Cheery young aide Elle Andersen has a natural propensity for care and comfort, making her an ideal compatriot for Captain America, Sergeant James “Bucky” Barnes, and the rest of the ineffable Howling Commandos.
North Star
Series // Bucky x OFC // in-progress
Former Howling Commando Elle Barnes -- a woman of many names and stories -- is settling back into her childhood home after the end of the war, having successfully melted into history as little more than a footnote. Her worlds collide, however, when the Tesseract is stolen.
Seven-Thirty
Series // Modern!Bucky x Reader // complete
You were planning on a productive — if lonely — weekend, but the little girl across the hall has different ideas about how you and Bucky Barnes should be spending your time.
Lemon Pie
Series // 40s!Bucky x Reader // complete
Moments measured in messy days and peaceful nights; in too-tart pies and slobbery toys. Bucky returns from war to find a life he never expected: a rich symphony of mishaps and mayhem and immeasurable love.
A State of Hope
Series // 40s!Bucky x Reader // hiatus
An unconventional love story blooms in the quiet tumult of post-war Brooklyn, as Bucky fulfills a desperate promise made in his darkest moment.
Carry On
Series // 40s!Bucky x OFC // complete
Secrets tear apart Bucky’s engagement, leaving him confused and heartbroken. He’s convinced himself, however, that his fiancée must have had good reason to do what she did — he just needs to find out the truth.
Sunshine Girl
Series // 40s!Bucky x OFC // complete
The night before shipping out to England, Bucky asks a seemingly simple favour of a childhood friend, never dreaming the tumult and change it could cause.
The Cupcake Guy
Series // Modern!Bucky x Reader // complete
Baking has become Bucky’s creative outlet, and the root of his recovery. He’d love to launch it into a full-time job, but he needs a good partner – business, and…you know…kissy-kissy.
Trick Question
Series // Modern!Bucky x Reader // complete
It’s a weekly battle of wills for Bucky and the Reader, as they navigate the stunning pressure that is pub trivia. Can these obdurate opponents find any middle-ground?
Gorgeous
Series // Bucky x Reader // complete
The friends-to-lovers ship that has yet to sail. When feelings boil over during a weekend away, you and Bucky are forced to reevaluate everything you thought was clear, squared away, and set in stone. Follows Sparks Fly.
Beautiful People
Series // Bucky x Plus-Size!Reader // in-progress
Bucky is adapting to a civilian life, busy with a new project and a possible career change (if Sam gets his way), as Steve prepares to move on and the Avengers ease into a new phase. Day-to-day life is consumed with the details, but Bucky finds himself looking for a different perspective. That’s where you come in.
Oneshots (BB)
Victory Red
La Grasse Matinée
These Fractured Places
Stardust
Here
California Kissin’
6 AM
Coca Cola Girl
Not Afraid Anymore
Glass Boy
Chocolate
You Go To My Head
Spin
Home For Christmas
Sparks Fly
Series // Sam Wilson x Reader // in-progress
Workaholic Sam Wilson is devoted to his career, and doesn’t have any time for romance – or so he thinks. Sparks start flying, however, when he meets you. Can the two of you figure out how to take a break before the fire burns out?
Oneshots (SW)
Just Us Two
Bibliophile
Forgive, Forget
Breeze
Soaring
Ivy
Series // Steve Rogers x Reader // coming soon
Three years on from a painful breakup, Steve sets out to find himself on a solo roadtrip across Canada. Bit by bit, he learns to let go of the lingering heartbreak, and replace it with a stronger foundation for his new life. Follows Gorgeous.
⤷ michael robinavitch x fem! resident! reader || 4.8k
synopsis. Robby tells himself he's paying attention because you're his resident. The explanation gets harder to defend with time.
warnings. attending/resident relationship, mutual pining, workplace romance, age gap, explicit sexual content, protected sexual intercourse.
The trauma bay smelled like antiseptic and the end of things, and you were at the sink, back to him, hands under the tap, humming.
He'd clocked it forty-three minutes ago. Done absolutely nothing useful with the information since.
Robby kept his eyes on the chart. He was, objectively, a man capable of extraordinary focus under extraordinary pressure — this had been proven, repeatedly, in rooms far worse than this one — and yet here he was, reading the same line about magnesium levels for the fourth time because you were humming something without any apparent awareness of his existence.
That was the thing that got him, if he was being precise about it. The total lack of awareness. Like you were alone in the room. Like the fact of him standing eight feet away was information your nervous system had simply not received and wasn't particularly interested in processing.
"Are you signing off on Martinez or are you planning to stand there all night?"
You turned around. Hands still wet. "Her oxygen sat's been stable for two hours. I was doing one last check." You reached for a paper towel, unhurried. "Good evening."
"It's nearly midnight."
"Good evening, Dr. Robinavitch."
He did not look up. He was very deliberate about not looking up. "Paperwork first. Pleasantries second. Order of operations."
"I'll keep that in mind." Perfectly pleasant. Not a trace of sarcasm. Impervious. Like being curt with you was something that happened to other people and simply bounced off you. He'd watched it happen across an entire shift — residents trying to one-up each other and you deflecting it with some mild observation about coffee going cold, a nurse coming at you frazzled and leaving calmer, and him, standing at the nurses' station, doing the thing where he read the same line four times.
He watched you cross the bay to get the chart, moving through the wreckage of twelve hours like you had a fundamental dispute with the idea that any of it had been hard.
He looked back at the magnesium levels. They remained uninteresting. Across the bay, you turned off the tap and the humming stopped, and somehow that was worse — the sudden awareness of its absence, the way the room rearranged itself around the quiet.
Robby set the chart down. Picked it back up. Read the magnesium levels a fifth time.
He'd been an asshole. He was aware of this with the specific clarity of someone who knew and had decided, at some point, that knowing was sufficient.
It hadn't started that way. He'd been neutral in the beginning, the way he was with most residents — professionally indifferent, appropriately demanding, nothing beyond. And then somewhere between you explaining to a thirty-seven-year-old construction worker why he needed to stay still and not, in your words, be a hero about the needle, because you'd dealt with actual heroes today and they had all, uniformly, behaved themselves — something had shifted. Slowly. The kind of shift where you don't notice until the geography's already changed and you're standing somewhere you didn't plan to be. And by the time he'd noticed, the only thing he knew how to do was be curt about it.
The curt had escalated. He corrected your charting when it didn't need correcting. He'd sent you to the Mathers consult — a three-hour admit, the kind that hollowed a person out — and watched you handle it with the patient attentiveness of someone who didn't know there was another option. He'd told himself it was assessment. He'd told himself a lot of things.
Then was the supply closet.
Pediatric case. Bad, in the quiet way. He'd delivered the news himself and sent everyone back to their stations and gone to chart it, and he couldn't find you anywhere. He checked the on-call room. Then, following some dim instinct he chose not to examine, he tried the supply closet.
You were on the floor, back against the IV bag shelf, knees pulled up, crying.
He stood in the doorway. Thought about leaving.
You looked up. And then — immediately, the reflex of it — you said "I'm sorry" and started to wipe your face. Then you tried to smile at him. Eyes wet, nose red, and you assembled a smile. Like you'd built one in advance for whoever came through the door so they wouldn't have to deal with the crying. Like you'd gotten efficient at this.
That ate at him. He couldn't name it more precisely. Something about the apologizing, and then immediately the smile, in that order, bothered him in a way he didn't have a word for.
He stepped inside and let the door close. "You don't need to be back out in thirty seconds."
"It's unprofessional."
"You're a resident. First one?" He meant the loss. You understood, nodded once. "Then it's biology. Not a failing."
He wasn't good at this. He knew that. There was a box of tissues on the shelf nearest him and he handed it to you, because it was the only object in reach that might approximate the gesture of offering something, and you looked at it and then laughed — barely, a wet sound, but a real one.
"That's not what I—" he started.
"No, I know." You took one anyway, turned it over in your hands. "Thank you."
He stood there another minute. Couldn't leave. Watched you put yourself back together the way you apparently did everything — methodically, without drama, heel of your hand to your eye, one slow breath, and then back. Like a person who had practice.
He went back to his charts and was sharp with two nurses and a second-year before he'd made it to the bay, and didn't connect the two things until weeks later.
Then was the case of the blueberry muffins. In a container with a lid that didn't close properly, and every time there was one sitting on the counter near the coffee maker, and every time an attending found their way over within twenty minutes. He'd eaten four of them across separate occasions. He never planned to acknowledge this.
You hummed when you were focused. A different song every shift, always half-familiar, always just past where he could name it. It was maddening in a way that defied professional articulation.
Every patient remembered your name. Not just remembered — asked for you specifically, used it. He'd had a seventy-three-year-old man with a hairline hip fracture ask him to send back "the nice one, who explained the scan thing." He'd known immediately. He'd sent you. He'd told himself this was about patient outcomes.
He started cataloguing things. Unconsciously, the way you develop a reflex. The way you always sat down to explain a diagnosis — never stood over them. The fact that you took notes by hand on rounds and had told him, unprompted, early on, as if expecting to be corrected, that you retained it better that way. He hadn't corrected it. The snack bars you kept in your coat pocket and distributed to nurses around hour eight without making anything of it. The way you said thank you to orderlies. The way you phrased bad news — he'd noticed the phrasing, catalogued it, thought about it.
He had no use for any of this information. He kept it anyway.
There was a morning, somewhere in the middle of all of it, when he'd been post-call and running on three hours and you'd appeared at the nurses' station with coffee you handed to him before he'd asked, or looked like he needed it, or given any outward indication whatsoever that he was capable of human wants.
"How did you know I take it black?" he said.
"I didn't." You were already walking away. "I just figured if you were you, you probably didn't want anything done to it."
He'd stood there for a moment with the coffee in his hand.
He'd been annoyed about it. The presumption of it, the casual intimacy of the gesture, the fact that you'd got him right. He'd been annoyed about it right up until the moment he'd taken a sip and thought, with a clarity that three hours of sleep had done nothing to dull, that he was in actual trouble.
The Torres chart hand-off happened on a Tuesday. You came up behind him at the nurses' station and he smelled the muffins before you'd said anything.
"Torres hand-off. She's been stable since fourteen hundred hours, no fever. I flagged a note about the blood pressure trend — it's within normal, I just wanted to document I'd been watching it."
"I can read."
"I know you can read." Still pleasant. "She also wants me to tell you you have a nice voice."
"She's seventy-one and on morphine."
"She said it before the morphine." You set the chart down. "There's a muffin on the counter."
He took the chart and didn't look up, and he stood there for a moment after you'd gone and thought, with some irritation, that he'd been tracking Torres's blood pressure every two hours all shift. He hadn't flagged it. He fixed the formatting error at the top of page two — not because it was egregious, it wasn't — and didn't tell you about it. He told himself this was efficiency and moved on before he could disagree with himself.
Jack waited until the lounge was empty. In retrospect, Robby should have taken that as a warning.
They were both doing charts. Fourteen minutes of workable silence, which was the best kind, and then Jack said without looking up, "Kowalski was at the nurses' station again."
Robby said nothing.
"Third time this week. Ortho. No clinical reason to be down here three times in a week." A pause. "He keeps asking about her."
"Her who?"
"Your her."
"She's not — she's a resident. She's on shift."
"That's not what he's asking." Jack closed his laptop. That was always the tell — the deliberate setting-aside, the signal that you were in a conversation now, predetermined. He looked at Robby with the patience of a man who has decided to wait you out. "You want to say anything about that?"
"I don't have anything to say about Kowalski."
"No. But you've been short with her."
"I'm short with everyone."
"Not the same short." Jack leaned back. "You corrected her on a splint she did correctly. I checked afterward."
Robby set his pen down. Picked it back up. "I don't know what you want me to say."
"I don't want you to say anything." Jack opened his laptop again. Closed it. "You know what I think?"
"No. But I suspect you're going to—"
"I think you've been so busy being her attending that you forgot she's going to leave and be someone else's problem in about eight months." A pause. "And I think that bothers you."
Robby looked at the coffee. Then the chart. Then some middle distance between the two.
"He's going to ask her to dinner. Kowalski."
The coffee in Robby's mug was still warm. He looked at it.
"Let him," he said.
Jack made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Sure," he said, and opened the laptop for the last time.
He went to the attending lounge because it was past two in the morning and he needed somewhere to sit that wasn't the nurses' station, and you happened to be there when he opened the door.
Asleep in the chair by the window. Your chart was still open in your lap. Pen loosely between your fingers. At some point, the sleep had simply won.
He stood in the doorway for a moment.
There was a warmth in his chest that was entirely inconvenient and he looked at it sideways, the way you look at something too bright. You'd been here since seven that morning. He knew this without meaning to know it — knew which admits you'd taken, what you'd ordered for the woman in bay three, that you'd eaten something from the vending machine at fourteen hundred because you'd complained about it to Dana with the mournfulness of someone deeply wronged by a sandwich. He'd started logging your schedule without any conscious decision to do so. That was a recent development he hadn't examined closely.
He should go to the couch. Do his own charts.
He stood there another moment. You looked cold. He picked up the green blanket — the ones you sometimes used, which he had no reason knowing — and draped it over your body. Tucked under your feet for good measure.
Then he stepped back and eased the door shut, very quietly, and stood under the fluorescent light of the hallway, and thought: oh.
The acknowledgment of something he'd been refusing to file anywhere useful for long enough that the refusal had become its own noise. Oh. Right. He understood now why Jack had closed his laptop.
He was reviewing a discharge summary in the corridor, and you stepped out of the lounge with the green blanket under your arm and walked directly into his eyeline. He wasn't staring. Sure, he wasn't.
"Were you out here when I fell asleep?"
"Yep."
"You didn't sleep?"
"I checked the lounge. You were in there."
"That's not an answer."
He'd underestimated you in that specific way, in the beginning — the quiet refusal to be redirected. You did it without any sharpness, without confrontation, like you'd noticed it and decided not to. It surprised him the first time. It had never stopped surprising him, exactly.
"I didn't want to wake you," he said.
You stopped. Something crossed your face that he couldn't quite catch the shape of. "That was actually very considerate of you."
"You sound surprised."
"A little." You tucked the blanket more firmly under your arm. "You've been different lately."
"I'm professionally consistent."
"Dr. Robinavitch." Very patient. "I watched you make a first-year cry over a documentation error."
"His documentation was wrong."
"Mine had a formatting error on the Torres file. Page two. You didn't say anything."
He said nothing.
"You fixed it yourself." Still not accusing — just noticing. "I saw the edit timestamp."
The corridor was quiet. A monitor beeped down the hall in its steady automated note.
"You didn't have to do that," you said. Softer now. "I would've caught it."
"I know you would have."
A pause. You were looking at him with that look — the curious one, the one that felt like you were trying to work something out carefully, without making a production of it. Like he was a thing worth figuring out. Like you'd decided to be patient about it.
He found he had nothing useful to say to any of that. You opened your mouth and he thought for a second you were going to say something that would require him to respond in kind, and he wasn't ready for that, not in a corridor at three in the morning with the green blanket under your arm and his chest doing what it was doing.
"Get some sleep," he said. "In an actual bed. Not a chair."
"Are you worried about me?"
"I'm concerned with your clinical function tomorrow if you're running on four hours in a—"
"Robby."
Just his name. Without the professional buffer of the title, and the way you said it — quiet, slightly tentative, like you were testing whether it was allowed—
"The blanket," you said. "In the lounge. Was that you?"
He looked at you.
You looked back, and there was nothing confrontational in it, nothing probing, just — curious, and underneath that, something that was almost gentle. Waiting.
"Go to sleep," he said, and walked back toward the bay.
He didn't quite remember, in the moment, how you got here.
That was a lie. He remembered exactly — you'd followed him into the on-call room with a consult chart, and you'd asked him something, and he'd turned around and you were closer than he'd expected, and the chart had ended up on the floor, and something that had been accumulating for a long time finally hit a pressure it couldn't sustain.
You'd kissed him first. Barely. More like you'd tipped toward him and he'd closed the remaining distance, which meant they were equally responsible, and he was prepared to argue this point at length.
Now your back was against the on-call room door and you were looking at him like he was slightly terrifying and very interesting, which was, objectively, the most appealing combination of expressions he'd seen in some time.
"Are we—"
"Yes."
"Okay." A breath. "Okay."
"Stop saying okay."
"What am I supposed to say?"
He pressed his mouth to the side of your neck and held it there — not moving, just breathing you in — until you went very still under him. He felt your pulse against his lips. He stayed there until you made a sound, small, involuntary, the sound of someone trying not to make a sound and losing the effort.
"Something more useful," he said against your skin.
Your hands found his collar. Fisted into it without quite pulling. "What do you want me to say?"
He pulled back enough to look at you. Already undone, and he'd barely started — the flush high on your throat, the way you were holding his shirt like it was the only fixed object in the room. Something settled in him that he recognised, distantly, as the opposite of the thing that had been sitting in his chest for months.
"Tell me what you want," he said.
You looked at him. Then sideways. Then back, with something stubborn in it underneath the flush. "You."
"More specific."
"Robby—"
"Dr. Robinavitch," he said, and watched your face cycle through several things.
"You cannot possibly be serious."
"I'm always serious." He undid the first button of your scrubs. "More specific."
Your breath came out uneven. "I want you to touch me."
"I am touching you."
"You know what I—" The thought didn't complete. He undid the second button and whatever you'd been about to say dissolved. "I want your hands on me. Properly."
"Properly," he said. "There you go."
He walked you back to the narrow bed and sat you on the edge of it. Then stood there for a moment — just looked. He had spent a professionally inadvisable amount of time not looking at you, deliberately, as a sustained practice, and he was going to allow himself a moment now that the situation had changed.
You looked back. Flushed, lower lip caught between your teeth.
He got your scrub top off, then the undershirt, then reached around and unclipped your bra. When you moved to cover yourself, he caught both wrists.
"Don't."
"I just—"
He pressed your wrists to the mattress, one on either side, gentle but deliberate, and held them there. You let him immediately. He filed that away. "Keep them there."
He took his time. He'd earned the right to take his time — all those months of being deliberately removed, of watching you from across the bay and looking back at his charts — he had accumulated a significant amount of patience that was now going to get spent in one place.
He put his mouth to your collarbone and worked down slowly, and every time you moved he said stay and felt you try, felt the effort of it in the tension running through you, your hands gripping the mattress. He got his mouth to your nipple and felt you arch up sharp, and he pulled back just enough.
"Stay still."
"I'm trying—"
"Try harder."
"Robby, please—" And there it was — the specific texture of your voice when you were overwhelmed, the thing he'd catalogued and refused to think about directly. The way it went soft and raw at the edges. Your eyes had gone glassy. "Please. I need—"
"Tell me what you need."
"You know what I need—"
"I do. I want you to say it."
You made a frustrated sound that turned into something else when he dragged his thumb along the inside of your thigh and stopped before it got useful. "I need you to touch me. Please. I need—please."
"Where?"
"You know where—"
"Where?" Quieter. Final.
"My cunt," you said, and your face went red saying it, and he pressed his mouth to your stomach to have somewhere to put the expression that wanted to happen. The slight mortification and the fact that you'd said it anyway. He was going to be thinking about that for a long time.
He pulled your scrubs down and the underwear followed, and he sat back on his heels and looked at you spread across the narrow mattress, flushed to your chest, thighs pressed together out of some residual instinct toward dignity, and thought with a startling clarity that you had absolutely no idea what you'd been doing to him.
He pressed his mouth to the inside of your thigh and felt you exhale shakily. Pressed it to the other. Kissed up slowly, felt you start to tremble, your thighs trying to close around him.
"You're already so wet," he said against your skin, and heard you make a sound. "I've barely done anything."
"Don't say it like that —" you whined.
"I'm just statin' what I see." He pressed his mouth to you properly and felt you gasp, felt your hands go immediately into his hair. He worked you slowly, his tongue flat against your clit and then pointed, then flat again, and two fingers pressing inside you, curling — and you made sounds he was going to be hearing in his head for years, the pitch of them, the way they went higher when he changed the pressure. He brought you right to the edge, felt it in the way you tightened around his fingers and your thighs started shaking—
And he stopped.
"What—" The outrage of it, immediate and genuine. Your hips chased nothing. "I was so close, I was right—please—"
"Tell me what you want."
"I want you to make me come," you said, without hesitation this time, and your voice was wet at the edges and your eyes were wet, actual tears on your lashes, and he pressed his mouth to the inside of your knee and held it there for a second.
"Please," you added, smaller. "Please. Robby."
He put his mouth back, and this time he didn't stop. He held your hips down with his forearms and kept the pressure steady and relentless, worked two fingers inside you in a rhythm that he'd figured out about four minutes in and was going to use mercilessly, and you came hard — shaking, properly shaking, both hands fisted in his hair, his name said so many times it became something else. He kissed your inner thigh through the end of it and felt you go loose by degrees.
He straightened. You had tears running down your temples. He kissed them away without entirely deciding to, and you laughed weakly.
"I'm just bein' thorough." He got his scrubs off, found the condom from the pocket he'd put it in on a hope, and looked up to find you watching him with red-rimmed eyes and an expression of dazed, complete attention.
"Stop looking at me like that," he said.
"Like what?"
He didn't answer. He settled over you and paused — his forearm beside your head, his weight on his knees — and just looked at you for a moment.
"Robby." Breathless. "Please."
"I've got you," he said, quietly, and pressed in slow.
He felt you exhale under him, felt you shift to pull him deeper, felt your legs wrap around him before he'd done anything. He set a pace that was, he'd admit only to himself, not particularly controlled — the months of it had a way of making themselves felt when the situation finally changed. He pressed his mouth to your ear and told you exactly what you felt like — and he was precise about it, anatomical in a way that made you shiver, hot and tight and so fucking wet that he'd had to think about something else when he'd first pushed inside you — told you what he'd been thinking about, in terms that left nothing abstract.
You made a sound into his shoulder that he was going to think about for a long time.
"You've been thinking about this?" you managed.
"At length."
"How long?"
"Longer than is appropriate." He pressed deeper and felt you gasp. "Considerably." He pulled back and pushed in again, slow, deliberate in the way that he could feel you registering — the way your breath caught, the way your nails pressed into his back. "You want me to tell you how long?"
"Yes," you said, slightly desperate.
"When you had the Torres admit. You were at the nurses' station and you leaned over to get a chart and your scrubs—" He stopped for a second because the memory had found him at an inconvenient angle. "I had to go chart something."
"You left because of me?"
"I left before I did something professionally unsound." He pressed a hand to the back of your thigh and pushed it higher, changed the angle, felt you make an embarrassingly gratifying sound. "Stop talking."
"You were the one who—"
"Stop talking," he said, and moved, and you did.
You cried through the second orgasm — actual tears, the way he'd half-expected, your face buried in his shoulder, both arms around his neck, holding on. He kissed the side of your face. The corner of your eye. Felt you clutch at him like you'd decided he was staying.
When he followed he was considerably less composed than he'd planned, face in your hair, your name said once, very quietly.
He hadn't meant to fall asleep. He understood this approximately fifteen minutes later when he woke to find you beside him, awake, looking at some mid-distance point with the expression of someone slowly processing a sequence of events and finding it, on the whole, acceptable.
"You fell asleep," you said.
"I rested my eyes."
"For fifteen minutes."
He looked at his watch. "Thirteen."
"Fifteen." You turned your head. Still flushed. He was not going to have feelings about that. "Should I—" You gestured vaguely toward the door.
"In a minute." He pulled you back before he'd consciously decided to, and you went without resistance, settled against him like you'd considered the geometry and found it reasonable. "Stop thinking so loudly."
"I'm not thinking loudly."
"You are." A pause. "Say it."
"I was just going to say." You seemed to be choosing words with some care. "This doesn't have to be weird."
"It's not weird."
"You've been weird about me for a while."
He looked at the wall for a moment. "Months," he said.
You lifted your head. Looked at him. He looked back with the equanimity of a man who had made a decision and was now on the other side of it.
"Months," you repeated.
"Don't make it a thing."
"You had a crush on me." The laugh was already happening, quiet, against his shoulder. "You've been making my shifts difficult because you had a crush."
"I don't have a crush. I'm almost fifty."
"You made a first-year cry."
"His documentation—"
"Was wrong, yes." You were laughing properly now, helpless, into his skin, and he let it happen and did not find it as irritating as he should have. "You fixed my formatting error. You ate four muffins."
"I ate one. Maybe two."
"Dana counted. She has a tally."
He absorbed this.
"Dana has a tally," he said.
"Apparently she's been running it since March."
He sat with that for a moment. The cart with the squeaky wheel went past outside, its regular circuit, the one maintenance had been promising to fix for weeks. He'd started timing the rounds. He wasn't going to tell you that.
"Robby," you said, quieter.
"Mm."
"The blanket." A pause. "It was you."
He said nothing.
You pressed your face back into his shoulder. He felt you smiling — actually felt it, the shape of it against his collarbone — and didn't say anything about it.
"Thank you," you said, very small. "For not waking me up."
He didn't answer.
You settled more completely against him. Outside, the hospital kept going — someone called down the hall, a monitor beeped its steady note, the cart made another pass. He listened to the intervals and thought this was probably fine. More than probably.
A thought occurred to him, belatedly. "Did Kowalski ask you to dinner?"
A pause.
"Last Thursday," you said.
"What did you say?"
Another pause. Longer. He could feel you deciding whether to make him ask twice.
"I said I was busy," you said.
"Were you?"
"No." You shifted against his shoulder. "But I had a feeling I'd be busier."
He didn't say anything. Outside, the cart went past again with its squeaky wheel.
"Robby," you said, half-asleep already.
"Go to sleep."
"Everyones's going to know."
"Hmm."
A pause. "Does that bother you?"
He thought about that for a moment. Dana had apparently been running a tally since March. Dana had apparently noticed before he had. That was its own kind of information about the past several months that he chose not to examine too closely.
"No," he said.
"Is that okay?"
He looked at the top of your head. "Go to sleep," he said.
a/n - thank you for reading. comments and reblogs are appreciated.
This was incredible!! You’ve got such an amazing eye for details, and use them so well to build up the scene and the characters within. I really love how you’ve captured Robby here. Beautiful, gorgeous writing!
there are some people on here who, when they followed me back, I got excited about as if they were a celebrity. and when I think about it, it's kinda sweet how we do that here, and so much more special than celebrity crushes. To be starstruck by someone when they're sharing their personal, more private self. You're famous to me for just being you.
Since he was fifteen years old, Bucky Barnes has only been sure of two things; the club should be the most essential thing in his life, and he’d burn it all down for you.
You’re the only thing in this world that matters, and he’ll do whatever it takes to win you back, even if that means destroying everything he built. None of it mattered without you
Swallows choose a mate for life, and will only nest with that bird and no other; they travel long distances apart only to find their way to back to each other, again and again. Bucky knew the second he met you.
You’re his other half; you’re his swallow.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Epilogue
(Biker!Bucky x Reader/ High school sweethearts AU)
what she left behind — chibs telford (soa) x reader
⋆｡°✩ 🎀 ♡ 🎀 ✩°｡⋆
summary she was in Oakland when the call came. she drove back to Charming doing eighty on the freeway and didn't stop until she was in the hospital corridor. and then four days later she saw a name on the visitor chart she didn't recognise.
prompt – season 2 car bomb, reader rushes back, Fiona Larkin, Gemma explains, age comment confrontation, soft resolution warnings – canon typical violence, angst, age gap (23/35), Fiona, heavy then soft
word count – ~4k
note – what she left behind because Fiona left and she stayed and that means something..
requests are open :)
⋆｡°✩ 🎀 ♡ 🎀 ✩°｡⋆
The call came at half past nine on a Friday night.
She was in Oakland — three days into a girls trip that had been planned for months, the kind of weekend that existed specifically to step outside of Charming and everything that came with it. She was laughing at something when her phone buzzed and she looked down and saw Tig's name and felt something cold move through her before she'd even answered.
There was a bomb. At the lot. Chibs got caught in it. He's alive but it's bad — you need to come home.
She didn't remember the drive clearly. Just the freeway and the dark and her hands steady on the wheel because they had to be.
He was unconscious when she arrived.
She stood in the doorway of his room and looked at him — at the damage of it, the tubes, the specific wrongness of seeing someone so physically present in the world reduced to something that had to be still — and felt something in her chest that had no name yet.
She sat in the chair beside the bed.
Held his hand.
Didn't say anything.
He opened his eyes sometime past midnight. Looked at her with the unfocused quality of someone finding their way back from somewhere far.
"Ye drove back," he said. His voice wrong — rough, scraped.
"Of course I drove back."
He looked at her for a long moment. Something moving across his face that he didn't have the energy to contain.
"Go home and sleep, lass," he said. "I'm no' going anywhere."
"Neither am I," she said.
He didn't argue. Just closed his eyes again and kept hold of her hand.
She was there every day.
The hospital had its own rhythm — coffee from the machine that tasted like nothing, the chair beside his bed, the specific quality of sitting with someone who was healing and needed nothing except presence. She was good at presence. She'd learned it from him.
On the second day he was more awake. More himself — or the version of himself that existed when the walls were slightly down because he was too tired to hold them all the way up.
"Ye should eat something," he said, looking at the granola bar she'd been turning over in her hands for an hour.
"I'm not hungry."
"Ye've been here since seven in the morning."
"I know what time it is."
He looked at her. The almost smile — barely there, but there.
"Stubborn," he said.
"I learned from the best," she said.
He made a sound that was close to a laugh and then winced and she leaned forward immediately.
"Don't make me laugh," he said. "Ribs."
"Then stop being charming."
"Can't help it," he said. And closed his eyes again.
She ate the granola bar.
On the third day she noticed the energy around the club had shifted slightly.
She couldn't name it exactly — just something in the way Tig looked at Jax in the corridor, the brief hushed conversation that stopped when she walked past. She filed it away. The club had its own rhythms and she'd learned not to ask about the things that weren't hers to ask about.
She went back to his room. Sat in her chair. He was sleeping.
She looked at him for a long time and thought about how close it had been.
The visitor chart was on the board outside his room.
She saw it on the fourth day — coming back from the coffee machine, glancing at it the way you glanced at things when you were tired. Most of the names she recognised. Club members, Gemma, a few others.
And then one she didn't.
Fiona Telford. Day three.
She stood there for a moment. Looked at the name. The last name hitting differently than the first — Telford. His name. On someone else.
She knew he'd been married. He'd told her that much — quietly, once, early on, in the specific way he disclosed things he felt she needed to know without elaborating further. She hadn't pushed. She'd understood there were parts of his past that weren't ready to be opened yet and she'd been patient with that.
But she hadn't known the name. Hadn't known she was here in Charming. Hadn't known she'd been in this hospital three days ago while she was sitting in that chair holding his hand.
She went back into the room and sat in her chair and looked at Chibs sleeping and told herself it was nothing.
It didn't feel like nothing.
She found Gemma in the corridor an hour later.
"Who is Fiona Telford," she said.
Gemma looked at her. Something moving through her expression — not surprise exactly. More like the specific quality of a woman who had been waiting for a question and was deciding how much of the answer to give.
"Come sit down," Gemma said.
Gemma didn't soften it. She never softened things.
She knew the outline already — the ex wife, the fact that Ireland had been hard, the vague shape of a past that had left marks on him she could see even when he wouldn't talk about them. What she hadn't known were the specifics. The IRA. Jimmy O'Phelan. The scars on his face — she'd noticed them early, had asked once gently and he'd said old history, lassand she'd let it go because she knew better than to push at walls that weren't ready to open.
She hadn't known the scars had a name.
She hadn't known his wife had been taken by that same name.
When Gemma finished the corridor was very quiet.
"She came on day three," she said. "That's — she would have had to leave Ireland the day it happened."
"She heard Chibs almost died," Gemma said simply.
She nodded. Looked at her hands.
"He knew she'd be coming," she said slowly. "He must have known. The club would have told him."
Gemma said nothing. Which was its own answer.
"He didn't say anything to me." She said it quietly. Not an accusation. Just the fact of it settling.
"Chibs doesn't talk about Ireland," Gemma said. "Not to anyone. Not really."
"I know." She did know. She'd always known there were parts of him kept somewhere she didn't have access to yet. She'd been patient with that. She'd understood it. She just hadn't known the size of it until now.
"Does she still—" she started.
"She still cares about what they were," Gemma said carefully. "That's different from what ye have."
She nodded.
"Thank you," she said. And went to find somewhere to stand that wasn't his room.
Fiona was in the corridor on the fifth day.
She was coming back from getting water when she saw her — standing outside his room with the specific stillness of a woman who had a history with this place and this person that went back further than she could imagine. She was older than her. Dark haired. The kind of presence that came from a life fully lived.
They looked at each other.
"You must be the girl," Fiona said. Her accent thick and soft at the same time.
"I must be," she said.
Fiona looked at her for a moment. Unhurried. Taking her in.
"How old are ye?" she said.
"Twenty three."
Something moved across Fiona's face. Not cruel. Sadder than cruel somehow.
"He always did like them young," she said quietly. The way you said something you believed was simply true.
She felt it land in her chest. The specific cold of it.
"I'm not a phase," she said. Even. Quiet.
"I didn't say ye were."
"You implied it."
Fiona looked at her for a long moment. Something reassessing.
"I loved Filip for fifteen years," she said finally. "I know what he gives and what he keeps. The parts he keeps are considerable." She paused. "I'm no' saying it to hurt ye. I'm saying it because ye should know going in."
"I know already," she said. "I've been going in for eight months."
Something shifted in Fiona's expression.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"Take care of him," Fiona said.
She watched her walk away down the corridor and stood there with her water bottle and thought about fifteen years and Jimmy O'Phelan and the scars and he always did like them young and the specific weight of being twenty three and loving someone who had entire countries worth of history she'd only just been given the outline of.
She stood there for a while.
Then she went back in.
He was awake.
He looked at her when she came in — the read, the thing he always did, the specific awareness of her that she'd learned to recognise.
"Ye spoke to her," he said.
"Yes."
"What did she say."
"Things." She sat in the chair. "Things Gemma had already told me, mostly."
The room was quiet.
"I should have told ye she was coming," he said.
"You knew."
"Aye." He looked at the ceiling. "I knew she'd come when she heard."
"And you didn't say anything."
"No." A long exhale. "I didn't."
She looked at her hands.
"I knew you had an ex wife," she said quietly. "You told me that. I wasn't asking for the whole story. I wasn't asking for Ireland or any of it." She paused. "I just needed to not find out from a visitor chart that someone had been sitting in this room while I was here every day not knowing."
He turned his head to look at her.
"I'm sorry," he said. Low and rough. The real kind — no managing, no walls, just the actual thing.
She looked at him.
"She said you like them young," she said.
He closed his eyes briefly. "Christ."
"She didn't mean it badly. I think." A pause. "But it landed."
"Lass—"
"I know it's not true," she said. "I know what this is. I've known for eight months." She looked at the window. "But twenty three is a fact and I can't argue with it and when someone says it like that it just—" she stopped. "It lands."
He was quiet for a long moment.
"Ye're no' young to me," he said finally. "Ye're just ye. That's all ye've ever been." He held her gaze. "And I'm no' with ye because of your age. I'm with ye because of who ye are. There's a difference."
"I know that."
"Do ye? Right now, sitting there — do ye actually know that?"
She looked at him.
"Yes," she said. "But I needed to hear you say it."
He reached out. His hand finding hers on the edge of the bed. Fingers closing around hers — certain, deliberate, the grip she'd memorised.
"Ye're no' a phase," he said quietly. "Ye're the first thing in a long time that felt like something I didn't want to lose."
She looked at their hands.
"The parts you keep," she said softly. "I'm not asking for all of them. I know I won't get all of them. I just need to know that sometimes — occasionally — you let me in a little further."
He was quiet.
"I know I don't," he said. "I know I shut things away." A pause. "It's never about ye. It's just how I've learned to—"
"I know," she said. "I've always known that." She looked at him. "I'm still here aren't I."
Something shifted in his face.
He shifted on the bed — careful, working around the injuries — and made space beside him.
She looked at it. Looked at him.
"You have broken ribs—"
"I know what I have," he said. "Come here, lass."
She sat beside him carefully. His arm came around her — slow, deliberate — and she rested her head against his shoulder and felt him exhale properly for what felt like the first time since she'd arrived.
"Her name was Fiona," he said. Into her hair. Quiet. Like he was deciding to open a door slightly further than it had been. "And Jimmy O'Phelan took her from me. Along with everything else." A pause. "The scars. Ye asked once."
"You don't have to—"
"I want to," he said. "It was him. Before he took her — a message, he called it." His voice was flat in the way things went flat when they'd been lived with long enough to become fact. "I left Ireland and I never went back."
She didn't say anything. Just listened.
"I should have told ye she was coming," he said again. "That's on me."
"Yes," she said. "But you're telling me now."
"Aye." His grip tightened slightly. "I am."
They were quiet for a while. The machines beeped steadily. Outside the corridor moved with its usual rhythm.
"Mo gràidh," he said eventually. Low and rough, the accent thick the way it got when something was real. His lips pressing to her hair. "I'm no' going anywhere. Whatever ye're thinking after today — I'm no' going anywhere."
She looked up at him.
He looked back at her with the private version of himself — the one she'd been given in careful increments for eight months. The one that was here now, in a hospital bed with broken ribs, choosing to open the door a little further.
"Neither am I," she said.
"Good." He pressed a kiss to her hair. Stayed there. "That's no' negotiable."
She almost smiled. "Is that right."
"Aye," he said. "It is."
She settled back against his shoulder.
Outside Charming was doing its usual thing and inside the room was quiet and she lay beside him and thought about visitor charts and fifteen years and eight months and the specific weight of loving someone who kept things — but was, slowly, in his own time, learning to let her in a little further.
This was incredible! Imbued with such deep emotion, little moments of knowing and connection that so cleverly suggest at the richer history between them. I’ve only recently started watching the show, and Chibs is my favourite! I think you did a fantastic job of exploring his complex character and history here, along with this lovely glimpse of his capacity for compassion. You have a lovely writing voice!
I naively thought that people would come away from last night’s excellent episode with a better understanding that these characters are people fighting their own terrible battles with mental health issues and extreme work conditions. But nope - what a lot of people seem to have taken from it is that there are good ones who deserve endless grace and bad ones who deserve nothing but hate and scorn.
Yes, this is just fandom, but it speaks to a cancerous lack of empathy and a tendency towards in-group/out-group thinking that is more and more our political and social reality.
james baldwin was so right when he said “the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
How it feels to genuinely enjoy the Pitt and not get caught up on every little bad thing a character has done because they’re all complex human beings and none of them are truly evil like everyone in this fandom seems to think
Jack abbot reacts to you crying (out of love) during sex
technically nsfw but there's literally no smut
It catches him off guard.
Jack Abbott is used to control.
In the trauma bay, in surgery, in his own life—he knows how to read people, how to anticipate reactions, how to stay one step ahead.
So when it happens— tears on your cheeks, eyes blinking rapidly as you try to hold them back—
He notices immediately.
Not the usual rhythm, not the sharp inhales or soft sounds he’s already learned to recognizse from you, that he craves and actively seeks out—but something uneven. Fragile.
He stills his hips, not pulling out, not yet.
Weight pressing down just slightly more.
“Hey…” his voice drops, rough but careful. “Look at me.”
You don’t.
Your face turns into his shoulder instead, like you’re trying to hide, and that’s when he feels it, as well as see it—
Warm.
Wet.
Jack freezes.
For half a second, his brain runs through everything—pain, discomfort, regret—
His hands come up instantly, grounding, one braced firm at your waist, the other sliding up to cradle the back of your head.
“Hey—hey,” he murmurs, tension creeping into his voice now. “Did I hurt you?”
You shake your head quickly, but the movement just presses you closer to him.
“No—no, it’s not—”
Your voice breaks.
Jack swears quietly under his breath, shifting just enough to get a better look at you, his hand guiding your face up whether you want him to see or not.
Your lashes are damp. Your lips parted like you’re trying to catch your breath.
Crying.
While clinging to him.
“Talk to me,” he says, softer now. Not a command—something closer to a plea.
You let out a shaky breath, your fingers tightening against him.
“I don’t know why I’m crying,” you admit, almost embarrassed. “I just—”
You cut yourself off, pressing your forehead against his collarbone again.
Jack’s grip on you tightens instinctively.
“Just what?” he prompts quietly.
Another breath.
Then, barely above a whisper—
“It feels too good. You feel too good.”
Jack's hands still.
Not because of the words themselves—
But because of the way you say them.
Overwhelmed.
Like it’s too much, not in a bad way—but in a way you don’t know how to hold.
Your fingers curl into his hair again.
“I just—feel a lot,” you add, voice small. “With you.”
That does something to him.
Something deep.
"Mostly.. safe, loved—"
Jack exhales slowly, the tension in him shifting from his shoulders.
“Hey,” he murmurs, gentler now.
His thumb brushes under your eye, catching a tear before it can fall further.
“You don’t have to hide that.”
You let out a soft, shaky laugh. “Kind of hard not to.”
“Not from me,” he says immediately.
There’s no hesitation in it.
None.
You finally look at him properly then, searching his face like you’re waiting for him to be uncomfortable. To pull away. To make it awkward.
He doesn’t.
If anything, his hand settles more firmly against your jaw, holding you there.
Grounding you.
“Look at me,” he says again, quieter this time.
You do.
And he softens.
Just a fraction—but it’s enough that you feel it.
“That’s not something to be embarrassed about,” he tells you. “You are loved. By me. I love you.”
Your breath catches.
Jack leans in, pressing a slow, deliberate kiss to your forehead, "I feel a lot when I'm with you, too, sweetheart."
Then another, softer one to the corner of your eye, catching the last of your tears.
“You okay?” he asks, voice low.
You nod, even though your grip on him doesn’t loosen.
“Yeah.”
A pause.
“…don’t stop.”
That almost makes him smile.
Not amused—something warmer. Something quieter.
Jack’s hand slides back into your hair, steady and sure.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs against your skin.
And this time, when he moves with you again, it’s slower.
More deliberate.
Like he’s paying attention to every breath, every small sound, every shift in your body—making sure you’re still there with him, still okay, still choosing this.
the great thing about the pitt is that it's a show of infinite nuance where every character has moments in the right and in the wrong and no one is irredeemable but also no one is unassailable. the terrible thing about the pitt is that you have to watch people raised by the bad faith no nuance everything-contains-a-moral-failing social media landscape of the 2020s interact with it and enough of that will make you want to join robby and abbot on the roof
