's mine. Gonna breed it, flood you with my cum.”
You whimpered, pushing back against him. “Yes, baby, yes... want your cum. Fill me up.”
His metal hand wrapped around your throat gently. As much as you told him you could take it, he would never get rougher with you than letting his lips bruise your skin. He pulled you up against his chest with the vibranium while his flesh digits snaked between your legs, replacing your fingers on your clit and rubbing until you clenched harder around him.
“Ohhh, that's it, darlin'. Squeeze me. Milk my cock dry.”
Your vision went white. A blinding flash as pleasure enveloped you. And your eyes rolled back as his words sent you over the edge, your orgasm crashed through you, walls fluttering around him bare, pulling him deeper.
“Bucky! Fuck, yes!”
He lost it as you groaned, your pussy clamping down on him, making him truly lose his mind. His thrusts turned erratic, animalistic, grunts turning to moans.
“Oh God, feel that? Your cunt's suckin' me in— bare, raw, fuck! Gonna come... gonna come inside you.”
Your arms shook with the effort of holding you up as you rode the aftershocks. “Do it, you gasped. “Come for me, Buck.”
With a guttural groan, he pushed in one last time, buried deep inside you, cock pulsing as he spilled his super-soldier seed inside you. Nothing could have prepared you for this. The sensation was new and overwhelming. Hot ropes of cum painted your walls. He kept thrusting through it. Drawing out every drop. Until finally he collapsed against you, panting.
But Bucky wasn’t done. Far from it. He pulled out slowly, watching his cum leak from you. A filthy smile curled on his lip. “Look at that. Always imagined this but actually seeing my cum drippin’ out of your pretty pussy… well… didn’t know it would do this to me.”
You looked down, surprised to see that his cock wasn’t quite as soft as you expected. He turned you onto your back, keeping your legs apart, scooping some of the cum with his fingers and pushing it back into you.
“Gotta keep it all inside, sweet princess,” he whispered in a conspiratorial tone, a rare sparkle of mischief in his eyes.
You moaned, sensitive but immediately aroused again. “Bucky…”
“Not done, sweetheart,” he whined, letting his cock slide through your folds, already slick with your combined fluids. “Need more. Need to feel you bare again.” His cock, still hard— thank you, serum— was already nudging insistently at your entrance.
"Wai-wai-wait," you laughed breathlessly, but he was insatiable now, eyes glazed with lust.
“Can't wait, sweet princess. The way you feel without that rubber... 's addictin’.” He slid through your folds again. “Please?” he asked with a pout.
You laughed again, unable to resist his adorable face and smoldering eyes. Bucky had an unreasonable talent at looking gorgeous and sweet at the same time and you couldn’t resist the power of his pleading gaze. So you spread your legs in answer.
He slid in again without hesitation, easier this time, your pussy welcoming him with a wet squelch. “Hear that, sweets? So fuckin’ messy. All because of me.”
He grinned proudly, even as he set a brutal pace, hips snapping, balls slapping your ass. Dirty talk poured from his mouth like a broken faucet. “Gonna ruin you for anyone else. No one gets this but me— *thrust* bare, *thrust* deep, *thrust* breedin' you like you deserve.”
“Harder, Buck.” You clawed at his back, lost in the sensations of your fucked out haze. “Fuck me like you own me.”
“I do,” he growled, grabbing your wrists and pinning them above your head with just his metal hand. “You’re mine. Pussy's mine. Gonna pump you full. Again *thrust* and again *thrust*.”
“So deep... can feel you everywhere.” You grinded against him, hips circling just to feel him throb inside you.
“That’s it, darlin’. Show me how much you love feelin’ me raw.” He smirked, thrusting up sharply. “Gonna make you drip for days.”
The bed made its protests known, creaking under the force of his hips. But your bodies were wrapped together in a world outside the mundane. Lost in a cloud of carnality. He leaned down, capturing one nipple between his lips, while his free thumb swept over your clit.
“Bucky!” you screamed, your back arching off the mattress.
He picked up speed, angling to hit your g-spot. “Gonna make you squirt on my cock. Bet you can, all messy and bare.”
“I- Bucky- I-”
“Come again, sweetheart. Wanna feel you clench around my bare cock.”
It didn't take long for the coil in your belly to reach its limit. Pressure built steadily. Intense. Until… it snapped much faster than you expected. You shattered. Gushing. A wanton moan leaving your lips. He followed very soon after, another load flooding you, mixing with the first, spreading out over your thighs.
He collapsed on top of you. Both your bodies sticky with sweat and cum. Sheets ruined. Bucky pulled you into his arms, kissing your forehead with surprising tenderness. “That was... insane.”
You hummed contentedly against his chest, still catching your breath.
“Yeah,” you murmured, lips brushing over one of the older scars near his collarbone. “So fucking worth it.”
Bucky let out a low, rumbling chuckle— the kind that vibrated through you where your bodies were still pressed together. His metal hand stroked slow, lazy lines up and down your spine while the right one settled protectively over your hip, thumb tracing contented circles on your skin.
For a long minute neither of you spoke. Just breathing. Just existing in the sticky, warm wreckage you’d made of each other.
Then he shifted slightly, just enough to press his lips to your temple.
“Gonna be honest with you, sweets,” he said quietly, voice rough and wrecked in the best possible way. “Don’t think I’m ever gonna be okay with puttin’ anything between us again.”
You laughed softly, the sound muffled against his skin.
“Good. Cause I don’t want you to.”
He exhaled softly through his nose, almost like relief, and tightened his arms around you.
“Stay right here,” he whispered. “Don’t even think about movin’ yet. I like feelin’ you like this… full of me. Messy ‘cause of me.”
You clenched around him on purpose— just a little— feeling his cock give a tired, but still interested twitch inside you even though you’d both just come apart. He groaned low in his throat.
“Evil,” he muttered, but there was a smile in it.
You tilted your head back so you could meet his eyes. They were softer now. Storm faded. Just deep blue and stupidly fond.
“Love you,” you said simply.
Bucky’s expression flickered— like the words still caught him off guard sometimes, even six months in. Then his mouth curved, slow and real.
“Love you too, sweetheart.” He kissed you gently this time. Barely a brush. “More than you know.”
He didn’t pull out for a long while. Holding you close. Letting the quiet settle. Letting the evidence of what you’d just done dry on your thighs and his sheets while he murmured sweet, filthy little promises against your hair about tomorrow morning. And the day after that. And every time after.
You fell through time by accident — and now you're stuck in 1943, watching Bucky Barnes charm every woman in the room but you. So you start to wonder: did the man you left behind ever really want you, or just keep what was convenient? He's about to answer that. He just doesn't know it yet.
◌⃘ Pairing: 1940s!Bucky Barnes x nurse!Reader and present!Bucky Barnes x scientist!reader
◌⃘ Word count: 2.5K
◌⃘ Warnings: angst, because I don't feel well and this is how my brain works when I'm sick.
The small dance hall in Brooklyn smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, and you had been standing against the back wall for the better part of an hour, watching the man you loved fall in love with everyone but you.
Not that he knew you. That was the cruel logic of it all. To Sergeant James Barnes, you were nobody. Nothing but a nurse he'd been introduced to twice, and forgotten both times. A face in a crowd of pretty faces, but by no means the prettiest.
You had stopped being able to feel your own face somewhere around the third song, no longer pretending to smile.
"You gonna dance, or you gonna be a wallflower all night?"
You turned. One of the girls— Doris, or maybe it it was Lilian, you weren't paying attention— was smiling at you with the social grace that women in this time seemed to possess effortlessly. They belonged in a way you never would. You gave her something that was probably a smile.
"I'm alright watching."
"Watching him, you mean." She followed your gaze to where Bucky stood in his dress uniform, left arm braced against a pillar as he leaned down to murmur something into the ear of a redhead who laughed like he'd hung the moon. "Half the room's watching him. Don't feel bad, sweets. He's real generous with the old charm."
Generous! You laughed to yourself, that was certainly one word for it.
You'd been in 1943 for eleven days. Eleven days since the machine in your lab had done whatever it was that it did. There had been a surge of power, a blinding flash of light and the smell of ozone that still hadn't left your nostrils. You had woken up staring at a strange sky, in an alley between two buildings you didn't recognize.
Eleven days later, you had talked your way into a nursing post with the competence that only came with training from a program that wouldn't exist for another sixty years.
The first time you had seen him, you hadn't been able to move. You almost walked past without a backward glance. The thing that had gotten your attention wasn't how he looked, it was his voice. It hadn't changed. What had changed was how freely he laughed
It was all you could think of as you lay on a narrow rented bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking: He's here. He's alive and whole and here, and he has no idea who I am.
You'd thought seeing this version of him would be a comfort.
You'd been so stupid.
So there you were, contemplating your existence, a woman out of your own time. And you realized that the thing nobody told you about time travel was that it was mostly waiting.
You had managed to track down a physicist— a nervous, but brilliant scientist who was well ahead of his time and happened to work for Stark Industries and liked to carry out experiments in his basement.
When you'd described the machine, he had gone very pale and very quiet and then become very interested. He offered to help you. He thought it would take weeks. He speculated a great many things, and every one of them required you to stay close to the war effort, close to the base, close— by fate or by accident— to Bucky-freaking-Barnes.
You should have quit, but you needed the money and a place to stay. So you saw him. Constantly. At the mess, in the corridors, at these godforsaken dances the other nurses dragged you to. And every time, the same knife went in.
Because Bucky Barnes flirted with everyone.
You watched him do it like a case study you had a vested interest in. I'm a way, you did.
He flirted with Lilian and Doris and Elizabeth, with Marian and Margaret and even Sandy. He flirted with the girl who sold cigarettes and the middle-aged woman who ran your boarding house who flushed like a school girl every time he tipped his cap.
He flirted with the same energy that other mean breathed— unconsciously, effortlessly and with enthusiasm. With the whole world except you.
With you he was polite. God, the politeness was utterly devastating. Every 'ma'am.' Every 'miss.' Every nod.
Once— and only once— he caught you looking at him for too long across the mess hall and you had noticed a flicker on his face. It wasn't interest, no you knew his expressions well enough, it was something closer to confusion. Almost as though he couldn't quite figure out why this particular nurse kept staring at him like she was drowning.
You'd looked away so fast you'd spilled your coffee.
So here's the thing you could quite wrap your head around. It was the splinter which kept digging it's way deeper. He was still Bucky. Before the fall. Before seventy years of ice and torture. Before his free will had been ripped away. It was still him. The same kind man you loved.
And his man had looked at you and felt nothing.
"You look like you're thinking too hard," Lillian said. "Never a good idea at a dance."
"Sorry." You forced a smile and made yourself relax. "Long shift," you lied with a shrug.
She patted your arm sympathetically and drifted off in the direction of a corporal who had been eyeing her from across the hall. And then you were alone. Again. Listening to Bucky laughing at something across the room, his eyes crinkled and nose scrunched. You had to close your eyes.
In the present, you told yourself, he loves you.
But did he?
This thought was the poison of the past, the reason the past eleven days had hollowed you out and given you reason to doubt. Because you'd met your Bucky broken. You'd met him after— after the Soldier, after the torture, after the long slow work he had done to put himself back together, with therapy and effort and the kind of hard-won stillness that made his rare smiles feel earned. Your Bucky was quiet. He was careful. He loved you the way a man loves the shore after a shipwreck— grateful, fierce, like something he'd been afraid to hope for.
When you thought back, this stillness had always felt like the depth in your relationship. That his quiet devotion was the shape of a man who had survived far too much to be careless with his heart. That when he reached for you in the dark, when he said your name with reverence, when he told you that he loved you, it was the truest thing in him.
Only now you'd seen the before.
Now you'd seen who he was when the world hadn't broken him yet.
And that man— that carefree, radiant, flirtatious man— he wouldn't have looked at you twice. That man had a type, and you were watching him charm her across the dance floor right now, and it most decidedly wasn't you. It was never you.
So what did that make what you had back home?
It was the ugly thought. The one that had been circling your brain in different iterations for the last eleven days.
He's with you because you were there.
Because you'd been kind to him at the worst point of his life.
Because you were willing, and steady, and you'd stayed when staying was hard.
Because a drowning man doesn't check whether the hand pulling him up is the one he'd have chosen.
He grabs what's offered.
You were what was offered. Convenient. Present. Undemanding.
Not chosen. Settled.
You believed it completely, while standing in that dance hall. It sank deep into your bones, like the weight of something you'd always half-known and finally let yourself see.
"You're that nurse."
You startled so badly at his voice that you knocked your purse off the table. Bucky was standing in front of you— right in front of you, close enough that you could smell the pomade and the wool of his uniform. And he was looking at you with that faint, puzzled crease between his brows. He bent down and retrieved your purse without a second thought.
"I— yeah. Sorry. Yes. I'm a nurse."
Brilliant. Very cool. Totally nailed that response. You mentally face palmed yourself.
"You keep looking at me." He said it plainly, without judgement. "All week. At the mess, and now here." He paused, studying your face. "Do I know you? From somewhere? I feel like I oughta, and it's drivin' me half crazy tryna figure it out."
You don't know me yet, was the thought didn't say. You won't know me for another eighty years.
"No," you managed in a flat tone. "You don't know me."
He studied you. And for one horrible, hopeful second you let yourself imagine that something would spark between you. That he would recognize something buried deep inside himself, the one who would one day become the man you loved. That he'd feel it, the way you felt it. The impossible gravity that existed between you.
He didn't. You watched him not feel it. He just gave you a small, courteous, sorry-can't-place-you smile and the last shred of hope shattered in it chest.
"Well," he said. "You alright? You look a little—" he gestured vaguely at all of you, "—pale. Rough night on the ward?"
You laughed dismally. "Something like that."
"You want some air? You look like you want some air."
And there it was. Not attraction. Kindness. The reflexive decency of a good man toward a woman who looked unwell. He'd have offered the same to Doris or Evelyn, to the redhead or the blonde, to anyone really. You knew it, and you took it anyway, because you were weak and you loved him and this was the closest he'd stood to you in eleven days.
Outside, the night was cold and wet and smelled of the harbor. Bucky lit a cigarette, offered you one, seemed unsurprised when you shook your head. For a while neither of you said anything.
"You got somebody?" he asked finally, and your heart lurched dangerously. "Back home, I mean. You got that look. Like half of you is somewhere else."
You laughed and it came out wrecked.
"Yeah," you said. "I've got somebody."
"He treat you right?"
He loves me like a man loves the thing that saved him, you thought. And I don't know anymore if that's the same as loving me for me.
"I don't know," you said honestly. "I used to think so. Now I'm not sure he'd have picked me. If things had been different. If he'd had… options. I think maybe I was just… the one who was there."
Bucky was quiet a moment. When you looked at him he was frowning— not the usual puzzled frown, it was something more thoughtful.
"That's a helluva thing to carry," he said. "You wanna know what I think?"
He looked at you, barely waiting for you to answer before he continued.
"I flirt with every dame in that room. You've seen me, don't pretend you haven't." He gave you a rueful half-smile. "It's easy. Don't cost me a thing. You smile, they smile, everybody has a nice night, nobody gets hurt. It's—" he searched for the right word, "—it's cheap. You understand? It's the cheapest thing I got."
You stared at him.
"You know what's not cheap?" he went on, looking out into the night. "The stuff that costs you something— and that's not the girl you charm across a dance hall. That's the one you'd still want around when there's nothing charming left in you. When you're scared, or sick, or done things you can't take back."
He exhaled smoke. "A fella who's had it easy, he'll flirt with anybody. Don't mean anything. But a fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person—" he shrugged, "—seems to me that's the only kind that counts. The rest's just… noise."
You couldn't breathe.
He didn't know how deeply what he'd said had resonated with you. He couldn't have. He was just a kind man being kind to a sad woman outside a dance hall, offering the accidental wisdom of someone who'd one day live every word of it. But he'd reached across eighty years and removed the splinter from your heart.
A fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person.
That was your Bucky. Not a drowning man grabbing for the nearest hand. A man who had been through the absolute worst the world could do. A man who had every reason to be closed and cold and careful with the little warmth he had left. And instead who spent it, deliberately, expensively, on you.
Not because you were convenient. Because when everything cheap had been burned out of him, you were what remained. You were the thing that counted.
The flirtation you'd been grieving wasn't the love you knew. It never had been. It was the noise. And your Bucky had gone silent with everyone else in the world and still turned, in the dark, toward you.
"Thank you," you whispered.
Bucky looked faintly bewildered. "For what? I didn't do anything."
"You'd be surprised," you said, tears slipping down your cheeks before laughing at the way he was hastily patting his pockets for a handkerchief with the flustered gallantry of a man way out of his depth
And for the first time in eleven days the ache in your chest had somewhere to go.
The scientist sent for you nine days later. You had pulled yourself away from the pub, one last glance at the Sergeant before you scurried away under the cover of darkness.
The machine hummed and the basement reeked of ozone. Suddenly your heart was pounding and you were looking back at the strange world you were leaving. At the war that hadn't broken him fully yet. At the still charming boy who would become, through unspeakable years, the quiet man who loved you.
I'm coming home baby, you told him, across the space-time continuum. I finally understand what I'm coming home to.
With that vow, you stepped into the light.
When you opened your eyes it was day and you were back in your lab, surrounded by your things and there— there was already someone crossing the room toward you at a dead run. Someone with a metal arm and a face raw with grief and terror that lasted twenty days. Someone who caught you and held you like the shore holds the shipwreck.
"You're back," Bucky said into your hair, over and over, wrecked and reaching only for you. "You're back, you're back, you're back."
"I'm back," you said. "I know exactly where I am."
It was a few days later when the words finally came spilling out. The two of you were in bed together— a place the two of you had spent a lot of time since your return.
His vibranium arm was heavy across your torso and the TV in your room was murmuring softly in the background to no one in particular.
You had already explained about the basement science you'd enlisted from a slightly creepy man for eleven days, which had brought a disgruntled expression to his face. But you'd been careful around the part that mattered, and Bucky, who noticed everything, had noticed that too.
"You saw me," he said finally. It wasn't a question. "Back then. You tell your story right up to it and then."
You went still in his arms.
"What was I like?"
He tried to keep his tone relaxed, but there was something mixed into his voice that you didn't expect. Not curiosity… dread. His thumb had stopped moving against your knee and was pressing into your skin harder than he realized.
"I don't—" He stopped, then started again, quieter. "I don't remember a lot of before. Just pieces. So whatever you saw, that's more than I've got." He paused, taking a breath. "Was I— was he someone you liked?"
And you understood, then, what he was really asking. Not was I charming. Not was I hot in the uniform. He was asking whether the man he used to be— the whole, unbroken version, the one the war and the ice hadn't gotten to yet— measured up to the ruin she'd come home to. Whether you'd looked at the original and wished you'd gotten that one instead.
You almost laughed. If he only knew.
"You were charming," you said, and felt him flinch, just slightly. "God, where you charming. You flirted with every woman in Brooklyn. The redhead, the cigarette girl, the landlady— everyone." You watched his jaw tighten even though your voice was light and playful."
"Yeah?" He breathed.
"Yeah, with everyone 'cept me. You didn't look at me twice."
"I— I'm… sorry," he said roughly, and he meant it, absurdly, apologizing for a man who perished eighty years before.
"Don't be." You caught his hand, laced your fingers through the cool metal of his. "You know… I stood there hating it. Eleven days. That's how long I watched you charm the whole world and skip right over me, and I thought— that's who he really is. That's the real Bucky. And the real one wouldn't have picked me."
His eyes came up to yours, dark and stricken, but you continued. "I was afraid that you only loved me now because you were different when you found me. Because I was there… and willing… and you grabbed the nearest hand."
"That's not—" His voice cracked. "That's not—"
"I know." You pressed your forehead to his. "I know it's not. You wanna know how I know?"
He didn't answer. He was barely breathing.
"Because he told me. Outside a dance hall, one cold night, not knowing who I was— he told me the flirting was the cheapest thing he had. That the stuff that counts isn't the girl you charm across a room. It's the one you'd still reach for when there's nothing charming left in you."
You felt him go rigid. "He told me a man who's been through the wringer and still reaches for one particular person— that's the only kind of love that counts. The rest is just noise."
The silence stretched out between you and when you pulled back to look at him, his eyes were wet.
"I said that?" he whispered.
"You said that."
"To you?"
"To a sad stranger you'd never see again." You smiled, and it wobbled. "You reached across eighty years and fixed the exact thing that was breaking me, and you didn't even know you were doing it. You always do it, Buck. The charming one skipped over me. This one —" you pressed his metal hand flat against your chest, over your heart, "— this one ran across a room and held on like I was the only fixed point left in the world. I don't want the one who flirted with all of Brooklyn. I never did. I want the one who counts."
He made a sound, half broken laugh, and pulled you into him, face buried in your hair, arms locked around you like he was afraid you'd fall through time again if he let go.
"I'd skip over the whole world," he said into your neck, wrecked and certain. "Every time. I'd skip over everybody but you."
You fell through time by accident — and now you're stuck in 1943, watching Bucky Barnes charm every woman in the room but you. So you start to wonder: did the man you left behind ever really want you, or just keep what was convenient? He's about to answer that. He just doesn't know it yet.
◌⃘ Pairing: 1940s!Bucky Barnes x nurse!Reader and present!Bucky Barnes x scientist!reader
◌⃘ Word count: 2.5K
◌⃘ Warnings: angst, because I don't feel well and this is how my brain works when I'm sick.
The small dance hall in Brooklyn smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, and you had been standing against the back wall for the better part of an hour, watching the man you loved fall in love with everyone but you.
Not that he knew you. That was the cruel logic of it all. To Sergeant James Barnes, you were nobody. Nothing but a nurse he'd been introduced to twice, and forgotten both times. A face in a crowd of pretty faces, but by no means the prettiest.
You had stopped being able to feel your own face somewhere around the third song, no longer pretending to smile.
"You gonna dance, or you gonna be a wallflower all night?"
You turned. One of the girls— Doris, or maybe it it was Lilian, you weren't paying attention— was smiling at you with the social grace that women in this time seemed to possess effortlessly. They belonged in a way you never would. You gave her something that was probably a smile.
"I'm alright watching."
"Watching him, you mean." She followed your gaze to where Bucky stood in his dress uniform, left arm braced against a pillar as he leaned down to murmur something into the ear of a redhead who laughed like he'd hung the moon. "Half the room's watching him. Don't feel bad, sweets. He's real generous with the old charm."
Generous! You laughed to yourself, that was certainly one word for it.
You'd been in 1943 for eleven days. Eleven days since the machine in your lab had done whatever it was that it did. There had been a surge of power, a blinding flash of light and the smell of ozone that still hadn't left your nostrils. You had woken up staring at a strange sky, in an alley between two buildings you didn't recognize.
Eleven days later, you had talked your way into a nursing post with the competence that only came with training from a program that wouldn't exist for another sixty years.
The first time you had seen him, you hadn't been able to move. You almost walked past without a backward glance. The thing that had gotten your attention wasn't how he looked, it was his voice. It hadn't changed. What had changed was how freely he laughed
It was all you could think of as you lay on a narrow rented bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking: He's here. He's alive and whole and here, and he has no idea who I am.
You'd thought seeing this version of him would be a comfort.
You'd been so stupid.
So there you were, contemplating your existence, a woman out of your own time. And you realized that the thing nobody told you about time travel was that it was mostly waiting.
You had managed to track down a physicist— a nervous, but brilliant scientist who was well ahead of his time and happened to work for Stark Industries and liked to carry out experiments in his basement.
When you'd described the machine, he had gone very pale and very quiet and then become very interested. He offered to help you. He thought it would take weeks. He speculated a great many things, and every one of them required you to stay close to the war effort, close to the base, close— by fate or by accident— to Bucky-freaking-Barnes.
You should have quit, but you needed the money and a place to stay. So you saw him. Constantly. At the mess, in the corridors, at these godforsaken dances the other nurses dragged you to. And every time, the same knife went in.
Because Bucky Barnes flirted with everyone.
You watched him do it like a case study you had a vested interest in. I'm a way, you did.
He flirted with Lilian and Doris and Elizabeth, with Marian and Margaret and even Sandy. He flirted with the girl who sold cigarettes and the middle-aged woman who ran your boarding house who flushed like a school girl every time he tipped his cap.
He flirted with the same energy that other mean breathed— unconsciously, effortlessly and with enthusiasm. With the whole world except you.
With you he was polite. God, the politeness was utterly devastating. Every 'ma'am.' Every 'miss.' Every nod.
Once— and only once— he caught you looking at him for too long across the mess hall and you had noticed a flicker on his face. It wasn't interest, no you knew his expressions well enough, it was something closer to confusion. Almost as though he couldn't quite figure out why this particular nurse kept staring at him like she was drowning.
You'd looked away so fast you'd spilled your coffee.
So here's the thing you could quite wrap your head around. It was the splinter which kept digging it's way deeper. He was still Bucky. Before the fall. Before seventy years of ice and torture. Before his free will had been ripped away. It was still him. The same kind man you loved.
And his man had looked at you and felt nothing.
"You look like you're thinking too hard," Lillian said. "Never a good idea at a dance."
"Sorry." You forced a smile and made yourself relax. "Long shift," you lied with a shrug.
She patted your arm sympathetically and drifted off in the direction of a corporal who had been eyeing her from across the hall. And then you were alone. Again. Listening to Bucky laughing at something across the room, his eyes crinkled and nose scrunched. You had to close your eyes.
In the present, you told yourself, he loves you.
But did he?
This thought was the poison of the past, the reason the past eleven days had hollowed you out and given you reason to doubt. Because you'd met your Bucky broken. You'd met him after— after the Soldier, after the torture, after the long slow work he had done to put himself back together, with therapy and effort and the kind of hard-won stillness that made his rare smiles feel earned. Your Bucky was quiet. He was careful. He loved you the way a man loves the shore after a shipwreck— grateful, fierce, like something he'd been afraid to hope for.
When you thought back, this stillness had always felt like the depth in your relationship. That his quiet devotion was the shape of a man who had survived far too much to be careless with his heart. That when he reached for you in the dark, when he said your name with reverence, when he told you that he loved you, it was the truest thing in him.
Only now you'd seen the before.
Now you'd seen who he was when the world hadn't broken him yet.
And that man— that carefree, radiant, flirtatious man— he wouldn't have looked at you twice. That man had a type, and you were watching him charm her across the dance floor right now, and it most decidedly wasn't you. It was never you.
So what did that make what you had back home?
It was the ugly thought. The one that had been circling your brain in different iterations for the last eleven days.
He's with you because you were there.
Because you'd been kind to him at the worst point of his life.
Because you were willing, and steady, and you'd stayed when staying was hard.
Because a drowning man doesn't check whether the hand pulling him up is the one he'd have chosen.
He grabs what's offered.
You were what was offered. Convenient. Present. Undemanding.
Not chosen. Settled.
You believed it completely, while standing in that dance hall. It sank deep into your bones, like the weight of something you'd always half-known and finally let yourself see.
"You're that nurse."
You startled so badly at his voice that you knocked your purse off the table. Bucky was standing in front of you— right in front of you, close enough that you could smell the pomade and the wool of his uniform. And he was looking at you with that faint, puzzled crease between his brows. He bent down and retrieved your purse without a second thought.
"I— yeah. Sorry. Yes. I'm a nurse."
Brilliant. Very cool. Totally nailed that response. You mentally face palmed yourself.
"You keep looking at me." He said it plainly, without judgement. "All week. At the mess, and now here." He paused, studying your face. "Do I know you? From somewhere? I feel like I oughta, and it's drivin' me half crazy tryna figure it out."
You don't know me yet, was the thought didn't say. You won't know me for another eighty years.
"No," you managed in a flat tone. "You don't know me."
He studied you. And for one horrible, hopeful second you let yourself imagine that something would spark between you. That he would recognize something buried deep inside himself, the one who would one day become the man you loved. That he'd feel it, the way you felt it. The impossible gravity that existed between you.
He didn't. You watched him not feel it. He just gave you a small, courteous, sorry-can't-place-you smile and the last shred of hope shattered in it chest.
"Well," he said. "You alright? You look a little—" he gestured vaguely at all of you, "—pale. Rough night on the ward?"
You laughed dismally. "Something like that."
"You want some air? You look like you want some air."
And there it was. Not attraction. Kindness. The reflexive decency of a good man toward a woman who looked unwell. He'd have offered the same to Doris or Evelyn, to the redhead or the blonde, to anyone really. You knew it, and you took it anyway, because you were weak and you loved him and this was the closest he'd stood to you in eleven days.
Outside, the night was cold and wet and smelled of the harbor. Bucky lit a cigarette, offered you one, seemed unsurprised when you shook your head. For a while neither of you said anything.
"You got somebody?" he asked finally, and your heart lurched dangerously. "Back home, I mean. You got that look. Like half of you is somewhere else."
You laughed and it came out wrecked.
"Yeah," you said. "I've got somebody."
"He treat you right?"
He loves me like a man loves the thing that saved him, you thought. And I don't know anymore if that's the same as loving me for me.
"I don't know," you said honestly. "I used to think so. Now I'm not sure he'd have picked me. If things had been different. If he'd had… options. I think maybe I was just… the one who was there."
Bucky was quiet a moment. When you looked at him he was frowning— not the usual puzzled frown, it was something more thoughtful.
"That's a helluva thing to carry," he said. "You wanna know what I think?"
He looked at you, barely waiting for you to answer before he continued.
"I flirt with every dame in that room. You've seen me, don't pretend you haven't." He gave you a rueful half-smile. "It's easy. Don't cost me a thing. You smile, they smile, everybody has a nice night, nobody gets hurt. It's—" he searched for the right word, "—it's cheap. You understand? It's the cheapest thing I got."
You stared at him.
"You know what's not cheap?" he went on, looking out into the night. "The stuff that costs you something— and that's not the girl you charm across a dance hall. That's the one you'd still want around when there's nothing charming left in you. When you're scared, or sick, or done things you can't take back."
He exhaled smoke. "A fella who's had it easy, he'll flirt with anybody. Don't mean anything. But a fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person—" he shrugged, "—seems to me that's the only kind that counts. The rest's just… noise."
You couldn't breathe.
He didn't know how deeply what he'd said had resonated with you. He couldn't have. He was just a kind man being kind to a sad woman outside a dance hall, offering the accidental wisdom of someone who'd one day live every word of it. But he'd reached across eighty years and removed the splinter from your heart.
A fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person.
That was your Bucky. Not a drowning man grabbing for the nearest hand. A man who had been through the absolute worst the world could do. A man who had every reason to be closed and cold and careful with the little warmth he had left. And instead who spent it, deliberately, expensively, on you.
Not because you were convenient. Because when everything cheap had been burned out of him, you were what remained. You were the thing that counted.
The flirtation you'd been grieving wasn't the love you knew. It never had been. It was the noise. And your Bucky had gone silent with everyone else in the world and still turned, in the dark, toward you.
"Thank you," you whispered.
Bucky looked faintly bewildered. "For what? I didn't do anything."
"You'd be surprised," you said, tears slipping down your cheeks before laughing at the way he was hastily patting his pockets for a handkerchief with the flustered gallantry of a man way out of his depth
And for the first time in eleven days the ache in your chest had somewhere to go.
The scientist sent for you nine days later. You had pulled yourself away from the pub, one last glance at the Sergeant before you scurried away under the cover of darkness.
The machine hummed and the basement reeked of ozone. Suddenly your heart was pounding and you were looking back at the strange world you were leaving. At the war that hadn't broken him fully yet. At the still charming boy who would become, through unspeakable years, the quiet man who loved you.
I'm coming home baby, you told him, across the space-time continuum. I finally understand what I'm coming home to.
With that vow, you stepped into the light.
When you opened your eyes it was day and you were back in your lab, surrounded by your things and there— there was already someone crossing the room toward you at a dead run. Someone with a metal arm and a face raw with grief and terror that lasted twenty days. Someone who caught you and held you like the shore holds the shipwreck.
"You're back," Bucky said into your hair, over and over, wrecked and reaching only for you. "You're back, you're back, you're back."
"I'm back," you said. "I know exactly where I am."
It was a few days later when the words finally came spilling out. The two of you were in bed together— a place the two of you had spent a lot of time since your return.
His vibranium arm was heavy across your torso and the TV in your room was murmuring softly in the background to no one in particular.
You had already explained about the basement science you'd enlisted from a slightly creepy man for eleven days, which had brought a disgruntled expression to his face. But you'd been careful around the part that mattered, and Bucky, who noticed everything, had noticed that too.
"You saw me," he said finally. It wasn't a question. "Back then. You tell your story right up to it and then."
You went still in his arms.
"What was I like?"
He tried to keep his tone relaxed, but there was something mixed into his voice that you didn't expect. Not curiosity… dread. His thumb had stopped moving against your knee and was pressing into your skin harder than he realized.
"I don't—" He stopped, then started again, quieter. "I don't remember a lot of before. Just pieces. So whatever you saw, that's more than I've got." He paused, taking a breath. "Was I— was he someone you liked?"
And you understood, then, what he was really asking. Not was I charming. Not was I hot in the uniform. He was asking whether the man he used to be— the whole, unbroken version, the one the war and the ice hadn't gotten to yet— measured up to the ruin she'd come home to. Whether you'd looked at the original and wished you'd gotten that one instead.
You almost laughed. If he only knew.
"You were charming," you said, and felt him flinch, just slightly. "God, where you charming. You flirted with every woman in Brooklyn. The redhead, the cigarette girl, the landlady— everyone." You watched his jaw tighten even though your voice was light and playful."
"Yeah?" He breathed.
"Yeah, with everyone 'cept me. You didn't look at me twice."
"I— I'm… sorry," he said roughly, and he meant it, absurdly, apologizing for a man who perished eighty years before.
"Don't be." You caught his hand, laced your fingers through the cool metal of his. "You know… I stood there hating it. Eleven days. That's how long I watched you charm the whole world and skip right over me, and I thought— that's who he really is. That's the real Bucky. And the real one wouldn't have picked me."
His eyes came up to yours, dark and stricken, but you continued. "I was afraid that you only loved me now because you were different when you found me. Because I was there… and willing… and you grabbed the nearest hand."
"That's not—" His voice cracked. "That's not—"
"I know." You pressed your forehead to his. "I know it's not. You wanna know how I know?"
He didn't answer. He was barely breathing.
"Because he told me. Outside a dance hall, one cold night, not knowing who I was— he told me the flirting was the cheapest thing he had. That the stuff that counts isn't the girl you charm across a room. It's the one you'd still reach for when there's nothing charming left in you."
You felt him go rigid. "He told me a man who's been through the wringer and still reaches for one particular person— that's the only kind of love that counts. The rest is just noise."
The silence stretched out between you and when you pulled back to look at him, his eyes were wet.
"I said that?" he whispered.
"You said that."
"To you?"
"To a sad stranger you'd never see again." You smiled, and it wobbled. "You reached across eighty years and fixed the exact thing that was breaking me, and you didn't even know you were doing it. You always do it, Buck. The charming one skipped over me. This one —" you pressed his metal hand flat against your chest, over your heart, "— this one ran across a room and held on like I was the only fixed point left in the world. I don't want the one who flirted with all of Brooklyn. I never did. I want the one who counts."
He made a sound, half broken laugh, and pulled you into him, face buried in your hair, arms locked around you like he was afraid you'd fall through time again if he let go.
"I'd skip over the whole world," he said into your neck, wrecked and certain. "Every time. I'd skip over everybody but you."
You fell through time by accident — and now you're stuck in 1943, watching Bucky Barnes charm every woman in the room but you. So you start to wonder: did the man you left behind ever really want you, or just keep what was convenient? He's about to answer that. He just doesn't know it yet.
◌⃘ Pairing: 1940s!Bucky Barnes x nurse!Reader and present!Bucky Barnes x scientist!reader
◌⃘ Word count: 2.5K
◌⃘ Warnings: angst, because I don't feel well and this is how my brain works when I'm sick.
The small dance hall in Brooklyn smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, and you had been standing against the back wall for the better part of an hour, watching the man you loved fall in love with everyone but you.
Not that he knew you. That was the cruel logic of it all. To Sergeant James Barnes, you were nobody. Nothing but a nurse he'd been introduced to twice, and forgotten both times. A face in a crowd of pretty faces, but by no means the prettiest.
You had stopped being able to feel your own face somewhere around the third song, no longer pretending to smile.
"You gonna dance, or you gonna be a wallflower all night?"
You turned. One of the girls— Doris, or maybe it it was Lilian, you weren't paying attention— was smiling at you with the social grace that women in this time seemed to possess effortlessly. They belonged in a way you never would. You gave her something that was probably a smile.
"I'm alright watching."
"Watching him, you mean." She followed your gaze to where Bucky stood in his dress uniform, left arm braced against a pillar as he leaned down to murmur something into the ear of a redhead who laughed like he'd hung the moon. "Half the room's watching him. Don't feel bad, sweets. He's real generous with the old charm."
Generous! You laughed to yourself, that was certainly one word for it.
You'd been in 1943 for eleven days. Eleven days since the machine in your lab had done whatever it was that it did. There had been a surge of power, a blinding flash of light and the smell of ozone that still hadn't left your nostrils. You had woken up staring at a strange sky, in an alley between two buildings you didn't recognize.
Eleven days later, you had talked your way into a nursing post with the competence that only came with training from a program that wouldn't exist for another sixty years.
The first time you had seen him, you hadn't been able to move. You almost walked past without a backward glance. The thing that had gotten your attention wasn't how he looked, it was his voice. It hadn't changed. What had changed was how freely he laughed
It was all you could think of as you lay on a narrow rented bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking: He's here. He's alive and whole and here, and he has no idea who I am.
You'd thought seeing this version of him would be a comfort.
You'd been so stupid.
So there you were, contemplating your existence, a woman out of your own time. And you realized that the thing nobody told you about time travel was that it was mostly waiting.
You had managed to track down a physicist— a nervous, but brilliant scientist who was well ahead of his time and happened to work for Stark Industries and liked to carry out experiments in his basement.
When you'd described the machine, he had gone very pale and very quiet and then become very interested. He offered to help you. He thought it would take weeks. He speculated a great many things, and every one of them required you to stay close to the war effort, close to the base, close— by fate or by accident— to Bucky-freaking-Barnes.
You should have quit, but you needed the money and a place to stay. So you saw him. Constantly. At the mess, in the corridors, at these godforsaken dances the other nurses dragged you to. And every time, the same knife went in.
Because Bucky Barnes flirted with everyone.
You watched him do it like a case study you had a vested interest in. I'm a way, you did.
He flirted with Lilian and Doris and Elizabeth, with Marian and Margaret and even Sandy. He flirted with the girl who sold cigarettes and the middle-aged woman who ran your boarding house who flushed like a school girl every time he tipped his cap.
He flirted with the same energy that other mean breathed— unconsciously, effortlessly and with enthusiasm. With the whole world except you.
With you he was polite. God, the politeness was utterly devastating. Every 'ma'am.' Every 'miss.' Every nod.
Once— and only once— he caught you looking at him for too long across the mess hall and you had noticed a flicker on his face. It wasn't interest, no you knew his expressions well enough, it was something closer to confusion. Almost as though he couldn't quite figure out why this particular nurse kept staring at him like she was drowning.
You'd looked away so fast you'd spilled your coffee.
So here's the thing you could quite wrap your head around. It was the splinter which kept digging it's way deeper. He was still Bucky. Before the fall. Before seventy years of ice and torture. Before his free will had been ripped away. It was still him. The same kind man you loved.
And his man had looked at you and felt nothing.
"You look like you're thinking too hard," Lillian said. "Never a good idea at a dance."
"Sorry." You forced a smile and made yourself relax. "Long shift," you lied with a shrug.
She patted your arm sympathetically and drifted off in the direction of a corporal who had been eyeing her from across the hall. And then you were alone. Again. Listening to Bucky laughing at something across the room, his eyes crinkled and nose scrunched. You had to close your eyes.
In the present, you told yourself, he loves you.
But did he?
This thought was the poison of the past, the reason the past eleven days had hollowed you out and given you reason to doubt. Because you'd met your Bucky broken. You'd met him after— after the Soldier, after the torture, after the long slow work he had done to put himself back together, with therapy and effort and the kind of hard-won stillness that made his rare smiles feel earned. Your Bucky was quiet. He was careful. He loved you the way a man loves the shore after a shipwreck— grateful, fierce, like something he'd been afraid to hope for.
When you thought back, this stillness had always felt like the depth in your relationship. That his quiet devotion was the shape of a man who had survived far too much to be careless with his heart. That when he reached for you in the dark, when he said your name with reverence, when he told you that he loved you, it was the truest thing in him.
Only now you'd seen the before.
Now you'd seen who he was when the world hadn't broken him yet.
And that man— that carefree, radiant, flirtatious man— he wouldn't have looked at you twice. That man had a type, and you were watching him charm her across the dance floor right now, and it most decidedly wasn't you. It was never you.
So what did that make what you had back home?
It was the ugly thought. The one that had been circling your brain in different iterations for the last eleven days.
He's with you because you were there.
Because you'd been kind to him at the worst point of his life.
Because you were willing, and steady, and you'd stayed when staying was hard.
Because a drowning man doesn't check whether the hand pulling him up is the one he'd have chosen.
He grabs what's offered.
You were what was offered. Convenient. Present. Undemanding.
Not chosen. Settled.
You believed it completely, while standing in that dance hall. It sank deep into your bones, like the weight of something you'd always half-known and finally let yourself see.
"You're that nurse."
You startled so badly at his voice that you knocked your purse off the table. Bucky was standing in front of you— right in front of you, close enough that you could smell the pomade and the wool of his uniform. And he was looking at you with that faint, puzzled crease between his brows. He bent down and retrieved your purse without a second thought.
"I— yeah. Sorry. Yes. I'm a nurse."
Brilliant. Very cool. Totally nailed that response. You mentally face palmed yourself.
"You keep looking at me." He said it plainly, without judgement. "All week. At the mess, and now here." He paused, studying your face. "Do I know you? From somewhere? I feel like I oughta, and it's drivin' me half crazy tryna figure it out."
You don't know me yet, was the thought didn't say. You won't know me for another eighty years.
"No," you managed in a flat tone. "You don't know me."
He studied you. And for one horrible, hopeful second you let yourself imagine that something would spark between you. That he would recognize something buried deep inside himself, the one who would one day become the man you loved. That he'd feel it, the way you felt it. The impossible gravity that existed between you.
He didn't. You watched him not feel it. He just gave you a small, courteous, sorry-can't-place-you smile and the last shred of hope shattered in it chest.
"Well," he said. "You alright? You look a little—" he gestured vaguely at all of you, "—pale. Rough night on the ward?"
You laughed dismally. "Something like that."
"You want some air? You look like you want some air."
And there it was. Not attraction. Kindness. The reflexive decency of a good man toward a woman who looked unwell. He'd have offered the same to Doris or Evelyn, to the redhead or the blonde, to anyone really. You knew it, and you took it anyway, because you were weak and you loved him and this was the closest he'd stood to you in eleven days.
Outside, the night was cold and wet and smelled of the harbor. Bucky lit a cigarette, offered you one, seemed unsurprised when you shook your head. For a while neither of you said anything.
"You got somebody?" he asked finally, and your heart lurched dangerously. "Back home, I mean. You got that look. Like half of you is somewhere else."
You laughed and it came out wrecked.
"Yeah," you said. "I've got somebody."
"He treat you right?"
He loves me like a man loves the thing that saved him, you thought. And I don't know anymore if that's the same as loving me for me.
"I don't know," you said honestly. "I used to think so. Now I'm not sure he'd have picked me. If things had been different. If he'd had… options. I think maybe I was just… the one who was there."
Bucky was quiet a moment. When you looked at him he was frowning— not the usual puzzled frown, it was something more thoughtful.
"That's a helluva thing to carry," he said. "You wanna know what I think?"
He looked at you, barely waiting for you to answer before he continued.
"I flirt with every dame in that room. You've seen me, don't pretend you haven't." He gave you a rueful half-smile. "It's easy. Don't cost me a thing. You smile, they smile, everybody has a nice night, nobody gets hurt. It's—" he searched for the right word, "—it's cheap. You understand? It's the cheapest thing I got."
You stared at him.
"You know what's not cheap?" he went on, looking out into the night. "The stuff that costs you something— and that's not the girl you charm across a dance hall. That's the one you'd still want around when there's nothing charming left in you. When you're scared, or sick, or done things you can't take back."
He exhaled smoke. "A fella who's had it easy, he'll flirt with anybody. Don't mean anything. But a fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person—" he shrugged, "—seems to me that's the only kind that counts. The rest's just… noise."
You couldn't breathe.
He didn't know how deeply what he'd said had resonated with you. He couldn't have. He was just a kind man being kind to a sad woman outside a dance hall, offering the accidental wisdom of someone who'd one day live every word of it. But he'd reached across eighty years and removed the splinter from your heart.
A fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person.
That was your Bucky. Not a drowning man grabbing for the nearest hand. A man who had been through the absolute worst the world could do. A man who had every reason to be closed and cold and careful with the little warmth he had left. And instead who spent it, deliberately, expensively, on you.
Not because you were convenient. Because when everything cheap had been burned out of him, you were what remained. You were the thing that counted.
The flirtation you'd been grieving wasn't the love you knew. It never had been. It was the noise. And your Bucky had gone silent with everyone else in the world and still turned, in the dark, toward you.
"Thank you," you whispered.
Bucky looked faintly bewildered. "For what? I didn't do anything."
"You'd be surprised," you said, tears slipping down your cheeks before laughing at the way he was hastily patting his pockets for a handkerchief with the flustered gallantry of a man way out of his depth
And for the first time in eleven days the ache in your chest had somewhere to go.
The scientist sent for you nine days later. You had pulled yourself away from the pub, one last glance at the Sergeant before you scurried away under the cover of darkness.
The machine hummed and the basement reeked of ozone. Suddenly your heart was pounding and you were looking back at the strange world you were leaving. At the war that hadn't broken him fully yet. At the still charming boy who would become, through unspeakable years, the quiet man who loved you.
I'm coming home baby, you told him, across the space-time continuum. I finally understand what I'm coming home to.
With that vow, you stepped into the light.
When you opened your eyes it was day and you were back in your lab, surrounded by your things and there— there was already someone crossing the room toward you at a dead run. Someone with a metal arm and a face raw with grief and terror that lasted twenty days. Someone who caught you and held you like the shore holds the shipwreck.
"You're back," Bucky said into your hair, over and over, wrecked and reaching only for you. "You're back, you're back, you're back."
"I'm back," you said. "I know exactly where I am."
It was a few days later when the words finally came spilling out. The two of you were in bed together— a place the two of you had spent a lot of time since your return.
His vibranium arm was heavy across your torso and the TV in your room was murmuring softly in the background to no one in particular.
You had already explained about the basement science you'd enlisted from a slightly creepy man for eleven days, which had brought a disgruntled expression to his face. But you'd been careful around the part that mattered, and Bucky, who noticed everything, had noticed that too.
"You saw me," he said finally. It wasn't a question. "Back then. You tell your story right up to it and then."
You went still in his arms.
"What was I like?"
He tried to keep his tone relaxed, but there was something mixed into his voice that you didn't expect. Not curiosity… dread. His thumb had stopped moving against your knee and was pressing into your skin harder than he realized.
"I don't—" He stopped, then started again, quieter. "I don't remember a lot of before. Just pieces. So whatever you saw, that's more than I've got." He paused, taking a breath. "Was I— was he someone you liked?"
And you understood, then, what he was really asking. Not was I charming. Not was I hot in the uniform. He was asking whether the man he used to be— the whole, unbroken version, the one the war and the ice hadn't gotten to yet— measured up to the ruin she'd come home to. Whether you'd looked at the original and wished you'd gotten that one instead.
You almost laughed. If he only knew.
"You were charming," you said, and felt him flinch, just slightly. "God, where you charming. You flirted with every woman in Brooklyn. The redhead, the cigarette girl, the landlady— everyone." You watched his jaw tighten even though your voice was light and playful."
"Yeah?" He breathed.
"Yeah, with everyone 'cept me. You didn't look at me twice."
"I— I'm… sorry," he said roughly, and he meant it, absurdly, apologizing for a man who perished eighty years before.
"Don't be." You caught his hand, laced your fingers through the cool metal of his. "You know… I stood there hating it. Eleven days. That's how long I watched you charm the whole world and skip right over me, and I thought— that's who he really is. That's the real Bucky. And the real one wouldn't have picked me."
His eyes came up to yours, dark and stricken, but you continued. "I was afraid that you only loved me now because you were different when you found me. Because I was there… and willing… and you grabbed the nearest hand."
"That's not—" His voice cracked. "That's not—"
"I know." You pressed your forehead to his. "I know it's not. You wanna know how I know?"
He didn't answer. He was barely breathing.
"Because he told me. Outside a dance hall, one cold night, not knowing who I was— he told me the flirting was the cheapest thing he had. That the stuff that counts isn't the girl you charm across a room. It's the one you'd still reach for when there's nothing charming left in you."
You felt him go rigid. "He told me a man who's been through the wringer and still reaches for one particular person— that's the only kind of love that counts. The rest is just noise."
The silence stretched out between you and when you pulled back to look at him, his eyes were wet.
"I said that?" he whispered.
"You said that."
"To you?"
"To a sad stranger you'd never see again." You smiled, and it wobbled. "You reached across eighty years and fixed the exact thing that was breaking me, and you didn't even know you were doing it. You always do it, Buck. The charming one skipped over me. This one —" you pressed his metal hand flat against your chest, over your heart, "— this one ran across a room and held on like I was the only fixed point left in the world. I don't want the one who flirted with all of Brooklyn. I never did. I want the one who counts."
He made a sound, half broken laugh, and pulled you into him, face buried in your hair, arms locked around you like he was afraid you'd fall through time again if he let go.
"I'd skip over the whole world," he said into your neck, wrecked and certain. "Every time. I'd skip over everybody but you."
You fell through time by accident — and now you're stuck in 1943, watching Bucky Barnes charm every woman in the room but you. So you start to wonder: did the man you left behind ever really want you, or just keep what was convenient? He's about to answer that. He just doesn't know it yet.
◌⃘ Pairing: 1940s!Bucky Barnes x nurse!Reader and present!Bucky Barnes x scientist!reader
◌⃘ Word count: 2.5K
◌⃘ Warnings: angst, because I don't feel well and this is how my brain works when I'm sick.
The small dance hall in Brooklyn smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, and you had been standing against the back wall for the better part of an hour, watching the man you loved fall in love with everyone but you.
Not that he knew you. That was the cruel logic of it all. To Sergeant James Barnes, you were nobody. Nothing but a nurse he'd been introduced to twice, and forgotten both times. A face in a crowd of pretty faces, but by no means the prettiest.
You had stopped being able to feel your own face somewhere around the third song, no longer pretending to smile.
"You gonna dance, or you gonna be a wallflower all night?"
You turned. One of the girls— Doris, or maybe it it was Lilian, you weren't paying attention— was smiling at you with the social grace that women in this time seemed to possess effortlessly. They belonged in a way you never would. You gave her something that was probably a smile.
"I'm alright watching."
"Watching him, you mean." She followed your gaze to where Bucky stood in his dress uniform, left arm braced against a pillar as he leaned down to murmur something into the ear of a redhead who laughed like he'd hung the moon. "Half the room's watching him. Don't feel bad, sweets. He's real generous with the old charm."
Generous! You laughed to yourself, that was certainly one word for it.
You'd been in 1943 for eleven days. Eleven days since the machine in your lab had done whatever it was that it did. There had been a surge of power, a blinding flash of light and the smell of ozone that still hadn't left your nostrils. You had woken up staring at a strange sky, in an alley between two buildings you didn't recognize.
Eleven days later, you had talked your way into a nursing post with the competence that only came with training from a program that wouldn't exist for another sixty years.
The first time you had seen him, you hadn't been able to move. You almost walked past without a backward glance. The thing that had gotten your attention wasn't how he looked, it was his voice. It hadn't changed. What had changed was how freely he laughed
It was all you could think of as you lay on a narrow rented bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking: He's here. He's alive and whole and here, and he has no idea who I am.
You'd thought seeing this version of him would be a comfort.
You'd been so stupid.
So there you were, contemplating your existence, a woman out of your own time. And you realized that the thing nobody told you about time travel was that it was mostly waiting.
You had managed to track down a physicist— a nervous, but brilliant scientist who was well ahead of his time and happened to work for Stark Industries and liked to carry out experiments in his basement.
When you'd described the machine, he had gone very pale and very quiet and then become very interested. He offered to help you. He thought it would take weeks. He speculated a great many things, and every one of them required you to stay close to the war effort, close to the base, close— by fate or by accident— to Bucky-freaking-Barnes.
You should have quit, but you needed the money and a place to stay. So you saw him. Constantly. At the mess, in the corridors, at these godforsaken dances the other nurses dragged you to. And every time, the same knife went in.
Because Bucky Barnes flirted with everyone.
You watched him do it like a case study you had a vested interest in. I'm a way, you did.
He flirted with Lilian and Doris and Elizabeth, with Marian and Margaret and even Sandy. He flirted with the girl who sold cigarettes and the middle-aged woman who ran your boarding house who flushed like a school girl every time he tipped his cap.
He flirted with the same energy that other mean breathed— unconsciously, effortlessly and with enthusiasm. With the whole world except you.
With you he was polite. God, the politeness was utterly devastating. Every 'ma'am.' Every 'miss.' Every nod.
Once— and only once— he caught you looking at him for too long across the mess hall and you had noticed a flicker on his face. It wasn't interest, no you knew his expressions well enough, it was something closer to confusion. Almost as though he couldn't quite figure out why this particular nurse kept staring at him like she was drowning.
You'd looked away so fast you'd spilled your coffee.
So here's the thing you could quite wrap your head around. It was the splinter which kept digging it's way deeper. He was still Bucky. Before the fall. Before seventy years of ice and torture. Before his free will had been ripped away. It was still him. The same kind man you loved.
And his man had looked at you and felt nothing.
"You look like you're thinking too hard," Lillian said. "Never a good idea at a dance."
"Sorry." You forced a smile and made yourself relax. "Long shift," you lied with a shrug.
She patted your arm sympathetically and drifted off in the direction of a corporal who had been eyeing her from across the hall. And then you were alone. Again. Listening to Bucky laughing at something across the room, his eyes crinkled and nose scrunched. You had to close your eyes.
In the present, you told yourself, he loves you.
But did he?
This thought was the poison of the past, the reason the past eleven days had hollowed you out and given you reason to doubt. Because you'd met your Bucky broken. You'd met him after— after the Soldier, after the torture, after the long slow work he had done to put himself back together, with therapy and effort and the kind of hard-won stillness that made his rare smiles feel earned. Your Bucky was quiet. He was careful. He loved you the way a man loves the shore after a shipwreck— grateful, fierce, like something he'd been afraid to hope for.
When you thought back, this stillness had always felt like the depth in your relationship. That his quiet devotion was the shape of a man who had survived far too much to be careless with his heart. That when he reached for you in the dark, when he said your name with reverence, when he told you that he loved you, it was the truest thing in him.
Only now you'd seen the before.
Now you'd seen who he was when the world hadn't broken him yet.
And that man— that carefree, radiant, flirtatious man— he wouldn't have looked at you twice. That man had a type, and you were watching him charm her across the dance floor right now, and it most decidedly wasn't you. It was never you.
So what did that make what you had back home?
It was the ugly thought. The one that had been circling your brain in different iterations for the last eleven days.
He's with you because you were there.
Because you'd been kind to him at the worst point of his life.
Because you were willing, and steady, and you'd stayed when staying was hard.
Because a drowning man doesn't check whether the hand pulling him up is the one he'd have chosen.
He grabs what's offered.
You were what was offered. Convenient. Present. Undemanding.
Not chosen. Settled.
You believed it completely, while standing in that dance hall. It sank deep into your bones, like the weight of something you'd always half-known and finally let yourself see.
"You're that nurse."
You startled so badly at his voice that you knocked your purse off the table. Bucky was standing in front of you— right in front of you, close enough that you could smell the pomade and the wool of his uniform. And he was looking at you with that faint, puzzled crease between his brows. He bent down and retrieved your purse without a second thought.
"I— yeah. Sorry. Yes. I'm a nurse."
Brilliant. Very cool. Totally nailed that response. You mentally face palmed yourself.
"You keep looking at me." He said it plainly, without judgement. "All week. At the mess, and now here." He paused, studying your face. "Do I know you? From somewhere? I feel like I oughta, and it's drivin' me half crazy tryna figure it out."
You don't know me yet, was the thought didn't say. You won't know me for another eighty years.
"No," you managed in a flat tone. "You don't know me."
He studied you. And for one horrible, hopeful second you let yourself imagine that something would spark between you. That he would recognize something buried deep inside himself, the one who would one day become the man you loved. That he'd feel it, the way you felt it. The impossible gravity that existed between you.
He didn't. You watched him not feel it. He just gave you a small, courteous, sorry-can't-place-you smile and the last shred of hope shattered in it chest.
"Well," he said. "You alright? You look a little—" he gestured vaguely at all of you, "—pale. Rough night on the ward?"
You laughed dismally. "Something like that."
"You want some air? You look like you want some air."
And there it was. Not attraction. Kindness. The reflexive decency of a good man toward a woman who looked unwell. He'd have offered the same to Doris or Evelyn, to the redhead or the blonde, to anyone really. You knew it, and you took it anyway, because you were weak and you loved him and this was the closest he'd stood to you in eleven days.
Outside, the night was cold and wet and smelled of the harbor. Bucky lit a cigarette, offered you one, seemed unsurprised when you shook your head. For a while neither of you said anything.
"You got somebody?" he asked finally, and your heart lurched dangerously. "Back home, I mean. You got that look. Like half of you is somewhere else."
You laughed and it came out wrecked.
"Yeah," you said. "I've got somebody."
"He treat you right?"
He loves me like a man loves the thing that saved him, you thought. And I don't know anymore if that's the same as loving me for me.
"I don't know," you said honestly. "I used to think so. Now I'm not sure he'd have picked me. If things had been different. If he'd had… options. I think maybe I was just… the one who was there."
Bucky was quiet a moment. When you looked at him he was frowning— not the usual puzzled frown, it was something more thoughtful.
"That's a helluva thing to carry," he said. "You wanna know what I think?"
He looked at you, barely waiting for you to answer before he continued.
"I flirt with every dame in that room. You've seen me, don't pretend you haven't." He gave you a rueful half-smile. "It's easy. Don't cost me a thing. You smile, they smile, everybody has a nice night, nobody gets hurt. It's—" he searched for the right word, "—it's cheap. You understand? It's the cheapest thing I got."
You stared at him.
"You know what's not cheap?" he went on, looking out into the night. "The stuff that costs you something— and that's not the girl you charm across a dance hall. That's the one you'd still want around when there's nothing charming left in you. When you're scared, or sick, or done things you can't take back."
He exhaled smoke. "A fella who's had it easy, he'll flirt with anybody. Don't mean anything. But a fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person—" he shrugged, "—seems to me that's the only kind that counts. The rest's just… noise."
You couldn't breathe.
He didn't know how deeply what he'd said had resonated with you. He couldn't have. He was just a kind man being kind to a sad woman outside a dance hall, offering the accidental wisdom of someone who'd one day live every word of it. But he'd reached across eighty years and removed the splinter from your heart.
A fella who's been through the wringer, and he still reaches for one particular person.
That was your Bucky. Not a drowning man grabbing for the nearest hand. A man who had been through the absolute worst the world could do. A man who had every reason to be closed and cold and careful with the little warmth he had left. And instead who spent it, deliberately, expensively, on you.
Not because you were convenient. Because when everything cheap had been burned out of him, you were what remained. You were the thing that counted.
The flirtation you'd been grieving wasn't the love you knew. It never had been. It was the noise. And your Bucky had gone silent with everyone else in the world and still turned, in the dark, toward you.
"Thank you," you whispered.
Bucky looked faintly bewildered. "For what? I didn't do anything."
"You'd be surprised," you said, tears slipping down your cheeks before laughing at the way he was hastily patting his pockets for a handkerchief with the flustered gallantry of a man way out of his depth
And for the first time in eleven days the ache in your chest had somewhere to go.
The scientist sent for you nine days later. You had pulled yourself away from the pub, one last glance at the Sergeant before you scurried away under the cover of darkness.
The machine hummed and the basement reeked of ozone. Suddenly your heart was pounding and you were looking back at the strange world you were leaving. At the war that hadn't broken him fully yet. At the still charming boy who would become, through unspeakable years, the quiet man who loved you.
I'm coming home baby, you told him, across the space-time continuum. I finally understand what I'm coming home to.
With that vow, you stepped into the light.
When you opened your eyes it was day and you were back in your lab, surrounded by your things and there— there was already someone crossing the room toward you at a dead run. Someone with a metal arm and a face raw with grief and terror that lasted twenty days. Someone who caught you and held you like the shore holds the shipwreck.
"You're back," Bucky said into your hair, over and over, wrecked and reaching only for you. "You're back, you're back, you're back."
"I'm back," you said. "I know exactly where I am."
It was a few days later when the words finally came spilling out. The two of you were in bed together— a place the two of you had spent a lot of time since your return.
His vibranium arm was heavy across your torso and the TV in your room was murmuring softly in the background to no one in particular.
You had already explained about the basement science you'd enlisted from a slightly creepy man for eleven days, which had brought a disgruntled expression to his face. But you'd been careful around the part that mattered, and Bucky, who noticed everything, had noticed that too.
"You saw me," he said finally. It wasn't a question. "Back then. You tell your story right up to it and then."
You went still in his arms.
"What was I like?"
He tried to keep his tone relaxed, but there was something mixed into his voice that you didn't expect. Not curiosity… dread. His thumb had stopped moving against your knee and was pressing into your skin harder than he realized.
"I don't—" He stopped, then started again, quieter. "I don't remember a lot of before. Just pieces. So whatever you saw, that's more than I've got." He paused, taking a breath. "Was I— was he someone you liked?"
And you understood, then, what he was really asking. Not was I charming. Not was I hot in the uniform. He was asking whether the man he used to be— the whole, unbroken version, the one the war and the ice hadn't gotten to yet— measured up to the ruin she'd come home to. Whether you'd looked at the original and wished you'd gotten that one instead.
You almost laughed. If he only knew.
"You were charming," you said, and felt him flinch, just slightly. "God, where you charming. You flirted with every woman in Brooklyn. The redhead, the cigarette girl, the landlady— everyone." You watched his jaw tighten even though your voice was light and playful."
"Yeah?" He breathed.
"Yeah, with everyone 'cept me. You didn't look at me twice."
"I— I'm… sorry," he said roughly, and he meant it, absurdly, apologizing for a man who perished eighty years before.
"Don't be." You caught his hand, laced your fingers through the cool metal of his. "You know… I stood there hating it. Eleven days. That's how long I watched you charm the whole world and skip right over me, and I thought— that's who he really is. That's the real Bucky. And the real one wouldn't have picked me."
His eyes came up to yours, dark and stricken, but you continued. "I was afraid that you only loved me now because you were different when you found me. Because I was there… and willing… and you grabbed the nearest hand."
"That's not—" His voice cracked. "That's not—"
"I know." You pressed your forehead to his. "I know it's not. You wanna know how I know?"
He didn't answer. He was barely breathing.
"Because he told me. Outside a dance hall, one cold night, not knowing who I was— he told me the flirting was the cheapest thing he had. That the stuff that counts isn't the girl you charm across a room. It's the one you'd still reach for when there's nothing charming left in you."
You felt him go rigid. "He told me a man who's been through the wringer and still reaches for one particular person— that's the only kind of love that counts. The rest is just noise."
The silence stretched out between you and when you pulled back to look at him, his eyes were wet.
"I said that?" he whispered.
"You said that."
"To you?"
"To a sad stranger you'd never see again." You smiled, and it wobbled. "You reached across eighty years and fixed the exact thing that was breaking me, and you didn't even know you were doing it. You always do it, Buck. The charming one skipped over me. This one —" you pressed his metal hand flat against your chest, over your heart, "— this one ran across a room and held on like I was the only fixed point left in the world. I don't want the one who flirted with all of Brooklyn. I never did. I want the one who counts."
He made a sound, half broken laugh, and pulled you into him, face buried in your hair, arms locked around you like he was afraid you'd fall through time again if he let go.
"I'd skip over the whole world," he said into your neck, wrecked and certain. "Every time. I'd skip over everybody but you."
