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wattpad - spideyanakin | started this blog on the 17/03/2020
what if I wrote a Eddie x reader fic la la land au? high school sweethearts who move to LA to build a life together, him with corroded coffin and her as an actress.
maybe he realises that he needs a steady job bc its not working out for him and all he wants is to provide for his girl, so maybe he signs with this awful pop band as back up guitarist, like it totally tames his music. maybe its only Eddie who has a contract with them and he barely has time for corroded coffin anymore, and its just what the fuck, but at least it pays well???
and then reader who is frustrated and wants to give up acting and is also so frustrated at Eddie. they break up bc they just can't handle everything anymore. Eddie is never here, and she wants to give everything up, go back to Hawkins.
and then like in the movie, Eddie forces her to take this last audition, she gets it and moves to Paris!!!! as she does, Eddie tells her he left the band and he's going to nyc with corroded coffin bc a manager wants to sign them!
they don't talk anymore, life bleeds into the 90's. they both become super stars, and tonight, well reader's friend has tickets to see corroded coffin and she doesn't want to go alone. at the concert, her friend meets one of her other good friends who works for corroded coffin. They go backstage, and well after years of going their separate ways, they realize that maybe, maybe now they can be something again!
summary - corroded coffin member!reader, what if you wrote 'always remember us this way' for Eddie Munson?
warnings - sad ending, star is born vibes im sry :(, mention of sex
word count: 7.3k
thank you @inknopewetrust for proof reading some bits <3
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eddie munson masterlist
That passion in your heart, burnin' in your eyes.
You fiddled with your pen as you watched Eddie from the other corner of the classroom. He was somewhere else; eyes distant and removed from the room you both occupied with 25 other bored souls. Mrs. Click was a drag. Her red manicured hands gripped the white chalk as it scratched the green stone.
The sound pulled him out of his stupor. He mumbled something incoherently and drew his pencil onto his paper.
On the other side of the room, you couldn’t focus at all.
A tune was haunting you. It was singing in the back of your mind as the melody began to swim around you. The notes of a song begging to be put onto a page and heard around the world. It was all you could think about; refrains coming to you two days ago when the boy across the room was six-feet-deep in a game of Dig Dug on your last date at the arcade.
A rhythm that you couldn't get out of your skin.
The mix of game chants and arcade music melted into one beat that you ended up humming all night. Fingers mindlessly drumming on the side of machines every time Eddie played his turn.
You knew that when night fell, Eddie could sense you had music dancing in your mind. It was what brought you two together, after all. The melodies of songs that shaped a life; how stories could express feeling without ever feeling too vulnerable. Eddie knew the sensation all too well. For many a night he had been the victim of that vacant expression and mindless humming of the same few lines over and over.
You were so lost in the tune that when Eddie’s turn was over and he had been defeated for the ten millionth time that evening, his eyes burning a hole into your head hadn’t even fazed you. There you were, half leaning against the machine with eyes glazed over on the odd shapes and colors that danced on the carpet your polished shoes touched. Perhaps you could see the lyrics on the floor. The shapes and colors filled with blues and yellows jumped from their home and painted a score above.
He called your name once. He called it twice.
"What are you thinking about?"
Eddie leaned on the machine’s panel that separated him from you, whispering the words in your ear. The light from Dig Dug illuminated his profile. He belonged in a place like this. A place where he could be free and seen and heard. No bands needth play when the song of Eddie Munson’s eyes filled your soul with warmth. Goosebumps passed through you. You blinked away the music from your mind and caught his gaze.
He was looking at you with so much love you thought you were about to burst. Leaning so close you could see the tiny sparks of gold in his eyes.
One of his hands came to hold yours, reaching up with his ring-clad fingers to play with the bracelet he had gifted you two weeks before–a dark blue band with mini skulls braided in. It screamed Eddie and that's probably why you loved it so much. He had never seen you take it off since he had gifted it, and it made a small smile appear on his lips each time he saw it where it was meant to be.
And that's when the first piece of lyrics came into mind.
'You look at me and, babe, I wanna catch on fire'
When the words started fitting together in your mind, you could feel the way it made you flustered—heat creeping up your neck and traveling up to your cheeks.
You really did feel like you were about to catch on fire that evening.
Two days later, in the desks of Mrs. Click’s class, you tapped your pen on the back of your hand as it rested over a loose-leaf sheet of paper that had scribbled lyrics that kept popping up. It was like catching butterflies with the words. They came and went, difficult to grasp and hold onto if you didn’t have a pen handy.
That passion in your heart, burnin' in your eyes
You look at me and, babe, I wanna catch on fire
It's buried in my soul, like California gold
You found the light in me that I couldn't find
The words “CHORUS” were written in sloppy big letters in the middle of the page. You scratched your head with the back of your pen, pouting as you tried to reach unknown corners of your brain for any kind of inspiration.
You had been on literal fire writing the first stanza. The words flowed freely and quickly and without remorse that perhaps it was cheesy that a boy in high school who you envisioned a life with had inspired those lyrics.
When you look at me and I can't find the words
When the sun goes down,
And the clouds all fade
You looked back to Eddie in hopes something would appear. He was the reason for the song, the whole why as to why those words had made their way to the page in the first place. You watched as he scribbled something of his own, dropping his pencil onto his own desk before suddenly turning his head around and meeting your eyes.
It would be a lie to say that you weren’t caught off guard. Seized in the midst of your contemplation, in mid quest to squeeze any more inspiration out of the being that was Eddie Munson.
He smirked, mouthing something but you couldn’t do anything back. You could barely make out his words. He made you all choked up. Your cheeks started to burn again at the simple thought of him. His smirk, his pretty face… it all disappeared as he turned his head back around.
He really had to choose now to be a good student?
You munched on the tip of your pencil before eying your page again. And as a light went off, you felt like scribbling something new.
So when I'm all choked up
When you look at me and I can't find the words.
~
"You keep staring lately."
Eddie took you by surprise, making you jump as he appeared behind you and laid his chin on your shoulder.
"I always stare… you’re my boyfriend, Eds," you pointed out, tightening your grip on your piece of paper where your lyrics had been written—hoping he wouldn’t see it.
"Then there’s something different to your stare," he offered, leaving his place at your shoulder to step in front of you.
You grinned, shaking your head and smiling before leaning in for a kiss.
There was something so cheesy about being one of those couples you had once snickered about in the halls. Love had not reached you then. It hadn’t filled every part of your being with the pure adrenaline and immense pleasure it could provide by looking at the one you loved. It had never been obvious to you before that what those people had, you now did too and it was something you would never trade for the world.
"Maybe it’s just because you’ve finally realized how desperately in love I am," you whispered against his lips and Eddie thought he could melt right there. He too had felt that love. He knew the Earth could swallow him whole and he would fly up to a heaven knowing that the girl of his dreams had loved him back.
Instead of answering with words, he brushed a strand of hair that had fallen onto your forehead, gently pressing a new kiss to your lips.
"I love you so much" he breathed out, leaning against you as your foreheads touched. The bell sounded–the passing period was over. Eddie backed away, raised his arm to lay over your shoulders and the two of you bounded off to class for the fifth hour of the day.
~
Eddie's bed was filled with random papers, scattered pencils, and mini figurines—your two bodies mingled in the middle of it all. Your chin rested on his bare chest while your legs were tangled up together.
You watched him frown as he dropped the paper he was holding and blindly tried to find another one. He wiggled under you in an attempt to fetch a half-crumpled piece of paper from the other corner of the bed, succeeding after a minute of struggle.
You chuckled at his theatrics. He was never one for subtlety. He moved the paper away from his face to meet your eyes and grin back at you.
"How's that campaign going?" You murmured, almost too scared to break the silence.
For the past thirty minutes, the only noise that could be heard were the rustling of the trees and the uneven buzzing of the fridge coming from the living room mixed with yours and Eddie's pencils scribbling on paper.
It all started an hour and a half ago, when you both couldn't sleep. You thought that maybe tearing each other's clothes off and moaning the other’s names would have been enough to put you to sleep—but there you were at 2 am, after having cooked a box of cheap mac and cheese that had been bought so long ago it expired in a week. You were wearing the shirt he had been wearing that day while he was just in his boxers.
You still felt guilty for laughing at him when hot cheese splashed onto his chest, slightly burning him. You had been a laughing mess when you scolded him for not wearing a shirt while cooking. It was dangerous, you had to chuckle at the act as it was so abundantly Eddie.
But now the bowls rested empty in the sink and Eddie was focusing on his campaign while you continued to think of the song that haunted your very being. The melody wasn’t catching. The lyrics weren’t forming and the ones that had stuck, from earlier that morning, loomed over your head like a big raincloud.
Sleep was still far from both your eyes.
"It’s going well," he beamed, lifting his head while you perched yourself off him to steal a kiss.
You leaned back into the position you were in and watched as he began to work again. He grabbed a D&D figurine from the box he had almost fully emptied on the bed minutes prior. He inspected it, trying to find any specific detail that could be scoured for ideas before diving back into his paper and scribbling something new.
You couldn’t keep your eyes away from his face. To the way his tongue slipped between his lips in focus, or how he drew in his eyebrows, and tapped the tip of his pencil to his temple.
He scrunched up his nose before using the little space left on his chest next to your head to erase his scribbling.
You sighed in content. Tracing circles on his skin with your free hand, you had to force your eyes away from his face to look back at your page of writing.
The lyrics slowly began to take shape. The melody wished to fly from your mind and out from your lips, the tune familiar to him. Eddie had heard it for two days straight and couldn’t place it. He knew it was new. He knew it was original.
Your hums broke Eddie's train of thought and he brought his attention back to you, a figurine still in his hand as the pencil wavered in the other.
"You keep humming this tune lately. I don’t recognize it," he spoke.
You felt the joy of songwriting leap from you. There was a grin on your face that threatened to hurt your face. You were certain that you were smiling so hard that the strain in your cheeks was unnatural.
"That's because I made it up,” you admitted. “It came to me that night at the arcade."
Eddie's face lit up. He dropped the paper he was holding to give you his full attention. Everything in his hands disappeared and found refuge on the floor.
"I've started writing lyrics to it as well," before you could even try and say something else, anything else to sell him your song, he was already wiggling himself away from the bed and walking to his guitars scattered around the room.
He didn’t have much, but what he had was certainly enough.
"Electric or Acoustic?" He asked, hand on his hips as he pointed to his most precious possessions.
"Acoustic… It’s 2 am, Eds, you don’t want to wake the whole trailer park," you chuckled.
"Who said I was plugging in an amp?" He turned to you, eyebrow quirked high in judgment before you gave him a flat face. He was joking.
"I'm still going to pick Acoustic," he rolled his eyes before grabbing his black guitar and settling with it on the carpet.
He waited until you followed him. Eddie patted the floor in front of him as if to say, ‘hurry up, we haven’t got all night.’ So, you sat right in front of him with your paper delicately placed between the two of you. Lyrics now exposed to the world, the melody was beginning to be strummed without rhyme nor reason, just talent and the sheer excitement of producing something new.
"What’s it about?" He questioned aloud as he started fiddling with the strings and pegs.
"You.”
Eddie’s fingers froze in place. Head raising to meet your eyes, his face brightened and he gave you his best grin before muttering:
"Will you sing it for me?"
Butterflies fluttered in your stomach as they caught the lyrics.
"Ok," you cleared your throat before reaching for the paper on the floor. You already knew the lyrics. They had been burned into your soul by this point because it’s the only thing you’ve been able to think about for 48 hours. But, you needed something to distract you from his burning gaze. "You ready?"
“To hear you sing? Always,” you blushed. His hands were already clasping his guitar, impatient to hear you.
"Also, it's far from being finished–"
“Sweetheart,” Eddie let out a breath, “just sing,”
“Alright,” you shifted on your spot "Ok,"
"Ok," Eddie repeated with a smile. Nodding, as if to tell you everything was going to be just fine.
"That passion in your heart,” you sang in the way you imagined you could hear it on the guitar. The rhythm and the pacing; all of it was to be done without the chords but the silence of the room and the tonal shifts in your voice.
“Burnin' in your eyes. You look at me and, babe, I wanna catch on fire,” your head was low, eyes fixed on your lyrics as Eddie's jaw almost dropped to the floor, his heart beating in his ears.
"It's buried in my soul, like California gold, you found the light in me that I couldn't find," he thought he was going to melt right there on the carpet of his bedroom floor as the words sunk in.
"So when I'm all choked up, but I can't find the words," you raised your melody, knowing you hadn't any lyrics to this part yet. You weren’t sure what would fill the space when your mind stopped working and all that was left was the loud, thumping of your heart and a mind that raced to find the words that Eddie Munson made you feel.
"When the sun goes down and the clouds all fade," you let out a bit more, until you stopped and finally gathered the courage to stare up at him as the words disappeared from mind.
"I think I've found lyrics for the next verse, but I'm not sure yet," you commented, dropping the paper on the ground again, meeting Eddie’s starstruck eyes with clarity.
You waited for him to say something, anything, that would make your anxiety about sharing this piece of work with him go away. But when he didn’t reply, his eyes just stared wide at you, mouth agape, heat climbed up to your cheeks and you suddenly felt shy.
"So… what do you think?" you barely mumbled under your breath.
"Are you sure this is really about me?" He asked, jolted that someone would write a passionate song about him.
"Yes, silly!" you took the lyrics on that loose-leaf sheet of paper and slapped at his chest lightly. "You've been judging me for staring at you too much lately! I'm sorry to say, but you inspire me and if staring at you is going to get me to write, then I’ll do it forever."
A bright smile appeared on his lips and before you knew it, his guitar was on the floor and he was kissing you.
"What's the next verse?" He muttered in between kisses, hovering over you as you reached to get the paper back.
"Tonight's scenery," your eyes scanned over the page and back to his eyes. You never wanted to look away from them, pools of honey that melted with his love for you. They were softened by his smile, you had to steal another kiss before you could read the rest to him.
"Lovers in the night, poets tryin' to write, we don't know how to rhyme, but damn we try"
"How are you so damn good at writing?"
"Because you inspired me," you tucked a rogue curl behind his ear.
"We’ve got to show this to the rest of the band!"
"It's not finished though!" you shrieked at the possibility of those boys witnessing this song in its incomplete nature. "It's far from being finished!"
"That's alright!” Eddie brushed it aside. “We can at least work on the melody with them if you'd like? We don't have to show them the words just yet."
He was so sincere. So honest and considerate. It made those words jittery on your fingertips; an itch to write again and put down more of what Eddie meant to you.
“Ok,” you nodded at him, a smile of your own creeping its way onto your face. “That would work.”
~
“This is useless,” Gareth pointed out, throwing his drumsticks to the floor and tugging at his hair. “Without Eddie were never going to get the proper rhythm, no offence Y/n.”
“Non-taken,” you shrugged, biting your lip as you looked down to your instrument.
It was a cheap blue and pink electric guitar you had gotten two christmas’s ago. It suddenly felt heavy, hanging by the strap wrapped around one shoulder. It wasn’t as near powerful or clean sounding as Eddie’s ‘second sweetheart’. The notes didn’t sound as graceful and as Rock’N’Roll as his warlock did. Your fingers tapped on the side of it, you occasionally played it as a backup for Eddie’s, never even attempted to lead using it.
It didn’t make the situation any better that you didn’t know how to play like Eddie, and that factor seem to aggravate the mood even more.
You knew that if Eddie had been absent with a reason, it wouldn’t have affected this rehearsal one bit. You had practiced multiple times without him before: like when he got caught up in detention or what ever odd side quests Eddie Munson was up to that week.
But this time, something was wrong and it was buzzing in the dusty Hawkins air, slithering through the streets and making people double lock their doors at night and barely leaving their homes. The paranoia was becoming unsettling, and it was starting to bubble in the stuffy air of Gareth’s garage.
Eddie had gone missing for two days now, he had left you soon after your last campaign, and you hadn’t seen him since. It didn’t help that Wayne Munson wouldn’t answer your calls and that Dustin Henderson refused to answer any of your questions. He’d told you a vague ‘He’s alright, don’t worry’, before scurrying off and getting into Steve Harrigton’s car, leaving with unanswered questions and mixed feelings.
No one wanted to tell you the truth and you had gotten answers from no one.
The rest of the band knew as little as you did.
There had been a murder at the trailer park, and Eddie had gone missing.
You also knew it wouldn’t be long before the police came at your doorstep to ask you about Eddie. You were just grateful Wayne hadn’t let your name slip.
Great.
Just great.
“You know what,” you spoke up, breaking the heavy silence. “Let’s just cancel band practice today,” you removed the guitar strap from your shoulders, heading to put it back in your case. “I don’t think any of us can focus.”
“Yeah,” the boys muttered, watching you leave without another word.
They all knew this was taking a toll on you, and all felt like they could use a good rest anyways.
You missed Jason, his gang and Lucas by luck that day.
~
“Hey, do you hear that?” Eddie jumped, a faint whisper of a voice making the hair on his arm spike, goosebumps tumbling down his spine.
The upsidedown was already a creepy place, and the last thing Eddie needed was whispers to start haunting him–he seriously didn’t know how much longer he could last in this place.
“Hear what?” Nancy turned, her torchlight lighting up Eddie’s face.
“I thought I heard a whisper,” Eddie muttered, eyes squinting from the light aggression.
“Didn’t hear anything,” Robin concluded and continued her walk through the dodgy forest.
Eddie recognised this place, they were already far from lover’s lake and were almost by the main road, not far from where you lived.
He bit his lip as he thought of you. He hated not telling you anything, but he knew it was to protect you. He couldn’t risk that the the evil he was wittnissing first hand to get to you, or hurt you in any way. He knew he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself if anything were to happen.
“Eddie,”
He jumped like a startled cat, the whisper had been clear, sharper.
“This time you guys must have heard it too!” He whined, gulping when everyone turned around with annoyed looks on their faces.
“Litsen, we’re not going to make it far if you keep stopping because you think you heard something!” Steve grumbled towards the metalhead, the aggravated look on his face becoming more serious. Steve’s hand was impatiently resting on his hip, now covered by Eddie’s battle jacket.
“I don’t think! I heard it loud and clear!” Eddie spoke up, matching Steve’s tone. “It called my name.”
“Great, now were loosing Eddie!” Robin whined before taking a step towards him and snapping her fingers in front of his face. “Get it together, Munson! We have to find a way out of here!”
“Right, sorry,” Eddie shook his head and continued his walk, pushing away what ever was happening to him–and ignoring the unknown whispers that nagged at his ear.
“Eddie please, answer me,” your fingers gripped the side of your talkie, in hopes that maybe, just maybe he would answer you.
But by the fourth time you called, the talkie unwinglingly dropped from your hand, tumbling from your bed to find a new home on the carpet of your bedroom floor.
Eddie had been missing for four days.
Four days of escaping Jason, four days of trying to squeeze an answer out of anyone.
“Eds, where are you?” You whispered to yourself, closing your eyes as your head fell straight into your pillow, clutching it at your side as you tried not to cry.
You hadn’t left your room today, only muttering a thank you to your mom for lying to Jason when he came at your door, again.
Things were leading to nowhere and the rumours were doing nothing good for your spiralling thoughts.
You lifted your head up from your pillow, sighing as your eyes caught a polaroid of you and Eddie. It had been taken by Gareth right after one of your gigs at The Hideout. You remembered Eddie asking you to do his eyeliner a few hours prior. You had neatly applied it all around his eyes as if he had been Billy Idol prepping for a concert, but after shredding his guitar like freaking Jimmy Hendrix on that small crooked stage, he looked more like a slanky raccoon than a rockstar.
His arm was wrapped around your shoulders, your hair was as wild as Eddie’s, going all over the place from the hour of performing. Both your eyes sparkled with some kind of after show high, but yours held something else entierly as you looked at Eddie. You looked so in love it only reminded you how much you cared about him.
About how much he means to you.
Stop. You decided it was enough sulking for one day. Swinging your legs on the side of your bed, socked feet touching your soft carpet before you snatched your notebook and pen from your nightstand, throwing it on the floor before taking your acoustic guitar from it’s spot on your wall. Your eyes barely caught the ‘This machine slays dragons’, spray painted in pink–done by Eddie himself on a rainy afternoon.
You sighed as you crossed your legs, resting the guitar on the edges of your thighs before starting to tune it, mindlessly twisting the pegs as you tride to push the ache from your heart away–maybe even channel it into words and music.
You opened your notebook, hoping to find something to save you, but it was just a reminder. The song still rested on the white pages, words mending together in pretty loops of letters. You had almost finished it before he vanished, and even if writing music had been the last thing on Corroded Coffin’s mind, it was the only thing that could keep you from spirialing. The only thing that kept you sane in this mess of a situation.
The page you were staring at had been wrinkled by your aggressive erasing during the past few days. The pencil writing of your most recent words were already smudged from the tears and constant doubting on the way it sounded with your melody.
But all I really know, you're where I wanna go,
And maybe, just maybe if you had told him these words before you would know where he is. Maybe you’d be with him and help him sort through this mess.
~
A week.
A week of silence.
And Hawkins had crumbled under your feet.
Your grip tightened on the cardboard box filled with clothes to donate. You had gone alone–sent by your mother who had been too busy to go herself. You tried to calm down your nerves as you walked in through the large double doors of the gymnasium. You didn’t know why anxiety was munching at your stomach, threatening to swallow you whole–but the bad feeling was rising in your chest and you couldn’t push the intuition away.
You caught a glimpse of Dustin talking to Wayne, frowning when the conversation didn’t look very joyous. Dustin had his fist closed, handing something you couldn’t see from that far to the older man sitting in front of him.
“You should give it to her yourself,” Wayne mumbled, pushing away the boy’s hand away.
Dustin blinked, shock seeping through him at the suggestion. God he didn’t know how he would even tell you.
And just like that Dustin found your eyes. You were already looking at him from the distance–eyes wide in silent question–maybe also fear; he couldn’t be sure, he couldn’t know until he actually talked to you.
He gulped.
Dustin’s face held nothing but anguish and the closer he was to you the better you could see the tear stains on his cheeks and the slight glaze in his eyes.
He didn’t have to even speak. He didn’t even need to voice it–the look in his eyes said everything that needed to be said.
Tears prickled at your eyes and you felt the sudden erge to throw up. The feeling rose and your heart physically started to ache–was that what grief felt like? Was that the feeling that came crashing onto your body like waves onto cliffs.
You didn’t even know what Dustin had said. It was all a distant echo, a distant voice in a parallel reality–muffled by the way your body’s reaction.
You caught some words. Sentences that didn’t ease the feeling.
‘He talked about you t’il the end.’
‘He didn’t want to put you in danger.’
‘He really, really loved you.’
‘He left this for you’
You didn’t know how long ago he had left. How long you had been standing there–Eddie’s pick necklace resting against your palm.
But it was long enough for you to register the sudden feeling of loneliness, washed up from the storm on the shores of your mind.
Your other half was gone.
~
"This is um- the song" You zipped up your bag, slipping out the tear-stained paper you had spent the last few days blankly staring at. Maybe hoping it would bring him back.
Jeff grabbed it without a word, giving you a tight smile. You could see he had been crying too.
You looked away as his eyes started shifting across the paper. You looked at the small window of Gareth's garage, the sunset bringing the rays of golden hour across the musty room.
If he had been here, everyone would have taken a break and you would all be watching the sunset. You'd be wrapped in his arms giggling to some dumb joke he made about whatever was on his mind.
But that wasn't the case.
And everything felt so dull now.
You looked around. You were slouched onto an old green bean bag chair, the one you and Eddie would fight over every single band practice, but now he wasn’t there to fight you for it–you had the dirty, half empty and wrapped up in duck tape poor exuse for a sagbag all to yourself. The used up thing didn’t even look appealing anymore, and you hoped Gareth would throw it away for your sake.
The garage’s owner was blankly staring at his cymbals, drum sticks barely hanging from his hand and threatening to drop on the carpet. He looked like hell, not much of a difference from his band mates if you were honest.
Jeff's bass was hanging low around his shoulders as he read, tears nudging at his eyes.
"You- you wrote this?" The strain in his voice was evident. "For Eddie?"
"I wrote it with Eddie, but I want to change a lyric, before we um, do anything with it."
"Yeah go ahead," he blinked the shock out of his eyes.
The lyrics felt so beautiful, so magical. To him, you and Eddie had been nothing but one of those high school couples that would either go on to get married, just to have that classic white picket fence life or end up breaking up before graduation. Nothing more, nothing less.
But as he looked at you wiping tears off your cheeks he realized it was so much more, and it had always been so much more.
The both of you were never going to fall into either of these two options. The two of you had always been the odds one out of the pack, the whole of Hawkins had been a witness to they way your crazy minds worked–but your relationship didn’t just hold on your similarities. The two of you had been in love, truly in love. Like the type of love Aragorn and Arwen shared, or the one in the stupid movies channel six passed on friday nights. The ones poets wrote about and people died for.
You were meant to be rock stars together as you crossed the world. The two of you were supposed to be the pillars of this band, the glue that would hold everything and see members come and go. He didn’t know why it took him all this mess to realise.
"You want to read it?" You looked at Gareth who looked up from his drum set with a blank expression.
"I'd rather hear you sing," he muttered.
"Alright,” you cleared your throat. "Can you-" You were about to ask if he could play the guitar for you but remembered that was Eddie's job. Jeff played bass, and Gareth was on the drums. "Nevermind," you took the decision on your own–you’d do it accapella.
You weren’t bad at guitar, you knew how too strum a few simple chords, but you weren’t Eddie.
"When the sun goes down" your voice cracked and you had to close your eyes to keep focus "and the band won't play," your words felt heavy in the room, and a sad smile adorned Jeff's lips. "I'll always remember us this way," you continued, and suddenly Gareth started playing the rhythm that you had rehearsed two weeks prior. Jeff started on the bass, and as they started duetting–your eyes fell upon Eddie's guitar.
You picked it up.
You grabbed the guitar from the corner of the room, hanging it on your shoulders and attempting to keep singing as you plugged it in the brand new Marshall amp–a gift from Gareth’s mom to the band.
You thought that maybe Eddie would be proud–proud of all of you for continuing music even if he wasn’t there.
"Lovers in the night," Gareth picked up the pace on the drums, and you desperately tried to follow the rhythm, hanging on to what Eddie had taught you. "Poets tryin' to write, we don't know how to rhyme, but damn we try," it took everything for you not to cry. “But all I really know, you're where I wanna go," You closed your eyes in anticipation of the next line, the one you had written just yesterday, "the part of me that's you will never die"
"So when I'm all choked up, and I can't find the words" Eddie was peering up at you with the brightest smile you had ever seen. "Every time we say goodbye, baby, it hurts" Your fingers glided over the guitar strings, Eddie knew you were fully into the song but he just had to stop you.
"What?" You smiled as his hand reached the guitar and his other your cheek.
"I cannot believe you wrote that about me"
You giggled, "is that so bad about?"
"I love you," you could have stared at the giddy smile across his face for ever.
"I love you too,"
"And I love the new lyrics, please continue, I'm sorry I've cut you off" He sealed the moment with a kiss, before leaning away and sitting patiently in front of you again.
"When the sun goes down, and the band won't play," the memory was cut by you opening your eyes again.
The sun might have been setting a beautiful color upon the walls, but the garage felt so much darker without him. Without his voice.
"I'll always remember us this way"
~
"So what inspired you to write this song?" The interviewer pursed her lips before settling her papers back onto her lap, fixing her glasses before staring back to you.
You looked down at your skull bracelet, sad smile forming upon your lips.
"Isn't it obvious?" You quirked an eyebrow, hiding behind humor to stop the bubbling feelings.
"Love?" She smiled back and you nodded your head. You wanted this conversation to end like it usually did. You always gave the same answer; Love.
The same music with cheeky gazes and smiles always followed;
‘Is it anyone we know?’
‘Is he in the band?’
‘Are they famous?’
‘Are you in a relationship?’
You never answered. Gareth, Jeff or the latest addition to the band would change the subject–but as the crowds grew, so did their curiosity. You knew you couldn't hide from the eyes of the public much longer.
"Yes, but we all want to know more,” she urged on, her tone staying sweet and comprehending. “You once said it was one of Corroded Coffin's most personal songs if I’m not mistaken."
There it was. You were alone–no boys to help you change the subject with a joke or random statement about the song. You looked at your shoes for a brief instant; maybe trying to sum up the courage and push away the feeling of dread. Attempt to mend the hole in your heart, just for a few minutes. After this you could leave back to your hotel room and find a way to drown your sorrows.
When you didn’t reply, she continued.
"I can't help but notice that there's a certain sadness to the lyrics?"
She hit the bull's eye.
"Well," You looked up, meeting her gaze. Maybe it was the unspoken comprehension of a woman towards another–the subconscious bond that created itself just by your similar place in the world that made you more comfortable to share. Maybe it was what caused her to spot the hidden meaning–or maybe it was just her journalist mind that picked the song apart, ready to latch onto any information you were ready to hand over.
"What people don't usually realize is that the song takes a turn,” you shifted uncomfortable in your seat–you had never gotten this personal in an interview before. "It starts out as this love song. Two soulmates who can't believe they've found each other," Eddie's pick necklace felt burning hot against your chest, the ring you had slid on the chain too–a diamond ring that belonged to Eddie’s grandmother.
You remembered the moment you had discovered it. You were going through Eddie’s room accompanied by Wayne, trying to naviagte around the ruins of the trailer and scavenge for anything that was left plausible to use or donate. Boxes of random objects and clothes laid in between all the mess and you had already managed to find his guitar–releif when it was in perfect condition, left untouch by the damages of the earthquake. Which now hung on your living room wall, preciously behind a glass frame.
Your attention had been caught on the broken closet while Wayne was going through the drawers of the small desk. The earthquake had broken one of its feet; making half of the drawers hang open with clothes tumbling out of it. You had organized his shirts and jeans already–piling up the ones you could keep and the ones you could give away or give to the corroded coffin boys to share upon themselves.
Your fingers gripped the handle of the third drawer–and you'd only realize this after but it was probably the last time you’d have any a glimpse of sanity in your bones; if you had even any sanity left since he passed away.
If you were honest with yourself you didn’t even really know what this drawer contained. He had never really opened it in front of you and you couldn’t say that you had much curiosity towards it before. You half expected it to be his sock drawer–but your breath caught in your throat when you slid it open.
A collection of souvenirs–mainly of you, laid at the bottom of the hard wood. Photos, souvenirs, concert tickets, boxes with what you assumed even more trinkets and things he collected since the start of your relationship.
You gulped in a pour attempt to push the tears away.
You started sorting through the collection papers and polaroids–everything bringing memories that were dug deep into your brain’s memory, hidden behind other memories of Eddie. You already knew you’d keep everything, probably throw everything in a box and sort it out in the comfort of your own room–when Wayne wasn’t there to see you crumble even more as you gazed upon Eddie’s collection.
There was a mediumish wooden black box nestled in the far corner of the drawer, and it immediately caught your attention–like something pulling you towards it, screaming for your acknowledgment.
The box wasn’t heavy in your hand, it almost looked like the boxes Eddie used to store his extra special drugs and you expected that to be the content. Eddie hid drugs everywhere in the trailer in a poor attempt at covering up the fact that he wasn’t a drug dealer in his spare time. That if the Hopper or some other dumb officer ever came around they couldn’t possibly find everything he hid.
But even if there was, most probably a zip-lock bag with some kind of funky psychedelic powder or pills hidden inside–you still wanted to be sure. You fiddled with the unlocked buckle, and pushed the lid open; but you were met with no drugs.
Instead there was another black box. A small squared box draped in black velvet. You frowned, it… couldnt be? No. You refused to even think about the idea–this was again probably one of Eddie’s weird drug hiding spots.
This must have been something even more special than the special K.
With trembling hands you grabbed it, fingers wrapping around the top of the box and popping it open.
You blinked, all words dying in the back of your throat. You didn’t trust your voice, but your mind had talked at loud on it’s own.
“Um, Wayne?” Your voice was definitely shaking, and he immediately turned to face you. “Do- um- what- huh-” You couldn’t formulate a proper sentence, and you watched Wayne’s expression soften when his eyes caught what was in your hands.
His mother’s engagement ring.
“So that’s where the little devil’s kept it,” Wayne almost laughed, almost chuckled at the absurdity of the unworldly situation. Your frown deepened and your heart raced to your ears, you couldn’t formulate one single thought and Wayne seemed to take notice because he continued, “we found it in a box a few months ago, Eddie was adamant of keeping it,” Wayne weighed out his words, wondering if he should continue. He knew well enough this was going to break you even more, but now that Eddie was gone, he couldn’t keep the subject of his conversations with his nephew to himself, “to give it to you someday.”
Wayne had insisted that you kept it. That it was meant for you and that he’d have no use of it–that it would be collecting dust in a drawer when Eddie wanted you to have it, when Eddie had kept it stored in the back of his closet for you.
You had worn it on your ring finger for months–as if he had actually given it to you himself. As if he had made it past graduation and got down on one knee, locking your lives together forever.
Gareth had caught you speaking of him one too many times at bars. You would have one drink too many, some guy had probably made a move and you shoved your hand towards his face, drunkenly rambling a life you wished had been real.
But your drunken and fuzzy mind always caught up with the fact that you were lying. That your fiance wasn’t really on a trip and you weren't just at a bar with your best friends to celebrate being engaged and soon to be married- and that's when the tears became uncontrollable.
Gareth-the usually sober one often found himself attempting to dry your tears, trying to sober you up on the floor of the dodgy tour bus or in some hidden corner of the bar if the bus had already been taken hostage by Jeff and his latest conquest.
But when fame rolled down at your doorstep you had to remove the ring from your finger to keep any unwanted rumors away.
And right now you couldn’t just open your room’s mini fridge to scavenge for anything that could take the pain away from your chest, you had to continue that interview.
"But then the song becomes a requiem," you continued, trying to keep your voice from wavering. You watched the interviewer face almost fall, her mouth opening into an 'o' as she pieced up the lyrics together.
You thanked the stars she was being respectful, maybe even understood.
Soon enough the interview was finished, and neither Jeff nor Gareth or the world was ready for what you did the next time you stood on stage.
Because for the first time in years you spoke his name.
For the first time, you told the world who this song was about.
summary - tws! bucky x f1 driver + daughter of a hydra agent! reader, your father, bloodthirsty for power found his way to gain the drugs and illegal tech being made behind the glitz and glamour of the formula one world; you, his daughter, future super soldier and formula one champion. Mastering the art of the beautiful, brainless athlete, you perfected in making rich man swoon while luring them to their executioner, to the soldat with ice in his eyes. But what happens when Hydra gets torn apart? When you are left with a life built over a lie, and the only person who truly understands you, does not know how to be human either?
warnings - guard dog! Bucky, a little lost and helpless! Bucky, messy! reader, absolutely done with life and chaotic! reader, wanting to forget your life, drinking, trauma (trauma bonding?), reader had an absolute shit dad, hydra abuse, being/feeling trapped, reader wears a slutty dress while someone (sadly not bucky) puts his hands on her hips?I think there's only one use of y/n [w.c 9k]
a/n - i'd like to thank @peterparkive who helped me w the plot and proof read this! also hope you guys like this, bc holy shit this is my first time writing for bucky!!! I was hesitating stopping the fic where I did, or continue it! so maybe if it gets some love i'll make this a series! You do not know how much i enjoyed building this world like avengers meets f1 and putting tony's f1 team to good use!!
main masterlist
bucky barnes masterlist
spa-francochamps, belgium, late 90’s
You watched your father’s face.
Cold, twisted and almost ugly beneath the grey clouds. Stance closed and fists opening and tensing in an arithmetic focus.
He had this look, this breeze passing behind his irises, unreadable to anyone but you. Something tortuous and ice-like in his fixed eyes, jaw locked and teeth clenching as he mustered up his role.
He wasn’t an actor, far from it, but he needed this information. He needed the technology, and as long as he looked the part they didn’t get too suspicious, the Italians were ready to throw anything in his way with a little vodka and money.
So he laughed when they did, and nodded when they spoke. He passed a hand over his hair and brushed your mother’s back when he caught a glimpse of a husband doing the same to his wife from across the room.
You had not known, when he slipped a bright red and yellow t-shirt over your body, secured a matching cap over your head and told you to stay put, or when your mother’s hand gripped your own in a silent plea for you to stay quiet, you would only learn years later, that it had all meant business.
But how could you have complied?
Because when everything met the eyes of this you, so young and innocent, so untouched by the sullied hands, metal, blood, dirt, gasoline and super serums, your eyes went wide, and a little breathless gasp escaped your lips as your eyes caught the rows of cars chasing each other in circles.
Something in you had been lit, and suddenly you forgot to be the perfect child you were raised to become.
The passion, the sparks in the driver’s eyes. The buzzing around the engines, the spray of champagne after wins. The shine of trophies glimmering under the sunlight. Something had burst in you, courage with the smell of gasoline and burnt tires.
The post race celebrations blew with champagne, glitter, music and the comfort of this small intimate, homely and familial bar the winning driver’s family owned right off the official formula one track.
You remembered everything as if it was yesterday.
The big windows with the see through white lace curtains that gave out a view to the family owned karting track. The rows of large, dark oak tables polished to a shine, with matching benches. The little porcelain clock that looked like the Heidi cartoon you caught on TV the morning before, big eyes moving with every tick of the clock under shaggy black hair staring at you. The happiness that bubbled through everyone here. Something you had never experienced before. Never felt first hand. The faint smell of beer that stuck to the bar, the cheers, the claps on people’s backs, the belgium anthem that bled into the Italian anthem, to bloat over, make sure everyone heard which team had won the race. A desperate show off of their new engines, their skills and most of all, hidden behind smiles and money, the illegal tech and drugs that were passed beneath tables and above the tires of their cars.
Your father had seemed to blend in, as if it was second nature. The crisp suit he wore, the way your mother’s dress shone over her skin. It was as if they were meant to be here, as if they had always belonged in this cheerful environment.
The winning driver, some gorgeous and tall belgium man that swaggered with each step and shone with the faint smell of motor oil always trailing behind him, was monitoring his karting track with lynx eyes and an expensive smile. He was offering rounds and rounds of races as if the fuel and the karting equipment was free.
The soft buzz of a go-kart rang in your ears, eyes scanning the slopes and the way their driver’s hands moved over the wheel.
Finally, the driver turned to you, bearing his shining white teeth and his prince-like hair at you, muttering the simple question, “do you want to have a go?”
You had turned around, and saw some adults strap helmets onto their kids, their grins matching and their eyes sparkling as they chose their kart. He was offering the kids present at the celebration a chance to try the track.
And there wasn’t a world in which you would have said no.
You saw it in your father’s face, the disdain, disgust and disappointment.
But he had a cover to maintain. He was the father of a happy rich family of important sponsors. He was close to the technology, close to getting the key that he needed, so close to them spilling everything he wanted to know.
So before you knew it, a man strapped a helmet to your head and you felt home.
Like the circuit was a freedom you had never experienced. Like you were flying across the asphalt. As if light had poured into every piece of your being and refused to leave again. As if everything was whispering to you, this is it, this is supposed to be your life.
Your father watched you race, he watched your small figure hidden beneath a helmet and a seat belt that engulfed your whole little form. Your hands gliding over the wheel as if they had been doing it all their lives, as if they had been forged just for it.
He let his eyes drift for a second, drift to the garage whose opened door showed the stacked tires and spare parts. But he knew, tucked in the hidden corners of this large shed, there was an unspeakable amount of valuable technology, and drugs more powerful and expensive than one drop of super serum.
It was smart, keeping everything tucked in behind home-like joy. A facade the team understood well. Your father knew more than anyone that this team could not afford creating all of this technology under their actual headquarters, so what better than to do it here?
And as if life could not be any kinder, the hydra lab was close, very close, safely tucked on the German border. Now all was left was a way to fully gain their trust, gain the recipe, buy off the plans, slowly but surely kill them from inside out, so Hydra were the only ones holding this key to winning.
“She’s good,” a man, looking all too much like an Italian mafia boss than a race engineer, spoke beneath his grave accent, “she races?”
Your father looked away from the shed and the spare karting parts, eyes cold and distant as he was pulled out of his ruminations.
“No,” he muttered beneath his drink, lips tightening into a smile.
“Good instincts, good driver.” The man continued, and your father’s ears perked, attention fully on his interlocutor. “We are looking for kids to sponsor.”
That’s all he added in his broken English, eyes kept steady as he watched you glide across the slopes and chicanes.
Your father’s lips curled into a smile,
your mother’s face morphed into a frown.
He had found the solution to his long term issue.
Your mother had realised right then and now that she could never save you from Hydra.
You had sealed your fate.
A fate whose tale smelled of adrenaline, heat and gasoline.
A fate whose head smelled of iron, blood, metal and gunpowder.
spa-francochamps, belgium, april 2014
It was a cold and humid day.
The harsh white light stuck to the ceiling like a lone star, exploding and blinding all at once. It hummed in its blinding stare, buzzing in your ear like a bug, circling and waiting to catch a glimpse of exposed skin. You failed, yet again to release the cold air stuck in your lungs as you tried to tune out the noise. Begged for the bulb to break into a million glass pieces, cursed whatever had bled in your veins that made you hyper aware and had not given you telekinesis to pair.
In another world, you could blink, lift a finger, and the light and the buzzing would disappear together.
You prayed to gods you could not name, for you, or maybe for that damned ceiling lamp you were seconds away from ripping out. Maybe if you did, it would not be that bad, maybe they would simply take it out of your paycheck. You’d be fine with that.
You closed your eyes, trying to focus on your uneven breaths. An impossible in and out, a battle for justice, for freedom over your own body. Something you did not know if you even owned.
You shivered beneath your fireproof suit, and under it, a cool layer of sweat stuck to your undershirt like an unwelcome pest.
Your heels bounced in your dark blue boots, elbows following the up and down movement as they rested on top of your knees. There was an impossible buzz fluttering in your stomach, ready to swallow you whole.
You sighed, wiping your forehead as you stared out of the garage. Angry clouds stared back. Rain was threatening to spill, this would make for an interesting race.
You adjusted the velcro strap on your neck for what felt like the tenth time, the little bright blue Stark Racing logo fading away each time your fingernails dug into it.
Your head hit the iron blue wall behind you with a thud and another breathy sigh.
You didn’t know why the uneasiness rose, and it bothered every inch of you.
You’d been racing long enough to know this wasn’t the usual pre race anxiety. You could handle the nerves. You could handle the pre race turmoil and the churn of your stomach, but this felt different.
A nervousness that you had not felt since you were a scrawny teenager.
Something you had not felt since the last time you had been there.
Your throat felt tight, too tight beneath the suit, like if you tried to speak you’d feel daggers in your throat and your lungs would collapse, and maybe, for just a second you let yourself wonder, if it simply wasn’t just because you were standing in the place where it had all begun, in the place that had dropped you inside your coffin and closed the final nail all in the same breath.
You hated it here.
Hated this place.
Hates this race.
Hated that you were barely a few miles away from there.
Spa was cold. Unforgiving hills that spread through turns that made your heart churn. This track had a bad history, held bad memories. You’d lost too much innocence to this place. Saw too much blood get spilled and too many teammates die beneath the pine trees and red and yellow track lines.
You shivered again, cold and hot streaking down your back. Lungs aching and preparing to take flight in a search for mercy.
You fiddled with your neck strap, dug into the logo again, played with the fading letters, their color stuck under your nails, unwelcoming, somehow comforting, there.
“You okay?”
You jumped, startled, and looked up like a deer caught in headlights.
Your team mate, all brightly green eyed, peered at you with the softest expression against your uneasiness. You could sense it oozing from him, the calm aura he’d learned to replace anxiety with years ago.
You hummed, trying to compose your tired traits, gathering your breathing.
Your hyper senses caught the slowness of his breath and the gentle soft clear of his throat as he waited for your answer.
“Yeah,” you mumbled, barely audible, barely true.
“Okay,” he smiled, all soft and warm against the looming humidity.
You watched him for a beat more, wondering if he would sit by you, but he only frowned over your uneasiness.
You almost had the urge to tell him you were fine. To ask him to fuck off and leave you to brood in silence, but you didn’t, you grabbed your water bottle sitting near you and sipped on your rubber straw instead.
You had tuned out the outside noise, but as the clock turned you opened your ears to the world again. Every tick of a machine, every buzz of an engine, every scrap of metal rubbing each other as they toyed with the cars. The hurried voices of the race engineers and their chasing footsteps as they got everything ready. The click of a camera, the soft hum of a microphone, the perky voices of TV presenters and team managers screaming at the incompetent inters. Reporters walking up and down the pit lane with local celebrities waiting to snap a picture of you, Lewis Hamilton or anyone they thought could gain them likes and a good headline.
You could hear it all from miles away, the buzzing around the cars, around the track, like bees to honey. The whole circus rang its bell and it did nothing to soothe the ache soaking in your bones.
You hadn’t dared to adventure yourself in the jungle of the pre race chaos, you didn’t want to, not with the impossible heaviness churning in your chest that would usually go away with a twist of your lips into a smile and the zip of your suit over your chest.
You were used to this. The cameras, the eyes everywhere, the microphones and tablets shoved in your face, the people looking up to you, the race engineers asking a million questions a minute about the car, the press.
Hydra,
Him.
It was all a dance you knew the moves to.
To be dissected by one or two sharp gazes that burned holes through your skull.
But this was different.
This felt different.
This, whatever this was, whoever this was, had intentions that you weren’t familiar with.
“Press wants to talk to you, by the way,” he nudged your shoe, waking you out of your hypnotic daze, and giving the softest smile. “I’ll be around if you need to talk.” He nodded before leaving for his own interview.
“Thanks,” you muttered, watching him leave. You looked to the paddock lane, catching another flash from a camera and a bright eyed Sebastian Vettel cheering over a microphone.
You sighed, rubbing your palms on your knees in a poor attempt to soothe the nerves. You rubbed your eyes next, digging your nails at the base of your hair line. One long breath of air leaving your lips before finally standing up.
You fixed the collar of your suit for a third time, gently slapping life back into your cheeks, slammed on the best fake smile you could muster and jumped into the snake pit.
Your mind swirled with precise and calculated prestige.
With the years of your father drilling what to say, what to do, how to act. There were fake sparks in your eyes and an undeniable charm that had been turned on like someone had pressed a button on a well oiled machine.
Your eyes were sharp, scanning and smiling as you walked towards your car. It was there, in all its glory, the winning engine sitting still in the middle of a herd of black suited engineers and big cameras.
You had the prettiest of smiles, and waved at a flash of light beamed towards you, multiple live broadcast cameras suddenly pointing directly at you as you walked into their pre-race show. You could hear it from where you stood. Almost all of it, the way your name rolled in the tongues of TV presenters from all over the world, their accents making it sound like a poem foreign to you.
People muttering they just needed to get an interview with you.
~
You’d won the race.
Fastest lap.
Twenty six points towards winning that damned championship. Twenty six points more towards making everyone proud, towards making the team proud.
There was an explosion of champagne, your suit was reeking of it, all sticky and sweet. Your hair damp, the drink creating a horrid frizz nightmare to peak atop your head. You looked crazy, you looked happy and the adrenaline had managed to make you pretend that just for a moment, you were.
That for a moment, all that mattered was the anthem playing across the track and your team mates cheering. Your team manager grinning with his big trophy as he patted your shoulder, proud of you for a race well done. The feeling of your car sliding through the track in skilled precision, the charming smile of your team mate as he popped his own champagne bottle open in your face. Everything felt like a mirage of smoke, sore muscles and boiling engines. The faint smell of used tires lingering in the air like the beautiful heaviness of your trophy.
Until your eyes caught the ones of your personal manager.
The world stopped spinning, the adrenaline drained from your blood, the bitter taste in your mouth came back and the chills ran down your neck.
He was looking at you as if you had personally burned his house, murdered his family and did it with a smile. Eyes devastating and jaw set as he looked at you, waiting for you. He wasn’t proud of your win. He wasn’t happy that Hydra’s creation was taking home trophies and more points than Stark Racing had ever known in their small years of formula one. He was still waiting for the actual goal, for the actual reason behind all of this spectacle, and you were all too familiar with the look behind his eyes.
You were going to have a mission.
~
You swallowed, breath stilling in your chest when the door to your lodge closed behind you.
Your manager handed you a damp towel, you took it without a word being shared, tension stiff across the small space. You wiped the champagne off your forehead, and you heard it, the racing beat of his heart, hammering against his chest, the way his breath slightly itched when he looked at the TV behind you.
It was odd.
He was bred with cold blood. Raised for steady hands and features so impossibly unreadable most reporters labeled him as hard and stern, never joking around–maybe the key to your success.
But you weren’t reporters. You weren’t the press, you weren’t the gossip page of a magazine hanging on the breadcrumbs of a conversation, and you knew the truth behind the man.
You assessed him.
Because that’s what you were raised to do. Trained to see the smallest flicker of an expression. DNA changed to hear the smallest sharpness to a breath, or the way a pulse quickened.
So you noticed, but you don’t think he realised you did.
You inhaled, sharp beneath the soreness of your ribs. You didn’t shake, didn’t show your weakness the way he did, but you still felt it all the same. You were afraid.
Because if the man before you feared something, then it meant the threat was big, really big. And it either meant his life was on the line, Hydra was running into some trouble you’d need to wipe clean, or worse, your formula one career was being compromised.
He didn’t let you dwell on it for too long, and as you were still wiping the champagne away from your exposed skin, his hands found the tv remote and his fingers pressed the big green play button.
The screen lit to life, and you watched in perfect stillness as he flickered through the channels, guiding air to your lungs as if he hadn’t alarmed every single one of your cells.
Your mind swarmed with directives. Fingers twitching towards the cupboard where the hidden gun laid. Foot inching towards the case behind the flimsy air panel where the anesthetic syringes were kept. Body leaning towards the knife hidden beneath the mattress of your couch.
You sighed through your nose, the TV flickering a swirl of colors over you. You looked at him, but his stare was fixed to the screen like a moth to a flame, features tense as he reached for a channel. He changed it one last time before you heard screams coming from the sound system, your attention turning sharply towards the TV.
It flickered with images of rubble tumbling and people running for their lives.
Washington.
The SHIELD headquarters burning in fire and blood, smoke licking the camera’s lens with every deadly breath.
The woman was speaking in french but you understood it as clear as day. You saw it, Hydra and Alexander Pierce’s great plan fluttering broken in the distance. The way the woman spoke, weary over her microphone and bright lights of the studio.
You took a step back, the woman’s french seeping in your ears like blood soaking white linen. Your calves hit the back of a chair and your hands found it, your entire body weight shrinking over it.
Hydra had been compromised. Everything, every electronic file, every name, every worker storm born and bred of fire with blood on their hands had been leaked. No one was safe.
“You are safe,” the man beside you spoke, after hours of silence from his part. “With your fame, Mr. Pierce made sure you were in case… in case we were ever in this situation,” his eyes flickered to yours and you saw the cracks beneath the sea serpent.
There weren't just small clues anymore, no, it was written all over him. The fear in his irises, the trembling of his hands, the wavering of his voice. The way his knuckles turned white over the remote.
“But I’m not. I have to leave, now.”
You watched, stricken and dumbfounded as he walked towards the closet. He pushed through a few racing suits, shoved a helmet to the side and grabbed his big black duffle bag, the one he kept for emergencies.
You could barely speak over the shock, over the ringing in your ears, the TV still humming in the background of it all. “But-”
“Be smart about this,” was all he said before he opened the small iron door and slipped into the crowd of race engineers and managers.
You never saw him again.
Only heard flickers of rumours lingering in the air like a foul scent.
~
A week later, stuffed in between race weeks and meetings with potential new managers, you were called as a witness in a trial against Hydra.
You were shivering beneath your jacket, even if it was April bleeding into June, even if it was bright and sunny in Washington.
You barely heard when spoken too, and only muttered the necessary.
You denied ever knowing, of ever realising your father’s dwellings, or after he passed away, ever knowing of the skeletons in your god father’s closet. How you’d been spared. How you had no idea your manager was dealing with them.
So they let you go. They let you run free without a scratch on your reputation, and the team hadn’t spoken a word of it.
Because it made sense, didn’t it?
Daughter of a Hydra scientist, god daughter of Alexander Pierce, being kept safe by a Hydra agent, hidden as her manager, left in the dark about her family's dwelling.
But you couldn’t help wondering, did Nick Fury know? Was the eyes and ears of what was once SHIELD aware of you? Was that why you were able to leave this court room without anyone holding an inkling of doubt about your loyalties?
Did Tony Stark know the beast racing under his name?
Milan, Italy, June 2014
The heat was overwhelming. This bearing, summer sensation that stuck to your skin like champagne after a win. It’s like you could still feel it, even after your shower. The sticky, bubbling liquid, sinking in the crease of your skin, embedded in your fingernails.
You hated it.
And Monza had been your favorite race for as long as you breathed.
You hated the heat that came after the setting sun, bleeding beneath your skin like overly sweet honey. The cheers, the alcohol bursting through your veins whose effect sizzled as quickly as it came.
You couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. So your body swayed.
There was another cheer. Another Italian anthem bleeding in your ears, another Ferrari tifosi insulting you in the kind, extravagant, Italian manner that only bloomed from the heat in their blood.
Your eyes stung beneath your eyelids, another bottle of something tossed in your hand, another swing of the bottle towards your lips, a new blink against the dazzling lights. Another twirl of your hips, letting them swing beneath a scandalous dress you would have never been allowed to wear before.
Your head spun.
Oh
Oh.
Whatever was in the bottle was working.
Actually working over the super serum that stuck to your DNA, that embedded every fiber of your skin, every muscle in your body, every cell within your shapes.
“Cos'è questo!?” You screamed over the base, some sinful remix of a popular song you couldn’t quite place. You swung the bottle over the face of the man who had handed it to you.
“Non lo so!” He laughed, as if this was the funniest thing that he had ever said before giving you the most radiating smile, his gaze bubbling something beneath your ribs.
You watched him dance for a beat. Watched the flashing colors move in dancing shapes over his features. Sharp nose, loving eyes that shone beneath the dim lighting. You thought you recognised him, some race engineer from Ferrari that worked from Milan. You knew you’d met him when you still worked as a reserve driver for them, and then you recognised him earlier when you shook hands with Kimi Rikkonen after the race. He had congratulated you, cheered for you although you now drove for an opposite team.
You didn’t remember his name, but you felt the envy of it on your tongue, the wish to speak it on the brim of your lips.
You took another drink from the bottle, a long sip, letting sink into your throat, relishing in the sensation, the heat, the boiling that embedded into your veins, sinked into your skin.
If this, whatever was in this bottle, this magic elixir could get you drunk, could get you to forget the ghosts in your shadows and the skeletons in your closet, then you’d gladly finish the bottle and ask for another.
The beat dropped, and you watched as the boy whose name you still didn’t know danced, twirling to the rhythm like it was second skin. You reached for him with your free hand, and his own rested atop your hip dragging you closer.
You laughed, a chest laugh that sung over the music like birds chirping at dawn.
Was this happiness?
Were you truly happy right now?
Maybe it was the alcohol seeping through,
Or maybe it was the boy looking at you as if you’d hung the stars in the sky just for him.
You were not sure, but right this moment, everything was perfect, felt perfect. Golden. Hazy in a mist of joy, light and bubbling adrenaline, something sharp and dangerous that bred only from the floors of this shitty club.
You leaned closer, his hand dragging dangerously low. You lifted your head to laugh, to chuckle at some Italian words whose meaning you did not know, but the lights flickered over bodies at the back of the room, and your heart dropped.
Like a cold shower, the dizziness sunk low, becoming grounding, shattering you back to reality.
You blinked, footing becoming unsure as you landed hard on the concrete floors of this underground inferno.
It couldn’t be.
“tutto bene?” The boy blinked at you, hand squeezing your waist to emphasize the question.
You didn’t speak, couldn’t, and the lights flickered again.
It hadn’t been your imagination or a hallucination caused by the mystery bottle still in your hand.
He was there.
Leaning against the back wall. Watching your every move with his eyes as sharp as diamonds and as cutting as a blade.
“Scusa me.”
You didn’t offer the Ferrari boy another smile, another look, gaze fixed on him, as if he was an oasis in a desert, a safety net under a cliff, or maybe spikes hidden in a river, or a field riddled with fire waiting for you to step upon, at this very moment you weren’t sure.
But it did not matter, whatever he was, doom or savior, you still made your way past the sweating and dancing bodies.
Your throat tightened, heart hammering in your ears, mixing with the horrid base from the club’s stereo.
What was he doing here? How was he still alive?
Were they still alive? Still pulsing through the undergrounds? Still controlling him?
Cut off its head, two more shall take its place.
You gulped, swallowed hard over the residue of alcohol against the back of your throat. The club lights made the metal of his arm glisten, shimmering in a dance of shapes and colored beams. His jaw tensed, gaze unwavering, fixed on you like a hawk watching its prey.
What did he want? You had witnessed first hand that metal arm cracking necks and twisting knives in chests. You knew the beast behind the cage, you knew what they had made him to be. A machine ready to comply with any given order, ready to snap someone’s neck at the smallest of triggers, and if Hydra was back, if they had sent him to find you, then you wouldn’t give up without a fight.
You weren’t scared. You’d train together, not quite as equals, yet not quite able to ever override the other. Carved from the same stone, yet polished differently. You knew his weaknesses, they were your strengths. You’d twisted his metal arm until Hydra had to repair the joints at his elbow. Smashed his nose in concrete until all he could see for days was his own blood staining his vision.
You also knew that hidden beneath the metal, the blood and the pain was a broken man. That Hydra couldn’t be in his head forever, and if you acted smartly enough to over drive the machine, find the glitch in the matrix, you could drag him to your side.
But maybe Hydra wasn’t behind it at all. Maybe he was free, as free as you, yet just as imprisoned, just as lost.
Just as lost as you.
You took another swing of your bottle. Someone passed in front of you, you almost stumbled before finally, finally you made your way out of the crowd and you stood barely a breath away.
His eyes softened when you reached him, and it hit you worse than a bullet.
“Hey,” his voice was hoarse under the music. Strained and shallow, like he had been screaming with the entire force of his lungs and hadn’t spoken for days after.
You were almost taken aback from the simplicity of his greeting.
“Can we- um, talk?” He asked again and you watched his eyes flicker, refusing to meet your gaze.
Was he nervous?
No, The Winter Soldier did not get nervous. The Winter Soldier wouldn’t dare show a glimpse of unsureness. He was cold, hard, and rough around the edges of his broad frame. He didn’t blink before pulling the trigger, or slashing a man’s throat. He was clean, he was sharp. He had eyes like a hawk and the reflexes of a fox.
And that’s when it dawned on you.
You stumbled again, grip on the bottle becoming tighter, lips pursing, body tensing over itself. You took a sharp breath, eyes still on him.
Hydra was really gone.
This wasn’t The Winter Soldier standing in front of you.
This wasn’t your mission partner.
This was the man who you had dragged through screams and panic attacks when Hydra was slipping. This was the one whose eyes lingered a little too long when they watched you. The one who asked to stay behind, who looked over you from the shadows even though that wasn’t his order, wasn't his mission.
This wasn’t The Winter Soldier.
This was James Buchanan Barnes.
Standing in front of you, leaning against the back wall of this horrid club with sticky floors and the smell of cigarettes. After everything Hydra had put him through, after the horrors that had been shared between you.
He was here.
Amidst all the places his freedom could have taken him, he chose this dingy stinky club, carved in the pits of the underground, with the few race engineers and super fans who had migrated here after not making it to the big vip guest list for the fancy place up the road.
You blinked, lips parting as you watched his features beneath the echoes of shimmering light. He looked impossibly handsome, but it might have been the poison in your blood speaking. The sharpness of his jawline, the slope of his nose, and the plush of his lips, closed, perfect and creating shadows in the dim lighting.
You blinked. Images flooded your mind. Flashes of old and grimy hands tugging at your waist, kisses with champagne breaths as you lured powerful men out of gala’s as they whispered their big plans to the supposed brainless athlete with a pretty face.
His eyes, sharp and boiling when you brought them to him. The way he didn’t flinch when he made them disappear. The way you’d come back to the room, hair shining, dress pristine and a perfect smile as if you hadn’t just lured a rich man to his executioner.
You stumbled over your footing again, mouth twitching and fingers curling further at the neck of the bottle. His gaze made you want to shrink, become one with the puddles of stepped on booze, cups, cigarettes and crushed drugs beneath your heel.
He was scanning you in a way you were too familiar with. In the same way you would read people, and it made you shiver beneath the lightness of your dress. You could see it in his eyes, and you knew it as clear as day. He was realising what you were doing, he had read you as easily as a book, and his eyes screamed it.
You are hiding.
At least attempting to hide beneath a slutty dress and a bottle of a drink so strong it affected you over your ‘super soldier’ status. You wanted to forget, but he wanted answers.
And even if he was looking at you with all the hope in the world, you weren’t ready to face this. Face him. To face the horrors of a past that was still so close it felt like the present.
Of orders that still lingered in your ear, and eyes you could still feel against you.
So you took another swig from the bottle. Sharp and rough in your throat, tingling in all the right ways.
“What’s there to talk about? It’s over. Shouldn’t we forget?” you gave him a tight smile, nails scraping the glass of the bottle as you held it. “Солдат.” You nodded, sparing him one last glance before turning on your heels and slithering through the crowd again.
You don’t know what happened next, but you remembered your bottle being full again, then a third time even though you swore you had finished it. You never found that Ferrari engineer again, the cute one who didn’t speak english and whose name you had wished to taste on your tongue.
Your entire body was buzzing. Struggling against the tension, against the way your heart pounded in your chest and the way you still felt his eyes linger on you for the rest of the night. You could feel it. Or maybe it was the memory of it. Of his eyes pouring into you, drinking you in like you were the world’s most intricate puzzle.
Muffled voices, cheers, the shatter of glasses against the floor and the unknown bottle was full for a fourth time and empty just as quickly. A trick whose secrets you still didn’t know, but whose mysteries you were beginning to find before the darkness came.
Swallowing you and drowning you in, making the world dark around the edges before fully seeping into black, in one last echo of music.
~
The curtains in the bedroom of your suite were drawn. Rich and heavy silk, embroidered in the finest fabrics in a color so rich he would not be able to name it. Beige? Silver? White? Light blue? It all blurred in his mind, but all he knew was that it matched the carpet that felt so soft beneath his boots it should have been a sin.
He watched you breathe, the soft rising of your chest beneath the comforter, beneath the silk sheets that wrapped over your frame like they could shield you from the world’s worst evils.
Everything in him wanted to leave. He knew you would be alright. Tucked in this giant bed, cared for by the hotel staff and the amount of personnel Stark had hired to work under his racing team to keep an eye on you after Washington, after Hydra and Shield had blown up under the same gun powder.
He saw it, the way some people from the team looked at you from the shadows of the garage, the way your new manager handled you like you like porcelain too gentle to be touched. You noticed it, he had seen it as clear as day, but he also knew you were refusing to admit it. Refused to acknowledge you were being watched like a zoo animal again.
He breathed, slow and steady and not enough to get his body to move under his will. He couldn’t. It was deep and almost brutal, the way he could not bring himself to look away, to turn around, leave this hotel room and never look back.
Did Hydra mean for this? Was this part of the multitude of tortures he had endured? To feel this undeniable pull, this urge to protect you, to look after you. As if his entire body would burn on itself if his eyes dared leave your frame.
His jaw tensed, and he finally dragged his feet away from the bedroom, closing the door with the softest thud. He couldn’t move, couldn’t bring himself to turn away from the heavy wooden door, and when he finally did, everything made his jaw tick and his metal arm tense.
His breath shuddered, just the slightest.
The living room looked ridiculously luxurious.
Yet he was used to it. To the glam, to the big spaces and comfortable sofas. To the champagne bottles on coffee tables, accompanied by a note from the hotel staff and crystal glasses that were worth more than his left arm.
But he hadn’t been used to living in them. To feel like he belonged there. Like he had the free will to take said bottle and said glass and pour himself a drink. No. These belonged to rich men he was sent to kill.
These carpets were meant to be cleaned of blood, while the curtains were meant to shield the world from his crimes. The coffee table was meant for smashing their heads until they were knocked out cold when there was no champagne, and when there was, it was meant to be poisoned.
He couldn’t look at the plush sofa leaning against the back wall without seeing the last billionaire he had tied to one of these. He couldn’t even bring himself to find haven in the little desk chair by the door, no, these were meant for weapons to be laid as he tortured his prey that laid on said plush sofa.
He shuddered again against his own will. The sky was blue. Dark and rich, the kind of blue that came right before dawn would peak through the stars. Shadows were cast, softly leaning against the room like they waited for him to become part of it.
What if someone knew about you? What if what was left of the Hydra scums were looking for you?
He shivered again. He couldn’t leave you, not now. Not when you had fallen unconscious in his arms as if the world around you didn’t exist. Not when you couldn’t protect yourself, weakened and lulled by the alcohol and grief.
He stood tall in front of the wall next to your door, guarding, waiting for a threat that would never come. He watched light pour into the room, the rising sun casting shadows upon the softness of the carpet and the parquet floors.
At some point, in which he had no control over, he felt the wall against his back, cold and steady as it supported his weight, and at some other instant, further into the dim morning light, lulled by the sound of your breaths coming from behind the door, or the safety of a world safe from Hydra. A world where he could exist in the same place as you without blood being shed. His body gave up, sinking to the floor, knees tucked against himself, head loosely resting to the side, but eyes never quite closing.
His exhales softened, his eyes taking in the details that made the room your own. No hydra, no Alexander Pierce. Just simple, human, details carved out of your own little universe. The human they had allowed you to become. The warmth he had been deprived of.
Your trophy on the console table by the large TV, glistening in all its glory. A pile of signed caps your PR team had yet to pick up. Your sweater, the blue one he noticed you wore a lot when you weren’t in Stark Racing gear, draped over a chair.
Your little bag with the big looped cross logo, the one he had placed himself on the chair by the table. Its handle dangling from the side, creating a shadow across the floor. Your shoes by the door, Stark branded sneakers and your heels from the night before. A tube of lipstick still open by a pocket mirror. A water bottle half drunk. A protein bar wrapper who had just missed the bin.
Everything felt so you. Not the one he knew from missions. Not the Гепард. Not the formula one world champion.
You.
The one Hydra tried to erase behind trophies, spotlight and missions in the shadows.
The one he had watched for so carefully. Whom beneath all the envy, beneath the ache in his chest when he noticed the things that made you normal against who you were trained to be, beneath it all, he couldn’t resist. Because you showed him what it was like to be human against the war machine. To smile at a stranger, to have life in your eyes even after a kill. To keep going, to keep fighting over the pain, over the drills, over the blood and the guns and the ache.
His body shifted against his own will, and his eyelids fluttered heavily, lulled in the quietness of your hotel suite. He watched the sky from his place on the floor, the sun climbing higher, draping the world in his hazy glow.
He should go. He’d be a fool to believe no threats liked daylight, but by now, it had been enough hours that you’d wake and be aware enough to fight back if threats did come.
You didn’t need him. Didn’t want to speak about it, didn’t want to see him.
You’d run away. You’d told him yourself, you wanted to forget. Forget the pain, forget the serums, the training, the guns, the blood. Everything. And he was just another reminder of it all.
You didn’t know the man behind the monster, not enough to realise it was peaking through, begging for help. Screaming and grasping at the softness of your eyes and the curve of your lips. Longing for a piece of his lost humanity.
He didn’t hear the door open, but he felt the presence and the air bend beside him. His body felt wrapped in cotton, his world felt dull, and it took him longer than necessary to realise you were standing in the doorway to your bedroom.
Your lips were parted, eyes glaring down at him in this surprised, curious manner that belonged to you. Your eyes were circled in black, make up smudging in the corners making you look like those panda bears he remembered from the zoo. You blinked, hand still on the golden handle of the door. You were silent, face unreadable.
He shifted, jumped to his feet, stumbling over himself, making a move to stand a little pathetically. He stood up so slowly, almost comical, as if making sudden moves would scare you. He watched your tired traits so carefully, you were still gazing at him, but now with a raised eyebrow, shifting your footing just so slightly. You blinked again. He blinked back, mirroring you in perfect stillness.
He doesn’t know how long you stayed like this. Watching each other, each one caught by the other, like cowboys flinching for their guns, waiting for a move.
He watched, the years of training utterly failing him to read you. Your breath, your eyes, your lips slightly parted, he could not tell what any of it meant, not when it came to you.
You were the one to finally break the silence.
As if you deemed him worthy of your space, dubbing him as a non-threat, you yawned, soft and painful over the ache from the night. You took a step in the room, rubbing your eyes, smothering the make up further down your cheeks as the black from your lashes bled.
“I have you to thank for bringing me home?” Your voice was hoarse, strained from the bottles and screams, you barely spared him a glance.
He nodded, still stiff in his corner, like he was stuck behind invisible panels, impossible to take a step out. Voice caught somewhere deep in his throat, blood like hardened cement, a statue becoming part of the scenery.
He could only watch you take him in when you looked his way again. The way you were catching a glimpse of his arm, the way you looked at his stance, his clothes, some black shirt he had rummaged from a line of drying clothes, black pants he had stolen along with it. Boots that were muddy and probably still stained with Steve Roger’s blood. The tactical gear he wore on top, everything he had on him when Hydra fell. The knives, the glock tucked in his left boot, the brass knuckles with the spikes he hated to use by he still kept in case his arm was failing him, the guns tucked under his vest.
You knew everything. He saw you could see them, knew their hiding spots, knew where he hid even the smallest blade.
He saw your shoulders slouch, just the slightest, as you now didn’t seem phased by his presence. You looked away from him, and moved towards the mini bar in the far corner of the living room. You groaned as you took a step, hand climbing up to your head, cradling it. He watched you walk, a slight sway and almost stumble that surely came from the bottles you drank without care the night before. And yet, there was a flawlessness to your movements, a carelessness of a fish in water, and he envied the simplicity of it. You weren’t caring about the stupid sofa, or the chair in the far back. The bottle of champagne didn’t make you flinch.
No. You reached for the crystal glass he could only see poison in. Found a bottle of water, uncapped the bottle with loose shoulders and poured half the content into the glass. He watched you chug the entire thing as if it was your only salvation, before filling it again and turning to him.
Your hands twitched slightly. Your guard was down, and his head started spinning.
“You want something?”
He didn’t answer, just stared. A little dumbfounded, a little dazed, and maybe just a little helpless.
He didn’t know how to behave. He couldn’t. Hydra didn’t exactly teach him how to act normal in a space like this, and the world outside seemed like an endless road of twists and turns he did not know how to navigate. You looked at him, spoke again, something he barely caught, maybe repeating your question.
He could only blink at you, his own lips parting as he watched you drink.
He doesn’t know what scared him most.
You dropped the glass on the marble counter, on top of a leather coaster with the Hotel’s logo on it and he almost flinched again. Images of broken glass, shoving coasters into a mouth to drown screams. Blood spoiling black marble.
“Я помню, как ты говорил по-английски, солдат.”
“I remember you speaking English, soldier.”
He stiffened, his metal arm making a noise as it tensed.
He blinked, met your gaze again. He swallowed, trying to untighten his throat.
You were glaring at him now, hand on your hip, eyes refusing to leave him before you got an answer.
“Bucky, my name’s Bucky.”
Your eyes widened for just enough seconds for him to catch. “Right.” you nodded, “you need anything, Bucky?” Your gaze, the one he remembered, the one he knew had tortured so many men finally left him and dug into the bowl filled with small plastic wrapped candies and other snacks. He watched your hand dig through it, scavenging for something interesting.
“N-no”
You nodded, as if you actually had barely cared for his opinion. You grumbled something under your breath, absolutely not convinced by the content. You grabbed the leather bound menu from the side of the bar.
“Why are you here?” You frowned over the menu, flipping the pages as if they personally offended you.
“I- I didn’t know where else to go,” he didn’t look at you when he spoke, only stared out the window and into the bright sky, the view of the inside courtyard, a seagull that had made its way onto a tree by the terrace. “You- you are the only thing left, гепард.”
You looked up from the menu, shoulders tensing.
Гепард. Guepard, as the French called you, Cheetah the Americans said. Fast, cunning, leaves nothing to chance, chases for her wins.
They might have called you racer or some other stupid thing, it felt all the worst of a branding.
“Y/n, my name’s Y/n.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
You paused. Eyes on him again, almost daring.
He looked back, like a small animal caught in a cage, begging to break free. You sighed, deep from somewhere guttural in your throat. Your eyes went back to the menu in your hand, the pounding in your head wouldn’t stop, the letters were blurring, you blinked.
You dropped the menu back in its spot, feeling his eyes still burning on your figure. You don’t know if you wanted to throw him out, punch him, scold him, or thank him for bringing you home safely and not waking up in a ditch bleeding or in some super fan’s bed.
So instead, you rubbed your eyes, a new, ridiculously long yawn pouring past your lips before you grabbed another bottle of cold water, poured half of it into your glass, and chugged it again.
When your eyes met him again, the silence was overbearing.
His eyes, no longer the icy ones you knew, longing to reach for something more, something further than his reach–but now scanning you as if he knew every single piece of your soul better than your own.
And maybe he did.
Because where he did his work in the shadows, you worked under the spotlight.
The yang, searching for its spot of white. His ying. Or whatever that bullshit was that your manager fed you while trying to calm your anger down yesterday morning when you crashed your car in qualifying. Never in your formula one carrier had an accident been your fault, and all it took was a slip of distraction, your eyes getting watery, out of all things that could have happened to you.
The five spot penalty had felt worse than the bullet that had gone through your arm two years ago in Madripoor, and the way you had burst into violent tears in the little car they sent to bring you back to the paddock, well, that felt like utter betrayal from your body, from the entire fucking universe actually.
And maybe your new manager, bless him, was right. You needed to find the balance. To find the Yang in your Ying, and to the Ying in your Yang. To breathe, get a grip or chill the fuck out and stop causing the team more damange than a fucking rookie.
But there was a Hydra shaped hole in your soul, and it screamed to be stitched back together, yet you felt like you couldn’t get the thread through the needle. Like your hands were shaking so much you couldn’t even see where the cracks started and ended.
Then the guilt kicked in. You should be fucking happy. You were a millionaire, getting higher paychecks than your team mate every month. You were standing barefoot on a carpet that cost more than your car and half of the team.
You had everything,
yet nothing.
And the man before you, looking at you as if you were the answer to all his prayers. The remedy to his pain, his saviour from all his tortures, well, he had nothing at all.
Where you were light, he was shadows.
And you couldn’t help but feel that awful pit, burning in your stomach as your eyes wouldn’t leave his. Because that’s what you were. Two souls; standing barely a few steps from one another, speaking the same language yet with an entirely different vocabulary, still trying to grasp for a glimpse of safety within the other.
It made you shiver. Your eyes blinking heavily. Hands almost shaking as you rested the heavy crystal glass back on the marble counter, and finally let out a quiet mutter,
“you might be the only thing I have left too, Bucky.”
a/n 2.0, if you've read this whole fic, i love you oh my god!!! hope you enjoyed it <3, please leave a note or reblog if you thought anything of it! you do not know how much this means to a writer!!! I'm also so excited bc this is my first bucky fic 🫣🫣
@gigglingtiggerv2 I love that :D (I'm also incredibly pumped by the amount of things I have to read and indulge in with your work 🤌)
Also thank you @muddyorbsblr for the tag :*
From my way old story that I need to finish really soon;
He sighed, his head falling back down on the pillow.
synopsis - harrington!reader, A new rule strikes the Harrington household: if Steve wishes to date ever again, his sister needs to find a boyfriend first. As Steve becomes desperate and thinks of everything in his power to set her up, only one guy comes to mind that will take up a challenge such as that: Eddie Munson.
- this series takes place before the events of season 1, and instead of it happening in November 1983, I changed it to be around April 1984!
current word count - approx 70k
chapter one [9k]
chapter two [12.5k]
chapter three [16k]
chapter four [11k]
chapter five [14.5k]
chapter six [8.8k]
chapter seven
thank you to the amazing @inknopewetrust for proofreading the chapters
➾ I’d also like to acknowledge that @sourwolf-sterek32 has also written a similar fic! None of us knew that the other was writing an Eddie fic based on 10 Things I Hate About You. So you guys now get double the amount of them :)
Fortunately both our writing styles are different and we picked different characters to build our story around! 10 things I hate about you by @sourwolf-sterek32
is the 10 things i hate about you series still ongoing? totally understandable if you’ve decided to drop it, but in case you think no one is still interested - just know that I’m a big fan and think about that series like once a week
this absolutely isn’t meant to pressure you to finish it! just letting you know that I really loved that series so even if you don’t wanna continue it, it will always have a special place in my heart ❤️
hey my darling!
Thank you for all the love, and those kind words, this means the world 💜 Especially knowing that someone regularly thinks about it, it touches in me so much darling you don't even know. It happened to me so many times where I've read a fan fic that just stuck, and I can just hope that the writer knows a glimpse of how much it has impacted me! So really, thank you so fucking much babes.
This series, to me too has always had a special place in my heart and forever will. It was the shift point in my writing where I went from decent writer to actually good. It shifted a whole new 'era' in my fics and my way of seeing writing, and I'm so grateful for it and the love that it has received!
A bit like the way most of us grew up with stranger things, I grew as a writer with 10 things I hate about you! I started it two years ago (HOLY SHIT), and so much has changed for me since, but I always had this series to write and come back to if I needed a mental escape, or just to write something out.
Worst part is that I know how it will end, I know what will happen in the last chapter, I've had everything planed out since I posted chapter one !!! But I think a part of me doesn't want it to be the end of it, because I know next chapter is the last chapter.
So to answer your question, YES! I am continuing it! I am! I'm working on it like a m'fuckin sloth, but it's in the works. I also have another Eddie series that is in the works (that has been my new baby) and that I promised myself I would finish before even posting so you guys don't get hung on to it, just for me to finish it 3 years later hahaha.
My goal is to post it MAXIMUM before-ish or when episode one of season 5 comes out! Hopefully sooner, and hopefully, I'll have a whole set of epilogues requested or ideas to melt into the plot of the other seasons since this takes place in season one!
So yes, I will finish it someday haha, and I'm so sorry for the amount of time it's taking!
love you, and thank you so much for the support, you don't know how rewarding it is as a writer <3
summary - mcu peter parker x black widow + nat’s sister! reader, after years of loneliness, buried feelings and chipping your life away, you found peter. Now months later, after fighting monsters from another universe and loosing may, you comfort peter atop the midtown rooftop.
based on this request: hey could you do one with peter x reader from nwh where it’s after may dies and the reader and peter are dating and she’s just there to comfort him & and reader is a black widow, nat's sister (pls) and is dating peter. maybe have the other peters react to her fighting skills.
warnings - so, technically, the character’s ages in the mcu don’t match bc if the reader is approx the same age as peter, then she would have been way too young or not even born yet to be a kid with nat and yelena, so let’s pretend that nat and yelena are way younger so the ages match-but that doesn’t really matter, this is fan fiction after all lmao–so reader is approx 18/19/20? mention of death, no way home spoilers, talks of skipping meals and not sleeping properly, a bit dark and angsty but next part is light n fun lmao [w.c 2.9k]
id also like to thank @peterparkive for proof reading this <3
freaks masterlist
peter parker masterlist
can be read as a stand alone or part of my freaks series
The air felt too heavy, firm, dark and hot.
The dry sweat in the creases of your suit, the dirt beneath your finger nails, the smoke still clutching to your lungs, and the grief vailing your bones.
Everything seemed to cling to you like a horrible second skin.
The tears were still hot against your cheeks, and the Manhattan skyline felt dim.
Everything felt like a twisted dystopia, while the world you once knew, was now out of reach, out of touch by your bloodied and calloused fingertips.
There was no breeze to comfort you, no soothing hum of traffic that usually echoed with the beat of your heart.
Simply the darkness of the night sky, no clouds, and no stars to bear witness to night.
It was quiet.
Too quiet.
Horribly dark.
Horribly hot.
Horribly heavy.
The only touch to reality, the only feeling against your skin that felt real, that felt like a glimpse of life was Peter’s hand against your own. The softness of his touch, grounding against the shattering of your world, mixed with the soft shudder of his uneven breaths.
Because while Yelena was hunting Clint behind your back,
you were saving the world with your spider-boy.
Now that you think about it, you don’t really know how it happened, how you ended up here, amidst all the places in the world your feet had thudded upon. If not physically, then emotionally. How you had opened your heart to someone the way you had with him, and landed in this mess, sticking and impossible to untangle, caught like a fly on a web of grief and pain.
One day you were free-lance, walking across Europe. Lone except for your weapons, mind, and all the habits gained courtesy of the red room. But you weren't bothered by your loneliness, not one bit. Because you had refused Yelena’s help, and you had been clear on wishing to be left alone since you were sixteen.
You perfectly knew how to fill it, that gap, that hole that was eating you away when the silence became too loud and the ghosts a little too ravaging.
You filled it to the brim with hunting the villains of the world, and tracing down the last pieces and remnants of the monsters that had forged you.
You lost sleep and appetite to them, hunger becoming a color only felt for blood and death to all that harmed you and the hundreds of girls victim to the spell and training.
Yelena would often give you a call, reminding you of glimpses of a normal life amidst the red room.
Soft touches, butterflies, christmas trees and blue hair dye.
Of giggles beneath the TV and singing birds on pine trees.
In your soft children's eyes, and in the way Nat used to braid your hair, there was no KGB, no training, no punching bags, no glocks, no screaming.
You could still taste it sometimes, or smell it in a bottle of shampoo you never dared to buy at the shop.
A life with just her, you, Nat, and the two people you once, in what felt like another life, called mom and dad.
So then, after trying to get a tear from your eye, an emotion, a reaction, anything to get you to miss her, she would slip in the latest project she was tackling, and a word or two about how great it would be for you to join her.
How you were too young to be left alone.
Or just how much Alexei missed you, and how he was too much of an emotional teddy bear to be hurt.
But every time, without missing a beat, you had the same answer.
One she didn’t understand, but one she respected, or at least tried in every way that she could.
So despite lying to the girl you called a sister, trying to convince her the blip had changed nothing, that just like her, you disappeared into dust and came back to a life unchanged, came back to a dusty cabin in the woods and the static sound of your broken radio and that you had healed from the news of Natasha’s death.
That despite not changing your habits and chipping your life force away, burning the light in your eyes with every missed hour of sleep, every skipped meal and every cut from a chase with a ghost. Despite all of that, in the end, you found an impossible comfort to Europe that you knew coming back to America would kill.
There was a familiarity, a mood, a vibration that made the world seem smaller, and the demons that still shadowed your steps less vicious.
Until you got a call from Nick Fury to join you in Venice, and your entire life tipped on itself.
He needed a shadow. Someone he could trust. Someone young, who could blend in with a crowd of high schoolers, keep an eye on them, and aid the Stark sponsored hero that was getting drowned in the aftermath of the blip and who Fury believed was not fully capable of handling such a threat as this.
Plus, the pay was fucking great. He made sure you couldn’t say no.
So before you could even blink, Nick Fury had enrolled you as an exchange student from Venice, who barely spoke Italian and had a questionable past of living in America, who would be joining Midtown High.
It was weird. You believed the cover to be less than full proof. But Nick Fury believed it was, so you followed the lead.
Your cover might have been weird but the teachers were even weirder, and the suspicions had died as quick as they came.
Little did you know you had just signed for your life to change forever, that you would be brought through a whirlwind without a warning, and things you never thought you would be able to feel again came rushing back.
Something in the way Mysterio toyed with your minds. Something in the way Peter had looked at you for just a second too long across the hall when you were stuck in your own tiny cell for female prisoners, empty with the exception of you when you landed in the Netherlands.
Something about the way his touch lingered a little too long, or in the way you’d catch the spark in his eyes. And finally, there had been something in the way he had hugged you. In the way his arms held you on that broken bridge in London.
Peter had witnessed death and betrayal, and somehow, amidst it all, he had deemed you good enough to be your friend, to smile at you and hold you, to kiss you days later under the London setting sun when he still thought you would stay in Europe.
He had managed to see something in you, managed to pull out the life and will to live that had been shattered to pieces, sullied and buried a long time ago by the Red Room.
So you followed him to Queens, making Peter and Yelena the two happiest people in the process.
And now, months later, after witnessing villains that came from another universe and disobeying a wizard (which you had strictly told Peter not to do, but he did it anyway). After helping the so-called villains from other universes and surviving an exploding building.
After losing May.
After watching her die in Peter’s arms, listening to his scream, his cries as he tried to reassure her, reassure himself that everything would be okay.
After everything that this day had thrown at you, you still, somehow, thought coming to America was the best decision you ever made.
Because you had him.
Because despite everything, you had each other, and whatever the world was ready to throw your way, you could handle it, together.
“You’re ok, right?” Peter’s voice came meek, small and broken over the night’s silence, and your heart shattered all over again.
“My suit is bullet proof,” you let your eyes open, ready to face your now broken world again.
The city sky line was still dim but clear, still pulsing with nothing but pain and sorrow as your eyes adjusted to its sight.
You breathed in, sharp over the pain in your ribs and turned your gaze to face him.
“I’m okay,” you reassured him, and maybe even yourself.
You scanned his features, searching his eyes for any sign of pain, any sign of distress despite the clear grief that settled in the air.
“You?”
He nodded instead of using words, squeezing your hand tighter in your own and you let your shoulders slacken just a little bit. He was alright.
You were alright.
You were both alive.
You shuffled closer, and Peter let you, the hand that was holding yours finding your waist with a slight wince. You observed, saw the way his shoulder flinched and the way his teeth gritted as his fingers dug your side to brace from the pain.
You let your fingertips travel up his face, brushing the dust and soot from a cut on his cheekbone. He sighed beneath your touch, eyes closing. You sighed with him, heart beats melting together in a calmer rhythm.
Your hand traveled down to his shoulder, and you brushed the gash there as gently as you could. You felt it. It was here, sharp and causing him a blinding pain every time he moved.
“Peter, you’ve got a bullet in your shoulder,” your voice came out a mix of worry and almost surprise, the type of surprise that could make him laugh under other circumstances.
“It doesn’t hurt, it’s on the surface anyways,” he shook his head, his fingers brushing your waist just above your utility belt.
He flinched a little when you inspected the wound further, he was a terrible actor.
“Bullshit. Peter, It’s a bullet,” you huffed, eyebrows pinching together.
“I’ll be fine,” he dipped his head just the slightest, resting it against your shoulder, and sighing with every piece of air he owned.
“I know you will,” you whispered, feeling him nod as your eyes closed and your hand found his hair, gently tugging as you tried to reassure him, soothe him, anything that could make the pain melt for just a second.
There was a heavy beat of silence. One poets could write about, not that you would let them. The world was suddenly filled with his warm breaths against your cheek and the way his pulse pounded against your own. His hand couldn’t leave your waist, gripping and anchoring him to reality as much as he could. You were both here, alive, and right now it was all that mattered.
“Peter, let me take out that bullet.”
“Okay,”
He sat up as best he could, leaning a bit crookedly, and clumsily pressed the spider at the center of his suit. You watched the top of the suit crumple and slip loosely over his shoulders and chest, stopping and pooling at his waist, he shivered when the breeze hit his sweat riddled torso. He caught your eyes as you stared at his now exposed chest, barely catching the blush creeping across your cheeks, but he made no note of it.
“You know,” you sighed through your nose and pulled up from your lingering stares, “with all that Stark tech available you could have made yourself a bulletproof suit.”
“Felt too bulky,” he muttered a bit sheepishly, “and I heal fast.”
“Fashion over safety… Right.”
“Well, my iron spider suit is bulletproof…”
You sighed, and tore your stare away from his eyes. His lips curved into the fainted ghost of a smirk, barely the curve of a lip and he watched you fumbled with the tools from your belt.
You pulled something out that made an overwhelming crumpling noise over his super hearing, it was a white, sterile packet he had never seen before and you ripped it open with your teeth, then followed a spray bottle he swore could not fit in there.
He hissed when the soaked sterile gauze pressed against his shoulder, even if your hands were the most delicate against him he shivered from the sting.
The gentleness of your fingers almost made him cry.
Then you pulled out something, a torture tool in between tweezers and a knife, and he would have almost been scared if it hadn’t been in your hands.
“This might hurt, but it won’t be bad,” you muttered, and dug in without warning. He flinched, his hand gripping your thigh as he braced for the pain.
His eyes closed and he leaned half of his weight against you, you flinched as the fast healing flesh tore against the bullet, and finally it was out, staring back at you with all its bloody and deadly glory.
“You wanna keep it?” You half joked, and he looked at you with eyes like a kicked puppy.
“No. God no.”
You nodded and tossed it. You could hear it, clink and fall somewhere in the distance of the Midtown High rooftop.
You grabbed a tissue from one of the infinite pockets of your suit and wiped your hands from both his and your blood.
“You should not be this good at removing bullets from a wound,” he shook his head, his voice cracking at his poor attempt to change the subject.
“You're right. I shouldn’t,” you sighed, and started unpacking a small wrap up bandage.
“But in the meantime, I’m here, skilled and saving your life,” you kissed his temple, and started gently covering his wound, wrapping it neatly.
“Thank you.”
He sighed, his chest shuddering as something bubbled up his lungs. You could feel it, and your own chest ached with it.
Your hand grabbed the edge of his suit’s shoulder and gently lifted it. You pressed the spider for him, and watched as the suit gently hugged his shape again. You noticed his suit that already auto generated, the wound on his shoulder seemed long gone over the smooth material.
When his eyes finally met yours again, your heart shattered into a million pieces.
He looked so lost. Eyes brimmed red and tears threatening to swallow him whole and drown him under his last breath. You tried to give him a faint smile, and your hand climbed up to brush hair out of his forehead, but the second your warm fingers touched him, he burst into tears, and you engulfed him in a hug.
You stayed like this for what felt like hours. The two of you, sitting on that rooftop, cradled by the city life below.
It was quiet.
Horribly dark.
Horribly hot.
Horribly heavy.
And the only thing grounding you to reality was Peter’s face resting in the crook on your neck, your hand rubbing soothing circles on his back as his shoulder violently shook.
The shoulder of your super suit was wet with his tears and you felt your own, hot and boiling over the curve of your cheek.
The sound of his cries, the hum of a passing car, and your heart beat ringing loud in your ears.
You had to breathe.
You would be ok.
Silent steps and quiet voices broke your rummaging. Your head lifted up, and your eyes softened on the faces of your friends.
Peter heard, his face lifted from your shoulder with a final sniffle, his nose red and eyes blinking the tears away. He sniffled again and rubbed the tears from his cheeks, refusing to make eye contact with his two friends.
“We um, we heard,” Ned’s voice broke the quiet, all low, tired and scared.
Peter gripped you a little tighter when he felt you move away from him, a small little whimper leaving his lips. You gripped his shoulder again, a way to show him you were there, but the tension in his shoulders did not ease under your palm.
“We um- we came because-”
“Wait,” you gazed at them, listening to the wind, but the look on their faces told you they knew. “we’re not alone, right?”
You might not have any superpowers but you were trained to feel. Trained to know when eyes were on you.
“Yeah. That’s what we're here for.” MJ pointed out and you raised an eyebrow. “Peter, um, there are people we would like you to meet.”
Peter’s eyes widened a little, and you felt him squeeze you tighter. You saw he was looking for something to reply, but then, out of the darkness, two other guys, stuck to the building’s tower, in the same way Peter would, slowly climbed down.
“Holy fuck,” you gasped as you realized who were standing in front of you. “You are all-”
“Spider-man,” the one that wasn’t in the suit finished your sentence.
