Takin all the stupid with me. @tiltheendofthepymparticles - Tumblr Blog

the hand plants, the heart reaps

Pairing: Landscaper!Bucky Barnes x Home Owner!Female Reader Summary: You never planned to return to the quiet countryside, let alone inherit your late grandmother’s weathered cottage and overgrown garden. Stressed and city-worn, you hire local landscaper Bucky Barnes to tame the chaos in order to honor her memory. But what begins as a simple restoration blooms into shared stories of loss, second chances and a path to starting over. Word count: 15.5k Tags/warnings: hurt/comfort; grief & mourning; death of a family member (grandmother); mentions of reader being burnt out; cottage core; strangers to lovers; unrequited feelings (briefly, if you squint, not really but kinda); slow burn; she falls first/he falls harder; lemonade as a love language (I’m serious); smut; oral sex (f receiving); p in v; unprotected sex; comeplay; fingering; happy ending Notes: welcome to April, the month of the most incredible, funny, groundbreaking, earthshattering collab you've seen in recent times! In all seriousness, I could not be more excited to start off Bucky's Dreamhouse Collab at @stantastic-association with my baby landscaper!Bucky 😊 this fic kicked my ass (i haven't written over 10k words in?? how long??) but i am so happy to finally be able to share it with you 💕finally, a big thank you to @miraclediviner who was our guiding light for this collab!

Blue light from your laptop bleeds into the darkness of your apartment, reflecting off the plastic lid of a container of cold Thai food that has been sitting there since… well, you aren’t actually sure. It’s 1 AM on a Tuesday—actually, Wednesday— and the city outside your windows lives in the middle of sirens and subway vibrations that rattle the bones of the building. For the past three hours, you have been staring at a spreadsheet until the cells began blurring into gray bars, eyes aching with a fatigue that not even sleep could touch.

You’re not tired today, you’re not tired of your job. Rather, you are worn out. Like the never-ending noises from the city have settled inside you, too, but instead of getting used to them, every single cell in you has started rejecting them like foreign objects. That description has been in your brain for weeks, now; close to a medical diagnosis you haven’t quite admitted to yet, denial before acceptance.

Your phone buzzes in the middle of another spiraling of staring at a screen that is not going to change unless you press meaningless keys. Whatever moment you were going through, though, didn’t quite prepare you for what follows.

Seeing your mother’s name on the small screen at this hour doesn’t bring a sense of alarm. It instead brings a hollow tightness to your chest, the kind of heavy stillness that usually precedes a car crash. And when you pick up the phone, come the news, even though they don’t quite feel like that when they sound through the tiny speaker. It’s a physical weight, a heavy stone dropped into a pool, sending ripples that touch every single branch of your current life.

Your grandmother is gone.

The woman who used to smell like peppermint and potting soil, whose voice was the only thing that had ever truly made the world feel quiet. You had spent countless summers with her, back in the countryside, hands in the dirt as she taught you the right way to plant a rose, how to prune a tree so it could grow stronger. Suddenly, the spreadsheet still bright on your computer has shifted from a boring task to a full-on insult. How could the numbers and columns still be there, rigid and demanding, when the person who taught you how to breathe through a heatwave on a July afternoon is simply… gone?

Are you supposed to simply go back to your life as you think of her kitchen, of the way the sunlight always seemed to pool on the linoleum in a buttery square where her cat would always sleep? Or as you are swarmed with the memory of her hands, mapped with veins like the very rivers she lived near, strong enough to haul buckets of compost and yet still gentle enough to braid your hair?

Still on the phone, your mother tells you she has left behind the weathered cottage and the garden to your name. In your mind’s eye, you could already see it surrendering to the weeds way before her heart stopped beating. No one ever cared for it the way she did, even though it had been in your family for generations. Your grandmother had been sick for a while, now, and you’re sure no one else had taken the time to care for the one thing she always did. It was yours, now.

You spend the rest of that Wednesday night in a state of suspended animation. There’s no crying, at least not yet, but you move through your apartment like a ghost, packing a back with a mechanical efficiency you’re sure would scare your mother, folding clothes you haven’t worn in years. The decision to leave doesn’t come from a sense of duty, of being present for your mother or the clinical logistics of a funeral that always feel too heavy for people mourning. It is simply survival instinct, one that hits you so sharp and sudden it almost knocks the breath out of you. Looking around your cramped apartment, filled with ergonomic furniture you don’t really like and unfinished documents, you realized tonight you were running on empty. There was no more fuel to give the city. Your grandmother’s passing was the only trigger you needed to leave it behind. You needed to go back to the only place that still holds the scent of something real, even if that reality is currently buried under layers of grief.

And by dawn, your suitcase is thrown into the trunk of your car and you are leaving the city behind.

The drive is a blur of highway static and caffeine-induced insomnia until the asphalt finally gives way to the gray ribbons of the backroads. The further you get from the skyline, from the tall buildings that framed your every day for years now, the more the silence starts to ring in your ears, echoing the emptiness in your chest. Silence used to be nice. Whenever you visited your grandmother, left the busy days behind for maybe a week or two, the silence was comforting. A heated blanket, a balm that helped you heal.

But now, as you finally pull into the gravel drive of the cottage, silence is no longer the peaceful sanctuary you had promised yourself. It’s heavy. The house looks smaller than you remember, tired, as if without her spirit to hold it up, the walls are finally starting to give in to gravity.

When you stop your car and step out, you don’t go inside immediately. Instead, you walk around the side of the house, drawn to the back where the heart of her life used to beat.

And just like the silence you had craved, the peace you had always felt here crumbles, too, the moment you lay your eyes on the yard. The garden isn’t overgrown; you think you prefer calling it a green monster. It’s aggressive, a sprawling graveyard of things your grandmother used to love. Waist-high weeds have completely swallowed the lavender path, and the wild blackberry thorns have woven themselves into an impenetrable wall. The trellis, where her prized roses used to climb in disciplined rows, is now buckling under the weight of strangling vines that look like they’re trying to pull the cottage back into the earth. An old fountain is overrun.

Standing on the bottom step of the back porch, the scale of the neglect is paralyzing. Leaves you to wonder how long had been since your grandmother had been physically able to care for her own things. How long she had kept away from the flowers and plants that had always breathed happiness into her. Just like your own mind, her space, now yours, is tangled and messy, far too gone for one person to ever hope to fix. You look at your own hands, too soft and lacking callouses, and realize you don’t even know where to start. How are you supposed to honor her memory? When you don’t know the difference between tools, the right time to plant the seeds? Guilt hits you, then, with the kind of edge that drags a cold sweat down your spine. In her absence, the wild had claimed her legacy while you were busy in the city filling spreadsheets that mattered to no one. You want to make this house a home once more. But how does one do that with an empty heart?

The first two days are spent in a state of mourning that feels exactly like static, gray and thick. You stay inside, unable to look out the windows at the chaos, and move through the cottage like a diver underwater, every motion resisted by the weight of silence.

Tea goes cold before you remember to sip it. You stare at the floral wallpaper in the hallway until the patterns begin to resemble the columns and rows of your old work, except this wallpaper doesn’t scream at you in approaching deadlines. Here, time has no teeth. It doesn’t bite, just swallows.

For the last two nights, you’ve slept in the guest bed. Your old room feels too much like a museum of a person you outgrew and no longer recognize, and her room feels like hallowed ground you are nowhere near holy enough to tread upon.

By next morning, you find yourself in the kitchen, the buttery square of sunlight hitting the linoleum exactly as you remember it, except there isn’t a cat any longer. Hands begin to aimlessly open drawers, finding yourself needing a distraction, or trying to look for something, anything. Matches for a candle. A reason to stay despite finding this place so different from the one you’d once called your second home once. And you find it, tucked between a ball of twine and a stack of expired coupons, right in the middle of the junk drawer: grandma’s old address book with a faded floral cover that still smells faintly of the rose-scented hand cream she used every night. The edges of the pages are frayed, paper slightly yellowed. A small business card falls to the floor halfway through flicking through the pages.

Barnes Landscaping & Restoration

Something in your heart flips. Not because you recognize the name, but because you immediately see her familiar handwriting in it. Another piece of her left behind that now you get to keep.

“Good lad. Strong hands and he listens to the earth.”

A sharp lump forms in your throat. This small note, mindless, written by your grandmother at a time she needed to keep a reminder, is the first thing that managed to pierce the numbness since the phone call announcing her passing. You can almost hear her voice saying it, the appreciative tone she used for people who worked with their backs and not just their mouths. And even though the grief cannot be fixed by a landscaper, you know now that there’s a flicker of hope of fixing everything else around here. You aren’t a gardener, just a person used to staring at gray bars on a screen. But an extra pair of professional hands surely will be perfect to help you face the thorns outside the house.

After you pick up the phone on the wall and dial the number, there’s two rings and then the line clicks open.

“Barnes,” the voice on the other side says. You freeze for half a second, like now you’re unsure what you’re even supposed to ask for.

“Hi,” you start, voice cracking slightly from days of disuse. You realize you haven’t said a single word since you’ve come here days ago. “I’m… I’m calling about the property on the old creek road. It’s my grandmother’s, Caroline… was. Sorry. She’s passed and I’ve just inherited the place and—” You look out the window at the waist-high weeds and strangling vines. “I think the garden has gone to war and I don’t have a way of winning that fight.”

There is a long pause on the other end. You hear the faint sound of a truck engine idling.

“Caroline was a very sweet woman. I’m sorry for your loss,” the man says, voice softening a fraction. “She spoke about you a lot. Said you were lost in the city.”

That stings a little. Mostly because it’s true.

“I’m not in the city anymore. This is my home now,” you whisper.

Another silence.

“If you’d like, I can come over this afternoon. Take a look at the garden, you can tell me what you’d like to do with it. First consultation is free for Caroline’s granddaughter.”

The afternoon sun is thick and syrupy, casting long shadows across the linoleum, when the silence of the old creak road is finally broken. You stay tucked behind the lace curtains of the kitchen window, watching heavy tires roll over unkempt gravel. A beat-up, dark blue truck pulls into view, a workhorse of a vehicle, mottled with patches of primer and the red clay of the country. The engine cuts out, and when the door creaks open, he steps out.

Barnes.

He doesn’t look like any type of contractor you’ve ever hired in the city. There’s no clipboard, no neon safety vest. He stands by the door of his truck for a long beat, hands sliding into the pockets of his dirt-stained denim, eyes surveying the “green monster” you were apparently too terrified of. From your vantage point, you see how his yellow plaid shirt, faded from too many washes and too much sun, first buttons open to reveal a white top underneath, stretches taut across a pair of shoulders that look like they were built for the sole purpose of carrying the heaviest of weights. But that’s not where your eyes linger.

Instead, they stay glued to his left arm. You don’t mean to stare. Not really. But the silver metal shines when the sunlight hits it and holds your gaze even if you try to look away. Spread across fingers, forearm, bicep, until it disappears under the short sleeve of his shirt. While watching him, you find no attempt on his side to hide that arm.

Barnes lets out a heavy sigh. Not a sigh of annoyance, or at least you don’t recognize it as such. He looks at the tangle of weeds and the buckling trellis not as nuisance, but as an old friend who has lost their way. There’s no rush to get the job done, no immediate knock on the door to get your attention. He is simply there, rounding the front of his truck as he looks around for details that surely escape you. Barnes looks like he belongs to the dirt, like the mud on his boots is a permanent part of his skin. He adjusts the brim of his cap, a movement that causes the fabric of his shirt to pull against the muscles of his back. There’s a quiet power in him, a “man of muscle” persona that’s just utilitarian, like he is a tool designed for this specific job. You can’t imagine him anywhere but here, amidst the messy chaos of your late grandma’s garden.

He touches a dry stalk, eyes some dead plants. The words from the address book return: he listens to the earth.

The door creaks behind you as you finally step out onto the porch, sneakers sinking slightly into the uneven boards, which have been worn down by years of sun and wind. You wrap your arms around yourself, though the day isn’t cold, just more of a habit that you’ve developed to shield yourself from the vastness of the yard that feels like it’s swallowing the cottage whole.

Barnes turns at the sound of you, and you then notice how he’s taller up close, broad through the shoulders in a way that makes the yellow plaid look borrowed from a smaller man. You don’t look at his metal arm again, and he doesn’t try to hide it or tuck it behind his body. It’s right there, part of him, gleaming faintly.

“Ma’am,” he says, removing his cap as a gesture all too long lost by men who called themselves gentlemen. The action reveals a sweep of dark hair damp at the temples from the heat, and without obstruction, you find it easier to see his eyes now, blue, color of ocean water. There’s no attempt to offer a handshake, and he doesn’t say anything more.

You offer your name back like it’s a gesture of gratitude. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Mister Barnes.”

“No need for the formalities. Haven’t been a Mister of much,” he corrects quietly. “I’m James. Most folks call me Bucky.”

His gaze drifts back to the yard, lingering on the strangled trellis. A muscle ticks in his jaw. “Been a while since I was out here. Last time… must’ve been early summer. Told me the roses were coming in strong, wanted me to come trim the climbers before they got away from her. But I used to be here all the time. Helped her with some drainage plannin’, built the trellis for her.”

There’s a pause, and you see him narrow his eyes at a patch of what might once have been… well, anything, now lost under a sea of bindweed. “Should’ve checked when she went quiet. Figured she was just busy with her cannin’ or had some family visitin’. Didn’t feel right to push.”

You recognize the weight in the words. Guilt. A stranger who wasn’t a stranger to your grandmother, feeling the heaviness of not having visited her more often. It’s particular, how grief has a way of finding everyone who loved the same person and handing each of them their own particular version of it.

“She was good people. Always had coffee waitin’, strong enough to wake the dead. Talked about her grandaughter, well, you, a lot. Always said you were the prettiest girl in the big city. ‘suppose she wasn’t wrong.”

That lands too close to the bone while the numbness in your chest holds firm, a gray fog that keeps any sharper feelings at bay. Another time, in the city, you would have found Mister Barnes, James, Bucky, an incredibly handsome man. Maybe you would have said something warmer to him. You’re impressed, distantly, by the solid build, the quiet competence that radiates without needing to announce itself. But the grief sits too heavy, a stone lodged between your ribs. Flirting feels like a language from another life, one spoken under different air. Here, it doesn’t occur to you.

Bucky seems to interpret the silence on your end as discomfort. He clears his throat and gestures toward the almost collapsing trellis. “She loved those roses. So we’ll build them back up. Cut back what’s chokin’ ‘em, give the roots some air. They’re tougher than they look.”

We.

You don’t know what to do with that word. It does something to the wall of numbness you’ve been operating behind, finds a hairline crack and sits there. Something about the way he says it, not a sales pitch, not an empty promise to bill you later. This isn’t just a job for him. It’s a mission, a way to set right something that had slipped away while he wasn’t watching.

You nod, the motion feeling distant. “I don’t even know where to start. It’s a lot. And I’m not her, I barely know anything about this.”

He nods, once. Accepts that.

“It's a big job," Bucky says, back to practical. “Months, probably, before it looks like anythin’.” He glances at you sideways. "Depends what you want to do with the place."

You look at the cottage behind you, at the lace curtains still visible through the kitchen window.

“I want it to feel like her again,” you say. “Doesn’t need to be perfect. I just want it to feel like it has a reason to still be standing.”

Barnes is quiet for a moment. Then he says: “That's a good enough reason to start.”

The sound of a trunk horn wakes you up before the alarm goes off.

Your body registers it first of all, pulling you up from the unreliable sleep you’ve been managing since you arrived, and for one disoriented second, suspended in the gray space between dreaming and waking, your mind can barely place it itself. Then the floral wallpaper swims into focus, then the smell of old wood.

The clock on the nightstand reads 7:12. Outside, the truck engine cuts, a door swings open and closed, and then silence again. You lie there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, listening in to the silence.

Bucky didn’t say he’d come this early. He didn’t say much at all, in full honesty. But you can already recognize the sounds of someone beginning to work in the garden that is now yours.

There is something deeply strange about it, a man like him moving through the wreckage of your grief at 7 in the morning while you are still horizontal and unwashed, yet the strangeness has an undertone to it that you can’t quite name. Maybe the particular relief of knowing that a problem is being faced even when you are not yet capable of facing it yourself.

By the time you manage to get up and get downstairs, you have pulled your hair back and traded yesterday’s clothes for something cleaner, which feels like the upper limit of what you can reasonably ask of yourself before 8 AM. The kitchen is exactly as you left it when you enter it to fill the kettle and set it on the burner before standing at the window.

Bucky is already deep into it.

He has positioned himself in front of the trellis, the worst of it, the structure that had looked to you like a lost cause from the moment you first saw it. Strangling vines have grown over it in layers, and he is working from the top down with a pair of long-handled shears, cutting in sections, pulling the severed lengths away and piling them to the side. The patience with which he does it makes it look like a delicate surgery.

You watch him work the way you watched him last time from this same window, with the glass serving the necessary distance for someone who is not yet ready to be in the middle of things. He reaches up to cut a particularly stubborn length of vine and the motion pulls his shirt taut across his back. You notice, again, the funny implausibility of his size relative to the delicacy of what he is doing. Hands, one flesh, one metal, moving through the overgrowth with the precision of someone looking for something they don’t want to damage in the finding.

The kettle whistles.

You make two cups of coffee on autopilot, as if the memory has already been embedded into you.

The back door opens just as you finish pouring the two cups, and Bucky walks over, registers you, then the cups, but he remains impassive.

“Mornin’. Didn’t expect you up this early,” he says. Doesn’t apologize for arriving at 7 AM, you notice. He’s just a man who assumed starting before the heat peaked was a given.

“I heard the horn.” With careful steps, you walk towards him and offer him a mug. “Grandma always had coffee waiting. Would feel wrong not to do the same.”

He takes the mug you extend with his right hand, wrapping his fingers around it, and you notice then the state of them. The knuckles. The deep lines of the palm, the hardened skin at the base of each finger, the kind of callouses that take years to build, sustained by the repeated act of choosing hard work.

“Thank you,” is all he gives you. Without being told, you realize that this isn’t the kind of man who fills silences out of politeness. That you can stand here and drink your coffee and not be expected to perform conversation, and that this is, somehow, the most considerate thing he could offer you right now. So you do just that. Stand there. Drink your coffee.

Eventually, Bucky finishes his coffee and then he’s back out the door, and back to work. You follow him this time, trailing behind him as you look at vines he’s begun working with. Up close, the damage is more visible than it was from the window. The vines have threaded themselves through every joint, every crossbar, working their way into the structure the way roots look for water by branching out and filling every small gap. But the trellis itself, the bone of it all, is still standing. Barely, but there, in a very unexpected way.

“You built this, right?” And even though it’s a question it sounds more like a statement because you remember what he told you already.

“Few years back,” he crouches to free a length of vine from the base, pulling steadily, working it loose rather than snapping it. “Your grandma wanted something that could hold the climbers through winter. Most prefab wouldn’t cut it.” Bucky glances up at the structure appraisingly, and you recognize the look of someone looking at something they’ve made a long time ago and are no longer sure what to think of it now. “Needs a few joints repaired, but the frame’s sound.”

Through the morning, he works and you watch, still keeping to the edge of things, mug gradually emptying before you fill it back. In the meantime, Bucky has uncovered a significant section of the trellis frame, and it is in this newly exposed stretch that he stops, crouches low, and puts the shears down.

What he’s looking at is a rose cane; or rather, what remains of one. It is gray-brown and leafless and looks, to an untrained eye like yours, like everything else in this garden, something that has long given up. But Bucky is looking at it with a particular kind of focus, one that makes you wonder if he’s reading something written in a language you definitely don’t speak, his metal fingers hovering just above the bark without quite touching.

“Is it…” Dead? That word cannot even slip past your lips.

“Dormant,” he corrects hastily. “There’s a difference.”

Then, his fingers pinch a small section of the outer bark away from the cane and he shows you the inside, which is very unmistakably green.

Alive.

“Oh.”

He stands back up, retrieves his shears and keeps working. You stay where you are a little longer, looking at the exposed cane with it secret green interior.

“She had a catalogue. Like mail-order flowers or somethin’. Used to argue about it,” Bucky says after a while, from slightly above and to your left, his attention still on the vine he’s cutting. He doesn’t feel like he’s making conversation, more like he’s just thinking out loud. “There was this one climber she’d ordered, I forget the name, she was convinced it would come back every year without any help. I told her it wouldn’t survive the first frost without protection. Stubborn thing, planted it anyway, said she’d take her chances.”

“Did it survive?”

Scanning the remaining vines with a slow eye, Bucky points to the largest dormant canes, one that is thicker than the others at the base.

“Third year runnin’.”

He doesn’t say it smiling. But the corner of his mouth does something, a small upward shift, before he ducks his chin slightly like he is trying not to make a thing of it; then goes back to cutting.

You stand there for another moment, before going back inside to refill the kettle, because the alternative is to stand there, in the middle of his work, like you belong there, and you’re not quite ready to believe that yet.

Making him tea is an accident, the first time.

You hadn’t planned it. You are in the kitchen, making a cup for yourself, the way you have been every afternoon since you arrived, and your hand simply reaches for a second mug. Muscle memory, maybe, or the particular guilt of drinking something warm while a man is pulling thorns out of the ground thirty feet away. You bring it out without overthinking it, set it on the porch railing and go back inside before he has to acknowledge it.

Bucky leaves the mug empty on the railing when he leaves.

The second time is less accidental.

A lavender path runs along the south side of the garden and is entirely invisible under a season’s worth of bindweed and creeping grass. Bucky has moved on to it after working on the trellis for a while, and he approaches it with the same care he approached the roses.

You have been watching from the porch for most of the morning, cup of tea gone cold in your hands, when he stops and looks back over his shoulders at you.

“You could help with this part,” he says, a statement of fact he’s choosing to share. You look down at your hands, then back at him.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“I know. Doesn’t matter for this, you’re just pulling.”

So you go in.

He hands you a pair of gloves without comment, the thick gardening kind, slightly too large, and you understand when you pull the first weed that this is why; the bindweed has thorns worked into it, a little too vicious, finding skin without any warning. You work at the edge of the path while he takes the denser middle section, and for a long stretch of time the only sounds are the pull and tear of vegetation.

The quiet between you has changed since the first day. It has lost the quality of two strangers being careful around each other, and it’s something simpler now. Still as quiet, but more comfortable now, like you’ve both established, without many words, that you trust each other enough to be silent together. You find that you can think in it, without the static that has followed you since the news broke.

“Is this one?” You hold up a stem you’re not sure about, something with small dark leaves that doesn’t quiet look like the rest of the weeds, but you also haven’t seen before.

Bucky glances over from where he’s kneeling. “Clover. Leave it.”

“…Why?”

“Pollinators like it. And it’s not hurtin’ anythin’.”

You put it back down carefully, tamping the soil around the base the way you’ve watched him do it, pressing with two fingers. There’s no comment from him on the imitation but you have the sense, even without looking his way, that he notices it. That’s the thing about Bucky, you’ve come to realize; he notices most things without making you feel watched.

Noticing without watching is a quality you have been trying put words to since the first day, when he looked at the rose cane the way most people look at something they love that has been damaged. There is a particular kind of attention he gives to things that is completely different from the attention you grew up being taught to pay. In the city, attention was a performance. In meetings, you looked at whoever was speaking to show them you were present, notes taken to demonstrate engagement. But here, Bucky’s attention is a different thing entirely. It is simply where his interest is. No performance, no proof. He looks at a plant and you believe that looking is the entire point of what he is doing.

And for the first time since his arrival, you find yourself wondering what it would feel like to have that quality of attention turned on you fully. Not the sideways glances you’ve caught, but the whole thing. If he’d find the flaws in your build, or if he’d look for the green under the bark.

Then you pull another weed, because this is not the time.

You are both working toward the center of the path from opposite ends when your hands converge on the same section, and you find the first live lavender stem. Bucky sees it first, a small cluster of gray-green stems, flattened under the weight of everything that has grown over them, but intact. He stops your hand and points.

“There.”

You lean closer, seeing the almost unrecognizable lavender, pressed flat and pale from the lack of light, but the leaves are still soft when you touch them, still releasing a faint dry fragrance that hits you all too softly. Then you hear him make a sound, like something has just occurred to him.

You glance over.

He is still looking at the ground, at the lavender next to you, an expression on his face like he’s actively deciding whether or not to let out whatever thought has come to mind.

Then, without looking up, without any preamble whatsoever:

"Why can't the flower ride his bike?"

You blink twice. Bucky’s jaw is set, expression aggressively neutral, like he has not just said what he said.

“… What?”

“… It’s just somethin’ that came to mind. An old joke I told your grandmother once.”

A pause hangs, your face doesn’t move except for your slightly furrowed brows.

“Okay. Why can’t the flower ride his bike?”

“Lost his petals.”

Bucky says it completely straight, the same tone he uses to tell you about drainage ingredients and soil composition and which weeds are worth keeping.

The laugh comes from somewhere so far down that it immediately surprises you on the way out. Not a small involuntary thing, but a bigger, louder laugh, one that takes over your whole chest and makes your eyes water before you’ve caught up to it. There’s no dignity to the sound that comes out of you, that escapes before grief has any chance to intervene. You press the back of your wrist to your mouth and it makes no difference at all.

Meanwhile, Bucky’s looking at you like he’s fighting very hard not smile, and losing that battle.

“That is the worst joke I have ever heard,” you manage, when you can speak again.

“Yeah. But you laughed. Was about time.”

The smile is still on your face when it happens.

It arrives quietly, the way the worst things do. One moment you are laughing, the sound of it still warm in your chest, and then something catches, a foot finding a loose board in the dark, and the warmth quickly dissipates.

Because the laughter had felt good. Physically good, the first thing in weeks that has cut cleanly through the haze, and the goodness of it is exactly what undoes you. The thought arrives fully formed and merciless: she will never hear you laugh again. Will never know you were here, in her garden, laughing at a terrible joke told by a man she liked very much.

The tears come before you can stop them.

You turn away from him immediately, a reflex, one hand coming up to cover your face. Tears that had been waiting, pressurized, behind the numbness for days, weeks, and are finally seeping through a moment of weakness. You try to breathe through it and can’t quite manage, and now you’re crying without much composure, without careful management you’ve been applying over your grief like a bandage of the wrong size.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be—”

“You don’t have to be.”

You don’t answer. You keep your hand over your face because looking at anything feels impossible right now.

“It’s not right,” you get out, eventually. “That I can laugh when she’s— I shouldn’t be laughing yet, it’s too soon, it means I’ve already started—”

“No.”

Bucky settles into stillness beside you, not touching, just present.

“Doesn’t work like that. Laughin’ doesn’t mean you’re done grievin’, or that you’re lettin’ go of anythin’. Just means you’re still here.”

You try to breathe.

“She would have wanted you to laugh. Grief will sometimes be loud, and then quiet, and then loud again. That’s okay.”

The tears are still coming but something in your chest has eased, just slightly. Finally, you lower your hand, and the garden comes back into focus. Bucky is giving you the courtesy of not watching you reassemble yourself, staring at something else which is, you think, exactly what your grandmother meant when she wrote that he listens to the earth. You’re part of it, too.

You wipe your face with the sleeve of your shirt and exhale slowly.

“I’ve been holding that in for a while,” you say.

“I can tell.” Another pause. “You know your grandma had no patience for held-in things. Would’ve had you cryin’ into a cup of coffee on the first mornin’.” The corner of his mouth gives up the fight entirely, shows a real smile, there and then gone just as quickly. “You want to keep goin' or call it for today?”

“Let's keep going,” you say.

He nods, once. Puts his gloves back on and you do the same.

From then on, every afternoon, somewhere around the point when the sun peaks and the garden becomes briefly inhospitable, Bucky takes a break he doesn’t announce and appears at the edge of the porch. You have started timing the kettle to it, which you admit only to yourself and no one else. You sit on the steps, he leans against the railing, and the conversation comes in the same way everything does with him: unhurried, arriving when it arrives.

He tells you things about himself. Careful, not because he doesn’t want to share them, but because you can tell he’s not sure whether you want to hear them. (You do, you come to find out.) Then tells you things about the garden and about your grandmother in the same tone, as if they are the same subject. That she once spent an entire afternoon arguing with him about the correct way to stake a climbing rose, and he let her win, and she knew he let her win and never brought it up again.

“She said something about you,” you tell him eventually. “In the address book, next to your number. I don’t know if you’d want to know.”

Bucky just looks at you.

‘Good lad. Strong hands and he listens to the earth,' you tell him. Exactly as she wrote it.

He looks away, out at the garden. Pulls the brim of his cap down a fraction, which you have figured is exactly what he does when something lands somewhere tender. There’s a long enough silence that you start to worry you’ve misstepped.

But then, quiet: “That’s good to know.”

That’s all.

The worrying starts a month in, and it announces itself in the most ordinary way.

You are inside the house when you hear it, a single sharp sound from somewhere in the garden, metal against stone, followed by a silence that has a different quality than the usual working silence.

When you move to the back door, what you find is Bucky standing very still beside the railing with his left hand pressed flat against his right forearm, metal protecting the flesh.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.” He says it so quickly and flatly that it’s very obviously a lie.

“Bucky.”

He looks at you then, a brief evaluating look, and something about whatever he finds in your expression makes him relent. He lifts his metal hand to show you: a long shallow scratch along the inside of his forearm, from a piece of broken border edging he had been repositioning. Doesn’t look deep from where you’re standing, but the way he’d been holding it suggested it had stung considerably more than nothing.

“I have a first aid kit inside,” you say."

“It’s fine.”

“I didn’t ask,” You say it the same way he says most things. A fact, not an argument. “Come inside.”

He does, and sits at the kitchen table carefully, as a man who has learned to take up the right amount of space and no more, while you find the first aid kit in the cupboard where your grandmother always kept it, between the spare candles and the batteries.

The scratch is genuinely minor. You clean it without ceremony and he watches the process with patience, and you are aware, more than you have been at any point working alongside him in the garden, of how close you are. The kitchen is small. His flesh arm is resting on the table and you are sitting in front of him, and the afternoon light is coming through the window at an angle that does something very specific to the planes of his face. It highlights the blue in his eyes, too.

You focus on the first aid kit instead.

“You don’t have to do this,” he says, but there’s no mention that he wants you to stop. Maybe he just feels required to offer you the exit.

“She’d have done it,” you say simply.

His eyes move to the window. “You’re not her.”

A small thing. It doesn’t need to be more than it is. But he finishes it in a way that makes it harder to simplify it: “I like that about you.”

You press a small strip of gauze into place with your thumb, smoothing the tape at the edges. There is no logical reason to take this long finishing a minor scratch. You both seem to know that, but neither of you moves away.

Your eyes travel, briefly and without meaning to, to where his metal arm rests next to his body. The afternoon light catches the articulated joints, the way it sits completely still the way flesh and bone rarely does. Your eyes drift away before it becomes a thing, but he sees it.

“You can look,” Bucky says. Not an invitation exactly. He’s just handing you a door you didn’t know you were standing in front of. “Most people do. Just usually they try harder to pretend they don’t.”

“I wasn’t—” you start, and then stop, because you were, a little. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. You’ve been one of the only people in a long while who just… let it be there. First day I came out, you looked and moved on. Treated it like it was part of a person instead of the whole story of one.”

You don’t know what to do with that, so you stay quiet and let him have the floor.

“Most people either stare and can’t stop, or they work so hard at not lookin’ that it becomes its own kind of starin’. Both make a man feel like a curiosity. You just… handed me coffee.”

“Seemed like the right thing to do.”

The corner of his mouth moves. “People don’t always do the right thing.”

Another silence, but it’s more comfortable now. There’s no need to fill it, you’ve both learned how to live inside it, but you continue anyway. A breach in his persona that you intend to explore, if he’ll let you.

“How long have you had it?” you ask, and you say it to his arm, because starting there feels like less an inconvenience than meeting his eyes.

“Fifteen years, give or take.”

The number lands heavier than you expect. Fifteen years is long enough to become the shape of a person. Long enough that you cannot picture the version of him that preceded it, and you suspect, that maybe he can’t always either.

“Work accident,” he adds, not because you asked. Just because the words are sitting there and he’s decided to pick them up. “Land clearin’ job, upstate. Big contract, the kind you don’t turn down when you’re twenty-five and tryin’ to build somethin’ from nothin’. There was an equipment failure. It was fast. Everythin’ else after was slow, though.”

You don’t say sorry, because something tells you he has a particular and well-earned exhaustion with that phrase. Instead, you ask: “What was the hardest part? After.”

He considers it for a bit.

“Knowin’ what my hands were supposed to do and not being able to trust them to do it anymore.” Bucky glances down at his right hand, the lines in the palm, the built callouses. “I’ve worked since I was seventeen. This kind of work, specifically. It’s the one thing I knew how to be. For a while I genuinely didn’t know who I was without it. Or if there was a version of me that existed separate from it.”

“But there was,” you finish for him.

“Took some convincin’. And a lot of broken things. Broke more fence posts learnin’ to calibrate the grip on that side than I care to admit. Had to relearn the pressure for everythin’. Soil density, stone, root systems. The sensitivity is different, temperature reads different. But some things are easier now. The metal doesn’t tire, doesn’t cramp in the cold.” He makes a face then, without self-pity, but still a bit funny. “Other… things are still being figured out, ‘til this day.”

“Fifteen years in and still figuring it out?”

“Most things worth doin’ take longer than that.”

You sit with that for a moment.

“I used to think that people would always see it first and everythin’ else second. That it would just be the thing that preceded me into every room,” he says, arriving at something he doesn’t often take out into the world. “But I have found that some people make it easy to forget it ever felt like a problem.”

Although he doesn’t look directly at you when he says it, his eyes now on his metal arm, you know he means you, even through the subtext.

You smooth the edge of the bandage one more time, a gesture with no remaining practical purpose, and then you fold your hands in your lap.

“For what it’s worth… from where I’m standing, it’s a good arm.”

He blinks. It's the closest to caught off guard you've ever seen him.

“Beg your pardon?”

“The arm. It’s good. Found the green inside the rose cane, pulled the lavender out without breaking it. It’s done something good. Just thought someone should say it.”

“… Thank you.”

And he means every syllable.

When he leaves that afternoon and you stand at the kitchen window watching the truck back out over the gravel, you notice something funny that takes you a moment to identify, unfamiliar after weeks of weight.

You are already thinking about tomorrow.

Not with dread. Not with the gray, flat, nothing that has colored every day since you arrived. It’s hopeful. You want tomorrow to come because that means you’ll see him again.

It’s a Thursday morning when Bucky announces he’ll start working on the fountain at the center of the garden. You’d looked at it weeks ago, and it was left on standby to be dealt with eventually. That eventually is today, which is how you both end up here, on your knees in the dirt, staring at the vines that have overtaken it.

“Pull toward you,” Bucky says (for the third time) because you keep pulling sideaways and the vine system underneath is apparently connected in a way that means you’re undoing his work every time you do. “The root runs that direction. You’re fighting it.”

You scoff. “I know I’m fighting it, I’m trying to remove it.”

“You remove it by not fighting it.”

“… Very zen for someone covered in mud,” you shoot back, even though technically he’s not covered in mud. But there’s a streak of it along his jaw where he’d wiped his face with the back of his wrist without thinking, and his shirt has long given up on any pretense of cleanliness. He looks at you, patience of a woman who has decided not to rise to it, and then reaches across and repositions your hands on the vine, both of his hands, flesh and metal, bracketing yours briefly.

“There, now pull.”

You pull, and the vine comes away from the stone in one satisfying length, roots and all.

“Oh.”

The fountain is old. Limestone, you think, or something like it, pale gray and carved simply, a wide basin sitting on a short column. Someone, maybe your grandmother, maybe your grandmother with Bucky’s help, had planted climbing things around its base and they had done exactly what climbing things do when left without guidance: they engulfed it entirely.

Clearing it takes the better part of the morning.

The heat is real today, thick, settling into the back of your neck and staying. You’ve both abandoned the idea of breaks, working through the mess in sections, passing the shears back and forth without needing to ask. You’re working closer together than you have been before; when he reaches past you to get a root system threading the far side of the basin, his metal arm crosses your line of sight close enough that you could close your hand around it if you moved a few inches to the left.

“Hand me the trowel?”

Find it, pass it over, and he takes it with his right hand, the left braced flat against the side of the basin to keep his balance while he works at the base and you watch the metal fingers spread against the stone for a moment before you make yourself look at something else.

And by noon, the fountain is mostly exposed.

You both sit back on your heels and look at it. The limestone is dark with old moisture in places, and there’s green algae mapped across the north face where the water must have pooled and sat. The pipe inlet at the base of the column is corroded but present.

“Think it still works?” you ask.

“Possibly. I imagine the line was shut off some time ago. If it hasn’t cracked in the cold and the pump is still… Where’s the external water shutoff?”

Which is how you end up in the small utility space beside the back door, the two of you shoulder to shoulder in a space that was clearly not designed for more than one person, while Bucky shines his phone torch at the copper pipework running along the wall and explains what you’re looking at and what he intends to do with it.

You are not listening to him as carefully as you usually do.

This is new, and you’re aware of it as a thing that is new. In the early weeks, Bucky’s presence had been a comfort primarily because it was a constant and because it was directed outward, at the garden, at the definable and fixable concrete. You could absorb the company without it requiring anything of you. Somewhere in the middle weeks, it became something you looked forward to specifically, the two cups of coffee and the particular silence that had grown familiar.

But this, right now, is something else again.

It’s the awareness of him as him, in a utility cupboard, explaining the gate valve, and something in you has oriented toward the way he moves and talks to you. Helplessly and without drama, just the natural consequence of conditions.

There is a difference between dormant and dead.

You’d thought it applied only to your garden.

“—so if you turn this one first, counterclockwise, and then the secondary valve gives, you’ll know the line is intact—”

“Bucky.”

“—and if it doesn’t, then we’re lookin’ at—”

“Bucky.”

He stops, looks at you, which in this space means looking at you closely.

“Sorry,” you say. “I missed the last part. Which one first?”

A brief pause, and then: “This one.” He takes your hand, your right and his right, and guides your fingers to the valve. “Counterclockwise. Slow.”

There’s a shudder in the pipework when you turn it, a gargle and the sound of water moving through old joints, and then: nothing catastrophic.

“Secondary,” Bucky continues, and you feel him behind your shoulder, leaning in to watch.

You turn the second valve, and the pipe hisses.

“Give it a minute.”

You give it a minute.

When you both walk back out to the garden, the fountain is running.

The water comes up through the basin inlet in a steady, narrow column, spills over itself and begins to fill the basin slowly, moving over the algae and the old stone. The sound of it is small and even and has been absent from this garden for long enough that it sounds almost strange to your ears.

Both of you dirty, both of you tired, you stand beside each other watching it, heat still pressing down from above.

“It works,” you say.

“It works,” he agrees.

Neither of you says anything else for a while.

You think about your grandmother's hands on this stone, over decades, the same hands that braided your hair and hauled compost and pressed the seeds into the earth. You think about Bucky standing at the edge of her overgrown garden on the first day.

Still here. That’s what he’d said when you’d been crying on the lavender path. Laughing doesn't mean you're done grieving. It means you're still here.

You are still here.

And you, here, don’t make a decision, exactly. Or if you do, it isn’t the kind you feel yourself making. It’s more like you just stop holding something.

Whatever small distance remains between you and Bucky as you watch the fountain is quickly closed when you shift toward him and kiss him.

It’s all too brief. Soft. His cheek is warm from the sun when you touch it, and he smells like turned earth, but nothing really compares to how his lips taste against yours. To how he kisses you back, for a full second, and you swear you can feel his body leaning in, and maybe you’ve got the power of sight because even with closed eyes, you can feel his metal hand hovering and reaching for your waist.

Except he doesn’t. He goes completely still and then steps back.

Bucky’s not unkind in the way he does it, but he does it nonetheless. One step that reestablishes a distance. Very briefly, he looks like a man who has just pressed his hand to a bruise he’d forgotten about.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he means it, which somehow makes it worse.

There’s warmth in your face when you look at him now, but not from the heat. “No, I’m sorry, that was…”

Was… what?

“This isn’t a good idea.”

This is the part where you say something, a distant corner of your mind observes. But the embarrassment has arrived, sudden, and you’re caught between it and the question of what he had done in that one still second before he moved away. Because it had not been nothing. You are certain, with the certainty of someone who has spent the last weeks learning how to read a careful person, that the way he kissed you back, even for a split moment, had not been nothing.

“Okay.”

It’s the only word small enough not to make it worse.

Days later, you make lemonade for the first time. You don’t examine the decision too closely. It’s hot, genuinely hot, the first real heat of the season pressing down on the cottage and the garden like a hand, and lemonade makes sense in a way that has nothing to do with anything else. You bought lemons a few days ago after finding a recipe with your grandmother’s handwriting tucked inside a cookbook. You follow it exactly, including the ungodly amounts of sugar mentioned at the end.

When you carry the pitcher and two glasses out to the porch, Bucky is working at the far end of the garden on the vegetable patch and he sees you from a distance. Straightens up. Looks at you. Walks across the garden toward the porch.

There’s something different about watching him move toward you versus watching him work, something you register without deciding to. He takes the glass you pour and drinks most of it standing up, deeply thirsty, then looks at you with mild surprise.

“Tastes exactly like your grandmother’s.”

“Found the recipe in the cookbook.”

You pour him another glass when he hands you his empty one, a silent request for more. Then he sits on the porch steps instead of leaning on the railing, which he hasn't done before, and you sit beside him at a reasonable distance.

This isn’t so different from the first day you stood side by side looking at the green monster. Of course, the garden is changed now, less of a green monster and more of a slight green inconvenience, nowhere near finished, but visibly different. The trellis is cleared and the roses are staked and the lavender path is at least recognizable. There is structure reappearing where before there was only chaos. Clear evidence of work. Evidence that things can be found again if one is willing to look.

You sit on the porch steps and drink too-sweet lemonade that tastes like every summer you spent here, and beside you Bucky is quiet in the way he is always quiet, which is to say completely and without apology, and it makes you think about the lavender pressing itself flat in the dark for years and still releasing fragrance when someone touched it.

There is a difference between dormant and dead.

You’re on the porch when a storm announces itself with the first roll of thunder somewhere past the treeline. Crouched by the vegetable patch, Bucky hears it too, and you see him pause his work and tilt his head back slightly, reading the lines of the sky.

The first drops are fat and isolated, hitting the porch boards, and then between one breath and the next, the sky opens entirely.

Bucky runs toward the porch steps in a few strides, and you both stand under the narrow overhang and watch the garden disappear into gray curtains of rain. The tin roof above you turns the downpour into something enormous, a sound that swallows everything else, and the smell of wet earth hits almost overwhelmingly.

“That came fast,” you almost yell over the rain.

“Saw it coming from the ridge about an hour ago. Didn’t think it’d move this quick.”

Wind picks up and drives the rain sideways under the overhang in a fine spray that finds your arms and your face, and Bucky shifts in front of you, blocking some of it.

“Come inside, there’s no point standing out here.”

The kitchen is dim with the storm light, and the sound of water on the roof fills the cottage from wall to wall. With careful hands, you put the kettle on, because that’s what you do, and Bucky leans against the doorframe that separates the kitchen from the hallway, carrying some self-containment of a man in someone else’s house, even after months.

You’ve noticed that he does this, chooses doorframes and porch railings and the edge of things, rather than the middle. Somehow, that makes you impatient today.

“You can sit down. You’ve been here every day for months.”

“I know.”

“You’re not going to wear out the chair.”

In an act that almost feels like rebellion, he doesn’t move, and you turn back to the kettle. Rain is relentless against the roof, and the kitchen feels smaller than it usually does, storm drawing in the walls somehow.

After the water has boiled, you set his mug on the table and sit, before Bucky crosses to the table, pulls out a chair and sits with the kind of particular quietness he always does since the other week’s incident. He’s always too careful around you, now, since that kiss. Like you’re an explosive device he’s terrified of setting off.

He drinks his tea. You sit down across from him and drink your own.

This should be comfortable. They used to be, your silences, for long enough that you’d stopped noticing them as silences. But this one has something in it, something that has been building in the open field of your garden. Things changed that day at the fountain; nothing broke, not fully, but something bent, and now both of you have been carefully working around it, pretending it doesn’t change the entire geometry of your relationship.

“Roses are gonna need checkin’ after this,” he says eventually, trying to loosen up the air just a fraction. Another time, you would have appreciated the gesture, but right now it makes something unsettling burn in your throat. “Heavy rain on new stakes can—”

“Can we not?”

A pause. Bucky looks genuinely confused.

“Not what?”

“Talk about the garden. For like ten minutes. Can we just sit here and not make it about the garden?”

A brief recalibration moves across his face. “All right.”

“Look, I need to say something,” you start, and you hadn’t planned to start saying anything at all, but the storm and weeks of careful distance have apparently reached some sort of threshold. “About the fact that you come here every morning and we work together, and talk about my grandmother, and your arm, and roses, and yet… you still sit across the table from me like you’re deciding whether you’re allowed to be in the room or not.”

His jaw does the small ticking thing while he chooses his next words very carefully.

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“I’m trying to be…” He stops, then starts again. “There’s a line.”

“What line?”

Bucky exhales, slow. “You hired me to do a job. You were grieving’, no, you are grievin’. There’s a power in that, in me bein’ here every day while you’re in the middle of somethin’ that hard, and I have no interest in bein’ the kind of man who takes advantage of a situation because he—”

“Bucky, I kissed you.”

There it is, words laid on the table along with any dignity you might have left. Bucky looks at you with an expression you haven’t seen before, stripped of its usual careful management. Whatever he’s feeling, however, he’s trying hard to not let it show.

“I know.”

“And you stepped back.”

“I know that too.”

“I’m not asking for an explanation.” (You are, a little.) “I just… you said it wasn’t a good idea, but every day you come and you drink my tea and talk to me and notice everything while not saying anything and I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what to do with you, with the fact that you didn’t want that.”

Rain is at its peak now, the downpour making the world outside the window entirely abstract and the kitchen feels like the only room left on earth.

Bucky has both hands around his mug, flesh and metal, and he’s looking at them rather than at you.

“Look… it’s not that I didn’t want to. That wasn’t the problem.”

“Then I don’t think I understand what the problem is.”

His expression does something complicated that you don’t find the vocabulary for. It isn’t closed, by any means, and that’s the thing that stays with you afterward, turning it over in the sleepless stretch of the night. It isn’t the face of a man who doesn’t feel anything. It’s the face of a man who feels something but has decided, for reasons you don’t have access to yet, that the feeling isn’t safe to act on.

The storm moves on eventually, and Bucky goes back outside as soon as the rain eases, checking the rose stakes just as he said he would.

Nothing, technically, changes in the following days. Nothing you can give a name to, anyway.

Bucky still comes at seven. The truck sounds the same on the gravel, the door swings open and closed with its own strange creak. Coffee gets made sometimes, other times tea (never again the lemonade). Work gets done.

But something shifts anyway.

He talks less. There’s no way to read it as a punishment, because it isn’t one, or as sulking. It’s not that. Afternoons on the porch steps, which had become part of the day you oriented toward without admitting it, still happen, but they’re shorter, and the conversation stays closer to a surface level. You talk about the garden and what needs to be done next week.

There’s nothing else that stretches into deeper roots, like the time he told you about how he lost his arm. Never again does he ask anything personal about you. Never mentions your grandmother again. Whatever personal territory he had slowly opened over weeks closed again as a quiet act of privacy.

It hits harder than you had expected it to.

Because he is scrupulous about the distance, about leaving every day at the same time, leaving no room for hope of a longer evening. There’s no more pause at the truck door before getting in, a small delay that wasn’t forgetfulness. He just leaves, now, and you stand on your porch watching him go.

And then comes an ordinary day when something breaks open.

It’s a regular Friday. You have been inside most of the morning, working through the last of your grandmother’s paperwork at the kitchen table, the administrative aftermath of a life that keeps arriving in envelopes even months after the fact.

You bring Bucky coffee after lunch, and when you come around the side of the cottage you find him crouched at the base of the climbing rose, admiring something fascinating: it’s blooming.

Pale red buds cracked open at the tips, three or four of them along the highest cane, reaching toward the afternoon light. You stand there with the mug in your hands, looking at the roses while something rises in your chest. This is the beginning of something. A second chance.

Bucky rises to his height next to you and you hand him his coffee without looking away from the roses. The quiet distance that has been maintained for weeks is gone, dissolved in the warmth of this moment, because there is no architecture of caution that holds up against the first bloom of something you’ve rebuilt together.

When you finally turn to look at him, he’s already looking at you.

And that’s really all it takes, comically. That is the entire mechanism of it, managed silence and dormancy coming apart at the seams with one look too full of things he has been keeping behind professionalism and boundaries.

This time, Bucky’s the one who closes the distance between the two of you.

His mouth finds yours without hurry, without the frantic quality of something held back too long. He moves with intention, giving you every opportunity to see it coming, and his hand comes up to your face, warm, rough-palmed, cupping your jaw too quickly like he has thought about this a hundred times already.

You stop thinking, because what else is there to think but the touch of his lips on yours?

The paperwork on the kitchen table and the Wednesday night phone call that tore your life apart all recede to somewhere very far away, and what remains is only this. The smell of earth and roses, the solid pressure of him under your fingertips when your hands steady themselves on his chest.

He kisses you the same way he tends to things, with attention that isn’t performance, letting the kiss exist completely in itself without rushing toward anything else. Flesh thumb moves once along your cheekbone, tongue presses against the entrance of your mouth and allows itself in because you let him, and his metal arm snakes around your waist and brings you closer because you let him.

Your fingers curl into the worn fabric of his shirt while time does something strange. Loses its forward momentum and simply rests, hanging, until you decide to make it move again.

There’s nothing to say to improve the silence when he pulls back only a few inches, forehead dropping to yours. Morning birds are suddenly very loud, and the fountain is running, and the roses are blooming right there, and his breath is slow and warm against your mouth, and…

Tasting the way your mind runs ahead of your thumping heart, Bucky squeezes your hip gently, bringing you back to him. You're thinking about your grandmother's handwriting on the back of the business card.

He listens to the earth.

He knows how to listen to you, too.

“I tried,” he says, very quietly. Rough at the edges, like he’s been struggling to keep the words down. “I want you to know that. I tried real hard.”

“I know,” you say against his mouth. Deep in your gut, you know what he means. Tried to stay away.

“Kept tellin’ myself that it wasn’t right. That you were grievin’, that you’d come here to heal somethin’ and I was just the man hired to fix your garden, it wasn’t my place to—”

“Bucky,” you interrupt, fingers tightening around his shirt and leaning that much closer again that you’re almost kissing when you speak. “Come inside with me.”

Hesitation is gone when he follows you inside, through the back door and into the dim warmth of the cottage. Walking together through the hallway, Bucky closes the distance and doesn’t let go of you the whole time, while heavy steps sound on the floor and you walk him with a very specific location in mind.

He kisses you differently when you get there. Outside, by the roses, it was a start. Now, walking past the door of your bedroom, his right hand finds your face again, with the same instinct, but he exhales against your mouth and kisses you harder. Desperate, a man who pushes his lips against yours like he has never wanted to kiss anyone else in his entire life. Kisses your mouth and the soft place at the corner of it, and the line of your jaw when he pulls back, then your temple, then back to your lips again because stopping seems impossible.

Your hands find his shoulders, the dark hair at his nape, and every point of contact registers with a vividness that makes the last months feel like an absurdity. Like you had both kept yourselves from drinking water on the premise that you weren’t sure you deserved to be thirsty.

Bucky sits on the edge of the bed and draws you toward him, keeping you standing between his legs as he stares up at you. His right hand moves with certainty when he reaches for one of your wrists and brings it to your lips, kissing the skin. Blue eyes watch his own fingers move across your skin before they close, feeling you warm and real and present, and he keeps having to relearn this fact from the beginning every few seconds, because a part of him has not yet fully accepted that you are here and that you are letting him do this.

His left arm, however, stays where it is.

At his side, against the bed. And of course you notice it, so you reach for his left hand anyway while you move to sit on his lap, straddling him. Half of him freezes; his right hand moves over your collarbone, dips under your shirt to trace your shoulders. His left side, in the meantime, feels like it’s been dipped in a bucket of ice-cold water.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.” You turn the metal hand over in both of yours, the articulated joints and cool weight of it, and you kiss it slowly, dragging your lips over every ridge, mapping every inch of the metal. Under your touch, Bucky almost crumbles, breathing unsteady, and you swear you almost feel him shaking.

“…Fifteen years. I haven’t… I never trusted it enough. The calibration for—” He’s looking for the word, but can’t seem to locate it in any comfortable dictionary while your lips trace his hand like it’s sacred. “This. I don’t know what I’m doin’ with this hand when it comes to this.”

“You found the green inside the rose cane,” you remind him again, just like the last time you talked about his arm. “Pulled the lavender out without breaking it.” Both your hands bring his metal palm flat against your face, warm skin against cool metal, and you watch his blue eyes build up a storm. You hold very still so he can feel that you are not afraid, that there’s nothing in you rejecting any of him. “You already know how.”

Metal fingers move then, slowly, tracing the hinge of your jaw, and he watches them, or watches you, reading the feedback, adjusting. You barely move at all, except for a shiver that runs through your spine when the metal touches the back of your neck, but the fingers quickly curling in his hair to pull him closer are enough indication that this shiver has nothing to do with fear. Fifteen years, and some things still aren’t figured out. You feel more than inclined to help him.

Both his arms move to wrap around you and he pulls you close, pressing his mouth to your hair before he lays you down.

His right hand moves through your hair, across your ribs through your shirt, learning you with the patience he gives everything, and his metal hand follows (more carefully, but follows nonetheless). The cool metal traces the same path a heartbeat later, fingertips gliding like he’s afraid the warmth of your skin might burn him if he presses too hard.

It’s strange to be on your back on the bed that used to be yours as a child (you were never brave enough to take over your grandmother’s bedroom, but you did manage to move out of the guest bedroom), the quilt soft and familiar beneath you, while Bucky is above you. But the strangeness doesn’t make you falter, not even when his flesh hand slips under the hem of your shirt and spreads, palm flat against the bare skin of your stomach.

He finds the bottom of your shirt and lifts it, inch by inch, and when the fabric clears your head, he sets it aside carefully before returning both hands to you. Flesh and metal cradling your ribs, thumbs brushing the undersides of your breasts as if the shape of you is a miracle he never expected to hold.

His voice says things while he worships you, words that he has been carrying too long in his chest. That he had felt it early, earlier than made sense, that he’d genuinely tried to stay away, that he believed he was doing the right thing because you were in the middle of grieving.

“I kept thinkin’ that if I just kept my head down long enough it’d go away. That I could go home and sleep it off like a cold,” he says, his mouth at your temple. Then leans down and presses his mouth to the center of your chest, right over your heart.

He kisses lower, open-mouthed, while his hands keep moving, always touching. The right hand slips beneath the waistband of your pants, easing the fabric down with a care that makes your breath catch. The metal hand helps, fingertips hooking the other side, sliding the material away as though he’s afraid even the brush of denim might mark you. When you’re bare beneath him, he sits back on his heels for a moment, just looking. Both hands rest on your thighs and he strokes upward in perfect unison, reverent drags of fingers that leave trails of heat and coolness in their wake.

“You’re so beautiful. I never let myself believe I’d get to touch you like this.”

Open mouth follows the path his hands have already started, kissing the curve of your breast, the soft plane of your stomach, the dip of your hip, while his fingers never stop. They trace over the hollow of your throat, then come down over your sternum, finding your breasts and pushing the fabric of your bra aside. His flesh hand cups one breast with impossible gentleness, thumb brushing over the peak until you arch into him, sighing his name. It hardens under his touch and he looks at you smiling, like he’s proud of his achievement, or maybe just in awe that his rough hands still have enough soft touch in them to make you feel good.

Either way, you barely notice when he settles between your legs, still not rushing there either. He kisses the inside of your thigh first, both hands moving to cradle your hips and spreading you open, then higher, until his nose is tickling the space between your thigh and your panties, where a wet patch has formed. Metal fingers curl around the soft fabric and push it down your legs in a gentle motion, and then without warning, without fireworks, his mouth finds you, warm and delicate.

“Bucky…” You sing his name in a soft melody, legs closing around his head instinctively, but his metal hand curls around your thigh and pushes it open again, not forcefully, but with enough firmness to keep you in place. His tongue speaks a new language into the wetness of your cunt, licking every whisper of your wetness, a stripe, then smaller hits, then focusing on your clit until you are almost begging for mercy.

You thread your fingers into his dark hair and pull, and mercy is not an option when he groans against you, the sound vibrating through your bones. Tug, pull, push, legs shaking around his head as he throws both your legs over his shoulders and goes to town as if staying alive depended on it.

‘Bucky’, you call again, needier this time, a dying whine on your lips, and he closes his eyes as if savoring the sound, but never relenting.

Even when your hips start to buck and your fingers tighten almost painfully in his hair, Bucky stays right where he is, a devoted lover, too focused on your pleasure. The flat of his tongue drags up the center of you in a long stripe, then circles your clit with patient pressure until something starts to burn behind your eyelids: not stars, maybe an all-out supernova.

“Bucky, oh my god,” your voice cracks in the middle and he answers by sliding his metal fingers into one of your hands, pulling it from his hair and instead lacing your fingers together against the mattress. In eating you out he never takes more than you can give, as if he knows exactly what the limit of your pleasure is, but he toes it with every lick until he seals his lips around your clit and sucks, soft, warm, until you can almost swear your slick is now a mix of your wetness and his own drool.

You come hard, sudden and overwhelming, like you haven’t in a while, in maybe too long, with his name on your mouth sounding more like a pathetic plea. It’s been a minute since your voice sounded like this for anyone. It’s been a minute since you’ve allowed yourself to feel anything at all. Bucky doesn’t pull away until you’re trembling and soft and breathless, and even then he only replaces the warmth of your cunt with other skin for his mouth to touch as he kisses up your body with slick-covered lips.

“Still with me?” he whispers against your stomach, kissing the sweat away.

You nod, heart thundering in your chest. “That was… you’re… God. Bucky.”

A chuckle slips past his lips, which is just as surprising to you as anything else happening today, because when have you ever heard this man this carefree in all the months you’ve spent together?

“I’m not God. But it’s good to know I still got what it takes to please my woman.”

That makes you pause, only a little, and you move the one hand still in his hair to press over his heart.

“Is that what I am now? Your woman?”

Bucky looks up from your stomach, eyes finding yours in the dim afternoon light, blue and steady.

“If you want to. I’ll take whatever you want to give me.” His right hand moves to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. “A friendship. A warm bed. Somethin’ in between. I’m not a man who needs a lot, but I’m not gonna pretend I don’t have a preference.”

“And what’s your preference?”

“You,” he says, too simply. “All of you. In my arm, next time I go to town to get some supplies. So I can take you to see a movie, or out for dinner, or both if you want. In my bed, so I can pull from you every night the same faces you just did.”

That makes you chuckle, and you realize you are still more out of breath than you thought.

“I like your preference,” you whisper to him. “I think it's mine, too.”

Bucky Barnes, a man on the edge of his own composure, finally pushes himself up and reaches for the buttons of his shirt, but his fingers are clumsy, the tremor of want making a simple task all too difficult. Through the haze of your recent pleasure, you reach up, covering his hands with yours.

“Let me.”

You undo them one by one, and as the fabric falls away, the breadth of him is almost overwhelming. Years of hard work have carved muscle into his frame, but there are scars, too, old ones, pale and faded, mapping stories across his skin. There’s a line where the flesh meets metal on his left shoulder, almost screaming at you, but you don’t react, don’t even flinch. Instead, your fingers trace the edge of it gently, the same way you touch any other part of him, and you lean up to kiss the scarred skin. Bucky is attempting to kick his boots off when you do, and you feel him stagger right there, as if it’s too unexpected, too soon despite it being on his body for fifteen years now.

You wait for the anger, for him to ask you to stop. Instead he exhales slowly, sheds his pants and boxers and lies down over you, mattress dipping under your combined weight. His body against yours is a revelation; strong and thick, radiating heat that rivals the summer sun.

You open your arms and he comes to you, settling between your legs with a care that very few men have ever shown you. Between your bodies, you feel the hard length of him, pressing not all subtly between your folds, not yet pushing in, but resting there. Blue eyes meet yours again, his brows furrowed in what seems to be a man deeply lost in thought. One of your hands reaches up, strokes the spread of his cheek.

“You are incredible. So beautiful,” he whispers against your temple, closing his eyes as he inhales the scent of your hair.

“You’ve said,” you reply, letting humor make the moment feel less heavy. Bucky grips your thighs a little harder.

“Don’t mock an old man laying his heart out to you,” he says back, the same amount of lighthearted fun in his tone, but you know he means it, deep down.

Before you have a chance to reply, he leans forward and kisses you deeply as he lines himself up, the blunt head of his cock nudging against your entrance. He doesn’t push in right away, instead just rocks gently while your mouths work together, sliding through your slick folds and coating himself. You moan against him and he swallows it in a breath, and that’s when he finally presses forward, inch by careful inch. Soft praises are whispered against your lips when he pulls back, and he moves slowly, giving you time to adjust, but your body still struggles to keep up, given how sensitive you still are.

Bucky moves with soulful patience, metal hand buried in the pillow next to your head and flesh hand gripping your hip, and every thrust feels like a question that is answered with the way you wrap your legs tighter around his waist every time, feet digging into the small of his back.

“You’re okay?” he gasps, searching your eyes for any trace of discomfort. Is the metal too cold, is he too heavy?

“I’m okay,” you breathe. “I’m okay, Bucky, keep going.”

The thrusts start slow, metal arm braced beside you, fresh hand cradling the back of your head with his fingers threaded through your hair. He angles his hips just right, grinding against that stop deep inside you that sets sparks lighting up behind your eyes. You meet him thrust for thrust, hands roaming where they can reach, nails digging into the hard muscles of his back, his shoulders, holding on to his biceps and he kisses your neck, your collarbone, mouth open and wet.

The pace stays unhurried, passionate in its restraint. Every slide of his cock drags deliciously, building heat low in your belly, and soon enough you can feel another orgasm begin to coil, slower this time. But Bucky’s control is fraying, obvious in the way his breaths turn ragged, in the slight stutter of his hips. It’s been too long for him, and you’re too warm, too wet, too many years of self-imposed winter, and the sound of your voice calling out his name is a catalyst he can’t fight.

His teeth graze your shoulder, eyes blown wide.

“I can’t… fuck—” he chokes out. “I’m gonna—”

He realizes he’s at a point of no return before he’s ready to be. With a frustrated groan, he braces himself with his metal hand and pulls out, the friction of the exit making you cry out in protest. Hot stripes of cum spill across your stomach in thick pulses, painting your skin as he weakly strokes himself through it with a shaky hand. His eyes are squeezed shut, mouth open on a silent gasp.

When the last spasm of his body fades he slumps forward, landing on his forearms so he doesn’t crush you.

“I’m sorry. Fuck, I’m sorry, that was… I swear I can last longer, just… has been a while…,” he rasps, breath still coming in harsh pants. “I didn’t even—I wanted to ask you where… where you wanted it and I—”

“Inside,” you say, breathless but slightly deadpan.

“… What?” His voice is tentative, as if he’s sure he’s misheard you through the gaze of his own orgasm.

“If you had asked, I would have told you to come inside me.”

Bucky exhales, though there’s barely oxygen left in his lungs after you’ve punched it out of him with those words.

“Do you wanna fuckin’ kill me?” he breathes against your mouth, and it would sound like half a laugh if he wasn’t almost breaking apart.

That’s when you feel him moving again, right hand slipping between your bodies and tracing feather-light patterns over the sticky mess on your stomach before gathering it on his fingers. Two thick fingers are now shiny with it, and he brings them down between your legs without hesitation, rubbing them over your swollen clit in one slow circle. Immediately, your hips jerk, a sharp gasp punching out of you.

Bucky doesn’t tease, just pushes those two fingers inside you in one smooth stroke, feeding his own release back into your cunt. The wet sound it makes is obscene in the quiet room, mixing your arousal with his release, his fingers stretching you open around them as they curl and search for that same spot his cock had hit not too long ago.

“Bucky,” you whimper, thighs trembling around his wrist.

His eyes are locked on where his fingers disappear inside you, dragging his cum deeper with every thrust of his fingers. “Promise I’ll fill you up proper next time. Just take my fingers for now.”

A third finger is added to the others, stretching you fuller, and his thumb finds your clit again, circling in time with the curl of his fingers. Pressure builds fast, too fast, burning hot in your belly. Every time your slick drools from inside you, he coats his fingers in it and fucks it right back inside you, making it messier.

It hits you not long after like a storm crashing over your garden, all too overwhelming and sudden, pulling you under. Your cunt clamps down around his fingers and you come with a loud cry and Bucky doesn’t stop. Just keeps fucking you through every spasm, drawing it out while he murmurs soft praise against your neck until you’re oversensitive and still clenching around him like your body refuses to let him go.

You don’t know this yet, but tonight you’ll fall asleep in his arms, and it’ll only be the first of many nights.

A year later

You and Bucky have finished the garden. Well, sure, Bucky has told you enough times that gardens are never truly done because living things require continued attention and presence, the willingness to show up before the heat peaks and stay past the point of easy. But it at least looks like itself again, the place it was always trying to be underneath all the strangling vines.

On a Tuesday afternoon, you are standing in front of the fountain with your second cup of tea of the day when Bucky comes around to meet you, cap on backward, shirt damp from the exertion of honest work.

“Finished your tea without me,” he says by way of greeting.

"I made you a cup. It's on the porch."

Bucky doesn’t move toward it. Instead, his hands slide firmly around your waist and with a sudden huff of effort, he hoists you clean off the ground. He doesn’t just lift you, he sweeps you into a wide twirl and the garden blurs into a smear of lavender purple and rose red.

“Bucky!” you gasp, laughing as your feet dangle and your head is thrown back with the afternoon sun dancing through the trees. Eventually he sets you down again, then steals you a breathtaking kiss.

“Had to get you out of your mind. You had that look.”

You raise an eyebrow, still feeling a bit dizzy. “What look?”

"The one where you're thinkin' something and decidin' whether to say it."

You huff in fake disapproval before you start making your way back to your porch, Bucky following right behind.

“I don't have a look,” you say just as you sit on the first few steps, watching the garden ahead of you.

“You have about twelve looks.” He comes to sit beside you, close enough that his shoulder presses against yours. “I’ve memorized all of them. That’s number four.”

“Bucky, you did not catalogue my looks.”

“You got the happy look, mad look, thinkin’ about your grandmother look, somethin’s on your mind look—”

“You’re making those up.”

“—stubborn look, which looks exactly the same as your grandmother’s stubborn look, for the record—”

“Absolutely not—”

“—lemonade look, which you think I don’t notice but you always make lemonade when you wanna ask me somethin’ you think I’ll say no to, I’ve verified this over twelve months of data—”

You laugh, an undignified full-chest sound, something that still surprises you because you can’t quite believe, all this time later, that it comes this easily when you’re around him. How little it costs you to just be happy when he’s with you.

“Anyway, number four. What’s on your mind.”

A Wednesday night in a city apartment, spreadsheets blurring into gray bars. A phone call that broke the world open. A business card in a phonebook. Two cups of coffee made without intention. Dormant, dead, the green inside the rose cane. A man who showed up and didn’t stop showing up. How life will look like five years from now. Ten. Eighteen.

“I’ve been thinking,” you start.

“You’ve been thinkin’ since about six this morning, based on when you stopped bein’ asleep next to me and started starin’ at the ceiling.” His right hand finds yours on the step between you and covers it. “Take your time.”

“The garden looks good,” you say.

A pause. He knows you well enough to let you take the long way round.

“It does,” he agrees.

"It feels like her."

He is quiet for a moment, that particular quality of quiet that you know now is not absence but presence, the whole of his attention given without requiring you to perform for it. Then he offers you an out; he continues for you.

“Everything’s growin’ fast,” he says, eyes scanning the spread of the garden before settling back on your face. “We’re gonna need a bigger fence. Probably more hands to help by next season.”

That makes you smile, and you lean in until your head is resting against his shoulder. “Yeah, I know. But we’ve already taken care of the extra set of hands. They’re just… attached to a body currently about the size of a lemon.”

His gaze softens impossibly at that. His metal hand reaches out, rests flat and protective against your stomach, a motion he has repeated every day since the news was confirmed by a doctor appointment.

“A lemon? Did you see that on your app?”

“Yep,” you say, chuckling. “Was thinking about the nursery this morning. When we should start building it.”

The two of you stay like that on the porch steps while the afternoon moves around you and the garden your grandmother had loved and left you lives on with you.

Slowly, things have gone back to normal, roses blooming, lavender coloring the path.

Things that are worth having will sometimes take longer to come. But they arrive, anyway, so long as you tend them and give them water and time to grow.

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