#pinkfics!💕

[pinksikhewei]

“But They Cradled Me, Yes?”

“Steve?”

Steve watched Bucky’s beautiful blue eyes look down at his skin as it softly fell to thin ashy pieces, then look into his own with a look of pure fear that Steve hadn’t seen since that moment in the Hellcarrier.

It was such an innocent, childlike fear that made Steve forget where he was. It made him reach out to grab at the ashes that fluttered away from Bucky’s body like struggling butterflies.

Word count: 850

Content: a short fic rewriting the scene where Bucky turns to dust bcs Steve didn’t do enough for me 💔 like wdym your best friend just died and you barely even look at him. Also because Bucky’s metabolism from the serum would’ve made it slower (a little bit like Peter’s)

A/n: This is MUCH shorter than I thought it would be but honestly I’m happy with it it’s pretty heat 😝 anyways reblogs/notes appreciated!!

Crossposted to ao3 with the same handle!

"The hands that cradled your face and tilted it upwards to kiss your forehead are soaked in unfathomable quantities of blood."

”But they cradled me, yes?”

💕

How can the soft rustle of tree leaves and the sound of heavy breathing feel like such a heavy silence?

Because it was a silence, not laced but soaked, with such a blood coated feeling of loss and guilt.

Steve, deep down in his quick-beating heart, knew what had happened. He had felt it— the shift; but the words spilled from his bleeding mouth, anyway.

”Where’d he go?” He said breathlessly, looking to Thor and hoping for something like a miracle. “Thor?”

Thor didn’t look at him, and Steve felt his gut drop with desperation.

Steve didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t believe it. He felt denial running through the blood on his face, seeping into the air in his lungs. He felt guilt trickling down his face with the sweat, felt the responsibility just as hot in his hands as the failure.

”Where’d he go?”

That was when he heard it; a couple shuffled footsteps, another gentle breeze.

Then it was Bucky.

“Steve?” The man managed.

Steve watched Bucky’s beautiful blue eyes look down at his skin as it softly fell to thin ashy pieces, then look into his own with a look of pure fear that Steve hadn’t seen since that moment in the Hellcarrier.

It was such an innocent, childlike fear that made Steve forget where he was. It made him reach out to grab at the ashes that fluttered away from Bucky’s body like struggling butterflies.

He got closer and stared at Bucky tenderly.

”Bucky?” He said with a wavering voice, not even sure how to react.

He couldn’t stop it, he knew he couldn’t, but he still tried hopelessly.

Steve grabbed at ash in the air, trying to pack it back into place on Bucky’s trembling shoulders, but those shoulders only wasted away even more underneath his soft, gloved hands.

”Steve?” Bucky whispered, his weapon discarded on the yellow-green grass.

This couldn’t possibly be it. After all those fights, after that war he had crawled his way through just to get his best friend back. There was no way he could lose him again.

They had been through everything together; from the schoolhouse as children to playing cops and robbers in the woods; from the war when Steve became Captain America to the moment when he was assigned as Bucky’s target. So much had happened, and yet Steve had never once given up on him, never once believed that Bucky was truly gone (unless you were to count the grief he’d gone through after Bucky had fallen from that train. Steve was sure of his death, then, so why should he be now)?

There was no way that Bucky, his Bucky was dying like this.

Bucky’s flesh started to deteriorate faster than Steve wanted it to. He held onto Bucky as the latter tried to hold onto him, too, but failed.

”I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Steve mumbled as if it would put him back together, looking up and down the dusty form of his best friend.

This was his fault. He could've stopped Thanos, but he wasn’t strong enough; he wasn’t good enough.

And Bucky? Bucky was crestfallen at the fact that they had lost, but oh how comfortable it felt to die in the hands of the man he trusted most. As he looked into Steve’s warm eyes in the cold world around him, he felt something like contentment. Not at the death of his friends, not at the deaths of the people he didn’t know, not at how afraid he was of dying, but at the feeling of not being alone.

He was afraid; he was terrified, but Steve was there, and that was enough for him.

And just as quickly as it had started, Bucky was gone.

Gone.

Steve fell to his knees, palming the ash all over the ground and grabbing at bits and pieces as if he could jigsaw-puzzle them back into Bucky’s soft shape. He nearly cried out as some of it started to blow away in the wind.

He shoved some of the ash, which translated to as much as his shaking hands could get ahold of, into his pocket; he zipped it up firmly and looked up at the others.

“Oh god.”

For what felt like a long time, nobody spoke. What could anyone say in that moment to make things better? How could any word in the world make up for the billions of lives just lost?

It felt as if even the forest, the rich earth of Wakanda, knew that a great devastation had just fallen upon its people. It felt like the dirt and the trees and the sky grieved their king.

It felt like every heart on the plant ached for their loved ones, every soul filled with wrenched black fear and sorrow.

He was meant to be with Bucky until the end of the line, and he had been.

But at what cost?

[pinksikhewei]

A blue blanket and a gentle guide back to yourself.

Spencer wasn’t exactly sure how much time he’d wasted trying to work himself down from a meltdown, but it wasn’t working and there was just never enough time and he just wasn’t ever good enough anymore.

“I’m not good enough,” he repeated like a mantra.

Word count: ~2300

Content: NO reader, very much centered around Spencer being autistic, mention of him stabbing himself lowkey, angst/comfort, idk what to put here bro im used to Ao3 tags 😭 basically Spencer not coping with having so much freedom after prison but it’s basically just him having a meltdown, JJ and Garcia being real ones, and I guess if you really look close Jeid is there but that wasn’t my intention so it’s up for interpretation💕

A/n: ahhhh this is my first fic on here, and also my first Spencer fic so this is exciting :))) if you see anything misspelled don’t look at me 💀 it feels a little disorganized but that’s just cos I haven’t written in MONTHS for anything other than my novel 😭 ALSO DISREGARD THE TITLE I LITERALLY PONDERED ON IT FOR LJKE THREE HOURS AND COILD NOT COME IP WITH ONE BUT THAYS OKAY

Sometimes, Spencer surprised himself by how odd he could be. Even more so by the twists and turns his life gave him on top of that. Sometimes he wished he could take a good, long look at the woven blanket that was his soul, his personality, his qualities, and decide exactly what to rip out.

But, he supposed that a blanket needed all its threads to keep from unraveling. So when it fell down to smother him, he learned to crawl his way out.

He’d been stronger than he expected himself to be in a lot of situations in his hectic life. Even if he didn’t want to admit it, he knew deep down he had courage. Sometimes it was simply a little difficult to find.

He’d found a lot of it while in prison, reaching deep into the dark depths of his soul to grasp onto whatever he could muster. Did that mean stabbing himself to stay protected, losing his best chance for survival in an attempt to make another one? Yes. Did that mean spending sleepless nights wondering if he was really going to get out? Too many times, yes. Did he let that kill him? Almost.

One thing Spencer Reid hated, in truly the most private ways, was change; loss of routine, loss of structure. When he found himself trapped in a cage with people he didn’t know and trust, he lost all of those values that often held him together just as his team did.

He lost his team those days, too.

He lost himself.

Luckily and not so luckily, it didn’t take long to find new routines, built upon him by ruthless guards and rules and blood-boiled inmates with pasts and inevitable futures rougher than his own. He was embarrassingly easy to mold into the rough shape of submission, going where they told him when they told him.

Spencer swore up and down some of those cold nights that if he could have killed himself, he probably would have, but ultimately his team and the promise of freedom were what kept him alive.

When he was finally released, that same team was the one to coax Reid back to who he was; however, none of them expected the damage that would’ve been done in those long six months.

It was almost as if his release did more bad than the initial imprisonment. He couldn’t focus, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t do things himself.

Independence was always important to him— his team knew that— but they couldn’t ignore the way he stood still in front of doors waiting for them to open, the way he sometimes forgot his own bedroom doors were unlocked, the way he was overwhelmed by the amount of choice he had so suddenly. They couldn’t ignore the way he got overloaded so much easier, meltdowns coming much quicker than even JJ had seen in their decades working together.

Everything was just so much for Spencer. Too much. And who did he turn to? Anyone he could carve gentle hands into; anyone he hoped could fill the Spencer-shaped hole in his heart. Of course, there were canyons of those he couldn’t have that embedded in his gut, too; ravines with little cabins where Gideon resided and soccer fields for Hotch to coach on and homes for Derek to make his own with little red doors.

He was grasping at straws trying to fix himself, and that was how Spencer had ended up in his current situation. Pacing the length of the round table room when he should have been getting ready to leave for a case.

But that was just it, they had just closed a case— an especially grueling one at that. It had been less than an hour before Emily had announced with a heavy sigh that they needed to depart from home again. By god, Spencer had never hated her more for saying ‘wheels up in 30’ when it usually made him surge with curious anticipation.

He wasn’t exactly sure how much time he’d wasted trying to work himself down from a meltdown, but it wasn’t working and there was just never enough time and he just wasn’t ever good enough anymore.

“I’m not good enough,” he repeated like a mantra. “Too much; calm down before you bother them.”

JJ, who had been making a last round to grab a cup of coffee before they left, was quick to notice him through the humbling glass wall of the room. Her face turned to one of pain, and she turned on her heel to find Emily.

Once she finally ran into the woman, her sincere voice struck Emily with surprise.

“Spence can’t go on this case. At least not in the field. He’s on the edge of a meltdown and I’m sure the second I go near him he’s going to fall off that edge. I’m gonna make him stay with Garcia.”

Emily nodded, flashing that face of concern JJ had seen many times before, saying, “Don’t you think that’ll set him off more? The change in plans.”

“I think it already has. He knows he’s not going to get through his case without a meltdown, I think he’ll be a little less upset about things this time around.”

“Alright, go,” Emily urged, staring softly into the round table room where she too saw Spencer’s frazzled state.

JJ all but stumbled into Garcia’s cave, tearing her precious blanket from her go bag and snagging a few more from Garcia’s hoard of them in the little basket behind her door.

“You’re gonna have company for the case, that okay?”

“Reid?” Garcia replied with a knowing look.

JJ nodded.

“Can you make him a little cozy place to sit down here? I think this one’s bad, I have no idea how long he’s been pacing.”

Garcia smiled sympathetically, immediately going to work creating a little nest of blankets and decorative pillows she could find around her cave, placing them neatly underneath her desk.

Meanwhile, JJ found herself outside the room that held Spencer and all his emotion. She took a deep breath before opening the door, met with Spencer sitting on the ground and rocking back and forth.

She took a quick motion in moving a couple of the rolling whiteboards in front of the window since sometimes the blinds got stuck and took minutes to work out.

“Spence? It’s JJ— is there anything I can do to help?” She tried softly, not confident she would get an answer.

Spencer didn’t even look at her, holding his knees to his chest and hugging them tightly. He knew by then she wasn’t going to let him in good conscience go in the field, and was working through that, too.

He brought a hand up to his mouth and started biting at his index finger’s knuckle, not really caring how stupid and childish he looked.

“Can you hear me, Spence? Just look at me for a second, so I know you hear me.”

Spencer’s beautiful brown eyes flicked in her direction before returning to the cold floor in front of him, and JJ sighed in relief.

“Great, thank you. I know you probably already know this but you aren’t going in the field, you’re gonna stay with Garcia. Remember you are still working the case if that’s what you want, okay? The only change in plans is location.”

Spencer hummed in a feeble attempt at a response before pulling his hand out of his mouth and wiping it on the fabric of his pants, embarrassed. JJ didn’t mention it, knowing it was the absolute least of their concerns.

“Do you want a hug? It’s okay if you don’t. I can just stay here with you until you’re ready.”

Spencer seemed to be lost in thought for a moment, and JJ let it happen. Then, he nodded, giving JJ a bath of pride in his improvement during the last five minutes.

She sat down beside him and leaned toward his trembling body, wrapping arms around Spencer’s frame in a way that made him feel inexplicably at home.

“God, Spence, you’re about to shake out of your skin.” JJ said absentmindedly, addressing his trembling.

Spencer thought it was silly, but he supposed he really was shaking like a leaf, trying desperately to hold onto its branch against the violence that was the bitter wind.

So, they sat like that until JJ’s phone started to beep more than Spencer knew was casual conversation. He felt the need to apologize, but wasn’t feeling particularly verbal, so he just picked his mop of curls up off her shoulder and wiped his tears with the back of his hand.

“Duty calls,” JJ sighed, then tried to lighten the mood a little. “Ten minutes wasn’t even that long, heaven forbid Emily says ‘wheels up’ and we don’t leave on the exact time she says to.”

Spencer silently mouthed fragments of what JJ had said, but JJ didn’t fuss as she’d grown used to his echolalia based habits over the years.

“You ready to head over to Garcia’s cave? She’s got a little pillow fort all set up for you, I’m sure.”

A snake of guilt slithered it’s way into Spencer’s cramped head, curling up around the static ball of overwhelm. He tried not to take too much time steadying himself to stand up, his balance and coordination slightly off from the meltdown. JJ stood with him as soon as she realized what he was trying to do, and helped him up.

“Doing great, Spence. I bet Garcia’s probably already grabbed your bag from your desk, so we can just head on down there.”

On the slightly wobbly and slow walk to Garcia’s cave, Spencer squinted against the lights and mentally cursed his too-tight tie. Once he finally made it, JJ broke off with a small apology and a good luck.

It took Garcia all of three seconds to open the door and immediately fawn over the man, and even if it made him feel burdensome he had to admit it also let him feel cared for.

“Hey, boy genius. I made you a little nook, and I also got you a cookie from my snack desk and a bottle of water,” Garcia smiled widely at him as she always did.

Spencer mustered up a small grin back, and looked down to where she motioned underneath her highly decorated desk. He recognized JJ’s prized blanket she took on every case with her and then his favorite soft blanket Garcia kept in her cave. His heart warmed and he grew a little more calm in knowing he had a safe place to stake out for the majority of the day.

He brought a hand up and adjusted his tie, tugging it off slowly as he tried to think of a way to thank her.

“Go, sit,” Garcia urged him, gently shooing him with her hands as she sat back down on her rolling chair and scooted in to the desk. “You need to drink some water and chill out before I do any sort of debriefing on this case.”

Spencer mimicked her shooing motions before he sat down, a little shamefully, and opened up the bottle of water.

Honestly, the small space made him feel safe, and the gentle light from Garcia’s fairy lights and monitors was just little enough that his eyes didn’t feel like exploding, and his mind settled a little bit.

He reached down and untied his shoelaces, resisting the urge to remove them all together, and then pulled the blanket up over his lap as he leaned against the wall. He looked up at countless little stickers and stars Garcia had planted there, wondering when and why she even put them in a place she couldn’t see.

“Better?” Garcia asked softly, and Spencer could hear the clicking of her keyboard.

Spencer, without really realizing what he was doing, quietly repeated her while he fidgeted with a little plush Garcia had put in the nest of blankets.

“Better?”

“Ah, so we’re mimicking today. Good to know,” she chuckled back.

“Good to know.”

She laughed a little, not surprised he’d been able to copy her voice to a T, but rolled back a little anyway.

“Alright, well, the case file is here but only if you want it and you’re ready,” Garcia tapped the desk above his head.

“Only when you’re ready.”

And so, Spencer sat there for the remainder of the day, occasionally laying down on his back if his legs started to fall asleep, surrounded by the soft energy of Garcia’s cave.

When he was ready— even if he was still a little stuck in repeating what was said to him— he gave Garcia input on the case and said hello to the team over the phone.

He was more than grateful for his team, his friends who cared about him. He knew that this was exactly where he was meant to be, even if it was missing a few of his favorite people. He knew this was where he belonged, this was what would fill that Spencer-shaped hole in his heart and let it overflow.

He just had to let it happen.

[pinksikhewei]

Hot Cocoa, Hummingbirds, and Something Sort of Like Healing.

Bucky quickly made himself enamored as flapping wings and the green tree leaves filled the screen. He tried to throw himself into the colorful songbirds and facts of sweet crows, tried to imagine himself flying away into a free sky with none of his heavy worries and bones as light as air. He tried not to remind himself of the lab rat he used to be, or of the torture or the abuse.

But at the end of the day, Bucky always ended up back there. He couldn’t get away from it, from himself.

Word count: ~2.1K

Content: Autistic!Bucky, protective Steve Rogers, he’s a really good friend, but I guess you could ship them in this if you want to, angst/comfort eventually, but I didn’t write the comfort only the very beginning of it 💔, I lowkey don’t even know what point in the fucking timeline I was in just imagine anything post!Civil War atp, Bucky’s special interest is birds bcs I said so

A/n: this one was lowkey difficult cos I tried not to mischaracterize Bucky while also doing that intentionally 😭 but anyways as an autistic person who oftentimes feels like their needs are annoying and embarrassing, this fic is a little bit special to me :)

Based on the last headcanon from this post

Reblogs/notes appreciated !!! Crossposted to ao3 from the same handle!

🥀

The tag on the inside of his shirt, the seams on his jeans, the slight prickle of his hair against his neck, the buzzing of every god-forsaken machine Tony had jammed into every possible nook and cranny. Bucky felt it all, heard it all. He sensed it down deep into his bones, and the years of conditioning to sense more than he was supposed to didn't help, either.

His week, overall, had been a pretty shitty one. From the rain hiding away the birds in the trees to the near-failed missions the team had gone on to the cold weather, he'd had enough.

He hated when he couldn't see the birds-- the cardinals and the Calliope Hummingbirds and the mourning doves stowed neatly into the tens of birdhouses hung outside Bucky's expansive window in his room in the Avengers' compound. 

He hated when his motor skills grew poor from exhaustion and overwhelm and his clunky metal arm didn't move where it told him to move, when his voice didn't move as fast as his brain, when it impacted his performance while he was working. He hated the way getting hit during battle and losing made him feel when for seventy-some years, he would never even dream of missing a single swing.

And the cold. Oh, how he hated the cold down to his rotten, strung out core. The cold reminded him of the cryo-freeze, the isolation, the chill against his back as he sat down to have his brain wiped, the being stuck in his worst nightmare.

The autism didn't help anything, either; only made things worse. It only made his heart break when he couldn't catalogue his dear birds, since they had been one of the only things to survive the conditioning of The Winter Soldier-- his special interest. It only made his need to be perfect heightened when those motor skills declined. It only made him feel the cold as what felt like a thousand times worse. It only made him feel so much more alone. Alone no matter how much the people around him told him he wasn't.

So, since he still hadn't worked out how to handle that, he went back to what he knew best. He put up a mask; a good one. It wasn't like he could hide the slurred speech or the running into corners sometimes, but he could hide the way it bothered him when the team laughed a little too hard on the jet, the way he had forgotten to eat for two days because Steve had forgotten to remind him, how he changed his shirt four times in the morning just to find one with an okay texture. He learned to ignore the way his brain needed quiet, the way he hated the smell of Tony's new cologne. He learned to keep his mouth shut when everyone was cracking jokes he didn't quite understand.

Sometimes, it worried him ever so slightly when it got bad. He felt like maybe he was just letting himself become The Winter Soldier again; silent, uncomplaining, numb. Steve worried, too, but he knew better than to say anything. It'd been like this for a while, even before Natasha had floated around the idea that maybe Bucky was on the spectrum, before the whole team had sort of just accepted it was the truth and kept going on without making it a big deal. Before Bucky had learned to hate those parts of himself.

Once or twice a month, sometimes even three, Bucky would start to crumble. He'd been masking and masking for so long, and he would keep up doing it until he genuinely couldn't manage it anymore. Steve had grown a sort of sense about it-- recognizing when the man would start to wince at the loud noises, stare off into space, run into the edges of countertops and pretend like it never happened, pull at the collar of his shirt like it was choking him. And Steve would be right there with him, subtly. There'd been an instance where he tried to talk to Bucky, help him relax, but had instead been on the receiving end of a meltdown where Bucky had hit him and screamed that he was okay.

Bucky had never felt more horrible, even though he didn't mean to do it all.

Steve had never felt so forgiving.

So, that Steve had slowly learned to get himself where he was then, making Bucky a simple bowl of plain grits exactly how he knew the other liked them, and leaving it on the counter when he heard him start to walk down the hall from his room.

He took one look at Bucky, tugging at his shirt's collar, and frowned.

"You're gonna have a bad day today, huh?" He said softly, pouring him a small glass of water.

Bucky took a moment, and did something he didn't often do.

He nodded; very reluctantly, but he nodded nonetheless.

"I appreciate you being honest," Steve smiled. "And I'm not mad, you're not annoying, and no you are not horrible or weird or a burden."

Bucky chuckled ever so slightly and took a bite of his food. It took him a while to work through it, the process of eating just being a bit difficult, and by the time the bowl was empty almost everyone else had woken up for a scheduled training session Tony had planned the week before. Bucky was both glad it was happening and dreading it all at the same time. He liked the problem solving exercises FRIDAY would generate for them to solve. Those were logical, predictable, perfect-able. He could knock them out in seconds. He liked proving he was worth something on the team.

So, when they finally made it to the training room, and Tony casually announced that he was reprogramming the AI for the small exercises, Bucky could have cried right then and there. The one thing he had actually planned to do all day, and the plans had changed. He took a deep breath, telling himself it was stupid to be upset over such a small thing, and ignored it. He went through the motions of the rest of the training, unfortunately getting toppled over by Peter a couple times, and ignoring everything he felt just to make it through the hour.

He felt embarrassingly exhausted, and it was only 11 AM. Bucky wished he knew how to be normal, or even just how to let himself be himself, but he couldn't. He didn't know how to stop hiding.

He wished his disability was so much more manageable than it was, then. He wished he could go back to the 40’s when he wasn’t ever too bothered by it, when he could so easily tuck everything away like a locked box under a bed-frame or deep into a full closet.

The botched experiments and decimation HYDRA had done to his brain left it permanently broken. His comprehension skills sometimes got the better of him, his focus, his calmness (did he even know what that word meant anymore)?, and no matter what had happened nothing could be worse than his disability flooding to each and every corner of his mind after being trapped behind a dam for so long.

Seventy years was a long, long time to ignore something like that.

Even after escaping the loud chatter of the team and taking half-refuge in the kitchen, Bucky felt like his chest was being pressed on so hard he couldn't breathe. The lights stabbed his eyes and every sound wiggled so far into his ears he thought his brain might burst. His shirt's texture was really starting to get to him, and it was cold in the compound today.

"Bucky?" Steve's gentle voice reminded him he was alive. "You okay?"

Bucky shrugged, a bit shaky, and shook his head no. He sat, unmoving, at the kitchen counter with a dead expression, trying to hold himself together like a bad crochet project caught on something sharp.

“You’re not alright, are you?”

”I’m fine.” Bucky said quietly, rubbing a hand across his lips and directing his attention to the tiles of the floor.

Steve’s somewhat disappointed expression melted into something sympathetic; understanding, as he started to make a cup of hot cocoa. He decided, then, that he should probably play it out as if he didn’t really know Bucky was having a hard time, even though the both of them would see right through it.

”I’m making hot cocoa, I’ll make you some, too, but you don’t have to drink it.”

He heard a small huff and took that as a yes, pouring hot milk into a cup with a small photo of a bluejay on it. He’d made a conscious decision to avoid Bucky’s cardinal mug, afraid the stark red would bother him and remind him of HYDRA’s star branding.

When he finally placed the mug in front of Bucky, the latter immediately wrapped his hands around it, probably to warm them up due to his poor temperature regulation.

”How about we watch that good bird documentary you like? The one with the hummingbirds.” Sam asked gently.

Bucky seemed to hesitate, probably winding through the labyrinth of his brain where every twist and turn told him he didn’t deserve help. However, he got up and started the slow journey to his room.

Once he’d finally made it in, he set his mug on the nightstand of his bed, and tugged off his shoes, making his way under the deep blue covers. (He never figured out what his favorite color was, so he just picked Steve’s).

Steve sat down beside him, not touching him or really looking at him too hard, and asked FRIDAY to pull up the documentary in question so Bucky didn’t have to. The large window darkened to hide the dark rainy sky behind it and lit up in the shape of a television screen, showcasing one of Tony’s more intricate technologies.

Bucky quickly made himself enamored as flapping wings and the green tree leaves filled the screen. He tried to throw himself into the colorful songbirds and facts of sweet crows, tried to imagine himself flying away into a free sky with none of his heavy worries and bones as light as air. He tried not to remind himself of the lab rat he used to be, or of the torture or the abuse.

But at the end of the day, Bucky always ended up back there. He couldn’t get away from it, from himself.

”Steve?” He whispered when he felt embarrassing tears press at his shiny blue eyes.

”Yeah?” The blond replied, already hearing it in his voice.

Bucky didn’t answer for a moment, fighting with himself, wishing for a moment that he hadn’t even said anything.

”It’s cold.” Bucky finally said, his voice failing him halfway through.

He wrapped his own arms around himself as he just couldn’t hold the tears back anymore. He didn’t look at Steve, too ashamed, and Steve didn’t look at him, either. He knew better.

”FRIDAY, turn up the heat, please.” Steve said pointedly, and folded his half of the blanket over onto Bucky as a second layer. “You stay as close or far as you want, Buck. But know I’m here, I want to help, and I’m not judging you.”

Bucky felt like he was being ripped apart between letting himself be loved and helped or sparing what little dignity he had left. He wanted his brain to slow down and also stop feeling like mush, wanted his hands to stop shaking and his heart to stop aching.

Bucky wasn’t even sure how long they sat there, in silence other than the narrator’s kind voice and the occasional songbird’s cry.

He told himself, I am not strong enough for this.

”You’re strong, Bucky. Just breathe, it’s gonna be okay.”

And that was when Bucky turned over and dumped himself into Steve’s arms.

Unraveling into a messy pile of exhaustion, Bucky let himself be held only because he felt like he couldn’t do anything else. He let Steve just run the smallest of circles onto his back and tentatively pull him a little closer, because he didn’t have the energy to pull away.

”I’m not mad at you, you’re not weak or stupid or embarrassing. You’re my friend, Bucky. Just breathe.”

and maybe, everything would be just a little bit okay.

[pinksikhewei]

Fly Away, Little Pretty Bird. (Where The Cold Winter Winds Don’t Blow).

Joel heard the faint clomp of Abby’s boots come toward him, and Ellie’s cries grew more desperate.

”Please don’t, please don’t, please.”

Oh.

Joel braced himself, visions of his Ellie blasting through his hurting head like a breath of fresh air.

A sharp pain in his neck, a scream that went right to his heart, then nothing.

Then, everything.

Word count: 1,005

Content: Joel’s point of view during his death with weaved in pieces of what people call a “memory recall.” AKA, The brain is active for seven minutes after death.

Warnings for major character death, of course, and hurt/no comfort <3 Joel does NOT get up in this fic I want to make that very clear 😭

A/n: I FINISHED THIS EPISODE YESTERDAY AND IT ACTUALLY FUCKED ME UP. SO I HAD TO WRITE ABOUT IT

Reblogs/notes appreciated! Crossposted to Ao3

Play this song and then queue up Into The Light by John Murphy (yes the gotgv3 one)

💕

“Joel, get up.”

Joel laid there, deep red blood running down his face and dripping onto the cold floor.

He could hardly see her, then, through the dark spots and the pain.

”Joel, fucking get up!”

Joel’s deadweight hand flicked up a finger. He needed to show Ellie he was there; he could see her, hear her, feel the sound of her screams deep in his battered gut. His Eliie.

This was it, he knew it deep down. He was failing, and this time it wasn’t in his sleep. It wasn’t a dream he could wake up from.

He knew he would never wake up again. He would never hear Tommy’s laugh, Dina’s voice calling out to him. He’d never hear Ellie happy again.

Joel was fighting for it, fighting to stay awake. He hadn’t been in the start, but by god did he hate the idea of dying in front of the girl who had seen so much death.

“Everyone who I ever loved has left me, except for fucking you.”

Oh Ellie, sweet Ellie. She didn’t deserve this— Joel knew that. He’d known that since the day he met her, when she was so much smaller and so much more afraid.

Everything seemed to move so fast, yet so painstakingly slow, like molasses.

She didn’t deserve this. He was failing again, and this time it wasn’t in his sleep.

Joel hated the way his heavy body wouldn’t move. His head lifted only a touch, but every inch of his bones and skin flamed with hurt and aches. It was as if he was glued to the ground, stuck to the chill of the hardwood.

He wished he could just get up and help Ellie. Christ, she was probably next.

Abby was so full of rage, what was to stop her from hurting Ellie, too? What was to stop her from bashing those sick shiny golf clubs into Ellie’s poor head, or kick her until she couldn’t breathe?

And then Abby did. She gave a blow to Ellie’s stomach and Joel just barely saw Ellie scrunch up in pain. For a moment he was glad for the blur of his vision so he didn’t have to see the look of panic he knew was on Ellie’s sun-soft face.

”They’re not gonna hit you.” Joel said.

Ellie’s eyes darted around, and Joel caught himself staring into them at her childish fear.

”Look at me, they are not gonna hit you.”

He heard the faint clomp of Abby’s boots come toward him, and Ellie’s cries grew more desperate.

”Please don’t, please don’t, please.”

Oh.

Joel braced himself, visions of his Ellie blasting through his hurting head like a breath of fresh air.

A sharp pain in his neck, a scream that went right to his heart, then nothing.

Then, everything.

His mind flashed with memories, memories that gently held him as they ran thorn bushes down his back.

”Why did the scarecrow get an award?” Ellie asked quietly, lying with her back to Joel.

”He was outstanding in his field.” Joel replied with a small smirk.

Joel hoped she would never stop telling those stupid jokes, if she made it away from Abby alive. Please let her make it out alive.

“Nobody’s going to find us out here, right?”

”Nobody’s going to find us.” Joel confirmed pointedly.

His original plan of getting some sleep easily melted away, and he found himself, rifle in hand, keeping guard. He wouldn’t let a single soul touch this girl, she didn’t deserve it. He was not going to fail, not in his sleep.

Joel heard her crying, felt his heart stop beating so heavily, felt the adrenaline give out.

He couldn’t really feel the pain, anymore, but he could feel Ellie’s.

How long had it been?

He couldn’t, see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel, couldn’t breathe.

Joel was afraid.

He wanted to hold her, to hear her, to be there for her. He wanted to show her that he didn’t hate her, and he wanted her to show him, too.

He didn’t want to die being hated by her.

He was failing, and this time it wasn’t in his sleep.

“Swear to me everything you said about the fireflies is true.”

”I swear.”

The sun blanketed down on the two of them, and Joel ignored the way it boiled the pure guilt in his chest.

”Okay.”

Through Joel’s blacked-out vision, he faintly wondered if he was crying.

Just barely, he felt something grab hold of him. His brain continued ambushing him with memory upon memory, stabbing through him like whatever Abby had used. It felt jagged, and it was cold against the yellowy warm thoughts it brought.

Joel stared at Ellie with the guitar in his hand. From his place on the porch, slightly rocking in the chair, she as looked beautiful as ever. Joel had always liked the way the streetlights made her glow. Ellie stared back, through the soft darkness as snow fell on her rosy cheeks. He stared and stared, trying to tell her things with his eyes.

I love you, I don’t want you to be angry with me. Please forgive me.

Snow blew down over the lodge, over the trees, over the mountain and the horde of infected ravaging Jackson. Joel fought and fought, like he always had done, trying to keep himself awake; keep himself alive even though he knew he was already done.

The moment he felt a shaking body climb atop his own, he remembered his sweet girl, Sarah.

”We are not sick!”

Please, dear god, he thought with all his might, let my Ellie know I love her.

He hoped he would stay warm long enough to warm her up, too. He hoped his body wasn’t too heavy, too much of a hassle on her grieving heart. He hoped Tommy would protect her, hoped Dina really was only asleep.

A face pressed up against his own, just as he felt it all slipping away. They grabbed his hand, liking bloody fingers into bloodier ones, but he couldn’t squeeze back, this time. Not now, not ever.

”Dad.”

Ellie.

[pinksikhewei]

Awake, Remembering, Grieving, Hurting.

Peter sometimes sat on the dusty hardwood floors, in a mess of tears and heavy breathing, when he remembered May’s death.

He recalled in a gut-wrenchingly perfect fashion the way he could hear her heavy-beating heart start to give out. He could count the seconds between each labored breath, hear each booming voice as police swarmed the outside of the building.

Word count: ~1.3K

Content: Hurt/NO comfort, heavily implied self harm/suicide but it isn’t the focus of the fic, basically a thousand words of a crashout session, Peter thinking about everything bad that happened to him and grieving everyone he loves, POST NO WAY HOME, a ton of past character death mentions!

A/n: I’m on the tail end of this fixation but I was in the mood to write something devastating with a lot of unnecessary analogies and stuff so I locked in 😝 reblogs and notes appreciated!!!

🕷️

Sometimes Peter laid awake— thinking. Remembering. Hurting.

Who was he? The world didn’t know, and he sure as hell didn’t. Peter Parker— The name felt almost foreign to him, now.

His dingy, grey-clad apartment didn’t help him find his way back to what felt like home. The map to anything that was good in the world was threaded terribly into the red and blue of his hand-made Spider-Man suit, and he didn’t know if he was supposed to tear it apart to find the answer to the giant puzzle that was his life, or if he should leave it right in front of his tired eyes and allow himself to give up on every pipe-dream of family and love he ever had.

Peter thought that if May had been the one to gently sew the pieces of the suit together, fit them perfectly over Peter’s body that he wished was still pure, it would feel a little bit better around his damaged skin, over broken bones and bruised knuckles. It would feel a little more like her tight hug surrounding him. It would feel a little more like Spider-Man’s suit.

Oh, May. Peter missed her like nothing he had ever felt. It was like the sun and the moon, unable to claw their way through blue skies to reach one another. It was like a star and the path it shed light on, and the star that Aunt May so beautifully resembled had exploded and left nothing but a glimmering dust.

No matter how hard he tried, it slipped through his fingers and out of his pockets and into the stale, greasy air of New York.

He hated to think of May, but sometimes he craved it like a cold glass of water on a hot summer day. He craved it because it was the closest he could get to the feeling of her motherly hands in his hair, her gentle eyes scanning him, her gorgeous laugh filling up the room and making him smile even on the worst days.

She looked like the tickling warmth of the sun, felt like the breeze from the roof of Peter’s high school, spoke with something softer than cotton candy.

The memories were the closest he could get to having her back, but sometimes they tore into his flesh with less consideration than the blade he often held between his fingertips. They cut through tan into deep, guilty, lonely red when the thoughts were too much and the memory was too angry and his bones ached from running toward a future he knew wasn’t possible.

Peter sometimes sat on the dusty hardwood floors, in a mess of tears and heavy breathing, when he remembered May’s death.

He recalled in a gut-wrenchingly perfect fashion the way he could hear her heavy-beating heart start to give out. He could count the seconds between each labored breath, hear each booming voice as police swarmed the outside of the building.

It felt like glass-shattering screams every time he saw the one-to-one picture of Happy’s face in his scattered mind, staring with such a knowing look at Peter’s absolutely devastating eyes before yelling at him to run.

Peter never forgave himself for getting up and doing just that.

The nightmares about those moments plagued him, and sometimes he just felt as if he needed everything to stop. He needed the crime, the loneliness, the rent on his apartment, the seeing MJ and Ned every morning when he walked past the old coffee shop to stop.

MJ, his MJ. He swore he could never have gotten enough of the curves of her smile, the curl of her hair, the scrunch of her eyes, the sweet leather smooth sound of her voice.

Sure, a pretty girl or two had flashed him a wink or a smile, but nothing gave him that soft bubbled feeling of MJ’s touch; the little giggles he found at each and every one of her fun facts.

And no tech-enthused kid he met at a library could top the way Ned had always had Peter’s back, the way he would support him to the ends of the earth. There was no human on the planet who could be the perfect “guy in the chair” as Ned had been. Nobody seemed fun enough to try building a Lego set with.

Peter thought his whole world ended when he listened to the mechanisms of Tony’s suit powering down; his arc reactor dimming so smoothly to black that it taunted him. He thought that was it, nothing could’ve been worse than losing Tony.

He’d never been so painfully wrong.

His apartment floor, recently swept and mopped, was where he sat now, his pounding head rested on scratched and shaking knees, his hands digging into soft wavy hair.

He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t patrol, couldn’t lean on anyone to save him, couldn’t lean on anyone to love him anymore because nobody truly did.

Peter wanted to think that deep down something inside their hearts knew who he was and that thing was aching for him, too, but he knew better. He knew he was alone.

Being like this made him angry in a way he didn’t like to feel. It made him wish he could go back in time and kick himself for jumping to the worst solution, kick Dr. Strange for ever casting that significant of a spell without confirming it was what Peter truly wanted.

On some of the worst nights, when he sat atop the highest buildings in the city and stared down at the sometimes puddled pavement below, he wondered what it would be like if nothing bad had ever happened to him. He wondered if he would be okay.

He wished he would be okay.

Peter wished this was the part of the story where someone would hear his cries, probably May from down the hall, and come and help him. He wished May was still in the same house, and she still woke so easily.

Peter tried to wake her, once. He tried to get her to crawl out of that big, funny, box they kept her in.

She didn’t wake up.

Peter had no one to help him ease the shaking of his hands, the trembling of his lungs that couldn’t get enough air, the scratch of his throat from the sobs that tore out of his mouth. Nobody knew how to speak to him just right, to remind him he was good enough, to stop him from thinking to himself that if he just tried harder, maybe Tony would still be here.

Nobody knew him.

Nobody knew him.

If Spider-Man couldn’t even save himself, how was he supposed to save New York? MJ and Ned had one another, and Peter knew better than anyone that they could make it through anything. Tony was gone because he was just a stupid kid, and May was gone because he couldn’t protect her.

Would it really make that much of a difference if Peter was gone, too?

He’d thought about it more times than he could count. He’d stared at brand new prescription medications for anxiety and wondered how many it would take. He’d looked out of the high-ish window of his apartment and known he could get higher.

And so Peter got up, jittering limbs and salty tears sneaking into the corners of his frowning mouth. A particularly loud sob lurched his head forward a little, and he wiped his tears with the back of his hand.

He grabbed a pencil and paper, laid it down on his table, and realized.

He didn’t even have anybody to say goodbye to.

[pinksikhewei]

Hello! I’m Pink! 🎀

FIC requests: OPEN :D

HC/BLURB requests: OPEN

Current hyperfixation: MCU, TLOU

💕SFW little blog! Visit the palace!

🩷 Blog for my original novel!

🌷Rules/Requests info!

💖Masterlist!

🌸Art!

💐Carrd!

🎀Other socials!

I’m an author, and a fanfic writer on the side! The first draft of my novel is complete, so I will be spending time editing and reworking in order to publish it by May 2026! Please keep this in mind and know that I may not get to any requests immediately! I am also a student participating in a fall theater program, so I may be a little busy :)