#bucky marvel

[skj-weebmam]

Another day, another mission…

[redemptive-truth]

Right Where You Left Me | Bucky Barnes

Part I

READ PART II HERE

Pairing: Thunderbolts!Bucky x Female!Detective

Summary: After accidentally slipping through a portal into an alternate Earth, she discovers that this world’s version of herself is dead—and that version of herself had an unexpected, mysterious bond with Bucky Barnes

Word Count: 14k

Warnings: angst; angst-heavy relationship conflict (verbal fighting, yelling, unresolved anger); panic; mentions of past death; slow-burnish; cursing; introspection; bit of an age gap; variants; mentions of different universes

Author’s Note: This was entirely inspired by Peter and Gamora's relationship in GoTG3...but Bucky is Peter and the main female character is Gamora. I loved the idea of Peter loving Gamora, losing her, and still having feelings for the other version of her who had never met him. This female character is not perfect by any means - she's young, impulsive, and indecisive. But that makes her all the more human.

This takes place after the events of the Thunderbolts...for creativity's sake, let's pretend like Sam and the team get along and everything involving interdimmensional travel is up for grabs. I was a bit loose with the rules of Marvel with this one.

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The crime scene had been routine—a drug deal gone wrong in the kind of alley where hope went to die. She'd been photographing evidence, documenting the scattered bullet casings and blood spatter, when reality decided to crack open like an egg.

The portal materialized without warning, a wound in the brick wall that bled golden light and hummed with impossible energy. It defied every law of physics she knew, every rational explanation her detective's mind tried to supply. But in a world where superheroes and mutants fought aliens and villains every other week, she'd developed a healthy respect for the inexplicable.

She should have called for backup. Should have cordoned off the area and waited for someone with more expertise and better equipment. Should have done a dozen things that might have saved her from what came next.

Instead, she'd stepped closer, drawn by a curiosity that had kept her alive this long and was about to be her downfall. The portal's edges rippled like water, casting shifting shadows that made her eyes water. She'd reached out—not to touch it, just to test the air around it, to see if she could feel whatever impossible force was tearing through dimensions.

The puddle was small. Insignificant. The kind of thing she'd normally step over without thinking. But positioned exactly where it was, at the precise edge of the portal's influence, it became the pivot point on which her entire world turned.

Her foot slipped. Physics took over. And suddenly she was falling forward, through liquid light and the space between heartbeats, through the golden throat of something that shouldn't exist.

The landing knocked the breath from her lungs and the sense from her head. When the world stopped spinning, she found herself sprawled on familiar concrete, staring up at the same brick walls, breathing the same stale alley air. But the portal was gone, sealed shut like it had never existed, leaving only the faintest afterimage burned into her retinas.

And somewhere in the distance, she heard the murmur of a city—familiar, but not the same. The cadence of traffic sounded off-key, like a song she knew played in the wrong tempo. The low thrum of voices carried different accents, different rhythms. Even the distant wail of a siren seemed to rise and fall in patterns her ears didn't recognize.

The wrongness revealed itself in layers, each one more unsettling than the last.

She discovered the first crack when she went to what should have been her station. At first glance, it looked identical—same brick facade weathered by decades of city grime, same cracked concrete steps where she'd sat during her lunch breaks, same scuffed double doors that stuck in humid weather. But the moment she walked inside, the air felt different. Heavier. Foreign.

The desk sergeant looked up with mild curiosity rather than the usual grunt of acknowledgment. Officer Martinez walked past without his customary nod. Detective Chen emerged from the break room with coffee and didn't so much as glance in her direction.

"Excuse me," she said, approaching the front desk with her badge already in hand. "I need to check in with Chief Barnett."

The sergeant—Henderson, his nameplate read, though she could have sworn his name was different yesterday—looked at her like she'd asked for directions to Mars.

"Ma'am, there's no Chief Barnett at this precinct. Never has been. You might be looking for the 12th? They got a Captain Barrett over there."

Her badge felt suddenly heavy in her palm. She held it up, the shield catching the fluorescent light. "I'm Detective—"

"Ma'am." Henderson's voice sharpened, and she saw his hand drift toward his radio. "I'm going to need you to step back from the desk."

That was when things went bad. Fast.

Within minutes, she was surrounded. Familiar faces wearing unfamiliar expressions of suspicion and confusion. She knew these people—had shared coffee with them, complained about paperwork, celebrated arrests. But they looked at her like she was a stranger wearing a stolen uniform.

"I work here," she insisted, even as they guided her toward the interrogation rooms. "Check my locker—it's number 47. Check my desk. I've been here for six years."

But when they checked, locker 47 belonged to someone else. The desk she thought of as hers was occupied by a detective she'd never seen before. And when they ran her prints—her own goddamn fingerprints—the room fell silent.

"That's impossible," she heard Chen whisper to Martinez. "These prints... they match a woman who died three years ago."

The words hit her like ice water. Died. Three years ago. The version of her that had lived in this world was dead, and now they were staring at her like she was either an imposter or a ghost.

They moved her to Interview Room 2—the one with the broken chair leg that she'd always avoided. The irony wasn't lost on her. Here she was, finally sitting in the damn chair, but as a suspect instead of a detective. She tested the chair before she sat down in it. The broken leg was stable. 

The one-way mirror reflected her pale face back at her, and she found herself staring at her own features as if seeing them for the first time. Same eyes, same scar on her chin from falling off her bike at age seven, same stubborn part of her hair that never stayed flat. But somehow, she looked like a stranger to herself.

Detectives came and went—Patterson, who'd taught her how to read blood spatter patterns; Rodriguez, who always brought donuts on Fridays; Williams, who'd been her partner for two years. Each one studied her with the same mixture of confusion and suspicion, as if her very existence was an insult to someone's memory.

She gave them everything—her name, badge number, social security, the names of every case she'd worked, every partner she'd had, every scar and story that made up her life. All of it true, and all of it sounding like elaborate fiction when filtered through their disbelief.

Hours passed. Or maybe days. Time felt fluid in that windowless room, marked only by the steady hum of fluorescent lights and the occasional rattle of the ancient air conditioner. She'd long since stopped pinching herself, accepting that whatever this was, it wasn't a dream.

When the door finally opened again, she expected another detective with the same tired questions and skeptical eyes. Instead, a stranger walked in.

He moved with the careful control of someone accustomed to being watched, though tension coiled in his shoulders like a spring wound too tight. Not a cop—his clothes were too casual, too lived-in. Civilian, but not ordinary. The way the desk sergeant had practically saluted when he'd walked past suggested someone with serious pull.

He was a handsome black man, probably mid-thirties, with intelligent eyes that seemed to catalog everything they saw. When he looked at her, those eyes went soft with something that might have been recognition, or hope, or grief. Maybe all three.

The silence stretched between them like a held breath. She watched him settle into the chair across from her with the careful movements of someone carrying invisible weight. His hands rested on the table, knuckles pale with tension, and she found herself studying the calluses on his palms—the kind that came from gripping something regularly. Reins, maybe. Or rope.

Finally, he spoke. His voice was steady but quiet, like he was afraid of the answer before he asked the question.

"Do you know who I am?"

The hope in his voice was so naked it made her chest tight. She wished she could give him what he was looking for, but honesty was all she had left.

"No," she said, then added more gently, "Should I?"

Something inside him crumbled. She saw it happen—the way his shoulders sagged, how his breath left him like he'd been punctured. The careful composure slipped, revealing grief so raw it made her want to look away. But he held her gaze, managing a smile that was equal parts bitter and fond.

"Maybe not this you," he murmured, and there was a world of loss in those four words. "Was worth a shot, though."

Her brows drew together, frustration sparking hot beneath the confusion. "What do you mean, 'this me'? Look, I don't know what kind of game this is, but I'm a detective. This is my station—or it's supposed to be. I don't know what happened, but one minute I was processing a crime scene and the next there was this... portal, or whatever the hell—"

"Portal?" He leaned forward so fast his chair creaked, urgency replacing the gentle sorrow in his voice. "What did it look like? Exactly where were you when it appeared? Did you feel anything before it opened—heat, electrical charges, any kind of distortion in the air?"

The rapid-fire questions made her head spin. "I don't know! It just... appeared. Like someone had torn a hole in reality and filled it with golden light. It was humming, vibrating the air around it." She shoved back from the table, the legs screeching against linoleum. "Look, I don't know who you are or why you're asking, but I've had enough mystery for one day. Just tell me what the hell is happening to me."

He studied her for a long moment, his jaw working like he was chewing on words too big to swallow. When he finally spoke, his voice was careful, measured—the tone of someone delivering news that would change everything.

"You're not wrong. About this not being your world."

Her heart stuttered. "What?"

"You came through some kind of dimensional rift. It happens—rarely, but it happens. Sometimes the barriers between realities get thin, and things slip through the cracks." He spoke gently, but each word felt like a small betrayal of everything she thought she knew about the universe. "You've crossed into a parallel dimension. A world that's similar to yours, but not the same."

She stared at him like he'd started speaking in tongues. "Parallel dimensions? Are you out of your mind? You expect me to believe I just... fell through a crack in reality like some kind of science fiction nightmare?"

"I know it sounds impossible." His voice remained calm, patient—the way you'd talk to someone standing on a ledge. "But I've seen enough impossible things to know they're usually just improbable. And..." His eyes softened as he looked at her again, really looked, like he was trying to memorize her face. "You're not the first version of you I've met."

The room seemed to tilt. "Excuse me?"

"There was another you. Here, in this world." He paused, choosing his words with surgical precision. "She was... important. To a lot of people. To me. She was a good friend."

Something in his tone—reverent, aching, carefully controlled—made her stomach clench with dread. She swallowed hard, her voice barely above a whisper.

"What happened to her?"

For the first time since he'd entered the room, he looked away. His hands flexed against the table, tendons standing out like bridge cables. When he spoke, his words were weighted with the kind of grief that never fully heals.

"She died. Three years ago."

The words hung in the air between them like smoke, acrid and choking. She felt the world shift beneath her feet, reality reshuffling itself into patterns she didn't recognize. The fluorescent lights seemed too bright suddenly, the air too thin.

"No." The word came out sharp, defensive. She shot to her feet so fast her chair crashed into the wall behind her. "No, that's not possible. I'm right here. Alive. Breathing. You don't just get to have another version of me conveniently die before I show up. That's—" She barked out a laugh that sounded more like a sob. "That's fucking insane."

He didn't flinch, didn't move, just watched her pace the small room like a caged animal. His patience only made her angrier.

"Do you hear yourself?" She spun to face him, fury and terror warring in her voice. "Parallel dimensions? Different versions of me? That's comic book bullshit. I'm a detective, not some interdimensional traveler. You think you can feed me this story and I'll just... what? Accept it? Stop asking questions?"

She slammed her palms against the table, leaning over him. "Tell me the truth!"

He met her gaze without wavering, and his voice when he spoke was rock-steady, implacable as gravity.

"I am telling you the truth."

The conviction in his tone cut through her spiraling panic like a blade. She froze, chest heaving, studying his face for any sign of deception. But there was none—just bone-deep certainty and a grief so profound it seemed to have worn grooves in his features.

He rose slowly, closing half the distance between them—close enough to be reassuring, far enough to avoid seeming threatening. "I know how insane this sounds. I know every instinct you have is screaming that it's impossible. But I've lived through stranger things than you being here right now. And I'm not trying to trick you or manipulate you. I'm trying to help."

Her jaw clenched, but some of the fight leaked out of her voice. "Why should I believe you?"

He was quiet for a moment, seeming to weigh his words. Then he extended his hand—palm up, an offering rather than a demand.

"Because my name is Sam Wilson. And if you let me, I'll do everything I can to make sure you're safe."

Something in the way he said it—solid as bedrock, unshakeable as sunrise—made her anger waver. There was a quality to his voice that spoke of promises kept, of responsibility accepted and never abandoned. Without meaning to, she found herself believing him.

Sam Wilson was clearly someone important. She could tell by the way the precinct transformed around him. Officers who'd treated her like a curiosity or a threat suddenly straightened when he appeared, their voices taking on the particular tone of respect reserved for true authority. They clapped him on the shoulder, thanked him for unspecified favors, and more than one called him "Cap" as they headed out for patrol.

She studied him as they walked to his car, noting the way he moved—confident but not cocky, alert without being paranoid. Military bearing, but softened by civilian life.

"Cap?" she asked as they settled into his black sedan. "As in Captain?"

Something flickered across his face—amusement mixed with something heavier, more complicated. His smile was warm but tinged with melancholy, like a song played in a minor key.

"Something like that."

She didn't press, but the title lodged itself in her mind like a splinter. Captain. The kind of rank that came with weight, with responsibility, with the expectation that you'd carry other people's burdens as easily as your own.

He drove her through the restless pulse of New York, and she found herself cataloging the differences. The skyline was almost identical, but not quite. A building here that shouldn't exist, a street there that curved the wrong way. Like someone had rebuilt her city from memory but gotten some of the details wrong.

They stopped at a building that seemed to hum with unseen energy, its architecture somehow more alive than the structures around it. The man waiting inside introduced himself as Doctor Stephen Strange, the air around him shimmered with barely contained power.

Strange studied her with eyes that had seen too much, and she caught the flicker of recognition—and pain—when his gaze met hers. Another person haunted by a ghost she was apparently wearing the face of.

His examination was thorough, involving incantations in languages that hurt her ears to hear and geometric patterns of light that made her vision water. When he finally delivered his verdict, his voice carried the weight of cosmic authority.

"She's a dimensional variant. Another world's version of the woman you knew." He paused, his expression growing grave. "And the portal that brought her here... it wasn't random. She was meant to come through. Meant to stay."

The words hit her like a physical blow. "What?" She lurched to her feet, the chair scraping against polished marble. "No. No, I don't belong here! This isn't my world, my life. That portal was an accident. You have to send me back."

Her voice cracked on the last word, desperation bleeding through the careful control she'd maintained all day. She turned to Sam, searching his face for any sign that Strange was wrong.

"You said the other me is dead. But I'm not her. I have my own life, my own world. People who'll miss me. You can't just... you can't just expect me to replace her."

Sam flinched like she'd struck him, his gaze dropping to the floor. The grief carved into his features was so raw it made her chest ache with sympathy she didn't understand.

Strange's voice softened, but his words remained uncompromising. "I'm sorry. If there were a way to send you home, I would. But the forces that brought you here... they don't make mistakes. You're here because this is where you belong now."

The pronouncement settled over her like a funeral shroud. She stood frozen for a moment, every muscle tense with the urge to run, to fight, to somehow undo the cosmic joke that had torn her from everything she knew. Instead, she forced herself to breathe, to think, to survive this moment the way she'd survived every other impossible thing life had thrown at her.

"I need air," she managed, and walked out before either of them could respond.

The hallway beyond was lined with artifacts that seemed to hum with their own inner light. Ancient books, crystalline sculptures, weapons that looked like they'd been forged in other dimensions. She leaned against the cool stone wall, closing her eyes and trying to find her center.

That's when she heard their voices drifting from the chamber she'd just left.

"Have you told Barnes yet?" Strange's voice carried clearly in the empty corridor.

A long pause, then Sam's reply, heavy with reluctance. "No. Not yet. I don't even know how to begin that conversation."

"She's here for a reason," Strange said firmly. "The universe doesn't place people where they don't belong. He'll need to know. The sooner the better."

Another silence, longer this time. When Sam spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper. "Yeah. I just don't know how either of them will handle it."

The conversation ended with the sound of chairs scraping, footsteps moving. She pushed herself off the wall and composed her face just as Sam emerged, looking like he was carrying the weight of the world.

"Let's get out of here," he said gently, as if she hadn't overheard every word.

His brownstone was a refuge from the chaos of the day. Warm wood floors, lived-in furniture, bookshelves that actually held books instead of just decoration. Photographs covered the mantle and side tables: Sam with various people she didn't recognize, group shots that looked like they'd been taken after successful missions, candid moments of laughter and camaraderie.

She sank into his couch, exhaustion finally catching up with her. The adrenaline that had carried her through the day was fading, leaving behind a bone-deep weariness that went beyond physical fatigue.

Sam settled across from her, elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped together. He studied her for a long moment before speaking.

"I guess it's time I told you who I am. My full story." He took a breath, as if steeling himself. "My name is Sam Wilson. I used to go by the Falcon—had a pair of mechanical wings, worked with the Avengers. But a few years back, Steve Rogers, Captain America, passed the shield to me. So now people call me Captain America."

The revelation should have shocked her, but somehow it fit. The deference at the station, the way Strange had treated him as an equal, the weight he seemed to carry…it all made sense now.

“Yeah, we…had a Steve Rogers in my world,” she murmured, playing with some loose threads between the cushions of the couch. “Had the Avengers. Mutants, too.” 

"The version of you that lived here," he continued, his voice growing softer, more careful, "she was part of that world too. An intelligence specialist who helped us track down dangerous people. She fought beside us, bled with us. She was..." He paused, searching for words. "She was family."

Family. The word hung in the air between them, loaded with implications she wasn't ready to unpack.

"And she's gone," she said quietly.

Sam's nod was barely perceptible. "Yeah. She's gone. But you're here now. And maybe—"

"There's no maybe." The words came out harder than she'd intended, sharp with frustration and fear. "There's no cosmic plan or grand design. Sometimes shit just happens. Bad luck, wrong place, wrong time. You're telling me that if you suddenly woke up in a different reality where everyone expected you to be someone else, someone dead, you'd just accept it? Roll over and play the part because strangers called it fate?"

Sam's expression hardened, but not with anger. With understanding that cut too deep. "You think I don't know what it's like to have everything you thought you knew about the world get turned upside down? To lose people who mattered more than your own life?" His voice carried the weight of hard-earned wisdom. "I've wanted to wake up in a different world more times than I can count. One where the people I've lost are still alive, where the choices I made turned out different."

He leaned forward, his gaze intense. "But that's not how it works. We don't get to pick the reality we land in. We just get to decide what we do once we're there. And right now, you're here. That's not negotiable. The only question is what you're going to do about it."

His words hit harder than she'd expected, cutting through her anger to something more vulnerable underneath. She wanted to argue, to maintain her fury because it felt safer than the alternative. Accepting that her old life was truly gone.

"So what, you expect me to just slide into her place? Live in some dead woman's shadow?"

"No one's asking you to replace her." Sam's voice was firm, brooking no argument. "You're not her, and we both know that. But like it or not, you're here now. And pretending this isn't happening won't change that fact."

"I don't belong here," she said, but the words felt hollow even as she spoke them.

"You don't belong there anymore either." The gentleness in his voice made it worse somehow. "If that portal brought you here, maybe it was because this is where you need to be. You can be angry about it—hell, you should be. But anger won't change reality."

The fight drained out of her slowly, like air from a punctured tire. She turned to stare out the front window at the head of the room at the unfamiliar-familiar city beyond, her reflection ghostlike in the glass.

Sam showed her to a small guest room with the same quiet efficiency he'd displayed all day. It was simple but comfortable. Clean sheets, soft pillows, and a window that looked out on a tree-lined street that could have been from her world.

"You can stay here as long as you need," he said, lingering in the doorway. "I'll work on getting you set up with your own place, new identity, whatever you need to build a life here."

The casual way he mentioned building a life here made the reality of the situation crash over her again. This wasn't temporary. This was her new existence, whether she wanted it or not.

"Sam?" Her voice was smaller than she'd intended. "Tell me about her. About... me. The one you knew."

Something in his expression shifted, pain flickering across his features like shadows cast by firelight. He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, his gaze growing distant.

"She was brilliant," he said finally. "Sharp as hell, with instincts that could cut through any lie or deception. She specialized in intelligence work—tracking people who didn't want to be found, uncovering connections others missed. She came into our world during the hunt for the Winter Soldier, back when he was still... when he was still HYDRA's weapon."

Her stomach clenched at the mention of the Winter Soldier. A killer in her world, same as in this one, it seemed. 

"She was the one who helped Steve and Natasha track him down," Sam continued, his voice growing softer. "And when we finally found him, when we realized he could be saved instead of just stopped... she fought for that. Fought to bring him back from the darkness."

The name hit her like a physical blow. Bucky Barnes. The Winter Soldier had a real name, a real identity. 

"After that, she stayed close to the team," Sam went on. "Worked missions with us, became part of the family. She was brave, loyal, never hesitated to put herself in harm's way if it meant protecting innocent people or helping the team." His voice caught slightly. "She saved my life more than once. Saved all our lives."

The grief in his voice was palpable, a living thing that filled the space between them. She found herself holding her breath, afraid to disturb the weight of his memories but wanting him to continue.

"She mattered," he said simply. And yet, the effect — the emotion on his face — was devastating. 

She didn't ask how the other version of her had died. The pain etched into every line of Sam's expression was answer enough. Some wounds were too fresh to probe, even three years later.

Sam moved to leave, but her voice stopped him at the threshold.

"The Winter Soldier... that's Bucky Barnes, isn't it?"

He went absolutely still, tension radiating from his frame like heat from a furnace.

"In my world," she continued, forcing the words past the tightness in her throat, "the Winter Soldier died. Steve Rogers killed him during the fall of SHIELD. It was the only way to stop him." She hesitated, then added, "I heard you and Strange talking earlier. About... him."

Sam turned slowly, his expression carefully controlled but his eyes dark with something that might have been worry or fear or protective instinct. Maybe all three.

"It's better if you don't know," he said quietly, each word chosen with surgical precision. "Not yet."

The finality in his voice left no room for argument. He left her alone with her questions and the growing certainty that whatever connection existed between her and this world's version of the Winter Soldier, it was going to change everything. 

Why did the other version of her help him? What was different about their relationship that Sam seemed so on edge about? 

She sat on the edge of the unfamiliar bed in the unfamiliar room, staring out at the unfamiliar-familiar street, and wondered if there was any such thing as fate. Or if the universe was just crueler than she'd ever imagined.

______________________________________________________________

Sam was a good man, that became clear within hours of meeting him. The kind of good that ran bone-deep, expressed not in grand gestures but in small consistencies. He checked in without hovering, offered help without condescension, and by the third day had somehow managed to secure her an apartment only six blocks from his brownstone. When she'd asked how he'd pulled that off so quickly in New York's brutal housing market, he'd just smiled and said he knew people.

She could see why they'd chosen him to carry the shield. His moral compass alone was seemingly larger than life.

Still, living under his roof felt like wearing clothes that didn't quite fit. Not because Sam was unkind. If anything, he was almost painfully considerate, the way people are when they're afraid of breaking something fragile. It was the weight of expectation that pressed against her shoulders, the careful way he sometimes caught himself mid-sentence, as if he'd been about to say something meant for someone else.

Someone who looked exactly like her. Someone who was dead.

She threw herself into research with the desperate focus of someone trying to solve her own existence. Hunched over her laptop at Sam's kitchen table, she devoured everything she could find about this world's history. The Avengers Initiative. The Chitauri invasion. The fall of SHIELD and rise of HYDRA. The Sokovia Accords. Thanos and the Blip—five years when half of all life simply ceased to exist, then returned as suddenly as it had vanished.

The broad strokes matched her world's timeline, but the details were all wrong. Like looking at a painting that had been copied by someone with imperfect memory. Close enough to be familiar, different enough to be deeply unsettling.

What disturbed her most wasn't the differences themselves, but the growing realization that she wore the face of a woman who had lived through these events, who had bled and fought and sacrificed alongside Earth's mightiest heroes. Every record she found mentioned her. Intelligence reports signed with her name, mission debriefs that referenced her tactical assessments, personnel files that listed her as an active associate of the Avengers until three years ago.

And then, abruptly, the records stopped.

Sam's grief haunted the spaces between them like smoke. She'd catch him looking at her sometimes, as if he could will her to be someone else through sheer force of longing. When their eyes met, he'd remember himself and look away, but not before she glimpsed the disappointment that flickered across his features. Brief as lightning, but it left its mark.

She understood. But that didn't make it hurt less.

The day after she'd arrived, Sam's friend Joaquin Torres had shown up with a laptop bag and an easy grin that transformed the heavy atmosphere in the brownstone. Young, maybe mid-twenties, with the kind of boyish charm that made people trust him instinctively. More importantly, he looked at her without the weight of recognition, treating her like a person instead of a ghost wearing familiar skin. He hadn’t known her, the other version of her, Sam had told her. Much to her silent relief — a fresh human interaction was much needed. 

"Alright," he'd said, settling at the kitchen table and cracking open his laptop. "Let's get you a new identity. Technically, the old you is listed as deceased, which creates some interesting paperwork challenges. But nothing we can't handle."

His fingers flew across the keyboard with practiced ease, pulling up forms and databases with the casual expertise of someone who'd done this before. She found herself relaxing for the first time since falling through that portal, grateful to be treated like herself…whoever that was now.

By the second day, curiosity got the better of her.

"Did she, the other me, have any family?" she asked, trying to keep her tone casual while her hands twisted together under the table. "Husband, boyfriend, anyone who might be looking for me?"

Joaquin glanced up from his screen, scratching his chin thoughtfully. "Let me check... okay, parents died when she was eleven—" Her stomach clenched. Her parents, the ones in her world, had died around the same time. "—grandparents took her in but passed right before the Blip. No siblings listed." He scrolled further, eyebrows rising. "But damn, look at these connections. Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, Sam obviously. Tony Stark had you on his personal payroll after the whole SHIELD thing went sideways in 2014. You ran in some serious circles."

He leaned back, scanning the screen with obvious admiration. "No marriage records, no registered domestic partnerships. But there's some interesting cross-references here..." His grin faltered slightly as his eyes focused on something specific. "Hey, did Sam mention Bucky? Because there's quite a bit of documentation linking you two, and I'm talking—"

He stopped. The words died in his throat as he looked up and saw her expression.

The confusion must have been written across her face in bold letters, because Joaquin's boyish enthusiasm dimmed like someone had turned down his brightness settings. His gaze flicked from her to the laptop screen and back again, and she watched understanding dawn in his eyes with all the subtlety of a freight train.

"Oh." The word came out small, uncertain. "Judging by the look on your face... Sam hasn't talked to you about this yet."

"No," she said carefully, studying his suddenly nervous posture. "He hasn't."

Joaquin shifted in his chair, angling the laptop away from her line of sight with movements that screamed guilt. His cheeks flushed pink, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost all its earlier confidence.

"Listen, if Sam hasn't brought it up, there's probably a good reason. Maybe it's... maybe it's not important right now."

The lie was so transparent she almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

"Something on that screen you don't want me to see, Joaquin?"

"No! Nothing like that," he said too quickly, his voice cracking on the denial. He clutched the laptop closer to his chest like a shield. "It's just... if Sam thinks you're not ready to hear about it yet, then maybe..."

He trailed off, realizing he was only making it worse. She let the silence stretch, watching him squirm, filing away every nervous tic and unconscious gesture. In her experience, people revealed more in their attempts to hide things than they ever did when trying to be honest.

Finally, she nodded slowly, as if accepting his non-explanation. "Okay."

But the damage was done. This was the third time Bucky Barnes's name had surfaced in conversation, always followed by the same pattern—hesitation, deflection, someone changing the subject or ending the conversation entirely. Whatever connection had existed between her dimensional twin and this man, it was significant enough that Sam couldn't even bring himself to discuss it.

The questions multiplied like cancer cells in her mind. Who had Bucky Barnes been to her? An ally? An enemy? Had they worked together, or had she been hunting him? Was he the reason she'd died, or was there something else she wasn’t seeing? 

The not-knowing was worse than any answer could be.

When Joaquin packed up his laptop that evening, giving her an awkward yet genuine goodbye, she remained at the kitchen table staring at the stack of files and printouts she'd accumulated. The apartment Sam had found for her was ready—bare bones, but functional. She could move out tomorrow, start building something that resembled a life.

But first, she had research to do.

She waited until she heard Sam's bedroom door close, then fired up her own laptop and got to work. If no one would tell her about Bucky Barnes, she'd find out for herself.

The internet was a treasure trove of declassified documents, survivor testimonies, and conspiracy theories that turned out to be disturbingly accurate. She cross-referenced names, dates, and events, building a timeline that slowly painted a picture of James Buchanan Barnes—friend of Steve Rogers, sergeant in the 107th Infantry, presumed dead in 1945.

Except he hadn't died. HYDRA had found him, broken him, turned him into their perfect weapon. The Winter Soldier had been a man stolen from time and stripped of his identity, programmed to kill without question or memory.

Her hands trembled as she read mission reports that detailed his crimes. Political assassinations spanning decades. Scientists who'd gotten too close to inconvenient truths. Whistleblowers who'd tried to expose corruption. All of them silenced by a ghost with a metal arm and empty eyes.

But the story didn't end there. In 2014, Steve Rogers had found his childhood friend buried beneath layers of programming and torture. Had fought to bring him back, to restore the man HYDRA had tried to erase. The process had taken years of therapy, rehabilitation, deprogramming. But it worked.

Bucky Barnes was no longer the Winter Soldier. He was an Avenger. A former Congressman. He had rewritten his own story.

Her breath caught as she found what she'd been looking for: a digital roster buried in the aftermath of the Sokovia Accords. James Buchanan Barnes – Status: Active. Affiliation: New Avengers Initiative.

He was alive. Reformed. Fighting for the good guys now, apparently.

The knowledge sat in her stomach like a stone. Here, according to Joaquin's nervous reaction, he'd been connected to her in some significant way.

The irony was so sharp it could cut. A brainwashed assassin from the 1940’s connected to her? Were they friends? Had he killed someone she knew? She had no idea. There were no records about his personal life online. 

She stared at the screen until her eyes burned, then made a decision that felt both inevitable and insane. If Sam wouldn't tell her the truth, if Joaquin was too loyal or too scared to fill in the gaps, then she'd get her answers from the source.

She was going to find Bucky Barnes.

______________________________________________________________

Her new apartment felt like a train station, a place to exist rather than live between stops. The walls were still institutional white, the floors bare hardwood that echoed with every step. Sam had helped her haul in the essentials: a mattress, a couch from a secondhand store, a small table that wobbled when she put weight on it.

It should have felt like freedom. Instead, it felt like exile.

She didn't linger. Twenty minutes after Sam left, promising to check in tomorrow, she was studying transit maps and plotting her route to the New Avengers facility. The original Stark Tower had been sold, but the team had established a new base of operations in the same building, now deemed as the Watchtower. 

The evening commute provided perfect cover. Thousands of people moving with purpose, no one paying attention to one more face in the crowd. She joined the stream of humanity flowing toward the subway, her heart rate steady despite the magnitude of what she was planning.

Breaking into a superhero stronghold probably wasn't her smartest decision, but she'd made a career out of risky choices. This felt like just another case to crack, another locked door that needed opening.

The Watchtower rose thirty stories into the Manhattan sky, its glass facade reflecting the dying light of sunset. Even from the sidewalk, she could see the security measures. Cameras at every angle, discrete guards positioned at key points, biometric scanners flanking the main entrance.

She approached with the confidence of someone who belonged, shoulders back, stride purposeful. Sometimes the best disguise was attitude.

"Ma'am." A security guard stepped into her path before she'd made it halfway to the door. Young, alert, with the kind of bearing that screamed military background. His partner moved to flank her, casual but deliberate. "I'll need to see some identification."

She reached for her wallet, movements slow and non-threatening. "I'm here to see James Barnes. He's expecting me."

That got their attention. Too much attention. She saw the micro-expressions that flashed between them: surprise, confusion. The lead guard's hand drifted toward the radio clipped to his vest.

"You'll need clearance for that, ma'am. And I don't see you on any authorized visitor lists."

Behind them, the building's main doors hissed shut with hydraulic finality. The message was clear — she wasn’t getting in.

She maintained her smile, friendly and understanding. "Of course. My mistake. I'll just call ahead next time."

She turned and walked away, feeling their eyes on her back until she disappeared into the evening crowd. 

An hour later, she was back.

The Tower looked different at night. Imposing, fortress-like, its upper floors glowing against the darkness. She'd spent the time walking the perimeter, mapping service entrances and delivery bays, timing guard rotations and identifying blind spots in the surveillance coverage.

The rear of the building faced a narrow alley used for deliveries and maintenance. Less glamorous than the front entrance, but infinitely more accessible. She positioned herself in the shadows between two dumpsters and waited.

Patience was a detective's best friend. After twenty minutes, a catering van rumbled into the alley, its headlights cutting through the gloom. She watched the driver show his credentials to the guard, saw the heavy security door roll up to reveal a loading dock beyond.

As the van backed up to the platform, she moved.

She slipped alongside the van as the driver climbed out, using it as cover while boxes and trays were unloaded. The guard's attention was focused on his clipboard, checking items off a list with mechanical precision.

When he turned to examine a particularly large crate, she made her move. Three quick steps took her to the door, another two got her inside. The loading bay was cavernous and dimly lit, filled with the hum of machinery and the distant echo of voices.

She pressed herself against a concrete pillar, heart hammering as footsteps approached. A maintenance worker in coveralls walked past, whistling tunelessly, his footsteps fading as he disappeared around a corner.

She was in.

The Tower's interior was a maze of corridors and security checkpoints, but she'd navigated worse. She found a service stairwell — no cameras, minimal foot traffic—and began to climb. By the fifteenth floor, her legs burned and her lungs worked like bellows, but she pressed on.

The residential levels had to be near the top. That's where she'd find him.

Twenty-eighth floor. Twenty-ninth. Thirtieth.

The final door was different from the others. Heavier, with a biometric scanner and keypad that spoke of serious security measures. This had to be it. The private residential area where the Avengers lived when they weren't saving the world.

She stood before the scanner, knowing she had no way past it, knowing this was where her amateur breaking-and-entering skills reached their limit. But she'd come too far to turn back now.

"Who are you?"

The voice came from behind her, low and accented and sharp as a blade.

She spun, instinct driving her hand toward a weapon she didn't carry, muscles coiling for a fight that might be her last.

A woman stood at the mouth of the stairwell. Small, compact, with platinum blonde hair that caught the corridor's LED lighting. But it was her eyes that made the breath stick in her throat. Dark, calculating. This wasn't building security. This was someone far more dangerous.

The woman moved with liquid grace, each step deliberate and controlled. She wore dark tactical clothing that seemed to absorb light, and something about her posture—coiled, ready, predatory—set off every alarm bell in her brain.

"I asked you a question," the woman said, stepping closer. "How did you get past security?"

Her mouth had gone desert-dry, but she forced her voice to remain steady. "I could ask you the same thing."

The woman's lips curved in what might charitably be called a smile. It didn't reach her eyes. "Cute. Very cute. But I live here. You, on the other hand, definitely do not." Another step closer. "So let's try this again. Who are you, and what are you doing on a restricted floor?"

The accent was unmistakably Russian now that she heard more of it. Sharp consonants softened by years of speaking English, but the underlying cadence still there. The woman's stance was that of a trained fighter. She was balanced on the balls of her feet, hands loose at her sides but ready to move in any direction. Everything about her screamed potential danger.

"Look," she said, raising her hands in a gesture of surrender, "I'm just trying to find someone. I don't want any trouble."

"Then you came to the wrong place." The woman tilted her head, studying her with a vague intensity. "You look familiar. Have we met?"

The question sent ice through her veins. Another person who might recognize her face, who knew the woman she'd replaced. But this one's recognition carried a different quality. Not grief or longing, but something sharper. More analytical.

She didn’t know her. The old her. Not directly, at least. 

"I don't think so," she said carefully.

The blonde's sharp eyes never left her face, cataloging every feature with unsettling precision. "Hmm. You remind me of someone. I cannot place it exactly, but you have a very familiar face." She paused, head tilting further. "Are you a reporter?"

The question was so unexpected she almost laughed. "Do I look like a reporter to you?"

"Yes," the woman answered with complete seriousness. "Actually, you do. You have excellent bone structure. Very photogenic. Strong jawline, well-shaped eyebrows. The kind of face they put on Channel 9 news, no?" She gestured vaguely at her features. "Really quite striking, actually. And we get reporters trying to sneak in here all the time. You would not believe the lengths they go to. But none have made it this far before, which makes you either very skilled or very stupid."

Her mouth opened and closed wordlessly. Was this woman seriously critiquing her facial symmetry in the middle of what felt like a life-or-death situation? "...Thank you? I think? But I'm not a reporter."

The blonde hummed thoughtfully, those dark eyes scanning her from head to toe and back again with predatory interest. "I believe you, strange woman. Somehow, I do. But that makes this worse, doesn't it? Because if you are not a reporter, then why break into a tower full of superhumans and trained killers? Seems very..." She paused, searching for the right word. "Stupid. Or very desperate."

The weight of the moment pressed down on her shoulders. She could lie—make up some story about being lost, about mistaking this for a different building. But something about this woman's piercing gaze told her lies would be spotted immediately and punished accordingly.

So she chose the truth. Raw, unfiltered, desperate truth.

"Because I'm not from this world." The words tumbled out faster than she could stop them. "I know how insane that sounds, but apparently I'm from a parallel dimension—almost identical to this one—and a week ago I fell through some kind of glowing portal that spat me out here in New York. Sam Wilson found me, helped me out, told me I can't go home."

She ran a hand through her hair, exhaustion and frustration bleeding into her voice. "But the version of me that lived here? She's dead. Has been for three years. And everyone keeps looking at me like I'm her ghost, keeps mentioning James Barnes like I should understand what he meant to her. So yeah, I broke in here to find him. To get some goddamn answers about who I was supposed to be."

The confession left her feeling hollow, stripped bare. She'd laid all her cards on the table for a complete stranger who could probably kill her seventeen different ways without breaking a sweat.

Not one of her brightest moments. But somehow, it had felt right. 

The woman stared at her for a long moment, expression unreadable. Then something shifted in her features. A flicker of recognition, quickly suppressed but not fast enough.

"What is your name?" she asked softly, and there was something almost gentle in her tone now.

She hesitated for just a beat before giving her real name. Not the fabricated identity Joaquin had helped create, but the name she'd been born with.

The effect was instantaneous. The woman's carefully neutral expression crumbled, revealing shock, disbelief, and something deeper. A profound sadness that seemed to age her years in seconds.

"Bozhe moy," she whispered, the Russian slipping out unbidden. Her shoulders sagged as if an invisible weight had settled on them. "Yes... I know your story. All of it. Oh….this will not be easy. But he needs to know you are here."

She stepped closer, extending her hand with careful deliberation. "My name is Yelena Belova. I am... an associate of Bucky's. A friend. I can take you to him now, if that is what you truly want."

Her throat constricted as she stared at the offered hand. Every instinct screamed warnings, but she'd come too far to turn back now. She reached out, gripping Yelena's fingers.

"It's nice to meet you," she said, her voice barely steady. "Did you... did you know her? The other me?"

Yelena's smile was hollow, haunted. "No. But I know of you. We all do." The words carried the weight of a funeral dirge. "Come. I will take you to him. You’re on the wrong floor."

The elevator ride felt endless, each floor they passed stretching the silence tighter between them. Yelena stood with her arms crossed, staring at her boots with the intensity of someone trying to solve the world's most complex equation. Her bottom lip was caught between her teeth, brow furrowed in deep concentration.

The quiet became unbearable.

"You know," she said, clearing her throat, "everyone who seems to know about this other version of me... you all look at me like I'm some kind of ghost."

That pulled Yelena's gaze up, one eyebrow arching with sharp precision. Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact. "That is because you are a ghost. You are supposed to be dead here. Did you forget that small detail?"

The bluntness hit harder than expected, making her chest tight. "No, I remember. But it feels like more than that. You don't just look at me like I don't belong. You look at me like you're afraid."

Yelena's exhale was long and weary, her shoulders dropping as if she'd been carrying an invisible burden. When she spoke again, her accent thickened with emotion. "We are not afraid of you. We are afraid of what your being here will do to the people we care about."

"What do you—"

"You will see soon enough." Yelena's tone brooked no argument, but her expression softened slightly. She reached out, resting a careful hand on her arm, the touch cautious. "Just... be gentle with him. Please. He has been through enough."

The plea left her speechless, questions multiplying like cancer cells in her mind. All she could manage was a stiff nod.

The elevator chimed softly, doors sliding open with a whisper of hydraulics.

She followed Yelena into what was clearly a common area, all gleaming surfaces and floor-to-ceiling windows that offered breathtaking views of Manhattan. The space was dotted with comfortable seating, state-of-the-art monitors, and a conference table that could seat a dozen people.

Four figures stood around that table, all wearing matching tactical uniforms with red "A" emblems on their chests. Their conversation died the moment they noticed the newcomers.

The tallest of them—a blonde man with the kind of square jaw that belonged on recruitment posters—straightened immediately. His blue eyes narrowed with suspicion as they fixed on her. "Yelena," he said, his voice carrying authority and wariness in equal measure. "Who the hell is this?"

Before Yelena could answer, the large bearded man beside him stepped forward with a booming laugh that filled the entire space. His presence was overwhelming. all warmth and barely contained energy, like a bear-sized golden retriever.

"Ah, look at this! A new face, and such a lovely one!" He spread his arms wide as if preparing to envelope her in a bear hug, his voice thick with Russian accent and unmistakable joy. "Finally, some beauty around here to balance out all these ugly faces. You are... how do Americans say... a sight for sore eyes, da?"

Heat flooded her cheeks. She stood frozen, caught between mortification and the strange urge to smile despite everything.

Yelena groaned audibly, dragging a hand down her face. "Dad, stop."

"What?" The older man looked genuinely confused, then winked at her with shameless charm. "I only speak truth. Your mother, if she were here, she would agree—this one has excellent genetics. Very fine bone structure."

"Stop talking, Alexei," Yelena snapped, her tone sharp enough to cut glass. She turned back to the group, exhaling through her nose like wrangling her father was a full-time occupation. "This is—" She glanced back, seeking silent permission, then said the name quietly, as if she knew what was about to happen.

The effect was immediate and devastating.

The brunette woman—young, maybe mid-twenties, with energy crackling faintly around her fingers—went completely still. The shaggy-haired man in civilian clothes muttered something under his breath and took an unconscious step backward. Even Yelena's father sobered, his jovial expression fading into something more complex.

But it was the blonde man's reaction that made her stomach plummet.

His entire demeanor shifted, professionalism giving way to something colder, more calculating. He stepped closer, hands settling on his hips as he studied her like she was evidence at a crime scene.

Recognition flickered across his features as he processed her name, cross-referencing it with files in his memory. His expression shifted into something caught between a smirk and a sneer—the look of someone who'd just solved an unpleasant puzzle.

"I know that name," he said, his voice taking on a mocking edge. "Wasn't that the name of Barnes' dead girlfriend?"

The revelation hit her like a sledgehammer to the chest.

Dead girlfriend.

The words ricocheted through her skull, each repetition more devastating than the last. Not partner. Not colleague. Not enemy. Girlfriend. The other version of her, the woman whose shadow she was apparently condemned to live in, had been dating James Buchanan Barnes.

The Winter Soldier.

With a known killer.

The irony was so vicious it threatened to tear her apart from the inside. In her world, she'd spent years hunting down monsters, bringing justice to families destroyed by violence. Here, apparently, she'd been sharing a bed with one of the worst monsters of all.

Her vision began to tunnel, darkness creeping in at the edges like spilled ink. Her lungs had forgotten how to function, each breath coming in short, desperate gasps that never seemed to bring enough oxygen. The panic attack was inevitable now—her body's revolt against information too massive, too impossible to process.

Heat flooded her face, a burning flush of shock and shame and something else she couldn't name. Her hands began to shake, trembling at her sides as if her entire nervous system was short-circuiting.

"Hey." Yelena's voice cut through the static filling her head, firm but gentle. Warm fingers wrapped around her arm, anchoring her to reality when everything else felt like it was spinning away. "Breathe with me. Just breathe. In and out."

She shot a murderous glare at Walker, her voice cracking with fury. "Excellent timing, you absolute moron. Really thoughtful approach there."

Walker raised his hands in mock surrender, but his expression remained coldly entertained, like he was watching a fascinating psychological experiment unfold. "What? I figured she already knew! Isn't that the whole reason she's here?"

Alexei, blissfully oblivious to the emotional carnage unfolding around him, chimed in with maddening cheerfulness. "Of course she is the girlfriend! Look at her—she is exact copy of girl in photographs on Winter Soldier's nightstand. Very beautiful, very tragic, like heroine from Dostoyevsky novel." He beamed at her with paternal pride that made her want to scream. "You loved him deeply, da? Was passionate romance? He was good lover?"

"Dad!" Yelena's voice cracked like a whip, her glare hot enough to melt steel. "You are making everything worse!"

But Alexei only shrugged, completely immune to his daughter's homicidal expression. "What? I only speak truth everyone is thinking. And besides, is much better to be remembered as someone's great love than to be forgotten completely, no? It is romantic tragedy, like in great Russian stories."

The words were meant to comfort, but they only drove the knife deeper. Great love. Romantic tragedy. She was standing in a room full of people who remembered a version of her that had been intimately, desperately connected to a man who represented everything she'd spent her life fighting against.

Her hands clenched into fists, nails biting crescents into her palms as she fought to stay upright. The walls seemed to press closer, the ceiling lower, the air thicker. Everyone's stares felt like physical weight pressing down on her shoulders until she thought her knees might buckle.

This was wrong. Fundamentally, cosmically wrong. She shouldn't be here, shouldn't be wearing this face, shouldn't be expected to carry the emotional baggage of a woman who'd made choices that defied everything she believed in.

But she was trapped. Caught between worlds, between identities, between a past that wasn't hers and a future that terrified her beyond reason.

"What the hell are you people talking about?" she whispered, her voice barely audible above the thundering of her own pulse. "Is this some kind of sick joke?"

The pity in their faces was worse than cruelty would have been. At least cruelty would have given her something to fight against. This careful sympathy, these cautious expressions—they made her feel like a wild animal everyone was afraid might bolt or attack without warning.

Everyone except Walker, who continued studying her with clinical detachment, and Alexei, who kept rambling about the beauty of doomed love.

"You need to slow down your breathing," Yelena urged, gripping her shoulders with steady hands and forcing eye contact. "Focus on my voice. Just breathe."

But the command fell flat. The air had turned to concrete in her lungs. The room spun around her like a carnival ride gone wrong, and she could feel herself fragmenting, splitting apart at invisible seams.

She tore herself free from Yelena's grip and stumbled backward, her body moving toward the elevator of its own accord. Her chest heaved with each stuttering breath, vision blurring as tears she refused to acknowledge burned behind her eyes.

"Listen to me," she managed to choke out, every word sharp and desperate. "I don't know what twisted game you think you're playing, but whoever you think I am, I can't be her. I won't be her. I'm my own person, and I'm not from this world, and I've never even met James Barnes—"

Walker's eyebrow arched with infuriating calm. "Well, sweetheart," he drawled, "you're about to."

Behind her, the elevator gave a soft mechanical hiss.

The doors slid open.

She turned, ready to throw herself into whatever escape the elevator offered, ready to run until her legs gave out or her heart exploded—

And froze.

James Barnes stood there.

To her, he should have been nothing more than a name in old files, a face in grainy photographs, a shadow from history books. But in the flesh, he was devastatingly, undeniably real. Taller than she'd expected, broader through the shoulders. Dark hair fell in waves past his collar, shot through with faint silver that caught the light. His beard was neatly trimmed, dusted with gray that spoke of years and battles and sleepless nights. And his eyes — pale blue like a winter sky, sharp and intelligent. And currently wide with shock.

But it wasn't his appearance that stole her breath and left her feeling like she'd been struck by lightning.

It was the way he looked at her.

He'd been stepping out of the elevator, probably heading to some routine meeting or training session, and he'd frozen mid-stride. His hand was still braced against the elevator frame, knuckles white with tension. His chest rose and fell in sharp, uneven breaths, like someone had just punched all the air out of his lungs.

Those ice-blue eyes locked onto her face with an intensity that felt like being dissected, like he was looking straight through time and death and impossibility to see something that shouldn't exist. The expression on his face — raw disbelief warring with desperate hope, grief colliding with wonder—made something twist violently in her chest.

To her, he was a stranger. A name from her nightmares made flesh.

To him, she must be resurrection walking.

Her name fell from his lips like a prayer, broken and reverent and so full of longing it made her want to run screaming. His voice cracked under the weight of that single word, and his entire body seemed to lean forward, drawn by invisible strings.

He moved toward her slowly, as if afraid she might vanish if he startled her. Every step was careful, measured, like he was approaching something that might disappear any second. She wished she could right now.

His expression was torn wide open, every emotion playing across his features without filter or pretense.

She couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. For one suspended moment, she was caught in the gravitational pull of his gaze, trapped in the way he looked at her like she was the answer to prayers he'd stopped believing would be answered.

His hand twitched at his side, fingers flexing like he wanted to reach for her, to touch her face and confirm she was real and not just another cruel dream.

And then reality crashed back down on her like a tidal wave.

Her chest seized with pure, primal panic. Ice flooded her veins, her body's fight-or-flight response kicking into overdrive. She stumbled backward, shaking her head violently, trying to break whatever invisible connection had snapped taut between them.

"Don't—" Her voice shattered on the word. "Don't come near me."

He stopped immediately, but the damage was done. The anguish that flooded his features was unbearable, like she'd physically struck him. His lips parted, words trembling on his tongue, confusion bleeding through the desperate hope.

"It's okay," he said softly, his voice gentle in a way that made her want to scream. "It's me. It's Bucky. I don't understand what happened, how you're here, but it's going to be okay—"

"I don't know you!" The words exploded out of her, sharp and laced with mounting hysteria. She wrapped her arms around herself like armor, her whole body shaking with the effort of holding herself together. "I don't know who the hell you think I am, but I'm not her!"

He said her name again, softer this time, like he was trying to gentle a frightened animal. The sound of it in his voice, so full of history and intimacy, made her feel like her skin was crawling.

Before she could respond, before she could scream or run or collapse entirely, Yelena stepped forward. She positioned herself subtly between them, one hand raised in a calming gesture that encompassed both of them.

"She's not who you think," Yelena said quietly, her voice cutting through the tension like a blade. Her gaze flicked between Bucky's devastated expression and her trembling form. "She's not the woman you knew, Bucky. She's a variant. From another world, another timeline. She's not... she's not her."

The words landed like physical blows. Bucky staggered backward, his face cycling through disbelief, understanding, and a grief so profound it seemed to hollow him out from the inside.

But his eyes never left her face. Never stopped drinking her in like she might disappear at any moment.

She wanted the floor to open up and swallow her whole. Wanted to wake up from this nightmare and find herself back in her own world, her own life, where none of this impossible situation existed.

"This is getting incredibly uncomfortable," the young man with shaggy hair muttered from somewhere behind the group.

And it was. The tension in the air was thick enough to choke on. The weight of everyone's stares, the pity and confusion and worry—it was suffocating. Worst of all was the way Bucky kept looking at her, like the sight of her was simultaneously healing and destroying him.

She hated it. Hated this twisted version of fate that had dropped her into someone else's tragedy. Hated being expected to carry someone else's love, someone else's loss. Hated the way this man, this killer she was supposed to believe had been redeemed, was looking at her like she held his heart in her hands.

She'd come here for answers, but the truth was worse than any mystery could have been.

So she did the only thing that made sense anymore.

She ran.

Her detective training had kept her in good shape, years of chasing suspects through back alleys and up fire escapes had given her speed and endurance. She used all of it now, lunging toward the elevator with desperate urgency.

Behind her, she heard voices calling out—Yelena shouting her name, someone cursing in Russian, the sound of movement as superhuman reflexes kicked into gear.

But she was already inside, her finger jabbing frantically at the door close button as if her life depended on it.

The last thing she saw before the doors slid shut was Bucky's face—devastated, lost, reaching a hand out toward her like he was trying to stop her from disappearing all over again.

The moment she was alone, the adrenaline that had been holding her together evaporated. Her knees buckled, and she slid down the elevator wall until she was sitting on the cold metal floor, her head buried in her hands.

And for the first time since that portal had ripped her away from everything she knew, she broke.

The sobs came in waves, ugly and harsh and desperate. They tore out of her chest like they'd been trapped there for days, weeks, a lifetime. She cried for the life she'd lost, for the world she'd never see again, for the impossible situation she'd been thrust into without her consent.

She cried for the woman who'd worn her face and made choices she couldn't understand.

She cried for the man upstairs who'd looked at her like she was his whole world coming back from the dead.

Most of all, she cried because somewhere deep down, in a place she didn't want to acknowledge, she'd felt something when their eyes met. Something that terrified her more than any truth she'd uncovered.

Recognition.

Not of him, but of the way he'd looked at her. Like she was home.

And she had no idea what that meant, or what she was supposed to do with the guilt that had made a home in her heart. 

______________________________________________________________

Sam showed up at her apartment a few hours later, and for the first time since she'd met him, he was furious.

"What the hell were you thinking?" The door had barely clicked shut before his voice cracked across the room like a whip, sharp enough to make her spine straighten reflexively. His jaw was clenched so tight she could see the muscle jumping beneath his skin, his shoulders squared and rigid like he'd been holding onto that rage through the entire drive over. She didn’t doubt it. "Sneaking into the Watchtower like that? I told you—I told you—to keep a low profile."

"Oh, so now this is all my fault?" The words launched out of her before she could stop them, her finger jabbing toward his chest like a weapon. Heat flooded her veins, her pulse already wild and erratic, her voice shaking with something deeper than just rage. Desperation, maybe, or the kind of fear that could only be fought with fury. "You expect me to sit here, smile, and nod at every half-assed, vague non-answer you people throw at me? Just twiddle my damn thumbs in a world where the other me is dead?" Her voice cracked on the last word, raw and jagged. "I'm a detective, Sam, not some helpless civilian you can placate with scraps."

For a moment, Sam blinked like she'd blindsided him with a truth he hadn't bothered to consider. The fire in his eyes flickered, uncertainty creeping in around the edges. "Okay. I didn't…" He exhaled slowly, his anger deflating slightly as understanding dawned. "I didn't think about it like that. But when you put it that way, yeah, it makes sense, but—"

"Oh, for God's sake." She groaned, both hands flying to her hair, fingers tangling in the strands and tugging until her scalp burned with the sharp bite of pain. It grounded her, kept her from flying apart completely. Her chest was heaving now, words tearing out faster than she could filter them, like a dam had burst. "Were you seriously not going to tell me that your version of me, that she…was with the Winter Soldier?"

The silence that followed was deafening. Sam's gaze locked on hers, heavy and unblinking, his expression shifting into something guarded and final.

"No," he said finally, the word flat and unyielding as stone. "I wasn't planning on it."

Her stomach plummeted, a cold wash of betrayal flooding through her. Her throat constricted. "What the fuck, Sam? Why wouldn't you tell me that?"

He threw his hands up in exasperation, the sound of his sigh filling the cramped space between them like a punctured tire. "Why would I? What possible good would that do you?" His voice climbed, defensive and sharp. "You never knew him in your world. All it would do is create exactly what's happening now. Chaos, confusion. Pain for everyone involved."

She felt her mouth fall open, the words catching like glass shards on her tongue, but he barreled forward before she could speak.

"And how would it help him?" His voice cracked this time, a raw edge breaking through the frustration like a fault line splitting open. His hands fell back to his sides, limp and defeated, like the weight of everything had finally dragged him down. "It would just rip him apart all over again. You don't understand…he never recovered from losing her. From losing you." Sam shook his head, swallowing hard, his Adam's apple bobbing with the effort. "And now? Seeing your face again, hearing your voice, watching you move like her but not being her…" His voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "I can't even imagine what that did to him."

Her breath caught, sharp and ragged, like she'd just taken a sucker punch to the throat. Her anger stuttered and died for one disorienting second, replaced by something she couldn't name. Guilt? Sympathy? The strange, hollow ache of mourning someone she'd never been?

Her voice dropped, barely more than a whisper, fragile as spun glass. "Was he the one who called you? Told you I came to the Tower?"

Sam looked at her then, and there was no anger left in his face. Just a deep tiredness and something that looked disturbingly like pity.

"Of course it was him," he said softly, each word deliberate and weighted. "He's my best friend."

He let that hang in the air between them, heavy and damning, like a confession.

"And I know you didn't know," Sam added, his voice quieter still, almost gentle. "But I was just trying to protect him. I've watched him put himself back together piece by piece, and I couldn't…I won't let him fall apart again."

The fight drained out of her like water through a sieve. All the yelling, the accusations, the righteous fury, it all seemed suddenly hollow and pointless as Sam's words echoed inside her skull like a death knell. She collapsed onto the couch, her knees giving out beneath her, elbows braced on her thighs, hands pressing hard against her forehead as if she could physically hold the spiraling pieces of herself together.

The silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating.

"Okay," she finally whispered, the word trembling out of her like a prayer or a surrender. "Fine. You didn't tell me before. But you can tell me now." She lifted her eyes to Sam, and the weight of the question sitting heavy in her chest felt like it might crush her ribs. "What happened to her? The… me from here. How did she die?"

Sam froze, his mouth opening like he was going to speak, but no sound came out. His gaze flickered away from hers, darting toward the window, the floor, anywhere but her face. Like the answer was a wound he couldn't bring himself to reopen, a scab he refused to pick.

The silence stretched taut and unbearable, elastic and ready to snap, until a low voice cut through the tension like a blade.

"She died right after the fight against Thanos."

Her head snapped toward the door so fast her neck protested.

Bucky stood there, framed in the dim amber light from the hallway, his broad shoulders rigid as steel beams, his vibranium hand clenched around the doorframe with enough force that she could hear the wood creaking under the pressure. He looked like he was using it as an anchor, the only thing keeping him upright and steady. His eyes were locked on her, storm-blue and unflinching. So intense it felt like he was trying to memorize every detail of her face, as though looking away would destroy him all over again.

"Bucky—" Sam shot to his feet, tension coiling through his frame like a spring wound too tight. "I told you to wait in the car—"

Bucky didn't look at Sam. Didn't even acknowledge he'd spoken at all.

His gaze remained fixed on her, unblinking, burning through her like he could pin her to the floor with nothing but the weight of his stare. His voice, when it finally came, was steady but saturated with grief so thick and suffocating it seemed to bend the very air around them. He was still looking at her like she was a ghost made flesh, a cruel trick of light and shadow.

He stepped further into the apartment—one deliberate step, no more—like crossing that invisible threshold would mean too much, would shatter some fragile equilibrium he'd spent years building. Even this much proximity felt dangerous, charged with electricity that made her skin prickle. His eyes were sharp and hard as cut glass, but she could see the faint tremor of a storm barely restrained beneath the surface.

"It happened after we all came back. From the Blip. Fifteen days later, to be exact. Some nutjob — mad about the Blip and trying to take it out on the Avengers — broke into her apartment and…killed her. But you don't need to know the details," he said finally, his voice clipped and final. His eyes were damn near black. Hollowed out with grief.

The weight of his words hit her chest like a stone dropped from a great height. She stared back at him, her own words tangled in her throat like barbed wire. Sam shifted awkwardly between them, his expression tight and pale, like he was watching history about to repeat itself in the worst possible way. Maybe he was.

Her jaw clenched, forcing her voice out through the sudden tightness in her throat. "So now you get to decide for me?" The quiet venom in her tone surprised even her, cutting and precise. "You don't get to do that. Just because you knew me in another life doesn't give you the right to—"

"Stop." His voice cracked through hers like a whip, cold and brutal and absolutely final. It froze her mid-sentence, the words dying on her tongue. "I didn't know you. You're not her. You're just a woman wearing her face, carrying her voice, moving through the world like some cosmic joke." Each word was delivered like a physical blow, precise and merciless. "So no, you don't get the right to know how she died. You don't get to carry her memories or her pain or her love. All you should be doing is staying the hell away from anything that has to do with her."

Her stomach dropped to her feet, a cold wave of shock and hurt washing over her. She wasn't sure why his words sliced so deep—this man was a stranger, wasn't he? But the raw, bleeding wounds in his voice told her otherwise. Every syllable sounded like it cost him blood to speak.

Her chest burned with indignation and something sharper. Rejection, maybe, or the sting of being reduced to nothing more than a cruel facsimile. "I don't want any part of this world, Barnes," she shot back, watching him flinch—that subtle, involuntary recoil—when his last name hit the air like a curse. "But I'm not wearing anyone's face. This is me. My identity. My body. My life." Her voice rose, shaking with emotion she couldn't contain. "So I'm sorry your girlfriend died, but it's not fair for you to tell me I don't have the right to know what happened when I'm the one who has to live with everyone looking at me like I'm her ghost—"

"Shut up."

The words were a snarl, torn from his throat with a fury so raw and primal it made even Sam take a step back. His voice cracked like thunder, filling every corner of the small room. "Don't fucking say you're sorry. You have no idea who she was…what she meant, what she gave, what she sacrificed. You have no right to even speak her name, let alone wear her face and pretend you understand what any of us lost when she died."

Her chest heaved as white-hot anger surged through her veins like molten metal. "Why are you being such a complete jackass?" she snapped, her voice rising to match his, all pretense of composure abandoned. "You can't take this out on me! This isn't my fault! I didn't ask to be here, I didn't know what I was walking into, I didn't choose to look like her!" The words poured out of her in a torrent, years of frustration and confusion and fear crystallizing into pure rage. "You think I wanted to land in a world where I find out I was apparently dating a mass murderer? In my world, you're a war criminal! A terrorist!"

Something fundamental broke in him then. She could see it happen, the exact moment his carefully constructed composure shattered like glass.

Before she could even draw her next breath, he was there. Impossibly fast, covering the distance between them in a heartbeat. His face was just inches from hers, close enough that she could see the flecks of silver in his blue eyes, could feel the heat radiating off his skin. The air between them vibrated with the force of his fury, electric and dangerous. His eyes had gone nearly black, bottomless and wild, and when he spoke, his voice was molten steel poured over broken glass.

"You need to stop talking. Right now."

But her heart was hammering against her ribs like a caged bird, her throat raw with fury and fear and something else she couldn't name, and she couldn't stop. The words kept coming, sharp and cutting and designed to hurt. "What, does the Winter Soldier not like being reminded of the blood on his hands?" she spat, each word hitting its mark with surgical precision. "You think you get to stand there and act like I'm the monster when it was you? You killed for decades, Barnes. Innocent people. Children, probably. And now you want to be the judge of who deserves answers? That's rich."

His jaw tightened, a muscle jumping beneath the skin, his metal hand curling into a fist at his side with a soft mechanical whir.

"You ruined lives," she pressed on relentlessly, her voice shaking with anger and hurt and the desperate need to make him feel even a fraction of the pain he'd inflicted on her. She didn’t know why. She felt horrible doing it, knew it would solve nothing but create more pain. But she was so mad. So frustrated that everyone was treating her like a scar that hadn’t gone away. Couldn’t they see how alone she felt like this? "Entire families. Hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent people who never even knew your name." 

She laughed, but it was sharp and bitter, more like a sob than anything resembling humor. "But I'm the problem here? Because I look like some woman you couldn't save? Because I'm a reminder that you failed to protect the one thing that mattered to you?"

"Stop." The word broke from him like something vital tearing, guttural and desperate, but she was too far gone to hear it.

"—at least I never became the boogeyman little kids had nightmares about. At least I never let myself become a weapon pointed at the innocent. You're a murderer, Barnes. A murderer trying to play saint, and you have the audacity to act like—"

"Stop it, babe —"

The word slipped out before he could catch it, automatic and devastating. His face changed instantly—shock and raw, bleeding pain flickering across his features like he'd just ripped open a wound that had barely begun to heal. His lips pressed together hard, his eyes wide with something that looked like horror at his own slip, but it was too late. The word was hanging in the air between them, heavy and intimate and absolutely forbidden.

Her stomach lurched violently. The sound of it hit her like a physical blow. Unfamiliar to her but weighted with an intimacy she didn't share, couldn't claim, had no right to. It was a glimpse into someone else's love story, someone else's heart, and she was nothing but an unwelcome intruder. She stepped back sharply, stumbling slightly, as if the word had burned her.

"Don't," she whispered, her voice cracking. "Don't call me that. I'm not her. I'm not—" But she couldn't finish, couldn't voice what they both knew: that she was a pale imitation, a cosmic mistake like he had said. A walking reminder of everything he'd lost.

Sam was there in a flash, planting a firm hand against Bucky's chest, shoving him back a step before things could escalate further. "That's enough," Sam barked, his voice sharp with authority, his eyes darting between them like he was trying to defuse a bomb. "Both of you. Stop this right now."

Bucky froze, his chest heaving with ragged breaths, but his eyes never left her face. He looked utterly shattered, like he wanted to reach for her. Or maybe like he wanted to run as far away as possible. She couldn't tell which, and that uncertainty made everything worse.

Sam's hand stayed firm against Bucky's chest, even as the soldier's breathing began to even out into something resembling normal. His gaze flicked to her — still standing there rigid and trembling, staring at Bucky like she didn't even know what she was looking at anymore, like he was some dangerous animal that might strike at any moment.

Sam made the executive decision first. "We're leaving," he said flatly, not taking his eyes off Bucky. He gave him a sharp nudge toward the door, and Bucky went without protest, his shoulders tense as steel cables, his jaw locked like stone. He moved like a man in a trance, hollow and mechanical.

Before following, Sam turned back to her one last time. His expression softened fractionally, regret shadowing his dark eyes like storm clouds. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, and she could hear that he meant it. Sorry for bringing Bucky here, sorry for the pain they'd both inflicted, sorry that any of this had to happen at all.

She didn't answer. Couldn't. Her throat was too tight, her chest too full of emotions she didn't have names for. She just stood there, arms wrapped around herself like armor, eyes burning holes in the floor as silence pressed in from all sides.

Sam lingered for a heartbeat longer, waiting for something, anything, from her. Some sign that she was okay, that they could salvage this situation, that the damage wasn't irreparable. But when nothing came, when she remained frozen in her protective shell, he nodded once—heavy and resigned and infinitely tired—and followed Bucky out.

She watched them go through the blur of unshed tears. The door closed behind them with a soft click that echoed louder than it had any right to, final and absolute. Bucky never looked back.

The apartment was suddenly too big and too empty, the silence pressing against her eardrums like deep water. And all she could hear was that single word still echoing in her head carrying a weight that wasn't hers to bear, a love that would never belong to her, and the devastating knowledge that she was nothing more than a cruel reminder of everything this world had lost.

______________________________________________________________

READ PART II HERE

[marvelstoriesepic]

Scatter My Heart (||)

Pairing: Mob Boss!Bucky x Reader

Summary: As it turns out, you can’t outrun a monster in his own home. You can, however, learn to question whether he was ever a monster at all.

Word Count: 17.7k

Warnings: real big emotions and confrontations; secrecy in a relationship; lots of panic/anxiety/fear/insecurities; weapons (guns, knife); minor injury (cut); references to criminal activity and violence; Bucky is possessive and protective and in love; emotional manipulation (perceived/debated)

Author’s Note: Here we are my lovelies, the second part to His Name Was Never Just Bucky. Honestly, I’m so relieved it’s finally done and I can return to other projects. This took me so incredibly long, but it’s rewarding to have it completed and I’m so proud I didn’t end up abandoning it like so many other things before. I truly hope you enjoy where I took the story ♡

Masterlist | part one

This was probably the worst decision you have ever made.

But, hell, now you officially jumped without a parachute, the ledge is gone, the air is passing by quickly, and your only hope is that you’ll somehow learn how to fly on the way down and you’ll be able to land on your feet.

The hallway outside has lost its symmetry, as you have lost your sanity, and now nothing seems to make sense anymore. Everything seems longer and crueler, your panic stretching the hallways into a long, suffocating throat. Each of your hectic footsteps makes you feel too exposed in this big mansion, they seem to echo your exact coordinates throughout the floors. Every hallway hears you, the walls themselves are turning their heads.

You take the first turn on instinct, then another, and another, trying to remember the route, trying to retrace the thread that brought you here, but your terror and all that bottled-up panic smashes sequence, steals direction, leaves you with nothing but speed because you know that if you stop, you’re done.

Your feel your heart everywhere. In your throat, in your ears, behind your eyes, beating against your teeth.

You blow past a side table where a cluster of pale lilies sits, blooming so aggressively, looking so wrong and even ugly in the corner of your eye, you have to take another turn.

You’re no longer thinking, you’re just running.

Your chest is a hollow chamber and all you hear is your own pants when you pass a maid who startles and calls something you don’t catch. You pass a window tall as a church promise and for one insane second consider throwing yourself through it. 

Somewhere behind you, from the office, you hear a loud crash. His voice follows. His voice. It sounds so much more blood-curdling now. 

He’s calling your name. Loud and baffled and then sharper. He doesn’t sound angry yet, but definitely alarmed in a way that makes every warning bell inside you turn rabid. Because there is something uniquely petrifying about hearing alarm in the voice of a man like him. It means you have disrupted the script. It means he does not understand. It means he is coming.

You run harder, every nerve in your body overflowing with adrenaline.

But, as expected, the house doesn’t simply spit you out. Corridors feed into corridors, archways into alcoves, burnished halls into rooms you have never seen, and every choice you make seems to slide you deeper into the belly of the place instead of toward freedom. 

With a ragged and desperate breath, you shove through one swinging door expecting another passage, and stumble instead into a kitchen vast enough to feed a wedding. There is all this gleaming steel and those butcher-block islands and hanging copper, bright under the lights in a way that feels grotesque after the dim severity of the office. 

It is wrong, all wrong, too open and yet somehow still a trap, because there is no front hall here, no visible exit, only counters and cabinets and startled staff, and you realize with a sick plunge of your stomach, that you have run yourself into a dead end dressed as luxury. 

This is bad, this is so bad. 

You stop abruptly, spinning around helplessly. The breath tears in and out of you like it is trying to escape without the rest of your body. The halls behind you are full of pounding footsteps, and you know it’s just one single set, but you also know it’s him.

He’s advancing and you can’t keep escaping.

A woman near the far counter goes still with a mixing bowl in her hands. Another man freezes by the sink with his hands in water. No one speaks. No one moves. The whole room seems to hold itself in suspension around your panic, everyone watching without watching, and then from somewhere behind you in the corridor comes Bucky’s voice sounds again, practically yelling your name—no confusion left now, only alertness, apprehension; and it punches you in the gut. It rings through you, through the kitchen, through the bright metal and tile and silence, and you know it has all been for nothing. 

But before there is anything you can do, before the ground can open a portal for you to fall through, Bucky appears in the kitchen doorway, looking like an avalanche with a name. A big name. A dangerous name. A name that will be the end of you. 

He doesn’t look raging in the obvious way, but he’s lost a bit of control. And for the man that he is, you don’t know how to survive it. And this intensity with which he came thundering after you is so extremely frightening because it looks expensive on him, tailored to fit, like one of his suits, like one of his watches, like all the impeccable and dangerous things he wears so naturally you once mistook them for elegance instead of that blaring warning sign they actually are. 

Why just have you been so stupid, my god.

He’s totally got you wrapped around his finger—and dick, as embarrassing and daunting as it is—or you would have maybe been able to open your eyes for a second, you idiot. 

But now they are open, wide, wide open, and you see him. You see him as the man he is. But maybe it’s a little too late now. 

He stops the moment he sees you pressed half-backward against the dark island, sees the way your hands have come up slightly as if your body has decided on defense without consulting you, sees the wet shine gathering in your eyes, the terror you are no longer managing to powder over, and something happens to his face that is so brief and so devastating, but all you can do is stare at him so you see that clean strike of realization. 

He doesn’t look confused anymore, and it makes him even more menacing.

He knows. He knows that you know. And he probably knows what he’s going to do to you now but you don’t know if you want to know that.

The air seems to cinch around you, seems to wrap itself around your throat, and squeezes. You can’t breathe. You don’t try to.

Bucky—James, your mind insists now with a sick recoil, James Buchanan Barnes, James Buchanan Barnes, biggest crime boss in the city—does not look away from you when he tilts his face to the staff. That, more than anything, makes your blood run strange. His attention stays fixed on you with a steadiness so absolute it feels like a physical thing, a hand at the back of your neck, while his voice turns toward everyone else in the room and comes out low and unquestionable. “Everyone out.” 

His command is dropped into the kitchen and nobody argues. The immediate obedience of his people makes you visibly shudder. 

A woman near the stove sets down a towel with trembling fingers. The man by the sink lowers his eyes and moves. Another staff member glances at you once with a quick look that seems almost guilty, almost pitying, and you feel the pulse of it pounding all around you, everywhere inside you. 

Nobody looks at you too long, nobody does anything besides leaving the fucking room. They won’t meet your fear and they won’t step between it and the source. Nobody here belongs to themselves enough to choose you over him. But it’s clear that they don’t. They’re his people for a reason. Nobody here will be on your side, whatever happens. 

A door swings. The kitchen empties in a matter of seconds, everyone slipping out with the furtive speed of people evacuating a room where something dangerous has just unsheathed itself. They leave with the scene in their eyes. They leave you with him. And the silence after the last one goes is so sudden it roars.

You take another step back and only feel the unhelpfully solid press of marble against your spine. There is nowhere else to go unless you want to climb onto the counter like a cornered animal, and for one hysterical beat of a second, the idea does not even seem ridiculous. 

You keep your eyes on him because looking away feels somehow more chilling, but your gaze is frantic within that line of sight, darting to the side entrance, to the swinging service door, to the corridor beyond him, to windows that suddenly seem decorative rather than useful, to every possible seam in the room where escape might be hiding in miniature.

There is none. The whole kitchen gleams at you with pitiless order that’s just full of steel and stone and copper, knives in their block and pots all around. 

He notices you looking, but you can’t care; all you have to care about is the distance between you and him, the distance between you and anything that might become escape if panic suddenly grew wings. 

Could you run past him? Maybe, if he were anyone else. Maybe, if this were some ordinary man with ordinary reflexes and an ordinary body and an ordinary life. 

But he is none of those things. You’re in this damn situation because he’s none of those things. 

He fills the doorway without even trying. He stands there in the collectedness of his dark clothes and encroaching presence, looking at you as if he can hear your thoughts tripping over each other and your fear has turned you transparent. 

His shadow has finally caught up to his skin and you now realize how dark it is.

Even if you got around him, where would you go? The front hall might as well be on another continent. Every corridor in this house has already left you stranded. There is no map in your mind now, only panic. No way out.

The knowledge gathers in your chest until it hurts. Behind your eyes, heat stings. Your throat tightens around a lump and only something choked leaves your lips. 

And Bucky sees all of it. You keep trying to shrink back from him because his very outline has now become a threat, and it doesn’t make your situation better, but he already knows, so you don’t have to pretend anymore. 

And his face alters. It’s as if the floor has given way under him. As if he had stepped expecting hard tiles and found air.

He does not advance. That should help. It does not. He stays where he is, one hand dropping slowly from the doorframe to his side, as if he understands that any sudden movement from him might send you straight through the nearest pane of glass. 

There is a fervor to him now that feels different from the one you knew in bed, at dinner, in the soft-lit luxury of his attention. It has made you feel protected, loved, worshipped. 

But there is no feeling of that anymore, none of that, because now it’s stripped of adornment, revealed as what it perhaps always was beneath all that heat and gentleness. It’s focus. Pure and frightening focus. 

His eyes are on you in that unwavering, devastating way of his, but the expression in them is nothing easy. There is something dark in there, something grim and braced, something that knows a door has just slammed shut and is already calculating what can still be salvaged from the wreckage. 

His mouth is set. His jaw is hard enough to cast shadows. He looks, absurdly, heartbreakingly, like a man who has been struck and is refusing to touch the bruise. But he stands, and he’s still so tall, much taller than you thought he could become, and he is not the man you thought you knew. 

He stands there with his hands visible, shoulders squared but not aggressive, and the intensity in him is bridled.

His stare does not feel like a threat in the crude sense, but it’s so full of attention, too much attention, because total attention from a man like him is its own species of fear. 

“Sweetheart.”

His voice has changed. It is calm but only in pretense. It is soft, technically, but not the way it was before. Before, his softness had warmth in it, a hand held out in the dark. 

But this is lower. Straighter. It has gone cool around the edges. It’s not vicious or unkind in any sense, but your body clocks it instantly. It’s almost formal in its restraint, as though he’s speaking across the lip of something that’s close to breaking and he’s trying not to widen the crack.

And that nickname makes you want to let the tears fall. Whatever he tries to achieve by calling you that, it doesn’t work. It’s just torture how familiar he tries to make it sound. 

His gaze falls in fast snaps over your face, your posture, your trembling hands. “This looks bad,” he concedes roughly. His throat works once before he continues. “I know it does. But it isn’t what you think it is.”

The words land in you and do nothing. They just sink. Sit there.

He studies your face, sees he has not reached you at all. “What did you see, baby? What has you—” He breaks off with a crack, shakes his head slowly, and lets out a shuddering breath, eyes still on you. “Tell me what you saw.”

What answer could you possibly give him? 

That you are looking at his mouth and thinking of all the times it softened around your name, and your own mind keeps turning traitor and overlaying that tenderness with headlines, with whispers, with ravening rumor? 

That the same voice which once coaxed and soothed now sounds capable of making rooms empty and men obey and whole situations forgotten? That the current version of his voice is a masterclass in control and it terrifies you to no end?

That his hands are hanging open at his sides, looking so damn human and ordinary, as though they’ve never done anything wrong? 

Which is a lie, you now know, a lie that runs deep and leaves you scarred, because all you can think is that these bare hands are the same hands you’ve had under your chin, lifting your face to his, tucking hair behind your ear, buttoning you up against the cold, and you’ve had them gripping you tight in the dark, moving inside you until you couldn't breathe, wrecking you in the best way possible.

These hands were your favorite things. 

But looking at them now, you picture what they are doing when you aren’t around. Doing the dirty work, the ugly work, the unspeakable work, hidden back in the blacked-out corners of a life he kept under lock and key.

Your throat feels too dry to talk and you stay quiet, letting the stillness in the room ripen, letting your lack of words and the fear in your eyes speak for themselves.

A hard, hollow tension knots his face, makes his jaw grind, and look as solid as a piece of rock. His hands ball into fists and when your eyes snap to them immediately, your body already flinching, he flexes them, but it seems forced. There is an almost brute rigidity to his throat, a silent scream of dread choked down only barely.

“What do you know?” he grits out through clenched teeth. 

The question is gentle in shape and brutal in substance. It makes your stomach turn. Because it sounds like a test. It sounds like inventory. It sounds like the kind of thing a ruthless man would ask before deciding what to do with the damage.

You let your fingers grip the edge of the counter. You can’t answer him. All you can do is try to breathe. All you can do is stare at the exit behind him, and his body standing between it. 

He draws in a slow breath, lets it out. “Look at me, Y/n. Please.”

You didn’t know some part of you would still obey, but you notice too late. Maybe it’s better this way. Your eyes lift fully to his. 

And you can actually see the way he has lost his grip. It’s right there in his eyes. If you were to describe it you’d say it looks distraught. As if he’s lost, his entire biography that’s been neatly written on paper now ripped away and he can’t find the next line. 

Judging by the way you act and look at him, he knows you know something, he just doesn't know what, and the mystery is eating him alive. Just for one disorienting second he doesn’t look that much like this untouchable figure from all those disturbing rumors, but rather like a simple man who knows that if he tries to force his way out of this, he’s just confirming your worst fears about him.

“My name,” he starts with a little hesitance. The gravelly low timbre of his voice makes you shudder, “is James Buchanan Barnes.”

Something in your face gives you away. 

You feel it the moment it happens. Some tiny involuntary flinch. Some helpless widening. 

Because something crosses his expression, his throat bobs hard enough to show that everything inside him is suddenly in pieces. 

He sees that the name is not new to you. He sees that you are already standing several steps ahead of where he hoped this conversation was.

He goes very still.

“You knew that already,” he acknowledges, and it almost hurts how he tries to sound calm about it all. 

Your mouth is dry. Your whole body feels like a struck match. You let out a pitiful small breath.

He takes one careful step forward, and it’s not really a step, not even truly an advance, but you recoil so sharply, you ram your whole body against the wall of marble behind you. Your back stings, but your eyes sting more. 

His face changes with your reaction, something like pain flashing through the severe framework of him before he reins it back in. 

“How?” he asks, and he’s no longer trying for calm. He ducks his head, pleading eyes on you, and he speaks with a wounded quiet. “Sweetheart, how did you find out?”

Your throat works around the answer. “Your tags.” It comes out so faint it is almost nothing, just a shaking breath that accidentally caught a few letters on the way out. 

For a second he shuts his eyes. For just one cut of time. 

His head tips back the slightest amount, and he deflates. A breath of air leaves him in a hitching, rattling shudder, like he’s finally run out of things to hold onto.

He looks back at you and seems briefly at a loss. James Buchanan Barnes, man of closed doors and fixed outcomes, with no ready sentence in his hands. 

It is strange and unnerving and it makes you talk more, bracing for him to yell and threaten and turn cold. 

“And,” you whisper, voice wobbling and blundering around in your mouth, “there was a gun.“ 

You want to explain, want to urge that you didn’t mean to find it, didn’t mean to come across anything at all. You want him to know you would like to dump your eyes in a container of white paint so your vision is a blank canvas and you can color it with other pictures, but it’s too late, and your words already seem to break across him, differently.

He does not move at first. He almost flinches, but catches it halfway, as if his body forgot for a moment to be disciplined. 

His eyes stay on you, and all that’s in there are things you’ve never seen in him before. Or in anyone, really. It is a stricken grief, resulting from the way every new piece of your fear is arriving inside him one by one and finding purchase. 

He looks at you like he can see the exact route your mind took from one discovery to the next, and hates every mile of it.

“Baby, I—” he croaks, having to pause. Instead, he starts toward you again, even slower this time, palms open a little, perhaps meaning only to soothe, perhaps meaning only to be nearer, but simply more trepidation triggers in you before thought can intervene. “Please listen to me—”

Your gaze snags on the knife block. 

The sleek black handles. The bright clean suggestion of defense. It’s without thought that you run to grab one. 

It is graceless and frantic and you don’t brandish it like someone brave in a film. You don’t know how to do this well enough for that and you don’t have the nerve to think about it. 

Your hand shakes around the handle almost immediately, and you pull it close to your chest, because fighting this vile man would be ludicrous considering who he is and who you are, knife or not, but you use it to protect yourself with the mere fact of holding something sharp. Hopeful that this thing will keep your horror from spilling out of your body altogether. 

The blade catches the light and makes it meaner. You hate that you have done this. You hate more that you had to.

Bucky stops dead.

The whole room seems to stop with him.

His eyes go first to the knife, then back to your face, and what crosses his expression then is so nakedly agonizing it is difficult to bear. 

Because he sees that you are not trying to threaten him, unlike how someone in danger might. 

You are not foolish enough to think a kitchen knife turns you into his equal. You are holding it because your body needs one small fiction to survive on—the fiction that you are not entirely empty-handed in a room with a man who could ruin you if he chose to. The fiction that you still belong, in some tiny harrowed way, to yourself.

“Hey,” he says, and his voice cracks clean through the middle of the word.

You have never heard that happen to him before. Never heard his composure split like badly fired glass.

His stare stays locked on yours, but now there is no distance in it, no coolness, no stranger’s cadence. Just a visceral, human ache. “Hey,” he says again, softer, but it sounds so incredibly heavy. It’s the way you’d talk to someone who’s just woken up from a nightmare and doesn't know where they are yet. “I’m— I’m not going to hurt you.”

Your grip tightens. The knife trembles visibly. “Don’t come closer.”

He stops breathing for half a beat and nods slowly. 

“Okay.” The word is a single rasp. “I won’t.” He swallows. You see the muscle move hard in his throat. “I won’t come any closer.”

You cannot stop shaking, no matter how hard you try, because a man with his power shouldn’t see you be so obviously afraid, but there is nothing you can do.

“Please believe me, sweetheart, when I say that I never intended to hurt you,” he swears, and there is no command in him now, none of that cold-sounding authority from a moment ago when he emptied the room with few syllables.

This is worse, in its own way. This undone version of him, this man trying to hold himself very still because the sight of you recoiling has clearly perturbed something structural inside him. “I have a thousand sins on my head, and it’s no use to claim otherwise now,” he speaks with a vulnerability in his tone that washes past you. “I’ve done a lot of things I can’t take back, but hurting you was never on the table. Okay? It was never even a possibility. You were supposed to be the only thing I didn’t ruin,” he ends with a lacerated wince.

You stare at him and have no idea how you can understand anything at all.

The knife handle bites into your palm. Your chest rises and falls too fast. The kitchen is suddenly too loud with all that humming of the refrigerator, the lights, the distant bloodstream of the mansion; and in the center of it all he stands facing you with that wrecked look in his eyes, as if your fear is not merely inconvenient to him but unbearable, and he’d rather be struck than watched this way by you.

And in a world that wasn't currently collapsing, maybe you’d actually care, maybe you’d actually notice how he would take a bullet to the chest just to stop you from flinching, but all you can think is that you are standing in the house of James Buchanan Barnes, with a knife against your own ribs as much as against him, and the man looking at you like heartbreak has found him at last is still the same man the city says should never be underestimated.

It’s so silent all of a sudden that the kitchen seems to be held in a trance. It feels as if there is a vacuum pressing against the walls and now the molecules of the room are terrified to touch the mess of what’s happening. 

The last bit of help you could have possibly still leaned on due to your desperation has vanished, echoes of footsteps now pull back into the depths of this mansion.

The overheads feel hostile, throwing down a flat glare that skims over the stainless steel and floorboards with an inert eye. 

And centered in that manufactured peace is him. 

James Buchanan Barnes.

The name has already erupted once inside your chest, but it keeps echoing, reverberating through your bones in smaller aftershocks. It feels strange to attach it to the man standing in front of you, when his hands have mapped every part of you—right to the most intimate ones—you’ve come to recognize his voice even in half-sleep and his laugh once wound through the cage of your ribs, vibrating against the bone until you couldn't tell its rhythm from your own heartbeat.

It feels like a wronged ownership. It feels like a glitch, an error in the logic of the world, but who are you to find a way out of it. Surrounded by him, in a mansion that is now suddenly as big as the world itself.

But you see it now. And god, it’s so painfully clear. So agonizingly obvious. 

You were delusional, you know that. It’s what hurts so terribly bad. You know exactly how this looks to anyone else. After all, this all started with you dating a guy for over a month and not even knowing his actual, legal name. But when you’re used to being nobody, a little bit of hyper-focused attention feels like a drug. He looked at you as if you were the only person in the room, and you would get this tight, anxious knot in your throat, thinking don’t ruin this. Asking for a last name or a background check felt like a quick way to feel high-maintenance, and you didn’t want to give him a reason to feel uncomfortable and walk away.

It was a habit born of pure insecurity, being so grateful for the crumbs of love that you don’t dare ask who’s baking the bread. He must have picked up on that on day one. He must have realized right away that as long as he kept making you feel special, you’d keep your mouth shut and let him stay hidden.

He used your loneliness, your blind spots. You were so desperately hoping to be seen, that you fell for the most obvious trap. And it’s your own fault, really. But it still makes you feel completely hollow, like someone scooped the air right out of your lungs with a cold spoon.

Now you have to live with the shame of that mistake.

Your jaw aches from clenching it, trying to swallow down the urge to throw up right there on the kitchen floor.

His presence alone seems to pull at the corners of the ceiling, dragging it down to squash you like a grape. He anchors the room to his foundation, consumes it with all he has, and tracks you with a pinpoint focus that has you shivering and sweating, because his gaze is treating the harsh thudding of your pulse as more vital than the massive, blood-stained kingdom currently cooling its heels on the other side of the door.

The roar in your ears turns outwards, seemingly engulfing the whole room with your panicked pulse. Your vision narrows down until the room stops spinning, and for the first time, you actually feel the air in the kitchen

And in the quiet, your awareness gives you the alarm that there is still something jarringly chilling resting just above your heart. It takes you a moment to realize it’s something physical. There is a weight there that now suddenly feels so deeply misplaced. 

Your hand moves on its own, your fingers lifting toward your throat to find the source of that cold, sinister pressure.

The tips of your fingers brush pearls. 

And for a moment, you stay frozen there, grazing the smooth curve of one luminous bead where the necklace drapes across your throat. 

It once made you smile, had your shoulders drop in ease when you made contact with this present of Bucky. But it no longer feels like a present at all, it feels like a bribe, a hook, a trap because its ultimate purpose surely wasn’t meant as a gift but rather to restrict your freedom and keep you bound to him.

This necklace, these shiny pearls, they aren’t about you. Honestly, you don’t think anything is about you. It never was. It’s just a reflection of what he wants you to be, confining you in his version of your identity.

He manipulated you and stole you and wanted to make you believe you’re the luckiest damn girl in the world.

And you had been. But now you’re just the stupidest.

And you keep on being, because your mind just continues jumping back to the evening he gave it to you, how it felt so soft and intimate, something chosen carefully and fastened around your neck with that glint of pride that lived in Bucky’s eyes. And you want to cry and break down at the way he stood there in front of you so awkwardly with the luxurious velvet box in his hand like it was something far more serious than jewelry. The way his voice had gone rough when he said he saw them and thought of you.

And now, sitting against your collarbone all cold, these are no longer gems, but tiny hooks sinking deeper into your skin, reminding you with every little sting, that you walked into this prison willingly.

You let James Buchanan Barnes clasp it around your neck. The man whose name crawls across newspapers like a stain. The man whose stories carry blood and conspiracies and savagery in their wake.

Somehow you manage to close your fingers around the strand despite of their shakiness.

Across the kitchen, Bucky’s gaze drops to your hand the moment it moves.

The necklace feels impossibly smooth beneath your touch, each pearl round and shining like a row of innocent little moons.

A gift.

From a man you didn’t know.

Or maybe a man you knew too well, just not in the way the world did.

Your throat feels hot suddenly and you know it's the cursed pearls burning holes there, pressing into your pulse with every overwhelmed beat of your heart.

You cannot stand it.

Your fingers curl harder.

Bucky's gaze snaps up to your face, then quickly back to your hands, and then he goes still. But still in the way of an animal that sensed the crack of a branch in the forest. Every line of him tightens in subtle increments, his shoulders locking, his breathing halting so abruptly you see the pause ruffle through his chest.

He knows what your heart doesn’t yet.

His attention sharpens and his eyes grow wide. It almost seems like he’s about to move toward you.

“Hey—” he starts softly, though the word is unfinished, frail, fearing the direction your thoughts are taking.

But your brain is no longer interested in choosing to make decisions carefully.

The necklace feels oppressive, every inch of it tied to a truth you did not have when he first placed it there, and so you can’t think or react any differently.

Your hand jerks in one swift motion just as Bucky releases a desperate choking sound.

The strand snaps free from your neck with a sharp little noise, like a thread breaking under too much strain, and now the pearls explode outward from your hand and scatter across the kitchen floor like a sudden spill of tiny white stars. They strike the tile with a bright, haphazard clatter that echoes far too loudly in the empty room.

tik—tik—tik—tik—

Some bounce high, ricocheting against cabinet legs. Others roll wildly across the floor, spinning in spasmodic circles before coming to a stop beneath stainless steel counters and chair legs.

The sound fills the kitchen in poignant, crystalline bursts.

A rain of little impacts.

A beautiful mess.

For a second you don’t even breathe.

You just stare at them—those small, perfect pearls—rolling farther and farther away from each other, punctuating the heartbreak in the air.

Across from you, Bucky doesn’t move. Something is breaking across his face. His breath leaves him in a soft, stunned exhale, and all he can do is stare with his eyes unguarded. It startles you.

He takes a step back. Not a deliberate one. More like his body forgot the floor was there. His boot slides half a pace behind him as though the sound of those pearls hitting the tile physically pushed him away from you.

His mouth parts.

For a moment he looks like he cannot quite process what he just witnessed.

His eyes—those confident, storm-colored eyes that usually hold such controlled intensity—have widened in a way you have never seen before. It doesn’t seem to look like anger, or anything like it.

It looks like hurt. Pure, unhidden hurt.

His gaze falls to the floor, tracking the scattered pearls skittering across the kitchen tiles, watching them roll away from where you stand with that look in his eyes that says he never wished to see them destroyed.

Then his eyes return to you. Slowly. And the expression there is devastating.

Because it is not rage.

It is not even disappointment.

It is heartbreak so unexpected and unfiltered it seems to hollow his chest from the inside.

His jaw tightens as if he tries to speak, but no words come immediately. The muscles along his throat move with a hard swallow, his chest rising and falling once in a slow, unsteady breath.

You realize then that he is looking at your bare throat.

The place where the necklace used to rest, and he stares at the place with sullen eyes.

Then his eyes lift again, meeting yours, and they are still wide, still aching.

For the first time since you’ve known him, Bucky Barnes looks like a man who has just watched something precious fall apart in his hands and realized too late that he cannot gather the pieces fast enough to put it back together.

And in the bright, echoing kitchen, the last pearl finishes rolling.

Tick.

Then silence returns, and your dread turns harrowing and now Bucky doesn’t seem to know where to put his hands, which is such a small, irrational thing to notice in the middle of your terror and yet your mind notices it anyway, because this is a man who has always seemed like a structure that was built out of conviction, who has been a straight line for you to follow in your world of scribbles, a man who enters every room as though the room had the good sense to expect him, and now he stands before you with your fear pointed at him in the shape of a kitchen knife and looks, inarguably, like he has been shoved off-script and dropped into the crack that formed in his foundation and now he is walled in by the very bricks he laid.

His eyes stay on your face, then the knife, then your face again, careful, heartbroken, alert in that frighteningly intense way of his, and you feel yourself shiver as he is tracking every tremor in your fingers, every drag of your breath, every microscopic shift in your balance in case you bolt again or collapse or cut yourself by accident on the trembling edge of your own panic.

“What you think you know about me,” he starts, and his voice is lower now, roughened at the seams, “what you’ve heard… what people say, it isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t even most of it.”

You barely hear the words. They hit the air and fall uselessly to the floor. Because what else would a man like him say, standing in a cathedral-sized kitchen in a house full of people who obey him before he finishes speaking, after you found the gun and the tags and the name that can turn a city’s rumor mill rabid by itself?

No matter what he says, no matter that he looks so unbelievably shattered—the shape of him is wrong now. That is what your body keeps insisting on. Wrong in the doorway, wrong under these lights, wrong with that caution and that gentleness still trying to live in his face as if it is genuine. You cannot make him fit into one meaning anymore. He is split down the middle in your mind—tender and terrible, gentle and catastrophic—and the fracture is making noise inside you.

He takes a breath, slow, as if he is trying not to startle you even with the sound of his lungs working. “I know how this looks.”

A cough breaks in your throat, or maybe it's a huff or a wet laugh, or whatever, but it hurts coming up and out of your throat. Your hand shakes so badly the knife glints in nervous little flashes. “You used me.”

The sentence leaves you wheezy and small and much too true-feeling inside your own head. But they are out, and you take a whimpering breath, and two tears fall. They don’t arrive elegantly, and they sure as hell don’t spill subtly. They feel hot and you feel humiliated and betrayed, so deeply betrayed, and you hate that they are coming in front of him, giving him the satisfaction because your body is not able to choose a fight, to give you steel and armor and an exit and a miracle. All it can provide you with is dread and tears, and a terribly shaking kitchen knife in your unpractical hands. Your whole body has become an argument against calm and there is nothing you can do.

His face changes so sharply it is almost like watching a flame twist drastically in wind.

“No,” he gets out quickly, and his voice trips over itself. It is denial stripped to the bone. Pure and cruel because he’s genuinely the greatest actor on earth. “No,” he chokes out again, softer and somehow more desperate. “No, no, I— It's not— I never—” He swallows, the line of his throat moving hard. He looks like he is about to walk barefoot through broken glass without letting you see the blood. “You matter to me. You— God, shit, that doesn’t even come close to—”

“Stop,” you whimper while a fresh tear slips down. You shake your head because the words feel obscene now, feel almost insulting in their tenderness, like someone laying roses on a crime scene.

“I’m not pretending.”

“Stop.”

His jaw flexes. He looks toward the ceiling for half a second, and it seems like he is trying to gather language before it deserts him entirely, and when his gaze comes back to you there is something naked in it, something grim and pleading and painfully real. He seems to grope for something that keeps him standing.

“I wanted to tell you,” he despairs, voice scratchy. “I was going to.”

You stare at him through your blurred vision. Every instinct in you rejects the sentence on impact. It sounds nonsensical. The knife quivers against your chest with each breath you are somehow able to take, but they are shuddering.

“When?” you choke out. “After what? After I was stupid enough? After I—”

“No.” He takes a step before remembering himself and stopping immediately, hands opening at his sides. “No. When it was safe.”

The word safe almost makes you laugh, except there is nothing funny left in you.

He hears how deranged it sounds in this room, and grief moves across his face in one dark, swift shadow. “Listen to me,” he presses, and his voice cracks, stripped of that expensive control he wears so well. “I know this life is ugly from the outside. I know what my name sounds like to people. I know what kind of stories get told. I knew if I handed you all of it too soon, all at once, you’d run before you ever had the chance to know what was real.”

Your tears keep coming and you don’t have it in you to wipe them away. You fear your heart won’t ever be able to unclench again after this day. If you even make it out of here. “So you thought you’d just let me” —fall in love first— “into your life the way you did?”

He closes his eyes, and you know the sentence hit exactly where it meant to. When he looks at you again there is nothing smooth or seamless about him, and you have never seen him this way. Because you have never really known him. He is no longer buttoned-up and bulletproof. He honestly looks about ready to be hit in the heart one final, fatal time. “I thought I would give you time,” he supplicates quietly, voice husky. “I thought I would let you know me before the rest of it ruined everything.” The breath that follows his words sounds full of sorrow and a deeply seated regret. “Which it seems like it has.”

Yes, it has. Yes, he ruined it. But would you have felt any other way if you found out another way? In another setting, maybe while you were tangled in the sheets together, or while he was holding your hands? You don’t know because it didn’t happen that way and you found out the way you did and now the world is upside down and all wrong-angled, and your mind is spinning in a room with no corners, completely unanchored by a lie you never saw coming, or maybe you have, because a guy like him couldn’t ever want a girl like you, and perhaps first and foremost you’re just mad at yourself.

Your throat has gone tight with crying, with fear, with the dizzying effort of keeping your body upright when your whole nervous system is trying to flee in eight directions at once. He sees you struggling and looks halfway to moving again, then stops himself so hard the restraint shows all over him.

“I’m a patient man,” he keeps going, and you just want to run past him, out of this hell. You don’t hear how there is no pride in his voice, no menace, just a worn sort of honesty, as if this is the one truth he can still offer without it breaking on impact. “I would have waited. As long as I needed to. I was waiting for the right moment, for when you felt safe with me, for when I knew you wouldn’t hear my name and only hear every lie this city tells itself at night.” His voice lowers further. “For when you loved me enough to at least stay in the room while I explained.”

You blink at him as if he has said something in a language your body no longer speaks.

And then, because this nightmare apparently still has room to worsen, he says, very softly, “Because I love you.”

All you can do is stare at this stranger, and it feels like you are looking at him through a broken window.

It is not the first time he has said it, not at all, and you had loved how he had no shame in telling you, how he pressed those very words into your skin night after night, even this early into your relationship.

Gosh, you had cherished it, fallen deeper for him because of it, and now you know it's all been part of his manipulation. So what else should it be now. But at the same time—why should he still be saying it? How can he still say that? How can he say that now, after all of this, after you know who he is, after the room has filled with the bomb of revelation? What kind of man says I love you while being the very thing you are trying to escape from?

You don’t understand him. You have no clue about who this man is and it is making your hands sweat around the handle. You don’t understand how his eyes can look this shattered, how his voice can sound this human, how his face can hold this much pain and still belong to James Buchanan Barnes.

The knife is still trembling against your chest. Your arm aches from holding it so tightly. The tears keep slipping down no matter how furiously you blink. He stands there with grief in his eyes and power in every line of his body, and both things are true at once, and both things are hurting worse because no single version of him will stay still long enough to be hated cleanly.

“I was going to ease you into it,” he explains achingly, as if confession has broken loose now and cannot be coaxed back in. “Slowly. Over time. I was going to tell you what I could, when I could, and let you decide what to do with it piece by piece. I was never going to throw you into the deep end and watch you drown in it.” His throat works. “Y/n, I’m so fucking sorry you had to find out like this.”

But you are not really listening anymore. Or rather, you hear every word and none of them settle. They clatter against your panic and bounce off immediately only to land in a repressed corner of your mind.

Because maybe he means them. Maybe that is the tragedy of it. Maybe he means every single inconceivable word. But meaning them does not open the door. Meaning them does not make this house less of a trap or his name less of a threat or your pulse any less palpitating in your throat. Meaning them does not undo the gun, the tags, the scathingly smooth way everyone in this place disappears when he tells them to. Meaning them does not turn James Buchanan Barnes back into only Bucky, back into the man whose shirt you wanted to pull on because it smelled like him.

All you need now is a way out.

You don’t want justice, or answers, or even the damn truth. You just want a way out of this. You want to get the hell away from him and everything that smells and looks like him. And the room starts reorganizing itself around that instinct. The service door behind him. The hallway to the left. The distance to the far counter. Whether he is standing on the balls of his feet or flat. Whether the island might slow him for a second. Whether dropping the knife would help or harm you. Whether there is any point at all in planning when this is his house, his kingdom, his maze, and you are just a girl crying in the center of it with shaking hands and nowhere good to go.

He sees your eyes move and something in his face folds inward with understanding, with woe, with the excruciating knowledge that while he is pouring his heart out in rough little pieces, all you are doing is looking for exits. He looks completely emptied out, as if his ribs had been pried open and the only soft part of him had been torn away.

“Baby—” And now he just sounds pleading. But he doesn’t get the chance to keep on going with his drama.

The kitchen ignites with noise before you even understand what you are hearing. There was just you with your messy breathing and Bucky standing a few feet away with that awfully gutted look on his face and then the door slams open so hard the plaster cracks and the sound ricochets against your nervous system.

A crowd of men comes flooding through the opening, like a breach in a dam, so fast and threatening and all of them primed for dirtier work than anyone should ever have to do. The floor shudders under their hard slam of boots. Nobody hesitates and nobody asks questions. They all just move on some sick instinct, weapons out and raised in the space of a single heartbeat.

And now all of them are pointed at you.

The sound that hitches in your throat is not at all dignified or brave. You wish you could stare at the end of your life with at least a small sense of bravery, but it doesn’t seem like it. Every weapon these uniformed men hold is fixed on your ribs, your throat, your eyes, and the paring knife you are gripping feels pathetic. It is a useless piece of household metal against a wall of black iron, against men who don’t care that you are small and fearful.

Even so, your knuckles go numb around the handle from how hard you are gripping it. Your fingers lock up, your skin flashing from freezing cold to scorching hot while your heart thrashes against your ribs.

You think, irrationally, that this is how it happens then. There is no big speech, no lightning strike from the sky. It is just going to happen here on the linoleum, next to a bowl of apples on the counter, and a row of clean water glasses that are catching the light of the kitchen while strangers decide to put bullets in you.

Bucky pivots.

It happens so quickly it feels supernatural, like a weather change, like the room altering under the weight of him. He steps in front of you without quite blocking you, but enough that every single man in that doorway seems to remember all at once who exactly they have just disobeyed.

His expression does not merely harden; it shears. Whatever softness had remained in his face a moment ago is gone so completely it is frightening, scraped away until all that remains is authority in its most lethal form.

You feel fused to the counter behind you. You wish you would be.

He fixes his stare on his men and his eyes become glacial, pale and freezing, incandescent with a fury that somehow feels far more menacing than an outburst. He speaks, and the volume is so low that the room has to go completely breathless to catch it.

“Guns down.”

The response isn’t fast enough. No one moves quickly enough. One of the guards hesitates—just a fraction, just long enough to die for it in any other circumstance—and Bucky’s gaze lands on him so heavily, it’s as if he is deciding where to leave the body.

“I said,” he repeats, and his voice comes out with a rough friction, stripped of any emotion except the promise to do harm, “if any one of you ever points a weapon at my girl again, I’ll put you in the ground myself and make sure nobody bothers digging you back up. Do you understand me?”

His words are deadly. It doesn’t even sound like he’s acting at all, he just sounds absolutely lethal. He talks as though he has already buried people before and wouldn’t think twice about doing it again.

Around you, the momentum of the raid falters. The guards look genuinely unnerved, expressions switching so quickly between shame, panic, and obedience in ugly little flashes. Guns lower and now point toward the floorboards. A muted apology gets muttered into the silence and some of them take a step back. But it is too late, far too late, because the last thread inside you has already snapped, and your body no longer cares about reason.

You run.

There is no time for anything else; you simply hurl yourself at the nearest gap in the room, toward the delusive hope of open space, of slipping between bodies, of somehow becoming smoke, becoming speed, becoming anything but this cornered and shaking thing inside your own skin.

You aim for the narrow corridor between Bucky and the island counter, convinced by sheer panic that if you can just get past him this once, just this once, the house might cleft and let you go. Your shoulder twists, your breath catches, your feet slip against tile and then catch again, and the world blurs into motion and noise and the blood-bright animal need to escape.

But Bucky is faster.

His arms hook around your waist in one brutal, seamless movement, and it yanks you backward before you’ve even made it past his shoulder. Suddenly you are no longer running, your feet lose the air, leaving you floating for half a heartbeat, before you are driven hard into the breadth and heat of his chest.

The cry you let out this time actually tears your throat. You thrash on instinct, your body fighting him with the full deranged force of your mind freaking out, and somewhere in that struggle your hand jerks.

The knife you have been using as a means of senseless protection, hits resistance. It slides cleanly, sinking into skin and it makes you gasp sharply, your lungs suddenly jamming. It’s not your skin.

The blade has opened a shallow red line across his forearm.

And that’s gotta be it. You’re now totally and completely fucked.

The knife drops from your hand and clatters to the floor.

For one aghast second you stare at the bead of red welling against his skin, bright as a neon sign, and horror crashes through you so adamantly it almost eclipses your fear.

But Bucky does not let go. He does not even flinch properly or draw back his arms. His wounded arm stiffens only enough to keep you from pitching forward, his other hand coming up to cradle the back of your head, not pinning now so much as containing, as if he is trying to physically keep something from breaking apart right there in his grip.

He seemingly is completely blind to his own bleeding skin, as if the knife you were holding was never a danger to his life and only a threat to yours. Even with his blood on the floorboards, his only instinct is to pull you deeper into his chest.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he calls, and the transformation in his voice makes your head spin, because the man who just threatened death into a roomful of armed soldiers is gone again, folded away, leaving only this hoarse, pleading tenderness that feels almost more agonizing. His mouth is at your temple, right at your hairline, his breath gasping against your skin. “Baby, baby, stop. Please—please, don’t do this, you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

You fight him anyway because your body refuses to do anything else. Your hands shove uselessly at his chest, your shoulders wrench, your whole body convulses with the effort of getting free. But he is built like a locked gate, and every single push only burns through the last of your energy. Tears pour hot and shamefully down your face. Your lungs burn. The room swims at the edges. Somewhere nearby, boots shuffle, and Bucky snarls over your head without releasing you.

“Out.”

It is one word, but every person in the kitchen obeys it instantly. You hear the kitchen staff backing away, hear the door open and shut, feel the room empty until there is no one left but you and him and the sound of your own sobbing.

Bucky’s hold eases just a fraction, softening the pressure so you can actually draw in air even if inhaling right now feels like swallowing water. He presses his cheek against your hair for one heavy second, and when he speaks again his voice is breaking in places you have never heard it break before.

“Listen to me,” he murmurs, each word roughened by strain, by remorse, by something that sounds so heartbreakingly sincere you almost hate him for it. “Hear me out, sweetheart, please. I got you. I got you. Nobody’s gonna touch you, nobody’s gonna lay a hand on you. I won’t! I would never. You hear me? You’re safe.”

Safe.

The word is a total deformity. It is so grotesque in this moment you could probably laugh, except it comes out as a broken cry instead.

You feel the way his body tenses around the sound, how it seems to travel straight through him with his heart as the target. He bows his head, his lips brushing your temple by accident or desperation, you cannot tell which.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and now there is nothing controlled left in him, no command, no careful poise, only a man fraying in real time. “Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry. I wanted you to know, doll, I did, just—not like this. Fuck, not like this. You mean everything to me. You gotta believe that. You are everything.”

You shake your head against his chest, small and uncoordinated, feeling spent. You do not know whether you are denying him, begging him, or simply coming apart. His shirt is damp beneath your face now, whether from your tears or the sweat chilled over your skin or the blood from his arm, whatever it is, it feels symbolic somehow—one more blurred line in a night made of them.

“I wasn’t gonna let anybody hurt you,” he whispers, and even that seems to drag through his throat, hitting the walls of it. “Nobody would ever be able to hurt you. Especially me, my love, especially me! I swear to God.” His forehead grinds into yours until you can taste the heat of his skin. “I’m still the same guy who kissed you this morning. I don't care if I’m a monster to the rest of the world, but not to you, sweetheart, please not to you. I would never—god, I would cut my own hands off before I ever used them to hurt you. You have to believe me, darling, please!”

But your body no longer knows the language of swearing, or soothing, or reason. Your muscles don’t translate his pleading into safety. Your body only knows that he is stronger than you, and that the arms holding you are the same arms that can dismantle a life without raising his pulse. The palm mapped so carefully across the curve of your head is the exact same hand that commands a firing squad, directs the local precincts, and seals fates with a slight tilt of his chin.

Every touch from him now delivers a repulsive duality—a rescue that feels like an arrest, a stroke that resembles a chokehold, an overwhelming affection that wears the exact outline of a cell.

You can feel how easy this is for him, how negligible his effort is in keeping you contained even while he tries his best to appear harmless. That insulting fact finally starves out the last bit of resistance left in your veins. Your nervous system runs out of fuel, leaving your body to go completely toothless against his chest, without actually surrendering or any returning trust. Your body is simply done.

Your fingers drop their useless leverage against his chest, your joints go limp and your knees refuse to carry your weight anymore.

You sag in his hold all at once. The sobs keep coming, but weaker now, thinning out, scraping instead of breaking. Bucky feels the change immediately. His grip loosens just enough to become support instead of restraint, his palm rubbing between your shoulder blades in one of those soothing motions you used to love so much and it makes your chest ache with a fresh wave of grief.

“That’s it,” he coos, though his voice sounds completely mangled by the words. “That’s it, honey. I know. I know.”

You don’t know what he means by that. You’re not sure he does either. Perhaps he simply recognizes that your stamina has bottomed out, that even the sharpest panic has its boundaries, and that the rush of survival instincts always burns hot and fast, leaving behind this full-body collapse.

He holds your dead weight upright anyway. He keeps murmuring into your hair but it doesn’t glue your broken pieces back together or erase the reality of what he is, what this fortress hides, and what you stumbled into. His sliced arm stays locked around your waist. You can feel the sticky warmth of his blood soaking through your clothes. It is startlingly human, and it should probably make him look less like a monster, the simple fact that he can bleed. But it makes every detail about your situation so real and dreadful.

When your body finally ceases its rebellion entirely, it isn't an act of submission. It is pure depletion.

And Bucky, keeping you pinned against the wall of his chest, seems to grasp that exhaustion better than anyone else could. His lungs expand and contract in uneven hitching motions. He drops his chin heavily onto the crown of your head. He closes you in not like a conqueror taking a prize but like a man trying, too late, to keep a catastrophe from widening under his hands.

Beyond the kitchen threshold, the entire estate drops into a dead, listening sort of silence, as if the plaster and timber have cocked an ear to the room.

He keeps holding you as if you are something he has no right to touch anymore and still cannot seem to make himself release, and it’s crazy that even like this, even with your body rigid from all the things you have learned too quickly and too late, he is still somehow heartbreakingly careful, his hand spread wide and warm between your shoulder blades, his hold immovable but never bruising, his mouth close to your temple as though he cannot bear to put distance between you if distance means losing you for good.

It is all just so utterly confusing because this is not entirely what you had expected would happen.

“The way you looked at me,” he continues, and his voice comes out rough as gravel dragged through water, ruined by restraint, by panic, by the sheer effort of trying not to frighten you further with the depth of what is in him. He does not sound like the man in the hallway, not like the man who commands rooms into silence with a glance, not like the man whose name can make other people blanch and step backward and say yes, sir, with their pulse all up in their throats. He sounds flayed open. He sounds like the sight of your fear has gone into him like shrapnel and lodged somewhere vital. “The way you looked at me in there—” He stops, breathes in shallowly, like he has run straight into a blade and is trying not to lean on it harder. “Christ. I’ve taken bullets that didn’t hit like that. To have you look at me like I’m something you need to survive.”

Your face is turned into his chest, your tears soaking through the expensive dark fabric of his shirt, and still your whole body is listening against your will, because his voice is all around you now, low and urgent and splintering in places that make something cold move through you.

His hand slides back up the back of your head, not forcing, only cradling, his fingers threading carefully into your hair as though the gesture itself aches. When he speaks again, there is something almost disbelieving in him, some stunned grief that does not seem feigned, cannot possibly be feigned for this long without becoming madness.

“If I could do it over, I would do every goddamn thing different,” he breathes brokenhearted. “Every part of it. I would tell you sooner. I’d tell you cleaner. Shit, I should’ve just told you. I should’ve given it to you straight before it got this messy and before you had to figure it out by yourself and piece me together out of all the worst parts with nobody there to shield you. I would have died before I let it happen like this. I swear.” He swallows hard enough that you feel it where your cheek presses near his sternum.

The kitchen is too bright and everything is stinging so harshly with those clean counters, the severe gleam of copper pans above the island, the neat little arrangement of knives in their block where one slot is now empty, the overhead lights turning everything brutally visible.

There is nowhere for your agony to hide. It shivers right out in the open, lives in the tightness of your lungs and the salt on your mouth, and the fact that every soft word from him only makes the unreality of this more baffling. Because he sounds sincere. He sounds devastated. He sounds like a man speaking over the body of something precious he helped kill.

He says all of this like he’s offering you his throat, while all around you the evidence of his power still glints and twinkles from every glazed surface, every distant footstep, every forced silence in a house built to keep his secrets and carry out his will.

He is talking with all the gentleness he has. He is nearly breaking with it. And still, inside you, fear sits and it pants and it is unconvinced, because love does not make a cage less locked simply because the hands closing it are shaking.

You make a small sound then—not a word, not even close, just some thin and wrecked little fracture of breath—and he tightens around you reflexively, then instantly checks himself, as if terrified you will read force into even that involuntary movement.

His next words come faster, crowding each other, not panicked exactly but pressed by urgency, by the sense that you are slipping through his hands even while he is still physically holding you.

“I know what I am.” He breaks off again, and this time you feel the tremor that runs through him. “I know what kind of man I’ve been, what people say about me, what they’re right about. I know exactly what it looks like from where you’re standing.” His voice goes raw. “But, darling, I never meant for you to be afraid of me. This was never supposed to happen.”

The words enter you but you just don’t know where to store them. There is something so naked in the way he says them that your mind keeps tripping over it, keeps trying and failing to fit it beside the other truth—the guns, the guards, the coldness in his authority, the name that belongs in whispers, the empire standing tall all around you in all its obedience. Or maybe it’s just loyalty. Respect? What even is it?

It’s hard to acknowledge that he still sounds like himself. James or Bucky, the man who kissed sleep into your skin and tucked blankets around your legs and pressed absent-minded kisses to your shoulder while reading beside you in bed still exists inside this other, larger, more terrible man. He has not vanished cleanly enough to make your fear simple. You give a small whimper.

“I was selfish,” he rasps, and now the confession lands without defense. “That’s the truth. I was selfish as hell. Because I wanted you anyway. I wanted you even knowing I should’ve stayed away from you. I know I should’ve left you out of all this. A girl like you deserves something clean and safe, and I’m neither of those things. I knew that. Fuck, I knew that. And it’s been killing me. I let myself have you and it’s been so fucking selfish.”

His breath hitches around the last word, and the grief in it is so unexpectedly torturous it almost makes you nauseous. His forehead lowers for a second against your hair, and he scarily looks so weary, suddenly too full of feeling to carry it elegantly.

“Because you are...” He exhales a broken laugh with no amusement in it whatsoever. “Christ, sweetheart, you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. You couldn’t ever imagine what you walking into my life did to it.”

Your eyes squeeze shut and fresh tears slip out anyway. Somewhere inside you, some tired and furious part wants to scream at him for speaking like this now, for laying tenderness over terror as if one can cancel the other out, as if love—even if it is love, even if it is real and not just another instrument in his alluring hands—can unmake what you know. But before you can push any of that into sound, he keeps going, quieter, the words drawn so close to your skin they seem less spoken than confessed into it.

“If you want to go,” he states, and there is a pause before it, the kind that tells you the sentence is costing him blood, “I’ll let you go.”

Your breath snags. You don’t trust it nor believe it instantly, but even imagining the words coming out of him feels like a tectonic event, a mountain bowing. He does not release you yet, but his body changes with the promise, some iron set inside him going rigid with the effort of saying it and meaning it.

“I will,” he says, with more force now, as if he knows you don’t believe him and cannot bear that either. “If that’s what you want, I will. I’m not gonna keep you somewhere you don’t wanna be. I’m not gonna turn into that for you. But, baby—” and here his voice gives way altogether, drops into something so human and stripped down it hardly seems to belong to the same man who froze a room full of armed guards with one look, “—I am begging you not to make that choice before you hear me. I am begging you. Stay this one night, give me one chance to explain it all to you, to answer every possible question you could have. One chance to do this right, even if I already did it all wrong.”

Begging. The word would sound absurd from almost any other man. From him, it sounds cataclysmic. His hand shakes at the back of your head before steadying, his chest rises too sharply under your cheek, and he continues speaking as if silence might kill him.

“I love you too much to let this be the end of it if there’s anything I can do to stop it,” he croaks. “Too much to let you walk out of here thinking none of it was real. It was real. Every second of it was real. Me wanting you, loving you, worrying about you, making room for you in my life in ways I never made room for anybody—none of that was a lie. The only lie was thinking I could hold both worlds apart long enough to protect you from what I am. That was the lie. That was my arrogance. My mistake.”

The mansion remains hushed in that eerie, cathedral-like way that comes after a disturbance, as if everyone occupying this huge mansion is pretending not to hear the aftershocks.

But here in the kitchen, everything feels narrowed to his voice and your breathing and the blood drying on his forearm and the fact that he is speaking to you like a man on his knees, even if he is still standing, even if his arms are still around you, even if his kind of desperation does not know how to unclench fully.

There is a daunting sincerity in him now, not because it is soft but because it is not. Because it is fierce. Because even his tenderness carries the shape of obsession, of decision, of something chosen with his whole irreversible heart.

What can you possible answer here. What can you possibly think.

“I’ll do whatever I have to do.” He sounds so full of conviction. Technically, the words are quiet, but there is a hard core somewhere in his tone, and it glows fiercely. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make you feel safe again. To prove this to you. To earn back one inch of your trust. I don’t care how long it takes, I don’t care what you ask for, I don’t care what I have to lay down at your feet. I’ll do it. I will.” He takes a beat and the next words are so low you almost miss them. “I know I don’t deserve another chance and you have all the best reasons to run, but I’m asking for it anyway, Y/n.“

At that, finally, he leans back just enough to look at you. It’s not much, but the hand at the back of your head can guide your face up with painful gentleness, giving you every opening to pull away if you need to, though you are too wrung out now to do much except tremble.

His eyes find yours and stay there, and the sight of his face nearly brings you to your knees all over again. There is no coldness in him. No cruelty. No mockery. Only a kind of bereft intensity, a ravaged devotion, and beneath it the severe understanding that he is seeing himself reflected in your fear and cannot survive the image.

The whole fact of how broken he sounds starts to mess with your head. It cracks the armor of your panic, if only just a little bit. You’re trying to hate him. Because, honestly, you want to. You want the fear to be this insurmountable wall between you, but his voice keeps crumbling pieces of it.

The worst part is that you can’t just flick a switch and stop loving the guy you were tangled up with this morning. You fell for him so fast, so completely, because his version of happy felt like the safest place on earth. But with all those shocking revelations, that same love feels like a trapdoor that just dropped you into a cellar, and you are so angry at your own heart for still wanting him to hold you.

Underneath the exhaustion, there is a nauseating doubt starting to rot everything you remember about the last few weeks, and you really don’t need your mind going that far, but it does. You start wondering if you ever actually loved him, or if you were just hooked on the way he looked at you.

He treated you like you were the only important thing in the world, and you just hung off that affection, soaking up the protective way he took care of you. Even though he’s standing here right now, bleeding and hollowed out, swearing that every single touch was real, how can you ever be sure? Every memory you have is suddenly poisoned by the thought that it was just a beautifully built illusion, and the whole thing makes you feel completely seasick.

It’s just too much to handle all at once. Your brain is trying to hold two completely different men in the same space—the gentle guy who tucked the blankets around your feet in the dark, and the boss who froze a kitchen full of killers with one word. They are both real. They are both right here in front of you, and the fact that he isn't a cartoon villain makes it a hundred times worse.

If he were just a monster, you could run. But he’s a monster who tells you he loves you with this gut-wrenching, unyielding honesty, and looking at his ruined face, all your willpower just turns to mush.

“I should have asked more questions,” you whisper, and still, your voice breaks, the words tumbling out of you like loose gravel. You aren’t trying to be eloquent anymore, you are just trying to get the noise out of your head before it chokes you. “From the start, I— When you wouldn’t tell me things. I— I don't know, I was scared, I guess.”

Your fingers tighten into the expensive wool of his lapels just to keep your knees from giving out. Letting this mob boss know about your fears is probably a bad idea. But your life consists of you making bad decisions and so your mouth keeps opening. “I think I just liked the way you were to me too much to risk messing it up.”

The words drag themselves out of you like they do not want to be born, like each one has to force its way through the knot in your throat and the salt on your tongue and the simple, mind-numbing fact that nothing in you knows where to place anything anymore—not him, not yourself, not the last weeks, not the hands that held you so tenderly and the empire those same hands command with a flick of the wrist.

Bucky’s gaze is piercing as he looks down at you, listening with his breath visibly held.

“But I— I still don’t understand. I think.“ Your voice comes thin at first, scraped nearly transparent by crying, but it sharpens on pain the way a blade sharpens on a whetstone. “I just— I saw this gun, and—,” you blur out, the memory making your heart do that awful stutter against your ribs again while Bucky nearly flinches. His eyes go wide, pupils shrinking until they look like two dark pinpricks. “It was an accident. I swear it was an accident. I was just— you told me to grab a shirt of yours but I couldn’t reach up your wardrobe and so I was just going to go grab the shirt you've been wearing, but your jacket was there and then it just fell out. And I— I completely lost my mind because I realized I didn’t actually know anything about you, and I’ve been so stupid, and I’m really not good at this. I'm not good at talking things out or figuring out the right things to say. It’s just— this is so much to take in.”

Bucky´s chest hitches, a rough, dry stutter or air that sounds like he just took a fist to the solar plexus. His face looks almost unrecognizable with the pain plastered on it. You feel his hands tremble against you and he slowly takes them away, putting himself at a small distance to perhaps give you some space. His palms stay open, as do his eyes. He looks entirely unhinged by the clumsiness of his own life seeping into yours.

How could anyone understand how a man can kiss your forehead like a saint and still have blood and fear braided into his name. It’s so hard to understand how someone can look at you the way he is looking at you now—like you are both miracle and mortal wound—and still have lied, still have omitted, still have arranged the world around you so skillfully that you walked through it unknowing, barefoot and bright-hearted, straight into the center of his hidden life.

You do not understand what parts were real and what parts were merely curated, and worst of all, there is a terrible little splinter of you that already suspects the answer is not clean enough to save you. That some unbearable amount of it was real.

Your mouth trembles and you know that he can see it.

“You lied to me,” you sob, and although you mean for it to, it doesn’t sound like a weapon you’re throwing at him. It just sounds sad. “You made it so easy. I didn’t even think about it. I just— I just woke up every day and trusted the way you looked at me. And the whole time, I didn’t even know you.”

You look down at his chest so you can stop having to meet those devastatingly sunken eyes. “You let me fall in love with you not knowing who you were.” Your sentence has a shape now, the grief in you finally managing to find a spine. But you still can’t make your words sound all that accusing. Because you got yourself into this situation. You’re supposed to be furious at yourself first.

You haven’t used the word love before. You just dropped it, being the first time it cleared your teeth and the timing of it feels completely disastrous.

And Bucky suddenly undergoes a drastic freeze, as if his nervous system has been struck by lightning. He seems to tip back just a tiny bit but stays in your orbit. He stares down at you, his mouth parted, his chest stalling on an intake of air that he forgets to let back out.

The fact that you love him—and that you are saying it right now, while covered with dread and shivering nearly against his chest—seems to completely break his brain.

There is a dark heat flooding his face, his jaw tight enough to snap a tooth. He looks agonizingly vulnerable like this, the dangerous mob boss utterly gutted by four letters. His fingers twitch where they are now hovering near your neck, desperately wanting to bury themselves in your hair and pull you back into his skin, but he forces his hands down to his sides, his knuckles trembling against his tailored trousers.

“You…,” he starts, eyes burning with a starved intensity that makes the air in the kitchen feel boiling hot. He swallows loudly, taking a moment, staring out into some space behind you, and switching focus back to you. “Don’t call yourself stupid,” he goes on, voice dropping into a rasp that shakes with the failure of his own arrogance. “None of what you told me and none of what you felt makes you stupid.”

His face leans closer to yours and somehow you only shrink back a tiny bit, not really at all. You can feel the wavering rhythm of his breath against your lips. He looks thoroughly undone by his own greed, stuck in the realization that he won the only thing he ever wanted, right at the exact moment he stopped being the man who holds you in the dark and turned into the reason you’re afraid of the dark.

“The love was real,” he sounds so convinced. His face is breaking, but his voice is not. He knows what he is saying. “Every single second of it was real. I am the one who ruined it. But what I feel, and what we have, that isn’t a lie. I swear to you on my life, it was never a lie.” His eyes close briefly, and it looks like he is losing his footing somewhere internal. “I know how it feels from where you’re standing. But I wasn’t playing some game with you. I wasn’t trying to—” He drags a hand over his face, and for an instant he looks older than you have ever seen him, not in years but in burden, in wear. “I wanted more time. That was my sin in it. I wanted time. I wanted to tell you in a way that didn’t make you look at me like this.”

Like this.

The phrase feels unkind. Because yes—there it is again, the damn nucleus of the whole thing. The way your eyes have changed on him. The way he has noticed every flicker of fear in you as if each one were a cut and he keeps taking your terror not as an insult to his pride but as an injury to something much more private and much more vulnerable. And that, more than any fake excuse could have, is so hard to process. 

Because men who only know cruelty do not usually grieve like this over being feared by the woman they supposedly love. Men who are only monstrous do not usually look half-unmade by it.

You don’t want that thought, you honestly don’t, but it does arrive.

Because he has not hurt you. He hasn’t done a single thing to hurt you, and that makes him so much more complicated at the exact moment you most need him to stay simple.

He has had a thousand opportunities by now to become the thing you are bracing against. In the hallway. In the office. In the kitchen. When you ran. When you fought. When you took the knife. When you cut him. At every turn, there has been room for rage, for punishment, for the kind of retaliatory violence your frightened mind keeps expecting from a man like him, and instead he has done nothing but hold himself on a brutal leash, speak softly, plead, bleed, look at you as if your fear is the one thing in this world he has no defenses against.

And it makes you weaker.

Because fear is easier when it is clean. Outrage is easier when there are no counterweights. But now your thoughts begin to buckle under the strain of contradiction, and you feel yourself growing tired in some deeper way, not merely from running or crying or panic, but from the effort of sustaining one total version of him against the evidence of another.

The story you are trying to tell yourself—that he is simply bad, simply dangerous, simply false—keeps snagging on the memory of his hands shaking when he begged, on the way he threw his men out for aiming guns at you, on the heartache in his face now, open and unarmored and miserable with not knowing how to reach you.

None of it erases anything, how could it this fast, but still it matters, and still some fatal hope flares.

Your lungs are burning. You become dimly aware that your body is leaning, not exactly by choice, but because exhaustion is making choices for you now. The kitchen feels too bright and too far away at the same time. Your fingers feel chilled, your knees unreliable, your heart still overworked from all that horror. Even your anger is beginning to lose its clean edges, dissolving into something wetter and more helpless.

“I don’t know what to do,” you admit, and there is no strength in it at all.

The sentence is barely more than breath, but it changes him instantly, makes his misery seem softer, as if your confusion pains him almost as much as your fear did. His gaze searches your face carefully, greedily, looking for any sign that you have not vanished completely from him.

“You don’t have to know right now,” he comforts, and this time his voice is gentler still, worn down to the most tender parts of his body. “You don’t have to decide anything this second. I know I dropped all of this on you in the worst possible way. I know you’re overwhelmed.”

Overwhelmed. The word is so pitifully insufficient you want to cry some more, but the sound catches and turns to another shivery exhale instead.

Overwhelmed is a rainstorm. A bad day. A missed train. This is seismic. This is having the floor beneath your life cleave open and discovering it was built over a fault line all along.

Still, you know what he means.

Because beneath all the fear, and the betrayal and the urgent need to flee, there is now also this leaden, disorienting fatigue, this collapse of certainty.

You cannot keep all your alarms ringing at once forever. The body is not made for it. At some point even terror begins to sag under its own weight, and in that sagging comes the most dangerous thing of all. Maybe not trust or forgiveness yet, but confusion. A human confusion. The realization that if he truly meant to destroy you, perhaps he would have done it already. That if cruelty were the point, he has passed up too many easy chances. That whatever else he is—and God, he is still intimidating, still hidden, still a man with too much power and too many locked rooms in his life—his feelings for you do not look counterfeit. They look catastrophic. They look real enough to have ruined him too.

He had every opportunity to end this argument with force, not even making his hands dirty in a physical sense. But he didn’t, and that roughened sincerity that seems so deeply wounded keeps gnawing at all the things you thought you found out about this man, the stereotype you made him out to be. It makes a guilty stone drop into your belly and land with damaging intentions.

And you do not know what to do with all this honesty and realness, when real arrives dressed as the very thing you were trying to escape.

But you have to acknowledge that your lack of strength is not the only reason why you have stopped fighting him, stopped trying to get away.

Bucky seems to read some fragment of this in your face, because he does not press harder. He does not crowd you with arguments. He simply stays where he is, close enough for warmth, far enough now that his care has space to breathe. His injured arm hangs at his side, blood drying in a dark seam along his skin, ignored. His other hand lifts as if to touch your cheek, then stops halfway and falls again when he sees the flicker in your eyes. That tiny restraint breaks something in you all over again.

“I know I lied by not telling you,” he says quietly. “I know that. I’m not asking you to call it something prettier. I’m just telling you it wasn’t because you meant nothing. It was because you meant too goddamn much, and I was trying to find a way to bring you closer without making you run.”

The honesty of it is so ugly, so naked, so free of self-congratulation that it feels like he just threw a wet sandbag right at your chest, knocking every scrap of air straight out of your lungs. It’s not an excuse, not quite. More like the shape of the selfishness itself, held out in his own hands for you to look at. He wanted you. He kept you. He delayed the truth because he was afraid the truth would cost him the one bright thing he had allowed himself to love. There is no innocence in that. But there is something crushingly human.

Your eyes burn again and your grip on your own certainty loosens another inch.

You hate that, too, because, damnit, it would be easier to stand here shaking and loathing him if he would just become less tender and less heartbreakingly earnest in his regret. But he stays persistently, ruinously genuine, and all at once you feel not only afraid, not only betrayed, but emptied out by the effort of trying to hold every contradiction at once. He is a bad man. He may also love you. He lied. He is also hurting. He hid things from you. He is also standing here looking like your fear is flaying him alive. None of these truths cancels the others. They just crowd together until your thoughts feel waterlogged, too swollen to separate.

So all that is left is the simplest truth again.

You really are overwhelmed.

You are so overwhelmed that language itself seems too heavy to lift.

Your breathing has started to slowly settle in increments, like a storm reluctantly retreating from a coastline it battered too long. It feels like there are bruises left behind in your lungs, but it no longer aches with each inhale.

Your fear has ebbed enough to make you think again, to make you see again, to make you look at him not as the single monstrous shape your panic tried to build, but as the complicated, human contradiction standing in front of you now.

His shoulders are still too tight, drawn up, and perhaps trying to seem smaller. He keeps his hands visible and loose at his sides to perhaps avoid startling you. The cut along his forearm has darkened into a narrow seam of red, drying in flaking lines against his skin and remaining completely ignored by the man attached to it.

His focus hasn’t left your face. And in that focus, there is not an ounce of triumph. Rather, the opposite. There is only pain. Such a grave torment that lives in the corners of his mouth, the prominent crease between his brows, in the cautious way he keeps tracking your movements as though you still might shove him away and try bolting for the door again.

You swallow and feel the ballast of everything press back down on your chest.

“I—” you start, timidly, using every last scrap of your bravery. You don’t meet his eyes, staring at the floor beside him. “I’ve seen them.” Your voice sounds strange to your own ears, small but a little bit more poised now, like glass that hasn’t shattered but still remembers the impact. “I've seen the news, and the headlines. All the stories about you.”

The words suspend themselves in the space between you.

Bucky takes a moment to answer. His gaze drifts downward, just briefly, as if the floor might offer him something easier to look at than the defenselessness sitting in your eyes. The vulnerable questions there. When he exhales it is long and tired, and it sounds like all the versions of himself he has spent years outrunning are catching up to him anyway.

“Yeah,” he mutters out breathily. But a little flat. There is no denial in it or some sort of excuse. He drags a hand across the back of his neck, his jaw flexing slightly before he speaks again. “I figured you probably had.” He takes a shivering breath, his whole chest lifting. “They’re not all lies.”

You hold your breath, but don’t step back, don’t let fear take its seat at the forefront of your mind again.

He lifts his eyes back to yours then, and the seriousness in them deepens, intensifying into something resolute.

“I’m not gonna stand here and tell you I’m a good man,” he says. The words come slowly, and his eyes are searching yours while he talks. He is placing them carefully like he’s building something honest out of wreckage. “I’m not.”

Your heart stumbles in your chest, but you still keep your feet grounded and meet his eyes.

“I’ve done things I’m not proud of. Things most people wouldn’t forgive if they knew the full story.” His voice lowers slightly. His eyes are full of sorrow. Despite the things he’s saying he unexpectedly doesn’t look threatening at all and it makes something startle abruptly in your chest. “And yeah, I’ll probably keep doing some of those things.” He doesn’t force anything into his tone that maybe should be there. He´s not saying those things with pride or arrogance or even threat. He has just accepted the callous contours that make his life the way it is. “But not for the reasons people think.”

His eyes soften then, slightly. And it makes you realize that they’ve actually been soft all along.

“I do what I do because there are people in this world who deserve protection. People who don’t have the power to protect themselves.” His gaze holds yours a little more firmly now. “And sometimes the only way to keep those people safe is to be the guy willing to do the ugly work.”

Your throat tightens.

“I’d do just about anything to protect you, Y/n. Even if it’s me you want protection from.”

The kitchen feels very still.

You don’t know what to say to that. You’re not even sure there is something to say. The statement isn’t a justification so much as a window, and looking through it leaves you with more thoughts to sort through and you’ve already gone through so many. But you hear him. You really do.

And he seems to notice that you’re listening now—maybe not agreeing, not forgiving, but truly listening, hearing him out—and some small measure of relief loosens the tension in his shoulders.

He doesn’t move a single muscle, standing before you like a brick wall, his legs pinned wide on the kitchen tiles, his frame perfectly still except for the anxious heave of his chest. His arms are hanging at his side, and shit, your gaze just has to focus on that bloody trail on his forearm. Because right, you’ve cut James Buchanan Barnes through his expensive suit enough to make him bleed. The redness runs from his wrist to his knuckles and you see some dots on the floor. The fabric of his suit is soaking it up, turning a dark wet black around the tear.

He still doesn’t glance down at it. He’s still so entirely anchored to your face, his broad shoulders squared as if he’s trying to shield you from the very room he owns. The survival instinct that had you clawing at the air drops away and now there is a sudden freezing emptiness in your head. And in that blank space, something takes place.

You look at the knife on the linoleum, then at the wet red tracking down his arm, and your stomach completely plummets through the ground. The panic you felt earlier didn’t protect you, it turned you clumsy and ignorant.

“Oh, no,” you choke out, gaze fixed on his arm, your words hacking up from your chest miserably. “Bucky, I— Your arm, I— I didn’t mean— This is my fault, I swear I didn’t mean to—”

“Hey,” he cuts in, his voice lowering into a rough, immediate hush that clips the words right out of your mouth. “Hey, no, sweetheart. No.” He steps back into your space and his huge palms come up, traveling slowly until they map themselves carefully across your jawline.

His fingers are trembling and the pressure is incredibly light. His skin is warm, smelling of that same familiar soap from upstairs, and his thumbs softly brush the wet tear tracks off your cheekbones, forcing you to look straight into his eyes. He doesn’t even spare a glance at his forearm.

“You don’t ever apologize to me for that,” he whispers hoarsely, his chest hitching against yours as he tries to get his breathing normal. There is so much regret in his voice, it is too much for your heart to handle. “You were scared out of your mind and I did that to you. That?” He tilts his arm toward you, indicating that he is talking about the cut. “That is nothing, sweetheart. Nothing.” The corner of his mouth lifts faintly, but the expression is gentler and definitely much more somber than humorous. “I’ve taken hits that should’ve put me in the ground, and none of them touched me.”

You shake your head in his palms. “But, I—”

“Doll,” he shushes, his arms keeping your chin locked, but not firm at all. His gaze is drilling into yours and it feels like he’s bleeding more from the inside and not the outside. “That little scratch hurts a hell of a lot less than watching you run from me.”

Your hands slowly stop trying to find leverage against his chest. The heat of his palms against your jaw feels like a grounding force, something so familiar but also completely new. It’s not entirely unpleasant in its newness.

You look up into his eyes, seeing the complete lack of the monster he just unleashed on his guards, and you can’t help but feel a little unmoored.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,” you admit breathily, your voice cracking as your forehead drops forward to rest against his tie.

Bucky lets out a long, ragged exhale, his chin resting against the top of your head as his arms wrap around your shoulders, pulling you into a hold that feels firm but unforced.

“You don’t have to figure it out right now, darling,” he eases, his words spoken with a splintered scrape into your hair. “You don’t have to decide anything today, or tomorrow, or next week. Take all the time you need. Turn it over in your head. Think about everything you saw, everything I am. And whatever you choose to do—if you want to pack your bags, and disappear, if you never want to see my face again—I will let you go. I will make sure you are safe, and I will support whatever choice you make. I swear it.”

He pulls back just an inch, his thumbs gently guiding your face up again so he can look straight into your eyes. There is something desperately begging in his stare, but he keeps his posture completely still, refusing to pressure you.

“But please.“ His knuckles tremble slightly against your cheek. “Just stay the night. Don't run out now while this is all still so new. Stay until morning. As soon as the sun’s up, the car is yours,” he promises sorrowfully, his thumbs catching the last of the dampness on your cheek. “If you want to leave, you leave. You can walk out of here and never look back, and I won’t follow you. I won’t look for you. If that’s what it takes to make you feel safe, I’ll let you go.”

He stops, his jaw clamping tight for a second, a sharp, jumbled hitch in his ribs breaking his breathing.

“But god, I hope you don't,” he shoves the words past the tightness in his throat, his eyes wide and burning into yours so achingly. “I will spend every single day of my life doing whatever it takes to fix this. I’ll earn back an inch of your trust at a time. I’ll show you the rest of me—the real parts—if you just give me the chance to try. I want you to love me again. I want that more than anything.”

He hitches his weight just a fraction closer, his large hands still framing your jaw with agonizingly slow caution.

“But just stay this single night,” he pleads with a strain in his voice, his forehead dropping down to rest lightly against yours. “Just stay until morning. Let me get you out of this kitchen, and you can just sleep. That’s all. Just tonight.”

You stare at the dark red crusting on his wool cuff, then look into that heavy, broken-down look in his eyes. Trying to picture next week or even tomorrow feels like watching a knotted ball of wire and not finding out where to start untying it.

But right now, your muscles are just running on empty, completely flattened and powerless from feeling all that panic. You let out one long shudder of air, asking your awareness for any reasons why you should still try to get the hell away from this guy, and come up with nothing yet. It’s all too fresh to truly give this some thought and right now all you want to do is curl up in those silky sheets and sleep it all off.

You give him a small nod. “Okay. Okay, Bucky, I’ll stay the night.”

Bucky’s shoulders drop with a massive, rattling relief. He doesn't say anything else, he just tucks your head back under his chin, his big arms closing around you to carry your weight out of the quiet kitchen, leaving the knife and the blood behind on the floorboards.

You don’t know what comes when the sun is up. You don’t know what loving a man like him means. You don’t know if the life he lives can ever exist beside the life you thought you wanted.

You don’t know if trust can grow again from the cracked ground beneath your feet, and considering your decision making skills, you shouldn’t let your heart handle things anymore.

But, frighteningly and also not all that much surprisingly after all, when you imagine leaving now—truly leaving, turning your back on him and walking out of this mansion forever—the image doesn’t bring relief.

It brings something bleak.

Because for all the discoveries of tonight and all that fear, all that shock, and the trust that has been abruptly broken, there is a bullheaded part of you that understands something you can’t yet put into words for him to hear.

You could run from this house.

You could run from his name.

But you are not sure you could run from him.

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”

- Oscar Wilde

A/n: Looking at the word count now, I honestly probably could’ve turned this into a mini series but because this whole thing is essentially one long scene, splitting it up even more just didn’t feel right to me. So I guess I just have to admit that this became an unexpectedly long two-parter lmao.

As always, I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on this continuation, if it gave you hope, or even if you expected something different to happen. I always enjoy hearing your interpretations and feelings after reading ♡

I also wanted to gently address something else. I’ve received a few critical comments regarding certain reactions, choices, and dynamics in the story, and I truly hope this second part helped answer some questions or at least offered a little more perspective. If it didn’t, that’s completely okay too.

What I want you to know, I genuinely do appreciate helpful criticism, especially when it comes to my writing itself, because I’m always trying to improve and become better at what I do. Constructive feedback that gives me something to work with is always welcome and appreciated. But if something in the story simply wasn’t for you, or you personally disliked a choice I made, then sometimes it’s okay to just move on from it instead of tearing it apart. And if you do choose to criticize something, I just ask that you do it kindly. We’re still a community here, and there’s no reason to be harsh or blunt. Talk to me like a human being.

I put a lot of time, emotion, and effort into these stories, not to be told this makes no sense or this is weird without any real conversation behind it. Sometimes I don’t think through every single detail deeply because at the end of the day, this is still fiction born from messy little ideas in my head, written for comfort, entertainment, and emotion—not perfection!

Still, thank you to everyone who continues to boost me and my work and helped me stay motivated to finish this part ♡

And if you enjoyed my work, please consider supporting me at my ko-fi ♡

[nadacarcan]

Call It What You Want

Pairing: 40s!bucky barnes x fem! reader Word Count: 13.8k Abstract: Bucky is your good friend. In times of war, he is your comfort. On cold December nights in Brooklyn, you invite him to your apartment to hang out. A small accident occurs that gets out of hand while you deal with the embarrassment of the moment. Will your friendship with him be affected, or will something new blossom between you? Disclaimer: 18+ explicit content — MDNI | no use of y/n, friends to lovers, eventual smut, hotpast, mutual pining, unprotected sex (p in v), breeding, overstimulation, teasing, soft dom!reader, soft dom!bucky, light power play, cockwarming, praise kink, oral sex (m&f — receiving and giving), fingering, use of pet names (darling, dove, angel, sweetheart, love, baby, princess), subtle angst, kissing, insecure/self-conscious reader, masturbation, soft intimacy, orgasm denial, squirting, touching, subtle old standards (40s), light fluid bonding, sexual tension, body worship, multiple orgasms, hair pulling (m receiving), fluff, aftercare, lmk if i've missed anything Author’s Note: this was going to be much shorter than I originally planned. It's my first Bucky fanfic, so please don't let it be a flop. I put a lot of effort into editing this work and spent two weeks writing it. English is not my first language, so I'm open to any corrections (preferably via anonymous or direct message, thank you). Enjoy reading this. I hope you like it.

In December, the busy streets of Brooklyn were less crowded than they usually were in the middle of the year. You loved this time of year, when you boiled milk to make a hot drink, just as you were doing now, watching the windows fog up with the warm contrast of your home. Your routine was the same as almost every day, but it was interrupted in a rather comforting way by your good friend Bucky Barnes. He had arrived from a successful mission, and you decided to invite him to spend the night at your apartment, celebrating with two cups of hot chocolate, chatting about your busy lives, talking about some new book or movie releases.

He had arrived at your apartment with a big smile on his face, wearing his impeccable sergeant's uniform and the recognition seals in his right pocket. He asked permission to change into something more comfortable and casual, something more homely, something that would allow you to feel connected to your friend without reminding you of the current situation with the war.

You turned off the stove, hummed a tune lost in your thoughts, focused on making hot chocolate, but something caught your attention. He had left his canvas bag on the sofa, which wasn't unusual for him. He was a bit messy and tended to leave things lying around. You figured he had grabbed his clothes in a hurry, going upstairs to change. However, a book or something more like a diary was about to fall on the floor, you approached to pick it up, but curiosity got the better of you at such an inopportune moment. It was made of soft leather, a little worn at the corners, some pages overflowing, others carefully placed in the binding groove. You should have left it where you found it, put it back in the bag, and continue with the hot chocolate until he came down from the guest room. You couldn't help being damn curious on this occasion.

You ran your index and middle fingers along the edge of the diary's front cover, opening it delicately, observing, examining it closely, judging a book by its cover. It had simple notes, some coordinates you didn't recognize, a few doodles here and there. He likes to draw, doesn't he? Street names, song titles to remember later on the radio... informal writings, nothing that could ever be of use to you. It was when you turned seven or nine pages further on that you found it, forbidden information, information that was perhaps too personal for someone you called a friend. Your eyebrows knit together, you frown with concern for yourself, cursing your curiosity, your desire to always know the “why” of things, a diary is what you use to record your adventures, ailments, experiences, and that was exactly what you found, your friend's carnal experiences.

Was this what men used to write in their notebooks, diaries, or agendas? A valid form of release and privacy, of course. Your index finger carefully travels over the cursive writing, the ink dry from some time ago, perhaps weeks or days, the more your eyes wandered in curiosity, the more you could understand what it was about, they were libidinous experiences come true, real encounters he had had, with every detail written in an casual perspective, specific details that did not go unnoticed in your quick reading.

A bubbling sensation tightened against the knot in your lower belly. It was uncharted territory for you. You had embarked on a ship bound for the most dangerous waters of the Pacific. You couldn't get off the boat without finding the treasure. Your curiosity got the better of you.

You turned one or two more pages, knowing that was enough. What you didn't know was that the author was right behind you. He spoke in a short sentence, you froze, your breath caught in your throat, your fingers clutching the back cover of the diary, wishing the earth would swallow you up right then and there.

“Say, I must’ve left my bag behind… looks like you found it ‘fore I did." In every scenario and every possibility, you would be trapped in the bars of shame. With clumsy movements and simple instinct, you carelessly stored the diary inside the canvas bag, you turned to face him, observing his expression. He was clearly confused, you saw no signs of anger anywhere, but he wasn't happy either, not in the same way he was when he arrived at your apartment and greeted you with a fresh smile.

“Sorry, I was moving some furniture and your bag was carelessly placed and some things were threatening to fall on the floor...” You stammered, your words were incompetent, but somehow you were clear with your intention, with a little lie on the tip of your tongue, but it worked... or so you thought.

You saw him frown, a subtle but visible gesture, as he approached you to pick up the bag between his fingers and noticed a tiny detail: the small strip that served as a bookmark in his diary was out of place on the page he had marked so as not to lose his place in his reading. He knew immediately that you had invaded his privacy.

He grimaced, not because he was upset, but because he felt a little strange, a feeling of rejection on your part haunted him like a bad omen, that you think he is a pervert who makes his perverse notes from time to time with different people at the same time. He leaves the bag on another sofa, the atmosphere is heavy, tense... so you decide to break it.

“Forgive me again... how about I turn on the radio and we relax a little? I made hot chocolate, your favorite...” You played with your fingers, a nervous but safe act for your nervous system. You got yourself into this mess, you would solve it.

Bucky nods gently, you swear you saw the corners of his mouth turn up in a small smile, that relieved you a little, you go to the small radio on the coffee table in the living room, you turn it on looking for a soft melody probably an instrumental jazz tune, you bring the steaming cups of hot chocolate to the coffee table letting them cool down a little. The two of you sit down on the comfortable sofa, neither of you saying a word, enjoying the comfortable silence that the room provides, listening to the melody on the radio and the soft tapping of the windows by the slippery night wind.

“How ya been? Still crackin’ the languages books, huh?” Miraculously, he decided to break the ice with a sharp knife, you took a deep breath turning your gaze toward him. He was looking at you with his icy blue eyes, bright and warm at the same time, which was comforting and gave you enough courage to lose some of the embarrassment that ran through your veins.

“You know... it's a little complicated to study two languages at the same time, but it works for me. I know that when the war is over, I can get a decent job.” Your hand travels across the back of the sofa as you talk, thinking about your risky decisions. You didn't want to vent your sorrows on a night like this, at least not for now. You feel a chill run down your lower back when you feel Bucky's hand resting on your shoulder, gently squeezing the tender flesh, an affectionate touch.

“Hey... everything’s gonna be just fine. You're one sharp dame, always questionin’ the way the world tries to pin us down. This society? It’s a real pain the neck sometimes, y’know? But with you… I feel like I’m finally home. I trust you.” Your eyes shine when he says the words that sweeten your heart “With you… I feel like I’m finally home.” He says it as if he has forgotten your action when you were snooping through his belongings a couple of minutes ago. You part your lips to let out a slight sigh coming from your chest squeezed by the feeling that you don't deserve this great man as a good friend of yours.

“Buck... guilt eats away at me. I can't be at peace if you offer me comfort and I still feel guilty for taking your belongings without your consent. Please forgive me.” Your eyes shine with pure sincerity and painful regret. He smiles showing that beautiful crooked smile that you adore at any time of year. His hand leaves your shoulder and moves up your right cheek, cradling it delicately despite his calloused fingers from the effort of being a soldier.

“Darlin’, I figure that same curiosity’s what drives you to study all them languages, and take a chance comin’ to a place like this. You really think I’d blow my top over somethin’ so small? Maybe it’s a little awkward lookin’ you in the eyes after you read those notes but hey… I’m sorry for that too. We’re square now, alright?” Sweet as honey, you thought, his lips letting out a melodious laugh, another wave of relief washed over you. You were even, and that was enough to end this uncomfortable nighttime chapter. Or maybe you would continue to the next chapter, because he cut through the thin layer of embarrassment again when he asked the following question.

“Still... I gotta say, I’m curious too… just like you. So, what’d you manage to read before I caught ya red-handed?" Shit, that was perceptive of him. Heat rose to your cheeks invading your face, and your expression faltered. You caught your lower lip with your teeth and lowered your gaze, avoiding his blue eyes as they scanned you with intrigue, something else peeked through them that you couldn't quite identify, you didn't want to jump to conclusions.

“First, I want you to know that it was pure coincidence that my fingers fell on those pages. I skimmed through it, so I don't have all the information in my head. I'll forget about it today, don't worry.” You lied. You knew that what little you had read would stay in your head for a long time, not when the writing, the feelings, and the stories told in that diary were strangely appealing to you.

You took the cup of hot chocolate to your lips and drank a little of its contents, but it wasn't enough to warm your body when Bucky pinched your cheek. Oh yes, he had his hand there, tonight you felt seriously distracted.

“That stuff you read… did it get ya or what?” He lowered his voice as if they were in a bar or a cafe surrounded by other people, but the reality was that the two of them were alone in your apartment, in a conversation that was escalating into something they hadn't experienced together as friends.

You didn't manage to choke on the chocolate because you had swallowed it before he dropped the grenade. You stretched out your arm and part of your body to put the cup back on the coffee table. You hesitated to look him directly in the eyes, but you did. There he was, his pupils curious, slightly dilated, waiting expectantly for your response.

“You have beautiful handwriting, a little sloppy, but good enough to write a book perhaps... I mean, you're a good writer. Have you ever thought about writing a book?” Did you hesitate? Were you nervous? He smiled sidelong, this time to tease you, of course. You had forgotten that your friend could be sarcastic at times.

"Not sure I got it in me to write a book right now... but I’ll keep it in the back o’ my head." Good point, you thought amid the jumbled ideas in your chaotic mind.

“Although I don't know if anyone in history has ever published an erotic book, there are movies, that's something I've heard about on the streets. I've never gone to see a movie like that, but you could dare to write one at some point, you know...” You frowned slightly, intrigued to investigate the subject further, or perhaps you were trying to take control of the strange feeling you were beginning to feel in the pit of your stomach.

The two of you fell silent again. It wasn't awkward just two young people trying to rearrange the ideas in their heads. The gears in your head were stuck on a question. You wanted to ask him that question, but you didn't know if it would be feasible to ask it right now. To hell with it, after what seemed like an eternity you asked him.

“If you feel uncomfortable, I want you to tell me right away, but... can you tell me a story from your diary?” Your fingers moved uncomfortably over the cotton of your dress, brushing it with clumsy strokes. You would probably regret this now, later or never, depending on his reaction and acceptance.

"Which one? Any o’ them or the one you couldn’t stop starin’ at?" He doesn't pull away, he doesn't judge you, his features don't wrinkle in an expression of disgust or rejection, his eyebrows move slightly upward arching them in interest, curiosity, and surprise. His hand which was on your cheek, moved away from you to stroke his chin thoughtfully. You felt the loss of warmth, but you let it pass; the intrigue kept you alert.

“Whatever anecdote you want to tell me, I don't mind. I think it's better when the author of a book shares his ideas aloud with the right listeners.” You spoke in a lower tone than usual, looking up to meet his meticulous gaze, his pupils dilated, the mocking smile still carefully placed at the corners of his lips. You swallowed, feeling the liquid roll harshly down your throat. You knew that kind of look in a man.

“Alright, alright...” He leaned back, resting his elbow on the front of the sofa, his face tilted toward you, his thigh brushing yours, rocking from side to side, your breath hitching, your entire body tensing as his presence crowded your tiny personal space, certainly making you restless.

“There was this one time... in Paris.” He let the words hang in the air for a moment, knowing that he'd already piqued your curiosity. “I believe it was 'bout a year ago. Can’t say for certain. Warm summer night, I’d just completed a mission and a few fellows I worked with invited me to a bar nearby. I’d never been inside a Parisian bar before, you see. The place was lively, full of all kinds of people. There were plenty of beautiful dames, sure… but one in particular caught my eye… She was a redhead, green eyes like emeralds. A smile with a hint of mischief… long legs graceful. I walked up, offered her a drink, and we shot the breeze a while.”

He paused for a moment, his eyes roaming over your face, studying your reaction. Your outer shell was restless, a hint of nervousness revealed by the unusual movement of your fingers on the hem of your dress, your thighs pressing together, your heart beating a thousand miles a minute in anticipation of him soon reaching the interesting part of the story. He ran his tongue over his lips, his gaze flickering over your body for a moment before he spoke again.

"Everything alright? You sure you’re okay with this?" Bucky used a tone that would melt any woman, soft, full of concern with a subtly low but audible tone. He carefully brought his thumb and index finger to your chin to hold it firmly, and you nodded quickly with some desperation to break the tension of the situation.

“I'm fine, I'm just a little nervous. You don't hear about experiences like this every day. Don't worry, you can continue.” The comforting warmth returned when he caressed your chin with a delicate touch, feeling the soft skin beneath his fingertips. His fingers were long, and you swore you could feel them close to your lower lip. You cleared your throat clearing the knot of unease, the corners of your mouth lifting into a small shy smile. He nods, a little unsure of whether he's making you uncomfortable, but he trusts you and your word.

"Well… she was sharp, quick with her words and she sure wasn’t shy ‘bout speakin’ her mind. One o’ those people you only run into once in a lifetime. Said she was a model for some magazine, which made sense the way she carried herself, delicate... real classy. But I didn’t judge, and I sure didn’t ask what a dame like her was doin’ in a place like that sittin’ alone, no fella in sight. That’s when things started gettin’ a little… warmer between us. She walked right up, laid her hands on my legs, looked me dead in the eye, and said maybe we oughta go someplace quieter. The noise, the crowd none of it really fit us."

You listened carefully to his words. That woman sounded like someone who wasn't afraid of being judged, almost like yourself, but no, you weren't seductive, you weren't flirtatious, and sometimes you felt bad about yourself. You made a small grimace with your lips, you were a little jealous of that woman... because of her confidence or because of her encounter with Bucky?

"She took my hand, and the two of us stepped outta that bar, just walkin’ through the Paris streets... it was my last night in town, so that little spur-of-the-moment date with Sarah that meant somethin’. Oh yeah… that was her name." The woman's name lingered on the tip of his tongue as if he were trying to savor the moment he shared with her. His eyes never wandered; he always kept them fixed on yours, his knee bouncing a little more intensely against your legs.

"Sure enough, she asked me to come up to her place. Not that it mattered even if she hadn’t, I’da still walked her home. A lady shouldn’t be out there on her own, not at that hour. World’s full of trouble, y’know?" You smile, sincere, and agree with his ideology. He was always a gentleman, even with you.

"Soon as we stepped into her apartment, I didn’t even get a chance to catch my breath. Next thing I know, I’m backed up against the wall, her hands all over me, runnin’ down my chest, my arms… and her mouth, right on my neck..." He paused his words, stopped rocking his knee against your legs, tilted his head slightly, looking at you with intrigue.

You felt heat, not the comforting heat you felt when Bucky's fingers moved across your skin, tracing that path you already knew, this was a heat like a whirlwind, confusing yet evident in the lower part of your belly. You weren't stupid, you weren't ignorant, you knew what it was, but who was causing it? The anecdote itself or the author of the anecdote?

"At some point, I was over her too we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. She was starved for it, and truth be told, so was I. She started unbuttonin’ my shirt slow, slid her hands across my chest, down over my stomach… ‘til she reached my belt buckle." He snorted softly, licking his dry lips, with his right hand he adjusted the fabric of his pants from the thigh, it was an awkward movement, adjusting a certain area, you understood exactly why he did it, you said nothing, you kept listening.

"A dame takin’ the lead like that it ain’t somethin’ you see every day. Took me by surprise, I’ll tell ya that. I’d never felt nothin’ like it before." There he goes, with a sideways smile showing his pearly whites. You couldn't take it anymore. You wanted to dive into this story as if it were a journey to an unknown but exciting place, you interrupted him.

“What do you mean by taking the lead? What did she do?” Your eyes shine expectantly, which did not go unnoticed by his analytical eyes. His two eyebrows arch in surprise; your impatience amused him somewhat.

"Most times, it’s men who take the lead. We’re the ones startin’ with the kissin’, runnin’ our hands over ‘em, takin’ things slow... undressin’ ‘em, makin’ sure they get theirs. It’s give and take, y’know? We enjoy it, they enjoy it. Fair game, but Sarah... she turned the tables right from the start, left my shirt wide open, unbuckled my belt, and slipped my pants right down, leavin’ me standin’ there in just my shorts. She went straight for my neck; I remember that part real clear she left a couple marks, too pinkish ones. I carried ‘em around for near two weeks, and believe me, the fellas didn’t miss a chance to give me hell about it." He shook his head, trying to add a little humor to this conversation, otherwise he would lose track of what he was talking about with what his body was crying out for. But he continued when he saw you more focused than ever on his lips, on his words.

"Her hand moved down over my stomach slow like she knew exactly what she was doin’. When her nails traced over my skin and reached the edge of my shorts, I felt this shiver sharp... then she slipped her hand inside, and started takin’ care of me, just like that. I’ll tell you no dame had ever handled me that way before, not even close." You couldn't contain the little gasp that escaped your lips when he got to the suggestive part of the story. He noticed, but you didn't care if it was below 10 degrees on the streets of Brooklyn, you were burning up, it was suffocating, not to mention the uncomfortable sticky feeling of your panties against your folds. You swallowed hard. What the hell was happening to you?

"She drops to her knees, tugs down my shorts in one smooth motion, her hands ran down my legs slow at first scratchin’ my thighs just enough to leave a mark or two...” He paused briefly; the tension palpable for both of them. It wasn't the same tension as when he found you reading his diary without his permission. This was different, sinful, exciting. He continued bluntly. “Then... well, let’s just say she didn’t waste time, she got right to work and I ain’t ever forgotten how that felt."

“How did it feel? Did you like it?” You took a risk, your lips were loose, your cheeks hot, and your panties wet. What did you have to lose?

“Damn… it was somethin’ else, her mouth was hot, her tongue... skilled.” He also took a risk when his thumb touched your lower lip, gently opening your mouth. You couldn't help but sigh, your warm breath brushing against his thumb. Too much contact in less than a second, it felt like an intimate privilege.

"We stayed like that a while… I let myself go, didn’t hold back. Took it all in more than I ever had before then she caught me off guard. One second we were in the parlor, next thing I know she’s pullin’ me into the bedroom, she gave me a push real smooth, landed me on the bed climbed right on top straddlin’ my lap like she’d done it a hundred times. Her body... moved like it was made for it, every bit of it right where it oughta be.”

Bucky looked at you, you could understand the expressions on his face, he felt the same way you did, expectant of something more, he always respected your space he would never go further if you weren't comfortable with it, but you wanted it, you desired it, and you just hoped that this wouldn't ruin the strong bond you two had forged almost a year ago.

“Shit… I'd be lying if I said I wasn't feeling... different.” You laughed nervously, shyly, without taking your eyes off Bucky, who was looking at you with a small smile on his lips, calm and patient. His hand cradled your face again, and he asked the question that overwhelmed your senses, his voice dropping to a low whisper.

"Mind if I kissed ya?" Your breath caught, you froze, you didn't waste any time. With your nerves on edge and excitement blossoming in your lower abdomen like a peony opening its petals, you nodded without hesitation.

There wasn't much space between them, but you wanted him close to you with a need you had never shown for him before. He left his place on the sofa to come closer to you, moving delicately as if trying to make you feel that his request to kiss you was serious and not part of a joke, as he usually did most of the time.

Their faces were only a few inches apart, and you felt his warm breath brush against the corners of your lips. You just swallowed, feeling your skin tingle and the hairs on your arms stand on end from his closeness. You put your hands on his thighs to steady yourself before falling to the side. Bucky let out an almost silent gasp at the abrupt touch of your hands on his thighs, sending a delicious shiver through him, his cock throbbing eagerly inside his tight fabric pants.

The connection was electrifying when your lips collided with his in a soft kiss, the appetizer before the main course. The delicacy didn't last long; you were hungry with need to have him connected to you for as long as possible. The hot chocolate had something toxic in it; otherwise, you wouldn't understand where this sexual energy came from.

You climbed onto his lap carefully, not wanting to scare him away, but if that woman could be bold with Bucky, why couldn't you? You could do it even better than her. He was surprised, but he didn't protest, his hands found the refuge they needed in the curve of your hips squeezing the tender flesh. You both gasped during the kiss, an opportunity crossing your path.

His tongue slipped into your mouth, careless but controlled, with the aim of making you feel good. You had never had such an intense kiss in your life, but you liked it. It helped a lot to relieve the burden of desire that was increasing in your nervous system, but it wasn't enough anyway. You needed more than this kiss.

The lack of oxygen became apparent, the two separated, a thin thread of saliva connecting their lips which glistened in the golden hue light of the ceiling lamp in the corner of your living room. You could barely see the blue of his eyes, his pupils taking up so much space in his orbs due to the arousal he felt for you at that moment. The two inhaled... exhaled, by chance they both laughed at the same time, two melodies breaking the momentary passion.

“Geez, that didn’t take long.” He teased you, and you just tapped him on the shoulder playfully.

“Is that a compliment? Or a complaint?” You frowned with a small pout on your lips, and he grabbed your cheeks with one hand, squeezing gently in a possessive way, or so you thought.

"It’s a fact, I liked it. What about you? That story... it get you goin’ a little? I didn't finish it anyway.” Bucky looks at you enchanted, he has always been a born observer, but this time it felt different, admiring every part of your face with desire, with affection.

Your fingers are guided by the slight stubble on his jaw. He must have trimmed it a few days ago, or so you can deduce. He is as handsome as hell, and that is where you have fallen. The heat is unbearable. “Hey... I want to try too... I want to be a confident woman, like that woman in Paris. Do you think I can do it right now with you?”

He follows your gaze, now a little more serious, but nothing to worry about. You saw his jaw tighten a little.

"I believe in you. You asked me to talk ‘bout that night I had with that dame so I told you. If you’re lookin’ to sail into unfamiliar waters… I’ll steer the ship. You got nothin’ to worry about. We don’t judge, remember? Ain’t that what you’re always preachin’?" Damn, the effect he had on you was mesmerizing. You just bit your lower lip and nodded, ready to venture into the dense waters.

Your hands moved down from the edge of his jaw to his shirt, you unbuttoned two buttons of his shirt, no more, his identification tags welcomed you lying on his chest moving in coordination with his chest breathing, rising and falling, his heart pounding with excitement, his body hair accentuated his pecs in a delicious way, he was masculine, your trimmed nails traveled toward his chest, caressing his firm muscle, he for his part brought his left hand to the strap of your dress, playing with it a little, pulling it, letting it go, a small tempting loop until he got tired and ended up gently lowering the strap down the curve of your shoulder. He didn't stop there, he did the same with the other strap ending up with a nice improvised neckline, he sighed to himself and his eyes didn't leave your beautiful arms moving subtly across his chest.

You wanted to try something different, you brought your hands to his neck touching his skin, running your fingers over his Adam's apple, he tensed every time you tried to press gently against the bulge, your right hand traveled behind to the back of his neck exactly, with your fingers covered in his hair you pulled his head back, not too hard, but it wasn't the movement of a damsel either.

A growl escaped his lips, you took advantage of this opportunity to lick a long line down his neck, leaving a trail of fresh saliva engraved on the pavement of his windpipe, salty yet sweet at the same time.

You heard it for the first time, a gasp combined with a whimper, it's the blissful sound that comes from his pretty pink lips. If heaven gave you the chance to choose a specific melody, you would clearly choose the one you just heard. That's when you noticed the interference on the radio, you were so caught up in the moment that you ignored the moment when the song reached its climax and the signal was lost along with it. It didn't matter. You would silence the whole world just to hear that beautiful sound coming from his throat. It was sincere approval, he was enjoying it.

You had never played this dominant female role before, you didn't even know you could handle it, you felt free, full of confidence, it was just what you were looking for to feel as sexy as the red-haired woman in Paris.

The buttons on his shirt were unbuttoned one by one as you sucked small hickeys on his neck, leaving pink, purple, and red marks to bloom. All those colors marked the evidence of your courage, claiming this man under your touch, your power to make him feel good, steal his breath, stopping his heartbeat to take it back with strength, this was exactly what you were looking for. Your ears were sensitized by Bucky's muffled gasps, he was holding back, teasing you, but you wouldn't let him turn the tables on you.

You undid all the buttons on his shirt and opened it, not taking it off because, honestly, he looked hot half-naked. You saw his chest rise and fall in ragged breaths, your eyes roaming over it. You had seen the hair on his sternum, but discovering the whole path was what made you let out a fleeting gasp. Your eyes traveled directly below his belly button, where his happy trial was patched and well presented. You were sticky, wet between your legs. You cursed internally. Your body was betraying you in the best possible way.

“Damn... dove, you’re real good at this.” He could barely speak, his arousal limited him to sweet grunts and gasps, music to your ears now that the radio was temporarily broken.

You didn't speak, yours were actions not words, this time you focused on his face, you swore you would be kind to him, his long eyelashes fluttering over his half-closed eyes, you could barely see the icy blue of his eyes, the pale pink color accentuated on his cheeks it wasn't because of the cold, that was for sure, his lips parted in a fragile line, you could see his two front bunny teeth and you smiled to yourself, cute.

Your thighs were on either side of his legs as you sat on his lap, you squeezed your legs together in an attempt to get more comfortable, he couldn't help but reach out and caress your thighs moving up the hem of your dress leaving it rolled up above your hips with his left hand in a firm grip, he looked at you, his breath immediately catching.

Your cream-colored panties, meticulously detailed with lace and rose designs, he could see the wet spot forming in the center of your panties. His tongue came out to wet his lips, leaving them glistening in the dim light, as his breathing returned, irregular and shaky. His right hand reached out to assault you, but you were faster grabbing his wrist firmly. He was taken aback by your outburst.

“This time we're going to abandon the ladies first protocol.” At last you could see his beautiful blue eyes open again because of your boldness. You stopped his hand and placed it on your right thigh, exactly where it should be. You didn't care that his other hand was in a swaying grip around the hem of your dress. You let it go, he can keep watching if he wants to.

You looked away from his face and down at his pants, at the bulge leaning slightly to the left, suggesting that he was more than ready for your next move.

Your fingers hesitated a little, but you pushed yourself to do it. He wasn't wearing a belt, which was a silent victory for you. Your index finger brushed against the zipper of his pants, his hips jerked forward instinctively, he was anxious, impatient. Your free hand positioned itself on his left thigh and you ran your fingers over the thick flesh until you reached the button of his pants.

You don't know how, but the button was probably loose. You were able to unbutton it with one hand using the strength of your thumb and index finger. A muffled groan came from above, he needed to free himself from his layers of clothing as soon as possible. You were exploring this shipwreck you had suddenly been stranded on, you would take your time.

You unzipped his pants in a slow and torturous movement, leaning your hand on his thigh and applying pressure, he could feel it. He was watching you, this new unknown side of you. He'd be lying if he said he didn't love the way you dominated him.

You reached the end of the line, stopping only to observe the disaster you were causing. Your hands positioned themselves on the hems of his pants and pulled down, not too hard. He was startled by the impact, lifting part of his lower body to make sure his pants didn't get stuck on his legs. You pulled them down to his knees without any problem.

Now it was your turn to let out a gasp, but you didn't stifle it, you exclaimed it proudly, his hard erection rising painfully above his underwear, a damp spot leaning smugly in the center of the fabric, both of you wanted this desperately, you smiled proudly this whole plan is scoring points for your egocentricity.

You moved closer to him, the tip of your nose drawing a line over his sharp jaw, like a kitten seeking the warmth of its owner, you gently bit his jawbone, your finger leaving a ghostly touch on his hardness, you felt his painful erection trapped in his briefs, straining against the fabric as his arousal was staining them. Bucky exhaled sharply through his nose, his grip tightened possessively around the hem of your dress, he didn't let go, he stood still for a moment.

Your curiosity reared its head again, palming him through his briefs, the wetness, the heat radiating from his cock came like an electrifying bolt of pleasure to the center of your legs just a second after feeling it throb in the palm of your hand. Two strangled moans escaped from their mouths, it was a mutual connection, a union between them that strengthened the intimacy they were sharing. You looked up through your vision blurred by desire, meeting his eyes, shining with need, dark with the arousal of the moment, he stared at you, not at your hand but at you.

His broad chest heaving with painful anticipation, each breath making the muscles in his abs tense, you could read his body language and understand that he needed more than a fleeting touch.

“Get 'em off angel c'mon...” He whispered, his deep voice dropping to a breathless needy tone, you couldn't help feel suffocated, struggling in your heightened state of arousal. You didn't anticipate when you grabbed the elastic waistband of his underwear and helped him out of them, his shorts piling up next to his pants at his knees, and your pupils dilated when you saw it.

His thick cock sprang up, hitting his abdomen, staining his pelvis and part of his happy trail. It was fully erect, swollen, and shiny with precum, his pretty tip flushed, angier, needing your touch. Small translucent pearls dripped down his length, and a thick vein stood out across the front of his phallus.

Unconsciously, your mouth began to salivate, you had to run the back of your other hand over your lips to prevent the liquid from escaping from the corners of your mouth. For a moment you forgot how to take control of the situation, but you quickly composed yourself cleared your throat with a low sound, moved away from his lap, and saw him frown confused by your action. His eyes opened with a hint of desperation that left you sighing internally, so needy...

You curled up on his left side, now more comfortable, with more access to touch him freely. He moved restlessly, gradually allowing his legs to spread further apart as he felt your heat invading his sanity.

You leaned over and your hands moved down to his legs, your fingertips tracing sweet patterns along his bare thighs, feeling the fine layer of hair surrounding his delicious muscular flesh. You pressed against his thighs guiding his legs to spread apart to your liking.

“I want you to keep your legs open like that, don't close them or I won't please you, understand?” Your tone of voice was firm, he nodded nervously but eagerly, struggling to maintain his composure, his chest rising and falling in shallow breaths, you saw a thin layer of sweat settle on his forehead and those pretty pink lips that have remained half-open since you first touched him.

His balls hung heavy, painfully full against the sofa upholstery. Your right arm traveled along the back of the sofa and deliberately fell on his back, your hand digging into a tight grip around his shoulder, your other hand reached down to his pelvis, your touch light as a feather as you looked up through your eyelashes to meet his eyes. He needed you urgently, the arctic-blue turning dark like a rainy night filled with mist, desire... He was trembling, desperately resisting the overwhelming urge to touch you, pull your body toward him, to remove that damn dress that stood between him and your delicate naked skin, to play with those pretty cream-colored panties, to lick the exquisite pearl that surrounded the center of your pink petals, to dizzy your senses in a cloud of pleasure that you couldn't bear alone, to take you to the peak and release your orgasm. But not yet, this was your turn, you were in control.

Finally you grabbed it, letting your hand move in a slow rhythm, you didn't need the baby oil you kept on your shelf in case your skin got itchy. His precum surrounded the entire base of his cock, your grip moved up to his tip you let it press gently into your fist and then moved down to the base of his cock, spreading those pearly beads along the length of his foreskin. Your hand soon moved up and down his length with ease, using his excessive amount of precum to make him touch the moon and the stars.

Bucky writhed, moaning desperately loving your touch. The sensation overwhelmed him, waves of pleasure coursing through his body, you felt his back arch eagerly against the back of the sofa, each moan that escaped his lips sounding like sweet encouragement. It was a delight because it felt so good to have him with you like this, under the control of your grip.

Your grip on his shoulder abruptly shifted to his jaw, you turned him around, finding yourself once again face to face with his face contorted in a trembling expression of excitement that clouded his senses. Poor Bucky could barely form a coherent sentence. You watched as a couple of crystal-clear tears formed at the corners of his eyes, you caught your breath it was like a silent plea, a vulnerability that only you would have the privilege of admiring.

Your hand was completely covered in his arousal, his nectar of shiny beads and pearls dripping continuously from his cock creating a warm slippery lubricant facilitating movement. The sticky feeling didn't disgust you; it made you realize how much you had aroused him in less than a night. You had never had an experience like this before. It felt forbidden, but why did it feel so good? The wet sound invaded your ears, the subtle “squeeze” echoing in your head. Damn, this was your new addiction.

You remembered part of his story. Had the woman sucked his cock? How would you do it? Your fingers slid down, wrapped tightly around his base. You squeezed, his hips jerked slightly, his abdominal muscles contracting, his breathing falling into a whimper weakened by distress.

His cock was hot, heavy, throbbing in the fist of your hand, trembling slightly as your hand encircled the base. You admired it, the moisture, the swollen veins, the reddish color of his tip, your mouth suddenly went dry. You knew what you needed to do to quench your thirst for desire.

Your grip was persistent, you got up from the sofa, again taking him by surprise, but this time he was patient, expectant, his cock throbbing and contracting in the palm of your hand. Immediately your knees found the cold wood beneath you, you fell to your knees for him, his legs remained open because that was your order from the beginning otherwise you weren't going to give him what he was begging for so much with his whimpers and moans, his release at your hands.

He spread his legs as far as they would go, his body slowly collapsing onto the sofa. You smiled arrogant, your hand firmly around his base squeezing to hold him back giving him pleasure at the same time.

You tilted your head forward, your breath skimming hot over his reddened head, you smelled the musk of his cock, addictive, manly, your panties were incredibly clinging to your wet pussy, you could have your orgasm just by touching him and smelling his cock, you didn't recognize yourself.

Bucky's eyes fell on your mouth, your tongue escaped from your lips and you slowly licked just above his reddened and dripping tip. He moaned, low, guttural, his head tilted back for a fraction of a second, you saw his Adam's apple flex on his throat, that moan came from inside him, natural, without pretense, you loved it.

You licked again, more agile this time, wrapping your lips around the head of his cock, cupping your cheeks slightly using just enough pressure to feel him react. Your tongue caught the salty, spicy taste of his cock, you pulled your head forward, taking him deep into your hot mouth.

With your free hand, you caressed his balls while your tongue played with every throbbing vein you could find. His body swayed slightly forward, pulling his hips against you, longing for you to take his entire length into your mouth. You were taking your time to savor the smooth, soft skin of his cock.

His hands clung to the tops of his legs, his left hand carefully reaching out to your face, his fingers brushing your jaw, his thumb caressing the tender skin of your peachy cheeks. If he had the necessary resources, he would buy one of those cameras that processed the film, creating a memorable photograph that he would carry in the right pocket of his uniform or in his no longer so secret diary. It was a simple fantasy, a thought that would live on in his mind, in his memories.

He left his hand there, your lips pulling wetly on his cock, your head bobbing up and down, the angle making it easy, natural, you could slide in a steady rhythm comfortable for both of you. His fingers moved up running through the strands of your hair at the nape of your neck, he didn't pull, he didn't grab possessively, it was a soft, firm touch to help you move with him. You let him be because it didn't interfere with your plans to dominate him.

The sound of your mouth working on him was wet, slippery, lascivious, the veins of his cock throbbed under your tongue, you were not an expert but your tongue curved in different directions, in those exact spots where he felt the most pleasure, you could tell by the way he gasped, waves of pleasure coursing through him, every nerve and contraction felt like an electric touch against your honey lips.

You couldn't take it all in your mouth, it was considerably large, you were a little disappointed in yourself, you slid his cock out of your mouth with a little “pop” joining the strings of saliva and precum that still clung to your lips as you pulled back a little.

You never let go of his cock, continuing to press firmly at the base, holding back any hint of premature orgasm, your hand on his balls remaining active, kneading his sack with a feather-light touch. This elicited a loud whimper in response to your warm hand patting against him, his beautiful sore testicles throbbing with anguish, seeking quick release of his thick semen. He hadn't cum in weeks and it was very likely that he would end up making a mess in your hand and part of your arm if you continued at that pace.

You were no longer kneeling before him. You moved forward, placing your knee against his cock, stabilizing yourself with your other leg standing, your hands resting on his broad shoulders, a growl was what you received with this new position, a manly, almost primitive one, it ignited your nervous system with arousal.

You thought for a moment how sexy this situation would be if you were wearing a lace lingerie set with a playful garter belt accessory and nylon stockings, high stilettos heels, harmonizing your legs and making them look taller and longer. Unfortunately, you didn't have that hot emergency outfit in your closet, you had seen it in adult magazines. Maybe if all this worked out, you would save up to buy a set and play lasciviously with Bucky.

His arousal covered your swollen, worn, and ruined lips, shining under the dim light of the room. You didn't lick your lips because you didn't want to waste it; you wanted to share it. You took a difficult risk.

Your face wavered close to his, his heavy eyelids half-closed, you had wondered internally how he had held out so long until now, he was close to releasing himself, and you knew it from the way the veins in his cock throbbed deliciously with pressure in your mouth. You wouldn't let him come so soon, you still wanted to push him to the limit of his sexual sanity, this opportunity presented itself and you weren't going to waste it.

Your breathing was fast and hurried with nerves, catching in your throat there was a hesitation that made your hair stand on end, your breaths mingled, you could feel his hot breath on your lips.

Your mouths met in a desperate kiss, so eager that you felt the shock of electricity running down your spine. He was tasting his arousal on your lips, your saliva mixing with his. You were afraid he would push you away, judge you, grab his belongings, and run out the front door of your apartment, abandoning you forever. He didn't. He stayed with you, receiving the heat that blossomed at the union of your mouths, your pulse racing between your legs, your fingers wrapped around Bucky's shoulders, your tongue moving experimentally against his in a dance of fiery passion, small strands of saliva rolling down the corners of your lips.

His mouth covered yours and deepened the kiss, taking you to the clouds, giving you what you deserved without asking more than twice. Bucky devoured you, his lips moving against yours in a needy and greedy push, both of you moaning arbitrarily between the little space that existed in your busy mouths, he ended up accepting the taste of his cock with dignity, here in the heat of your apartment there were no protocols, no misogyny, no weak masculinity, the stigmas of the times, were the two of you venturing into the incredible pleasure that existed in every particle and cell of the human body, there was no sin, only the sweet taste of intimacy.

You kissed Bucky as if war would knock on your door at any moment and take everything away. You loved him like a good friend, but deep down you wanted this moment, to live it, to feel it in your memory as a memory that would never fade from your chaotic mind. Your heart longed for it so much that it would hurt when the night came to an end.

Bucky's touch stung in a not-so-pleasant way. He hadn't felt your body since the first moment you straddled his lap, he didn't want to ruin your fantasy, but his hands were restless, empty, unstable without the subtle grease of your flesh rooted to his fingers. He grabs your waist tightly, calloused fingers scraping and burning your ribs, wrinkling the tattered fabric of your dress, you gasp into his mouth, instantly pulling away from him, your lungs agitated, begging for a breath of air. You rest your forehead against his as your breaths are unstable and desperate alongside his.

Your hands massage the tense skin of his shoulders, exerting the most delicious pressure on them sending unexpected currents of desire through his hard, needy cock, dripping his translucent essence down your knee. You feel his balls contract, he is trembling, he is so close and you don't want this to end so soon, your tongue comes out and brushes the corners of his lips stealing his breath, savoring the combination of your saliva created by the intense kiss you had a minute ago, your lips curve into a smile.

Your knee remained pressed against his swollen balls, your hands left his shoulders for a second his grip on your waist loosened, your fingers danced over the hem of your dress pulling it up until you lifted it over your head to take it off. It had no clasp or accessory to get in your way; it came off in one smooth motion, fresh, you felt safe, you abandoned the comfort of the cotton that once brushed against your smooth skin.

He swallowed hard, his eyelids fluttering for a second as a wave of emotions rained down on his head, his eyes traveled over your exposed body, you were standing there in your cream-colored lace bra and panties, simple cotton, nothing fancy, no garters, no stilettos, no orange-red lips, like in Playboy magazines, unreal, fake, pretentious, you were there, standing in the dim light of the table lamp flickering softly, bathing the room in amber tones, long shadows decorating your figure next to the frame of him sitting trapped between your knee in a gesture of power and seduction that he was willing to continue savoring, your lips a natural cherry red and swollen, small traces of moisture from the previous kiss, your hair pulled back was a mess with barely consistent curls, some loose strands falling rebelliously over your porcelain neck. He looks at the outline of your breasts standing out under the thin fabric of your bra, his lazy gaze falling on the curve of your hips and the top of your bare thighs. You took his breath away more times that night than in his entire career as a soldier serving his country.

Your cheeks are flushed with a subtle pink dust from the frank inspection of his gaze, you almost stagger to hide from his gaze, but no, you feel safe with him.

One of his hands wants to assault you, but you abruptly pull away with your knee still pressed against his painful erection. “Wait, let's change the cards and make it more interesting.” Your voice was low, barely a whisper, a clear and specific command. He has been very good to you, he could take it a little longer.

You walked away from him definitively, hearing a sob, almost like a buzzing sound coming from his chest. His breathing hitched; his eyes guided by the plump curve of your butt swaying in the gentle sway of your walk, you were finishing him off.

You sat down on the armchair in front of him. It was smaller, for one person. Your body sank into the soft fabric, your frame fitting perfectly into it, your hips pulled forward to place your two legs around the armrests of the armchair giving him the best view, front row seats to a show for two.

Your panties were soaked, from the center to the seam, clinging to your wet folds. He could see the shape of your pussy, trapped in those uncomfortable panties, his cock throbbed with a sway sending blood directly to his aching cock.

“I want you to come to me slowly and kneel before me...” You hinted with anticipation, as if you knew how loyal he was to your command. He wouldn't deny you something like that, not when you have your legs spread and your pussy trapped in thin fabric, silently inviting him to free it from its confines.

He gets up from the couch, letting out a muffled groan, his legs numb from being in that position for almost an hour. His hard cock bent painfully, begging for friction, for your attention, warmly lubricated with his slick, reddened at the tip. With just a touch of your fingers he would cum hard spilling his cum over your hands, but you wouldn't let him yet.

He approaches you with careful steps, his expression showing loyalty to your command, when his frame rose above you, he hesitated for a moment, unaccustomed to this change of role. The feeling quickly passed, you made him feel good, and he wanted to give you what you wanted from him, to test his limits.

He kneels before you, touching the cold floor with his knees, his hands clinging to your hips pulling you toward him, his torso leans forward, his face inches away from your visible arousal. You make a low, breathless sound, your heart pounding anxiously in your chest.

“Wait a moment... bring one of your hands to your cock and squeeze at the base. I want you to hold back while you take care of me.” Your right leg drops from the back of the armchair, and you extend your foot to press gently against Bucky's cock. He stifles a moan, a strangled whimper, opening his eyes in surprise, his dark eyebrows firmly knit together, furrowing them over his brow. Your foot felt slightly cold, delicate as a rose petal's touch, his cock warm dripping with need. The combination was overwhelmingly pleasurable. “I can feel you... don't masturbate, don't do anything I haven't allowed you to do.”

Your hand traced your abdomen, the fine hairs standing on end at your touch, your fingertips tracing delicate patterns as you moved down your lower belly until you reached the center of your need.

Your index and middle fingers moved your panties aside, revealing your delicate folds. You caught a glimpse of his gaze as you did so. Hungry was the best adjective to describe his situation, his eyes blinking heavily, his long lashes brushing his flushed cheeks, he didn't hesitate for a second.

He wrapped his right hand around the base, slowly and deliberately, his cock contracting in his palm, his jaw muscle tightening, hypersensitive, an unfamiliar stimulus in his body never before experienced.

Your foot is positioned against his balls and you can feel him gripping tightly around the base of his cock. It seemed obscene, your mind reeling to rethink this position, but it worked, you would maintain control over him, watch him this way, making sure he didn't touch himself secretly while he took care of you.

Although he was desperate to sink his mouth into your pussy, he took his time working you, with his free hand grabbing your ankle and placing it on his shoulder giving him more space to travel before reaching your overflowing heat.

His hand slid down the back of your calf, kneading the soft muscle of your legs, he leaned in, his lips pressed a wet kiss on your kneecap, your eyes looked at him with devotion, he didn't break eye contact, he made you feel powerful, loved, and desired, taking his time, he was methodical, the night would last forever for him if he could manage it to his advantage.

Another kiss, on the flesh of your thigh, the hairs on your leg bristled with goose bumps, the cold of the night colliding with the wet traces he left with his lips, his hand squeezed your calf firmly the sensation made you shiver deliciously, you were impatient but you didn't stop him, you just looked expectantly.

That's when you felt him dangerously close to your arousal. He kissed you on the inside of your thigh, then another slower, more persistent kiss, memorizing your vanilla body scent. The stubble of his beard created a delicious friction that tickled you faintly.

You let your guard down for a second when you felt the tip of his nose brushing against the small patch of your pubic hair, above your mons pubis, your hips contracted at the warmth of his breath, he curled up close, a low breathless moan hit close to your clit, he was inhaling your scent, the sweet musk enveloped his senses, the grip on his cock trembled, he's not frantic, he'll keep waiting until he has his release, it's about you, about making you feel good.

His tongue emerges from his lips teasing your clit with a touch as light as cotton, your hips shake, a loud moan spills from your lips, shit... you could have had your orgasm with that tiny lick.

His tongue moves in long, patient strokes, slow at first, your leg trembles, you rest your heel on his shoulder for stability.

His lips gently curl around the bud of your clit, he sucks lightly, your back arches a broken sound escapes your throat coming from deep within your chest. His tongue licked you with precision, slow, tight circles, snaking left and right, savoring the sweet pearl that adorned your pretty folds, he still licks you with control, unhurried, not careless, adoring the musky taste of your pussy. Your erect clit begins to throb intensely in his mouth.

He released your clit with a wet sound, a loud one on purpose so that it would not escape your ears, his tongue slid down searching for the source of your fluids, along the way he licked all your arousal, he was not going to waste anything tonight.

He teased your entrance, licking in circles again, you let out a muffled moan, you smooth his hair back and away from his face, your fingers caressing his chestnut strands before squeezing and holding him tightly, you take a moment to appreciate the sight of him submerged between your legs, licking everything he can, his blue eyes fixed on you with a primitive hunger you were going to lose your rhythm as soon as it began.

His hand reaches up to grab your honey thigh tightly, wishing he could grab both your thighs maneuvering you so your pussy was at his mercy, but the prison of his hand at the base of his cock denied him passage. He was an experienced man, he would find a way to continue to give you pleasure.

He thrusts his tongue into your entrance, pumping inside you. You scream with pleasure, your fingers clinging to strands of his hair. He moans in response, the sound vibrating against you. Your vision clouds and you suddenly see dark, you were so close to coming in his mouth.

He was forced to abandon your thigh, his hand hesitating until it reached your pussy, your poor neglected and abandoned clitoris, his thumb settling on your bud moving it in a creamy, pleasurable way, and it was enough for you to curl your toes in an electrifying tingle.

Your orgasm hits you unexpectedly, like a wave crashing against a rock, strong, slow, your senses sharpened, your vision blurred into a cloud of transparent micro stars, it was the best orgasm you'd ever had in your life, your body sank like jelly into the armchair, you had reached the peak so quickly because your body had been aroused since Bucky told you his sexual anecdote in Paris. You held it back very well and finally released the heavy burden of your orgasm.

Bucky didn't go unnoticed. You saw him pull away from your pussy, the sight was enchanting, taking your breath away. His cute pink lips were parted, panting, with a glistening sheen adorning them, your fluids, the peach-colored dust decorating his cheeks, his unkempt strands of hair falling across his forehead, sticking to the thin layer of sweat, adorable.

The tender scene didn't last as long as you would have liked, his thumb didn't leave its place, continuing his slow movement over your swollen and sensitive clitoris, pinching the bundle of nerves sending invisible sparks of fire through your body, you threw your head back letting out an erotic moan, you no longer held back, you didn't give a damn if anyone could hear you.

His eyes sparkled as they looked at your pussy, wet enough for his cock to roll easily between your folds. His imagination flew, his cock contracted, you decided when you would sink into his length impaling yourself on his thickness.

He dragged two fingers through the mess of your arousal, his middle and ring fingers sliding inside, deeply curved, pressing that rough spot near your pubis, one that sent your hips forward, your ass was on the edge of the couch, you could fall at any moment, he adjusted the support of your leg by raising his shoulder with a simple shrug, his fingers were busy sunk into you up to the knuckle.

He wasn't rough, but he wasn't delicate either, your pussy was lubricated enough to take his fingers inside you. You were hypersensitive, your vaginal walls squeezing him proudly, you were more than ready to receive him.

“James! Shit...” You exclaimed in a cry that echoed throughout the house. He smirked, fuck manners! you thought. Bucky saw your gaze, saw the round, crystal-clear tears swirling at the corners of your eyes. You were at your limit. He thought you had forgotten your dominance over him. Anyway, he wasn't an idiot, he would just give you one more orgasm and let you go.

"Sweetheart… gimme another one. I know you got it in ya..." His voice is raspy, deep, careless, his damn accent lit a fire in you, encouraging you to please him. Your ears were captivated by hearing him after so long, he was broken, just like you. Your breathing was uneven, pressure and moisture building between your legs, without rationalizing, without being able to control yourself.

His two fingers began to pump inside you, a slow and pleasurable stretch, as he slid his fingers in your walls instinctively squeezed them at random intervals, your thighs shook, the sounds were lewd, slippery, skin colliding with skin, your senses clouded by overstimulation.

He leaned back toward you, removed his thumb from your clitoris, and was immediately replaced by his mouth, closing his lips around the bud sucking hard, kissing it luxuriously, pressing your sensitive spot, curving his fingers as best he could, your head hit the back of the armchair, your hands holding on to whatever you could grab, you looked at the ceiling, your lips parted, moaning obscenely, you would deal with your neighbors' complaints tomorrow.

Your hips swayed forward, rolling toward his mouth, the tip of his nose brushing against the patch of hair above your clit, your body spasming, he knew how to handle you when you couldn't stop yourself.

Without warning, he slid a third finger inside you, his index finger, you screamed with pleasure. Your busy foot moved away from his erection and you lifted it onto his other shoulder squeezing your thighs around his head. He moaned loudly with his mouth busy, you felt the vibrations in your sore clit, he didn't stop.

Your eyes rolled back into your head, you loosened up, you felt the familiar burning knot in the pit of your stomach you were going to come for the second time, your feet dug into his shoulders, your thighs didn't suffocate him because they were trembling like jelly around his head.

His three fingers curled at a fast, controlled, deliberate pace, you feel his teeth gently scraping your clit, your body twisted, the pressure was fucking good, your whimpers drowned out the radio interference, you couldn't form coherent sentences, you couldn't command him to do anything, you were at his mercy for this fleeting moment.

His fingers pushed deeper, pumping you with wet sounds accompanying the melody of your moans, the tip of his tongue sliding erotically over your throbbing clit, swirling over you in large, sensual circles, his nose breathing in your sweet scent, he couldn't see you from that angle but he knew, he felt it, you were falling over yourself, he smiles to himself, smug... as if he knew exactly how good he was making you feel, the heat bubbling in your stomach warning you of your second best orgasm of the night, better than the first, you would dare to think.

You screamed in an erotic sound, your pussy walls squeezing him tightly, a little squirt coming out of you wetting his three fingers and part of his chin. You leaned against him, your body curving forward, almost collapsing off the couch, spasms running through you immediately, pleasure rising through you as you had your second orgasm.

Your head is blank, serotonin hormones rush through you from head to toe, you feel it all over your body, you needed this, you had no damn idea how much you needed Bucky to make you touch the sky with his fingers and tongue.

You are still trembling, melting in the intense heat that filled your body when he subtly moves away from your overflowing pussy, removing his fingers from your entrance with a sound that will probably stay in your head for a while, his thumb and index finger sliding down, holding your folds, spreading them gently watching as more of your fluids drip from your sensitive hole.

"Holy hell… would ya look at that, darlin'. You’re makin’ a mess down there." He murmurs in a heavy, excited tone of voice, full of pride in his work.

He runs his tongue all over your entrance, teasing, tasting your fluids, intoxicated by your arousal, cleaning up any trace of your wetness. He wanted to keep working you like a man committed to his woman's desire. You wanted him more than ever, but you stopped him.

You complained with a brief sound, he let you go, looked at you expectantly for your next command, he had been very sweet to you, you were going to reward him, you swore it to him from the beginning.

“Okay... you can let go now, go sit back down on the sofa.” Your voice was hoarse from the moans and cries you had let out during the intense oral sex session Bucky gave you that night. He obeys and returns to the same place where the night began for the two of you.

You get up with difficulty, your fingers tangled in the hem of your panties, which you heaved off and tossed somewhere random in the living room, your drunken but determined steps lead you to him, you climb carefully onto his lap, wrapping your thighs around him. His arms immediately encircle your hips, his fingers pressing into your skin leaving small pink marks from the pressure.

His hard cock was lining up with your slippery entrance, neither of you forced it, it was a natural reaction, his erection rose against you on its own and your wet pussy was ready to receive it.

Your gaze drops to see the scene, he moves one of his hands to cradle your chin, carefully, as if you might break, your fingers crawl freely up and over his pelvis, your ring fingers following the natural line of his V, his toned abdomen, the layer of sweat accentuated on them. You feel his skin shiver at your touch, goosebumps, hairs standing on end, you apply just enough pressure to his trembling muscles to draw a moan from his throat, you look at him, the two of you were ruined, the room smelled of the musk of your sexes, the light flickering tensely over their sweaty bodies, the blush on your cheeks did not go unnoticed by him, his thumb caressing you in a fragile touch, afraid to break that fine thread of intimacy.

"Tell me if this is what you want. I’d never do nothin’ you ain’t ready for. You got my word." You hate him, in a good way, his words sweetened your ear, you hissed a sound with your lips and raised one of your hands to his shoulder to balance yourself, you leaned towards him taking his cock in your free hand, you felt it contract in your hand, his length pressing comfortably between your folds, lubricating it with your fluids, the slow burn giving way to need, the urgency to have it inside you at once.

“Fuck yes... I'll ride you right now,” you muttered without further ado, watching his reactions, his hand moving toward your waist squeezing tightly, pressing against one of your ribs, his other hand resting on your shoulder near your sternum, waiting patiently.

You sank onto his cock without wasting any time, impaling yourself on his slippery length, both of you screaming with pleasure as the heat of your sexes merged for the first time, enveloping you in a feeling of unbridled, instinctive, overwhelming desire.

Your pussy walls squeezed him so tightly, you would be willing to milk him of everything he had been holding back in his testicles for over an hour, extracting every last drop of cum and receiving it in your womb, the idea gave you chills.

You guided yourself upward, moving with the help of gravity, letting yourself fall onto his cock, savoring every nerve, every throbbing vein of his phallus, every sensation. He stretched you pleasantly, but this didn't bother you. You were both well lubricated, your libido sky-high, but you wouldn't last long, you took advantage of your countdown.

Bucky's heart pounded loudly in his chest, his ragged breathing allowing his chest to rise and fall in a slow but torturous rhythm. You heard him curse in low breathless moans.

As soon as your pussy quickly got used to the thickness of his cock, your hips moved erotically, finding a rhythm as intoxicating as rum, making your cunt forget the burning sensation of overstimulation from your previous orgasms, preparing you for a third.

The adrenaline kept you active, but your muscles ached, a slight grimace appeared on your face, he didn't miss it, you felt cold where his hand once rested on your waist, warm and protective, without realizing it you felt a delicious shiver run down your spine when his fingertips traced soft touches along your lower back to the nape of your neck, you shuddered, your cunt contracting involuntarily around his cock.

His other hand moved down from your sternum, resting on your lower waist. He pulled you toward his warm chest, your arms sliding protectively around his broad shoulders until they embraced his neck. His sweat mixed with yours, the silent emotional response of his grip comforting you.

With the strength of his body, he holds you and opens his thighs to make more room, your feet in a squatting position, better than crushing your knees against the sofa.

"I got you, love. Lemme handle it." He whispered reassuringly. You feel his fingers move up your neck until they find your hair, his fingers running through the soft strands, gently scratching your scalp. Your breath catches when the tip of his nose brushes your jaw, moving down to your neck, positioning itself where your pulse begins, smelling the traces of perfume that still linger on your skin after this long day. He loves the floral scent of carnations, the natural vanilla of your skin, the musk that fills the room. He closed his eyes and memorized every bit of your unique scent, his cock throbbing eagerly inside you, you let out a low moan as you felt him buried to the hilt, his cock fit perfectly, the two of you were made for each other and you understood that on that very winter night.

His hips bent toward you, seeking more of that friction, that intimacy of being united in body and soul, you feel his pubic hair rubbing against your clit, a hoarse harmony comes out of your throat, a softened moan, he grabs you tightly preventing you from pulling away from his body, he remained still, the satisfying graze of every inch being dragged along your sensitive walls.

He decided that was enough, and began to penetrate you quickly. The sudden thrust caused your nails to dig into his back. He established a fast, strong, and deep rhythm. Bucky were doing so well that your only words were sounds muffled by your moans of lust.

You didn't want to be left behind, you jumped on his cock, balancing yourself with your thighs, he swayed with you each thrust perfectly matching your own movements, his cock hitting that sweet spot in your pussy, you whimpered, dizzy from the overstimulation, taking you much further than he could take you with his fingers.

Bucky left small reddish hickeys on the skin of your neck, your scent anchoring him to you like a ship at rest, he licked a bead of sweat one that fell from your jaw to your windpipe, his warm breath was too much for your senses, you were blinded.

Your nails dug precisely into his muscular back, he moaned against your throat, his hips meeting yours, his cock sliding in and out of your pussy, the wet sounds of flesh colliding, the natural lubrication of your sexes merging, making it faster, louder.

Bucky was holding back for your own pleasure, he wanted to keep listening to your moans, the heat of your cunt pressed against him, your trembling body, he was close to orgasm and wasn't very happy about it after all because he wanted to worship you all night, all your life from now on.

The only thing keeping you grounded was the coldness of his dog tags pressed against your chest. His voice broke into your clouded thoughts.

"Darlin’… you’re squeezin’ me just right. I’m gettin’ close. Tell me, sweetheart… where d’ya want me?" You heard him speak in a whisper, almost like a growl that started under his chest, vibrated in his throat before coming out of his mouth. You didn't answer right away, you concentrated on riding him hard pressing on the ideal spots for your pleasure and for him, your hips moving in circles, your clit rubbing against his pelvis, you're dizzy.

He let out a slow, manly moan, your pussy adjusted to the perfect size of his cock, you hugged him tightly squinting your eyes trying to relieve the pressure building up in the heat of his belly, you were close too.

"I ain’t gonna last much longer. Tell me baby... where d’ya want me?" He asks you a second time, his tone firm and hoarse, gently pulling your hair back to look into your eyes. Your back straightens stiffly, you weren't in your right mind to think about the consequences. You just nodded with your lips parted, the pretty glisten of your saliva rolling down the corners of your mouth.

"You want it, don’t ya? You want me to give you every drop, right here inside. Say it, love... tell me you want it. I need to hear it." You watched the possessive gleam in his eyes. You wouldn't admit it, but you loved this dominant side of him.

“Fuck yes! Fill me up until I overflow, I've been waiting for this all night.” You sobbed, every roll of your hips, the way you naturally undulated against him, the way he contrasted you with his desperate movements, fucking you with all the energy left in his body, seeking to release your orgasm and his.

His fingers dug into the skin of your back, his knuckles white from the pressure, he pulled you back toward his body to press hard into you burying his face in your chest, you felt his warm breath brush your sternum, his manly moans were your new addiction.

It burned and scorched at the same time, your vision blackened for an instant, your walls pulsed tight around him, spasming with every beat of your climax, the friction of his pelvis against your clit was what led you to touch the clouds for the third time, your body was on the edge, a tingling sensation filled your head releasing endorphins and hormones, you had never experienced such strong emotions, it was enchanting, but you couldn't bear another release.

His hips began to shake, careless, uncoordinated movements until you felt it for the first time, you feel him spill into you, he cried out against you, clinging to you as waves of pleasure washed over him, he stayed inside you, his cock throbbing with difficulty, your pussy squeezing him in coordination, strings of hot thick cum covered your cervix and the inner walls of your cunt.

He pushed slowly, savoring every sensation, his release overwhelming him so much that he remained inside you, anchoring him to reality, his grip loosening letting you breathe heavily, his hands falling lazily digging into the soft curve of your hips. Your knees fell to either side of him, your limbs aching like hell, you wouldn't be taking a shower today, even though you desperately needed one. You wanted the comfort of your bed now and all night long.

The silence of the room was interrupted by the beating of your heart deafening your ears, his low gasps, and a soft jazz melody. The damn radio recovered its signal just as you both reached orgasm. How convenient.

You are lost in your thoughts when he takes you by the nape of your neck, lifting his face from your chest towards you. He caresses both your cheeks, his thumbs wiping the wet corners of your eyes, the back of his hand sweeping the sweat from your forehead. You look like shit, and you are sure of that, but he looks at you with admiration, with devotion and love, and that melts you inside.

"Everything okay, dove? You need anythin’?" He asks gallantly, patiently and attentively waiting for you to say something. Outside, snow begins to fall in small flakes, gently hitting your window in silent waves.

The heat of your orgasm and his body heat give you stability, but as soon as your ecstasy subsides, your body shivers a little from the cold of the night. You hug him, resting your head on his chest, your index finger traveling over his dogs tags, taking them between your fingers in a meticulous inspection, reading his information. You look over at the coffee table, where two cups of hot chocolate sit, obviously cold from being abandoned. He never touched his.

“I need my blankets, another cup of hot chocolate, and... are you staying the night or do you have to go?” You asked with a hint of concern in your voice. You had grown fond of him and didn't want to sleep alone. The blankets would feel quite empty without his warmth.

"I’ll stick around till dawn, princess. Don’t worry the night’s still young for us." The corners of his lips curved upward in that familiar way you had known since the first day, kind and flirtatious. His thumbs drew soft circles on your cheek, your hand reaching forward to cover his fingers, intertwining as you closed your eyes in a silent gesture of peace. There was still a long way to go for Bucky and you, for him to ask for your hand in marriage with honor, but you were happy, you hadn't felt this way in a long time, you would convince yourself to give what your heart dictated a chance.

Author’s Note pt2: If you've made it this far, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you enjoyed this, please leave a comment, reblog, or like. It helps motivate me every day. Stay safe <3

[elizawritestoo]

santa, baby⋆.𐙚 ̊

alt version | part of my winter holiday celebration | main masterlist

pairing: avengers!bucky barnes x f!reader summary: you'd been living dangerously all night. prancing around in that short dress, drinking a few too many christmas cocktails, and taking your role as mrs. claus a bit too seriously... or, you drunkenly sit in bucky's lap. wc: 3.0k warnings (18+): smut [making out, lap sitting, dry humping, cumming in pants], alcohol consumption, descriptions of drunkeness, not proofread, pics are not representative of reader's physical traits!!

note: this is an alternative version of my dec. 7 fic, secret santa. this is the same au, same reader & same bucky but in this fic there's no secret santa game being played. some sections are taken directly from the previous fic, this is just my alternative idea for how it plays out.

you had always annoyed bucky. gotten under his skin for some reason that he couldn't quite figure out. there was just something about you that bugged the hell out of him. not that he'd ever admit it to your face; you were the avengers' darling after all. their favorite lab assistant, cute as a button and always ready to help. you were such a good employee that tony had you move into one of the spare rooms in avengers tower, so you'd literally always be there to help.

great for you and everyone else, fucking hell for bucky. every corner he turned, there you were with that stupid fucking smile on your face, chatting with someone, probably brightening their day.

you'd tried to do that with bucky only to be shut down every time. the truth was, you'd admired bucky, knowing he'd been through so much. so you'd tried to talk to him and become friends but every time you spoke he'd say maybe one word then just walk away. it got to the point where you just stopped trying. and you were fine with not talking, thinking that maybe he was just awkward and not social (which was true), but then you noticed other things. like how he'd stare at you sometimes, but not just staring, he was glaring. or sometimes he'd roll his eyes at something you said. it was hard not to be offended, even with steve telling you not to take it personally.

for the most part, you kept it cordial with bucky. you didn't try to start conversations with him anymore (which bothered him more than he would like to admit), but you also weren't out right rude to him. he was just around. that is until one fateful weekend: the weekend of the avengers' christmas party.

you had been excited about the party for weeks, even ordering a mrs. claus costume to wear. though it was a little more scandalous than you usually went for (as you told natasha during your thirty minute debate about whether or not it was appropriate), you had thrown caution into the wind and decided to wear the dress anyways.

the party was all christmas cocktails, sugar cookies, and santa hats galore. everyone had loved your costume, some maybe a little too much; you had seen pepper smack tony's arm after he ogled a little too long.

you had also come up with a spectacularly terrible drinking game for yourself where every time you felt self conscious about your outfit, you took a sip. this is how you ended up loudly singing christmas carols with sam, much to everyone else's annoyance.

this annoyance led many to having even more drinks. at some point, thor produced a bottle of liquor he said was from another of the nine realms or something, though you weren't really listening. you were far too busy nearly dying as one sip of the liquor seemed to have burned the skin off your throat. so even though you stuck to the earthly cocktails, the extra terrestrial liquor did turn it into a proper party. maybe a little bit too much.

tony had--for some reason--felt encouraged to challenge thor to a drink off, which he lost nearly immediately, having to be comforted by pepper (thor laughing and bruce shaking his head as they watched). sam had taken two shots of the E.T. and was now laid out on the couch. steve was by his side making sure he was okay while nat laughed and documented the situation on her camera phone.

this left bucky somewhat unattended in a corner of the party. while everyone else's attention was elsewhere, yours had focused in on said lonely man as you finished your fourth drink.

the alcohol had done its job (and a damn good one) lowering your inhibitions, so you fearlessly walked (stumbled) up to bucky with a smile on your face.

"buckyyy," you sing as you approach. he had been watching you approach and was now looking up at you expectantly. before he can process what was happening you sat yourself down. right in his lap. it's a bold move, and though you definitely feel looser with the alcohol in your system, you're fully aware of what you were doing.

he hadn't been ready for it, and apparently neither had you, because you immediately begin to tip over. his hands shoot out and grab your hips instinctively, steadying you on his leg. your hands reach out for his shoulders, which you now happily hold onto as you smile at him even bigger.

"ohh, bucky!" you say excitedly, "merry christmas!" you give a little bounce to emphasize your happiness.

he just watches you with a rapt curiousity as you swing your legs over his so he's practically holding you bridal style. he keeps one arm around your back to keep you from falling over again.

"yeah, merry christmas," he mumbles before looking around the room to see if anyone else was aware of what was happening right now. they weren't.

"oh." he turns back to see you pouting as you look at him. "you're not having a good time?" any other time, you would have expected him to roll his eyes and tell you to leave him alone. but the way you were looking at him right now, lips drawn in a pout, eyes wide with sadness-- he just wants you to look happy again.

"no, it's okay," he tries, "it's a nice party." he watches your mouth change into a lopsided smile, like you were halfway between happy and sad.

"yeah, i guess." you shift in his lap as you turn to look out at the party, which was starting to empty out as thor carried tony to his and pepper's room. as you move, you unknowingly scoot closer to him, your ass getting dangerously close to the bulge in his pants that he's currently hyperfocused on keeping down.

the little dress you're wearing doesn't help one bit. the fur trim around your low-cut collar doesn't do much to hide your breasts. the skirt of the dress was so short that it had lifted up, meaning your bare thighs and underwear are resting on his jeans. damn it, bucky, why would you think about her underwear at a time like this?

you sigh loudly, pulling his attention back to your face. "bucky, you're always so sad. it makes me sad. i just-- steve's told me a bit about what happened and i know you don't like me, but i just want to help. i like you a lot, bucky, and you--"

you stop suddenly, leaving bucky hanging as he waits for you to continue. he unconsciously leans in closer to your face, like maybe he just can't hear you.

you, on the other hand, feel your face flush at your admission of liking him. the alcohol must be wearing off because you can feel some embarrassment start to slip in. what were you doing telling him all this?

"i'm sorry, i should--" you start to get off his lap, but his hands quickly wrap around your waist, pulling you back onto him. you gasp as he pulls you close, your leg accidentally brushing against the growing tent in his pants.

"wait," he says lowly. "don't." you look at him with your eyebrows furrowed. "i don't hate you." he says it so quietly you aren't sure if you even really hear it. your eyes dart around his face until his gaze becomes too much and you look down at your lap.

"bucky..." you breathe out. the air between you two had gotten thick. you can feel yourself getting more and more sober by the second, just as you feel his cock getting harder and harder against your thigh.

you look up at him and swear you're even closer than you were before. his face is just inches from yours as he watches you.

"i don't hate you," he repeats. though they're simple words, ones that shouldn't excite you the way they do, they feel like more than just a statement of indifference. maybe it's because you know that him saying anything to you is a huge step forward. or maybe it's because he's like three inches from your face and his eyes keep stealing down to your lips.

you act on basic feeling, closing the distance between your lips and his. it's soft, almost too soft. he's so gentle, it's like he thinks he's going to break you. he pulls away after only a few seconds, his face hovering a few inches from yours. he begins to whisper your name before someone interrupts.

"hey buck!"

bucky quickly helps you slide off his lap onto the seat next to him. you both look to steve walking towards y'all. as he gets closer, he starts looking between the two of you, like he knows he's interrupted something.

"sorry, uh, we're gonna take sam to his room. make sure he gets back okay," steve says, gesturing to where natasha is standing in front of a very intoxicated sam. "are you..?"

"i'm fine," bucky says gruffly.

steve looks between the two of you again, like he's not sure he believes it. bucky huffs a sigh. "steve, really, i'm fine."

"okay. uh, let me know if you need anything. i'll just be with sam for a minute," steve says. he looks between the two of you again before giving you a nod and walking back towards sam. he gives the two of you another look before he helps natasha carry sam towards his room.

this is when you look around to realize the party has ended. however, you don't think whatever is happening between you and bucky has ended just yet.

"bucky--"

"i'm sorry. i shouldn't have--"

"no, i'm sorry. i kissed you--"

"no, no," bucky says, putting his hands up. "you're drunk. i shouldn't have kissed you."

you shake your head. "i'm not that drunk."

"you stumbled up here and sat in my lap," he says matter-of-factly.

"okay? i'm-- i knew what i was doing. i still do." you didn't mean for the words to come out so breathless. they almost sounded like a proposition, though neither of you know quite how to respond. you decide to start again. "bucky," you say carefully, "i kissed you. and i'm sorry if it made you uncomfortable. i shouldn't have--"

"it didn't."

you're at a loss for words. you teeth pull your bottom lip in, biting like maybe it'll give you an answer for what to do next. your brain can't seem to come up with the right thing to do, so you, for the second time tonight, decide to act based on feeling.

"bucky, i want you."

bucky almost can't believe it, but you said it so softly, so earnestly. his hands twitch at his sides, wanting to reach out and hold you again so badly but his mind is stopping him. his eyes are analyzing your face, trying to see if you're telling the truth. do you really mean this? you couldn't possibly...

"bucky," you say his name to break him out of his thoughts. "please say something."

he doesn't say anything. he can't. because you're impatient, tired of this limbo you've been in for what feels like hours. so you pushed your body forward onto his, gingerly pressing your lips against his.

bucky stills for a second, before his resolve snaps and his hands fly to your waist. he pulls you in closer until you're on his lap again, thighs around his hips. you deepen the kiss as you wrap your arms around his neck, fingers dancing in the ends of his hair.

you feel his erection against your core as you mindlessly grind against him. his arms wrap around your torso, his flesh hand snaking up to grip the back of your neck which allows him to pull you impossibly closer to him.

the kiss only breaks after you moan into his mouth from the feeling of his jeans against your clit. you're practically panting above him as you grind against his hardened cock, but he's not doing much better. it's understandable why you're so enthusiastic about getting off on his lap (you haven't been with another person since before moving in to the tower). it makes you wonder how long it's been since he was with someone. the wonderment is cut off when his mouth greedily seeks yours again.

he groans after you grind against him particularly roughly, almost bouncing as you move your clothed cunt against him. the feeling of your warmth against his dick, even through the several layers of fabric, has his mind melting.

"fuck," you breathe as you feel your pussy clench around nothing.

he can practically feel your wetness soaking onto his jeans and he nearly cums at the thought. honestly, he doesn't know how long he's going to last. with your soft mouth on his lips, your chest bouncing against his, and your warm, wet cunt desperately rutting against his cock... it's hard to believe he's lasted this long.

"oh, sweetheart," he groans, "slow down. i'm-- i'm not gonna last."

the sound of his voice pushes you to the edge of orgasm. "oh fuck, bucky," you nearly whimper. "it's okay, i'm close."

you bury your head in his neck as you keep grinding against his shaft, desperate for your orgasm. you feel his hands run up and down your thighs before they come to squeeze your hips so hard they may bruise, like he's trying to keep control.

"it's okay, bucky," you breathe as your orgasm approaches. "oh fuck," you whine as his cock twitches from inside his jeans. you can feel him pulsing through the fabric as he cums, the knowledge sending you over the edge. he squeezes your hips even tighter as he presses you against him. your pussy clenches over and over, wetness leaking out of your hole.

your breathing is uneven at best as you ride out your orgasm against him. you feel the remnants of whatever alcohol you drank wash over you in your haze, suddenly feeling very tired as you slouch against his body.

you listen to his breathing calm down, feeling his heartbeat against you as you lay on his chest. eventually, he loosens his grip on your hips. after a minute of regaining some of your composure, you lean back from him.

"are you okay?" he asks quietly.

"yeah," you sigh, content even as exhaustion takes over. "you?"

he nods, but he seems off. his eyes are looking anywhere but directly into yours and he just feels... far away. you place your hand lightly on his cheek, forcing him to look into your eye.

"you're sure?" you ask again.

he draws in a sharp breath, but nods a few seconds later. you bite your lip, unsure of if you believe him. but you're not able to say anything before he speaks.

"you should go to bed." and with that, he's already lifting you off his lap. he practically holds you mid air while your legs untangle from his body and drop to the ground. you're still a little wobbly, so he keeps a firm arm supporting you as you make your way towards the hallway.

passing through the empty common room, you remember how the party was raging earlier. some of the lights have automatically dimmed, leaving just the twinkle lights to keep the room aglow. you can see lights of the skyline through the glass, but you prefer the warmth of the lights in here.

bucky leads you to your room. he opens the door for you and starts to walk you to your bed before you stop him.

"wait just a second, i've gotta go to the bathroom," you get to the bathroom door before turning back and adding, "don't leave yet," before disappearing into the bathroom.

you're quicker than usual going to the bathroom and honestly a little surprised when he's still there after you're done. you crack a little smile at how out of place he looks in your bedroom. his large frame against the rather cozy feel of your room... it's cute.

"hey," you say softly as you walk up next to where he stands against the wall of your room. you can feel sleep begging to take over, but you need to talk to him first. "i don't regret what we just did, you know? and i do like you." he doesn't reply with more than a nod, so you ask the question that has been stirring for the past few minutes. "do you regret it?"

you hold your breath as you wait for an answer, staring into his eyes like maybe they'll give you a hint on how he's feeling. he shakes his head.

"no. but we can talk about it tomorrow. you need to sleep." you huff. you don't know if you're fully happy with his answer but you also know he's right.

you turn towards your dresser and start unzipping your dress, not caring if he's looking (partially because you're too tired to care and partially because you literally just dry humped him until you both came in your pants). you pull on clean underwear and pajamas, stealing a glance in his direction to find he's turned his back to give you privacy. you smile despite yourself at his gentlemanly ways before walking up to him and tapping him on the shoulders.

"promise me that we'll talk tomorrow. first thing," you say, your vulnerability evident in your voice. bucky nods.

"i promise," he says before pressing a chaste kiss to your forehead. it happens so quickly, the next morning you're not even sure it really did happen.

but the next morning you also wake to find him waiting outside your door, ready to discuss what happened last night. you had to insist to him several times that you were within your right mind when you hooked up with him for him to believe you, but eventually the conversation turns sweet.

note: ok up to the wire on this dec. 25 deadline for this story but it's a holiday. i hope y'all enjoyed this. it may be a bit of a mess because honestly i wrote it over like two days and was tired both times. also second fic in a row featuring dry humping... whoops. that's what i get for trying to branch out and not have piv in every fic.

taglist: @bonjourjiminie @yesav111 @paubotty27 @alastorssimp @cynbx @reidmiss-3

-> join my taglist!

[daydreamgoddess14]

I'll do that thing 🔥

Bucky x f!Reader established but secret 🤫

It's too damn hot, the AC is broken, and your boyfriend is a furnace. But there are solutions.

Bucky Masterlist

word count: 1.1k

warnings: pussy slapping, Bucky's vibranium hand, fingering... just a bit of heatwave filth, really. Encouraged by the gif above, darling @sunday-bug ☀️ and my other feral beauties in the gc.

There was sweat in places you couldn't even begin to imagine.

It pooled in the small of your back, in the valley of your breasts, the crook of your elbow, the backs of your knees, behind your ear.

“Engineers said next week,” Bob huffed, flopping down on the floor. Even the marble tiles were hot to the touch.

“I'll be dead by next week,” Lena groaned.

“Think I'm dead now.” You sighed. You shifted an inch to the left, peeling your leg off the one next to you.

The leg moved an inch closer.

You moved another inch away.

When it went to move again, you slapped your palm down hard on their bare leg.

“Ow! Shit!”

“Buck, you're like a furnace. Stop putting your leg against me,” you whined.

“How is every engineer in City busy?” Alexei demanded. “I fix it!”

“No!” Half a dozen voices rang out in unison.

“I'll fix it,” Bucky announced, standing up.

For you, the relief was immediate.

“You?” Ava asked, highly skeptical.

“Me. Fixed Sam's boat. What's an AC unit gonna do?”

“Blow up?” You shrugged.

“Better come with me then, in case it explodes.”

“No way.”

“It'll be cooler in the basement?”

“Deal.”

Across the room, John nudged Ava and wiggled his eyebrows.

“Have fun!”

"Don't do anything I wouldn't do!”

“In this heat?” Lena grimaced. “Disgusting.”

“Fuck you, Walker!” You gave him the middle finger as you followed Bucky out of the room and into the elevator.

“You've gotta stop touching me in front of them,” you said as soon as the doors were closed. “They're gonna know.”

“They already do, babe.” He shrugged.

The basement was cooler, barely.

You found the hopeless AC unit wheezing and whirring. Bucky looked around it, his eyebrows pinched together.

Whatever this was, it hadn't been going on for long. Weeks and months of tense sparring sessions, flirty comments, and open ogling had culminated in him turning up at your door one night and barely putting you down since.

You hopped up to sit on a crate while he ‘worked’. In reality, it was a chance to ogle.

“Can feel you watching me, sweetheart. Something you need?”

“In this heat? Come near me and I'll bite you.”

“Promise?” As he turned to ask the question, he yanked a hose out of the unit.

With a violent hiss, a plume of freezing mist streamed out. “Oh. Shit.” He turned back to the unit.

“Want me to hold anything?” You peered around the unit. While you were distracted, he placed his left palm on the back of your neck.

The vibranium was ice cold against your hot, sticky skin. “Ohh fuck -” you breathed.

“Yeah?” He stepped behind you, replacing his hand with his mouth. His hand, still cold, pulled the neck of your cami down and pinched your quickly pebbling nipple.

Your head fell back onto his shoulder, giving him a perfect view down your body. Your back arched into his touch.

“Still too hot?” He murmured against your neck.

“Mmm, why? You gonna cool me down?”

“Gonna try,” he removed his hand, warmed by your skin, and put it back in the path of the freezing steam.

“S'too hot, Buck,” you insisted, moving out of his hold. Your body was on fire.

“C'mon, I'll do that thing?” He held you tighter, his voice pleading. “Need to touch you, baby.”

The fog hissed, curling around his wrist.

He dragged the cold vibranium fingers back along your collarbone, then lower, tracing the swell of your breast until you gasped. The contrast made your skin pebble under his touch - hot and flushed, meeting ice cold metal.

“That better?” he murmured, voice thick with amusement.

You didn’t answer. Not with words, just a low, breathy moan.

He circled your nipple with the very tips of his fingers, letting the cold settle in, sharp enough to make you shiver - then cupped your breast in full. A soft whimper escaped you, hips twitching as heat pooled low in your belly.

“Still too warm,” he said, almost to himself.

His hand slipped lower. Past your stomach. Down between your thighs.

The first brush of cold fingers against your slick heat made your whole body jolt.

“Fuck,” you hissed, breath catching.

“That’s it,” he murmured, dragging the metal through your folds again - slower this time, letting you feel the contrast between hot and cold.

Then - a sharp, deliberate slap.

It wasn’t hard, just sudden - a stinging smack of cold against the wet heat of your pussy, and your hips bucked instinctively, a broken moan tearing from your throat.

“Jesus,” you gasped, “do that again.”

He chuckled low in your ear. “Told you.”

Another slap, a little firmer this time. The sound of it, sharp and obscene, sent a shockwave straight through your gut. Then his fingers were between your folds, stroking with slow, steady pressure - cool vibranium rubbing where you needed it most.

“You’re soaking,” he growled. “All that heat getting to you?”

“You,” you whispered, grinding into his hand. “It’s you, Bucky, fuck -”

One finger slid inside - impossibly cold, your body clenching around him eagerly, greedy for it. Then another. He moved them in slow, curling thrusts while his thumb circled your clit in soft, frosty sweeps.

His teeth grazed your neck, his right hand held your hip steady while his left had you seeing god.

It was overwhelming. Heat and cold, sharp slaps and gentle strokes - your nerves couldn’t tell which was coming next.

When he smacked you again, right against your clit this time, your whole body jerked, your thighs trembling. He held you up against him, your back slicked with sweat against his broad chest.

“Oh my god,” you whimpered, hips grinding helplessly against him, pressing hard against your ass. “Don’t stop, please -”

“Not planning to, sweetheart.”

His fingers pumped faster, curling with every thrust, the heel of his hand pressing just right. And when he slapped you again, just once more, timed perfectly, it tipped you over the edge.

You came hard, body arching, a cry caught in your throat as everything clenched and broke open.

He held you through it, murmuring something against your neck you couldn’t even hear over the rush of blood in your ears.

“Oh god,” you breathed heavily.

With an obscene pop, he removed his hand from your aching pussy. He brought his digits to your mouth and you licked them clean.

He turned you gently, leaning you against the AC unit, pulled your top back up, and placed the softest kiss to your lips.

He weaved his hand through the freezing steam one more time and placed it between your shoulder blades. The cool relief made you sigh, the memory of his cold touch made your hips jerk against him, still hard.

“You not done, baby?”

Despite the heat, you arched into him, winding your arms around his neck.

“Not even close. Come take a cold shower with me?”

“Shower?” he grinned, gripping your thighs. “Nah, I want to make you sweat harder first.”

[gn0czi]

I just had to draw this, I couldn't resist

[aderna01]

Neon Lights and Ferris Wheel Rides

pairing:  junior!bucky x sophomore!f!reader

summary: you head to a famous carnival with your lifelong best friends, steve and bucky, expecting nothing but rides and sugar, only to find bucky brought another girl along. the night twists through neon lights, sharp comments, unexpected jealousy, and bucky defending you when you least expect it. when steve heads out early, you and bucky end up alone under the glowing sky, stumbling into soft moments, shared thrills, and a spark that feels impossible to ignore.

warnings: pure fluff, cursing, friendship, romance, no use of y/n.

word count: 8.2k

song inspo: sugar talking by sabrina carpenter

a/n: ugh i wrote this because i went to a carnival recently and i had so many ideas for this while on the ferris wheel!!! Carnivals are so fun and this story was SO CUTE, i was literally giggling and kicking my feet while editing this EEEK! (i spent too much time on this so i didn’t proof read, sorry!!)

─˖· masterlist

you, bucky, and steve had been a trio since you were all in sandbox together, your three little buckets making a perfect triangle in the golden sand. steve and bucky were born in the same year, two peas in a pod, while you trailed behind them, the tagalong little sister they never actually minded having around. growing up, it was always bucky with the easy charm and the devil-may-care grin, steve with the steady heart and the righteous gaze, and you, the quiet observer who catalogued every stolen glance and every shared secret. it was no surprise to anyone that when your college acceptance letter arrived, you were bound for the same sprawling university campus as them, a fact that had you all bouncing on the balls of your feet with a giddiness that felt like pure, unadulterated sunshine.

college life was a whirlwind of caffeine-fueled study sessions in the library, the smell of old books and stale coffee, your constant companions. you were a sophomore now, navigating the sprawling campus with a bit more confidence than you had as a freshman, but still feeling like you were playing catch-up to bucky and steve, who were juniors and seemed to have this whole thing figured out. bucky, with his effortlessly tousled brown hair and eyes the color of a summer sky just before a storm. he had the campus reputation for being a bit of a heartbreaker. you'd watched him from the sidelines, metaphorically speaking, as he dated a string of girls: the cheerleader, the poetry major, the girl from his chemistry class. each one was beautiful and bright, and each one eventually faded away, leaving bucky unscathed and charming as ever. steve, on the other hand, was the steady one, the one who had a serious girlfriend or two, relationships that were built on a foundation of mutual respect and shared values.

you had always, always had a crush on bucky. it was a fact as constant as the north star, a secret you kept tucked away in the deepest corner of your heart. he was harmlessly flirty with everyone, his compliments as easy and natural as breathing, and you were always on the receiving end of them. "hey, beautiful," he'd say, slinging an arm around your shoulders as you walked across the quad. "that color looks amazing on you." or, "don't study too hard, sweetheart, wouldn't want you to burn out that brilliant brain of yours." and every time, you'd feel a little flutter in your chest, a tiny spark of hope that you'd immediately stamp out. you were too scared of messing up the perfect, fragile thing the three of you had. you were a unit, a tripod, and you wouldn't risk that for anything, not even for the possibility of something more with him. so you smiled, and you laughed, and you pushed your feelings down, down, down, convincing yourself it was all just a part of who bucky was; a charming, slightly flirty player who didn't mean anything by it.

it was a tuesday, and you were crammed into a lecture hall for your intro to sociology class, the professor's voice a monotonous drone that was doing a poor job of competing with the glorious sunshine streaming through the tall windows. thankfully this was one of the few classes you thoroughly enjoyed on campus. not because of the teacher, but because of two of your best friends, one being a gorgeous tall and beefy frame that sat next to you.

the three of you didn’t end up in this class by accident, no. you planned for this. you remember having forced bucky and steve to sit down and create a plan of their semester classes up until their graduation date. now, when it came to choosing the electives, you all agreed to pick sociology together, hoping it was interesting enough to keep you guys entertained for a semester.

you were scribbling notes, your pen scratching against the paper, when bucky, who was sitting next to you, nudged your elbow. you glanced over, and he was grinning, that same mischievous, boyish grin that had gotten the three of you into more trouble than you could count.

"guess what i got," he whispered, his voice low and conspiratorial.

you raised an eyebrow, trying to focus on the professor's diagram of social stratification. "a passing grade on your last exam?" you teased.

"ha ha, very funny," he said, rolling his eyes. "no, better. way better." he reached into his backpack and pulled out three neon green tickets, the kind that looked like they'd been printed at a cheap carnival. "the traveling carnival is in town this weekend. the big one. the one with the roller coaster and the giant ferris wheel. i got us three tickets."

your eyes widened, and for a moment, you forgot all about social stratification. the carnival was a legendary event, a temporary city of lights and sounds that set up on the outskirts of town for one weekend every fall. you'd been talking about wanting to go for weeks, but the tickets were notoriously expensive and sold out fast. "bucky, are you serious?" you breathed, your heart doing a little leap. "how did you even get these?"

"i have my ways," he said, wiggling his eyebrows. "i know a guy who knows a guy. but yeah, i'm serious. for friday night. you, me, and stevie. we're gonna go."

on your other side, steve, who had been pretending to be absorbed in his textbook, leaned over. "the carnival? nice, buck!" he said, giving bucky a fist bump in front of you, his face lighting up. "i've been wanting to try that deep-fried everything stand."

you felt a wave of pure, unadulterated happiness wash over you. it was just going to be the three of you, just like old times. "this is amazing, bucky," you said, your voice full of genuine gratitude. "thank you. i didn't think i'd be able to go."

"of course," he said, his smile softening as he looked at you. "wouldn't leave you guys out." he reached over and tucked a stray piece of hair behind your ear, his fingers brushing against your cheek for a fleeting second. it was a simple, friendly gesture, but it sent a jolt through you all the same. "it's gonna be great."

the rest of the week passed in a blur of classes and assignments, but the thought of the carnival was a constant, bright spot in your mind. you found yourself daydreaming about it during your lectures, imagining the neon lights reflecting in bucky's eyes, the smell of popcorn and cotton candy hanging in the air, the sound of laughter and screams echoing from the rides. when friday finally arrived, you felt a strange, unfamiliar sense of nervous energy buzzing under your skin. you were in your dorm room, staring at your closet, a feeling you couldn't quite identify swirling in your stomach.

you should have just thrown on your usual jeans and a hoodie. that was your go-to, your uniform. but instead, you found yourself pulling out a pair of dark-wash, tiny, denim shorts that you usually saved for special occasions, and a soft, dark red sweater. you spent an unusual amount of time on your hair, trying to get it to fall in just the right way, and you even dug out a tube of mascara and a hint of lip gloss. you caught your reflection in the mirror, a flicker of self-consciousness making you blush. what were you doing? this was just bucky and steve. you'd known them your entire life. you'd seen them with food poisoning and broken arms and terrible haircuts. why did it smatter what you looked like?

a little voice in the back of your head whispered, ‘because it's bucky.’ but you quickly shoved that voice aside, telling yourself you were just being silly. you were just excited to go to the carnival. that was all. you slid on your shoes and headed out to meet them, your heart thumping a little faster than usual.

they were waiting for you by the main entrance of your dorm building, just like they always were. steve was leaning against the brick wall, scrolling through his phone, and bucky was standing next to him, his hands shoved in his pockets, a small, thoughtful smile on his face. when he saw you, his smile widened, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

"hey, look who it is," he said, pushing off the wall and opening his arms for a hug. you walked into them, breathing in the familiar scent of his cologne, something clean and woodsy. "ready to have your mind blown?"

"always," you said, your voice muffled against his shoulder. when you pulled back, you noticed someone standing a few feet behind him. she was tall and blonde, with a perfectly manicured smile and a cute miniskirt that looked like it belonged in a club, not at a dusty carnival. she was looking at bucky with an expression of proprietary interest, and your stomach did a little flip-flop that had nothing to do with excitement.

"chloe, this is," bucky said your name, introducing you and turning to the girl and then back to you. bucky repeated your name, continuing with the introductions “, this is chloe."

your smile froze on your face. "oh," you said, trying to recover quickly. "hi! It's really nice to meet you,” your smile more welcoming by the second.

"you too," chloe said, her voice smooth as silk, but her eyes were cool as they raked over you. "bucky's told me so much about you,” she said plainly, still eyeing you.

you glanced at bucky, who was rubbing the back of his neck, a slight flush on his cheeks. "yeah, well, i hope all good things," you said, trying to joke, but it fell a little flat.

"i hope you don't mind that i invited her," he said, turning to you and steve, his expression a little apologetic. "i bought an extra ticket."

"of course not," steve said, ever the peacemaker, stepping forward to offer chloe a friendly smile. "the more the merrier."

you got lost in your thoughts for a second. you recognized her name from campus whispers, a sophomore in your year who was rumored to be as sharp as broken glass and twice as evil. you'd always given people the benefit of the doubt, assuming most rumors were just little white lies born from jealousy or boredom.

bucky's eyes had lit up when he'd mentioned her joining them, a bright, eager look that you'd rarely seen directed at anyone else. you felt a little pang of jealousy, but ultimately shrugged it off because you knew he didn’t like you like that. you had no right to feel that way. you were just his friend. and besides, maybe she was nice. maybe all the rumors were wrong.

the carnival was a sensory explosion from the moment you stepped through the gates. the sun was just beginning to dip towards the horizon, painting the sky in strokes of orange and pink, and the entire place was buzzing with a chaotic, joyful energy. the air was thick with the smells of popcorn, fried dough, and sweet, spun sugar, all mingling with the faint scent of diesel from the generators. neon lights in every color imaginable blinked and pulsed, casting a kaleidoscope of reflections on the wet pavement. the sound system was a cacophony of upbeat pop music, the delighted shrieks of people on the rides, and the booming voice of a carnival barker promising a prize to anyone who could ‘knock down the milk bottles!’

"wow," you breathed, your eyes wide with wonder. it was even better than you'd imagined. "this is incredible."

"told you," bucky said, his voice full of pride. he was standing close to chloe, his hand resting possessively on the small of her back. "so, what first? the tilt-a-whirl? the haunted house?"

"definitely the roller coaster," you exclaimed, pointing towards the massive metal structure that loomed over the rest of the carnival like a giant, skeletal beast. its tracks twisted and turned in impossible loops, and you could hear the screams of its riders echoing across the fairgrounds.

"i don't think so," chloe said, wrinkling her nose. "i just got my hair done. and i don't want to get whiplash."

"oh," you said quickly, your enthusiasm deflating slightly. "right. well, maybe the ferris wheel then? we could see the whole town from the top,” you smiled.

"that's a bit... boring, don't you think?" chloe said, tapping a perfectly manicured nail against her chin. "how about we play some games first? i want a prize." she looked up at bucky, batting her lashes and smiling "are you gonna win me that teddy bear bucky?"

bucky's chest seemed to puff up a little. "for you? anything," he said, half joking and half flirting, his voice a low, a charming rumble. he led them over to a booth where a man with a grizzled face was gesturing towards a pyramid of milk bottles. steve followed, shooting you an apologetic look over his shoulder. you trailed behind them, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in your stomach.

you watched as bucky paid for three balls, his muscles flexing in his t-shirt as he wound up for the throw. he was a natural athlete, and it showed. the first ball flew through the air and knocked down all three bottles in the front row. chloe clapped her hands delicately and smiled. the second ball took out another row. but the third ball, aimed at the final, most stubborn bottle, bounced off the rim and flew wide.

"so close," the carny said, a smirk playing on his lips.

"let me try," steve said, stepping up. he was strong, deceptively so, and his first throw sent the remaining bottles flying. "there we go," he said, a triumphant grin on his face.

“nice stevie!” you added, grinning and looking proud. 

the carny sighed and gestured towards a wall of prizes. "take your pick."

steve reached for a purple octopus, but chloe was already pointing at the small teddy bear in the top corner. "the big one, steve," she said, her voice dripping with sweetness. "bucky almost got it for me."

“almost.” you muttered quietly under your breath, trying not to roll your eyes.

steve's jaw tightened for a fraction of a second, but he nodded gamely and pointed to the bear. the carny grumbled as he unhooked it and handed it over. it was small, furry, and she immediately wrapped her arms around it, snuggling into its fuzzy brown fur.

"my hero," she cooed, looking up at bucky, not steve. 

“he didn’t even fucking win it for you” you whispered quietly to yourself, turning your head to hide your annoyed expression.

you really wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but she made it so fucking hard. you weren’t really sure if you were more angry that she was dick-riding bucky or the fact that she might actually literally dick-ride him. but if there was one thing you knew how to do was push your emotions to the side. you’ve done it with bucky for years, how hard can it be to hide your growing annoyance for just a night.

you immediately snapped back into reality when you heard chloe ask, “what was that?” while tilting her head and giving the fakest smile you’d ever seen.

“oh nothing,” you added, scrunching your nose and shaking your head.

"buck, what should i name him?" she presses.

"how about barnaby?" bucky suggested, his eyes soft as he looked at her.

you felt a little sick to your stomach, like you might actually throw up. so you turned to steve, who was already giving you a side-eye, a wry smile on his face. "come on," he said, jerking his head towards a ride that looked like a giant swinging pendulum. "let's go on that thing. i need a break for a minute." he teased, widening his eyes and shaking his head as he walked.

you laughed, the tension in your chest easing slightly. "you and me both," you said. "that thing looks like it could make a person's brain fall out of their ears."

“are you talking about the ride or chloe? because if its chloe that was a great metaphor” steve added, nudging your shoulder to make you laugh.

you let out a small chuckle. steve always knew how to cheer you up.

"come on, lets find out if this ride will scramble that smart head of yours," he said, ruffling your hair before grabbing your hand and pulling you towards the ride. you glanced back at bucky and chloe, who were already lost in their own little world, chloe stroking the bear's head while bucky whispered something in her ear that made her giggle. you pushed the image away and focused on steve, whose warm, steady presence was a comforting anchor in the sea of unfamiliar emotions.

the ride was exhilarating, a stomach-dropping, heart-pounding thrill that had you screaming and laughing until your sides hurt. as you stumbled off, your legs feeling like jelly, steve was right there to steady you.

"you okay there?" he asked, his eyes crinkling with amusement.

"i think my organs are all in the wrong place," you gasped for air as you laughed, leaning against him for support. "but yeah, i'm great, wow! that was amazing."

"glad to hear it," he said. "now, i believe we were promised some deep-fried delicacies."

you spent the next hour or so wandering through the carnival with steve, trying on ridiculous hats, making fun of the cheesy prizes at the game booths, and eating yourselves into a state of blissful, greasy stupor. you shared a deep-fried pickle corndog that was surprisingly delicious, and a basket of deep-fried oreos that were pure, unadulterated heaven. for a while you had completely forgot about bucky and chloe. that was up until bucky and chloe caught up with you, but they seemed to be in their own bubble, and you found yourself gravitating back towards steve, whose easy-going company was a welcome relief from the tension that seemed to cling to chloe like a second skin.

"so, what's the deal with her?" steve asked, nodding towards chloe, who was currently trying to convince bucky to win her another prize, this time a giant pink unicorn.

you shrugged, trying to act casual. "i don't know. i've heard some things, but i don't really know her. she seems... nice enough." you knew you were lying, and you knew steve knew it too.

"right," he said, nodding, holding back a laugh. "Nice."

you both made eye contact and immediately broke into laughter. “honestly i can’t even lie anymore,” you said, shaking your head and throwing your hands up in surrender “she’s a bitch!”

steve was always really nice, not often engaging in gossip, but today, with chloe, it was a completely different story. he noticed how she talked to you and made snarky remarks. it was hard not to laugh at her persistent attitude.

after hours, the sun finally dipped below the horizon, the carnival transformed. the neon lights seemed to grow brighter, casting long, dancing shadows on the ground, and the air grew cooler, carrying with it the promise of a crisp autumn night. you were all standing in line for the haunted mansion, a classic ride that promised a scary good time, except this one had a water warning outside of it, but you simply assumed it was probably just a bit of mist and water drops to add fear to the ride. you were getting in line with steve when chloe decided to make another appearance.

"i'm not going on that," she said, her voice dripping with disdain. "it looks creepy. and i'll get wet."

"It’s called the dripping in fear haunted mansion for a reason, chloe," you said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of your voice. "that's kind of the point."

she shot you a look that could have frozen hell. "i wasn't talking to you," she said, her voice icy.

you scoffed, a bit fed up with her bad manners.

"chloe," bucky said, his voice a low warning.

"what?" she said, turning to him, her expression instantly softening. "i just don't want to ruin my shoes. they're new."

"it's fine," you said quickly, not wanting to cause a scene. "we can do something else, it’s not a big deal."

"no," bucky said, his voice firm. he looked at chloe, his brow furrowed. "why don't you go get us some funnel cakes? find a table and we'll meet you there."

chloe's smile tightened, but she nodded. "fine," she said, her voice sweet as poison. "anything for you, my love." she stood on her tiptoes and gave him a quick, peck-like kiss on the lips before sashaying away, leaving a cloud of cloying perfume in her wake.

you couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy and rage when you saw her do that, but you quickly shoved it, storing it deep in your heart because bucky was still your best friend. you always wanted him to have the best, to be happy, and if chloe somehow did that, that was good enough.

you and steve and bucky stood in awkward silence for a moment, the sounds of the carnival swelling around you. you could feel the anger radiating off bucky in waves, his jaw clenched tight.

"i'm sorry," he said, finally turning to you. "she's not usually like this."

"it's fine," you said, even though it wasn't. "really,” you smiled.

"no, it's not," he said, his voice low and intense. "she had no right to talk to you like that." he ran a hand through his hair, a gesture of frustration you knew all too well. "i don't know what's wrong with her tonight."

"maybe she's just not a carnival person," steve offered, ever the diplomat.

"maybe," bucky said, but he didn't sound convinced. he looked at you, his blue eyes full of a regret that made your chest ache. "i'm really sorry, doll. i wanted this to be a good night for all of us."

"it is a good night," you said, forcing a smile. "i'm with my two best friends at the carnival. it doesn't get much better than that." you reached out and squeezed his arm, trying to convey a sincerity you weren't sure you felt. "come on, let's go on this thing."

the dripping haunted mansion wasn’t as wet as you’d expected, but it sure was scary as hell. you sat in the middle of the cart, steve directly in front of you, and bucky bringing up the rear. as the ride progressed, you encountered all types of scary actors with makeup as well different jumpscares. you could feel the mist coming down from the ceiling, but with the noise around you and seemingly fake blood dripping on the walls it was disgusting and terrifying. 

just as you thought the ride was about to end, the cart quickly turned a sharp corner and a massive clown flashed and moved above your head, a scream tearing from your throat as you squeezed your eyes shut. the cart quickly rolled down a tiny incline and you came out of the house, being ushered out of the seats.

"holy shit," you gasped, gripping your hair in fear. "that was horrible"

bucky was laughing, a genuine, deep-throated laugh that you hadn't heard all night. "you look like you just saw a ghost" he said, his eyes sparkling.

"maybe because i just fucking did" you shot back, splashing him with the droplets of water that were dripping from your hair.

steve was just shaking his head, a grin plastered on his face. "either i’m too old for this, or you’re a wimp, because that was not scary," he said, but he was laughing too.

you weren’t soaked but your hair had taken most of it, but you didn't care. you found chloe sitting at a picnic table under a large tent, a pristine funnel cake sitting in front of her, untouched. she looked you up and down, her lip curled in disgust.

"you're all wet and your hair is frizzy," she said, as if it were a personal affront.

"it's the dripping haunted mansion" you said, your voice sprinkled with a sweetness that rivaled hers. "it’s exactly what I expected" you retorted, taking a step back, pulling your hair in your hands and shaking most of the water out.

"i can see that," she said, her eyes narrowing. "did you have to shake all over the place? you're gonna get water on my shoes."

“my hair isn’t even near you, that's why i stepped back” you defended, slightly irritated.

"chloe," bucky said, his voice dangerously low.

"what?" she said, turning to him, her eyes wide with mock innocence. "i'm just stating a fact. she's being a bit of a mess, don't you think?"

that was it. you'd had enough. you were tired of her snide comments and her condescending tone. you were tired of her making you feel like an intruder in your own group. you opened your mouth to say something, something sharp and witty and cutting, but bucky beat you to it.

"that's enough," he said, his voice cold and hard. he stood up, his posture rigid with anger. "come on, we're leaving."

"what?" chloe said, her smile finally faltering. "can she not take a joke?"

"nobody laughed," he said, his voice leaving no room for argument. "we're leaving. Now."

he grabbed her arm,  his grip firm but not rough, and started to respectfully guide her away from the table. she stumbled after him, her expression a mixture of shock and outrage. you and steve watched them go, your heart pounding in your chest.

"well, that was... something," steve said, breaking the silence.

"mhm," you voiced.

"well, he can deal with her. I’m gonna go to bathroom" steve said, gesturing towards the green portapotties. "i'll be right back."

you nodded, your eyes still fixed on the spot where bucky and chloe had disappeared. you felt a strange mix of emotions: relief, anger, and a lingering, aching sadness. you'd wanted this night to be perfect, a chance to recapture some of the old magic, the easy camaraderie the three of you had always shared. instead, it had been a minefield of tension and unspoken feelings you had.

you decided to take a walk, to clear your head. you wandered through the crowded midway, the lights and sounds a blur around you. you weren't paying attention to where you were going, your feet carrying you on a familiar path, until you heard a raised voice from behind a row of game booths. you recognized it instantly. it was bucky.

"...don't care," he was saying, his voice tight with anger. "you don't talk to her like that. you don't even look at her like that."

"like what?" chloe shot back, her voice shrill with indignation. "like she's a child who can't take a joke?"

"it wasn't a joke," bucky said, his voice low and dangerous. "you were being cruel. shes special to me and you know that.”

“oh trust me, i know she’s special to you, you never shut up about her.” chloe gritted

“i won't have you treating her like shit." bucky remarked back.

"or what?" she challenged. "what are you going to do about it?"

"wow okay,” he said, swiping his hand over his face. “Yea this," his voice flat, "we're done. go home, chloe."

you heard a scoff, followed by the sound of footsteps stomping away. you held your breath, your heart hammering against your ribs. a moment later, bucky emerged from behind the booths, his face a mask of fury. he saw you standing there, and his expression softened, the anger in his eyes replaced by a look of weary resignation.

"how much of that did you hear?" he asked, his voice quiet.

"enough," you said, your voice just as quiet. “buck, i’m so sorry.”

he ran a hand through his hair, sighing heavily. "no, i'm sorry," he said, for what felt like the hundredth time that night. "i really messed tonight up."

"no," you said, stepping closer to him. "you didn't. you couldn’t have known she would act like that."

"i shouldn't have invited her," he said, his eyes fixed on the ground. "i just... i thought it would be fun. i didn't think..."

"it's okay, bucky," you said, reaching out and placing a hand on his arm. "i promise it's fine."

he looked up at you then, his blue eyes searching yours. they were so full of emotion, a swirling vortex of regret and frustration and something else, something you couldn't quite name. "you're too good for this," he said shaking his head, his voice thick with emotion. "you're too good for me."

"don't say that," you said, your voice soft. "that's not true."

"isn't it?" he said, a bitter laugh escaping his lips. "i bring a girl who treats you like crap, i ruin the night you were so excited for, and then i have a public fight with her in the middle of a carnival. some friend i am."

"Buck, you're my best friend," you said, your voice firm. "and tonight is not ruined because it's not over."

a slow smile spread across his face, the first genuine smile you'd seen from him all night. "yeah?" he said, his voice a little hopeful.

"yeah," you said, returning his smile and nudging his shoulder. "now, are you going to buy me a deep-fried snickers bar, or do i have to steal steve's wallet?"

he laughed, a real, honest-to-god laugh that made your heart soar. "lead the way," he said, gesturing grandly.

you found steve by the funnel cake stand, looking a little lost. when he saw you and bucky approaching, a look of relief washed over his face.

"everything okay?" he asked, his eyes darting between the two of you.

"everything's great," you said, linking your arm through bucky's. "chloe had to go. something about a... hair emergency, right?" you asked jokingly while looking up at bucky.

he simply nodded, holding back a laugh.

steve's eyebrows shot up, but he didn't press. "well, in that case," he said, a grin spreading across his face. "who wants to ride the scrambler until they puke?"

the rest of the night was a blur of pure, unadulterated fun. you went on every ride you could find, from the bumper cars to the gravity-defying pendulum, until you were all dizzy and breathless with laughter. you ate more fried food than you thought was humanly possible, sharing sticky, sweet bites of funnel cake and crispy, salty onion rings. bucky was back to his old self, his charm and his easy laugh on full display, but there was something different about him now. his eyes kept finding yours in the crowd, a soft, warm look in them that made your heart skip a beat.

it didn’t help your case when he made flirty remarks towards you, or when he looked at you with his gorgeous blue eyes, gosh you were head over heels for him and you couldn’t do anything about it.

by the time you made it to the ferris wheel, the night was in full swing. the moon was high in the sky, a pale silver disc against a backdrop of inky black, and the stars were out in full force, a dizzying array of glittering diamonds. the line for the ferris wheel was long, but you didn't mind. you were content to just stand there, tucked between bucky and steve, the cool night air a welcome relief from the heat of the day.

"i don't know if i can do another one," steve said, his face a little green. "I think that last ride might have been a mistake."

"aw, come on, stevie," bucky said, slinging an arm around his shoulders. "the ferris wheel is a gentle ride. it's practically a rocking chair. you'll be fine."

"i don't know," steve said, his voice a little weak. "i think i'm going to call it a night. you guys go ahead. i'll just... wait here for you."

"are you sure?" you asked, a little concerned. he did look a bit pale.

"yeah," he said, forcing a smile. "i'm sure. just... maybe don’t go on any more rides that go upside down. i don't think your stomachs could handel more."

“pussy” you said jokingly coughing into your arm, steve rolling his eyes and chuckling at your remark.

"no promises," bucky said, grinning.

you said your goodbyes to steve, promising to meet him back at the entrance in an hour, and then you and bucky got in line for the ferris wheel. the line moved quickly, and before you knew it, you were being ushered into a small, swinging car, the metal gate clanging shut behind you. the car lurched as it was hooked onto the giant, slowly turning wheel, and you felt a little flutter of excitement in your stomach.

"i haven't been on one of these in years," you said, leaning your head back against the cool metal of the seat, finally feeling relaxed.

"me neither," bucky said, his voice quiet. As he sat across from you, his knees pressed against yours, and you could feel the warmth of his body touching you. "not since we were kids."

"remember that time we went to the county fair back home?" you said, a fond smile on your face. "and you got stuck on the top of the ferris wheel with that girl from your math class? what was her name? jessica?"

"jenna," he said, a laugh in his voice. "and i didn't get stuck. the ride operator just stopped it at the top to give us a romantic moment." he said, emphasizing his words and wiggling his eyebrows.

"it was the most awkward five minutes of my life," you said, laughing. "i was down on the ground with steve, watching you two just sit there in silence. i thought steve was going to die from secondhand embarrassment."

"hey, in my defense, i was fourteen," he said. "i didn't know what to say to her."

"you never know what to say to girls," you teased. "you just stand there and look pretty."

"and it works, doesn't it?" he said, his voice a low, teasing rumble.

"most of the time," you conceded, rolling your eyes, feeling your heart fluttering a little. "but not with jenna."

"no, not with jenna," he agreed, his smile softening. "she was too smart for me."

"or maybe you were just too busy staring at her boobs," you said, unable to resist the jab.

"hey," he said, feigning offense. "i was a fourteen-year-old boy. what do you expect?"

"i expect nothing less," you said, grinning.

the ferris wheel continued its slow, steady ascent, the world below you shrinking with every rotation. the lights of the carnival blurred into a glittering tapestry of color, and the sounds of the crowd faded into a distant hum. it was peaceful up here, a quiet, intimate bubble suspended between the earth and the sky.

"it's beautiful up here," you said, your voice barely a whisper.

"yeah," he said, his voice just as quiet. "it really is."

you turned to look at him, and he was already looking at you, his blue eyes soft and luminous in the dim light of the carnival. they were the color of a deep, tranquil ocean, and you felt like you could drown in them, happily and without a second thought. the air between you crackled with a tension that was both terrifying and exhilarating, a thousand unspoken words hanging between you, waiting to be said.

"bucky," you started, your voice a little shaky.

"yeah?" he said, his voice a low, gentle hum. 

"why did you invite her tonight? why bring chloe if she’s such a… like a…" you asked, struggling to find the right words, the question tumbling out before you could stop it.

“a bitch?” he asked straight faced.

“well i mean, i was gonna say cunt but yea that too!” you said breaking out in laughter

he chuckled, his gaze slowly dropping from yours to his hands, which were fidgeting in his lap. "i don't know," he said, his voice quiet. "i guess i was just... trying to prove something."

“what?” you asked confused.

“you asked why i brought her here. I was trying to prove something.”

"prove what?" you asked, your heart aching for him.

"that i could date other girl" he said, his voice barely audible. "that i didn't... that i wasn't..." he trailed off, his jaw clenched tight. “nevermind,” he grumbled out.

"that you weren't what?" you prompted, tilting your head, your voice soft and confused.

he looked up at you then swiped his tongue across his top lip, biting back a laugh. “doll, i thought you were smart.” 

“okay rude. i would like you to know that i am ver–” you groaned, stopping mid sentence. “ugh, it doesn't matter, buck, you didn’t finish your sentence–”.

“and i’m not going to.” he said plainly.

“i– what? why not?” you asked, raising an eyebrow.

“you’re smart doll, you’ll figure it out.” he said, ruffling your hair as he got up to get out of the car.

you hadn’t even noticed you were back on the ground until you were trailing behind bucky, taking massive strides to catch up with him.

“bucky wait, are you gonna explain or?” you said walking after him before he stopped abruptly.

you watched as he looked up at the massive circular structure in front of you. “woah” you whispered, watching the rides car do a full 360, leaving the passengers completely upside down.

"what the hell is that?" you asked, completely caught off guard by the insanely terrifying coaster in front of you.

“that is the ring of fire” he said pointing towards the massive, steel monstrosity that literally looked like a giant, spinning ring of fire

your eyes widened in horror. "nope," you said, shaking your head. "absolutely not. that thing leaves you hanging upside down." you said trying to turn around and walk away from the ride.

bucky quickly grabbed your wrist and pulled in, resting his hand on the low of your back. 

"i know," he said, his voice full of mischief. "it'll be fun."

"it'll be terrifying," you corrected, shaking your head. "i'm not going on that."

"please," he said, turning his head down, his blue eyes wide and pleading. "for me?"

“i’ll tell you what I meant on the ferris wheel” he added.

you knew you should say no. you knew it was a terrible idea. but you were looking into his eyes, and you could see the boy you had grown up with, the one who had dared you to climb the tallest tree in the park and the one who had held your hand when you got your stitches. you saw the man who you were head over heels for. you wanted to know the truth, something he was adamant on not sharing with you. and you knew you were a goner.

you took a deep breath, "deal," you said, your voice a little shaky. "but if i puke, i'm doing it on your shoes."

"deal," he said, repeating the word back to you, his face breaking into a triumphant grin.

you started to walk closer to the queue of the ride. the ring of fire was even more terrifying up close. it was a giant, steel circle, with a single row of cars attached to the inside of the rim. as you watched, it started to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until the cars were perpendicular to the ground, the riders screaming as they were held in place by nothing but a flimsy-looking lap bar. then, as it reached its maximum speed, the entire ring tilted upwards, until the cars were at the very top of the circle, completely upside down, a silent, breathless moment of defiance against gravity.

"i can't do this," you said, your heart pounding in your chest. "i changed my mind."

"too late," he said, grabbing your hand

and pulling you closer to the entrance. "you already agreed. no backsies."

"that's not a real rule," you protested, but you were already being ushered into a car, the metal lap bar coming down to lock you in place. it felt flimsy and inadequate, and you were suddenly very aware of how high up you were going to be.

"it's the most important rule," he said, his hand finding yours in the darkness of the car. he laced his fingers through yours, his grip tight and reassuring. "just hold on to me. i've got you."

you took a deep breath, trying to steady your nerves. "okay," you said, your voice a little shaky. "i'm holding you to that."

the ride started with a jolt, the car lurching forward as the ring began to spin. it was slow at first, a gentle, rocking motion that was almost pleasant. but then it started to speed up, the world outside the car blurring into a dizzying kaleidoscope of light and color. you could feel the g-force pulling at you, a heavy, insistent pressure that pinned you to the back of the seat.

"you okay?" bucky yelled over the roar of the machinery.

"i think so!" you yelled back, your knuckles white where you were tightly gripping his hand.

the ring began to tilt, the ground slowly disappearing from view as you were lifted towards the sky. your stomach dropped, a sickening lurch that made you gasp. you squeezed your eyes shut, your heart hammering against your ribs like a trapped bird.

"don't close your eyes," bucky said, his voice a steady anchor in the chaos. "look at me. just look at me."

you forced your eyes open, and you were looking at him. his face was illuminated by the flashing lights of the carnival, his blue eyes intense and focused on yours. he was smiling, a wide, exhilarated grin that made your heart do a little flip.

"see?" he said, his voice full of confidence. "it's not so bad."

"it's terrible!" you yelled, but you were smiling too.

the ring reached its apex, and for a terrifying, exhilarating moment, you were completely upside down. the world was a dizzying, upside-down mess of lights and sound, and you were hanging on for dear life, your only connection to reality the warm, steady pressure of bucky's hand in yours. you screamed, a long, loud, cathartic scream that was equal parts terror and pure, unadulterated joy. there were muffled yells around you, but you could hear bucky laughing, a deep, booming sound that was even louder than the roar of the ride and screams.

and then, just as quickly as it had begun, it was over. the ring began to level out, the spinning slowing down until you were back on the ground, the world righting itself around you. the lap bar released with a loud clank, and you stumbled out of the car, your legs feeling like jelly.

"i can't believe we just did that," you said, your voice shaky with adrenaline and laughter.

"i told you it would be fun," he said, his arm wrapping around your waist to steady you.

"it was the most terrifying thing i've ever done in my entire life," you said, leaning against him, your body still buzzing with the aftershocks of the ride.

"but you loved it," he said, his voice a low, confident rumble.

"i did," you admitted, a wide, unstoppable grin spreading across your face. "i totally loved it."

you were standing there, in the middle of the crowded midway, the lights of the carnival pulsing around you, the sounds of the rides and the laughter of the crowd a distant roar. you were breathless and disheveled, your heart still pounding in your chest, and you had never felt more alive in your entire life. you looked up at him, at the boy you had known your whole life, the man that you convinced yourself you could live romantically without for years on end, and you knew, with a certainty that settled deep in your bones, that you didn’t want to do that anymore. that this was it. this was the moment.

you reached up, your hand cupping the back of his neck, and pulled him down to you. you kissed him, a fierce, passionate kiss that tasted of adrenaline and cotton candy and a future that was finally, beautifully within your reach. he kissed you back, his arms wrapping around you, pulling you closer, his lips claiming yours in a way that left no room for doubt. it was a kiss that said everything you had ever wanted to say, a promise of all the adventures to come, a declaration of a love that had been there all along, just waiting for the right moment to be set free.

when you finally pulled away, you were both breathless, your foreheads resting against each other. the lights of the carnival seemed brighter, the music louder, the stars in the sky more brilliant than they had ever been before.

You bit back a smile, "wow," you breathed, your voice full of wonder.

"yeah," he said, his voice a low, contented hum. "Wow."

“well i guess you figured out what i was talking about on the ferris wheel. told you you were smart enough doll.” bucky said grinning.

“oh shut up” you said giving him a small push backwards with a smile on your face.

“where do you think you’re going?” he said, grabbing your wrist and pulling you back in for another kiss. this time it was sweeter and slower, showing the gentle way each piece found its place, like a story meant to unfold this way.

pulling back he immediately took your hand, his fingers lacing through yours, and you started to walk, away from the noise and the chaos of the midway, towards the quiet, tree-lined path that led to the entrance. you walked in comfortable silence, the sounds of the carnival fading behind you, replaced by the gentle rustle of the leaves in the cool night air.

"so," you said, your voice a little shy. "you owe me a pink unicorn" you teased.

he laughed, a deep, warm sound that made your heart soar. "don't worry," he said, squeezing your hand. “first thing tomorrow, we're coming back, and i'm winning you that giant unicorn. and the teddy bear. and that weird-looking fish with the googly eyes." he added, placing his fingers over his eyes and flailing his head around jokingly.

"you don't have to do all that," you said, nudging him, your voice soft.

"yes, i do," he said, his voice firm. "i have a lot of time to make up for."

you reached the entrance of the carnival, the bright lights a stark contrast to the quiet darkness of the street beyond. steve was waiting for you, leaning against a lamppost, a sleepy smile on his face.

"there you are," he said, pushing himself off the lamppost. "i was about to send out a search party."

"sorry," you said, grinning. "we got a little sidetracked."

"i can see that," he said, his eyes darting between your intertwined hands and the goofy, lovesick grin on bucky's face. "it's about time."

"shut up, steve," bucky said, but there was no malice in his voice, only a deep, abiding affection.

"i'm just saying," steve said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. "it's about damn time."

you all started to walk, the three of you, a unit, a tripod, just like you had always been. but something was different now. something had shifted. the unspoken tension that had always existed between you and bucky was gone, replaced by a new, easy intimacy, a comfortable silence that spoke volumes. you were walking hand in hand with bucky, your fingers laced through his, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

"so," steve said, breaking the silence. "did you win her a prize?"

"not yet," bucky said, his eyes twinkling. "but i promise i will."

"you better," you said, leaning your head against his shoulder. "i've been waiting a long time for this."

"me too," he said, his voice a low, contented hum. "me too."

you walked through the quiet streets of the college town, the three of you, your laughter echoing in the cool night air. you stood between steve and bucky, your hand on their shoulders. the carnival was a distant memory, a glittering dream of lights and sound, but the feeling of it, the magic of it, stayed with you, a warm, glowing ember in your heart. you looked at steve, your best friend, he was there, every year, through every single situation you encountered, then you looked up at bucky, at the boy you had grown up with, the man you had been in love with for years, and you knew, with a certainty that settled deep in your bones, that this was just the beginning. the beginning of everything.

─˖· masterlist

*as always, thanks @uzmacchiato for the gorgeous banners <3