hydra in my head
pairing: bucky barnes x reader | 6.1k words
warnings: heavy angst, vivid descriptions of torture & brainwashing, nightmares, ptsd, dissociation, mentions of violence and murder (non-graphic, canon-level), soulmate au, brief panic attacks, guilt, self-worth issues, but soft hurt/comfort and hopeful ending
summary: soulmates see the life of one another through dreams. what happens when your soulmate looks like he's from the 1940's and has experienced a hell you can't even begin to imagine?
authors note: soulmate au's will always have a huge piece of my heart and add the angst of sharing dreams with the winter soldier? i'm there. loved writing this one so much!!
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You have your first nightmare at eight years old.
It starts out ordinary, the way all the stories at school say soulmate dreams do. You open your eyes in the dark and you’re not in your bedroom anymore—you’re somewhere else, somewhere colder. You’re standing in a narrow alley that smells like smoke and rain, watching a boy with too-long hair tuck a smaller kid under his arm and laugh.
“C’mon, Stevie, we’re gonna be late,” he says, accent warm and rough, and your heart does something strange in your chest.
You don’t understand why you know his name. Why you know that if you could reach out and touch him, the skin of his hand would be rough from work and the softness behind his eyes would be just for you.
But you’re eight. You just know this is important. You just know this is yours.
You spend that first night trailing behind him like a shadow. Watching him steal bread from a windowsill and give all of it to Steve. Watching him charm a girl behind the soda counter and then turn around and share the free candy with the skinny kid at his side. Watching him sit on a tenement rooftop and lean back on his elbows, staring at a sky full of city light and smoke, somewhere in Brooklyn.
You wake up smiling. Head full of his laugh. Heart full of the way he tipped his head back and told a joke you can’t quite remember.``
The next night, you dream of him again.
And again. And again.
At school, kids whisper in corners, swapping stories about their own soulmate dreams. The girl who sees a boy in Seoul practicing violin on a rooftop. The boy who watches his soulmate paint murals across brick walls in São Paulo. They talk about first kisses in borrowed bodies, about the way it feels when their soulmate looks into a mirror and for one breath you see their face and yours overlap like a promise.
You stay quiet.
You don’t tell them that your soulmate is older than you. That instead of fumbling through middle school with you, he’s out there in the world, already grown. You don’t tell them that every night you lay your head down, you wake up in the 1940s—the clothes, the cars, the ration lines, the war posters peeling on brick.
You don’t tell them that your soulmate signs a piece of paper and becomes a soldier.
You don’t tell them how, the night he ships out, you wake up in his skin.
It happens without warning. You go to sleep in your own bed—a little bigger, a little more lonely than it was when you were eight—and your eyes open into blinding sunlight. You’re on a train platform. Your hand—his hand—is gripping a duffel bag so tight your knuckles ache. Steve is talking, voice breaking, telling you to write. To come back.
You feel your own throat burn when you hear yourself say, “Don’t do anything stupid ‘til I get back.”
“How can I?” Steve shoots back. “You’re taking all the stupid with you.”
You laugh. Except it’s not really a laugh. It’s something torn, something afraid.
You wake up with tears on your face. The world is dark and quiet and the clock on your nightstand says 3:07 am. You press your shaking hands over your mouth and feel the echoes of his goodbye like a bruise.
It takes you three days to stop crying.
You tell yourself this is what soulmate dreams are. Messy. Overwhelming. Beautiful.
You cling to that word—beautiful—for as long as you can.
It carries you through boot camp, through the taste of dirt and the ache of muscles that are not your own. It carries you through Europe, through the first time you watch a body fall because you pulled the trigger.
It lasts right up until the night everything changes.
The night you watch him fall off the train, it feels like your own heart shatters inside your chest.
You wake up screaming. Your own bedroom walls. Your own hands, empty and reaching. Your mother bursts through the door and gathers you up, still half asleep, asking if it was another nightmare, sweetheart?
You can’t breathe.
“He fell,” you choke, words tearing out of you. “He fell, he fell—”
“Who?” she asks gently, like she doesn’t already know. Parents grew up with soulmate dreams too. They know the helpless, distant look that comes with them. The way kids wake up with tears that aren’t quite theirs.
“My soulmate.”
Something in her face folds. She holds you tighter.
“Sometimes,” she says softly, “the timing’s just… the timing’s cruel, baby. It doesn’t mean your story’s over. It just means…”
She trails off, because there’s no good ending to that sentence.
You don’t dream for three days. You can’t decide if that’s mercy or punishment.
On the fourth night, you open your eyes into a cold so vicious you can’t feel your fingers.
Water crushes you from all sides. It burns your lungs. Your body—the one that’s not yours—is thrashing, pulling, dragging itself toward a pinprick of light above while the weight of metal on your arm drags you down.
The scream rips your throat raw. Bubbles burst from your lips and vanish into the icy dark.
You don’t make it to the surface.
When you wake, you taste blood and river silt in the back of your throat. Your bed is soaked with sweat. Your nails have left crescent moons in your palms.
You don’t sleep again until your body gives you no choice.
The next dream isn’t better.
White light. A ceiling blinded by it. A ring of faces leaning over you, mouths moving in a language you can’t quite understand but immediately hate.
A bite of cold against skin as someone presses a scalpel to flesh.
You scream awake again.
Your mother starts taking you to therapists after that.
Most kids, the brochures say, dream of exams and awkward dates and milestones. Your charts fill up with words like recurrent nightmares and secondary trauma and dissociation.
None of it changes the fact that every time you close your eyes, you are dragged back into that room.
Back into that chair.
You learn the cadence of commands in Russian before you ever learn where on a map to put Moscow. Nine unpronounceable words barked like gunfire. Each one a hammer blow. Each one chipping away at a man who used to laugh on rooftops and steal bread for his sick friend.
You watch them strip him down to bones and obedience.
You watch them shock him, carve him, freeze him.
You watch them put a metal arm where flesh used to be.
You watch until the line between what’s his and what’s yours starts to blur around the edges.
You startle when people touch your left arm. You flinch when someone says the word soldier too loudly. You hold your breath when you hear Russian in movies and your heart slams against your ribs like it’s trying to claw free.
You learn how to build walls between your nights and your days, between the girl who smiles and nods and does her homework and the girl who wakes up hoarse from screaming words in a language she shouldn’t know.
You get very good at pretending.
You stay very, very quiet.
Because the first time you tried to explain this to someone—really explain, not just, “I have bad soulmate dreams”—they looked at you like you’d made it up for attention. Like it was impossible that one man could hold that much darkness.
Impossible or not, he lives inside your skull.
And for some reason, you’re still helplessly in love with him.
Your soulmate never dreams of you.
That’s how it’s supposed to work—two lives, two vantage points. Two people growing together in parallel, building a mosaic of each other’s days until, one day, you meet. You’ve lived each other’s memories. You’ve hurt when they hurt and laughed when they laughed. You fit.
Except.
He has never once looked into a mirror and seen your face.
You know because you’ve checked. Every time he’s near a reflective surface, you hold your breath, waiting. Wondering what you’ll look like in that cheap barracks mirror. In the gleam of a Hydra scalpel. In the shine of a shield’s vibranium curve when Captain America bursts into a lab and says his name like a miracle.
You never see your own eyes looking back.
And later—much, much later, when the Soldier with the metal arm stands on a sidewalk in a world full of color television and smartphones and watches Steve drive away—there is a terrible emptiness where your presence should be.
You know he doesn’t dream at all. Not really. Just orders. Missions. A voice in his head telling him to comply.
You lie awake sometimes, staring at the ceiling. Wondering what it was like for him in the 1940s, before you were even born. Before your existence meant he was supposed to have something soft to fall into, a second life to land in when the world got hard.
Did he think his soulmate had died? Did he think he didn’t have one at all?
Did Hydra take that away from him, too?
The questions feel like weights on your chest.
You grow up. You go to college. You study psychology because of course you do. Professors call you insightful. They praise your understanding of trauma. They don’t know you learned it half-asleep on a concrete cell floor.
You watch news footage of Washington, D.C. tearing itself apart—carriers falling out of the sky, smoke boiling up between monuments. You watch a flash of metal and a familiar face with hair that’s now long and wild and eyes that are empty in a way you’ve never seen in your dreams.
You frighten your roommate when you fall to your knees in front of the television and sob like someone stabbed you.
She thinks you’re crying about the city.
You’re crying because your soulmate just dragged Steve Rogers out of a river and collapsed beside him on the mud, and for the first time since that train, you feel something fragile and human slip through the cracks of his programming.
“Who the hell is Bucky?” he says, and you press your face into your hands and whisper, It’s you. It’s you, it’s you, it’s you.
Later, when footage leaks of him in Bucharest, of governments calling him a terrorist, you shake so hard you spill coffee all over yourself. Your hands don’t stop trembling all day.
By the time word spreads—half rumors, half official—that the Winter Soldier is dead, you’ve gotten very good at breathing around a permanent ache.
He’s not dead, you think stubbornly, even as your therapist gently suggests a new medication.
Because you still dream.
The locations change. The walls switch from damp concrete to smooth wood. The windows open onto African sun instead of Siberian ice.
But he’s alive. You can feel it every night when you close your eyes. You make coffee in a kitchen that smells like earth and greenery and peace while a man with long hair and a beard leans in a doorway and tries to relearn how to be a person.
You’re there when people call him White Wolf as a joke. You’re there when he wakes up screaming and claws at his arm like he wants to rip it off.
You see every tremor, every step forward, every stumble back.
You keep your silence like a promise.
Because there is a tiny, terrified part of you that believes if you ever try to step into his real, waking world—if you look him in the eyes and he doesn’t know you—the last piece of you still holding on will break.
You meet him on a Tuesday.
It’s almost insultingly mundane.
New York sky, too bright. Air full of car horns and overheated asphalt. Your shoes pinching a little because you wore the nicer pair for the interview. The building in front of you is an angular tower of glass and metal that the world knows on sight.
Avengers Tower.
They’d asked you to come in for a consult. Trauma specialist, they said. We have people who need help and don’t trust easy, one of the recruiters had told you over the phone. Your résumé is… unique.
You laughed. If only he knew.
The security check is thorough. The elevator ride is nauseatingly smooth. Your own reflection in the mirrored walls looks small and out of place between the polished chrome and the sleek lighting.
You’re smoothing your hands down your blazer when the doors slide open.
And he’s standing there.
Just standing there, in the hallway, like a dream you didn’t mean to interrupt.
He’s wearing a Henley that clings to shoulders you’ve only ever seen under body armor. His hair is shorter than it was in Wakanda, pulled back into a low knot, a few strands falling loose around his face. The stubble on his jaw is a shade darker than you remember from last night, when he shaved in a small bathroom, the mirror fogging up with steam.
His eyes are the exact same blue they’ve always been.
For a second, you forget how to breathe.
He blinks, clearly not expecting the elevator to open on a stranger. He shifts his weight like he’s considering retreating.
You know every micro-expression in that face.
You know what he looks like when he’s bracing for pain.
You know what he looks like when he’s trying not to hope.
“Uh,” he says finally. “You lost?”
The sound of his voice in the same space as you is… wrong. It vibrates in your ribs like a plucked wire.
You swallow. Realize your fingers are trembling. Clench them into fists.
“I—um. No.” You hold up the visitor badge dangling from your neck. “Here for an interview. Trauma team.”
His eyes flick down. Your name flashes in black letters against your chest, next to the Stark Industries logo.
Something in his gaze sharpens. Not hostile. Just... wary.
You’ve seen that look from behind his eyes. It’s different being on the receiving end.
“Right,” he says slowly. “Right. They mentioned they were bringing in someone new.”
You should leave. You should step out of the elevator, shake his hand, introduce yourself like you don’t already know the shape of his scars, the cadence of his nightmares, the way he curls his fingers when he’s trying not to reach for someone.
Instead you stand there, staring, while your heartbeat hammers in your ears.
He frowns. “Are you okay?”
The question snaps you back like a rubber band.
“I’m fine,” you lie, because what else is there to say? Hey, I’ve watched every second of your life for as long as I can remember, you look good in daylight?
You force your feet to move. You step onto the floor. The elevator closes behind you with a soft whoosh.
You’re close enough now to see the tiny pale lines at the corner of his mouth. The faint shadow of where a scar used to be along his jaw, before Wakanda’s healers smoothed it away.
“Name’s Bucky,” he offers, almost awkwardly, like he’s still getting used to saying it out loud.
I know.
You bite the words down before they can escape.
You offer your own name instead, and he repeats it—your name—in that careful, rough voice, like he’s trying it on his tongue.
You feel the sound all the way through your bones.
You get the job.
Of course you do. You’re good at it. You’ve spent half your life studying trauma and the other half drowning in it. You know how to listen. You know how to sit with silence without flinching away.
You don’t get assigned to Bucky.
You think that’s probably for the best. At least at first.
He’s… there, though. In the halls. In the kitchen at 3 am when you’re both pretending you don’t have insomnia. In the training rooms, working a heavy bag until his chest heaves and sweat darkens his shirt.
You get used to feeling his eyes on you, quick flickers, like he’s cataloguing your presence. You get used to swallowing a dozen confessions every time he looks your way.
You do not get used to the way your whole body hums when he stands too close.
It takes exactly three weeks for everything to crack.
You’re in your office. It’s late. You should have gone home hours ago, but you’re dictating notes for a session and staring blankly at your laptop screen when there’s a knock on the door.
Your heart knows who it is before your eyes do.
“Come in,” you call, somehow sounding normal.
The door opens. Bucky steps in, hovering just inside the threshold like he’s not sure if he’s welcome.
He’s in sweats and a threadbare t-shirt, hair damp from a shower. There’s a tension in his shoulders that sets off every alarm in your body.
You stand up automatically. “Is everything okay?”
He huffs a breath that’s not quite a laugh. “Define ‘okay.’”
You gesture toward the chairs. He doesn’t move.
“I know I’m not on your schedule,” he says. “I’m not… your patient. Or whatever. I just…”
He trails off. His jaw tightens. His metal fingers flex against his thigh, the plates catching the light.
“It’s okay,” you say softly. “You can sit. Or not. You can pace if you need to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Bucky.”
His eyes flick to yours. For a moment, something like trust flickers there.
He comes in. Closes the door.
And then he just stands there, breathing hard, like walking from the elevator to your office took more energy than a mission.
You wait.
“I’ve never had dreams,” he says abruptly.
You blink. Your grip tightens on the back of your chair.
He’s staring over your shoulder, somewhere past you, like if he looks at you this will be too much.
“Not the soulmate kind,” he clarifies. “Everybody else did. Back home. Before the war. They’d talk about seein’ their girl, or their guy, or just… faces. Names. Whole lives.”
You knew this. You’ve wondered about it your whole life. Hearing it in his voice feels like stepping off a ledge.
“I kept waitin’,” he continues, words rough. “Figured maybe it’d start late. Or maybe my soulmate was younger. Or maybe…” He swallows. “Maybe I just didn’t have one. Maybe they died. Maybe I did somethin’ wrong before I was even born.”
Your chest aches. “You didn’t,” you say, without thinking. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
His gaze snaps to you.
There’s a sharpness there. A warning. A plea.
“You don’t know that,” he says quietly.
I do, you think. I’ve seen you my whole life.
He takes a shaky breath. “Then the war happened. And the train.” His voice stutters on the word. You know the memory he’s stuck on. The rush of air. The scream. The impact. “And then… nothin’. No dreams at all. Just… missions.”
He says the word like it tastes like ash.
“I thought that was it,” he says. “That whatever chance I had at… that kinda thing… it was gone.”
He laughs again, brittle. “Then I get out. Hydra’s gone. I’m in Wakanda, learnin’ how to be a person again. And I start hearin’ about people seein’ my life in their sleep. ‘The Winter Soldier is my soulmate,’” he quotes, in a mocking falsetto that makes something in your stomach twist. “Jokes. Memes. Kids on the internet makin’ content.”
His mouth curls in disgust.
“It’s not funny,” he grits. “There’s nothing—there’s nothin’ funny about any of it. And I know most of it’s bullshit. But I keep thinkin’… if there is somebody out there who had to watch all that—” His breath hitches. “Every time they shut me down. Every time they woke me up. Every time I—”
He cuts himself off. You know the word he’s swallowing.
“Kill,” you say softly.
His jaw clenches. He nods once.
“If there is someone,” he whispers, “if I do have a soulmate… and they saw all that… I don’t know if I want to meet them. I don’t know if I deserve to.”
Your own hands are shaking now.
He looks at you, really looks, and you realize there are tears standing in his eyes. He blinks them away violently, like he doesn’t have the right.
“I came here because…” He trails off. His shoulders slump. “Because I thought maybe talkin’ about it, with someone who knows how this stuff works, would help. Except I feel worse. Because all I can picture is some kid who grew up with my nightmares. Some—some sweet person who maybe just wanted to see their soulmate’s first day of school and instead got strapped into my life like a horror movie they couldn’t turn off.”
His voice breaks.
“And I don’t know how to live with that.”
The silence that follows is thick and heavy and humming with something electric.
You could lie.
You could say something clinical. You could talk about vicarious trauma. About how whoever they are, they’re probably fine now. That it wasn’t his fault.
You could stay safely behind your professional distance.
Instead, you take a breath that feels like stepping off another ledge.
“Bucky,” you begin, gently. “Look at me for a second?”
He hesitates, then does.
You step around your desk. You sit in the chair opposite him so you’re on the same level, knees almost touching.
Your heart is beating so loud you’re sure he can hear it.
“You’re right,” you say softly. “It’s not funny. At all. And if your soulmate… if they saw what you went through… I’m not going to pretend it didn’t hurt them. It did. It… it does.”
His face crumples, just a little.
“But,” you continue, before he can drown in guilt, “they’re not that kid anymore.”
He swallows. “How would you know?”
“Because,” you say, and your voice shakes, “I’m not a kid anymore.”
The words hang there between you.
For a second, he doesn’t understand.
You watch the moment he does.
His pupils blow wide. His lips part, but no sound comes out. His metal hand curls slowly, fingers digging into his own thigh.
“I—” His throat works. “What?”
You force yourself to hold his gaze.
“I’ve… always had dreams,” you say. “About you. Since I was eight. Brooklyn. Steve. The war. The train.” Your eyes sting. “The water. The lab. The chair. The missions. Wakanda. Here.”
You see his breath stutter. See his jaw go slack. See denial and hope crash together behind his eyes like two waves colliding.
“No,” he whispers. “No, that’s— you can’t—”
“You just told me you came here because you were worried,” you say, gently but firmly. “Because you couldn’t stop thinking about what it must have been like for your soulmate. For me.”
The word lands between you like a thrown knife.
He flinches.
“I thought about telling you earlier,” you admit, voice shaking. “When I first got here. When I saw you in the hallway, it almost knocked me over. Like… like the world finally lined up the way it was supposed to. But I didn’t know if you’d want that. If you’d want me. Knowing everything I know. So I… I waited.”
“And you—you saw…” His voice breaks.
“Yes,” you whisper. “I saw.”
“All of it?”
You close your eyes, just for a second, and it’s all there behind your eyelids. Blood and ice and metal and a scream cut off mid-breath.
“Enough,” you say. “More than enough.”
His face twists. He jerks to his feet like he can’t bear being still. He paces once, twice, then presses his metal hand against the wall like he needs the anchor.
“I’m sorry,” he says hoarsely. “I’m so— God, doll, I’m so fuckin’ sorry.”
The nickname slips out before he can stop it. It rips through you like a live wire.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” you repeat, more fiercely this time.
He whirls on you. “I killed people.”
“You were tortured,” you shoot back. “You were brainwashed. They took your choices away. They took your— your dreams—”
He laughs, raw. “That too, huh?”
“And they tried to take your name,” you say. “Your face. Your heart. They tried to make you a weapon. But they didn’t win, Bucky. They didn’t.”
His eyes shine. “Then why do you wake up screamin’?”
The question knocks the breath out of you.
Because of course he’s thought it through. Of course he’s pictured it in more detail than you ever wanted him to.
You swallow. “Sometimes I do,” you admit. “Especially when I was younger. It was… a lot. To see that much pain and not be able to stop it. To watch someone you—” You break off, tongue thick.
“Someone you what?” he asks quietly.
You look up at him. At the man you’ve watched fall and break and get rebuilt over and over.
“Someone you love,” you say.
His breath hitches like you hit him.
“You don’t even know me,” he says, but it’s weak. Tattered.
You smile, shaky. “I know you better than anyone alive, James Buchanan Barnes.”
He flinches at the full name, but doesn’t correct you.
“I’ve seen you steal bread for a sick kid,” you say, voice gaining strength. “I’ve seen you dance in a Brooklyn club like you owned the whole damn room. I’ve watched you sign up to go to war and then get on that train even after you thought you lost your best friend because you couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t try to stop what was happening.”
A tear slips down his cheek. He doesn’t wipe it away.
“I’ve watched you be hurt and broken and put back together more times than I can count,” you continue. “And every single time, there was this… this core of you that never went away. This stubborn, ridiculous goodness. This… this refusal to give up, even when giving up would have been easier.”
You take a breath. It comes out broken.
“Those dreams… they hurt. They still do, sometimes. But I never once wished for someone else.”
His face crumples.
“Not once?” he whispers.
“Not once,” you repeat.
He stands there, for a long moment, breathing like he just ran a marathon. Then, slowly, like he’s moving underwater, he comes back to the chair and sinks into it.
His metal hand is shaking.
You bite your lip. Then, very carefully, you reach out and lay your fingers on the back of his knuckles.
He goes absolutely still.
“You asked how to live with it,” you say softly. “With the fact that someone had to see what you went through.”
He swallows. Nods, just barely.
“You live with it by letting me choose,” you say. “By letting me tell you that I’m here on purpose. That I walked into this knowing exactly what you’ve carried, and I still… I still want to be the one who sits with you when the nightmares hit. I still want to be the one who makes you coffee in the morning and teases you about your bedhead and tells you when you’re being too hard on yourself.”
Your voice drops.
“If someone had to be in that room with you, I’m glad it was me.”
A sound tears out of him. Not quite a sob, not quite a laugh. Something in between and more broken than both.
“I don’t deserve you,” he chokes.
You squeeze his hand. “That’s not your call to make.”
He lets out a strangled noise that might be agreement. Might be surrender.
Very slowly, like he’s afraid you’ll vanish, he turns his hand under yours so your fingers fit between his, metal and flesh and skin. The plates are warm from his body heat. You can feel the faint whir of servos when he moves.
“You sure about this?” he asks, eyes searching yours. “Because once I start… I don’t know if I’ll be able to—”
“I’ve been sure since I watched you steal that bread,” you say, and a wet, disbelieving laugh escapes him.
“Okay,” he breathes. “Okay.”
You fall asleep beside him for the first time two weeks later.
It’s not planned. You’d met up in the common room after a late debrief, both too wired to sleep. One thing turned into another—movie, conversation, a shared blanket. At some point, his head tipped against the back of the couch and his breathing evened out.
You watched him for a long time. In your own bed, he’d always been half a world away. Here, his arm was draped along the back of the couch behind you, close enough to feel the heat radiating off him.
You dozed off listening to his heartbeat under your ear.
You wake up in your own bed.
Not the Tower couch. Not his room. Your room, where you fell asleep months ago with his whimpers echoing in your head.
Except the pillow smells like him and you’re warm all over, like someone tucked a blanket around your shoulders.
You blink blearily. Sit up.
And realize this is not your room.
It takes a second to piece together what you’re seeing. The walls are the wrong color. The window looks out over a city skyline instead of the tree outside your apartment. There are pictures on the dresser—Avengers in various stages of exhausted celebration. Sam grinning. Steve. Nat. A younger, thinner Tony.
Bucky, looking startled in every single one, like he can’t quite believe he’s allowed to be there.
You look down.
You’re in his bed.
He’s not beside you.
Your heart jackhammers in your chest. You swing your legs over the side, bare feet hitting cool floor—and then you freeze.
Because the light in the bathroom is on. And you can hear the shower.
Water. Steam. The faint silhouette of a man through frosted glass.
You back away instinctively, cheeks burning, and that’s when the wrongness hits you.
You don’t feel like a passenger.
You feel… solid.
You lift your hand. It’s your hand. Your skin, your faint scar on the knuckle.
But the air tastes like him. The room smells like him.
And something about the angle of your own vision is off, like you’re seeing yourself from a height you don’t have.
“Hey,” a familiar voice says behind you, slow and careful. “You okay?”
You spin.
Bucky is sitting up in the bed, hair mussed, eyes heavy with sleep. He’s shirtless. The sheets are pooled around his waist, baring the curve of his shoulder and the scars you could trace in the dark.
Except.
You look down again. Your hands. Your body.
You look back up.
“Holy shit,” you whisper.
He blinks. Then his eyes widen.
“Are you—” He scrubs a hand over his face. “Is this—god, please tell me this isn’t some fucked-up hallucination.”
“You’re… dreaming,” you say slowly. “About me.”
He stares at you.
Then he laughs, helpless and hoarse.
“I fell asleep on your couch,” he says. “I remember that much. You were… right there. Warm. Breathin’ against my chest.” His voice goes soft. “And then I… I opened my eyes and I was somewhere else. Here. But different. And I could feel things that weren’t mine. This…”
He gestures to you. To your body. To the way you’re standing in the center of his room, wearing his t-shirt, hair a mess from sleep.
“This is your place,” he says. “Or… a version of it. From before you moved in here.” His mouth quirks. “You sure have a lot of books, doll.”
You laugh, shocked and shaky. “You… saw my apartment?”
“Think I might still be seein’ it,” he replies. “Or I’m seein’ you seein’ me seein’ it. I don’t know, this soulmate physics stuff is above my pay grade.”
You step closer, slowly, like approaching a wild animal.
“You never dreamed before,” you say. “Not like this.”
He swallows. “Guess I finally caught up.”
You can see the moment it hits him, really hits him, what this means. His shoulders tremble. His eyes shine.
“For all those years, you… you watched my life,” he says. “And I never gave you anything back. Not a single night of peace. Not a single stupid moment of my day to balance out the bad.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” you begin, but he shakes his head, smiling through the tears.
“Maybe not,” he says. “But I still hated the idea of you bein’ alone in it. Of you carryin’ all that without ever gettin’ to hand me somethin’ to carry in return.”
He reaches out. His flesh hand hovers near your cheek, not quite touching.
“Let me have some of it now,” he whispers. “Let me see you. All of you. The good and the bad. Let me watch you cry over exams and spill coffee on yourself and dance in your kitchen when you think no one’s lookin’. Let me be the one who wakes up shakin’ because you had a rough day and I need to make it better.”
Your eyes burn.
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to,” he cuts in, fierce. “I’ve wanted to, since the day I realized you exist. Since the day I stepped into your office and saw how my nightmares had carved lines in your face.”
He steps closer. His hand finally lands on your cheek, calloused thumb brushing away a tear.
“Let me share it,” he says. “Please. I can’t go back and stop those men from hurtin’ me. I can’t take those images out of your head. But I can be there now. I can stand in front of whatever’s comin’ next.”
You sink into his touch.
“I don’t want you to keep punishin’ yourself for things you couldn’t control,” you whisper.
“Then don’t you do it either,” he says softly.
You let out a small, wet laugh. “Hypocrite,” you murmur.
“Yeah,” he says, smiling a little. “Guess I am.”
You look up at him. At the man who has haunted your nights and now, finally, stands in your days.
“Stay,” you say. “In my dreams. In yours. In the kitchen at 3 am. On the couch when we both pretend we’re really into whatever movie’s on.”
His smile deepens, eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Anywhere you’ll have me, doll,” he says. “I’m there.”
You step into his arms. He wraps himself around you like he’s been waiting his whole life to remember how.
You breathe him in. Warmth and soap and the faint metal tang that’s always hovered at the edge of your senses.
You tilt your head up.
He kisses you like you’re something holy.
It’s not like the secondhand kisses you watched him give girls in clubs. It’s not like the bruising, desperate collisions you felt through his body in Hydra missions. It’s slow. Reverent. His mouth soft against yours, his hand cupping the back of your head like he’s afraid you’ll disappear.
You kiss him back like you’ve been practicing in your sleep for years.
When you pull back, you’re both breathless.
“Think I’m gonna like this whole dream thing,” he murmurs, forehead resting against yours.
“Yeah?” you whisper.
“Yeah.” He huffs a quiet laugh. “Got a lot of time to make up for. A lot of nights to give back.”
You curl your fingers into the fabric of his shirt.
“I’ll be there,” you say. “Every time you close your eyes.”
He nods, like that’s a vow you just exchanged.
You wake up on the Tower couch with your head on his chest and his arms around you, holding on like the world might try to take you if he loosens his grip.
His shirt is damp where your tears have soaked through.
His eyelashes are wet, too.
“Morning,” he murmurs, eyes blinking open.
You smile up at him, throat tight.
“Morning,” you whisper. “Did you sleep okay?”
He looks at you like you hung the moon.
“I dreamed,” he says simply.
Your chest aches in the best way.
“Me too,” you say.
He kisses your forehead.
You think, for the first time in your life, that maybe nightmares can be outnumbered.
That maybe, together, you can rewrite the story.
Not by erasing what Hydra did. Not by pretending the chair and the lab and the missions never happened.
But by layering new images over the old ones. Shared breakfasts and late-night talks and soft touches and kisses that taste like hope. By letting him see you the way you’ve always seen him—flawed and hurting and still, somehow, unbelievably good.
By letting your dreams finally, truly, belong to both of you.
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