Harry Potter is trending at #1 on tumblr so I thought I’d take the opportunity to say fuck JKR, fuck transphobes, fuck her stupid books, her theme park, her endless landfill fodder merch slop, and her fucking castle on a hill. Read another book yall!! Read another book!!!!!!!
Can u plzzzz write a fic where male reader was in HYDRA with Bucky and when Bucky got out, he didn't see male reader again. But years later around the Thunderbolts, they are all sent out to get information on HYDRA or smth and they have to interagate M! reader, after he already has a normal life ig. And Bucky sees him again plzzz 🙏🙏🙏
Past Won't Leave My Head - Bucky Barnes x Male Reader
Summary: Bucky's past is catching up with him, and for once he can remember what it looks like.
CW: Angst - Ex-military reader - Ex-Hydra reader - Reader is a Russian super soldier - Established past relationship - Happy ending
Words: 4.2k
A/N: Oh it took me so long to edit these images that I nearly gave up. Anyway, I haven't written for Bucky in awhile and it seems like his happy streak is finally over but thats okay, it happens and I'm sure he'll be happy again soon. I realized too late this went a bit off from what you requested, I'm sorry I'm just burnt out and this is what I ended up with.
Bucky was starting to forget your face.
It used to be vivid, sharp enough to cut through the static, but lately, the edges were fraying. The image he would conjure from across a dim, smoke-filled bar—bathed in the soft, bruised orange glow of a neon sign—was becoming a watercolor left out in the rain. Details shifted every time he tried to pin them down: a mole where it didn't belong, eyes set too distant or too close together, a laugh that sounded distorted, and a smile that never quite sat right. It was just a frustrating blur of something he desperately wished he could hold onto.
He hated it. He hated that his mind, scrambled and stitched back together by a hundred different technicians, was failing him here. He hated that he couldn't remember the exact shade of your eyes without them bleeding into the grey of the winter sky. He hated that the tactile memory of your lips against his during that reckless, drunken night in the barracks—the stolen warmth before the world went up in flames—was fading into nothing.
Worse still were the memories that did stick.
The ones that survived weren't the quiet moments in the dark or the shared grins over mess hall rations. They were the cold, hollow look in your eyes down the sterile corridors of the Siberian facility. The shared agony as the Russian handlers strapped you both to the metal chairs, the agonizing snap of conditioning taking hold, the screams that tore from your throat echoing off concrete walls until they became his own. Hydra didn't just break you; they hollowed you out. The warmth he clung to was completely erased, replaced by the bitter reality that you had both been turned into living weapons—cold, obedient, and entirely disposable.
You hadn't lost an arm like he had, but the rot had gone deeper, sinking its claws straight into your head. Even back then, when the masks were off and the missions were over, the toll was unmistakable. You would sit on the edge of a cot in the quiet hours between cryo-freezes, staring at your hands—hands that looked entirely human, yet moved with the terrifying, mechanical precision of a killer. While Bucky fought a constant, grinding war against the Winter Soldier persona inside his own skull, you seemed to have folded inward, a ghost haunting your own skeleton long before you ever managed to break away.
Now, a blurry face and fractured, painful memories were all you were to him.
You were a fragile, fading hope tucked away in the darkest corner of Bucky's mind. A desperate wish that somewhere out there in the noise of the modern world, you were free. That you were somehow living the life you deserved—even if, in his most selfish, quiet moments, the only life he ever truly believed you deserved was right here next to him, safe, breathing, and finally allowed to grow old.
The transition from sleep to waking was never gentle for James Barnes.
It was a jagged, violent wrench that dragged him out of the red mist and slammed him back into the quiet, sterile confines of his apartment. Tonight, the nightmare had been particularly vicious. He had been back in the chair, the cold, heavy band of the headpiece tightening against his temples, but the face hovering over him in the blinding fluorescent light hadn't been an anonymous handler. It had been you.
Your eyes—wide, glassy, and completely devoid of the person he used to share a quiet laugh with over stolen rations—stared right through him as the current tore through his nervous system. You weren't fighting it. You had stopped fighting long before he had, retreating so far inward that the man he loved was nothing more than a ghost rattling the cage of a conditioned machine.
Bucky bolted upright in the dark, a choked gasp tearing from his throat.
His chest heaved, every muscle in his body coiled as if preparing to launch into a firefight. His skin was slick with cold, shivering sweat, plastering his dark hair to his forehead. He dragged his left hand—the heavy, cold weight of vibranium grounding him against the phantom pains of the metal arm he used to wear—across his face, wiping away the moisture as his heart hammered a frantic, deafening rhythm against his ribs.
Breathe. You're home. You're out.
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force the lingering echoes of the Siberian facility back into the dark where they belonged. Slowly, the shadows of his cramped apartment took shape, steadying him. The silence of the night pressed in around him, heavy and suffocating.
Then, breaking the quiet with a sharp, abrasive vibration, his burner phone lit up on the small wooden nightstand.
Bucky flinched, his head snapping toward the glowing screen as if it were a live grenade. The phone buzzed again, vibrating violently against the wood, casting a harsh, pale light across the dark room.
He didn't move. He just stared at it.
In his line of work, late-night calls were never good news. They meant trouble, they meant shadows, they meant pulling a thread he desperately wanted to leave alone. But tonight, soaked in sweat and still haunted by the ghost of your face, a cold, sickening dread pooled in his stomach.
With slow, hesitant movements, his metal fingers reached out and picked up the device. He didn't check the caller ID. He didn't need to. He could already feel the heavy, oppressive weight of who it was before he even swiped the screen.
He pressed accept and brought the phone to his ear, saying nothing.
For a second, there was only static and the sound of heavy breathing on the other end. Then, a cool, unbothered voice cut through the silence, dropping a single word that instantly stripped away whatever fragile peace he had managed to reclaim.
"Hydra."
The name hung in the air like poison, paralyzing his vocal cords before his brain could even begin to process the logistics, the danger, or the implications. All the air left his lungs. The nightmare hadn't ended; it had just followed him into the waking world.
Before reason could catch up to instinct, before he could demand answers or slam the phone down to sever the connection entirely, the words slipped past his dry lips, resigned and dead tired.
"...I'll be there."
The air in Valentina's office always felt pressurized, like a high-altitude cabin about to drop its masks. It smelled of expensive leather, ozone, and the faint, bitter tang of old scotch she didn't bother offering to anyone else.
When Bucky pushed the heavy glass door open, the muted click of his vibranium fingers against the latch was the only sound that pierced the heavy silence of the room.
The rest of them were already there, scattered around the sleek, minimalist conference table like a collection of misfits waiting for the executioner. Bucky didn't look at them as he walked in. He kept his expression locked into that familiar, terrifyingly blank mask—the Winter Soldier's armor pulled tight over his skin to keep the panic from leaking out. He pulled out the empty chair at the far end of the table and sat down, heavy and deliberate.
Even so, he could feel them.
He didn't need to turn his head to know. Yelena’s eyes were narrowed, tracking his movements with that unnerving, hyper-observant sniper’s gaze. She looked at him the way a cat looks at a mouse that hasn’t realized it’s trapped yet—like she could read every single micro-expression, every tight twitch in his jaw, every frantic heartbeat hammering against his ribs. Across from her, John’s eyes were just as heavy, narrowed with a sharp, suspicious curiosity, sizing him up as if waiting for Bucky to crack under the pressure of whatever secret he was carrying.
They knew something was off. They could see right past the blank facade, sensing the raw, exposed nerve twitching just beneath the surface. Bucky ignored them, locking his jaw and keeping his eyes fixed on the empty space ahead of him.
"Glad you could tear yourself away from whatever charming nocturnal activities you've got going on, Barnes," Valentina purred from the head of the table. She didn't look up from the tablet in her hands, her sharp heels clicking softly against the concrete floor as she paced. "You look like you've seen a ghost. Or perhaps just had a particularly bad night with the old scrapbook."
She stopped pacing. With a theatrical flourish, she reached across the table and tossed a thick, tan manila folder across the smooth surface. It slid across the wood, stopping right in front of Bucky's hands.
"Open it," she gestured with a manicured nail, her tone dropping its playful edge for something chillingly professional. "We have reason to believe someone is trying to stitch the rotting corpse of Hydra back together. Not a splinter cell. Not a few fanatical die-hards hiding in a bunker. Someone with capital, institutional memory, and access to legacy assets we thought were buried in the permafrost."
Bucky stared at the folder. The cardboard felt thick, heavy with the weight of whatever nightmare was trapped inside.
"And why am I looking at it?" Bucky’s voice was a low, gravelly rasp, barely carrying across the room.
"Because," Valentina smiled, a thin, humorless stretch of red lips, "the person in that file has the answers. Or, more accurately, they are the key to whoever is pulling the strings."
Slowly, his metal fingers reached out. The tips brushed against the rough texture of the manila tab. He hooked his thumb beneath the flap and flipped it open.
The top page was a standard-issue intelligence brief: translated Russian telemetry, encrypted financial routes, a series of blurred surveillance stills. But tucked beneath the paper clipped to the left side was a physical photograph—a glossy, high-resolution surveillance print of a target captured on a crowded street corner somewhere grey and anonymous.
Bucky froze.
The breath instantly evacuated his lungs, leaving a sharp, burning void in his chest. The room around him seemed to tilt, the ambient hum of the building's ventilation system fading into a roaring, high-pitched static in his ears.
It was an older picture. The face looking back at him from the glossy paper was older too—etched with the unmistakable lines of time, shadows beneath the eyes that spoke of decades carrying the same invisible weight he did. It was a face he hadn't seen in the waking world in over half a century.
Except... it was wrong.
It wasn't the blurry, distorted, melting watercolor face his broken brain had been torturing him with for years. Despite the lines and the years, it was clear, it was vivid, and it was entirely, devastatingly real. It was you.
His mind violently rejected the discrepancy between the ghost he had been mourning in his nightmares and the flesh-and-blood reality staring up at him from the dossier. The file tried to blur you out, labeling you as an unknown anomaly, reducing you to a threat matrix, but Bucky’s eyes bypassed the ink entirely. He knew the slope of that nose. He knew the exact shape of that jawline. Beneath the weathered edges of a life lived in hiding, you looked almost completely the same as the night they dragged you down into the dark.
His gaze dropped frantically to the text printed beneath the photo.
Your name. A string of bold black letters that felt like a physical blow to the sternum.
An address—an apartment number in a city thousands of miles away.
A place of work—a quiet, unassuming existence built entirely on a lie.
You were alive.
The realization hit him like a freight train, violent and sickening. All these years, while he was drowning in the static of his own mind, while he was clawing his way back to humanity one agonizing inch at a time, you had been out there. Breathing. Walking the earth. Surviving.
A sudden, suffocating wave of nausea rolled through his stomach. His vision tunneled, the edges of the room going pitch black as the phantom scent of ozone, antiseptic, and Siberian snow flooded his senses. His fingers curled into the edges of the manila folder, the paper instantly crumpling and tearing beneath the crushing, involuntary grip of his vibranium hand.
Yelena’s voice cut through the ringing in his ears, sharp and probing from across the table.
"Barnes? You look like you're about to throw up on the conference table. Do you know him?"
For a heartbeat, Bucky couldn’t breathe. The silence stretched, heavy and dangerous, filled only by the frantic, erratic drumbeat of his own pulse. Every instinct drilled into him by a lifetime of war—first as a howling commando, then as a programmed ghost, and finally as a man fighting tooth and nail for his own soul—screamed at him to lock it down. Put the mask back on. Flatten his expression. Deny, deflect, bury it.
His jaw locked so tight his teeth ached. He forced his fingers to relax just a fraction, pulling them away from the crumpled manila folder before the reinforced steel of his vibranium hand tore the paper completely to ribbons.
He raised his chin, dragging his eyes away from your name and forcing them upward to meet Yelena’s piercing stare. She was leaning forward now, her elbows on the table, studying him with a chilling, predatory focus. John Walker was watching too, his brow furrowed as he tried to piece together why a seasoned veteran and an Avenger-adjacent asset looked like he’d just been put through a meat grinder.
"No," Bucky said. His voice was a flat, gravelly rasp, utterly devoid of inflection. It was the voice of the Winter Soldier, pulled out of the dark like a rusted weapon he swore he’d never use again. "Never seen him before."
It was a blatant lie, and he knew they knew it. But it was all he had.
At the head of the table, Valentina let out a low, theatrical hum of skepticism. She didn’t buy it for a second, but a slow, knowing smirk crept onto her red lips. She loved secrets. She lived for leverage. If Bucky had a weak spot—if this dossier represented a buried piece of his past he was desperate to keep hidden—that just made him infinitely more useful to her.
"Is that so?" Valentina purred, leaning back in her leather chair and crossing one leg lazily over the other. "Shame. Because according to our intel, this particular ghost has a very specific set of skills, and someone high up in the new black-market syndicate is trying real hard to bring him back into the fold. Voluntary or not."
Bucky’s blood ran cold. The words struck a nerve so raw it made his vision blur. *Voluntary or not.* They didn't just want information; they were hunting you. If a resurrected Hydra faction had gotten their hands on your file, it meant they knew where you were, what you were capable of, and how to push your buttons just like they used to push his.
"Then why bring it to us?" John Walker cut in, breaking the heavy tension in the room as he shifted his weight forward, resting his forearms on his knees. "If it's a Hydra ghost, send a strike team. Snatch him up, extract the data, and put him in a box. Why make a meeting out of it?"
"Because, Captain," Valentina snapped, her gaze shifting to Walker with a flash of synthetic warmth that didn't reach her eyes, "a standard strike team would get themselves killed in the first three minutes. Whoever this is, they spent decades hiding in plain sight. They know the old protocols. They know how to vanish."
She turned her dark, calculating eyes back to Bucky, her smile sharpening into something razor-thin.
"We need someone who can get close. Someone who understands the psychological architecture of a legacy asset. Someone who can recognize the threat before it detonates in our faces." Valentina leaned forward, resting her palms flat on the mahogany table, pinning Bucky to his seat. "Your assignment, Barnes, is to find him. Bring him in, or figure out who’s pulling his strings. And you're going to do it quietly, before the rest of the world realizes Hydra is crawling out of the woodwork again."
The room went dead silent.
The mandate was clear. They were handing him a compass pointing directly to the past he had spent years trying to outrun, and telling him to walk right into it.
Bucky stared at Valentina, his heart hammering against his ribs like a caged animal. Every instinct told him to stand up, flip the table, and walk out the door. But beneath the panic, beneath the nausea and the sudden, suffocating weight of history crashing down on him, a fierce, terrifying resolve began to take root.
If anyone was going to find you—if anyone was going to protect you from the monsters trying to drag you back into the dark—it wasn't going to be Valentina's squad.
It was going to be him.
Slowly, deliberately, Bucky’s metal hand reached out and closed over the manila folder, sliding it toward himself. He didn't look at Yelena. He didn't look at John. He just stared at the edge of the paper where your name was written, his jaw set in a hard, unyielding line.
"...Consider it handled," Bucky said, the words tasting like ash in his mouth.
The hum of the motorcycle engine died, leaving behind only the heavy, oppressive silence of the alleyway.
Bucky sat astride the machine in the shadows, half-concealed by a rusted dumpster and the overhang of a brick fire escape. Across the narrow street, the dim neon sign of the bar flickered and buzzed, casting a sickly amber glow over the back entrance. It had closed an hour ago. The patrons had trickled out into the night, the lock had clicked into place, and the chaos of the evening had bled away into quiet routine.
Through the smudged, fogged glass of the backdoor, he could see you.
The blurry, melting watercolor face that had haunted his nightmares for decades was finally snapping into razor-sharp focus. Every memory he had spent years trying to bury—every stolen glance, every touch in the dark, every shared trauma carved into his nervous system—slapped back into place with the terrifying force of a freight train. It wasn't a ghost anymore. It was you.
You were moving methodically around the dimly lit interior, wiping down sticky wooden tables, stacking chairs, and tossing a dirty bar towel over your shoulder. Because of the engineered serum burning through your veins and the decades spent trapped in cryo-stasis, time had barely touched you. You looked almost exactly as you had in the barracks, the only difference being the heavy, watchful wariness in your eyes—a quiet survival instinct bred by Hydra. You had carved out a semblance of peace, a fragile, hard-fought normality in a world that didn't know what you really were.
And looking at you now, a sickening dread coiled in Bucky’s gut.
Because he knew what was coming. He knew that the moment he stepped through that door, the peace you had fought for would shatter. The shadows he carried would bleed into your world, dragging you right back down into the nightmare you both thought you had escaped. Valentina was hunting you. The syndicate was moving in. The past was clawing its way up through the floorboards, and the tragedy of it nearly crushed him—that the only life you deserved to have, a life where you could both just grow old together, was about to be ripped away all over again, and he was the one bringing the storm to your doorstep.
Bucky’s jaw worked, a muscle ticking violently in his cheek.
He raised a heavy, trembling hand, shoving it through his dark hair as he dragged in a sharp, shuddering breath of cold night air. His heart thundered against his ribs, a frantic rhythm echoing the war he had fought inside his own head for half a century.
Walk away, a cold, military voice whispered in the back of his mind. Protect him by staying gone. Let him keep his life.
He looked at you again. He watched the way your shoulders slumped under the invisible weight of a long day, the way you paused to rub the back of your neck—a subtle, heartbreakingly familiar gesture he remembered from the cold concrete floors of the Siberian facility. You were carrying it all alone. Just like he was.
No. He had spent decades being kept away from everything that mattered. He wasn't going to sit in the dark and watch you slip through his fingers a second time.
With a low, ragged sigh, Bucky swung his leg over the saddle of the motorcycle and killed the lights completely. His boots hit the damp asphalt with a dull, heavy thud.
He didn't hesitate anymore.
Crossing the quiet street, his heavy coat flaring behind him in the midnight wind, he moved with the silent, predatory grace of the man he used to be. The metal of his left arm hummed faintly beneath his sleeve, a cold weight grounding him to reality. He bypassed the front entrance entirely, stepping into the shadows of the alleyway and walking steadily toward the heavy metal backdoor you had slipped through moments before.
He reached the door, raised his fist, and froze. The space between his knuckles and the painted steel felt like an abyss.
With a slow, deliberate breath, Bucky lowered his hand and knocked.
The sharp, metallic rap echoed through the quiet alley, sounding entirely too loud in the dead of night.
Inside, the movement stopped.
Bucky held his breath, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. For a agonizing second, there was total silence from within the bar. Then, the faint scuffle of boots against the floorboards drew closer. The shadow of a figure approached the frosted glass of the door. A lock clicked. The heavy deadbolt slid back with a metallic scrape.
The door swung inward.
And there you were.
Standing in the dim amber light of the back room, looking right at him. The serum-induced perfection of your features hadn't faded a single day; you looked entirely as you had in the barracks, frozen in time just like he was, untouched by the natural decay of the decades. But the look in your eyes—sharp, defensive, narrowed with the immediate, lethal muscle memory of a Hydra asset—was a punch straight to Bucky's gut.
You had half-raised a hand, fingers curling into a defensive posture, ready to strike or throw a punch at whoever was stupid enough to knock on a back door past closing time.
Then your gaze locked onto his face.
The breath caught in your throat. The aggressive, defensive tension instantly drained out of your posture, replaced by a profound, paralyzing shock. You stared at him, your eyes wide, tracking the familiar lines of his face, the dark hair, the grim set of his jaw. Your hand slowly lowered, trembling slightly at your side.
"James?"
The name slipped past your lips like a phantom, a whisper so fragile it barely carried over the hum of the street lamps.
Hearing his real name—not the designation, not the code, but his name—spoken in your voice after half a lifetime shattered the last remaining wall holding Bucky together.
"Hey," Bucky choked out, his voice thick, rough, and entirely broken.
He didn't wait for permission. Before his brain could process the danger, before the cold tactical logic screaming in the back of his mind could stop him, Bucky stepped across the threshold.
The door shut behind him with a heavy thud, sealing them off from the rest of the world. The scent of spilled beer, cleaning solution, and old wood enveloped them, but all Bucky could smell was you—real, breathing, and standing right in front of him.
You didn't move as he closed the distance between you. Your eyes searched his face, desperately looking for the monster, looking for the Winter Soldier, looking for any sign of the cage they had both been locked in. Instead, you found only him—shaking, overwhelmed, and looking at you like you were the only real thing left in a world made of smoke and mirrors.
When Bucky reached out, his human hand came up to cup the side of your face, his thumb trembling as it brushed against your cheekbone. Your skin was warm. Real. Alive.
A sharp, ragged breath tore from your throat, your eyes fluttering shut for a fraction of a second as you leaned instinctively into his palm, drinking in the touch you had both starved for since the world went dark.
"They're coming," Bucky whispered, his forehead coming to rest against yours, his voice cracking under the weight of the confession. "Hydra... they're looking for you. I couldn't let them find you alone."
You opened your eyes then, staring up into his with a grim, knowing clarity that proved the serum hadn't dulled your edge at all. A faint, sad ghost of a smile touched your lips.
"They were never going to leave us alone, James," you murmured, your hand coming up to rest tentatively over the heavy, solid warmth of his chest, feeling the frantic beat of his heart. "Not really."
"No," Bucky agreed, his grip tightening around you, pulling you impossibly close as the shadows of their shared past closed in around them. "Not really. But this time... we do it together."
being an adult is just saying to yourself “this is the weekend i’ll clean my [x]” and then proceeding to not do that because it’s the weekend and you deserve to relax, goddamnit
Betrayed and backstabbed by your scheming evil advisor? Psch. Skill issue. Absolute amateur problem. Just hire two of them and reward them for snitching on each other. Just make sure that neither of them is gay or they'll just end up hate-fucking each other and fucking you over all the same.
Hi, these bees are babies! They’re not clumsy at all, this is what is called orientation flights. After birth and before beginning their careers as foragers (as all Honey bees cycle through all the jobs in the Hive throughout their lifespan), Honey bees take short flights back and forth, to and from the Hive, to orient themselves with their wings and their home so they can learn its location and how to get back home after foraging! Everyone has to learn, these are just smol little baby turkeys. Bees use the angle of the sun for location so adults have a better and more direct sense of location than any human
When I was in grade school I used to send emails to biologists and zoologists asking them questions to get answers to include in school projects I was working on, and would cry when they did not respond because I thought I was stupid for thinking that some random kid would ever be deserving of a response from someone who does something as smart and cool and important as *checks notes* studies frog fungus.
Now, at 29, I’m lowkey having a panic attack because my academic email is filled with middle schoolers wanting me to answer their questions about pygmy raccoons and I keep putting off answering them because I’m so overwhelmed with all the other raccoon stuff I have to do.
Anyway, greatest apologies to any scientist I ever emailed as a child and also an adult.
Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.
Kids books is probably not the best way to word it, you can enjoy them at every age, including your childhood, as you get older you may find new truths in them, but they're still good for any age.
