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salty-tang · 12 days ago

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For the Record 6: The Cost of Doing It All (multi-chapter series)

Congressman!Bucky Barnes x Congresswoman!Reader

Chapter Summary: Bucky votes, the bill fails (again), you realise he can’t fix this, and you finally decide to stop waiting for him to save you. serum vials, quiet heartbreak, political triage, and the beginning of your hunt.

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a canon compliant congressman bucky x congresswoman reader fic set somewhere between tfatws and thunderbolts, chronicling congressman barnes’ first term as a representative.

Warnings/ tags: Slow Burn, Political Drama, Light Angst with a happy ending, Mutual Pining, Bucky Doesn’t Think He Deserves Good Things, Hurt/Comfort But Make It Legislative, Secret Missions with Legislative Consequences, The Interns Have Theories,Canon-Typical Violence, Congressman Bucky Barnes, Congresswoman Reader, author is not american and barely gets american politics, no use of y/n, this is the plot heavy long form fic

Word count: 6.7k

ps: AO3 is my main platform for this work, tumblr is just getting the reupload!

For the Record masterpost || AO3 || congressman bucky masterpost

On the day of the AFTERMATH vote, your office suite is chaos.

The heat clings relentlessly under the midday sun – not the thick, swampy heat of other battlefields, but the hell-born kind that seeps through silk and willpower alike. Your iced Americano is sweating harder than you are, condensation bleeding wet rings across the latest whip count.

It’s been two months since the lockdown. Two months where everything returned to normal, like nothing of significance had happened. Committees resume, the press cycle churns, and the reading continues to be endless.

But beneath it, some realities, once exposed, do not lie quiet.

You are now aware of a threat – shadowlike and abstract – but nothing has touched you so directly since that night. You can feel Bucky out there, quiet and watchful, keeping the wolves at bay without ceremony or thanks. A sentry stationed at the edge of your world.

The thought almost warms your heart. Almost.

Like it or not, Bucky now feels obliged for your continued existence – and that’s as much sentiment as you allow yourself. There hasn’t been time for anything else. The work takes all you have. Everything – except the almost-kiss you refuse to name, because there are far more important things to regret.

Like the fact that you almost let yourself believe that Bucky could keep the wolves at bay forever. But maybe it was foolish to think he ever could — heroes get tired, even guards need relief.

The phones are ringing off the hook. Staffers talk over each other, chasing three crises at once. Derek’s halfway through a line about polling margins when Mills shoves a sticky note into his hand; he adjusts without breaking cadence. The rest of your comms team parses cross-tabs like it’s a hostage negotiation.

You’re due on the floor in seventeen minutes.

There’s a new amendment for a different – no less important – water pollution bill on your desk, a report flagged CRITICALLY URGENT blinking in your inbox, and three caucus leads waiting impatiently on your call-back. Always something else to deal with.

Compartmentalisation has always been your gift. The job demands it; where instinct collides with strategy, and attraction is just another hazard of proximity. You’ve worked in high-pressure rooms before – midnight negotiations, election night war rooms, legal triage in half-lit basements – you know exactly what adrenaline does to people. Yes, it sharpens the senses, but it also crosswires stress with hunger, and turns proximity into impulse. You’re not so arrogant as to think you’re immune.

So when you think about another regret – all the times Bucky leans in, too close, too quiet – you don’t label it anything dangerous. You file it away, the way you would a procedural oversight or a poorly worded clause: something to fix, later.

Because what’s at stake today is bigger than a misfiring pulse. AFTERMATH has the power to shift entire lives out of temporary zones and into permanent safety. If it passes, it could be the most meaningful thing you ever put your name to.

And it's holding on – barely. You’ve flipped twelve cosponsors this week; two defectors, and one committee chair who’s suddenly discovered a conscience (or maybe just the right donor). The bill is moving, the window is narrowing. You can’t afford distraction – not by hormones, not by compromised photographs, not by intense blue eyes and the way they watch you for the barest flicker of attention.

So you double down and let your days run together; hearings that stack like bricks, subcommittee edits bleeding red ink, and the thousand small humiliations reserved for anyone stubborn enough to champion unsexy but necessary housing policy. Even the district weeks offer no respite – airport delays, over-lit town halls, the slow drain of answering the same question in a hundred different ways for people you genuinely want to help.

But when your brain finally quiets, when the last intern leaves and the building softens into silence, one memory returns – not the kiss that didn’t happen, but something else entirely.

Jakarta drifts back to you unbidden – the humid dark, the rain, standing together under that awning…

Enough. You fold the memory away with professional precision.

That was then. This is now.

You field three press calls in succession while powerwalking the connecting Capitol tunnels, your voice calm, heels echoing. One caller veers off-script. You steer it back. Behind you, your staff manoeuvres like a campaign convoy – trolleys groaning under binders, briefing books, the weight of all their efforts.

Devon sidles up beside you as you wait for the lift, tablet clutched like classified evidence, curls pinned back with the delicacy of someone defusing a political bomb. They’ve been tracking internal caucus tallies for the past forty-eight hours like it’s a hostage negotiation. In a way, it is.

“It’s looking good, ma’am,” they report.

You don’t correct them.

You used to imagine legislating as debate and deliberation. Turns out, it’s mostly triage and controlled burns.

It’s not hope you feel, exactly. Hope is reserved for people who can afford to wait. Hope is for people who have faith in ‘the process’, ‘the universe’, or the illusion that good things will happen if you just keep showing up.

What you feel is pressure. Like the first shift of weather before the storm breaks – the kind that comes after the work, not before. It builds because you’ve done everything right, and now all that is left is to wait and see if it’s enough.

Your phone buzzes with a reminder to send the updated language to legal counsel. You flag the clause with one finger and continue to talk into your earpiece as the Capitol’s creaky elevator doors begin to close.

“You’ve been busy,” drawls Rep. Whitmore (R-TX-13), wedging his shoe into the narrowing gap and slipping inside like he owns the place (which, in his mind, he probably does).

The elevator crowd stiffens. No one greets him and a few staffers shift closer to the walls, suddenly fascinated by the contents of their binders.

The ripple of annoyance doesn’t even touch the greasy smile on his face. “Though I suppose that’s expected. Haven’t seen your better half all day.”

The elevator hums. Someone clears their throat behind you.

You don’t look up from your phone. “He’s probably doing something productive. That might be why you missed him.”

Whitmore smiles like he’s just remembered something funny. “It’s sweet, really. The whole joint operation thing you two have going. Very post-partisan. Very Blip-era unity.”

He pauses, and his smile turns thin. “Makes me sick, honestly. All that hand-holding across the aisle. Doesn’t leave much room for the rest of us.”

And then he leans in, not enough to be overt, just enough to sour the air. “If Barnes had signed on as lead sponsor instead of backing from the sidelines, maybe that first draft wouldn’t have tanked so hard. People listen when he talks. Or maybe it’s just the arm.”

You don’t flinch and you don’t rise to the bait. You briefly calculate the PR fallout of stomping on his instep with your heel - not worth it, barely.

There’s a beat of silence where you think he’s finally shut up.

Then, “I mean, ‘aye’ and ‘no’ are about his limit when it comes to floor vocabulary, aren’t they?” His tone drips with disdain, like even speaking of Bucky leaves a bad taste in his mouth. “Does he talk more when you’re alone?”

You turn your head slightly, not enough to meet his eyes. “Did you have useful feedback on the bill, Representative?”

“Oh, just passing commentary,” Whitmore says, feigning detachment. “If I’d written the thing it might’ve been tighter. A little more spine and a little less… open-ended.”

The elevator dings.

He follows you off, voice pitched low as he falls into step. “Still. You and Barnes made quite the team overseas. Jakarta, wasn’t it? Thought a little international bonding might’ve helped grease the wheels.”

A pause. His smile curdles just slightly. “Guess not.”

You don’t break stride. “I find policy outcomes are best discussed in committee, not elevators.”

Whitmore grins behind you. “Of course, of course. This is just a little bit of chit-chat.”

You keep walking.

A few steps later, he’s intercepted by a reporter hovering near the press. He stops, visibly delighted to be noticed, and basks long enough in the attention to mistake the question for an invitation to pontificate.

Your heels keep their precise cadence as you pass. You’re going to be unusually generous in your next quote to that outlet.

And behind you, Devon mutters like he’s been biting his tongue since the elevator, “Aye, No, and ‘shut the hell up, Whitmore’ seems like a pretty solid vocabulary to me.”

You don’t even glance back. “And that’s why you’re not allowed near live mics.”

They just grin, unrepentant. “Then it’s a good thing you are.”

You just shake your head as you approach the threshold of the Chamber. The noise envelopes you like the tide coming in.

Staffers crisscross the corridor clutching clipboards like shields, eyes sharp beneath the fluorescent buzz. Someone from leadership barks Derek’s name mid-step and he veers off without hesitation, already parsing the new whip math in his head. Devon catches your eye one last time and offers a tight smile, all nerves and loyalty, before peeling toward the gallery where the other interns have been holding him a seat. Mills is already poised, highlighter uncapped, her notebook angled like a weapon drawn with purpose.

Everything’s moving at the pace you’ve set. This is the cool weight of preparedness. There are no nerves now, no second-guessing. The chamber is a battlefield and this is not your first campaign. Today you stand to return fire, measured and precise.

Show time.

You scan the room – habit more than a search. You take in the polished wood, the measured rustle of papers, the low murmur of Representatives posturing. Every seat is filled with bodies running their own calculations and readying their own lines of attack.

And then you notice it.

Bucky’s not here.

You don’t falter, but something in your carefully established equilibrium tilts. The 'district travel' block on his committee calendar expired last night. That line item disappeared without fanfare, just a quiet refresh at midnight leaving a gap where an excuse used to be.

You’ve been watching his calendar – the coded scheduling blocks, the way Mike’s red flags vanish after certain briefings. You don’t know where Bucky is, not officially. But you know how it goes.

But something’s off today.

This morning, you clock Jenna and Micah loitering near your office, offering – unprompted – to run memos and collate any last-minute printouts. Their sudden interest in print room logistics says enough. If something more urgent or salacious were happening, they’d be there.

If he were in Washington, he’d be here.

You take a sip of your coffee and glance at his seat. It’s bitter in your mouth. Unease prickles under your ribs, quiet and insistent. You shove it aside. There’s no room for doubt today.

***

The gavel drops with three sharp raps – a call to order. Members settle in with the kind of restlessness that means everything has already been said, and no one’s changed their mind.

You glance toward the floor as the chamber hushes.

Derek leans in. “Whip team says it’s within margin.”

You nod once. “All we need is three.”

He adjusts the papers in front of you, flattening the edges of your notes like it might hold the room together. “Then let’s hope they all show up with their brains.”

There’s a murmur across the aisle. The Speaker clears her throat, voice cutting through the buzz. “The House will now proceed to final remarks on the proposed amendment to the Aid and Funding for Traumatized Evacuees in Regions of Metahuman Activity, Turmoil, and Harm Act. The gentlewoman from New York is recognized.”

You stand and smooth the front of your jacket with one hand.

The mic clicks on. Your tone is courtroom calm.

“Madam Speaker, I rise in support of this legislation not because it is perfect, but because it is necessary. Because survivors of metahuman conflict deserve more than temporary shelters and sympathetic headlines. Because we were elected to build systems stronger than a news cycle.”

You speak clearly, but not particularly loudly, trusting the microphone to amplify your voice to the far reaches of the room.

For three minutes, you talk about oversight, about safeguards, about the cost of waiting. You talk about the families still waiting in temporary zones. About the girl in the second row of a town hall last week who asked if she could vote for you from the shelter she was born in.

You do not talk about missing votes, or missing people.

And as you turn to yield, the door opens.

There’s no announcement or dramatic pause. Just a quiet shuffling motion from the east side of the chamber. From your position at the front, you clock movement out of the corner of your eye.

Bucky slides through the smallest gap in the oak wood doors, jacket wrinkled, shirt collar askew, tie pulled tight like an afterthought. His congressional pin is crooked on his left lapel, clinging on dearly like it might fall off at any moment.

Even from this distance, you can tell his face is a mess. There’s dried blood crusting at the edge where skin meets stubble, and there’s that unmistakable look of a barely scabbed over gash. His eyes are shadowed and hollowed out – the kind of look that comes from either no sleep or too much pain. He looks like someone who’s been punched, stitched, and dropped back on his feet before the numbing wore off.

He doesn’t look at you, nor at anyone else. He nods once – to Mike, who rises quietly and disappears without a word toward the press gallery.

You return to your seat and Derek doesn’t say anything. Neither do you.

“The House will now proceed to vote.” The Clerk begins the roll.

You listen to them like distant rainfall, each Aye and No falling into place with bureaucratic inevitability. Each one carries the weight of its own tiny betrayal or quiet courage, and today, none of it feels personal, until it does.

“Mr Barnes.”

His answer is immediate.

“Aye.”

No inflection. No hesitation.

Just that.

You keep your eyes fixed on a point near the front – somewhere past the Clerk’s desk, where the flag hangs heavy against its pole. You trace the stars and stripes with your gaze, unseeing. Externally, you don’t move. But inside, something unknots – something clenched for so long it had unknowingly become part of you. Not relief, exactly. More like the slackening of a rope pulled too tight for too long.

You reach for your coffee. It’s warm and diluted now, the ice in it having melted sometime during your speech. Condensation has soaked through the layers of tissue – cheap brown paper disintegrating like it can’t bear the weight.

You don’t want to drink it but you’ve failed to resist the urge to give your fingers something to do – something to grip, something to keep steady and remind yourself you’re still here, tethered to this moment. But you keep your grip light. You keep everything light.

Across the chamber, someone coughs. An aide passes a folded notecard to a backbencher, who doesn’t read it. The Clerk continues.

435 names, votes, and confirmations in the usual choreography.

You keep your face still. You don’t look at the board. You already know.

The last name is called and there’s a beat – not dramatic, just mechanical and bureaucratic. The display lights up with numbers.

And at the very top: Motioned Failed

By three votes. Again.

This time, something inside you breaks, quiet and clean. You can hear Whitmore’s voice in your head, oily and amused: If Barnes had signed on as lead sponsor instead of backing from the sidelines, maybe that first draft wouldn’t have tanked so hard.

Your chest tightens. Maybe it was never going to pass. Maybe they were right about you. Maybe you weren’t strategic enough, persuasive enough, worth listening to.

You want to let the spiral take you under. But then you inhale and force your thoughts to still. This isn’t personal. It cannot be personal. The moment you make it about yourself is the moment you lose the bill for good.

Your eyes flick to the far aisle before you can stop them, seeking Bucky out instinctively. The one person who, for a fleeting moment, you thought might steady the ground beneath you.

And he’s there. Half-risen from his seat, looking like he wants to cross the chamber, to come to you, say something – anything – but Mike is already at his side, one hand braced under his elbow, murmuring insistently. You see Bucky resist, just for a second, but Mike’s grip tightens and he yields, letting himself be guided away, his gaze dragging across the floor to you as he goes.

Whatever he might have said wouldn’t have changed the count anyway.

***

The hallway is too quiet when you return; your aides have cleared out, anticipating that you might want the space to process. They’re somewhat right – you don’t just want space, you also want something to hit.

Derek had stayed behind in the chamber to buffer whatever party leadership is about to say about the bill’s failure, again.

Mills hears the sound of your heels before she sees you. Her head whips up, posture stiffening. She has a folder in hand.

You don’t slow down. “Bad?”

She hesitates for half a second before handing it over. “Um. It depends about how you feel about being accused of soft corruption?”

Definitely bad.

You slide the printed pages halfway out. Twenty in total, with an executive summary stapled to the front.

The logos on the header makes your stomach dip. A well-respected policy institute, partnered with a prominent university. Peer-reviewed, nonpartisan, the kind of publication that gets cited in oversight hearings and quoted by second-tier columnists who still move opinion.

You recall them testifying in a closed-door hearing nine months ago. They were lukewarm, evasive, and centrist to a fault.

The subject line is bland: Policy Risks in Rapid Humanitarian Deployment – Preliminary Recommendations.

Mills watches for your expression as you scan the summary. From the bullpen, Devon squints at a second copy still being spat out by the printer. “I took that professor’s class once. He talks like a Bond villain. I hate him.”

No one laughs at their attempt at levity. You nod your thanks at Mills for bringing this to you as you step into your office and shut the door behind you with a resolute click.

You lay the folder flat on your hardwood desk and pick up a pen. The language is clinical. Detached. All professionally cautious concern.

It critiques the overall ‘structural instability’ of rushed metahuman aid bills with a focus on flagging the potential for misuse of emergency corridors. It suggests ‘increased vetting’ for lesser-known NGOs operating across multi-border jurisdictions.

The AFTERMATH Act is never named outright, but it doesn’t need to be. Each line is a dog whistle and each chart, a scalpel. It’s crystal clear in every word what bill they’re talking about. What legislator.

And then, halfway down the tenth page, buried in a section on ‘field-tested delivery models’, a single line jumps out at you. The Outreach Exchange for Emergencies Foundation, cited positively and described as a ‘proven actor with consistent regulatory reporting and strong positive community feedback from recent deployments in the Southeast Asia corridor.’

You stare at the words. It’s quite the mouthful – not exactly Médecins Sans Frontières, or the Red Cross, who usually flood a second paragraph with donor names and logistical blurbs.

But there it is, just one line sandwiched between charts and acronyms and the illusion of impartiality.

You try to shake it as you turn the page. But your gut is already tightening and it’s never been wrong before – not on people, not on politics, and especially not when something feels manufactured. You’ve sat through enough investor decks, due diligence briefs, and emergency oversight briefings to know what it looks like when someone is trying to seed something.

On the last page, where the authors cite their sources and thank several ‘anonymous informants’, there’s a time stamp and a signature line. You purse your lips. Released early this morning, right before the vote. You stare at the page until both the words and your thoughts start to blur.

So that’s the purpose of the paper – not just to critique the bill or even undermine it (though you suspect whoever commissioned this wouldn’t lose sleep if AFTERMATH didn’t pass again) – but to slip in this reference in preparation for whatever comes next.

You can’t even be mad. If you wanted to establish legitimacy for a quiet operator, an NGO without a household profile but ambitious reach, you also wouldn’t lead with it. You’d start like this, small and offhand, in a paper with just enough clout to slide past scrutiny.

It’s just that today of all days, it grates on you the most. Not the attack itself, but the certainty that there is a second step you can’t yet see. A move already in motion while you’re still reading the opening gambit.

Absolutely not. You have worked too hard, carried too much, to become quiet scaffolding for someone else’s arc.

You are not going to be the footnote in anyone’s story.

***

Your knuckles on Bucky’s office door are light, almost perfunctory. You don’t wait for an answer before pushing in. Mike had only said, quietly, he’s in his office with medical. You hadn’t asked how bad because you didn’t need to, because you could see it on his face.

The overhead lights are all flicked on, and the blinds half-drawn. The sharp, sterile scent of antiseptic hangs in the air. On his desk sits a medical kit, lid cracked. Bloody gauze and half-empty vials mingle freely with the papers on his table. Bucky himself is perched on the edge of the table, torso hunched slightly as the plainclothes medical staff (contracted, surely) finishes wrapping his ribs in tight, even strips of white bandage.

He's half a man – his boots are unlaced, tactical pants streaked with portside grit, button up shirt hanging open for the medic’s access. His jacket and tie rest on the back of his chair, crumpled but not quite tossed. The metal of his dog tags glints faintly against his chest, resting in the hollow between his collarbones. Under the harsh light, the planes of his abdomen are drawn sharp, each muscle cut clean beneath pale, bruised skin. Your attention lingers for longer than you mean to. It always does.

He looks up the moment you enter. Not startled. Just – there. Present, watching, something softening in his expression.

“Just finishing,” the medic mutters, clipping the end of the bandage neatly. “Cuts are clean. No internal puncture. He’s lucky.”

Bucky grunts but doesn’t otherwise move. You can see the tremor beneath his control now.

There’s a frown on your face as you perch on the armrest of the nearest chair – spine straight, arms crossed loosely over your chest. Your legs extend long and deliberate to the floor, ankles crossed, tension running through you quiet and controlled.

The medic gathers up their kit without making eye contact. “I’ll give you some privacy.” You nod your thanks, and the door clicks shut behind them.

Silence.

You take this time to catalogue the cost. Up close, the damage is clearer: the gash on his cheekbone, the swelling under one eye, the bruises peeking out from beneath the fresh white bandage, blooming slow and uneven across his torso like a watercolour of violence. For once, words fail you.

He catches your gaze, something almost sheepish passing through his eyes. “Don’t start,” he mutters.

But you can’t hold it in. “You look like hell.” It’s the first thing at the tip of your tongue – too blunt, too sharp – and regret prickles immediately at the back of your throat.

“Bucky,” you sigh, an apology for your harshness.

It comes out quiet, barely more than a breath – instinctive, unarmoured, too intimate, and too his. The name folds around his edges like something you’ve carried for far longer than you’d admit.

His head lifts slightly, eyes catching yours. There’s a flicker there – something startled, something gentle. And then something else entirely, darker and softer at the same time, like he’s memorising the way it sounds in your voice. But he doesn’t comment. Just swallows, gaze dropping back to his lap.

When he speaks, his voice is tired. “There’s been worse. They were expecting me.”

You look at him, alarmed. “What do you mean?”

“He wasn’t run-of-the-mill security,” he exhales like the movement pains him. “Called me ‘Soldier’ and had a blade dipped in something that would’ve stopped anyone else’s heart three hours ago.”

Something in your stomach drops to your feet. “You almost died.”

“Key word – almost."

You swallow down the anger, the quiet indignation, that responsibility for him you can’t quite name – something that feels too close to wanting him safe, wanting him to keep coming back to you.

It knots in your chest, impossible to parse, so you reach for the only shield you have left. “Vote would’ve failed by four without you. Now that would’ve really pissed me off.”

Bucky almost smiles – almost. “Didn’t want to disappoint.”

“Too late,” you say as you set the folder gently beside him on the desk. “Have you seen this?”

He clocks the author header. “Mike gave me the run down.”

There’s something cautious in his voice. Like he doesn’t know if this is going to turn into a reckoning. Maybe it should.

“I’m sorry,” he says, softly, “that someone’s taking shots at you.”

You exhale through your nose. “It’s not just shots.”

He doesn’t reply, so you push the pages forward with two fingers, exposing the highlighted line. “The Outreach Exchange for Emergencies Foundation is named in it.”

He blinks once. No recognition; you don’t think he’s pretending.

“OXE,” you sound out the letters slowly, distaste dripping off every syllable. “I think they’re the ones behind the paper. While it reads like a critique, it’s just them planting their flag.”

He says nothing for a moment, eyes distant. Then, in that mechanical, precise way of his, “the smuggling.”

“Smuggling?”

“The crates were Atlas Relief. But the route, the cargo, the zones of play – it all matches. Civilian-labelled freight through the Southeast Asia corridor.”

Your mind sharpens around the phrasing. “Atlas ships it, OXE receives it?”

Bucky nods. “Wouldn’t be the first time a front has split ops. One organisation to handle shipping and customs, another to receive. Even legitimate organisations do it. Even if someone traces from one end, they hit a wall that looks above board. Makes the whole thing harder to unravel.”

You’re on your feet now, pacing the length of his office. “How long?”

He shakes his head. “Not often. Never really flagged until now.”

You step back, just enough to see him more clearly. “You didn’t think it was worth telling me?”

“I didn’t think it had anything to do with you.”

That’s when it lands. It always had everything to do with you.

“They buried it. Two lines in a twenty-page takedown of my work,” you say, quieter now. “But it’s clean. Too clean. Southeast Asia corridor. NGO funding trails. Your kind of mess.”

A pause.

“I’ll look into it,” he says. He moves – just slightly – and you catch the wince. His hand twitches like it wants to go to his ribs, but it ultimately does not.

You meet his eyes – blue, tired, searching for absolution you can’t give.

“No,” you say, voice steady even as something inside you splinters. “I will.”

For a moment, it almost feels like betrayal – like taking the knife out of his hands and leaving him unarmed. You’d wanted to believe he could carry it all. That if anyone could keep the worst at bay, it would be him.

But looking at him now – bruised, bloodied, barely holding himself upright – you see the truth. This was never his fight to finish.

And maybe, in the quiet corners of your mind you rarely visit, you realise it was never fair to ask him to.

He doesn’t argue. He looks at you – really looks, with something like guilt softening his eyes.

You pick up the report from his desk, fingers brushing paper instead of skin.

“Next time they aim at me,” you murmur, “don’t say sorry. Just stand beside me.”

It isn’t cruel. Just honest.

He swallows. His fingers curl loosely on the edge of the desk. “Maybe if I’d spent more time up here – talking, politicking – your bill would’ve passed. Maybe if I wasn’t always playing catch-up. Or fists first.”

You’re close to him now. Not quite touching, but near enough that your sleeve brushes his wrist when you shift your weight. The contact is featherlight.

“You showed up,” you say. “That matters.” You pause, the words tasting heavier than you intended. “But don’t kill yourself trying to fix everything at once. This isn’t a sprint, Barnes. I need you alive for the long run.”

“I thought if I handled it on the ground, the rest would fall into place,” he says, exhausted and a little raw. “Like cleaning up the op would mean the rest of it couldn’t touch you.”

You straighten. “It did. But not enough.”

The silence stretches, but it isn’t empty.

Bucky reaches for his desk drawer, wincing at the pull in his ribs. You catch the flicker of metal in his grip before he sets it down between you both. A glass vial. The liquid inside is clear, viscous, faintly tinged with blue.

“From Manila,” he says. Voice flat. There’s something in the way he looks at you, it almost feels like it’s a test.

You study it, hands folded, pulse steady. “What is that?”

His eyes flick to yours, searching, searching, then drop back to the vial. Something in his shoulders ease by a degree.

“An attempt at serum,” he says. “They’re still trying to recreate it. To sell it. To….”

The words trail off into silence, into history.

Slowly, you reach out, fingertips brushing the glass. It’s colder than it should be, like it remembers the cold box it was pulled from, like it remembers him.

You are already triaging the situation, your teeth worrying your bottom lip. The implications flicker through your mind – military contracts, illegal research funding, human testing. All the congressional briefings you’ve ever sat through on bioweapons and experimental enhancements.

“What do you think?” you ask.

“I don’t get the obsession with the serum,” he says, almost mulishly. “Nothing good ever come from it. And still, there’s people who want it.”

You nod and resume your pacing. “I was never good at science. My lab partner and I somehow always managed to get negative yields. But I know ambition. And ambition always finds its market.”

He huffs a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. He picks up the vial again, and for a moment it looks almost delicate, dwarfed by his vibranium hand.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “That’s what scares me.”

“So, what are you going to do with it?”

He exhales, ragged. “Destroy it. Already documented it for the team. I don’t want this on the market. Don’t want it… anywhere.”

Your thumb presses to the side of the vial, feeling its delicate resistance. All that power, condensed. The difference between a man in a chamber voting yes and a man in the field tearing steel apart with his bare hands.

You place it back down and push it toward him. “Then destroy it,” you agree. “But not here.”

His eyes meet yours, dark with fatigue, a glimmer of relief threading through them. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “Wouldn’t want to spill on your papers.”

You watch as he closes his fingers around the vial again, sealing its danger back into his palm. Your legs take you to his door.

It’s not difficult to see where this is going – it doesn’t end with just a lone operative in a back alley or a hero on a commemorative stamp, but with whole systems warping around them. Economies, power structures, global balances shifting to accommodate the oldest currency civilisation has ever traded in: power over what a person is, and what a person could be.

This is what frightens him – what power does to people. But you know that it’s never the serum itself that corrupts, it’s the ones who believe they deserve to wield it. And those are names you can find.

Let them chase their synthetic gods. You’ll chase the men who think they can own them.

You pause at the threshold, just for a moment. The urge to look back flickers through you—brief, dangerous, quickly extinguished. Then you step out, letting the door close behind you with the soft finality of choices made.

***

It’s late and your office is still, not silent – Capitol HVAC never really sleeps – but the stillness feels misplaced, as if the walls should be trembling with everything you’re holding in.

The corridor lights outside have dimmed to their motion-sensor hum. Your staff cleared out hours ago, Derek last of all, pausing at the door to say, “Don’t fall asleep at the desk again. It’s undignified.”

You nod, waving him off and didn’t tell him you had no intention of sleeping.

There’s a fresh cup of coffee on your desk. You don’t touch it – you’re already buzzing. Instead, you wait for the echo of Derek’s footsteps to fade down the marble corridor. Then you open the locked drawer and lay out the folders on your desk.

The collection doesn’t look like much – half-labelled folders, random pieces of paper, the kind of thing most staffers would assume were standard budget anomalies or oversight redactions. But you know better because you’ve seen how Bucky works. Every underline, every post-it, every note that isn’t quite a directive but a fragment of his thinking, laid bare.

You shift the stack aside, and pull the packet on grant funding towards you. A lose page slips free, weighed down by the Post-it stuck to it.

Anomaly in expenditure routing? – B

You stare at it a beat too long, and not because you’re surprised, but because you remember brushing past it the first time.

You were juggling a subcommittee hearing on dam issues and rewriting the language of the Safehaven rider clause that week. You hadn’t clocked the weight of what he was handing you. You didn’t ignore them out of disinterest. You’ve been drafting amendments, fending off lobbyists, wrangling coalitions, babysitting interns, preparing for the annual Congressional retreat. You’ve been doing the job.

And you’d thought he was the exception. That he could do what no one else could. That if anyone could keep the world from splitting open again, it would be someone like him.

But here, in the quiet of your office, you see it clearly – there are things even he can’t reach. Problems he can’t clean up or punch through or carry alone. And maybe he was never meant to.

But you can.

It’s a grant routing diagram – nominally dull. But the funding trail splits in two. One line goes to an approved health initiative in Brunei. The other vanishes into a regional ‘subsidiary org’ listed as a logistical contractor – no actual contract on file.

You frown. Brunei is just downstream of the Singapore and Malaysia port corridors – exactly where Bucky flagged Atlas activity last quarter. You cross-reference a list you half-remember from that briefing. Two other grants follow the same pattern. One subsidiary shares a fiscal agent with a company previously flagged for fraudulent aid distribution – potentially an OXE partner org, if memory serves.

Your pulse ticks higher. This isn’t just bad accounting, this is a web of infrastructure – routes, shells, fiscal agents – all laid out to move something with clean paperwork and humanitarian cover.

You tag it. Then start again.

Some of these names make your chest tighten – genuine operators, small teams doing critical work in flood zones and Blip refugee camps, caught in the dragnet of suspicious routing. Others are opportunists, gaming grant language to pad executive salaries and hide inflated invoices. And threaded between them, coiled quiet and deliberate, are the real threats: OXE and Atlas, laundering legitimacy through the chaos.

You power up your desktop to pull the budget trail from Appropriations. One entry is buried under four levels of foreign assistance bundling.

The original recipient: OXE Foundation.

Bingo.

You cross-reference the shipment manifests from a different folder. Atlas Relief appears first, and then again, and as you scroll, a dozen more times. They always have clean records for shipments that end up in Southeast Asian ports. In every case, the listed local delivery partner – the one receiving the supplies on the ground – is OXE Foundation.

Just as Bucky had suspected; frontend and backend.

You click on OXE’s profile, and it loads quickly. The bio is brief: “A disaster relief fund supporting post-Blip mental health research.” You try to access funding records, and the system throws up a red bar; clearance required.

Why would a disaster relief fund be blanketed under Tier III international security clearance?

You pull out your personal phone and dial one of the three numbers you have memorised. It rings twice before a familiar voice answers – clipped, alert, a little surprised to hear from you after all these years.

“Hey,” you say quietly. “Can you still trace NGO funding paths?”

A pause. Then, like muscle memory, “Depends. Domestic or international?”

You look down at the name that you keep circling in ink. You can still smell copier ink and old cologne on the file.

“International. Southeast Asia. I’m looking for an OXE Foundation.”

A pause, then a rattle of keys. “Jesus. This thing’s buried under more clearance than some counter intel dossiers. What’s going on?”

You don’t answer.

You already know.

Clearance like that doesn’t just appear. Someone requested it. Justified it. Filed it under foreign humanitarian exceptions, or metahuman threat containment, or post-conflict stabilization. The buzzwords don’t matter, just the effect.

It means someone doesn’t want OXE traced, and someone even higher up made sure that decision stuck. Whoever it is, they aren’t just laundering money or weapons. They’re laundering legitimacy through channels that touch your own committee’s jurisdiction, and that feels intensely personal.

The worst part is knowing you can’t treat them all the same. You can’t shut the doors on everyone without suffocating the genuine ones, can’t clear the corridors without catching innocents in the sweep. And that’s what OXE is counting on – that you’ll hesitate long enough for them to slip past.

And for better or for worse, the serum narrows the field.

Weapons? Anyone with a grudge, a buyer, or an offshore shell company can traffic those. Money laundering? Half the criminals on this planet have an LLC and a lobbyist on retainer. But serum research is different – fewer labs, fewer buyers. Only those with the resources and the arrogance to think they can rewrite human limits.

You exhale, eyes flicking over funding lines and archived appropriations notes.

Good. Let them make themselves known – it’ll only make the hunt easier.

Every bit of paperwork that has ever crossed your desk is looked at in a new light. NGO audit reports. Fiscal year reallocations. Humanitarian aid invoices that skip dates. Subcontractors tied to shell companies with pristine acronyms. The paper trail doesn’t just stretch – it coils, looping through budget authorizations and disaster relief subclauses, disappearing behind the language of appropriations law that few people could ever parse on a first read.

This was never just about bad actors – it’s also about the systems built to protect them. Bucky could chase them across the Pacific, but here – in the footnotes and line items and subclauses – is where you separate what deserves saving from what deserves to burn.

Outside, it’s starting to rain.

The dome glows faint through your office window, a quiet testament to all that endures and all that remains unseen.

A/N: 29k words for reader to call him bucky to his face!! we take slow burn really seriously in this house

<< 5. Jakarta, Manila, and Washington DC || AO3 ||

#for the record #the first tuesday in november #writing #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes fluff #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes #bucky x reader #bucky x you #bucky barnes x female reader #james buchanan barnes #james bucky barnes #bucky barnes x f!reader #Sebastian stan #Sebastian stan x reader #bucky barnes fanfic #bucky x female reader

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