Breaking Ice (Day 9)
Pairing: Avenger!Bucky x Avenger!Reader
Summary: When a mission gets compromised and you stop breathing beneath the ice, Bucky breaks every rule to bring you back with a love he can no longer hide.
Word Count: 1.9k
Warnings: near drowning; falling through ice; hypothermia; cpr/resuscitation; panic; angst (w happy ending); Bucky is desperate
Author’s Note: It’s been so long since I’ve written anything in Bucky’s pov. But I believe it fit so well here. I loved this emotional request, my dear, thank you so much for sending it in! I hope you enjoy ♡
WWC Masterlist | Masterlist
Bucky has learned not to trust silence. Or surfaces that look too calm.
And right now, he doesn’t trust any of this.
The ice expanse looms wide and perfidious, a frozen lake transformed into a combat zone. Its skin is veined with subtle cracks resembling stress lines beneath glass. Somewhere beneath it, dark water lurks and waits.
Snow scuds sideways across the ground as if it’s being chased. The world has shrunk to shades of white and steel-blue and the crunch of boots over something that pretends to be solid.
And Bucky doesn’t like this.
“Stay sharp,” Steve says into the comm, voice concentrated, shield strapped tight. “Thermals show movement north of the ridge.”
Sam hums, a grumble and a teasing lilt in his tone. “Because of course Hydra would pick the one place where falling equals instant death.”
Bucky hears you make an amused sound as you adjust your footing. And when you glance back at him over your shoulder, he pretends not to have watched your every step. Your breath fogs the air, your eyelashes already dusted white. And you still manage to look at him with a smirk. “Barnes, if I eat it out here, you’re carrying me back.”
Bucky snorts despite not feeling like it. “You wish.”
But his eyes don’t leave you.
They never really do. Not since somewhere between Sokovia and Siberia and all the moments in between and before. He tracks the way you move, careful but unafraid, the way your shoulders square when the wind shoves at you, the way you always walk just a fraction ahead as though you’re daring the world to keep up.
It terrifies him.
The ice groans underfoot. Deep and hollowed. Almost conversational. As if the ice is clearing its throat before opening its mouth.
“Hey—” Bucky starts, but it’s too late already.
Someone bursts from cover and slams into you hard from the side. The force is brutal. Momentum weaponized. You skid, boots screaming uselessly across the slick surface, arms not having the time to pinwheel and it will haunt him forever because your balance doesn’t stand a chance.
You crash downward.
Then the ice gives up.
It doesn’t just crack, it howls a low animal sound dragged up from the planet’s spine.
The surface caves inward, serrated and brutal, a jaw opening and only closing once you’re inside.
There’s no pause, no time, no heroic slow-motion — just a destructive crack and the sickening absence where you were.
“Y/n!” Your name is torn out of Bucky’s chest as though he’s spitting out his heart.
“Contact!” Natasha shouts. “We’ve got—”
Bucky is already running. Ice be damned. Mission be damned. He doesn’t ask permission, doesn’t check angles or cover or the mission parameters still ringing in his earpiece. Something in him detonates and his body answers.
“Barnes, hold position!” Sam barks. “Bucky—!”
No.
There is only the hole and the water and the unendurable absence of you where you were supposed to be.
The wind is a knife, the snow a white cloud, the gunfire distant and irrelevant.
He skids to his knees at the edge. It’s ugly, bleeding dark water, and as he peers down, he sees you beneath the surface. Your body is yanked sideways, out of reach, out of touch, out of sight, hair drifting around your face.
You’re not moving. You’re not fighting.
And something inside him shatters so sharply, so personally, it almost feels audible. His breaths are brittle gasps, short shards of air snapping off in his throat.
“Track her,” he growls to no one, slamming his metal palm flat against the ice. The arm vibrates, feeds him data he doesn’t deserve to have. Faint heat signatures. Motion. A ghost of you slipping farther away.
He sprints along the fractured line, boots slipping, heart hammering and trying to break free of his ribs to follow you into the depths of the water. The ice above you is thick again, deceptively solid, smooth as a lie.
Bucky doesn’t hesitate.
He drives his vibranium fist down.
The impact cracks the surface like lightning splitting the sky. Once. Twice. The third punch cracks the ice wide, water erupting upward and exploding in a freezing roar.
Cold vapor burns his lungs as he dives without thinking, without breathing, without anything but you burning bright and singular in his mind.
The water is a monster. It is agony. It wraps around his limbs and squeezes. It seizes him, pounces into every seam of his gear, steals the air from his chest in one ferocious gulp. It’s so cold it feels hot, like fire inverted, like pain sharpened into clarity. He clenches his teeth against the shock and forces his eyes open. Everything is blue-black danger, bubbles screaming past his face.
There.
You’re limp. Unresponsive. Hair floating around your face like a halo that doesn’t belong in a place like this. Your eyes are closed. Your body drifts away from him, obedient to the current, uncaring of the man breaking himself to reach you.
His blood flow seems to abandon his brain, leaving him light-headed, half-evacuated.
No, he thinks, viscerally. No. No. No.
He kicks hard, metal arm cleaving through the resistance. The world is trying to steal you piece by piece and he’s not going to let it.
So he fights, and he gets to you, and he grabs you around the ribs. The relief that hammers into him is savage and overwhelming, so intense it nearly costs him the strength to move.
He hauls you up and continues fighting. He fights the water, fights the pull, fights the rising scream in his chest as his lungs start to spasm. The ice above is a warped mirror.
He breaks the surface with a sound that’s half-sob, half-snarl, vision tunneling, arms wound tight around you.
Hands grab him and you immediately.
“Shit” Sam’s voice cracks. “Get her out— get her—”
Together, they help pull you onto the ice.
“Get her flat!” Steve orders.
Bucky basically shoves away a shocked Natasha to get back to your side.
Fear is a hand over the mouth of reason, muffling logic until it goes hoarse.
You’re motionless. Skin pale, lips tinged blue, water streaming from you relentlessly. He drops beside you so hard, his knees protest, hand shaking as he brushes wet hair from your face.
His chest is a barricaded door rattling in its frame. Something is pounding from the inside, desperate to be let out.
“No, no, no,” he mutters, words rumbling rough and vulnerable. “Come on, please!”
He tilts your head back, checks your airway with hands that refuse to be steady. Nothing. No breath. No rise of your chest.
Horror makes his mind slip its leash and lets his body drag after it at full speed. Feral and wild.
He places his hands on your sternum without thinking. Locks his arms. Presses down.
“One—two—three—” His voice ducks and flinches before the words even land, but he keeps counting, compressions precise and desperate, pouring everything he has into each push. “Come on. Come on, sweetheart. Breathe. You’re— you’re too stubborn for this.”
Utter dread crawls along his spine and counts each vertebra like steps toward a cliff.
Sam hovers nearby, unusually quiet. Steve watches with his jaw clenched tight. Natasha has tears in her eyes. They’ve seen Bucky fight armies without flinching, but this is naked terror, laid bare in the way his shoulders shake, the way his eyes never leave your face.
He lets his tears fall, doesn’t care who sees, doesn’t care about anything except the terrifying stillness beneath his hands. His lungs don’t remember their choreography, each breath tripping over the one before and none of them recovering. Panic like he never felt before grinds its thumb into the soft place beneath his tongue, turning saliva to sand and making him choke on it.
“Don’t you dare,” Bucky pleads under his breath between counts. “Come back to me. Come on, Y/n. Wake up. Wake up!” His words arrive bent, corners crushed, syntax bruised.
He seals his mouth over yours, breathes life back into you, then returns to compressions, erratic, limitless, refusing the universe any other outcome. He will continue doing this until he dies.
Again. Again.
“Come back,” he almost shouts in a cry. “Please come back.”
Your body jerks.
A cough tears out of you, harsh and wet. Water spills from your mouth as you gasp, lungs seizing around air as if it’s brand new.
It’s the most beautiful sound he ever heard.
He lets out a broken sob and collapses forward, catching you as you lean instinctively into him, shivering hard.
“There you are,” he whispers shakily, pressing you to him. “You’re okay. It’s okay.”
Bucky wraps around you without thinking, arms locking tight, metal and flesh forming a cage against the cold. He feels your fingers fisting in his soaked suit, face pressed into the hollow of his throat.
Steve exhales slowly, something like relief loosening his posture. Natasha turns away, giving you privacy without comment, schooling her expression back to composed.
Sam shakes his head. “Told you,” he utters under his breath, subdued, lacking a little bit of that teasing tone he tried to push into his voice. “He’s got it bad.”
Bucky doesn’t care about the others.
He just tucks your head under his chin and keeps his arms firmly around you. Shielding you from the wind, from the world, from anything else that might dare to take you. His body won’t stop trembling. His heart is still racing and it seems it hasn’t got the message that you’re alive and well in his arms.
He peppers a kiss to your wet hair before he can stop himself, before he can remember how to be careful.
You cough against him, and he tightens further, presses you closer.
“Cold,” you whimper.
“I know,” he answers immediately, rocking you just slightly. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” He says it again and again. Hoping it might remind him.
The mission can burn.
The ice can crack.
The world can do its worst.
You’re breathing.
And he knows like a cold certainty growing in his chest that he will never get over this. He can outlast missions, cheat death a hundred times over, learn every trick for outrunning the past, and it still won’t matter. Because the image of you drifting away beneath the ice will follow him forever.
It’s a deeply etched mark he will carry wherever he goes. It will surface in the quiet seconds before sleep, in the hollow pauses between heartbeats, in the spaces where he should feel victorious but doesn’t. No distance will dull it. No success will bury it.
And he knows what it means. That scar is not just grief or fear or regret — it is love in its most brutal form. It survives terror and brands itself into bone and refuses to be erased. It hurts precisely because it matters so much.
And he’s done carrying it alone.
If the memory is permanent, then so is the truth it holds. He owes you that much. He owes himself that much.
So he will finally let the words rise, will finally have to tell you how he feels, because loving you has already changed him forever, and it’s time you know.
