slashedgutz

[slashedgutz]

The Boys || The Last Time to Look on This World of Lies (3.05)

[slashedgutz]

𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗲𝘁 𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader

Synopsis: When a visit to his office leaves you shaken, Bucky is determined to take care of you.

Word Count: 4.4k

Warning(s): CEO!husband!bucky x wife!reader. protective!bucky. no use of y/n. use of nicknames sweetheart and angel. established (secret) relationship. reader is a damsel in distress. "GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY WIFE" 🗣🗣🗣 trope. public humiliation. physical violence (reader is manhandled - not by bucky). hurt/comfort. angst, fluff, smut (holy trifecta) (18+ mdni!!!). vaginal fingering. lots of praising. bucky is Scary™ and only soft for reader.

Author's Note: GUYS HI I'M ALIVE 👋🏼 so sorry for being MIA. work has been kicking my ass. I've literally been skipping lunch and working through weekends bcs of how crazy it is (yeah I know it's bad). but other than that, I've also been having the worst case of writer's block ever. I have three fics in my draft that I kept deleting and rewriting because none of them turned out good enough. this is the only half decent thing I managed to produce. not fully happy with this bcs I wanted to spend more time on it, but I've also been itching to put out something for you guys, so pls bear with me 😔 hopefully you'll still like it 🧡 don't forget to comment/like/reblog 💕

Bucky Barnes Masterlist

As soon as you step through the rotating doors, a relieved breath escapes your chest. 

The rain continues to patter outside, merciless in their mission to soak everyone who dares to leave the comfort of their home. Your wet hoodie clings to you like second skin; your cotton skirt dripping on the marble floors below. The back of your neck scorches as you notice a few sharp glances sliding your way. 

This is so not how you thought this day was going to go.

A quick coffee run with the girls had been the plan. The only plan. A chance to catch up with Wanda and Natasha amidst the unpredictability of everyone’s hectic schedules. Everything was going well. Up until the point you left the coffee shop, started the trek back towards the subway station, and realized something.

Your wallet was missing.

Not misplaced.

Not forgotten.

But actually missing.

You spent the next couple of hours retracing your steps—going back to the coffee shop, peering under evey chair and table, even asking the clueless barista if anyone had turned it in—but nothing. You even emptied your tote bag in the middle of the sidewalk at one point. Confirming that the wallet was, in fact, gone. To make matters worse, your phone had also died somewhere between Wanda showing you her latest painting project and Natasha's crude remarks about your sex life. In that raging desperation, you made a decision to resort to one last dramatic measure.

Bucky's office.

Inside your drenched sneakers, your toes curl. It’s silly for someone to feel this nervous about visiting their husband's place of work. But when the husband in question is none other than James Buchanan Barnes—CEO and founder of Barnes & Co.—you suppose the churning in your gut is somewhat justified. Especially when the prospect of visiting his office, impromptuly and without the dark cover of night, feels like crossing a threshold you've been avoiding for far too long.

You and Bucky have been together for over two years, married for one short, whirlwind month. The news of your wedding broke across the country like a hailstorm. Stirring a media frenzy and a nationwide intrigue revolving one question in particular.

Who is the woman that managed to conquer the heart of one of America's most eligible bachelors?

You've always dreaded the attention that comes with being Bucky's partner, hence why you asked to keep your identity a secret at the start of your relationship. And Bucky—despite having his reservations about not being able to love you loudly in front of the whole world—had agreed, but not before promising you that his world was yours to enter whenever you pleased.

You just never thought that the entrance would happen today.

The dribbles of rain have gathered into a puddle under your feet. You squirm as more eyes begin scrutinizing you as if you're a ketchup stain in their otherwise polished world of Rolexes and Armani-clad egos. Taking a deep breath, you will the thumping in your chest to abate, forcing your chin up as you stalk towards the front desk across the lobby.

The two receptionists are conversing among themselves when you approach, huddled over a phone on the desk. You’re about to open your mouth when the mention of a familiar name stops you dead in tracks.

“Bet she's just a ditzy arm candy,” one of them remarks. “I won’t be surprised if he found her at a yacht party.”

The other gasps scandalously, pausing mid-way of applying her dark red lipstick. “You think she's an escort?”

“I don’t think. I know.” The first one smirks. “But then again, a guy who looks like that? With that kind of money? Hell, he could probably get with any woman in the world.”

“Yeah, you're right. I'd gladly get on my knees and be the sidepiece if Bucky Barnes asked me.”

The two receptionists snicker.

A few paces away, you're standing with hands curled into fists, commanding the red hot emotion in your chest to dissipate before you do something you might regret.

Instead, you clear your throat.

Two pairs of eyes look up, and the moment they catch sight of you—teeth chattering and skirt trickling with mud—their expressions twist into something unpleasant. Dismissive. Judgemental in a way that causes your skin to crawl and your ears to ring.

“Can I help you?” asks the one with the red lipstick.

“Hi. Yes, please. I, uh—” you shift on your feet, “—I'm here to see Mr. Barnes.”

“He's in a meeting,” she replies, already tapping something on her keyboard. “Do you have an appointment?”

“No, but—”

“You need an appointment to see Mr. Barnes.” She smiles, so sickly sweet as she drags her eyes from your head to your toe. “I can't let you in. Sorry.”

“Okay. But I'm actually—”

“She said you can't go up, Ma’am,” the other receptionist interjects.

“If you could just call his office and tell them—”

“Mr. Barnes doesn't receive walk-ins,” says Red Lipstick, her gaze acrid when it lands on you. “Especially not from… strangers.”

You grit your teeth. “I'm his wife.”

The other receptionist snorts.

It takes everything in your power not to snap right then and there.

“Look,” you sigh, tugging at the hem of your drenched hoodie, “can I at least borrow a phone, then? Just to call his secretary?”

Red Lipstick sneers. “We're not a public phone booth.”

Next to her, the other receptionist doesn't even attempt to hide her smug smile. There is an ache prickling in the back of your eyes. You're soaked, freezing, and exhausted, and the last thing you need is to defend your identity in front of two people who seem to have resolved their judgement upon seeing your appearance. All you want to do right now is to get home, curl up in bed, and forget that this whole day ever happened in the first place.

“Fine,” you mutter, exhaling a stuttering breath, “I'll just wait then.”

You head towards the seating area several feet away, the leather squeaking the moment you sink down. Red Lipstick whispers something to her friend before picking up the desk phone.

Two minutes later, security shows up.

Chill licks up your spine as you watch the man in the uniform talking to the receptionist from earlier, the latter throwing daggers in your direction without bothering subtlety. You move your tote bag to your lap—as though the material can shield you from the impending confrontation—and clutch the canvas in a death grip when the security starts marching towards you.

“Ma'am.” The large man, all muscles and ear-piece, towers over you. “I need to ask you to leave the premises.”

You close your eyes.

This can't be happening.

“I'm not doing anything wrong.”

“You're causing a disruption.”

“Disruption?” you seethe, your voice shakier than you would like it to be. “I'm only sitting.”

“Please, Ma'am—”

“I'm just waiting for my husband, alright?” Your voice cracks. “Just—just please… give me five minutes. I'll just wait for his meeting to be over and—”

You don't get to finish your sentence.

Before you can fully process what is happening, the security guard has stomped forward, plunging his claws around your forearm, and jerks you up to your feet. You yelp as he begins to try and drag you away, scrambling to peel his vicious grip.

“Hey! What are you—? Let me go!”

“You need to stop resisting, Ma'am.”

“I'm not! Please, just… just let me go, you're hurting me!”

All around you, people have paused and begun watching. Businessmen halt mid-call. Women with perfect sleek buns turn their heads to lour at the sudden commotion. You're half certain that someone in the crowd has even pulled out a phone to record the whole thing. 

And yet, none of them steps forward to help.

Shame creeps up your neck, burning in tandem with the ache that now travels through your arm. Your sneakers screech against the marble floors as the security heaves you across the lobby, unperturbed by your whines of pain and your desperate pleas. 

No one seems to care.

That is until a voice breaks through your choked cries.

“What the hell is going on here?”

The crowd falls into a sudden hush, panting like the Red Sea to reveal the figure standing in front of the closing elevator doors.

Bucky Barnes.

His suit jacket is unbuttoned, tie slightly loosened from the tumult of the day. You can almost picture him tugging repeatedly at that piece of fabric as he sits in one of his tediously long meetings—the same tie that you bought for him several months prior. His steel-blue eyes scan the surroundings, flicking from the mass of foreign faces standing in his lobby to the scene that has seemingly rendered everyone frozen on their spot. His gaze lands on you—dripping, scared, and on the verge of crying—and immediately zeroes in on the security guard's iron grip around your forearm.

Bucky steps forward.

And something inside of him snaps.

"Get. Your fucking hands. Off my wife."

The meeting is running long.

Too long.

Bucky keeps glancing at the clock above the screen monitor, counting down the minutes until the longer hand strikes twelve. He barely hears the pitch being presented. Not when his mind isn't even present in the room. His phone sits face-down on the table, buzzing occasionally with email notifications, meeting reminders, missed phone calls, but not from the one person who matters the most.

You.

He sighs quietly.

When the final slide clicks off and the lights turn on again, Bucky doesn't waste time standing to his feet. “Good work,”  he says, already halfway out of the door. “We'll review the proposal and follow up. That's all.”

He doesn’t even give his team a chance to respond.

The hallway is deserted as he walks past. Bucky enters his office and shuts the door behind him, checking his phone to see the last four messages he has sent to you.

[08.28 AM] Have fun with Wanda and Nat. I'll see you tonight, angel ❤️

[11.47 AM] Still with the girls, sweetheart?

[12.04 PM] Let me know once you're home

[01.58 PM] Angel?

His jaw clenches.

Bucky presses the call button and brings the device to his ear, cursing when the line goes straight to voicemail. You never do this—leave his messages hanging for hours like this. You always answer—with a text or a phone call, sometimes with a single emoji response when you're too busy or too tired to form a proper one. A total silence is unheard of, and Bucky knows that this can mean one of two things.

Either your phone is dead… or something is wrong.

Bucky’s gut plummets.

He hits another number on his phone, his driver instantly answering on the second ring.

“Bring the car to the front,” Bucky orders. “I'm heading home.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bucky moves in quick lightning. Gathering his things and shoving important documents into his briefcase. He leaves the office and stops by his secretary's desk, who shoots out of her seat immediately upon seeing him.

“Cancel everything else for today. I'm going home.”

“Wait, what? But, Mr. Barnes, you still have—”

“I don’t care,” he says, already turning towards the elevator. “I need to check on my wife.”

Inside the elevator, Bucky fiddles with his cuffs, trying not to imagine the worst. There is a good chance you probably just forgot to charge your phone and got way too caught up reuniting with your friends to notice the time. Maybe you're already back home, asleep, snoring softly into his pillow. Maybe there really is no reason for Bucky to worry.

But he does worry.

Bucky has been worried for sometime. Particularly since the story of your wedding broke a month ago. 

He didn't say anything to keep you from stressing, but on the second week of your honeymoon in the Caribbean, Bucky received word from his security team that a stalker had tried to break into his house in Westchester. The perpetrator was caught and handed to the police before things could escalate, but it still wasn't enough to ease Bucky's mind. He had to relocate your residence temporarily to his penthouse in Manhattan—telling you a little white lie about doing some renovations at the house. Thankfully, you're none the wiser. You've always loved living at the heart of the bustling city, anyway.

The elevator doors open with a ding.

Bucky steps out, pausing in his tracks when he realizes there is a horde gathering in the lobby. People are murmuring among themselves, their necks craning as they attempt to sneak a peek at the center of the ruckus. Bucky's brows furrow.

“What the hell is going on here?” he bellows.

The crowd parts.

Bucky examines his surroundings. Seeing at least two people with their phones out, receptionists standing behind their desks, and heads turning towards a scene unfolding near the sofas.

There is a man there.

A man in uniform—a security guy—who has his hand around a woman's arm, trying to drag her away across the lobby.

The woman is drenched and shaking, voice hoarse from pleas that have fallen on deaf ears. When he finally catches her eyes—your eyes—blown wide with panic, the rest of the world seems to evaporate.

Bucky sees red.

“Get. Your fucking hands. Off my wife.”

The security guard falters, just for the briefest of milliseconds, but it's all Bucky needs to yank his hands off you. He shoves the guard so hard the man stumbles nearly five feet back. Bucky doesn't stop there—he grabs the guard by his collars, the man now trembling with fear in front of him. It doesn’t matter. Not to Bucky. Not after what he just saw this man was doing to you.

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?!” Bucky froths, face twisting into stone. “Touching my wife like that? Dragging her out? Do you want me to fucking kill you?!”

“S-Sir, I—”

“Bucky.”

His head snaps.

Your voice is meek beneath the tense air of the lobby, but it reaches him nonetheless. It always does. One short utterance of his name from you is all it takes for Bucky to loosen his grip on the security guard, his breath catching in his throat as he finally takes you in—soaked to the skin, shivering, shoes drenched under your feet.

Everything else melts away.

In two long strides, Bucky is now standing before you, his large palms cradling your face with a softness that startlingly opposes the man that has threatened death upon another human being five seconds ago. There is a pinch in his forehead as he studies your face. His face contorting as if the sight of you alone has plunged a blade so deeply into his soul.

“Sweetheart.” His voice breaks. “What happened?”

Your lips quiver. “I-I'm sorry, Bucky. I didn't mean to… I lost my wallet, and my phone’s dead. Then it just—it started raining, and I—I didn’t know what else to do—”

“Shh, angel. It's okay.” He tugs you close, arms wrapping around you without hesitation, not caring the fact that your rain-soaked clothes are probably ruining his expensive suit. You press into him, an involuntary shudder running through your limbs. “Shit, angel, you're freezing.”

Bucky shrugs out of his jacket and wraps it around your shoulders, firm hands rubbing your back to transfer some of his warmth to you. His voice is so unbearably tender as it falls on your ears.

 “I’ve got you now,” he whispers. “You’re safe, angel. I’ve got you.”

Then, Bucky turns. 

Slowly.

“You,” he barks at the security guard, blue eyes burning with hellfire. “Explain. Now.”

The guard swallows. “Sir, I-I didn’t know. The receptionist said she was causing a disturbance. Said she was crazy. Claimed she was your wife. I was just following—”

“She is my wife.” Bucky’s voice is deathly quiet. Venomous. “And you fucking manhandled her.”

“I-I didn’t mean to—”

Bucky turns his gaze towards the front desk.

The girl with the red lipstick is now as white as a sheet. Beside her, the other receptionist doesn't seem to be doing much better.

“Mr. Barnes,” Red Lipstick begins. “I didn’t—I didn’t know. She didn’t look like… She just sat on the furniture like she owned the place, and she—”

“She does own the damn place,” Bucky snaps. “And she told you who she was. And instead of doing the one job you have—calling my office—you humiliated her. Called security. Let this entire lobby watch while you treat her like dirt.”

“I—I was just trying to—”

Bucky raises his hand.

The girl's jaw snaps shut.

“I want all of you gone. Now. Security. Receptionists. Both of you. Fired. I don’t want to see any of you here again.”

The other receptionist tries to speak, “But sir—”

“Do you want me to fucking repeat myself?”

The three of them stay quiet.

Bucky turns back to you then, still enveloped in his jacket, looking smaller and more vulnerable than the person he knows you to be. Something inside him splinters at the sight.

“Let’s get you home, sweetheart,” he murmurs.

He guides you through the lobby, tucking you against his side as if he's afraid to let even an inch of space separate the two of you from now on. Before he reaches the rotating doors, Bucky halts his steps. He sweeps his gaze across the crowd, a raging flame in his sternum when he sees some people with their phones still out.

Bucky takes out his own mobile, typing in something without ever retracting his other arm away from your frame. Seconds later, his driver appears through the rotating doors, taking a subtle double take at your state, before nodding dutifully at the two of you.

“I want you to get all the names of the people in this lobby,” Bucky commands. “Give them to me by tomorrow. Check their phones. Confiscate them if you find anything of my wife. Prepare a fund to reimburse them for the device, we will not be returning them.”

The driver nods.

“Oh, by the way—” Bucky adds, gesturing at the security guard and the two receptionists, “—those three? I want them gone by the end of the day. Make sure to blacklist their names. Notify our partners as well.”

With that, Bucky leads you away again. Out of the office, out of the rumpus, and straight into the safety of his arms.

By the time you reach the apartment, New York City is in mourning.

The rain has exploded into a full-blown storm. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, you can see the darkness that has befallen the entire city. The roar of thunder echoes through the floor, still rough, still formidable, but a little quieter now that you're swaddled in the safety of your home.

Next to you, another thunder is subsiding.

Bucky doesn't let go of your hand as you step further into the apartment. He holds you like you're procelain, tucking you a little closer into his side every time he feels a tremble running through you. His lips are pressed onto your temple as he leads you towards the hallway.

“You're shivering, sweetheart,” he points out. “Let me run you a bath, okay?”

You don't have the energy to respond.

In the bathroom, Bucky guides you to sit on the toilet. He moves through the space like a domesticated cyclone—filling in the tub, lighting up your favorite candles, adding in that lavender and eucalyptus oil that he knows you love. Steam is rising within minutes. Bucky turns back to you with the gaze of a man who is trying to spell out love with his eyes alone.

“I'm gonna take off your clothes now, alright?” 

He sheds each layer with reverence. As if he was revealing your secrets rather than taking off rain-soaked worn cotton. Bucky pauses every now and then to squeeze your hand, peppering tiny kisses along the knuckles, shifting closer every time he detects gooesbumps on your skin.

The whole thing is so sweet.

He is so sweet.

And it makes the whole dam you've been straining to uphold finally collapses.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, surprising him.

“Sorry?” Bucky is perplexed. “Angel, why are you sorry?”

“S-Sorry for… for showing up like that. For making a scene. I shouldn't—I must’ve embarrassed you—”

“Hey,” he says firmly, cupping your face in his hands. “No. Don’t do that.”

Tears cling to your lashes.

“You can never embarrass me, sweetheart. You’re my wife. The most important thing in my life. If anything, I should’ve been there sooner. None of this is on you.” Bucky brushes his nose to yours, massaging the nape of your neck. “I'm so sorry, angel. You didn’t deserve to go through any of that.”

Your breath stammers. 

Bucky leans back and presses his lips to your forehead.

“Come on.” He smiles. So tender and loving you think you might unravel completely. “Let me take care of you.”

He helps you into the tub, guiding you down into the warmth with a steady hand on your back. The water laps against your skin, chasing the chill from your aching bones as well as your bruised heart. The next thing that comes out of your mouth is a relieved sigh.

Bucky moves to stand.

Your hand shoots out and curls around his wrist before he can rise.

“Join me,” is all you say.

He doesn’t need to be told twice.

Bucky never takes his eyes off you even when he starts stripping down his clothes. He steps behind you in the tub, tugging you to his chest the moment he has settled into the bath. Your whole body liquefies on instinct the second his arms engulf your middle.

“I’ve got you now,” he murmurs, pledging the words to your temple. “You’re safe.”

Bucky reaches for your soap, lathering his plams with the scent of lavender and peppermint. You sigh and sink deeper into his chest as you feel his touch working over your skin—shoulders, arms, the curve of your back. He kisses each spot every time he finishes rinsing it off, running his tongue down your neck, whispering praises with each breath.

“So strong. So brave.” He nips at your ear. “So proud of you, sweetheart. I love you so much.”

Bucky continues peppering your skin with kisses. Experimenting with the graze of his teeth and the scrape of his tongue. You squirm in his hold when his fingers begin swiping at your chest. Subtle, at first, but then he takes a nipple between his fingers and twist it just enough to make you mewl in delight.

It's the best goddamn sound he has ever heard on this planet.

He begins massaging your breast with his left hand, the other one sliding lower and lower with every bruise he is sucking into your neck. Bucky parts your nether lips, feeling you soft and compliant under his touch. You jolt in his arms the moment he skims over your sensitive nub.

“B-Bucky—”

“Shh, I got you, angel. Don't worry,” he soothes, burying his face in your throat. “Just feel me. Gonna make you feel so good, okay? Just lean back and relax for me.”

You follow his instruction, letting yourself fall back onto his chest. Bucky starts rubbing you slowly, earnestly, circling his fingers around the one place that is yearning for him, never quite touching it just to tease those breathless sounds out of you even further. In front of him, you're panting. Your hips grinding against his hand as you attempt to chase more of those heavenly feelings.

“Look at you,” Bucky muses, relishing the way you're chasing more of his touch. “Always so beautiful for me. You know that, don't you, sweetheart?”

“Bucky,” you whine.

“Shh, I know, angel. I know. Doing so good for me.”

Bucky rubs his fingers over your clit, groaning when the motion tears a wrecked sound out of your throat. He carries on with his ministrations, playing your body like a musician would their favorite instrument. Alternating between lazy strokes and desperate flicks that have you gasping and writhing against him. 

“Oh God.” You close your eyes, brows creasing when Bucky eventually plunges two fingers into your heat.

He moves them in and out of you languidly. Curling his digits, feeling your walls contract and suck him deeper each time he stimulates that one spot that always paints your vision with stars. You're gripping his forearm now. Your head falling back onto his shoulder as his other hand slides downward towards your bundle of nerves.

Everything feels heightened.

Everything feels good.

You angle your head to the side and kiss his jaw as you feel a familiar knot forming in your abdomen.

“Bucky,” you whimper, locking your eyes with his. “I-I'm gonna—oh God, don't stop—I wanna—”

“Wanna cum, angel?” Bucky purrs, running his nose down your cheekbone. “Can feel you squeezing my fingers—shit. Go ahead, sweetheart. Let go for me. Let me see you.”

You come apart within seconds. The murmurs of Bucky's encouragement as your music and the kisses he leaves on your shoulder as your anchor. His fingers continue to drag in and out of you with reverence, prolonging your pleasure, never once relenting until he is sure you've given him everything that you could.

“That's it, sweetheart. You did so well.” He tilts your chin up, leaving a chaste kiss in the corner of your lips. “Such a good girl for me.”

He holds you until your breathing slows, until the thrum under your skin quietens and your nerve endings stop lighting up in flames. Bucky helps you out of the bath with a towel already warm in his hands, drying you carefully, each brush a well-concocted plan because he knows you deserve nothing less than the utmost form of care.

Once you're dressed, Bucky leads you to your shared bed. You're already half asleep by the time he tucks the covers around your frame, brushing his thumb across your cheek.

“I love you,” he confesses into the quiet. “You’re my whole world, angel.”

You blink at him, eyes drowsy but warm. “Love you, too.”

Bucky slides in beside you, pulling you close until your head is rested on his chest and your hand finds the steady beating of his heart.

Outside, the storm continues to rage. Anguish in its name and its promise, chasing thunders with the stable clatter of the rain.

Inside, though, it's quiet. A stretch of silence merely rustled by the intakes of breath and the soft snores of Bucky's whole life—his wife. His world. Kept securely inside the certainty of his embrace where nothing and no one else would be able to lay their hands on you.

And with that reassurance, Bucky closes his eyes, drifting off with his heart stitched solidly to yours.

[slashedgutz]

when the sun hits (it matters where you are)

pairing: bucky barnes x emergency room nurse!reader summary: it’s your name, written in the soft fog of his breath. and his name, traced endlessly across your skin. you've always been meant to cross paths this way. (soulmate au!) word count: 11.4k words content warnings: 18+ mdni, fem reader, praising, piv, overstimulation, shower sex, creampie, face riding, dirty talk, ungodly levels of yearning, mentions of violence and clinical situations, death, explores heavy themes

You’ve gotten very good at waking up without hope over the years.

Your alarm goes off at 4:48 a.m. because you refuse to wake up on the hour like everyone else. It’s a small rebellion—pointless, probably, but in a life built from shifts and protocol, those twelve minutes feel like something you own. 

The soulmark itches before you even lift the blankets. You don’t touch it. Haven’t in years. It rests on your left side, just under the ribs, where your arm folds when you cradle a patient or scrub blood from your skin. The name’s still there. James Buchanan Barnes. Etched like a brand. 

You learned to stop reading it a long time ago.

You were thirteen the first time you felt it — not the weight of it, not really, but the press of inevitability. The skin just under your ribs itched for three days straight, and no matter how you scratched, how you pressed cold washcloths to it or distracted yourself with school or swimming or the terrifying newness of puberty, it pulsed with the promise of something you couldn’t name.

"Maybe you're allergic to something," your mom said, more distracted than concerned, passing you a bottle of calamine lotion while balancing a phone call.

Then, the name came in the middle of the night.

You’d woken up disoriented, not from a nightmare exactly, but from the sense that something had shifted. That your body was no longer just your own. 

You pulled up your pajama shirt with trembling hands, stomach flipped inside out with something like fear. Or awe. And there it was, written in a careful, antique script like it had always been there — James Buchanan Barnes.

You said it out loud. Just once. Just to see if it sounded real. 

The next morning, you pretended to look up World War II details for an eighth-grade project. Typed his name into Google with fingers that wouldn't stop shaking.

This—this definitely wasn't what you were expecting. You were expecting someone… someone at least closer in age, someone who was maybe going through the same strenuous expectations of middle school, someone… someone who was alive.

It was underwhelming at first. Just a name. A war vet. Deceased. You didn't think you'd find him so easily. You spiraled past Wikipedia into forums your school firewall probably would’ve blocked if they knew what they were doing.  You dug deeper. Wikipedia spiraled into conspiracy forums. Articles turned into footnotes, turned into theories, turned into pictures. Redacted documents. Old photographs.

That was when your chest started to ache.

He wasn’t a boy.

He wasn’t even a man in the way people are alive. 

He was history, frozen in sepia. James Buchanan Barnes, colloquially know as Bucky, a soldier, missing in action. You found an old black-and-white photo with him half smiling in uniform, arm slung casually around the Captain America's shoulders, and your throat closed like you’d been punched from the inside. Because he looked real. Not just an idea, not just a ghost.

And you loved him. You didn’t mean to. But there it was.

That summer, you begged your parents to take you to D.C. "For the exhibits," you said. "The history. Please."

You cried in the car. Your mom reached back and handed you a bottle of water. “Carsick?” she asked.

"Yeah," you lied, watching trees blur past as the pit in your stomach grew deeper.

At the Smithsonian, your eyes scanned every exhibit like you were searching for a face in a crowd. You found him in a war display—just a photo, again. Yellowed and framed. A plaque. Sergeant Barnes. You stood there too long. An older woman beside you glanced over, then away, probably confused as to why this pre-teen was staring at the display with such fervent intensity.

You didn’t touch your mark. 

Not there. Not in public. But you felt it, a phantom pulse echoing under your ribs. Like it knew. Like it missed him too.

That was the first time you understood what it meant to lose something before you ever had it. To mourn a future that could never come.

That summer, you grieved a stranger.

The rest of those months passed in a fog. Friends talked about boy bands and sleepaway camps and the boy from seventh grade who cried during dodgeball. You started reading old war journals and relics and Stark experiments just to feel closer to a time you’d missed. By the start of the school year, you'd already gone through your U.S. History syllabus and back.

At night, you lay awake imagining what it would’ve been like to meet him before the fall. What you’d say. If he’d be kind. If he’d recognize you.

If he’d regret it.

By sixteen, you had your mind made up. Not because you wanted to save people—though you did—but because it felt like the only thing that made sense. Something tethered. Something present. You’d learned how to triage your own feelings, how to hold grief without crumbling under it. ER nursing made too much sense. You wanted the immediacy. The clarity of purpose. The adrenaline to chase out the what-ifs.

You told your guidance counselor it was about the job stability.

You didn’t say that you needed a life that moved fast enough to keep you from looking back.

You got good at it. Fast. Precise. Reliable. The type of person they called first when a kid came in coding, when someone’s chest had to be cracked open at bedside. You learned how to operate under pressure. How to compartmentalize. You learned to move toward chaos, not away from it.

And eventually, you stopped looking at the name. Not because it faded—it never did—but because it became too familiar. Like a scar. Like an old story you didn’t tell anymore, because no one would believe it.

Because you hardly believed it yourself.

.

You peel yourself out of bed, step into the shower. The water doesn’t stay hot for long, but you don’t need it to. You just need enough heat to convince your muscles to move, your brain to stop stalling. The morning ritual is muscle memory now: shampoo, rinse, conditioner (leave-in), scrub your face, try not to look at yourself too closely. By the time you’re dressed and out the door, you’ve spoken zero words and swallowed two ibuprofen with the stale dregs of yesterday’s coffee.

The drive to the hospital is quiet, but not peaceful. 

The city’s in that strange twilight lull between night and morning, where the drunks have staggered home and the nine-to-fivers haven’t yet left their beds. It feels like a ghost town with too many ghosts. Some days, you swear the silence carries weight. Residual grief, maybe. 

You park in the far corner of the lot because the closer spaces are already claimed by the truly unwell—nurses who never go home, residents who sleep in call rooms, attendings who live to round. You used to be like them. You’ve grown out of the martyrdom. Or maybe you’ve just run out of energy to perform it.

The hospital doesn’t smell like death, not exactly. It smells like ammonia and latex and that synthetic lemon cleaner that’s supposed to mask the rest. You wave to the front desk nurse, badge in, and clock your shift the way you have every day for the last six years. 

Your soulmark is never mentioned. Not because people don’t see it, though you keep it hidden well, but because no one talks about soulmarks anymore. It’s passé. Soulmate matching used to be romantic. Now it’s considered a statistical liability. There are support groups for people like you, sure, but they mostly spiral into grief therapy and long-winded self-help monologues. You tried one once. A woman wept about her soulmate dying in Sokovia. Another talked about her mark changing. Yours never did.

Soulmate politics are complicated now. Too many anomalies. Too many cases like yours.

There’s a thread on Reddit dedicated to soulmarks tied to dangerous people. Super soldiers. Villains. Politically gray mercenaries. Your name—his name—comes up sometimes. You don’t engage. You lurk. Scroll through the comments. Watch strangers try to figure out what they’d do if it were them.

The consensus always boils down to one thing: If your soulmate is a killer, you have a moral obligation to reject the bond.

You don’t know if you agree. You don’t know if you disagree either.

Most days, you just ignore it.

Your shift starts like any other. A stabbing. A toddler with a fever. An elderly man who doesn’t remember how he got here. The trauma bay gets two back-to-back ambulance drop-offs, both from the same freeway accident. The paramedics hand off a broken woman in pieces. You get her on oxygen. You get her to CT. You get her prepped for surgery. You don’t think about her name, or her face, or what might’ve been the last thing she said.

You think about the steps. You think about the chart.

This is what makes you good at your job.

You care. You just don’t let it show anymore.

Lunchtime—if you can dignify that title with a limp vending machine sandwich and fifteen minutes of couch—is spent in the staff lounge, watching reruns of The Great British Bake Off with the volume off. The man on screen is assembling an architectural sponge cake. You feel emotionally invested. Mostly because you think it might collapse.

One of your colleagues—Zoya, you think, though you’ve never quite decided if you like her or not—slides onto the couch beside you with the weary grace of someone who’s been on her feet for nine hours. She’s got a protein bar in one hand and her phone in the other.

“I read the polls,” she says, chewing like the bar personally insulted her. “People are actually fired up this time around.”

You hum in response. Noncommittal. You don’t take the bait.

“They say Barnes is running for Congress,” she adds casually, eyes flicking sideways toward you. “That surprises me. Who woulda thought?”

You don’t blink. Don’t flinch. Just peel a piece of lettuce off your sandwich like it’s offended you. “Guess being an Avenger's not the high-paying career it used to be.”

Zoya snorts. “Seriously. You think he’s for real?”

You lift one shoulder. “I think I’ve seen stranger things on C-SPAN.”

She lets out a low whistle. “Still wild, though. Imagine finding out your soulmate is, like… that guy.”

You glance at her. Smile. Tight. Unreadable. “Yeah,” you say. “Imagine.”

She doesn’t press. You both go back to watching a woman on screen cry over underbaked choux pastry.

It’s easy now. Easier than it used to be. Pretending he doesn’t matter. Pretending you don’t know his voice by heart. Don’t remember the way your mark burned that day in the laundromat. Don’t still check the news for his name the way other people check the weather. It’s a skill.

And like all your best skills, it was learned the hard way.

.

When you get home that night, your legs ache, and your stomach hurts from too much caffeine and not enough food. You drop your bag on the couch, toe off your shoes, and stand in the middle of your kitchen for ten full seconds trying to remember what it means to rest.

Your phone buzzes on the counter. A missed call. Your ex. You don’t call back.

Instead, you go to the sink, wash your hands out of habit, and glance down at the faint outline of the mark under your scrub top.

You trace it, just once. Not enough to mean anything.

Just enough to remember that it’s still there.

.

You were twenty-four when you first saw his face in motion. In reality.

It was a Tuesday. You remember because it was your one day off that month, and you’d spent most of it in a laundromat trying to get the smell of bile and bleach out of your scrubs. You were curled up on the plastic bench by the window, still damp from rain, watching a battered flatscreen overhead.

BREAKING NEWS: GLOBAL MANHUNT UNDERWAY FOR FORMER SOVIET ASSASSIN.

You didn’t flinch when the words came up. At first, they didn’t mean anything. But then the photo appeared, grainy and indistinct—a security cam freeze-frame. Dark jacket, metal arm, face caught mid-motion.

There he was. James Buchanan Barnes.

You felt it like a punch. Air gone. Sound sucked from the room. Your hands tightened around a bottle of Tide.

They said he bombed the Vienna International Centre. Killed a king. Injured dozens. Your brain refused the narrative, but not because you knew better. You didn’t. It was just … incongruent. Cognitive dissonance. You couldn’t square the name on your skin with the cold, feral man on the screen. But that didn’t stop you from watching.

You didn’t leave the laundromat. You sat there long after your clothes finished drying. Hours, maybe. Absorbing every second of the footage. Reading every chyron.

You watched the raw surveillance clips when they hit the web—him running, being chased, fighting like something born in a lab. Like something not quite real.

And then, all at once, the world tilted.

He was real.

Not a myth. Not a name in a book or a mark burned into your side to haunt you. Real. He was breathing the same air, walking the same crumbling sidewalks, looking over his shoulder beneath the same indifferent sky. There was this thrumming under your skin—louder than your heartbeat, sharper than breath—that said he's alive. Not long-dead. Not lost to time. But here. On this earth. Behind your eyes. And somehow, you had to keep living like that wasn’t the most destabilizing fact you’d ever known.

You memorized the cadence of how people said his name.

At some point, you realized you were shaking.

That week, your mother called, like she always did. You didn’t tell her. She asked how work was. You said fine. She asked if you’d seen the news. You said you hadn’t.

You started keeping your left side covered, even in the shower.

In the weeks that followed, he became a name everyone knew. The Winter Soldier. The media dug up every blurry photo from seventy years of history, every CIA leak, every whisper in a dossier. You catalogued them without meaning to. It wasn’t obsession. Not exactly. It was survival.

Then came the reveal: it wasn’t him. Not exactly. Not only him.

Mind control, they said. Brainwashed. Hydra.

You read the words like they were gospel. Like they explained something they didn’t. Like they offered you absolution by proxy. You hated that you wanted to believe it so badly. You hated how much of yourself you saw in the hollow of his eyes when he was caught on camera again—restrained, confused, a man unraveling.

You hated that you understood it.

.

Then came the Blip.

The morning the sky broke, you were in trauma bay three with a man who’d been impaled on a metal pipe. You blinked, and he was gone. Just … gone. The pipe, slick with his blood, clanged against the floor, still warm. Your brain froze. Your hands kept moving.

Your friend Ashley vanished mid-joke during lunch break. Half your ER staff was gone by the end of the day. You worked thirteen more hours without blinking. You only remembered bits—someone screaming in the stairwell. Someone trying to break into the pharmacy. A girl with burns and no parents left to consent to treatment. You remember the air smelling like copper and panic. The vending machines ran out by day two.

When you finally got home, your building was quiet. Too quiet. The streets were deserted, eerie and raw like the aftermath of a dream you couldn't fully wake up from. Someone had looted the gas station across the street. You stepped over broken glass to get inside.

You turned on the TV. Sat down on the floor. Let the flickering images wash over you in silence. Aerial shots of cars abandoned mid-commute. Apartment buildings full of empty beds. Hospitals choked with the chaos of subtraction.

Then his name came up. Just for a moment. In a reel of the missing.

James Buchanan Barnes. Missing. Presumed dust. It seems like the world would never get tired of those three words recurring in your life like a sick joke, like a sucker punch.

You knew it before they even confirmed it. Knew it in your bones. The soulmark burned for days after. A phantom itch. A psychic scream. You whispered to the room, “No. No, no, no—”

You didn’t go to work the day they called it. That he was gone. That it wasn’t speculation anymore.

You called out sick, which you never did. Stayed under the covers with your curtains drawn and your phone turned facedown. You didn’t cry. Not in the way that would’ve felt cathartic. There was no release. Just weight. A steady pressure under your sternum, like your lungs were packed too tight with silence.

Grief like that doesn’t come all at once. It drips. Slow. Insidious. A lifetime’s worth of maybes collecting in your throat.

You tried to tell yourself he wasn’t yours.

That you didn’t know him.

That the mark didn’t mean anything.

That you didn’t feel the loss like your own skin folding in on itself.

But you stopped wearing crop tops after that. Stopped sleeping on your left side. Stopped reading the news altogether, because every time they mentioned his name—even in passing—it felt like someone reaching inside your chest to twist the knife, just to see if you’d bleed.

Your friends thought you were just burned out. Work was hard. Everyone was struggling.

“Have you tried meditating?” someone asked once.

“Have you tried shutting the fuck up?” you almost said. Instead you smiled. Said you were fine. You let them believe it.

You threw yourself into the ER. Picked up extra shifts. Took on the worst cases. Became the one they called for the ugly ones—the resuscitations that didn’t work, the organ donors, the impossible parents waiting for bad news. It gave your hands something to do. Gave your grief a mask.

You were so good at pretending you didn’t care that even you started to believe it.

But sometimes, on the drive home—when the city was too quiet and the sky too empty—you caught yourself glancing at the passenger seat like someone should be there. Like you’d forgotten to pick him up.

You imagined what he’d be like. Not the soldier. Not the assassin. Not the man they called the Winter Soldier like he was myth, not bone.

Just… a person.

Would he have been quiet in the mornings? Would he have let you take the last piece of toast? Would he have liked dogs? Would he have hated how sterile hospitals feel? Would he have looked at you like your name was written on him, too? 

The mark never faded. You used to check. Stupidly. Desperately. You read somewhere once that when a soulmate dies, the mark vanishes. But yours didn’t. Not even a little. It stayed sharp. Clear. Unforgiving.

You don’t know if that made it better or worse.

All you knew was this: it didn’t matter if the world called him a ghost. He was real to you.

And he was gone.

And you had to go to work tomorrow, like none of it ever mattered.

.

Time passed. You got used to the silence.

Then, five years later, he came back.

Just like that.

No fanfare. No press release. Just a name in a sea of billions. Alive again. Somewhere in the world.

You didn’t sleep for three days after that either.

.

He resurfaced differently this time. Tactically invisible. Not a headline anymore. Then, out of nowhere—a year or two later—he announced his candidacy for Congress.

You nearly laughed. Not because it was funny. But because it felt so surreal, so absurdly mundane, that your brain short-circuited. It had been three back-to-back 12-hour night shifts. Your scrubs still smelled faintly of antiseptic and vending machine coffee. Your eyes burned. Your feet hurt. And there he was—your mark, your ghost—printed five feet tall next to a mattress ad. 

You stared. Read the copy three times. Just to be sure it wasn’t a hallucination.

You told yourself not to look him up. Then you got home and did it anyway.

His campaign site was minimal. No donation pop-ups, no splashy endorsements. Just a simple landing page, a schedule of town halls, and a single embedded video labeled Why I’m Running.

You clicked play.

It started with silence. Then the low rasp of his voice, steadier now, filled your apartment.

“I’m not here to pretend I’ve always done the right thing,” he said. “I’m not here to sell redemption. Just accountability. I’ve seen what happens when systems break, when good people fall through the cracks. And I believe we can build better.”

There were no slogans. No party jargon. Just him, seated on a worn bench near a city garden, hair shorter than you remembered, jaw shadowed with a few days’ growth. Still armored, but softer. Realer. He didn’t mention soulmarks. Or the war. Or the weight of being a name that history couldn’t agree on.

But he didn’t need to.

You watched the video twice. Then again the next night.

And you didn’t vote for him.

You didn’t vote against him either.

You just… waited. Watched. Tracked the polls like you were taking a patient’s vitals. Checked for signs of movement. Hoped it wouldn’t all combust before the finish line.

When he won by 6.4%, you sat in your dark apartment, phone lit in your palm, and felt something in your chest go still. Not relief. Not pride. Just… a strange, anchored kind of knowing.

He was out there. Alive. Choosing something. Choosing this.

And somehow, that meant something to you, too.

.

You still don’t talk about it. But every so often, you read the transcripts from his interviews. You pretend it’s because he talks about legislation affecting healthcare infrastructure. It isn’t.

You’ve never reached out. Never driven past one of his town halls. Never liked a single post.

But you know which office he holds. You know the hours of his community clinic situated right by the VA. You know what color his suit was the day he was sworn in.

The name on your ribs has not changed. It probably never will.

And maybe he’s never thought of you at all.

It starts with a nosebleed.

You’re just off shift. Third one this week. Your badge is clipped to your hip, your hands smell like latex and soap, and your brain is somewhere between REM and resignation. You’re half-waiting for the crosswalk light to change when you see a man slump against the side of the public library and slide down like his bones have given up.

At first, you think: drunk. Happens more than you’d like to admit, and it's Brooklyn you're talking about. But then you see the way his hand curls against his thigh—controlled, but shaky—and the tight set of his jaw. His suit is immaculate. Not a homeless guy. Not a junkie. And that look on his face? That’s not intoxication.

That’s pain.

You cross the street. Instinct before thought.

“Hey,” you call, crouching near him. “You okay?”

He looks up. There’s a beat—half-second, maybe less—where neither of you speaks. His eyes are blue. Really blue. And he’s not just handsome, he’s specific. Recognizable in a way that drops into your stomach like a lead weight.

You know who he is. You've spent half your life committing him to memory, watching him coming and going like a revolving door.

Selfishly, instinctively, you can't help but glance down at his left hand—covered by a glove. He notices, shifting slightly, uncomfortably.

Finally, he blinks. “I’m—yeah. Fine.”

“That’s a lie,” you say, because you’re too tired to be polite. “You’re about to pass out. I’m guessing low blood sugar. Maybe dehydration.”

He breathes through his nose like it’s an old habit, like he’s used to being clocked and is choosing not to bristle. “I was just at a council meeting. Forgot to eat.”

“Drink anything?”

“Two coffees and a Red Bull.”

You stare at him. “Jesus Christ.”

His mouth twitches. Just barely. “I didn’t say it was a good idea.”

You glance around. It’s midday. Plenty of foot traffic, but no one’s stopped to help him. Of course not. Most people pretend not to see, even if he's a U.S. representative who's helped save the world a handful of times. New Yorkers have learned to mind their own business these past couple of years.

“Alright, Mr. Barnes,” you say, because you don’t want to say James or Bucky, not the name etched on your skin. “Can you stand up?”

He lifts an eyebrow. “You know who I am?”

You consider lying. “Yeah.”

His expression doesn’t change, but something in him goes still. A readjustment. Like he’s running probabilities behind the curtain of his eyes.

“And you still came over,” he says.

“Don’t take it personally. It's my civic duty; I’d help a mediocre politician too if they were about to eat pavement.”

A snort. Then, with the faintest tilt of his head: “Lucky me.”

You help him to his feet. He leans on the wall. Doesn’t quite use you for balance, though you think he might want to. You guide him into the nearest air-conditioned bodega and deposit him on a bench near the pharmacy counter. Buy two bottles of Gatorade and a protein bar. You don’t ask for reimbursement.

He drinks like it hurts to swallow. Like he’s out of practice with kindness.

“Thanks,” he says. Eventually.

You nod, sitting on the far end of the bench. “You should probably have a handler.”

“I do,” he says dryly. “She left five minutes before I remembered I hadn’t eaten.”

You glance at him sidelong. “So what, she’s in the wind?”

“Texted her,” he replies. “Told her I was fine.”

“You always lie to the people trying to keep you alive?”

Something flickers at that—too fast to name. “Sometimes.”

A silence settles. Not uncomfortable, exactly. But charged.

You glance down at your hands, then back at him. “Do you get nosebleeds a lot?”

“Not usually.”

“Good. If it starts again, you’re going to the hospital.”

His smile this time is faint, but real. He takes a glance at your scrubs, gears turning in his head. “You work there?”

“Yeah.”

“Doctor?”

“Nurse.”

He gives a little hum. “Makes sense.”

You frown. “Why?”

“Because you didn’t flinch.”

The statement lands oddly. “New Yorkers don’t usually flinch at guys hunched against the wall mid-day.”

“Not that,” he says. “Me.”

You meet his gaze. Don’t look away. “Well. Maybe they should.”

He stares at you for a long moment. You get the sense he’s parsing something. Not calculating. Listening. Not just to what you said, but how you said it.

“You didn’t tell me your name,” he says.

You open your mouth. Then close it.

And for the first time in your life, you think: If I tell him, he’ll know.

You’re not sure what scares you more. Him knowing. Or him not.

He notices the hesitation. His eyes drop—unintentionally, you think—toward your ribs. Just a flicker.

You say, quietly, “Don’t do that.”

He nods once. Doesn’t ask again.

Another moment passes. You hand him the rest of the protein bar.

He doesn’t say thank you again. He just eats it.

Eventually, he stands. A little steadier now. You watch him check his phone. You think he might offer to walk you somewhere, but he doesn’t.

Instead, he looks at you like he’s memorizing something. Then:

“You know,” he says, “there was a time I thought she’d be dead.”

Your heart skips.

You try to sound normal. “Who?”

He doesn’t smile. Not this time. Just studies your face.

“My soulmate.”

You freeze.

“Figured she’d died during the Blip,” he continues. “Or worse. Thought I felt it. But I came back and the mark was still there. So. Who knows.”

You inhale slowly. “What would you have done if it was gone?”

“Moved on,” he says.

You nod. Try to play it off. “That easy, huh?”

“No.” His voice drops a register. “But I would’ve had to.”

Silence again. He exhales. Checks the time. Nods once.

“Well,” he says. “Thanks for saving me from an embarrassing death outside a library.”

You stand too. “Wasn’t gonna let a congressman die on my watch, Mr. Barnes."

He gives a lopsided smile, and suddenly, you see a flicker of that man you saw in the Smithsonian all those years ago. “Call me Bucky. I'm just a guy, today.”

Then, softer: “See you around.”

You don’t say anything. Just watch him go.

When you finally look down at your ribs, you expect the name to be glowing or bleeding or something dramatic.

It isn’t.

It’s just there. Quiet. Permanent.

.

You don’t see Bucky again for months. He's gone from James Buchanan Barnes to Bucky, and it feels like foreign territory.

Not in person.

You follow his trajectory the way you follow the weather—warily, with one eye on the exit. A year into being entrenched in politics, and he gets pulled into a team, a superhero one, nonetheless. The new Avengers become a household name, or something close to it. You don’t pay for the streams, but you hear the headlines. They’re sent in to handle things that the rest of the government won’t touch. Places too messy. People too expendable.

Their first mission didn't have a name. Just a black void on every screen.

For New York, it was basically another Tuesday.

It starts mid-shift.

You’re in the middle of helping intubate someone when the power flickers—just once, like the building’s held its breath. Everyone stops. Monitors beep a half-second late. The trauma bay lights blink. Then come back. Then cut out again.

You keep your hands steady. Overhead, a resident says, “Is it just us?”

Someone else says, “No, it’s the whole block.”

And then your phone buzzes.

Not a call. A national alert.

EMERGENCY ALERT: ANOMALOUS EVENT IN PROGRESS. SEEK SHELTER.

You finish the procedure anyway. You don’t panic. You don’t run. You switch to battery-powered floodlights and keep your mask on. That’s the thing about being on the inside when the world starts to fall apart. You don’t get to pause.

Outside, the sky changes. It turns the color of old bruises. A gash opens above the skyline—wide, black, impossibly still. Something like a mouth. Something worse.

They call it the Void later. You never see it in person. Not really. You just feel the air change, the pressure drop. You feel the way every patient suddenly stops bleeding. The way everyone holds their breath.

And then, hours later, the lights flicker back on.

The void collapses into itself like it was never there.

And just like that, you keep working.

Afterward, the news trickles in. Bucky was there. Of course he was. He and the others were part of whatever last-ditch plan got the void to close. Whatever sacrifices were made, they’re classified. What isn’t: the look on his face when they put him on the podium afterward.

You watch it from the break room, over a vending machine lunch.

The new Avengers are announced. Not the old guard. A stitched-together lineup of whoever’s left, whoever didn’t run, whoever’s willing to keep showing up.

Bucky stands at the edge of the stage.

He looks like a man being honored at his own funeral.

You watch the broadcast until it ends.

You don’t say a word.

.

Two weeks later, you run into him again. And it’s so dumb, so ordinary, you don’t even realize what’s happening until you’ve already said yes.

You’re coming out of the pharmacy with three days’ worth of migraine pills and a jug of Pedialyte, and he’s just… there. Baseball cap, dark coat, looking like he hasn’t shaved in a week. The glove's off, his metal hand shining under the sterile lights. He spots you before you spot him.

“Hey,” he says, not quite surprised. “Funny seeing you here.”

You squint. “You okay?”

“I was gonna ask you the same thing.”

You glance down at the bag in your hand. “Pharmacy run.”

He nods. “I’m heading to get coffee. Want one?”

You open your mouth. Pause. And then, God help you, you say, “Yeah. Sure.”

You don’t talk about the void.

You talk about everything but.

The café is half-empty. He orders a black coffee and a lemon poppy seed muffin like someone trying to prove they’re still human. You ask for a chai. He insists on paying.

You sit across from each other, not touching. Not leaning. But there’s something in the air between you—charged, familiar. Like a room you’ve walked into before in a dream.

“Still at the hospital?” he asks.

“Yeah. We don’t really get to retire. Or take vacations.”

“That’s a shame.”

You shrug. “It’s a calling. Or a curse. Not sure.”

“I know the feeling.”

You sip your chai. He breaks the muffin in half and doesn’t eat it.

There’s a pause. Then—

“You never told me your name,” he says again. Not quite a question.

You watch him. Something in your chest thuds like recognition.

You set your cup down.

“I didn’t think you wanted it.”

He blinks. “Why wouldn’t I?”

You glance at the window, at the people outside walking past like none of this matters. Like the world didn’t almost end. Like the two of you aren’t teetering on some invisible edge.

“I don’t know,” you say finally. “Because you didn’t press.”

He doesn’t speak for a second. Just watches you, something gentle and old in his eyes.

Then he smiles. Soft. A little tired.

“Because I wanted you to give it when you were ready.”

The silence between you shifts. Not heavier. Just realer.

You say your name.

It fills the air between you like a quiet truth.

He breathes it in like it means something.

“Can I see you again?” he asks.

Your throat tightens. But your voice stays steady.

“Yeah,” you say. “I think you can.”

You don’t say anything as you leave the café. Just nod goodbye and let the door close between you. But later, when you replay the afternoon in your mind, it lingers. The quiet between words. The fact that he didn’t ask to see the mark. That he didn’t flinch.

The fact that when you said your name, it felt like exhaling. You don’t expect to see him again so soon. Not really.

But you do.

Twice that week, by accident.

First, it's after an especially gruelling night shift. The sun's barely even peeking through the trees yet, and you're covered in miscellaneous bodily fluids and there's bags under your eyes that weigh you down. Outside the bodega near your building, where you planned on getting bread and bananas and off-brand electrolyte packets. He’s coming out with a six-pack of seltzer and one of those microwave dinners that scream I-don’t-trust-a-stove as you're coming in. You nod at each other, and, looking down at your scrubs and your state, he asks if you just got done. 

You nod. "Every Tuesday at 7 AM."

He asks how your shift went. You lie and say easy. He doesn’t call you on it.

The second time, you’re on a park bench halfway through a sandwich you don’t want, getting some much-needed air during your lunch break when a shadow falls across your lap. 

It’s him, in jeans and a threadbare henley, hair mussed like he slept wrong. It's oddly domestic. You resist the urge to tuck a stray strand behind his ear. “Didn’t take you for a turkey club kind of girl,” he says, like this is the kind of thing you’ve always talked about. You offer him half without thinking. He takes it.

It’s not every day. Not even often. But you start to spot him in places you never used to. On the corner outside the pharmacy. At the edge of the farmer’s market. Once in the hallway of the clinic where you pick up your medical license renewal. He doesn’t make it obvious. He doesn’t insert himself. But he’s there.

And slowly, without meaning to, you start looking for him.

There’s a night when the ER is chaos and the weather is worse and your body is vibrating with exhaustion. Your car's given out on you. You miss your bus. You consider calling an Uber, then don’t. You’re standing under the overhang by the staff entrance, shivering in your scrubs, scrolling your phone for nothing in particular, when headlights sweep across your shoes and stop.

A car idles. Familiar. Black. Out of place like a shadow with wheels.

You squint into the window, and of course, it’s him. “Stalking me?”

He straightens, just a little. “You said your shift ended at seven.”

“I did,” you say slowly, walking toward him. “Didn’t mean it was an invitation.”

His mouth twitches. “Consider it a standing offer.”

You glance at the car, then back at him. “You gonna tell me how you got a vehicle this inconspicuous, or is that classified?”

He opens the passenger door. “Perks of being an Avenger.”

You eye him. “Is this kidnapping?”

“If it is, it’s the most considerate kidnapping ever. I brought snacks.”

You get in.

It becomes a habit after that.

That’s the first ride.

It becomes a habit. Not a routine, exactly. That would suggest he comes at the same time, says the same thing, follows a pattern. He doesn’t. He’s unpredictable in the way thunderstorms are—sudden, insistent, quietly necessary. He’s just… there. Enough times that your coworkers start raising eyebrows. Enough times that you stop pretending it’s odd.

You don’t talk about the soulmark. Not directly.

But you talk about other things.

The price of gas. The merits of different hospital coffee. He tells you, offhandedly, that he used to hate mornings until he had to start facing them at 5 a.m. with a loaded weapon. You tell him you’ve delivered twins in a supply closet. Neither of you laughs, but the air warms between you.

One evening, he brings you tea instead of coffee. He says it’s because you looked like you hadn’t slept. You want to ask how he knew. You don’t.

You get used to the way his presence takes up space. Quietly. Without pushing. You start saving podcasts to share. You start to notice the way his metal hand rests against the gearshift like he’s forgotten it’s not flesh.

He learns your tells. Which sigh means you’re burned out and which means you’re hungry. He doesn’t always talk, but he listens better than most people speak.

And slowly—terrifyingly—you start to want him to be there.

.

Bucky never texts.

Not once.

He calls.

Always.

Even for the smallest things. A grocery question. A movie suggestion. A let-me-know-when-you’re-done. Sometimes you don’t pick up, and he doesn’t leave a voicemail. Just calls again an hour later like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

One day, you ask him why.

He’s driving, one hand on the wheel, the other—metal—resting on the gearshift like it belongs there.

“I don’t like waiting for a response,” he says, after a beat. “Feels like talking to a wall.”

You nod. “Makes sense.”

He glances at you, then adds, “Also, I can't type for shit. And autocorrect thinks I’m a lunatic. My PR manager thinks I'm a walking liability waiting to happen." You don't know what makes you snort first; the thought of him keyboard smashing his phone or the fact that he has a goddamn PR manager.

Then, the first time you see the arm up close, he’s asleep on your couch.

You’re supposed to be watching a movie. You don't even know who initiated, who invited who over. But something old and black-and-white is flickering on the screen, one of his picks. But somewhere around the twenty-minute mark, he dozed off. His hoodie’s bunched up at the elbow, metal catching the lamplight.

You don’t stare. Not really. But you don’t look away either.

It’s not the glossy, hyper-chrome finish you remember from the surveillance footage. Not the Soviet brutality of jagged red stars and burnished steel. This one’s different. Sleeker. Sleek but brutal. Matte black and dark silver, subtle gold veins etched faintly between the segmented plates—Wakandan tech, you realize. Lightweight. Adaptive. The sort of engineering that moves with a person, not against them.

It looks like something alive. Something that remembers things.

You wonder if he remembers it’s there. If it registers temperature. Pressure. Pain. If the nerves ghost in that space the same way yours do when your fingers go numb from fatigue. If it ever aches when it rains.

You don’t ask.

Not yet.

He stirs, eventually. Looks at you through half-lidded eyes. 

“Did I miss the plot twist?”

“You missed a wedding, a car crash, and three dramatic monologues.”

“Damn,” he mutters, stretching.  His hoodie pulls a little higher. You glimpse the sharp, seamless lines of the elbow joint. Compact. Clean. Not like a machine—like an exoskeleton. Like armor. You look away. “We can rewind.”

You shrug, smirking into your mug. “I don’t know. I’m kind of emotionally invested now. I might want you to suffer through the confusion with me.”

He huffs a quiet laugh, still half-asleep, eyes flicking toward the screen.

You don’t rewind.

You just sit there, the credits rolling, and listen to him breathe as he falls back to sleep. You start to wonder what it would be like to fall asleep with his hand on your side. With the mark between you, not unspoken, but accepted. Real. You start to feel it again—that pull. The one you used to ignore. The one you used to press down like a bruise that wouldn’t fade.

This is what soulmates are about, you think. What they’re meant to be.

Not the fireworks. Not the rush. Not the storybook symmetry or the neat little bow at the end. Not the lightning strike of recognition. It’s quieter than that. Slower. Messier. Built of hours and questions and the space someone leaves you to be tired, to be flawed, to be real.

You think maybe it’s this — the way he handed you your coffee earlier exactly the way you take it without ever having asked. The way he watches the road when you don’t want to talk and turns the music up just a little, like a soft wall between you and the world. The way he never reaches for your hand, but always lets his linger close enough that you could.

It’s the consistency. The patience. The terrifying kindness of being seen when you’re not trying to be. When your armor’s off, not because you dropped it, but because he never asked you to put it on in the first place.

There’s something in your chest that loosens when he’s near. Some old tension that stops buzzing like an alarm.

And maybe that’s what the mark is. Not fate, not prophecy, but permission. A tether, yes—but one you can pull at your own pace. One you can choose.

And every day you don’t walk away, you’re choosing him.

Even if neither of you has said it yet. Even if neither of you knows how.

“You ever get tired of people looking at you sideways?” you ask him once, on a late-night walk back from a diner you guys have started to frequent together. You’ve both got milkshakes in hand because Bucky insists they’re a cornerstone of civilization, and you’re learning not to argue when he gets weirdly nostalgic.

He takes a sip. Shrugs. “Used to.”

“And now?”

“Now I don’t care.” A pause. “It helps that you don’t.”

You look over. He’s not smiling, but he’s softer. Always is, around you. Less edge. Less shield.

“I used to,” you admit. “When I was younger. I thought it’d fade. The mark.”

He nods, like he’s heard that before. Like he understands more than you meant to say.

“It didn’t,” you add.

He glances at you, then at your side. Not lingering. Just a flicker.

“Good,” he says, so quietly you almost miss it.

You stop walking. “Why?”

He doesn’t look at you. Just finishes his drink. Crumples the cup in one hand.

“Because I’m still here,” he says, like it should be obvious.

And it is.

Somehow, it is.

He cooks, occasionally. Not well. But with effort. One night, he burns a grilled cheese so thoroughly the fire alarm goes off. You have to wave a towel at the smoke detector while he swears under his breath and throws the pan in the sink.

You’re still laughing when he sets two very sad sandwiches on the table and mutters, “Fine. Next time, we order.”

“There’s gonna be a next time?”

He gives you a look. “Unless I’m banned from your kitchen.”

You pick up half a sandwich. “You’re on probation.”

He watches you take a bite. Raises an eyebrow.

You chew. Swallow. “Tastes like regret and cheese.”

That gets a huff of laughter. He doesn’t laugh easily—not fully—but you’re learning the sounds he makes when he’s amused. The little exhales. The under-his-breath muttering. The half-smile he hides behind his hand.

You’re learning all of it.

And you’re starting to think he’s learning you too.

One night, he’s quiet.

Not in the usual way — not in the half-aware, hands-in-pockets, I’ve-seen-too-much kind of way you've learned he wears like a well-worn, favorite coat. This silence is heavier. Not a thing he’s hiding from you, but a thing he’s holding. Something sharp and delicate and dangerous, like broken glass wrapped in cloth. You don’t know what it is yet, but you feel it.

You’re curled up at opposite ends of the couch, legs almost touching, the ghost of his knee brushing yours whenever either of you shifts. The movie’s still playing, long-forgotten. It’s just noise now. A screen flickering in the background while your heart waits.

He inhales like it hurts. And then—

“Can I tell you something?”

His voice is quiet. Too quiet. And he’s not looking at you Blue eyes staring straight ahead at the TV, the little space between his brows wrinkled into something indecipherable.

You blink, slowly. “Yeah,” you say, just as softly. “Of course.”

That gets a breath out of him. Not a laugh. Not quite a sigh. Just something let loose. You watch him stare ahead, fixed on a point in the middle distance like it’s safer than you. Like your face is too much to hold right now.

“I used to hate it,” he says. “The mark.”

You don’t move.

You don’t breathe.

“I thought—” He rubs the heel of his hand over his sternum, just once, like something aches there. “I thought it was some kind of punishment. Like the universe picked me just to prove it could.”

Your heart twists.

He still won’t meet your eyes. But he’s speaking now, and it feels like something old and knotted finally starting to unravel.

“I didn’t know what it meant, not really. Not at first. Just this pain. A weight. And then the name came, and it didn’t mean anything. Just letters. A future that didn’t make sense.”

His hand tightens, flexes, then drops into his lap again. You watch the way his fingers curl, restless and bare.

“And then it did mean something. And it got worse.”

He swallows. Hard.

“Because I looked you up.” His voice dips, almost like he’s ashamed of it. “When I got the chance. I knew. Who you were. Where you were. For years. I didn’t—I didn’t do anything about it. But I knew.”

Something tightens in your chest. A coil. A knot. He looked for you. All those years, he searched and he reached and he wanted all the same. You want to reach for him, but you wait. You feel like if you breathe wrong, he might vanish.

“I kept thinking—if I left it alone, if I stayed away, maybe the universe would rethink it. Give you someone better. Someone cleaner. Someone safe.”

Finally, his gaze flickers to you. Brief. Bracing. The kind of look you imagine he’s given a thousand times in battle — checking to see if the person beside him is still alive.

“And I thought I could carry that,” he says. “I thought if I ignored it long enough, maybe it’d fade. That maybe you’d forget, or never know. And I could just—live around it.”

His laugh is bitter. Not sharp, exactly, but cracked around the edges.

“But it didn’t fade. You didn’t fade.”

You feel like you’ve stopped breathing entirely.

He leans forward, elbows on his knees, fingers knotted together. The mark under your ribs aches in quiet sympathy.

“You know what’s worse than feeling like you don’t deserve someone?” he asks, eyes fixed somewhere near your ankles. “Feeling like you do, for just one second. Like you could, if only you were different. If only everything hadn’t already happened.”

He sits back again. Slower this time. Exhausted.

Your chest is tight, full of static. Your eyes sting.

“I used to see your name and think, how cruel. That someone like you had to carry the weight of someone like me.” Bucky finally looks at you again, and there’s nothing distant about it. It’s searing. Devastating. “But then you showed up. That day at the library. And I—”

His voice falters.

He swallows again, blinking hard. “I’ve spent so long being looked at like I’m a weapon. Like I’m a ghost. But you looked at me like—” He stops, breath caught in his throat. “Like I was real. Like you’d known me. Like I wasn’t a mistake.”

You blink fast, because the alternative is crying.

“And I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t know what to do with that,” He exhales, a quiet tremor in his chest. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be the person who deserves this. Or you. Or the mark. But I want to be.”

He turns toward you fully now, and for the first time, he doesn’t look away.

“I want to try,” he says, softly. “If you’ll let me.”

You reach for his hand. Slowly. Carefully. Like it’s something sacred, and your fingers meet his.

You don’t say anything right away. There’s no need. His hand tightens around yours like an answer. Like a prayer. And under your ribs, where the mark lives, you feel it — not a tug, not a weight, but a warmth. Like the sun, breaking through after years of winter.

He doesn’t let go of your hand.

His fingers are rough in some places, calloused in others, warm where it counts. He holds you like he’s learning how. Like maybe the trick is not to grip too tight, but not to let go either. That sweet, aching middle ground. Like maybe you’re something breakable—but not fragile.

You’re not sure how long you sit like that. Just the two of you, suspended in this strange, soft liminal space between the past and whatever comes next.

The TV hums in the background. The couch dips where your knees almost touch. You swear you can hear his pulse—yours too—skipping every third beat, then rushing to make up for it.

He’s still watching you like he’s waiting for you to vanish.

You speak first. Barely a whisper. “I think I started loving you before I even knew what it meant.”

His eyes close, slow. As if the words are a balm. Or a blade. You’re not sure which.

“I used to feel you before I understood how,” you continue, voice steady now, stronger with each word. “Not in the mark. Not in the skin. But in the air. In the quiet. I’d be washing blood off my hands at three in the morning and think—I’m not alone. Not really.”

His throat moves with the effort of swallowing. He doesn’t speak. Not yet. You’re not done.

“I hated you for it too, for a while,” you admit. “For making me hope. For giving me something to lose before I ever had it.”

You shift, close the last few inches between you. He doesn’t flinch. Just watches, gaze dark and wide and impossibly open.

“I didn’t want this to be real. Because if it was, it meant I could break. That I had something to break for.”

He breathes out your name. Just once.

You touch his face. Thumb trailing the edge of his cheekbone, slow and deliberate. He leans into it like he’s forgotten what it means to be held. “I see you,” you whisper. “I see you. Not the headlines. Not the soldier. Not the mark. Just��� you.”

And something inside him unravels. Not all at once. Not like a dam breaking. But like a thread pulled gently, deliberately, until what’s been bound up for too long begins to loosen.

“I love you,” he says, and it’s not polished. Not pretty. It’s real. Broken around the edges. Bare and breathless. “I love you, and it’s terrifying.”

You nod. Because you know.

He exhales. Then moves.

He kisses you like he means it. Like it’s the first and last time he’ll ever be allowed. His lips press to yours, slow at first, exploratory. Like he’s trying to memorize the shape of it. The feel. You breathe him in. Let your hand slip to the back of his neck, anchor him there.

He doesn’t rush.

His hands, warm and steady, skim your waist like he’s relearning what it means to touch without taking. To be given something instead of stealing it. He pulls you closer—not to possess, but to be sure you’re still there.

When he parts from you, it’s just for breath.

You lean your forehead against his. “We’ve already survived so much,” you whisper. “What’s one more impossible thing?”

His laugh is soft, unguarded. It shakes a little at the end.

You tilt your face, kiss him again—deeper this time. His response is immediate. Hands tightening, lips parting. You taste the urgency in him, the tremble beneath restraint. Your mouth moves against his like a promise. Like maybe this—you—was what the mark was always meant to lead to.

Not fate. Choice.

His metal hand brushes your hip, steady and impossibly gentle. He maps the curve of your ribs like he’s memorizing the lines of his own name. You press your palm to his chest, feel the echo of your name there too. Not carved in flesh, but in feeling. In ache. In the quiet places only the two of you have ever touched.

“Come here,” he murmurs, voice wrecked and low.

You’re already there.

Bucky kisses your neck. Your shoulder. The space just under your jaw. He doesn’t rush the way his hands roam—careful, reverent, like he’s turning pages of something sacred. You think your heart's going to burst or stop at any given moment, because there's no way he's real. 

When he pushes your shirt and your bra up over your head, your hands quickly move up to knot through his hair, anchoring them there until he's groaning and mumbling against your skin. He leans down, open mouthed kisses along the way until he finds what he's looking for, taking a pert nipple into his mouth and playing with the other with his metal hand. "Bucky, I—"

He doubles down, holding you closer against his core so he can feel you bucking against him, grinding uselessly against the rough fabric of his jeans so he can feel you pulse, head flooding your core. "Fuck, don't stop. Please don't stop, Bucky, I'm—" You sigh breathlessly when you look down and he's got your nipple between his teeth, gently tugging as he looks up at you with too innocent blue eyes. Like he's not pulling you apart.

"I won't stop, sweet girl," Bucky shakes his head, laughing softly like he can't believe it. "Don't even think I could, if I tried."

The rest of your clothes end up as a pile on the floor, and then it was just Bucky slowly undressing in front of you between your knees. It's enough to make you lose your breath, but his next words sends another sharp heat to pool between your legs.  "I'm gonna make you feel so good. You're so good to me, you—fuck, I'm gonna take my time with you. You gonna keep being good for me?"

"Yes, yes," You whispered, arms coming to wrap around him as he carries you to your bed, nails scratching lightly on the toned muscles of his back. "I'll be so good, I wanna feel good—just be with me."

He comes back to you, bare and ready and when you glance down, you can't help the gasp that escapes you. He's big. Bigger than you've ever had, thick and heavy and weeping at the tip. Gorgeous. Fuck, he's gorgeous. At the quiet sound, he pulls back a little bit, just enough to ask, with concern that's mixed with a little bit of amusement. "You okay, baby?"

Baby. Baby. The word rings in your ears, pushing another quiet, needy sound through your lips that Bucky's all too eager to swallow. But then suddenly, he stops and you have to resist the urge to whine. He presses a kiss against your skin, eyes searching yours. "Baby," Fuck, there's that word again. "I'm—I didn't bring anything with me. I don't wanna—"

You part your thighs without being told and the want in your voice is so clear, so evident. "Bucky, I'm clean. I'm on the pill, and I want you so bad, I need it. I need you inside me, want you to mark me, fill me until I'm overflowing with you."

He curses, looking at the way you're spread out underneath him. His hand reaches out to cup you where you're glistening and swollen and impossibly soft. "I can't say no to that, can I?"

"No," Your legs hook around him as he situates himself between your legs, your heart rate rising as he's so, so goddamn close, you can feel his body heat. "No, you can't."

When he finally sinks himself inside of you, you feel like you're being consumed. It's like your birthday and Christmas and the fucking Fourth of July, all in one, making you moan and swoon in a way that you know will have your neighbors sending a strongly worded complaint in the morning.

He's hard and fast and brutal, rocking against you while he sings praises into your hair, and you're wondering how you've ever been able to live without this. How you can't possibly live without this ever again, but then his hand, warm and on a mission, snakes its way beneath your stomach and pulls and pinches at your clit, and it sends you on another high.

Bucky groans. "Just what you needed, huh, baby?"

You nod, moaning out his name in reply.

One particularly hard thrust, after pulling almost all the way out and then rearranging you in a way that should be impossible, and you're falling apart on him as he fucks you through it. He loves you, he loves you, and he means every single word.

When he cums, it hits you like a train, still reeling from the aftershocks of your last orgasm when he groans and roars, putting his face to your throat and babbles—baby, sweet thing, the love of my life.

Afterwards, you just wanna lay in the mess with him, tangle yourself up with his legs and arms and get stuck there, but you're–the mess between your legs is sticky and quickly drying and the though of Bucky, soaking wet and dripping with water under the spray of your—

"Shower," you murmur. And Bucky nods against you, leaning down so he can wrap his arms around you and carry you down the hall to the bathroom.

It doesn't end there.

You ride his face under the shower. He's so good, on his knees like this was penance. For not being there for years, for not coming home to you sooner. His name rattles around your mouth and his tongue makes delicate, soft little shapes on your clit and nibbles against your thighs when you squeeze him just the right amount to make him a bit dizzy. A cool hand on your back, heat rushing in between your legs. His beard sending pinpricks up your spine as you curl your hips closer to his mouth.

Then—all at once, you on his tongue with a stuttered gasp, head spinning as he laves you with all sorts of praise. His other hand snakes up, circling and rubbing your clit like a man on a mission. "Oh god, oh god."

"Let me have all of it, sweetheart, baby, god. Let me taste you."

You do, of course, fucking of course, you let him. "My baby, taking everything ya want from me. I'll always give it to you. Christ."

When Bucky moves over your body, standing up to his full height, you're all too eager to taste him on your tongue. He's smiling lazily against your lips, like he's won a fight. It's sweet, it's a little sticky, it's—god, it's so fucking attractive, the way his lips and his stubble shine under the bathroom lights with your juices. "Say my name, Bucky, say it—"

He says your name, over and over and over and it's perfect. The water continues to spray above you, soaking both of you, but especially him as it dribbles down to the base of his cock. When he sinks into you, thick and heavy and ready until your shoulder blades knock against the cool tile, you both hold your breath until he's all the way inside, flush against your skin. 

There's his hands on your hips, a momentary pause, before his hips start snapping against yours. His dark hair, sopping wet and falling into his face, barely concealing the way he grits through his teeth. "Fuck."

You love him so much. You don't think you've ever felt a love so all-encompassing, a love that sets you on fire. You'd give him absolutely anything, everything he wants. Your words fail you, but it's the only thing you can think of as he continues to pound into you, up against that sweet, sweet spot that sends your vision spinning. In the haze of your mind, you can hear yourself moaning, begging—

Then you're falling apart again, cumming with a silent scream.

"There you go," Bucky groans and suddenly, you can feel it too, the way he fills you up, throbbing and pulsing inside of you. Until he was empty and you were full. "There you go. So good, baby. Been so good."

All at once, it all comes back to you.

The bathroom is fogged with steam, the mirror a blurred memory of your shapes, blurred edges, the safe hush of water hitting tile. He doesn’t speak when you finally wrench yourself apart from him, just to move behind him, doesn’t tense when your hands press against his shoulder blades to guide him just slightly aside—enough to step in beside him, under the spray. He shifts automatically, lets you in. Like it’s instinct now.

The water is hot, almost too hot, but he doesn’t flinch. He crowds you a little, warm chest to your back, arms curving around your middle like you’re something to protect. Or anchor to. Or both.

You feel the kiss of cold tile against your front, his breath low against your shoulder. It should be overwhelming. Should make you squirm. But instead, it feels inevitable. Like exhaling. Like gravity doing what it always does.

You lean back into him, and he lets you turn. No push. No pressure. Just a subtle retreat that gives you space. When your eyes find his in the low light, he’s already watching you, his gaze open in the way it only is now, after. After everything. After the storm and the silence and the choosing.

“Pass me the soap,” you murmur.

He obliges. Hands you something dark and nondescript, expensive-smelling and deliberately plain, like everything else he owns now. The scent hits as you squeeze a dollop into your palm—cedar, maybe. Bergamot. Clean, and quietly masculine. Like him.

He runs a hand through his hair, rinses under the stream, half turning away from you, blinking water from his lashes.

“Uh-uh,” you chide gently. “Get back here.”

His brow lifts, bemused, but he obeys. Always does, when it’s you. You rub your hands together to lather the soap, then step forward—closer than necessary. Not because you want to tease. Because you want to see.

You start at his sides, palms gliding slowly over his ribs, where old scars have long since faded into muscle. He sucks in a breath, low and sharp. Not from heat. From the contact.

Your fingers move across his stomach, up over the dip in his chest, across the swell of his shoulders. He stands perfectly still—except for the breath hitching in his throat, the twitch of his jaw. You press your body to his, full skin-to-skin, and feel his chest rise beneath your breasts, slow and tight.

He watches you like he’s never been touched like this before. Like the softness is the part that breaks him. Not the hunger. Not the fire. But the care.

You rise up on your toes, sliding your hands over the back of his neck, around the nape. One hand slips down between his fingers, rubbing suds over the back of his hand. His metal arm stays still at his side, but his flesh hand… it flexes beneath yours. Tightens around your fingers like something unbearable is unraveling in his chest.

That’s when you look up. That’s when you see it.

He looks wrecked. Not from what happened in bed. Not from anything physical. But from this—this ridiculous, tender act of washing him like he matters. Like you’re not asking anything in return. No demands. No debt.

Just love.

And he knows. You can see it—see the realization in his face as clear as sunlight on glass. He knows now, as fully as you do, what this is. What you’ve been. What you are.

You want to look away. Want to laugh it off, run, bite something smart and quick and false between your teeth just to fill the silence. You don’t.

He takes your wrist gently in his flesh one—fingers cradling the inside like it’s something delicate. Then, with his other, his metal thumb presses to your skin, slow and deliberate.

He traces a letter. Then another.

It’s not rushed. Not uncertain. The motion is familiar. Repeated. You've traced over his name countless of times, and the rough pad of his pointer finger goes through a path you've known for half your life.

Your throat tightens.

“You,” he says quietly, voice rough from emotion and steam and everything in between.

He takes your hand gently and takes it to his ribs, where your name's resided for the better part of his life. “And me.”

You stare down at the mark he’s making, not because it’s visible, but because it’s real. You can feel it there, etched into the space between heartbeats.

“You and me,” he murmurs again. “Always was gonna be.”

Then, still holding your wrist, he lifts your hand to his lips and kisses your knuckles. Softly. As if you were made of prayer.

There’s nothing else to say. No big revelation. No sudden orchestral swell.

Just this. Just the sound of the water, the warmth of his chest against yours, the slow unraveling of every wall you ever built around the part of yourself that's wanted to believe in love since you were thirteen, staring at your skin in awe.

Later, there will be groceries. Buses. Shifts at the hospital. He'll have to go back to being an Avenger. Other lives moving in parallel lanes around yours.

But right now, it’s this.

It’s weightlessness.

It’s your name, written in the soft fog of his breath. And his name, traced endlessly across your skin.

[slashedgutz]

[slashedgutz]

[slashedgutz]

depression — dean winchester ݃⁺݄+

summary: it’s breaking dean’s heart to see you wilting away in his bed, suffering from a depressive episode.

warnings: depression (symptoms, behaviours, thoughts, etc.), non-sexual nudity, angsty fluff, angsty/sad dean, pure comfort, loverboy!dean, depressed!reader, set in the bunker/later seasons (bf!dean x gf!reader)

wc: 4.28k

⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂ ⠂⠄⠄⠂☆

dean winchester had never been a stranger to letting dark feelings consume him; he knew what it was like to feel like you’re drowning from the inside with thoughts that made your soul crumble piece by piece.

he knows.

he gets it.

but with you? it was different.

you weren’t like him—you allowed yourself to wallow in your sadness, letting it suffocate you like a weighted blanket until one day it magically lifts and you’re back to being yourself. it was routine at this point, something you just accepted as part of your life.

dean, however, spent his days existing alongside his depression, running through life like a bulldozer, never allowing himself to rot in the sadness—because deep down he knew he wouldn’t be able to get back out—but instead using it as a means to keep himself going through the challenges he faced.

his heart ached as he watched you spend day after day in his bed, withering away amongst the sheets, letting your unspoken thoughts and feelings eat at you, draining the usual light in your eyes into dull lifeless voids.

each morning was the same routine.

“you want some breakfast, baby?” dean asks, sitting on the side of the bed with his hand carefully threading through your greasy unkempt hair.

you shake your head. again.

and dean sighs. it’s like clockwork.

“you sure? i can bring you something.”

“just wanna sleep,” you mutter, your quiet croaky voice barely louder than a whisper.

dean’s heart breaks in his chest. you look so sad. so broken. so absent.

he looks away, not wanting you to see his frown. “alright. i’ll– uhh… i’ll leave you be then,” he sighs and wipes a hand down his face. “i’ll be in the library with sam if you need me, okay?”

and with a creak of the mattress and another soft sigh, he’s out of the room, and you’re back in the quiet solitude of his bunker bedroom, blanketed by the dull smell and thick air that seems all-consuming.

back in it.

back in the midst of your own tired brain, spewing out things you’d never dare say aloud.

things you’d never share with dean.

but dean’s not an idiot. he knows depression like the back of his hand, and he’s seen your episodes before—though it doesn’t make it any less painful whenever you enter one.

you spend your days in and out of consciousness, swimming in the dire thoughts that plague your mind and leave you feeling empty.

and you perhaps look even worse than you feel. you should be embarrassed, you think, letting dean see you like this—the unwashed hair, the unbrushed teeth, the crinkled pyjamas you’ve been wearing for days that are starting to smell.

but you don’t care.

it’s hard to care.

you’re so wrapped up in your own brain, trying to fight the onslaught of grim thoughts, that you don’t even see the impact you’re having on dean.

he’s tried everything.

he was gentle at first—the soft-spoken words and tender touches that just made you feel worse.

guilty… maybe.

and when his soft love didn’t help, he moved onto bringing you things, like a meal or your toothbrush, but every time he tried, he was met with a grunt or hum of disinterest.

and it broke his fucking heart.

even sam could see the stress that your dynamic was having on dean. he watched his brother wallow in despair, going days without a smile and the usual bite of confidence that he walked around with. he was losing himself in worry, but yet, the pair of them were clueless when it came to helping you; they didn’t know what to do.

they’d grown up just coexisting in their shared anguish, not letting their afflictions get in the way of life. they couldn’t afford to let it get in the way, no matter how much they were struggling.

but you were different.

and to them it was different.

so as the days of you rotting in his bed went by, dean’s own light began to fade. he walked around the bunker dejected and heavy-hearted, just existing with a sad level of apathy. he didn’t care for the cases sam would bring up; he couldn’t find it in himself to worry about the potential victims or the entities that were no doubt wreaking havoc.

not when he was worrying about you.

you were lying in his bed, half asleep, as you heard dean’s footsteps patter down the hallway. you pulled the blanket further up under your chin, almost shielding yourself from him and whatever he was going to say to you.

the door opened with a creak, the light from the hallway illuminating the dark room. dean popped his head in, letting his eyes land on you. “sweetheart?” he asked quietly, letting his gentle voice float through the stagnant air that reeked of you.

when you didn’t respond, he sighed, opening the door wider and stepping into the room. you felt his weight pull down the mattress as he sat, and his hand met your side over the blanket, gently rubbing, trying to coerce a response out of you.

“it’s 4 o’clock,” dean murmured, studying your face and the way you hid it in the pillow. “you don’t wanna get up? you’re not hungry?”

he knew his questions were redundant. he’d asked them every day since you’d first fallen into this depression.

you shook your head against the pillow. “m’tired,” you muttered.

“i know, sweetheart. i just–” dean sighed, “i’d just like you to eat something. it’s late… and i’m sure you’re hungry.”

he waited.

but you didn’t respond.

“i can make you a sandwich. some toast?” he offered, still rubbing your side over the sheets.

you shook your head again, silently pleading for him to give up like he usually does with these conversations.

“baby, please,” dean’s voice wavered, his usual gruff tone wobbling with emotion as he looked down at you. “please,” he begged again.

“not hungry,” you muttered, finally giving him a reply with words.

dean sighed. his hand moved up to your head, brushing some hair out of your face. his touch was gentle and reverent, like you were something that’d break if he wasn’t careful.

cause perhaps you were.

“i know you’re not, sweetheart, but i want you to eat something. you need to.”

the stale air around you felt thicker as the moments of silence grew, and you felt it suffocating you.

“please, dean,” you tried.

“no… i’m gonna make you something, and you’re gonna eat it for me, okay?”

your eyes finally fluttered open and hesitantly looked up to his. dean’s eyes immediately softened. there you were.

“baby…”

the look of hopelessness on his face made your chin tremble—it was beyond your control. the way his eyes looked sunken in was a reflection of your own misery.

he moved his hand to rest against your cheek. his touch was warm, and you found yourself swimming in the contact.

“c’mon, angel. please…” his voice was strained, tight with emotion that he was trying to keep from spilling out all over you; he didn’t need to make you feel any worse. “let me get you up. come sit in the kitchen. just you and me.”

he didn’t give you time to argue with his words. instead, he gently peeled the blanket away and slid his hands under your body.

a groan of protest left your throat, but your body melted into his as he pulled you up off the mattress.

“there we go,” dean muttered, letting you sit against him. your tired eyes blinked at him, conveying all the words you couldn’t find the energy to speak. “i know, sweetheart, i know. just for ten minutes, yeah?”

you blinked slowly, watching his face search yours. his expression was a mixture of concern and empathy, and you felt your heart lurch at the sight, knowing you were the cause.

his hand stroked your cheek as the silence grew once more. “you’re… you’re a bit ripe, baby,” dean finally spoke, his tone gentle and a little reluctant.

you swallowed. you knew those words should embarrass you, but… you couldn’t find the energy to care. “i know,” you whispered.

dean nodded. “c’mere…”

his big arms wrapped around you, caging you against his chest. his hand rubbed your back, attempting to soothe away the sadness he could feel emanating off you.

you melted into his embrace, his warmth alleviating some of the tension in your body.

“i love you, baby. let me look after you… please. it kills me to see you like this,” he whispered into your hair.

you let out a soft noise, one that left your throat without your permission.

“i know,” dean murmured. he pulled back and looked down at your face, brushing a strand of hair behind your ear. his eyes softened as he met your tired gaze. “i’m gonna run you a bath, okay? i’m gonna help you.”

he nodded along with his words, almost reassuring you with his actions.

you wanted to argue. you wanted to tell him to go away, that you didn’t want a bath, that you just wanted to sleep.

but the pain in dean’s expression stopped you. the way the frown tugged down on his lips and the way his eyes silently pleaded with you had your chest tightening.

“okay.”

dean let out a shaky breath. “yeah, okay. good… that’s my girl.” he placed a tender kiss on your forehead, letting his lips stay against your skin for a few moments before pulling back. “you stay here. i’ll be right back.”

he pulled away from you, your body instantly feeling cold at the absence of his touch. he ducked out into the hallway and down to the bunker bathroom, ready to fill the tub for you and wash off your layer of grime.

you slumped back down into the mattress, your heart beating faster in resigned anticipation. you didn’t want to get up. you didn’t want a bath. you just wanted to fall back into sleep and avoid being awake, like you’d been doing all week.

but dean’s face appeared in your mind, and you knew how much this meant to him. your heart ached knowing you were the cause of his sadness, and so you sat back against the sheets, waiting with a heavy heart for him to return.

dean entered the room again only moments later. he stood beside the bed looking down at you, a cautious yet glum smile pulling at his lips. “bath’s running. you just– you just wait there.”

you watched him pull out the drawers of his dresser, grabbing an old shirt and a pair of his boxers, before dipping back out of the room in a rush.

a few minutes passed before dean returned again. he approached your sad state on the bed and loomed over you with a steady presence. “okay, sweetheart. bath’s full. c’mere.”

he bowed down and slipped his hands under your lifeless body, pulling you away from the warm sheets of the bed and into him. your head instinctively ducked into his neck, searching for closeness as he began carrying you out to the bathroom.

“it's gonna be okay, baby,” dean murmured into your hair. “i’m gonna look after you, okay?”

his gentle words made your heart flutter, the first sign of life in your chest in days. a warmth spread, and you sighed, nodding in response.

dean walked you into the bathroom, closing the door with his foot before setting you down in front of him. the tiles were cold against your feet, and the fresh air of the bathroom invaded your nose. it was a lot, after being surrounded by the stale air of his bedroom for so long, but dean’s presence somehow made it all feel okay.

you looked at him, waiting to see what he’d do, but his eyes were already on you—round and wide with that same glimmer of concern, but still full of so much love.

“let’s get you undressed,” he said softly, his hands already moving to the pyjama shirt you’d been marinating in for the past few days.

you nodded, wordlessly, and let him pull it over your head, your arms slipping out of the fabric and covering your bare chest. dean’s eyes flickered down to the covered skin, and a small smile grew on his lips. “s’nothing i haven’t seen before, baby. you’re alright.”

you felt a smile threaten to tug on your own lips at his small remark—another beat of life returning to you momentarily.

dean pulled down your pyjama shorts and underwear in another careful movement, gently lifting your feet to slip them out of the leg holes.

“there we go,” he huffed softly, throwing your soiled clothes into the laundry basket.

dean’s face softened as his gaze returned to you, and his eyes swept over your form reverently. “my beautiful girl,” he breathed out, the love seeping from his words. your sad heart soaked it up as he cupped your cheek with his palm, the contact almost electrifying for a moment, waking you up from your slightly hazy state.

“let’s get you in the tub, yeah?” he murmured once again, his green eyes flickering between yours in assurance.

you nodded.

and dean nodded in return before leaning down and pressing a kiss to your forehead, “that’s my girl.”

he guided you to the bathtub. bubbles floated on top of the water, and steam plumed up into the air. the sweet scent of your body wash filled your nostrils as you stood in front of it.

dean watched your eyes take in the sight, a small smile gracing his face. “i did alright, didn’t i?” he let out a soft laugh.

you glanced up at him, your heart skipping a beat at his beautiful face. god, you loved him. “yeah,” you replied softly, your voice nothing more than a mere whisper.

but still, dean smiled.

he was pulling more words from you in fifteen minutes than he had been for the past week.

“hop in, baby. it’s nice and warm.”

you tentatively dipped a foot in, testing the temperature, before committing and taking a seat in the water.

the warm water surrounded you, gently lapping at your skin like gentle kisses on an ocean shore. it felt nice, and you were already feeling better than you had been all week.

“good?” dean asked as he lowered himself beside the tub, sitting on his knees.

you relaxed back against the porcelain. “good.”

dean smiled once more, taking in the sight of you. “i’m glad,” he murmured. he let his hand reach over the tub and dip under the water, meeting your knee. he gave it a gentle squeeze.

you let out a deep sigh, a long sound that seemed to escape your lungs without your consent. dean just nodded. “i know, baby,” he said, squeezing your knee again. “i'm gonna wash you and get you back to bed. i know you’re feeling rough, my baby. just let me do this for you.”

his tender words struck at your heart, your heartstrings tightening as a frown grew on your lips. as little as his words seemed at face value, they meant the world. he saw you. he saw the pain that existed within you, and yet, he was okay with it. he understood it, and you could see he was more than willing to help you shoulder it. that much was clear.

and so you nodded once more, words seeming too daunting for you to handle. dean hummed and picked up your shampoo bottle from beside the tub. “can you wet your hair for me?” he asked, his soft eyes falling over your face.

you swallowed and slipped down, dipping your head into the water.

you found yourself falling back into a hazy state as dean began washing your hair, his gentle hands massaging the suds into your scalp—the motion tender and careful, like he was touching you for the first time again, cautious that you’d pull away.

your eyes fluttered shut, your wet lashes draped over your warm cheeks as he rinsed and conditioned your hair. emotions bubbled in your chest at the feeling of being looked after, cared for like your soul had been aching for. dean took care of you with such love, and your fragile soul soaked it up, revelling in his presence for the first time in days instead of feeling repulsed by it.

the salty tears escaped your eyes while dean began scrubbing your body clean. 

dean saw them.

“oh, sweetheart,” his voice wavered. his free hand came up and cupped your cheek, almost guiding your face to meet his gaze. “it’s okay. you’re okay.”

you looked at him through your blurry vision, the tears still spilling down your cheeks and your throat closing up from how much his touches were forcing up emotions that suffocated your airways.

you whimpered.

“i know, baby, i know. i’m so sorry you feel like this,” dean murmured. he leaned forward and placed a kiss on your forehead, letting his lips linger a few seconds longer than necessary, as if he was trying to kiss away some of the hurt from inside of you.

your lips trembled, and your chin quivered. it felt too much. it all felt too much.

you let out a sob—a quiet one, the sound broken and pained.

dean felt his heart rip. there was no other way to describe it. he felt your pain evaporate from your insides and expel itself into the air in the form of sobs.

maybe your tears were good, and maybe your sobs too.

he kept gently scrubbing your body clean, his heart twisting at every cruel sound that escaped you. “i know, angel, i know. i’m so sorry. i wish i could make it better.”

you cried.

for the first time in weeks.

you felt the floodgates open, and you had no way of closing them. the sounds were almost guttural, ravaging your insides and tearing out of your mouth.

but as painful as it all seemed, your sobs lightened it—lessened the load of what you were carrying inside, lightened the heavy feeling that had manifested itself into the dull ache in your chest.

you couldn’t see through your tears by the time dean had drained the bath and managed to wrap you in a towel and pull you into his arms.

“i wish i could take away your pain. i’d take all of it, every last drop, baby, just so you’d never have to feel like this again,” he whispered into your hairline. his voice was so soft, so raw, and so sincere. “i’m so sorry.”

he kept his strong arms around you, holding onto you like a vice, feeling like you’d shatter into a million pieces if he were to let go. you just collapsed into him, your body seeking his comfort after days of stubbornly rejecting it.

when really

it was all that you’d needed.

you couldn’t say how long you stood in the bathroom together, just letting him hold you. but it didn't matter. you felt your internal turmoil lessen with each second that passed, like dean alone was sucking out the oxygen that kept your pain’s flame alight.

your heart beat in your chest; a steady rhythm gently pounding under your skin. you could feel dean’s too, right under your ear as you rested your head against him, neither of you caring about soaking his shirt with your wet hair or the droplets of water that were landing on the floor.

it didn’t matter.

dean finally pulled his head back, a gentle sigh escaping his lips. his gaze flickered down to your face still buried in his chest, searching for solace in his touch, in his presence.

“i love you so much,” he muttered, his voice low and delicate, not wanting to break the moment. “i want you to get better… and i want you to talk to me, okay? i want to help with whatever’s going on in here.”

he gently poked at your temple.

you swallowed down the lump in your throat. it felt scratchy from how badly you’d sobbed your throat raw.

but you looked up at him, blinking. you nodded.

dean nodded back.

he was gentle as he pressed you against the counter, the back of your legs hitting the edge. and he was even gentler as he rubbed in your moisturiser and towel-dried your hair.

he was so beautiful. so patient. so understanding.

and though your insides were turning inside out, practically screaming at you to back away and hide in the comfort of his dark bedroom, you stayed put, allowing dean’s presence to mute the constant array of dark thoughts from bouncing around in your mind.

he soothed you. inside and out.

and part of you hated yourself for rejecting this for so long, denying yourself his comfort.

dean thought you looked vacant as he dressed you, pulling up his old boxers over your legs and covering you in one of his shirts. his chest hurt, but again, this was more from you than you’d given him in a week.

and that meant something.

he didn't let go of you the entire walk back to his bedroom. his hand was wrapped around yours, tight, almost like he was trying to remind you of the devotion he felt for you.

the smell of his bedroom air hit your nose as you walked back in. was it really this bad before? it was like your innermost thoughts were hung in the air, polluting the room with a foul stench that reeked of misery.

you frowned.

dean let his hand run up your arm, wrapping around your shoulders and pulling you into him again. you let him, melting into his warm embrace.

“you hungry? don’t say no.”

you glanced up at his face, taking in his softened expression. you allowed yourself to nod. 

“okay, yeah. good,” he murmured. he pulled away, reaching over to his desk. you saw the plate in his hand. two pieces of toast sat on top of the ceramic dish.

“i texted sam…” he explained, trailing off as he passed you the plate.

you nodded again. “thank you,” you returned, a quiet muttering.

“i– i’m gonna change the sheets, sweetheart. i can’t– i can’t sleep another night in them… and that’s saying something… you know, coming from me,” he said, his humour lightening up the heavy mood of the room. he smiled gently. “you sit. eat.”

dean pulled out his desk chair and gestured for you to take a seat. you slumped down into it, letting out a soft sigh.

he kept his eyes on you as he pulled the dirty sheets off his bed, stripping it bare as he watched you take small hesitant bites of the toast that sam had made. you looked tired, practically fusing back into the chair, but at least you were up. that's what dean told himself.

“gonna grab some new sheets, okay? finish your toast, baby. i'll be back in a sec.” he spoke to you like how someone speaks to a toddler—gentle and soft like the wrong word or tone would send you spiralling back into bed for another week, but he couldn’t afford that, not when he had managed to get this far with you.

you nodded, and he left the room with the dirty sheets in hand, returning only moments later with the fresh linen that immediately lifted the room’s scent.

you had finished your toast by the time dean was done pulling the sheets onto the bed. you put the empty plate back onto his desk and looked up at him with wide tired eyes.

dean came over, standing in front of your legs. “all done?”

you nodded. “yeah.”

his hand made contact with your head, brushing some of your damp hair back and petting you. his movements were gentle, like he had to be extra delicate with you in your fragile state, but his touch sent a surge of love and affection through you—something that jolted you awake for what felt like the first time in days.

you looked up at his face, like really looked up.

“i love you,” you muttered out, no louder than a whisper.

dean’s hand paused in your hair. his face softened. “i know, baby. i love you too… more than anything in the world.”

his hand slipped down to your cheek, cupping it tenderly. his palm was warm, almost searing against your skin with unspoken words of affection. his thumb rubbed along your cheekbone.

“can i hold you?” he asked, his twinkling green eyes searching yours, rounded like he was bracing himself for you to say no.

but you nodded, leaning into his touch. “please.”

dean let out a breath. “mmkay, up you get then, angel.”

you stood up from the chair. he pulled the sheets back, helping guide you back into the warmth and safety of his bed. dean slipped in after you, the mattress dipping under his weight. his arms immediately wrapped around your waist, pulling you into him.

you felt your body relax for the first time in days, releasing all the tension from your muscles and melting against him almost innately. you sighed, closing your eyes.

dean pulled you closer. “i got you, sweetheart. you know i’ve always got you.”

fig yaps: first time doing proper angst !!!!!! i hope it’s not cringe omf i’m hiding away after i post this !!!! BUT comfort fic ??? hopefully !!! i started writing this when i took my lil break bc i was sad as hell and all i wanted was for dean to look after me LMAOOO i hope u enjoyed <3

reblogs and feedback are appreciated :P

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[slashedgutz]

𝙳𝙴𝙰𝙽 𝚆𝙸𝙽𝙲𝙷𝙴𝚂𝚃𝙴𝚁 ✄ 𝟷.𝟶𝟻 𝙱𝙻𝙾𝙾𝙳𝚈 𝙼𝙰𝚁𝚈

[slashedgutz]

After Hours

pairing | au!bucky x teacher!reader

word count | 7.8k words

summary | when bucky barnes keeps showing up early to pick up his nephew from school, it’s definitely not just about being a good uncle—it’s about the sharp, no-nonsense kindergarten teacher who won’t give him the time of day. one desperate club night and a locked bathroom later, you finally do.

tags | (18+) MDNI, unprotected sex, p in v, semi-public sex, rough sex, oral sex (f!receiving), dominant!bucky, flirty!bucky, modern au, cocky!bucky, no-nonsense!reader, slow burn to smut, mutual pining, enemies to lovers-ish, no description of reader, BUT reader does have surname (racially ambiguous as always), ABBOTT ELEMENTARY CROSSOVER (this is fanfiction so I can do whatever I want)

a/n | this is filthy you guys, based on this request, and after reading this if you haven't I beg you to watch abbott elementary, literally rewatching for the fourth time, it's everything and changed my entire personality

likes comments and reblogs are much appreciated ✨✨

ᴍᴀsᴛᴇʀʟɪsᴛ

divider by @cafekitsune

“You do realize we’re ten minutes late, right?”

The voice came from the backseat—small, unimpressed, and filled with the kind of quiet disappointment usually reserved for tax season and slow Wi-Fi.

Bucky glanced at his rearview mirror and caught sight of his nephew, Danny, hair flattened oddly on one side from sleep, Superman backpack twice the size of his torso, and the most judgmental frown a five-year-old could possibly muster.

Bucky cleared his throat, shooting the kid his best reassuring grin. “Ten minutes is nothing, buddy. Trust me. Back in the day, I once showed up to basic training a whole hour late.”

Danny blinked. “Did you get yelled at?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“Did you cry?”

“…No.”

Danny leaned back in his booster seat like a seasoned war general staring down a doomed campaign. “Ms. Lane’s gonna be mad.”

Bucky huffed a laugh as he pulled into the parking lot, spotting a scattering of parents still dropping kids off at the entrance. “Your teacher’s not gonna be upset you when I explain. You’re five. You’ve got diplomatic immunity.”

Danny shook his head slowly, solemnly.

“Not with me. You.”

Bucky paused mid-parallel-park, one hand still on the wheel, his brow furrowing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Danny didn’t answer. Just stared straight ahead at the entrance to Abbott Elementary like it was the last checkpoint before war. Like he was waiting for the music from The Godfather to start playing.

“You’ll see,” he said simply, grabbing his backpack straps like they were armor.

Bucky frowned as he helped him out of the car. “What’s with the dramatics, huh? She gonna throw a book at me?”

Danny shrugged. “She’s just… Ms. Lane.”

And with that, the kid marched ahead like a tiny soldier into the building, leaving Bucky trailing behind, wondering what the hell kind of teacher scared a kindergartner more than a DC-level supervillain.

He was about to find out.

Bucky followed Danny down the hallway, trying not to feel like he was walking into a parent-teacher trap. It smelled like crayons, wet sneakers, and disillusionment.

A cluster of teachers loitered near the front office—one of them with an armful of broken rulers, one loudly arguing with a printer, and one sipping coffee with the grace of a woman who’d already survived decades of nonsense.

He made a beeline for her. Elegant, composed, a pearl necklace that said “respect me,” and an aura of calm he hadn’t felt since his last decent nap.

“Ms. Lane?” Bucky asked, offering a smile that had gotten him out of more than one parking ticket. “Sorry for the delay, I was doing my sister a favor—her son, Danny? He’s in your class.”

The woman blinked up at him, unimpressed. He could practically hear the mental pen clicking as she filed him under Oh no, not another one.

“I am Mrs. Howard,” she said, calmly correcting Bucky like he'd just misquoted Scripture. “Ms. Lane is the other kindergarten teacher.”

Bucky opened his mouth to apologize, but she wasn’t done.

“She’s just down the hall. Room 3B.” Then came the pause. The head tilt. The look.

“Young man…” She gave him a once-over. Not flirtatious. Not judgmental. Just quietly disappointed—like he'd shown up to church in jeans.

Bucky blinked. “Yes, ma’am?”

Mrs. Howard offered a solemn shake of her head. “Good luck.”

And with that, she turned and glided off, coffee in hand, already done with his entire existence.

Bucky stood in the hallway for a second, frowning. How bad could this Ms. Lane be? What, was she going to quiz him on phonics or glare him into a coma?

The door was already open a crack, but Bucky still knocked first, because that’s what you did when walking into enemy territory.

There was no chaos. No screeching. No glue sticks flying through the air. Which was immediately suspicious for a kindergarten class.

Instead, he stepped inside to find… silence.

Twenty tiny heads bent over worksheets like they were prepping for the SATs. Crayons moved in eerie unison. No one screamed. No one licked a desk. A kid in the back raised his hand quietly—quietly—to ask if he could use the bathroom.

That was his first warning.

Because when were kindergarteners ever quiet?

Bucky hesitated in the doorway, feeling like he’d just stumbled into enemy territory. What kind of boot camp were they running in here?

Danny nudged him forward, but Bucky’s attention was already drifting to the figure at the whiteboard across the room—spine straight, skirt fitted, heels clicking as you scrawled a date across the board with clean, efficient precision. You didn’t look up. You didn’t need to.

You radiated authority from thirty feet away.

He half-expected to see gray hair, maybe glasses on a chain. Strict. Sharp. The kind of teacher whose name gets spoken in terrified whispers on playgrounds.

Then you turned around.

And Bucky’s mouth dried up instantly.

You weren’t old. You weren’t scary. You were stunning. Not just pretty—gorgeous. The kind of beautiful that hits you like a left hook. And you didn’t smile when you saw him. Of course you didn’t.

You just turned, one brow raised, assessing him like a problem you were deciding whether to fix or eliminate.

Bucky cleared his throat, defaulting to his most practiced, most lethal move: the smile. The one that had gotten him out of bar fights, jury duty, and once, weirdly, an IKEA return policy.

“Hi. Sorry—I’m Bucky Barnes,” he said, stepping inside. “Danny’s uncle. Rebecca asked me to drop him off today. It’s my first time—”

“Kids are supposed to be in class by eight,” you interrupted, voice calm, level, and sharp enough to slice drywall. “It’s eight fifteen.”

Right. Okay.

The smile faltered just a fraction.

You crossed your arms, waiting, watching him like you were unimpressed by his entire bloodline.

Danny, standing a little behind Bucky now, mumbled, “Told you so.”

Bucky sighed and shot him a look before stepping forward a bit, trying again with a little more Sergeant, a little less smug.

“Yeah,” Bucky said, holding onto the edge of that smile. “That’s on me. My sister got called in early, and I didn’t realize traffic near the school was… a situation.” He gave a little shrug, trying to soften the blow. “It’s only fifteen minutes.”

One kid—front row, bowl cut, way too invested—visibly winced for him as you took a step closer to him. Bucky barely caught the movement before he felt the weight of your stare.

“Danny,” you said, never breaking eye contact with Bucky, “you can go take your seat.”

Danny didn’t hesitate. He made a beeline for his desk like he was escaping a hostage situation, never once glancing back at his uncle.

You turned your full attention on Bucky then, your eyes sweeping him head to toe in a single motion so dry, so thoroughly unimpressed, it made his spine straighten instinctively.

“Fifteen minutes,” you said, voice still perfectly pleasant, “is long enough for a child to lose their morning routine. It’s long enough to miss foundational learning, to feel behind before they’ve even started the day. It’s long enough to build a habit of dismissing responsibility.”

Bucky opened his mouth.

You didn’t stop.

“Fifteen minutes late to school turns into fifteen minutes late to interviews. Fifteen minutes late to jobs. Fifteen minutes late to life. That might not seem like much to you, Mr. Barnes, but to a five-year-old trying to learn structure in an unpredictable world? It matters.”

A low “oooh” rippled through the class like someone had just witnessed a verbal assassination.

You turned your head—just slightly—and every single one of them went silent like a switch had been flipped.

Then you turned back to Bucky with a smile so polished it might’ve passed for genuine, if not for the gleam in your eye that said this isn’t over, and you will remember me.

“Have a good day, Mr. Barnes.”

He blinked. “I—”

“Have a good day, Mr. Barnes.”

His mouth shut. His posture shifted. He nodded, respectful this time. “Of course.”

You turned back to the whiteboard without another word, already moving on like he was just a bump in your perfectly structured morning.

As Bucky stepped out of the classroom, he glanced back over his shoulder one last time.

The kids were still silent.

You were still terrifying.

And now?

You were stuck in his head.

From then on, Bucky made a small but strategic adjustment to his week.

He got Rebecca to agree—grudgingly, at first—to let him handle school drop-off twice a week and pick-up three times. It was about being involved. Showing up. Being a solid, male figure in Danny’s life. A steady one. That’s what he told himself. And his sister.

And sure, maybe it was also because Danny’s kindergarten teacher was the most infuriatingly magnetic person Bucky had ever met.

Ms. Lane.

You.

Every time he stepped into that classroom—on time, now, thank you very much—you were there. Clipboard in hand, spine like steel, eyes that didn’t blink when he smiled at you like he’d invented it.

You never giggled. Never blushed. Never let him get so much as a twitch of a lip curl when he dropped a line like, “Careful, you keep looking at me like that and people are gonna think we’re in a PTA scandal.”

Nothing.

You’d just stare at him, arch a brow, and hand him a paper that said ‘Parent Reading Night RSVP – Required.’

At one point, he was pretty sure you gave Janine more reaction for sneezing glitter.

And the worst part?

The kids loved you. Danny adored you. Sure, you also partially terrified them all, but you had their respect. Which meant Bucky couldn’t even pretend to resent the way you owned every room you walked into. He just had to lean in, play along, keep showing up, and try not to let it get to him when you ended every conversation with a clinical “Have a good day, Mr. Barnes,” like he was some stranger in a waiting room.

So he tried harder.

He wore better jackets.

When Becs didn't have the time, he made Danny’s lunches look like they were packed by Pinterest moms.

He learned all the traffic patterns around Abbott to avoid being even one minute late.

He even tried calling you “Ms. Lane” in that flirty voice he’d once used on girls outside jazz clubs in Brooklyn.

You looked up from your lesson plans, dead-eyed, and said, “Are you choking, or is that how you normally talk?”

You were unshakable.

Immovable.

He was in hell.

Beautiful, dry, completely-uninterested-in-him hell.

And he couldn’t stop coming back.

The door creaked open just as you were nodding along to whatever Janine was rambling about—something involving manifesting healthy communication with her plants or possibly something about moon phases and exes.

You barely suppressed a sigh. You liked Janine in small doses. She was enthusiastic. Kind. Chronically incapable of taking a hint. And lately, she’d made it her personal mission to turn your life into a rom-com, complete with imaginary “will-they-won’t-they” tension and way too much commentary.

“See, what I’m saying is, if he keeps showing up early, that’s basically a love confession. And if you weren’t so emotionally repressed—”

The door opened and he walked in.

Bucky Barnes strolled into your classroom like he owned a portion of the lease. Jacket unzipped, sleeves rolled, hair an intentional mess. He gave Janine a familiar nod and then locked his gaze on you like he always did—like you were the only person in the room.

He smiled. That easy, smirky, I-know-you-hate-this-but-maybe-you-don’t kind of smile.

“Ladies,” he greeted smoothly. “Miss Teagues. Ms. Lane.”

You didn’t look up from your clipboard. “You’re early.”

“Yeah, figured I’d show up before the bell, for once.” He leaned against the edge of a desk, far too casual. “I hear being punctual really impresses a certain someone.”

You deadpanned, “My class is in the library for story time. They won’t be back for another twenty minutes.”

He grinned. “Guess I’ll just have to entertain myself then.”

“God, you two are so adorable,” Janine burst out, hands clasped like she’d just walked in on a Hallmark movie climax. “The way you flirt—so classic enemies to lovers. It’s giving Pride and Prejudice. But like, modern. And in a school.”

You didn’t even blink.

“Janine. Leave.”

You looked at her. Just looked. One long, unimpressed, soul-shearing glance.

“Right. Right, right, right,” she mumbled, fumbling for her tote bag. “I have… bulletin board stuff. Laminating. Paper… science.”

She took two steps backward, then paused, giving Bucky the most exaggerated wink a human could physically perform.

You didn’t react. You were too tired.

She nodded like she was passing the torch of your romantic destiny and literally backed out of the classroom like Homer Simpson into a hedge.

The door clicked shut.

Bucky exhaled dramatically, like he’d just survived a natural disaster. “She’s like a human glitter bomb. No warning. No escape.”

You didn’t look up from your clipboard. “She’s enthusiastic. It’s exhausting.”

He chuckled, low and knowing. “So I guess that means I’m not your type either.”

“You’re not glittery.”

“Oh, come on,” he said, stepping closer, that damn smile still lingering at the corners of his mouth. “I sparkle a little.”

You glanced at him then—slowly, flatly.

“You always this persistent?” you asked, voice dry as ever.

He tilted his head, hands sliding into his jacket pockets like he had all the time in the world. “You always this impossible to impress?”

You shrugged, tapping your pen once against the clipboard before setting it down. “Only with people who try this hard.”

He gave a low whistle, grinning like you’d just scored a point in a game he didn’t mind losing. “Damn, but I bet if I said I was here for the stimulating curriculum and not to see you, you'd kick me out.”

“I’d consider it,” you said coolly. “But I’m invested in Danny’s education.”

“Ouch.”

He stepped a little closer again, but not too close. Like he was testing a line with his toe, just to see if you’d swat him back or finally step over it yourself.

“I ever make you laugh, Ms. Lane?” he asked, real curiosity under the velvet of the question.

You raised an eyebrow. “Do you want a sticker if you do?”

His grin turned into something a little rougher. “I’d rather earn one of those gold stars I see on your discipline chart.”

You didn’t smile. Not quite. But there was a flicker in your eyes he caught anyway, and his grin deepened like he’d won something.

You turned back to your desk, flipping a folder open without looking at him again.

“You know,” he said, glancing around your empty classroom, “this is the quietest I’ve ever seen it. Kind of eerie. I was starting to think the kids were fake—like one of those training simulations.”

You gave a low, unimpressed hum. “If they were fake, they wouldn’t sneeze directly into my coffee when I’m not looking.”

He chuckled, eyeing your desk. “Is that why you’ve got three different mugs over there? Just in case?”

You didn't respond. But the faint upward curve of your mouth—blink-and-miss-it—was the closest he’d gotten to a laugh since the first day he met you.

It made something curl low in his stomach.

“I know I keep saying this, but I’m not just here to bug you,” Bucky said after a beat, his voice edging toward sincere despite the grin still playing at his mouth. “Danny likes it when I pick him up. Says it makes him feel cool when I show up.”

You looked up, just slightly. “He does like showing you off.”

Bucky’s smile softened, just a little. “Kid’s got good taste.”

Then his eyes slid back to you, the cocky glint returning. “Speaking of good taste—what are the odds I could convince you to grab coffee sometime?”

You gave him a long, slow blink. Not mean. Just… devastatingly neutral.

He added, “I’ll be on time. And I promise not to flirt with the barista.”

You opened your mouth—possibly to respond, possibly to destroy him—but before a single word could land, the bell rang.

Shrill. Loud. Unforgiving.

You sighed like the universe had interrupted you on purpose.

“Danny’ll be waiting for you outside the library,” you said, already picking up the clipboard again like this was over and done. “Probably trying to con the librarian into letting him borrow another comic book.”

Bucky hesitated. “So… is that a maybe on the coffee?”

You didn’t even look up. “It’s a ‘your nephew’s in the library.’”

He grinned, slow and crooked. “I’ll take that as a soft yes.”

You arched an eyebrow. “Take it however you want, Barnes. Just go get your kid.”

He turned toward the door, still smiling, still smug—but quieter now. And before stepping out, he glanced back one more time.

You were already back to your paperwork.

But you hadn’t said no.

Bucky was still smirking to himself as he stepped out of your classroom and into the hallway—clearly riding high off your non-answer like it was a personal victory.

And, as luck would have it, he walked directly into Principal Ava Coleman’s path.

She had sunglasses on indoors and a folder she clearly hadn’t opened all week tucked under one arm.

“Good afternoon,” he said politely, offering her a nod and a half-smile.

Ava turned so fast it was like she’d been waiting for this exact moment. “Oh it is now,” she said, eyes raking over him so blatantly Bucky actually paused mid-step.

She watched him until he rounded the corner, then turned on a heel and bee-lined straight for your classroom, heels clicking like trouble.

She leaned into your doorway with no regard for your personal space or your peace of mind.

You didn’t even look up as she strolled through your door, “Girl.”

You kept sorting worksheets. “Ava.”

She gave you a look like she just walked in on free tickets to a concert and front-row seats.

“Now that is the finest white man I’ve seen this whole year,” she said, plopping down into one of the tiny student chairs with zero grace and maximum chaos.

You glanced up, deadpan. “It’s March.”

Ava rolled her eyes. “I meant school year. Don’t try and be smart with me.”

You arched a brow. “Wasn’t trying.”

She pointed a perfectly manicured nail toward the door. “You better quit playing with that man’s heart before I mess around and pull rank.”

You blinked once. “I’m not playing with anything.”

Ava smirked. “Girl, please. You’ve got him showing up early on purpose. That man’s in here more than Gregory and he actually works here.”

You didn’t respond right away. Just gathered your things slowly, expression unreadable.

Then: “He’s annoying.”

Ava stood, smooth as silk. “Mm-hm. And yet he’s got you so annoyed you keep your lipstick fresh after lunch.”

You glanced at her, unimpressed.

“I’m just saying,” Ava continued, striding around the room like she owned it (she technically did, unfortunately), “if you don’t take him, I will. That man is gonna give me some fine, emotionally stable mixed babies.”

You looked at her. Just looked. Slightly disgusted, mostly exhausted.

“Ava. Seriously?”

“What?” she asked, clearly unbothered. “You’re the one over here acting like you don’t notice. Always so uptight, hair all sleeked back like you’re about to defend someone in court. Girl, this is a school.”

You pinched the bridge of your nose. “Ava, what do you want?”

“I’m going out tonight,” she said, waving a perfectly manicured hand like this was some kind of decree. “Clubbing. Drinks. Vibes. You’re coming.”

You didn’t even flinch. “Absolutely not.”

She pointed. “You’re coming.”

“No.”

“I’m your boss. You’re forced to. It’s in your contract.”

“It’s really not.”

“Also,” she added, shrugging, “you’re the closest thing to an equal I’ve got in this place. So you’re coming for moral support.”

You finally looked up, full eye contact. “Ava. No.”

She pointed at you. “Nine o’clock. I’m texting you the address. Now go home, let your hair down and let your scalp breathe for once. Wear something that says ‘I’m open to bad decisions.’ Not ‘I’m about to read you your Miranda rights.’”

You opened your mouth to decline again, but she was already halfway down the hall, yelling something about “energy healing” and “pre-gaming with affirmations.”

You sighed.

Loudly.

“You gotta stop lookin’ like someone stole your dog,” Sam said, nudging his shoulder as they walked toward the club entrance. “You’re killin’ the vibe.”

Bucky shot him a look. “You dragged me out.”

“I’m saving your sad, one-woman-man life,” Sam said. “You need to remember other women exist, Buck. The world’s bigger than that kindergarten teacher who makes you sweat like you’re back in basic.”

Bucky sighed, scanning the line outside the club. “You’re not gonna let this go, are you?”

“Nope.” Sam clapped him on the back. “C’mon. Maybe the actual girl of your dreams is in here.”

“Already found her.”

“You are so damn whipped, man,” Sam muttered.

Inside, the club was all neon glow and bass-heavy music. The air pulsed with energy and cheap cologne. Bucky kept his hands in his jacket pockets, jaw tense as Sam tried to steer him toward the bar.

And then he saw you.

You were standing near a tall cocktail table, back to him, dress hugging every curve like it was tailored by sin itself. That deep burgundy color against your skin, the sheer lace sleeves, the neckline that made his mouth go dry—fuck.

It was like the air got sucked right out of the building.

He stopped walking. Just… stopped.

Sam bumped into him. “What? Don’t tell me you already gave up—”

Bucky lifted a hand, pointing without looking away. “That’s her.”

Sam followed his gaze. “That’s Ms. Lane?”

Bucky nodded, dumbfounded. “Yeah.”

“She teaches kindergarten?”

“Yeah.”

Sam stared a moment longer. “I’ve never wanted to re-enroll in school so bad in my life.”

Bucky’s jaw worked. You hadn’t noticed him yet. You were talking to someone—smiling, even, which was a rare enough sight that it nearly took him out.

Then he saw who was beside you.

“Oh. Ava’s here too.”

Sam turned. “Who’s Ava?”

“The principal.”

Sam blinked. “You’re telling me the tall one with the long hair and wearing that is the principal?”

“Yep.”

“I’m calling Sarah,” Sam said, already reaching for his phone. “We’re transferring my nephews.”

Bucky didn’t respond. His eyes were locked on you—his teacher, his girl, his quiet obsession—laughing in a club with a dress that made his palms sweat. All those weeks of buttoned-up shirts and sarcastic dismissals, and now here you were, looking like a damn vision.

Sam nudged him. “You gonna stand there drooling or go say something?”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I think I’m in love.”

Sam rolled his eyes hard. “God, you’re so dramatic.”

But Bucky didn’t hear him. You’d turned just enough for your eyes to start sweeping the room, and the moment you looked in his direction—

He knew you saw him.

And he knew everything was about to change.

The club pulsed around you—sweaty, crowded, way too loud—and you were already regretting everything.

You weren’t the kind of woman who went out on Friday nights. You were the kind who wrote parent emails about glitter-related injuries and kept a drawer full of emergency dry-erase markers.

The kind who dodged PTA moms like landmines and maintained a firm no-nonsense reputation because the moment you didn’t, someone’s child would be climbing the bookshelf like it was Everest.

But here you were. Burgundy dress, heels too high, lip gloss too shiny, sipping on a drink that tasted vaguely like regret and melted candy.

Ava was beaming beside you, obviously thriving. “Now this is what I’m talking about,” she said, swaying to the music. “You, me, outfits that should be illegal. This is the energy we need.”

You took a sip, trying not to look like you wanted to crawl out of your own skin. “I already want to go home.”

“You always want to go home. You're, like, emotionally married to your couch.”

You opened your mouth to reply, but then Ava froze—gasped like someone had pulled the fire alarm—and grabbed your arm with enough force to startle you.

“Girl. Girl. You will not believe who just walked in right now.”

You frowned, confused. “What—”

“Look.”

You followed her eye line. The club suddenly felt ten degrees hotter.

Bucky Barnes stood at the entrance, taller than anyone else around him, leather jacket open over a dark henley, hair tousled, mouth set in that stupid half-smirk like he knew he didn’t belong there and didn’t care. His blue eyes scanned the crowd like he was looking for someone.

And then they landed on you.

Oh no.

No.

“This is not happening right now,” you muttered, nearly tripping over your own words. “I have got to get out of here.”

You turned, already strategizing your exit route, but Ava threw an arm out in front of you like she was stopping traffic.

“Girl, forget you. Look at that man’s fine ass friend.”

You blinked, turning your head just enough to catch him—Bucky’s friend. Broad shoulders. Clean-cut. Smiling already like he knew how this worked. His eyes were on Ava like she was a problem he was already planning to solve.

“Hell yes,” Ava said. “That’s my man. Manifested. Claimed.”

You were too busy trying to make your brain reboot. Because Bucky was still watching you. He hadn’t looked away once. Like you were the only person in the club. His mouth curved slightly. Not cocky. Not playful. Just… locked in. Sure.

And damn him—you felt it. That same heat in your chest you pretended didn’t exist every time he came to pick up Danny. Except now, there was no desk between you. No escape.

And then, the inevitable.

The two pairs drifted toward each other. Like planets colliding. Like destiny had a sick sense of humor.

It was Ava who broke the silence first.

“Hi,” she said to Bucky’s friend, offering a hand like she expected it to be kissed. “Ava Coleman. Principal. Administrator. Visionary. And I know you’re about to buy me a drink.”

Sam blinked once, clearly amused. “Sam Wilson. Nice to meet you, Ms. Visionary.”

“Mmhm. I know.” Ava looped her arm through his like it was nothing. “Let’s go, future Mr. Coleman.”

You turned, shocked. “Ava—”

She didn’t even glance back. “You’re on your own, counselor. Don’t mess this up.”

And with that, she strutted away with Sam trailing behind her, clearly both confused and deeply invested.

You turned back to find Bucky still standing there.

Still watching you.

And now it was just the two of you.

No classroom.

No clipboard.

No rules.

Just you. And him. And the truth you’d been ignoring.

He smiled.

And you suddenly couldn’t remember a single reason why you ever told yourself he wasn’t dangerous.

Bucky stood there for a second longer, drinking you in.

The lace sleeves. The curve of your waist. The neckline that made his brain stop working for a solid five seconds. It wasn’t just the dress—it was you in it. Out of your usual uniform. Out of your guarded shell. Still composed, but softer somehow. Looser.

“You look—” he started, voice low.

“Hot?” you cut in, arching an eyebrow, mouth twitching just enough to betray your awareness.

He laughed, quiet, head tipping slightly. “I was gonna say amazing. But hot works too.”

You rolled your eyes and took a slow sip of your drink to hide the way your pulse jumped.

Bucky stepped closer, just enough to speak without raising his voice. “I didn’t think you went to places like this.”

“I don’t. Ava dragged me.”

You glanced past him, where Ava was already leaned over the bar with Sam looking both impressed and slightly alarmed.

“And now she’s dragging him,” you murmured.

Bucky followed your gaze and let out a soft chuckle. “Should we check on them?”

“No,” you said instantly. “Let natural selection take its course.”

He grinned again—less smug this time. Quieter. More real. The kind of smile that said he’d missed seeing you. The kind that made your breath catch a little deeper than you wanted to admit.

You took another sip, letting the pause stretch, then tilted your head at him.

The music pounded around you. People brushed past. The lights shifted.

But it felt like everything stilled between you and him.

“I thought maybe, outside the classroom... you’d stop pretending I’m not getting to you.”

Your grip on your drink tightened slightly.

You didn’t look away.

You should have.

But you didn’t.

Instead, you held his gaze like it was a contest. Like you were daring him to blink first. Your chin stayed lifted, eyes steady, but something behind them flickered—just for a second.

Bucky saw it. That crack in your wall. And God help him, it made his pulse jackhammer in his throat.

You tilted your head slightly, that same biting calm in your voice. “You really think you’re getting to me?”

He stepped in closer, slow, careful—not touching you, but close enough that the heat rolled off him like static. “No,” he said. “I know I am.”

Your throat worked on a swallow you tried to hide, but Bucky clocked it.

You were still composed. Still wrapped in that hard-earned edge of professionalism, like even now, in heels and lace, you could throw a behavioral chart at him and end the whole thing.

But your body betrayed you.

The shift of your weight. The way your breath hitched when he looked at your mouth.

You didn’t push him away.

“You always this arrogant?” you asked, voice like silk-wrapped steel.

“Only when I’m right.”

You opened your mouth, probably to put him in his place again—but then the music shifted, a heavy, pulsing bass dropping in from the DJ booth. A sea of people moved on the dance floor, but the space between you and him felt small. Pressurized.

His eyes dipped to your lips, then back up.

“Dance with me,” he said.

You blinked. “What?”

His smirk curled slowly. “You heard me.”

You scoffed, already shaking your head. “I don’t dance.”

“Sure you do. You just don’t want to with me.”

“Accurate.”

“But you will.” He leaned in, voice brushing the shell of your ear now. “Because I’m asking. And because for once, I don’t think you want to walk away.”

You hated how that made your stomach flip. Hated it even more when he held out a hand—not cocky, not smug. Just… waiting.

You stared at it.

Then at him.

Then, slowly, you slid your hand into his.

And that was all he needed.

Big win. Massive win.

He tugged you gently into the swell of bodies, his hand warm against yours, his other settling lightly on your waist. And when he pulled you close—closer than you’d ever let him stand before—you didn’t pull back.

You danced.

At first, stiff. Calculated. Like you were trying to make it not mean something.

But Bucky? He knew how to move. Knew how to guide without pushing, how to lean in just enough to make your head spin. Every time your hips brushed, every time his hand slipped an inch lower on your back, you felt it in your knees.

You hated him for being good at this.

You hated yourself more for liking it.

And when his lips brushed your ear again, breath hot and voice low, you barely heard the words over the music:

“Just admit it.”

You swallowed, refusing to answer.

He smiled against your skin.

He already knew.

You didn’t answer.

Couldn’t.

Because something inside you snapped the second his breath touched your neck. And the next thing you knew, your fingers were gripping his wrist, dragging him behind you through the crowd with single-minded purpose. Not speaking. Not thinking. Just moving.

Bucky didn’t ask where you were going.

Didn’t need to.

He followed like a man being led to his own damn salvation.

You found the restroom near the back—single occupancy, thank God—and yanked the door open, pulling him in after you. The lock clicked behind you just as his mouth crashed into yours.

It wasn’t gentle.

There was no space for that anymore.

You kissed like you’d been waiting weeks to do it—months actually. All teeth and tongue and heat, his hands gripping your waist like he still couldn’t believe you were real. You pressed him back against the wall, palms flat on his chest, lips dragging along his jaw, biting at the curve of his neck just to feel him shudder.

His hands roamed—your waist, your hips, sliding lower, greedy, hungry, completely unrestrained. His mouth returned to yours, catching your gasp mid-kiss as he backed you against the sink now, one hand curling around the back of your neck, the other on your thigh, tugging it up around his waist.

“You sure?” he murmured against your mouth, breath ragged.

You answered by dragging his lower lip between your teeth.

“Fuck,” he breathed.

He kissed you harder.

Sloppier.

Desperate.

The kind of kiss that said he didn’t care about the lipstick smudging or the way your dress rode up or how his belt buckle knocked against the porcelain edge of the sink. It was all teeth and moans and hands gripping too tight.

Your fingers slid under his jacket, then his shirt, pushing it up, needing to feel skin—hot, firm, real. You ran your nails over his stomach and he groaned like it physically hurt to be touched that way.

“You have no idea what you’re doing to me,” he panted.

You gripped his belt, pulling his hips flush to yours. “You’ve got a pretty good idea what you’re doing to me too.”

He looked down at you like he was already wrecked—and still starving.

Like this wasn’t enough.

Like it was never going to be enough.

Then suddenly Bucky let out a breathless laugh, eyes darting around the cramped bathroom as he made sure to lock the door behind you. “In here? Really?”

You smirked, stepping backward until your back met the cool tile wall, the sink brushing your hip. “What?” you said, voice teasing, eyes locked on his. “You’ve never fucked in a public bathroom before?”

He tilted his head, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Have you?”

You shrugged, that slow, calculated way that always made him insane. “First time for everything.”

He stared at you for a beat, eyes dark and full of heat—then moved.

He was on you in a flash, hands braced on either side of your head, mouth finding yours again in a kiss that tasted like restraint snapping in half. It was messy, all tongue and teeth, lips crashing together.

Your hands threaded into his hair, tugging, nails scraping against his scalp as he kissed you harder, deeper, needier. His body pressed into yours, firm and unrelenting, and you gasped when you felt the hard line of his cock against your thigh.

Then he dropped.

Literally—dropped to his knees, palms dragging down your sides with reverence and greed.

“Bucky—”

“Shh,” he murmured, voice rough as his eyes flicked up to meet yours. “Let me.”

His hands pushed your dress up slowly, worshipfully, bunching the burgundy fabric around your hips. He hooked a finger into your panties, pulled them to the side, and let out a soft, guttural groan.

“Jesus Christ…”

Then he dove in.

His mouth pressed against your cunt like he was starving, tongue parting your folds with a groan that vibrated against you. You cried out—soft, sharp—your hands flying to his hair again as he started to lick, slow and purposeful. Long, wet strokes that made your knees go weak.

One hand clutched the sink for balance, the other fisted in his hair as he sucked your clit into his mouth, groaning like you were the best thing he’d ever tasted.

You bit your lip to keep quiet—pointless, really. Your hips bucked against his face and he held you there, arms locking around your thighs, face buried between your legs like he had no intention of coming up for air.

“You taste so fucking good,” he growled, voice muffled as he licked deeper, tongue fucking into you before circling your clit again with maddening precision. “Been thinking about this since the first day I saw you.”

You choked on a gasp, head tipping back, the edge already building—too fast, too strong.

And he wasn’t stopping.

Not for anything.

Your grip tightened in his hair as Bucky’s tongue dragged a slow, torturous circle around your clit, only to suck it between his lips with a low, obscene groan that vibrated through your entire body.

“Fuck—” you gasped, breath hitching as your thighs threatened to close around his head.

He wasn’t having it.

His left hand braced against your hip, holding you open, steady, while his right slid up your thigh—palm rough, fingers sure—until he reached your slit. One thick finger slipped inside, slow, dragging along your walls as he moaned like he felt it too.

“You’re so tight,” he breathed against your cunt. “So wet for me. This pretty pussy’s been waiting for me, huh?”

You shuddered, jaw slack, hips rolling down onto his face and hand like your body knew exactly what it needed. He pumped the finger slowly, deliberately, curling just right to make your knees buckle. Then he added a second—stretching you, filling you—and the heat in your belly twisted hard.

“Oh my god—Bucky—”

“That’s it,” he murmured, eyes flicking up to watch your face as his fingers curled deep inside you. “Let me hear you, baby.”

His mouth returned to your clit, licking in messy, desperate circles while his fingers fucked into you faster—his rhythm syncing perfectly with your shaking body. Every thrust hit that spot inside you with aching precision, your thighs trembling as your moans broke free.

You weren’t composed now.

You weren’t silent.

You were his, unraveling in his mouth, pulsing around his fingers, the world narrowing to the slick sounds of your body and the obscene groans he made as he devoured you like it was his last meal.

“I could do this all night,” he panted, fingers curling hard as your hips jerked. “You gonna come for me? Gonna soak my fuckin’ fingers?”

You couldn’t even form words—only nod, only whimper, only clutch at his hair and the edge of the sink like you might float away if you let go.

“Come on, sweetheart,” he growled, tongue flicking your clit fast and filthy now, fingers pounding into you. “Come on my face.”

Your body clenched, the pressure snapping like a whip crack—your orgasm crashing over you so hard you cried out, hips shaking, thighs locked tight around his head. He groaned, licking you through it, fingers still working you until you were whining, pushing weakly at his shoulder.

He finally pulled back, mouth and chin glistening, chest heaving.

He looked wrecked.

And proud.

Bucky stood, chest rising hard, his jaw clenched like he was fighting off every urge he’d ever had. His mouth was slick with you, his fingers still glistening, and he looked down at you like you were the only thing tethering him to sanity.

Then he cursed.

“Shit—” he growled, hand dragging down his face. “I don't have a condom.”

You blinked, still breathless, still shaking.

Then you reached for his belt.

You pulled him close with both hands, grabbed his face, and kissed him hard—tongue sweeping into his mouth, tasting yourself all over him.

He groaned, loud and broken, his hands flying to your waist, gripping tight.

“I’m on birth control,” you panted against his lips. “It’s fine.”

He froze for half a second.

Then everything snapped.

He spun you around, bent you over the sink, and shoved your dress up around your waist again with a growl that sounded like it was ripped from his chest.

“Fuck, I’ve wanted this,” he muttered, dragging his pants down just enough to free himself—his cock hard, thick, flushed at the tip.

You looked at him over your shoulder, eyes dark, daring. “Then take it.”

He didn’t hesitate.

He grabbed your hip with one hand, the other guiding himself to your soaked entrance. He groaned when he felt how wet you still were, and then he thrust in—hard, deep, one sharp movement that made both of you cry out.

“Jesus—” he bit out, buried to the hilt inside you.

You gasped, your hands bracing against the sink, your head dropping between your arms as he pulled back and slammed into you again, rougher this time, like all the control he’d been clinging to shattered in one thrust.

His grip on your hips was bruising.

His rhythm? Relentless.

“Look at you,” he gritted, hips snapping into you again and again, cock dragging perfectly over your walls. “All that attitude. All that sass. And now you’re fucking dripping for me.”

You moaned, arching your back, pushing back onto him. “Shut up and fuck me.”

That did it.

He pounded into you, deep and rough, grunting with every thrust, each one sharper than the last. Your hands scrambled for grip, one of your heels slipping as he rutted into you like he was trying to claim you, pull every sound out of your throat that you’d refused to give him in daylight.

“Been thinking about this since the first time you called me Barnes like it was a threat,” he growled, one hand fisting in your hair to pull your head back. “And now you’re letting me fuck you in a goddamn club bathroom?”

You gasped, eyes fluttering. “Shut up.”

He fucked you harder.

“You love this,” he growled in your ear. “You love the way I feel inside you. Admit it.”

Your nails scraped the porcelain.

He yanked you upright against his chest, his cock still buried inside you, pounding you with punishing, perfect rhythm.

“Say it,” he demanded, voice ragged. “Say you wanted this.”

You moaned, nearly sobbed. “I—fuck—I wanted this—”

He groaned, low and guttural, lips dragging over your shoulder and hand drifting to your neck.

His hand on your throat wasn’t choking—just holding. Just claiming. His mouth was at your ear, breath hot, voice wrecked. You were bent over the sink but upright now, your chest flush to his, and your eyes—

He made sure they were on the mirror.

“Look,” Bucky growled, fucking into you hard enough to make the sink creak. “Look what I’m doing to you.”

Your gaze caught the reflection—and fuck, it was obscene. Your lips parted, cheeks flushed, sweat-damp hair clinging to your temples. His broad chest against your back, one hand gripping your hip, the other still around your throat like he was holding you steady so you couldn’t escape how good it felt.

Every thrust slammed into you from behind, deep and fast, his cock stretching you wide, hitting that perfect spot over and over until your legs were shaking.

You whimpered, unable to hold back anymore.

“That’s it,” he rasped. “Let me hear you. No classroom. No clipboard. Just you. And me.”

Your head tipped back onto his shoulder as his thrusts grew rougher, deeper, fucking you in front of the mirror like he wanted you to remember this—to see exactly what he turned you into.

“I can feel you squeezing me,” he panted. “So fuckin’ tight. You gonna come for me?”

You moaned, body tensing, orgasm coiling hard in your belly, your thighs trembling, the pressure too much.

His fingers moved down your stomach, finding your clit, rubbing tight, fast circles as he slammed into you.

“Come for me,” he growled into your ear. “Come on my cock. Let me feel it.”

You shattered.

It was sharp, messy, loud—your cry bouncing off the bathroom walls as your pussy clenched around him, body locking up, hips jerking uncontrollably. You came so hard you saw white, barely able to hold yourself up as your orgasm rolled over you in crashing waves.

“Fuck, that’s it,” Bucky grunted, and then he lost it.

His rhythm stuttered, a broken gasp tearing from his throat as he buried himself deep one last time and came inside you, hips jerking, breath ragged against your neck.

He held you tight, forehead pressed to your shoulder, still inside you, both of you shaking and panting, sweat-slicked and spent.

The mirror caught everything.

Two people undone.

Two people who couldn’t take it back.

And neither of you wanted to.

The room was quiet now, save for your breathing and the soft hum of music bleeding through the walls.

You blinked slowly at the mirror, still bent over the sink, your hair mussed, dress bunched around your hips, Bucky’s body heavy and warm behind you. He was still buried inside you, both of you barely recovered.

He exhaled, lips brushing your shoulder, then your neck. “Well, damn.”

You let out a breath that might’ve been a laugh if you weren’t still coming down from the best orgasm of your life.

He finally pulled out with a low groan, pressing a kiss to your shoulder as he did, and then helped smooth your dress back down over your thighs. His touch lingered just a second too long, like he wasn’t ready to let go of you just yet.

You straightened, turned slowly to face him, your expression mostly neutral—but your eyes were warmer than before. He saw it. He always did.

Bucky leaned back against the sink beside you, tucking himself back into his jeans with practiced ease, still watching you with that lazy post-orgasm smirk.

“So,” he said, running a hand through his hair, still slightly breathless. “Now that we’ve gotten the hard part out of the way…”

You arched a brow, lips twitching. “That was the hard part?”

He grinned. “Figuratively. And literally.”

You rolled your eyes, turning to check yourself in the mirror. Your lipstick was gone. Your cheeks were flushed. Your neck had the faint outline of his stubble. You looked exactly how you felt: fucked out and dangerously close to letting him in.

You dabbed at your collarbone with a paper towel.

He watched you quietly for a second, then said, softer now, “Come on, baby. Just one date.”

You froze.

He didn’t miss it.

“One date,” he said again, stepping a little closer, voice still low. “Not the club. Not the classroom. Just you and me. Dinner. Or drinks. Hell, coffee if that’s all I get.”

You looked at him, really looked.

He was flushed, eyes bright, hopeful in a way he hadn’t been in weeks. There was something real behind that smirk now. Something open. Unprotected.

You should’ve shut him down.

Should’ve said something cold. Dismissive.

But instead, you leaned in—kissed him, slow this time, less teeth, more tongue. Just a whisper of what could happen again if you said yes.

When you pulled back, your lips barely brushed his.

“You’re gonna regret asking me out, Mr. Barnes.”

He grinned.

“Not a chance, Ms. Lane.”

[slashedgutz]

ngghhh older!dean who comforts you when you cry over how boys never like you. he’s petting your hair and kissing your jaw as he coos over his sweet girl.

“it’s okay baby.. you don’t need any of em when you got a real man, yeah?”

　　　　　　　౨ৎ 🎀｡˚🍨♡ ˚₊‧

[slashedgutz]

౨ৎ ₊˚⊹ hello kitty condoms

pairing: older!dean winchester x fem!reader

summary: you persuade dean to use your pink hello kitty condoms

cw: 18+ smut.ᐟ mild language.ᐟ for once dean uses protection [wrap it up silly].ᐟ reader loves hello kitty.ᐟ

word count: 433

julia yaps: this has been sitting in my drafts for months

inspo: condom by ayesha erotica

────────── 💕 ──────────

“sweetheart you don’t seriously think i’ll put this on, do you?” dean asks with a raised brow, a hello kitty themed condom in between his two fingers.

you shrug playing clueless. “what’s wrong with it? too small?” you give him a small smirk.

he tilts his head, not falling for your act. “it’s frickin hello kitty”

you can’t help but chuckle a little “awww is your man ego gonna get hurt?” you coo at him, earning an unserious glare from him.

“no but seriously…those are the only ones i have left dean, man up it’s just a condom” you giggle.

dean playfully rolls his eyes.

“hey you want to fuck me or not?” you tease him, a mischievous smile on your face as you crawl your way closer to him on the bed.

“how bout..” dean starts off but you already know what he is away to suggest.

“no dean i am ovulating right now and you’re not getting me pregnant” you interrupt him before he manages to finish his sentence.

“besides…” a mischievous glint in your eyes which he doesn’t fail to notice, you crawl between his legs, your fingers hooking at the waistband of his boxer briefs and slowly tug them down. your eyes on his as you do so.

dean’s eyes turning a darker, more deeper shade of green. his breath hitching slightly as he watches you painfully slowly peel his boxers down, freeing his throbbing member. pre cum on his tip already from the earlier make out session.

you look up from his pulsing cock up into his eyes, “…the idea of you pounding me into the mattress while wearing this condom turns me on so much” you spur him on, reaching for the condom packet and carefully ripping it with your teeth, making dean’s cock twitch.

dean’s plump lips are parted as he observes your every move as if he was in a trance.

you take out the pink condom out the wrapper and place it on his tip, you look him in the eyes with a seductive gaze before you slowly roll the condom down his shaft, earning a shaky breath from him. the pink see-through material oddly complimenting his cock.

watching his beloved girlfriend putting a condom on him will never not be the hottest thing ever.

“i need you inside me..” you swallow as your eyes appreciate the view between his legs. your eyes drift up into his, both of you sharing a lustful look.

“you don’t have to tell me twice sweetheart” he says with a smirk on his face before flipping you over.

thank you so much for reading! feedback and reblogs are always deeply appreciated <3

🏷️ : @jensino @emeraldcrs @soldiersgirl @jensenacklesballsack @missus-ackles @littlejackles @littlejenackles @deanswifeyy @slut4jackles @h8aaz @bruisedfig @figisonline @angelicjackles @losers-clvb @lyarr24 @cowboysandcigarettes @blossomingorchids @bluemerakis @rositaslabyrinth @deanspookiebear @tinas111 @bejeweledinterludes @miss-marmalade @pinksatinpanties @multiversefanfics @cupidzbunny @sunnyteume @mrsanakinwinchesterpoldark @krabog @that-stanford-girlie @pwin098 @tendertulip @honeyyxxbee @rerejunebug @iloveeveryoneyoureamazing @idontwannabehere78

𑁥౿ check out my masterlist for other works!

♡ see this post to be added to the taglist!

© pieandflannel – do not plagiarise or repost any of my work!

© reserved for photo/gif owners! (pinterest)

© diver by @cafekitsune <3

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3. What was the last song you listened to? 

15. What’s your favorite season? 

30. What are you looking forward to in the near future? 

3) nettles by ethel cain (great inspiration for writing btw, literally fuelling my fic of the boys lol)

15) WINTER!! not only bc i’m a december baby, but i love the cold.

30) starting uni in september. finally ready for that big change— i’m gonna be taking creative writing.

[slashedgutz]

For the ask game :)

2. Do you drink tea or coffee? How do you take it?

19. Do you have a best friend? How long have you been friends?

23.Do you believe in aliens?

28. How are you, really?

HEY BAEEE

2) coffee all the way! i like it straight black, with some syrup because i have a sweet tooth. cannot stand tea, even tho i’m a brit </3

19) used to have someone, but they’re probably dead now lol. currently it’s the (platonic) love of my life, @holy3cake

23) no?? never really understood the whole thing for them.

28) uhhhhhhaojahaloaiah where to begin lmao

[slashedgutz]

♡ asks ♡

 Do you have freckles? 

 Do you drink tea or coffee? How do you take it? 

What was the last song you listened to? 

Do you sleep on your back, stomach or side? 

Do you sleep with a stuffed animal? 

Do you prefer drawing or writing? 

What’s your ideal number of blankets to sleep with? 

What’s your favorite band/artist? 

When is your birthday? 

How tall are you? 

What color are your eyes? 

Who are five (or more) people you want to hug right now? 

Fears? 

What’s your favorite color? 

What’s your favorite season? 

Want any tattoos? What of? 

Want any piercings? Where? 

Who is the last person you texted? 

Do you have a best friend? How long have you been friends? 

What/who do you miss? 

How was your day today? 

How much sleep did you get last night? 

Do you believe in aliens? 

When was the last time you cried? Why? 

What’s your favorite decade? 

What are some seemingly childish things you like? 

What’s your favorite book? Or just one you’ve read a few times? 

How are you, really? 

Does it take you a long time to make decisions? 

What are you looking forward to in the near future? 

What are you looking forward to in the distant future? 

If you could go anywhere right now, where would you go? 

Do you sleep with your door open or closed? 

What’s your favorite flower? 

Do you currently have a squish? 

Do you like your middle name? 

Do you prefer dogs or cats? 

Do you have any phobias? 

Do you stay up late?

Do you like the beach? Do you prefer it sunny or cloudy? 

What’s your favorite cartoon? 

Tag 5 of your favorite blogs

Do you have siblings? How many? 

Who was the last person you said “I love you” to? 

Is there anyone you would die for? 

What do you need when you’re sad? 

Have you memorized your phone number? 

Who’s someone you can trust with your life? 

What does your last text say? 

Wild Card. Any question, ask away. 

[slashedgutz]

This scene was like sexually tense

[slashedgutz]

Girls get it done 👯‍♀️🧍‍♂️🇺🇸💪

[slashedgutz]

people on tiktok having a fit over soldier boy and homelander being canonically bi in the comics

oh the fucking stroke these people will have when they find out what happens with them in the comic!herogasm