Wake Up Darling
PAIRING: soldier!bucky barnes x agent!reader
WARNINGS: psychological torture, captivity, mind manipulation, Hydra experimentation, injury, blood, confusion and disorientation, panic, grief, reality distortion, emotional whiplash, angst with a soft landing, desperate rescue, trauma aftermath, and one man who will burn the world to bring you back.
SUMMARY: You wake in a perfect life—white fences, morning coffee, and Bucky’s soft kisses—but something’s wrong. Whispers bleed through the walls, reflections don’t match, and the world feels too flawless to be real. When the illusion shatters, you’ll have to face the truth: Hydra built your heaven, and Bucky is fighting like hell to drag you home.
A/N: to my 🖤 anon, i am sososo sorry! this completely got put on the back burner even tho it has been done for like 2 weeks. i had so much fun with this one! the idea of being put in that "perfect world" and bucky having to fight to get you out? sign me up. inspired by this ask, this gave don't worry darling in the best way. enjoy!!
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The coffee is perfect.
It’s the kind of morning you’ve always said you’d earn someday: sunlight pooling over a calm, scrubbed countertop; a mug warmed between your hands; the distant hush of sprinklers catching light like confetti. There’s a ring on your finger that fits the way a promise should. There’s a dish towel slung over Bucky’s shoulder and a smear of flour on his jaw because he swore he could make pancakes without measuring and now he’s muttering “eyeballing is a skill” like a man defending his thesis.
He kisses your temple while the baby gurgles in the high chair, legs kicking, cheeks shining with applesauce. The house hums with quiet things—radio static slipping into a Motown chorus, the low click of the ceiling fan, the whisper of a morning that has no sharp edges. It’s ridiculous, how right it feels. The shirt on your back smells like dryer sheets. The tile is cool beneath your feet. Bucky’s laugh fizzles bright in your chest like soda, fizz up your throat, bubble at your lips.
“I could get used to this,” he says, and the way he says it—even, sure, soft—makes something warm expand behind your ribs like a sun rising just for you. He taps the ring with a knuckle. “Hope you’re not regretting it, Mrs. Barnes.”
You give him a look that means never and always and thank you and mine, all at once. “Regretting you?” You drag a finger through the flour on his jaw, an easy little ritual of affection. “Not possible.”
He grins like you’ve swallowed him whole. Later he’ll mow the lawn in sloppy loops and the neighbor will wave over the picket fence and you’ll catch yourself aching at the sight of the lines in his cheeks when he smiles at the baby, like he’s memorizing something he doesn’t ever want to forget. Later you’ll walk to the farmer’s market and buy peaches that drip down your wrist. Later you’ll curl into the couch and doze while the baby naps and he reads a paperback with the spine cracked down the middle.
Right now he pours you another cup. It tastes like caramel. It tastes like a small, safe life you didn’t know it was allowed to want.
You bring it to your mouth and, for half a second, the reflection on the surface isn’t your face.
A ripple, a misalignment—another woman staring up at you from the coffee: gaunt, wide-eyed, a smear of blood at her hairline. Your hand jerks. The cup wobbles. Bucky’s hand is already there, steadying, his palm warm, his brows pinched. “Hey,” he says, tone light but not careless. “Hey, careful. I’m trying to impress you with my barista skills.”
“Just hot,” you lie, and swallow fast, and the second you blink it’s your reflection again in the brown sheen—the off-center part in your hair, the soft line of your mouth, the curve of the ring when you lift your hand. Your heart thumps irregular, then smooths, like a record skipping and still finding its groove.
Weird, you think. Nothing else.
The rest of the day keeps its promises. You hear a lawnmower two houses over. You help the baby stack plastic rings and clap when she shrieks and knocks them over. The mail is addressed to you and him, as if it always has been. There’s an invitation to a block party. There’s a coupon for mulch. You study the return address like it matters, like your name has roots that go all the way back to a seed.
When you go to rinse a knife at the sink, you look up and the window’s glass shows you the yard: Bucky unspooling the hose, the baby’s sun hat pitched crooked where he’s pinned it on. There’s a sheen on the glass, a little film, as if the day is something you can peel and fold.
He looks up toward the window, right where you are, and mouths I love you, and then—just for a blink—the words stutter out of sync, his lips forming something like wake up instead.
You flinch. The knife clatters. Water splashes your shirt.
When he comes in with the baby and finds you staring at the sink, he tilts his head, all concern under its blanket of ease. “What’s wrong?”
You want to say it: nothing, everything, I’m hearing ghosts in the day you built for me. You scratch your nail against the curve of your ring and tell yourself you’re tired. You slept weird. You had a dream you can’t snag by the tail. You need a nap like the baby.
“Nothing,” you say. “I’m… I’m being weird.”
He kisses your forehead and makes you sit and drink water and brings the baby’s chubby foot to your lips to make you laugh. He smells like cut grass. He moves through the kitchen like he was born to reach for the sugar with his left hand and nudge the drawer shut with his hip. He calls you sweetheart like he’s been doing it for years. When you catch his profile in the microwave door, for a breath you see a metal glint where his temple should be. For a breath, you smell antiseptic and smoke.
This is heavenly, you think, out of nowhere, which is a ridiculous word for a room with applesauce fingerprints on the highchair tray. Maybe that’s how it works. Maybe heaven doesn’t look like a choir of light; maybe it looks like relief.
The whisper comes back while you’re folding laundry—wake up—and you freeze with one of Bucky’s shirts open on your knees. The voice isn’t angry. It isn’t even loud. It’s the sound you make when you’re coaxing a sleeping baby into letting go: gentle, rhythmic, come on, sweetheart, eyes on me.
You look up and the mirror across from the bed shows a small, bright bedroom, a pair of shoes kicked under the dresser, your own body perched on the edge of the mattress, your head tilted as if you’re listening to something no one else can hear. The mirror also shows, for a slice of a second, that same gaunt woman behind you, hand raised with a steadying urgency as if she could reach through. Her mouth shapes the words. Wake up.
The next moments slide wrong. You stand. The floor feels… padded. Like a stage dressed up as a floor. Like the sound of your feet is being softened by someone running the board.
You go to the mirror and touch it and your finger comes away smudged with powder you don’t remember wearing. There’s a hairline crack at the bottom left corner. You crouch to see it and hear Bucky in the hallway humming to the baby. It’s the tune of something you can’t place and then can: not a lullaby, not a radio hit. A rhythm you know by heart like your own pulse. A rhythm that makes your throat go dry.
You’ve heard it in basements. You’ve heard it stitched into the hum of generators. You’ve heard it on missions where Hydra made the air taste like electricity. You watch your face go white in the glass.
The next morning, everything tries harder.
He serves the pancakes in a neat stack, every circle perfect. The baby claps. The neighbors knock with a welcome basket. There’s a breeze that sneaks a curl loose at your neck and Bucky hooks it behind your ear with a thumb as if he’s memorizing touch the way other men memorize lock combinations. “You okay?” he asks, without asking. You don’t realize you’ve been scanning corners, peering at seams, waiting for the set to show its scaffolding until he makes you meet his eyes. “You keep looking at the ceiling like it owes you money.”
You want to say: It’s too perfect. Don’t you feel it? The corners are rounded off. The light’s in the same place every time I turn my head. The baby never cries for more than thirteen seconds. The radio never mentions the news. Your left shoulder never twinges. You never wake up gasping. No one calls us. No one needs us. No one bleeds.
Instead you say, because it breaks out of you before you can leash it, “When did we get married?”
It’s not a challenge. It’s a test. You’re ready for June in a backyard and vows at sunset and Natasha’s laugh in the back row.
Bucky sets the spatula down and smiles like he’s letting you win at something on purpose. “Last spring. You wore white; I wore a tie. Steve cried.”
“Where?”
His eyes flick, just once, like a system accessing shelves. “At the courthouse.”
“And after?”
“After,” he says, a little slower, and his fingers drum once on the counter, “we danced in the kitchen. I burned the lasagna; you said it was charming.”
There’s a snap of static at the base of your skull. You can feel the answer bending to meet your question, like metal under heat. You glance at the baby and she studies you with a solemn gravity that makes your chest ache. It isn’t fair, the way the world will use the things you want most against you.
“Okay,” you say carefully, and pick up the spatula and press it to your palm. It’s warm. It’s heavy. Real is not the same as true.
The day turns itself like a body looking for the coolest part of the pillow. You take a walk. You pass identical roses in identical beds. You wave at the same women with the same ponytails pushing the same strollers. There’s a hum you can’t un-hear now: just below the birdsong and the squeak of stroller wheels and the chatter of your neighbors, a low, persistent current, like a transformer three doors down, like a machine trying not to trip a breaker.
When you get home, Bucky is at the table with a pile of mail. You pick up an envelope and peel it open and inside is a letter from your mother telling you how proud she is, how she couldn’t be happier to see you settled, safe, sweet, finally. The signature is hers and isn’t. There’s a wrong loop in the y. She always dots her i’s like nails. You turn the paper over. The back is blank, almost too blank, the kind of matte that refuses fingerprints.
That night you dream that the ceiling fan stops mid-rotation and the silence it leaves is a hole you can see through. You wake with your heart burning. Bucky rolls toward you and tucks you into his neck like he’s been practicing since the first day. “Nightmare?” he says, already a whisper, already a balm. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
But halfway through the words, the voice tilts. Not his. Not his exactly. Yours? No. A braid of familiar timbres: Sam’s urgency when the comms fail; Steve in a corridor yelling your name; Natasha cussing as she reloads; the buckling sound of your own breath when the world squeezes.
Wake up.
You sit up too fast. The room doubles. You clutch at your ring out of reflex and your fingers close around cool, smooth metal. For a flashing, awful half-second, you expect to feel a serrated edge. A cuff. A restraint disguised as sentiment.
“Sweetheart?” Bucky’s voice and the moonlight and the baby’s soft whuff through the monitor all in the same breath. His hand on your back. His weight shifting to support you. “What do you need?”
“Tell me about the market,” you blurt, because it’s the one thing you can’t shake, juice sticky on your wrist and heat breathing off the pavement. “What did we buy last week?”
“Peaches,” he says instantly, like he’s throwing you a rope. “Flowers. The guy with the accordion played—”
“What color were the flowers?”
Something in his face stiffens. He smooths it before it can make a sound. “Yellow,” he says. His mouth makes the shape like he’s written it on cue cards. “They were yellow.”
“We bought white.”
He blinks. “We—” The word glitches in his throat.
“There weren’t any yellow left,” you hear yourself say, and your voice is not your voice, it’s the voice of the woman in the mirror, it’s the voice of the comms, it’s the voice of a building when the foundation shifts. The space between the two of you fills with a pressure like weather. “We bought white because we said they’d look nice in that vase—” You point at the credenza automatically and there it is, a neat glass cylinder with stems fuzzed into abstract green by the water, blossoms luminous as moons. You don’t remember placing them there. You don’t remember changing the water. “We joked our whole house is an ad for toothpaste; we said the white would match the—”
“Okay,” he says, and there’s a fraction of a second where his eyes go large and old, and then he is the softness again, the balm, the safe. He cups your face. He’s very careful. “Hey. It was a different week, babe. I mixed it up.”
“Why are you calling me babe?” You’ve been sweetheart, honey, love, and it should be such a small thing, such a silly little snag, but something behind your ear screams.
His throat works. “Because I—because I always—”
“No,” you say, flat and shaking. “You never do.”
The baby whimpers, a soft, tentative sound. It feels staged. It feels merciful. It feels like someone dimming the lights so you don’t see what’s behind the set.
“What is this?” Your voice scrapes raw. “Bucky, what did you do?”
He flinches like you hit him. It’s not pretend. That wince belongs to a man who has spent years learning to keep his face open even when his heart is a locked room in a burning house. “I—I didn’t—”
“How did we get here?” you demand. “How did we get this house? Who signed the mortgage? Where are the papers? Where are our wedding photos? Where’s—”
The front door opens.
Neither of you moved.
You hear footsteps you know too well. Boots, heavy. You smell cold air, wet metal, a tang like ozone. The baby monitor squeals and then cuts out. You feel something in the walls groan with effort.
“I can’t do this,” you say, and you don’t know whether you’re talking to him or to the house or to the thing that is wearing the shape of your life. “I can’t—”
“Sweetheart,” Bucky pleads, but the word frays, the letters getting caught in an invisible grate. His hands are on your shoulders and you’re cold where he’s touching you, as if something in you is already stepping out of your skin.
You stand. The room tilts. The mirror on the dresser shows the bed and the ring and the white flowers and a smear of darkness in the doorway. You reach for the ring and yank. It doesn’t come off. Your breath shards. Panic flings sparks behind your eyes.
The door opens wider. A man you don’t know is framed there—a stranger and not. His face is… wrong. Not Hydra, not your past, not your nightmares. A composite, a thing made of things you fear, a mask that uses your own memory as glue. He smiles and your mouth fills with the taste of pennies.
“Time’s up,” he says, but the mouth that moves is not his. You hear it in your bones. You hear it under the floorboards. You hear it from the deep, stubborn place in you that never learned how to die. Wake up.
You force your ring over your knuckle. It cuts. The skin breaks. The sting is shocking. The first wild color in a black-and-white film. For a dizzy moment you expect nothing, because you expect nothing in a world that never bleeds.
Pain blooms.
The house inhales.
“Don’t—” Bucky says, strangled, and for a fractured heartbeat you think he’s warning you, begging you to stay, holding you here like a hand at your ankle. Then you see the tears in his eyes that the simulation can’t grind out of him fast enough, the naked panic the mask can’t facsimile in time. “Please,” he says, not the word the world wants him to say, not stay, not safe—please, to something else, to you somewhere else, to whoever is still listening. “Come back to me.”
“Who are you?” you ask him, and you mean it like a blade. “And what did you do to me?”
The sound that splits his face open isn’t anger. It’s heartbreak. He steps back like you shot him. “I’ve been trying,” he says, and it comes out like a confession, like a prayer. “I’ve been—god, baby—I’ve been talking to you for hours—days—just—just come back—”
The stranger in the doorway lunges. The house folds the edges of him to make him fit whatever you need him to be most—cop, priest, doctor, handler—and he is all of them and none. He grabs your wrist. His hand is iron. The ring cuts deeper. The blood isn’t real and it is. The world jitters like a bad movie file. “No,” he says. “No, no, no—”
Wake up, the voice says, and you know it now, you know the true voice, not the mask of it, the core: Bucky, in a different room in a different life, jaw locked, hands shaking, saying your name like he built a house out of it and the wind knocked the roof off.
You wrench free and run.
Halls telescoping. Stairs extruding. Doors appearing, blank, then named: laundry, pantry, office. Your bare feet slap and slip as if the floor is deciding whether to be tile or concrete. You choose the one door that’s never been there before—basement. Of course. Of course the set has a basement. You yank it open and there’s—what is that smell—wet copper, burned dust, the clotted tang of machines that have been doing something ugly for a very long time.
You go down. The stairs count themselves like a nursery rhyme. Twelve, eleven, ten—
At the bottom: a room that does not belong to your house. It’s harshly lit. It’s white, then not white, then raw, then blinking, then a flicker resolves and there it is, unvarnished: steel chair, restraints splayed like dead hands, a crown of needles haloing the headrest. The air vibrates with held current. There’s a hum that sits in your teeth and vibrates bone.
You look at the chair and all the oxygen in your body quits.
The stranger pounds down the stairs behind you and his boots find metal when they should find carpet; the world can’t keep up. He snarls. He’s losing definition. His face is glitching, a stack of transparencies slipping. The ring on your finger blazes like a brand. You know, you think suddenly, exactly how to break this.
You sit in the chair.
“No,” the stranger roars, and now it is Hydra’s voice, and your handler’s, and every man who ever made your body a map for knives. “No, you don’t get to—”
You slam your hand down on the armrest. The metal is cold enough to hurt. You feel the echo of restraints that are not there and are very much there somewhere else. You tighten your fingers. “Run it,” you say, and your voice is steady because you invented steady, you practiced it until your throat was feathered with it. “Run the program.”
The machine hears you the way a trained dog hears its handler. The world goes bright and then black and then your skull is full of bees and then someone is shouting your name, your name, your name. It could be your own mouth. It could be the man you love. It could be the sky.
What it is: the sound of the door opening in the room where your real body is.
What you feel: hands on your shoulders, real weight, something warm pressed to your palm that isn’t a mug, it’s flesh, it’s the heat of another person’s plea. All at once the fake basement and the fake chair and the fake ring and the fake baby explode outward like a soap bubble in a high wind, and the afterimage burns onto your retinas, the way a camera flash leaves you blind.
You open your eyes.
The world is too loud. The light is wrong. A ceiling you’ve never seen. The smell of alcohol. Monitors throwing numbers in frantic green. Your throat is cotton. Your skin is packed with glass.
You jerk, because your first instinct is always to fight. You rip something from your arm. An alarm screams. Hands catch you. A voice breaks itself trying to be gentle. “Hey—hey—hey—shh, shh, sweetheart, stop, you’re okay, you’re safe—”
Bucky’s face.
Too close and too far. Eyes red-rimmed. Stubble he didn’t bother shaving. Hair shoved back like he’s done it a hundred times tonight. He’s shaking. He’s mouthing something over and over, your name, baby, please, I’ve got you. His hand is locked around your wrist like you’re the last anchor he had left.
You heave for breath and every breath hurts, like re-entering the atmosphere. Your chest is a wrecking ball. Your head is full of fog and glass and pins. You try to sit up. You try to recoil. You try to check your left palm for a ring that doesn’t exist and hurts like it does. The machine that isn’t here anymore sings in phantom behind your ear.
“You—” your voice breaks on the edges of your own teeth—“you put me there.”
The way his face goes soft with devastation is obscene. He shakes his head hard. “No, no, no—sweetheart, no—don’t—look at me—look at me—”
“You put me there,” you rasp, because in the world you just left his mouth made “wake up” and it sounded like a threat. Because the ring cut and the baby cried and the door opened. Because the things you want most are the easiest knives to hold against you. “You said—” Your brain can’t find the thread. Your whole body feels like a badly tuned radio. “You said wake up.”
“I’ve been saying it for hours,” he chokes out, one hand on your cheek like he could hold your skull together. “Days. They—they had you in a pod. We found the lab—we tore it apart—baby, I swear, I swear to you—”
Something in the room shifts. You hear familiar voices at the edges, blurred, strained. “Clear the doorway—c’mon, give them space—” “Vitals stabilizing—” “She’s back with us—” “Buck, ease up, she’s—she needs air—”
He doesn’t ease up. He can’t. He keeps saying your name like he learned it wrong and he’s going to keep practicing until the sound fits his mouth again. You gulp him in, starving, certain, furious, drowning. Your mind is trying to reconcile two realities like two plates of the earth grinding. It’s brutal. It’s slow. It’s not neat.
“Where—” you manage, every word teeth—“where’s—”
He knows. His face breaks. You think, wildly, that he looks like a man who accomplished something and lost something in the same breath. “There wasn’t—” His voice is a thread that keeps catching on metal. He swallows. “It wasn’t real, honey.”
It’s worse than being cut. It’s worse than anything the machine did. The grief that hits you is oceanic and humiliating, because logic should cauterize it and it doesn’t. You ache for a baby who never existed and does, in the pound-for-pound way of longing. You ache for a white kitchen with a vase of white flowers. You ache for a neighbor’s wave, for a block party, for a world where your best worry is mulch.
You press your fist to your mouth and feel the phantom ring burn. Bucky flinches like you struck him. “I’m sorry,” he says hoarsely, which is the stupidest thing he could say and the only thing, because he didn’t do it, and he’s sorry anyway, and he will be sorry for both of you until the end of everything. “I’m so—I’m so goddamn sorry.”
You should tell him it’s not his fault. You should tell him you know, deep in the place that the machine couldn’t mine out of you, that he would burn the world to its studs to pull you out—which he did. You should take the hand he’s holding out like a drowning man offers a life ring to the person who went under first.
Instead you say, low, ugly, “Don’t call me babe.”
His mouth twitches. Even this is relief. Even this is an anchor. “Yeah,” he whispers, a laugh cut to the bone. “Okay. Okay, sweetheart. I won’t.”
The room unmutes. Sam is a blur in the doorway, jaw set, eyes wet. Natasha is a line of steel and mercy. Steve stands with his hands half-lifted like he’s ready to catch anything, even the air. The monitors settle. Your breath finds you again. The adrenaline recedes like a tide and leaves you shivering and mean and human.
Bucky tucks a blanket around you with exquisite care. He moves like the floor could be booby-trapped. He moves like the chair could leap out of the corner. He moves like your body is a lit fuse. “You don’t have to forgive me,” he says, and his voice is steady now, the steadiness he saves for moments like this, the steadiness he learned the hard way, the steadiness he made for you like a house. “Not tonight. Not tomorrow. I just need you to know I didn’t do it, and I never would, and I will spend the rest of my life making sure nobody can again.”
You close your eyes because looking at him hurts. You see white daisies blurring through your lids. You see the baby’s sun hat. You see a door you opened because you could. Your throat thickens. “She had your eyes,” you whisper, and you hate yourself for saying it because it’s cruel and it’s true and it doesn’t matter and it matters.
He makes a sound that is not a word. He presses his forehead to the back of your hand like he’s at a church built out of what you’ve survived. “We can—” he starts, and stops, and resets like a man choosing his one true thing. “We will make our own life,” he says fiercely, a vow clipped of every frill. “It won’t be a machine’s idea of perfect. It’ll be messy and loud and real. If you want it with me. If you don’t—if you need time—if you need me across the room—I’ll go across the world. Just—don’t leave me in the place where I can’t help you.”
It’s not a plea. It’s the plainest thing he knows how to offer. He holds your gaze like a rope. He doesn’t flinch when you jerk your hand away; he doesn’t lunge when you let your fingers drift back and find his. He threads them with a careful pressure, like someone learning a new language.
The door to the room closes. The world gets smaller. It gets bearable by inches.
“Tell me something only you know,” you say, because you want a bridge and you can’t build it yourself yet. “Right now.”
He doesn’t reach for the easy ones. He doesn’t say the Brooklyn thing or the plums thing or the way you take your coffee. He licks his lips, and for a moment he is that boy with his hair slicked back, the one with a grin big enough to be its own city, and he says, soft and mortally sure, “You hate yellow flowers. You bought white and told me to lie and say they were yellow so you’d have a reason to be angry later, because being sad is too quiet for you.”
The breath you take shudders its way down. It sticks and then it doesn’t.
He squeezes your fingers. A tear slips clean from his jaw to the sheet. “Also,” he says, voice cracking, “if you ever want to call me a villain again, I’ll hold your hand while you do it.”
This is not heaven. It doesn’t pretend to be. The light is bad. Your head is ringing. You are stitched back into a world that hurts and heals haphazardly, not on a plot, not by a wire pulled from behind a wall. You’re not ready to let go of the life you just lost—might never be, not entirely. The ache will be something you live with, a ghost kid giggling in the hallway at the corner of your life.
You look at him. Your villain. Your rescue. Your liar, your truth. You’re going to need days. Weeks. You’re going to need to see a ring and not flinch, hold a mug and not search it for another woman’s eyes. You’re going to need to hear wake up and not think of a man in a doorway or a machine under your skin.
“Okay,” you say, voice wrecked. You don’t know whether you mean the flowers or the future. You don’t know whether you mean forgive or fight. You let him have your hand anyway. You let yourself have his.
He breathes like he hasn’t in hours, days. “Okay,” he echoes, and for the first time since you opened your eyes, the word doesn’t scrape.
The house in your head will keep standing for a while. Sometimes you’ll think you hear sprinklers. Sometimes you’ll taste peaches. Sometimes you’ll wake in the night and swear there’s a baby crying down the hall. Maybe someday there will be. Maybe someday you’ll buy white flowers because you like how they look in the vase and yellow ones because he does. Maybe you’ll plant something and it’ll take.
For now, Bucky folds his big, shaking hand over yours like it’s shelter. For now, you lie there and let the machines be machines, not gods. For now, you stay, and breathe, and bleed a little, and choose the mess.
He leans close—not a kiss, not yet, just his breath at your cheek, a quiet you can live inside—and he whispers, the right way this time, the way only your bones can hear:
“Stay with me. You’re here.”
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