Talk
Pairing: Bucky Barnes x reader
AU: Sci-Fi / Star-Crossed Lovers / Space Communications
“I'd be the voice that urged Orpheus when her body was found.”
part v of love songs for ghosts — a multi-au bucky barnes x reader series inspired by music, memory, and the ache of unfinished love.
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Your ship is quiet now.
No engine hum. No system alerts. Just static in your ears and the gentle echo of your own breath inside the helmet.
You've been drifting for twenty-six days.
Technically, you're still considered active by command—your life support is steady, food rations still viable, and you're within the last recorded range of the Centauri relay. But the ship’s thrusters are blown, the nav-core's shot, and the distress signal—your only real lifeline—has been looping unanswered for seventeen of those twenty-six days.
You should feel afraid.
But you’re not.
You’re listening.
To him.
The first time the signal reached you, you thought it was just residual code—an old fragment bouncing through the wreckage of space, meaningless. But it wasn't a code.
It was a voice.
A low, steady voice, fuzzy through the interference, quiet as a prayer.
“…this is Delta 6, repeat—Delta 6… if anyone can hear me, respond. Please. I know you’re out here.”
You didn’t recognize the designation.
Didn’t recognize the voice.
But you listened.
Because loneliness makes even ghosts sound like companions.
And when you answered, he almost cried.
“Holy shit,” he breathed. “You’re real.”
His name is Bucky.
Or was. He doesn’t know if he’s still allowed to claim it.
He says he’s been transmitting on an abandoned channel for years—ever since his ship was marooned past the Vega Divide. He doesn’t know if there are others out there. Doesn’t know if Earth even still exists. The way he talks, you’re not sure if he’s been alive for two years or two centuries. Sometimes he forgets how to measure time.
But his voice never wavers when he says your name.
You gave it to him during the first hour.
Didn’t think twice.
Didn’t expect him to hold onto it like something sacred.
The comms are unstable, but consistent.
Short-range relays, bouncing between deep-signal beacons still lingering in the outer sectors.
You tell him where you are.
He tells you how to hold on.
You share airlock rituals, cabin rituals, the songs you hum when you're floating in sleep cycles. He tells you about a place called Coney Island, and you wonder if it's a dream or a real memory burned into a boy who used to believe in home.
You never ask how he survived.
But some nights, he tells you anyway.
“I wasn't supposed to wake up,” he says once, when the oxygen is thinning and you're both quiet. “I was part of a research pod. They froze us after the war—some experiment to preserve... something.”
You don’t interrupt.
He rarely speaks in full truths.
“They pulled me early. No one else made it. The ship’s AI was corrupted. It kept sending me instructions to kill anything organic onboard.”
Your stomach twists. “Did you?”
“No,” he whispers. “But I thought about it. For a long time. I stopped trusting my own thoughts. Stopped trusting my hands.”
You close your eyes. Let the quiet fill the space between you.
“I trust you,” you whisper.
A pause.
Then—
“I don’t deserve that.”
“I didn’t ask if you did.”
The signal weakens after day thirty.
You start logging every message, recording your own voice just in case he loses yours in the static.
At night, you drift in the dark, whispering into the transmitter like it's a tether.
"Bucky. It's me. I ate the last of the peaches today. You'd laugh if you knew how long I made them last."
"...I found a rip in the starboard panel. Not enough to kill me, but I patched it anyway. You'd be proud."
"...I keep thinking about your hands. I don’t even know what they look like, but I swear I’d recognize the shape if they held mine."
And then—
“I don’t know if you’re still out there. But I’m still here. And I’ll wait.”
He answers on day thirty-five.
“I heard you.”
Your knees give out.
You don’t cry.
Not until he says—
“I think I’d know your hands too.”
The signal shifts after that.
Not stronger, but steadier.
You talk more. Not just about systems and repairs and survival, but about memory. About dreams. He tells you he dreams in sepia tones. That sometimes, in the quiet, he sees a red star explode and thinks it’s the universe’s way of telling him to keep going.
He asks you what you dream of.
You lie.
You say oceans.
You don’t tell him that lately, you only dream of his voice.
You stop logging entries meant for mission control.
Start saving only the ones meant for him.
Start reading old books aloud into the comms.
Start leaving a space in your bedroll, like maybe someday his body will fill it.
You know it’s foolish.
But so is surviving in space.
So is love.
“Will you tell me a story?” you ask him one night.
He hums low. “What kind?”
“Something beautiful.”
He’s quiet for so long, you think you’ve lost him.
Then—
“There was a girl,” he says, voice quiet. “She worked in communications, monitoring deep-space channels. She never expected to hear anything. But one day, a broken man started talking. And she stayed.”
Your throat tightens.
“What happened to them?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I think the universe owed them a meeting.”
The power starts to fade on day forty-two.
Life support stabilizers begin to glitch.
You don’t tell him right away.
You pretend it’s fine.
Until you can’t.
“I’m running out of time,” you whisper into the comms one night, voice trembling.
He doesn’t say anything for a long time.
Then—
“I’ll find you.”
You laugh, bitter and low. “You don’t even know where I am.”
“I know enough,” he says. “And I’m closer than you think.”
“Are you lying?”
“I’m surviving.”
You close your eyes.
“I’m scared.”
“I know.”
You imagine his hands again.
The shape of them. Steady. Calloused.
You think you’d believe in anything if they could just hold you once.
On day forty-eight, you lose external navigation entirely.
No stars. No guidance. Just endless dark and a heart that refuses to stop hoping.
You press your forehead to the transmitter and whisper, “If you’re real, please come.”
You wake to red lights.
Proximity alert.
You scramble to the viewport.
And then you see it.
A ship.
Smaller than yours. Older. Scarred.
And floating right toward you.
Your knees hit the floor.
You crawl to the comms.
“Bucky.”
A beat.
Then—
“I told you I’d find you.”
He docks manually.
No AI. No tech to buffer his presence.
Just him.
When the door finally opens and he steps through your airlock, everything stops.
The world. Your lungs. Time.
He’s older than you imagined.
Tired.
Beautiful.
He stares at you like you’re the only thing he’s ever wanted to touch without breaking.
You don’t speak.
You just throw yourself into his arms.
And he catches you.
With hands that shake and arms that anchor and a voice that breaks against your ear as he whispers, “I heard you.”
You pull back just enough to see his face.
And then you kiss him.
Like the universe only made you for this moment.
Like silence never existed.
Later, you lie beside him on the floor of the shared chamber, wrapped in emergency blankets and breathless disbelief.
He runs a thumb across your jaw.
“I would’ve talked forever just to find you,” he murmurs.
You smile.
“You did.”
He kisses your cheek.
“I’d be the voice that urged Orpheus…”
You close your eyes.
“…when her body was found.”
