#carambola star fruit | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

astxrwar · 4 months

Text

drops of blood [3/4]

SYNOPSIS: Bucky Barnes has some wires crossed. He fixates on a barista at a coffee shop near his apartment, and tells himself it's fine as long as he keeps his distance. Except you keep making that distance smaller.

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 11k

CONTENT WARNINGS: masturbation in this one. stalking, exhibitionism. consensual-but-not-safe-or-sane vibes really starting to settle in. Weird psychological elements kinda. For easter eggs you can check my AO3 chapter notes; for additional content check my tag "fic; drops of blood". there is a playlist and it's got hozier and the songs are sooo mood.

Thanks for reading!

Read on AO3

[ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ]

It's been snowing, on and off, the last few days; the gutters on your apartment complex are ancient and decaying, and meltwater pools in the rusted divots along them. The runoff from the rooftop freezes overnight, forms these jagged, spindly icicles on the overhangs, like fingers reaching down towards the street below. You can hear them outside your bedroom, water sliding off the sharp pinpoint ends and hitting the ledge of the window, wearing divots into the brick.

The sound follows you to sleep, the steady drip-drip, drip-drip, drip-drip, staccato and rhythmic and spaced like a heartbeat. In your dream you wriggle out from the tangle of your covers and pad to the window and part the curtains. You look out at the dark night sky and watch the droplets as they fall, glittering flashes of light reflected in the beads of water from streetlamps or the headlights of passing cars somewhere on the street below.

When you look down to the windowsill, the water gathered there has turned color, glittering like rubies, like pomegranate seeds. Like blood, dark and rich and red.

“It’s called starfruit. Carambola, technically.”

It’s just the two of you, and it’s late, the sky black and the street nearly empty and the lights inside the coffee shop reflected back by the windows, the both of your reflections mirrored there. Barnes has been here since seven-thirty, but you’d been busy again, and you feel bad; he must have been horribly bored, just waiting that whole time. If he was, he doesn’t look it– he looks just as neutrally impassive as ever, leaned back in the chair, watching you dump the grocery bag out on the tabletop and pull another chair over to sit across from him.

The fruit is yellow and ridged and weird-shaped, and he prods at it with one hand; the left one, gloved. His mouth twitches.

“Dunno if you’ve ever seen a star,” he says, “But I’m pretty sure they don’t look like that.”

You flash him a smile, dragging the chair a little closer. Under the table– the cheap square of laminated plastic that suddenly feels far too small– your knee brushes against his, and he starts, jerks back a fraction of an inch and straightens, this sharp frisson of tension that reverberates out through his whole body like tremors from a stress fracture. His reflexes are much faster than yours, all of them, and he’s able to compose himself and carry on as if nothing happened before you can respond to whatever that was; he’s already leaning to draw his knife from his boot and setting it on the table by the time any of it has even registered in your brain.

Hyperreactive startle response, you reason; that’s not abnormal. He’s a veteran. Multiple times over. You’d spent a long time researching it, combat PTSD, wanting to know, wanting to have the information to be able to— meet him halfway, or something. You don’t know the details of his life these days, not outside of these slivers of time he spends with you, and you’d never ask, but a part of you still wonders how many other friends he has. How many other people he even talks to, besides you and his therapist. The thought makes something ache, in your chest, something soft and melancholy and a little bit painful; it does something else, too, makes you feel determined to not mess this up.

You figure right now, what would help the most is for you to not mention it. The way he’d– flinched, or startled, or something, jerked back from less than half a second of contact like you’d burned him.

Barnes lays out the starfruit lengthwise across one of those flimsy recycled paper napkins and aligns the knife to cut it right down the middle, which conveniently gives you something to say that’s entirely unrelated to whatever just happened.

“Hold on, wait,” you say quickly, “You’re doing it wrong.”

“Doing it wrong,” Barnes repeats, and maybe you imagine it, the way his shoulders relax. Like he’s relieved. He looks up from it, at you; his eyes crinkle up at the corners, just a little bit, humor glinting in the precise and magnetic blue of his irises, and something strange lights in your stomach in response. “What, because there’s a right way?”

“Yes,” you reply, with a teasing sort of cadence like, duh, obviously.

Whatever that feeling is, It buzzes in the pit of your stomach at the barest amount of warmth in his expression; something like adrenaline or anxiety or frayed nerves, only multiple times brighter. A sensation that’s not unfamiliar, not unrecognizable, either, and also not something you really want to think about or examine too closely, right now. Or— ever.

Barnes opens his mouth like he’s going to say something and then doesn’t. He closes it again, and he glances down and away from you, drums his fingers against the table. Taptaptaptap, taptaptaptap. When he looks at you again, the brightness that had been in his eyes before is gone, snuffed out like somebody’d blown out a candle, and whatever it’s been replaced with is something else entirely.

He sets the knife down. The handle clicks against the laminate and your pulse does something weird at the sound; stutters, maybe, or skips, or just stalls outright. He nudges it with the tip of his finger, at the base, makes it spin in a slow, juddering circle, until the blade is pointed towards him, and then he slides it across the table.

When your heartbeat picks up again, it’s too-fast, thudding quick and insistent in the hollow of your throat, like rabbit’s feet.

“Here,” he says. “You want to, this time? Since– since there’s a right way, and all.”

There’s a roughness to his voice, a strain that makes you think of last week, please do it, I just want you to be safe, makes you think of the blood by the dumpster in the back, how he’d looked when he’d come back inside, they were just drunks, it’s fine, it’s all fine, and that warmth inside of you dissipates.

(No, it doesn’t.)

“Sure, yeah,” you hear yourself say, warbly and far-away, like maybe somebody else is speaking. Somebody who isn’t you. But it’s your hand that reaches out to drag the edge of the napkin across the table, and it’s your hand that closes around the knife, too.

The handle is still warm. Something deep inside of you coils in on itself, in the pit of your stomach or the base of your spine or maybe lower, twists and tightens and pulses like a heartbeat. You think about his hand, being where yours is now, the way that he’d spun the knife a few weeks ago, how he handles it with this unnervingly practiced ease, this familiarity, like it’s something more than an object.

Like it’s an extension of his body.

(Again, you think about the blood.)

Carambolas are long, oval fruits with five- or six-point ridges; you cut it into slices the way you’d slice a banana, and the pieces fall over one another shaped like stars.

“Huh,” you hear Barnes say, and when he reaches for one, the glove probably in his pocket, you swallow around nothing at all, suddenly aware with startling clarity of how close his hand is to your own. How much bigger it is than your own. “Starfruit. No kidding.”

You wait for him to pull back before you move to take your own piece, his flinch replaying in the back of your mind, and something else there, too, that you determinedly continue to ignore. The skin on the carambola crunches between your teeth and the juice floods your mouth, sour-sweet and unfamiliar; you’re aware of it, the mechanical action of eating, the taste, but you’re not paying attention to that.

He hasn’t moved to take the knife back. It’s sitting on the table still, closer to you than it is to him. You don’t even really make the conscious decision to reach for it, you just do, dragging it closer to you and turning it lengthwise; up close, there are flaws that you couldn’t see from a distance, chips in the matte black coating of paint over the flat of the blade and the handle, divots worn into the edge from use.

(You wonder if he’s ever killed anyone with it.)

“How sharp is this thing?” you ask absently– idly– inanely, operating on some stupid and unthinking whim, the same impulse that has you reaching out and touching the tapered point of the knife with your thumb, pressing in, just a little, the skin indenting around it until–

Until something entirely predictable happens. Something that anyone with a modicum of common sense could have guessed at, that most people, you figure, probably would have known well enough to avoid, because most people, you think, possess a rational understanding of actions and consequences that would have kept them from doing what you’d just done.

“Okay,” you say, watching the blood beading up along where the sharpened tip had cut into your skin. It’s just a little, no more than you’d get from a pin-prick or a paper cut, just enough to well up into a drop that grows until the surface tension breaks and it spills onto the flat of the blade, oozing sluggishly down the pad of your thumb. “Pretty sharp.”

You’re not going to wipe it off on the napkin, because there’s food on there, so you bring it to your mouth; the second your hand is clear of the knife, Barnes reaches for it, snatches it back, so quickly that it feels like both things happen at the same time, even though you know, rationally, that isn’t possible.

Barnes is staring at you.

“Sorry,” you blurt out reflexively, “Sorry, that was— pretty stupid of me, don’t know what I was expecting—“

“No,” he cuts you off, “No, you’re— it’s fine, you don’t need to apologize, I shouldn’t have—“ he stops and he stammers and then he cuts out into silence and his expression flickers through a whole bunch of things, some that you recognize and others that you don’t; he looks plaintive and stricken and ashamed and worried and scared and something else that you can’t find the words to describe. “Are you— you’re okay?”

“I— yeah, of course,” you reply, feeling again like there’s something you’re missing. Like whatever puzzle you’re constructing of James Buchanan Barnes—it has this hole, right in the center of it, a silhouette in the shape of whatever it is you’re unable to figure out, and like if you could just find it you might be able to fit everything together, and that it– that he– might finally make sense to you. “Not your fault, I was being— dumb. And look, see? It’s fine.”

You hold out your hand to him. He glances down at it for a fraction of a second and then looks back at you, eyes wavering and glassy and filled with that thing you can’t name.

All that’s left is a thin, red line where the knife had pressed in.

No blood.

You finish late, almost midnight.

It’s your own fault, you’d gotten distracted, neglected clearing out the pastry display case and cleaning the espresso machine and prepping the brewing stations for the next morning in favor of sitting with Barnes for— way too long. He’d left at eleven, on the dot, and you hadn’t asked him to wait because he’d already been there a while, spent most of it just waiting there for you as the steady tide of customers ebbed and flowed and ebbed again, always just busy enough to keep you occupied and unavailable. So when you strip off your apron and your uniform hat and shrug your coat on over your sweater and finally flick the lights off in the shop behind you, you expect to come out to— nothing. Nobody.

But he’s there, standing off to the side, hands in his pockets, expression flat and clear and calm. He makes eye contact with you and something tightens, his brow, maybe, just for a half-second, but then you smile just on instinct, stopping on the sidewalk a few feet away, and his expression, it– softens, again.

“You stayed,” you say aloud, aware of how pleased you must sound and wondering again, somewhere in the back of your mind, if that’s really how you should feel.

“Yeah,” he replies, glancing down at his feet, scuffing one foot against the concrete. “Yeah, sorry, I, ah—“

“No, I wasn’t– I’m glad,” you interject quickly, back turned from him as you lock the door behind you. “I just— I didn’t ask today because I knew I’d be out late, and I don’t want to— take up all of your time, I guess, I already feel like I made you waste so much of it just, like, sitting, so—“

When you turn back to him, he’s staring, the way he does sometimes— the way he does a lot, precise and unwavering and intense enough to make you feel like you’ve been pinned to the spot– and whatever you’d been saying dries up somewhere in the back of your throat.

“No,” Barnes says, takes all of an aborted half-step closer, and then he tears his eyes away, like he’d maybe realized and tried to correct it, the way that he’d been looking at you. “It’s— you’re not a waste of time,” he says, looking at the ground.

The warmth you can feel in your face, you decide, is because of the cold, and nothing else.

He tells you to lock up again, and you tell him that you will.

It’s the very first thing, after pulling the keys from the door, before you hang them up on the peg nearby or strip your coat or take off your shoes— you always flip the deadbolt, and the flimsier lock on the door handle. Force of habit, deeply ingrained.

The windows, though—

It’s the third floor, you reason. There’s a fire escape outside the one that looks in on your bedroom, but the ladder can only be released from the second-story landing, some fifteen feet in the air. You have nothing to worry about. And maybe that’s why you just never get around to it; the fact that the urgency’s not there. It’s not a part of your routine. You mean to do it, because he asks and because you’d said you would, but somewhere between stripping from your work clothes and washing off the smell of stale coffee after a long and annoying shift and padding into your bedroom with a towel wrapped around your chest and water still dripping from your hair and onto the floor—

You always end up forgetting.

You have those dreams again. A whole bunch of times.

The ones with the broken pavement, the darkened street, the heartbeat.

The blood.

His birthday is March 10th. He hasn’t told you this. You know, though. You’ll see him on the 8th, the Friday he always comes in, and that’s close enough, you figure. Probably better that way; with how he is, so closed off, you think he’ll probably want to spend the actual day alone.

There is an Etsy shop that makes pocket-knives. Fancy ones. Objectively cool-looking ones.You place the order at two in the morning Saturday night, operating on some half-awake impulse. It’s four inches long— street-legal— with this wood-paneled handle and a flat-grip hilt and three letters engraved on one side. JBB. You figured that was better, the initials; the interpretation being left up to him, whether it’s Buchanan or Bucky. It’s just a keepsake. Something you thought he might— like.

“What’d you get this time?” he asks, that brightness in his expression again; your heart is beating too fast, and you’re anxious and doubtful and feeling a little bit sick, spiraling and suddenly certain this was all a massive mistake. But it’s in your hand, in a reusable grocery bag, and you hadn’t even brought anything else to fall back on in case you ended up losing your nerve about it like you are right this second.

You pull out the chair across from him and sit down and drop the bag at your feet, awkwardly folding your hands on the table.

He stares at you.

You stare back.

The silence drags out for what must be only a few seconds but still somehow feels like so much longer, thick and oppressive and borderline uncomfortable.

You open your mouth to speak—

Whatever small amount of courage you’d managed to work up evaporates from you completely.

“Nothing,” you say, nudging the bag with your foot until it’s under your seat, “It’s, um— it’s nothing.”

Barnes stares at you some more, and then raises one incredulous eyebrow. “Okay, well, it’s definitely not nothing.”

“Yeah, or, I mean– no, it’s just— “ You grimace and shift in your chair, suddenly realizing how uncomfortable it is, flimsy and straight-backed and too hard. “I had an idea, but it was a bad one, and— just, nevermind. It’s really— it’s nothing.”

Barnes pulls a patently disbelieving face and leans back and straightens out until his legs are just a little bit past yours under the table, his heels angled against the tiled floor on either side of your calves. There’s still a lot of space between the two of you, he’s nowhere near close enough to be touching, but the awareness of it— his body almost bracketing your own, even if only a little— it lances right through the pit of your stomach, a bright shock of electricity that hums somewhere in your whole body, like it’s leached right into your blood.

Barnes is still staring at you.

“Just spill it, come on,” he says. “I’m not so old that I can’t tell when you’re full of shit.”

You swallow, half-nervous and half— something else.

(Something worse, maybe.)

“It’s your birthday this week,” you blurt out, so quickly that the words all sort of blur together into one continuous block of sound. “I remembered from– you know. History.”

You regret saying it before the words have even completely left your mouth, because something in his expression just– shatters.

“You didn’t—“ He sits up straight and shifts back and shuts his eyes, his brow pinching together in the middle. When he speaks again, it’s soft and small and remarkably plaintive. “You did, didn’t you? I can’t— you shouldn’t have— no. Just— no.“

Your mouth twists into this tight little frown.

“See, I knew it was a bad idea,” you say, aiming at sounding dismissive in some light-hearted and trivial way, and unsure how close you get to achieving that. “Don’t worry, I can just— I’ll return it. I should have asked, but I—well, I saw this thing online, and I thought of you, and I didn’t, you know, actually think, and—“

You’re trying, pretty hard, to not sound like you’re a lot of things—self-conscious, embarrassed, a little disappointed— but it’s clear you do a fucking terrible job at hiding all of that, because his eyes snap open and that furrow in his brow worries deeper and before you can even finish he’s leaned forwards again and cut you off completely.

“No, hey, it’s— it’s fine, you can still— if you want—” he starts, stumbling over the words, like he’s saying it faster than he can even think, “If you really want to, then I’ll— it’s okay.”

You’re not looking at him anymore, looking at the table instead, the places where the laminate is cracked and peeling along the edge closest to you. Whatever you feel right now is cold and slimy and awkward and bad, but you figure this is the time to suck it up and get the fuck over it. No gifts. That’s—fine. It’s a totally reasonable boundary, and you should have known better; you should have asked, you should have thought of it earlier so that you would have even been able to ask, but you didn’t. And it’s fine.

When you finally do look back at him, he’s doing that thing again, his eyes gone all wide and glossy and sad. “Just forget about it,” you reply, a lot more firmly than before, “Seriously, it’s fine, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, and I shouldn’t have—“

“No, it’s okay, really,” he interjects, with a strange urgency. “Really, all right? It’s– I— I just didn’t want you to feel like— like you have to. You’re— you already—“

Barnes cuts off mid-sentence, and falls silent like he’d decided whatever he was going to say wasn’t actually worth saying, after all. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, and then he laughs, this short, sharp, self-deprecating sound, and his mouth twitches at the corners, just a little. It’s not like a repressed smile, not really; it’s rueful and distant and a little too sad.

“It’s just—it’s been a really long time since anybody’s—“ he starts, trailing off, clearing his throat, like that might make his voice steadier. Less hoarse. “Since I’ve had a birthday. Guess I kinda forgot my manners. Last time I had to use ‘em was way back in 1942, so. Kind of— rusty.”

Something in your chest— it aches, like somebody’s stuck a hand in past your ribs and grabbed your heart in a fist and squeezed it.

“I’m sorry,” you blurt out. “I thought– I figured somebody would have– since you’ve been back, I didn’t know–”

“No– hey, c’mon, don’t be sorry,” he says quickly. He leans forwards a little bit more, rests his elbows on the table, arms folded over each other. “What do you have to be sorry for? It’s not– it’s not like it’s your fault.”

You manage a kind of watery approximation of a smile at that, and maybe you imagine it, the way that the tension around his eyes and his mouth eases, his expression going just a little bit softer.

(But maybe you don’t.)

“Kinda makes me wish I’d gone all out,” you say quietly, your mouth curling up further at the corners, despite itself. “Sheet cake and everything, you know? Candles. Balloons, even.”

Barnes makes another sound, another laugh, maybe, except not really. More like the kind of thing somebody does as a placeholder, instead of something else. Maybe something worse. “I definitely don’t deserve all that,” he says, with this kind of lightness that feels— feigned. Performative.

And all of this, you think, with this soft sad sinking feeling; all of it suddenly starts to make a lot more sense.

“It doesn’t work that way,” you tell him, before you can think better of it. You’re looking down at your hands, and your voice comes out small, but steady. Certain. “People don’t— deserve anything from anyone, not really. I just— I wanted to do something nice for you.”

You still don’t look up. Whatever might be in his expression right now— you think if you looked at him, if you saw it, you might lose your nerve again. “If— if that’s okay, I mean,” you add, after a while, painfully aware of his silence.

“Yeah,” he says finally, so quiet it’s almost a whisper. “That’s— it’s okay.”

When you do finally glance up at him, his eyes are wavering and glassy and strangely delicate, like a sheen of ice frozen over window panes. The way he’s looking at you; he’s never looked at you like that before. You don’t think anybody’s ever looked at you like that before, soft and fond and fragile and like you might be able to break him wide open, if you tried. If you wanted to.

(And maybe you do want that. Just to get inside, just to see, you think, in some part of your brain buried so deep you can almost pretend you don’t think it at all. You’d do it gently, put him back together after, piece by vulnerable piece, and maybe you want to do that, too.)

You reach for the bag under the table and take out the box inside, wrapped up neat in brightly-colored paper, the cheesy kind they sell at the dollar store, with a pattern of multicolored balloons and ribbons and HAPPY BIRTHDAYs written in this big, overdramatic font plastered all over it.

“Here,” you say, kind of timidly, sliding it across the table.

Barnes stares at it for a long time. He blinks, and clears his throat, and then finally reaches for the package, pulling it closer to the edge.

“You put a bow on it,” he observes, nonplussed, pressing down on the glinting silver loops of folded plastic with his index finger until they flatten against the box.

The corners of your mouth twitch up, just a little. “I did,” you reply, watching as he peels the square of adhesive-lined cardboard off from where it’s affixed to the wrapping paper, mumbling something under his breath that sounds a lot like what the fuck as he examines it; it occurs to you that they’d probably actually tied bows by hand, way back in the 40s, and that this might be his first time encountering one of the shitty little mass-produced stick-on ones that you can get at the dollar store.

It’s kind of funny. And then it’s also kind of sad.

He sets it on the table and spins the package until he finds the edge with the tape and pulls that free, working it open that careful way that you’ve seen old people do, when they’re trying not to tear the paper, and that, too, is absurd and endearing and has you pressing down on the beginnings of a soft smile. “Just rip it, I don’t care, it’s going in the garbage anyways.”

“Oh, yeah,” Barnes mumbles, and then tears right through it. “Old habit.”

With the wrapping paper gone, there’s just the actual box the knife came in, made of dark, varnished wood, spartan and simple. It props up, with this mechanism on the inside, doubles as a display case; you’d fooled around with it when it had arrived in the mail.

He flips open the lid and his breath catches.

You shift, nervously, in your seat, careful to not lean closer or brush his calves with your shoes, just trying to fidget enough to dispel whatever apprehensive wave of tension has washed over you at the face he’s making, the worry lines folding deeper and his brow furrowing in again.

He pulls the folded knife free of the case with his fingers, so carefully, like he thinks he might break it just by touching it at all, and turns it over in his palm.

“It has— those are my initials,” he says, blankly.

You clear your throat and duck your head and look at the table again. “Yeah, um— the guy I bought it from, he does custom engravings, too, and it was free, so.”

Barnes pulls down on the release mechanism with his index finger and the knife flicks open with a soft click. He hasn’t looked at you, and you’re not sure if that’s good or bad.

“It’s, like. Damascus steel?” you continue, painfully awkward, painfully aware of how awkward you’re being and somehow also unable to do anything to stop yourself, “It’s this weird thing where they take two steel alloys and they fold them together a whole bunch of times, and that’s how they make it, that’s why it— looks like that.”

He makes this sound, holding it in his left hand so he can touch the flat of the blade with the tips of his fingers, running them across like he thinks he might be able to feel ridges, or something, evidence that the two contrasting shades of metal are actually distinct and separate parts, but there’s nothing. It’s smooth. You’d done the same thing yourself, just to see; you can’t feel the individual alloys at all, can’t even tell where one ends and another begins anymore. It’s all just one piece, complete and inseparable. Whole.

“How much did this cost?” he says, his voice wavering.

You pick at the spot on your side of the table where the laminate is peeling, working a fingernail under the edge and pulling it up more. “Only two dollars,” you say, keeping your own voice as light as you can make it, hoping with a mounting sense of unease that you haven’t upset him. That it wasn’t as terrible of an idea as your brain is telling you it was. “In— you know. 1940s money.”

Barnes makes some sound that’s probably supposed to be a laugh, but it’s thick and rough and hoarse and doesn’t really sound anything like one. “You said when you saw this,” he begins, turning it over again in his palm, still just staring at it. “You thought of– me?”

“Yeah,” you reply, eyes still cast down. “I— yeah, I thought you might— like it.”

(That’s not a lie. Not really. It’s just not the whole truth, either.)

“Oh.” Barnes closes his eyes for a second. He swallows thickly, gives one jerky and abrupt nod before he opens them again and says, his voice shaking more than you’ve ever heard, “I do, I— I really—this is— thank you.”

And just like that— all of your worry is gone, melted away like frost in the sunlight, and you’re smiling at him before you can even think to stop it, not sure if you would have been able to, anyways.

“Good,” you say, “I’m really glad,” like maybe if you say it with enough insistence he might actually believe that you mean it; that it’s not about pity or obligation or any of that. You’d really just wanted this, nothing else. To do something nice for him.

He gives you another one of those looks again, soft and fond and impossibly grateful.

You hesitate, just for a second, before you add, “Happy birthday, Barnes.”

Almost as soon as you say it, his eyes break from yours so abruptly that it takes you by surprise, feels like it physically jolts and forcibly recalibrates your whole nervous system.

There’s a long, strange, fraught pause.

You’re suddenly aware of how close you are, both of you leaned in with your elbows on this tiny little coffee table that’s a grand total of two feet across, and something inside of you feels like it ignites at the realization. His legs are stretched out underneath it again, longer than yours, larger, too, so you can fit easily in whatever space is left there, even with them straightened and taking up way more than half of it, and you’re aware of that, too, whatever had come alive in your belly burning a little brighter in response.

In the soft orange light from the overhead fixture, as close as you’ve ever been to him, you can see flecks of silver glinting in the stubble along the sharp edge of his jaw; the angular planes of his face and the blunt curves of his cheekbones and worry lines setting in on his forehead. It’s not his birthday yet, it’s still two days away, and you find yourself wondering how old he’ll be.

Thirty-seven, you think, completely arbitrarily; though you’re not going to tell him that.

“Would you do something for me,” he blurts out; it’s a question, but it’s not really phrased like one, comes out pitched low and flat and monotone. His eyes are closed and his expression tense again, like he’s forcing himself to say it.

“Yeah,” you reply, automatic, unthinking, “Yeah, whatever you need, what’s up?”

What he does in response to that could technically be called a smile, based just on description alone, but in reality looks nothing like one at all; the upturn of his mouth too sharp and his eyes too cold and the sum of it deeply self-deprecating. More like a grimace, you think.

The silence stretches. Charged. Expectant. He’s staring at you again, and you’re thinking more stupid things about the color of his eyes, his irises that bright and blinding shade of blue, and you’re not paying attention as much as you should be.

“Can you—” he clears his throat. Looks away. “I want you to call me Bucky.”

You blink at him for a moment, uncomprehending. And then your stomach does this weird and physiologically impossible fluttering jittery thing and your pulse speeds up or slows down or maybe misses a beat entirely. Maybe misses several.

“Oh, I– okay,” is all you say, momentarily too stunned to manage much more than that. Suddenly your tongue feels thick in your mouth, clumsy and uncooperative, like you’ve just somehow managed to forget how to move it with the dexterity required to actually form syllables and say them aloud, and it takes way too long to snap the fuck out of it and stammer through all of three words in a voice that sounds way too soft and way too shy to actually belong to you, “Happy birthday, Bucky.”

Something flickers in his eyes, too fast for you to examine in detail, and then—

He smiles. Really smiles, small and soft and entirely too fleeting, the kind that reaches his eyes and transforms his whole face and softens his expression into something open and honest and so fundamentally different than the way you’re used to seeing him that it almost feels wrong to be seeing it at all. Like you’ve been sucker-punched, or something. Like you’re staring, wide-eyed, into the sun.

For a second, he looks— happy. But just like with anything else you’ve ever seen from him, it’s only a second, and then it’s gone.

“Listen, ah, next week,” Barnes— Bucky— says, stopping at your apartment building; he’s not looking at you, looking at the ground, head ducked down, one hand rubbing at the back of his neck, “How about— maybe I could bring something. Y’know, for— for a change.”

You’re standing on the first step of the staircase up to the lobby door; you think it must put you almost at head-height, compared to him, but it’s hard to tell. He’ll let you sit across from him, at that one little table, but he always stands so far away.

“Yeah,” you say, looking back at him; you’re maybe still kind of running on the high of before, the thought that you might have done something that made him happy, even if just for a second, and you blame that and the fact that it’s nearly midnight for why even something as small as that has you smiling, bright and wide and embarrassingly genuine. “Yeah, that’d be– I’d like that.”

“And don’t forget to lock your—“

“I know, I know,” you cut him off, fighting back the mostly good-natured urge to roll your eyes. “I will.”

He looks uncomfortable, maybe uneasy, but it’s brief and fleeting and less important than the number of other things you’re still thinking about.

You stand there for a long, lingering moment, just looking at him.

He stares right back at you, expression unreadable.

Finally, he clears his throat. Looks away.

When he says goodnight, he says your name, too, and a frisson of— something, it shivers right down the length of your spine at the sound of it.

“Goodnight, Bucky,” you say back, a part of you kind of hoping that you’ll get another smile from him, even just a split second of one.

A flicker of something soft and satisfied flashes across his face, but it doesn’t last, and he doesn’t smile again.

It’s all because of that, you’ll think later, having woken up for no reason at some ridiculous hour Saturday night and found yourself unable to fall back asleep, staring at your bedroom ceiling in the dark.

You’d been thinking about him, because it’s past midnight, technically Sunday. Technically his birthday. And you keep thinking about that smile, all of a split second of one; some stupid part of you had been strangely captivated by it, the way that you’d almost been able to see that twenty-eight-year-old guy from Brooklyn way back when, the ghost of him still in his mannerisms, sometimes, but never as clearly visible as it had been right then. Maybe it was the contrast, the superimposition of that younger, happier, safer self over the face of somebody who wasn’t really any of those things anymore— but you’d been reminded, painfully, of a fact that you’d been doing a great job at ignoring, until now.

The fact that he’s— handsome. That you had, at one point, found him attractive. The crush was brief and surface-level and fleeting, the dead Sergeant James Barnes functioning as a suitably unobtainable receptacle for what was, at the time, your tenuous grasp on the concept of attraction in general. You had realized pretty quickly as you’d gotten older that your type, the kind of people you’re actually interested in, the kind you would actively pursue in real life, are not anything like he was; sweet and charming and boyish and—

And young, a particularly hedonistic voice in your head supplies unhelpfully.

But Barnes— Bucky, your brain corrects, which is also unhelpful and has your stomach doing another one of those weird little flips— he’s not any of those things, anymore. He’s older than he’d been then, by an amount that is not-insignificant, and he’s thorny and standoffish and intense and even a little bit scary, sometimes. That childhood crush had been on a guy who was essentially fictional, a memorialized facsimile of a real person, and that had felt safe, idealized and superficial and well beyond your reach. Whatever your little relationship with Bucky is now— whatever it’s turning into— it’s not like that at all. Sergeant Barnes was some long-dead historical relic, but Bucky is alive, he’s a real human being, someone that you know.

It’s strange to think about, and your mind drifts there, next; the fact that you actually know what he looks like, not just in frozen split-seconds from photographs, but in person, up close. You’ve seen him with a five o'clock shadow and with scruffy days-old stubble and you know that he sometimes nicks himself shaving; you know what he looks like when he’s well-rested and when he’s dead tired with bruise-dark bags under his eyes, you’ve seen him with hair all messed up by the wind and chapped lips when there’d been that cold spell back in February and the air had been freezing and bone-dry for weeks. You know that he takes up way too much space when he’s relaxed, slouches in his chair and stretches his legs out as far as they’ll go, and you know that he’s taller than you, larger, too, that his chest is broad and his shoulders are broader and sometimes when he sits leaned forward his leather jacket bunches up around the tops of his biceps like the sleeves are just shy of being a little bit too small, and you know that his right hand— the only one you’ve ever seen without the gloves on— is tanned and calloused and a lot fucking bigger than yours, that it looks like it might be just a little bit rough, if he were to touch you—

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” you mumble, out loud, feeling your face burn with some awful and deeply embarrassing warmth; you try to just roll over onto your side and smush your face into your pillow and will yourself back to sleep, to not fucking think— whatever the fuck you were even thinking. But it’s two in the morning, that horrible hour when nothing seems real and your impulse control is languishing somewhere hopelessly out of reach, and you’re barely half-awake and verging on delirious and as much as you try to think of anything else— literally, literally anything else— the thoughts just seem to sharpen, defiant. Like some part of your brain that you can’t access or control is all the more interested in bringing these things to mind, now that you’re working so hard to ignore them.

Like the fact that you know he runs hot; if he were to touch you his hand would be rough and it would be warm and it would be able to cover such a large span of your body, effortlessly, without even trying. And the other one— you know that it’s metal, even though you’ve never seen it, and that horrible part of your brain suggests that that one might be cool and smooth and if he were to touch you it might make goosebumps spill down the backs of your arms from the chill, from the contrast; he could span your whole ribcage with both of them, your brain supplies traitorously. Could probably close his palm right around the bones of your wrist, maybe even both at once, could cover the whole soft sensitive stretch of the insides of your thighs, could fit one, easily, around your throat—

You make another sound, a wavering and ashamed and deeply self-reproachful one, but it’s really fucking late and you’re really fucking tired and your brain is doing that stupid thing where it decides to hyperfixate on something specifically because you don’t want to think about it, and you rationalize, with a dull pang of guilt, that you might as well just— get it over with. Give up and give in and then get some fucking sleep and be entirely back to normal tomorrow and never have to think about or address any of it ever again.

You shift again, onto your back, and you squirm your way deeper under the coverlet until it’s up around your shoulders and shove your underwear down with the heel of your palm and you ignore the visceral stab of something like shame if shame had fucking teeth that burns in your belly at just how wet you already are, your fingers slipping and sliding and sticky and rubbing light little circles over your clit.

You stop trying to fight that part of your brain that’s insisting on thinking about it.

His reflexes, they’re so much faster than your own, so inhumanly fast that it sometimes feels supernatural; the things he could do to you, you think, helplessly, how strong he is, how he could probably move your whole body like you weigh nothing at all, how he could keep you from moving, and it wouldn’t even be hard. You think about the shadow of perpetual stubble on his cheeks and jaw and how it might feel, coarse and prickly and rasping against the corners of your mouth or the spot where your neck meets the slope of your shoulder or the sensitive insides of your thighs, and then you think about the sound he sometimes makes, the sharp little exhale of breath, an almost-laugh, imagining it in a wildly different context–

Some kind of awful traitorous little whine of a noise almost escapes, the pressure building behind your voice box, but you crush it into silence instead, pressing the flat of your forearm across your mouth, the muscles in your thighs already starting to twitch and tighten and that pressure in your belly rising way too fucking fast.

You think about his face twisting up and going tense and his eyes screwed shut so tight the little muscles around them tremble with the effort, and you think about the all of a handful of times you’ve ever heard his voice shake. Heard it crack. You think of his fingers winding in your hair and his hand tightening into a fist and how the muscles and tendons there would bunch and flex and the skin stretched across his knuckles would turn pale and taut and bloodless, his expression going finally, blissfully fucking slack, images your brain conjures with a terrifying degree of accuracy because you’ve seen all of this from him already. You know what it looks like, in person, up close, you know what he looks like and what he sounds like and you even know the smell of what must be his aftershave or maybe his cologne, warm and woodsy and a little bit sweet, and it’s so easy to take those memories and separate the details out and rearrange them into something else, a horribly vivid fantasy.

You think about standing on the first step of your apartment complex and looking at him and how he’d said your name.

It takes you by surprise, when you come, how easily you do, quick and sweet and warm and shamefully satisfying, a shockwave of heat that ripples out through all of your limbs and shivers down your spine and pulses in the fibers of your muscles, constricting your breathing and forcing your heels to dig divots into the mattress and your thighs to close up around your hand and a single muffled shuddering sound to finally break the silence you’d imposed on your vocal cords and escape from your open mouth.

Outside your window, the fire escape creaks, like maybe there’d been a sharp gust of wind through the alley where the apartment complex dumpsters are lined. That’s the first thing that registers, as your body relaxes and your breathing steadies and slows and your brain reorients around things that are— real. The sound of swaying metal. Your darkened bedroom. The faint sheen of sweat you can feel starting in the dips of your collarbones. The haze of perpetual city light leaking in from outside, a dim, slanted rectangle of it cutting across the floor under the window, your curtains not quite drawn all the way shut. Exhaustion hits like a fucking freight train; your eyelids are heavy and your pulse is slowing and your limbs feel warm and weighed down like molten lead and your brain is, thankfully, finally, silent.

You hear it again, right before you drift off; the creaking outside. And maybe there’s a shadow, one that cuts across that block of gray-blue light on the floor, as quick and as sure as a knife— but maybe there isn’t. Maybe you’re already asleep. Already dreaming.

This time, you’re down on the street again, walking from the other direction. Not like you’re coming home from work, but maybe the grocery store or a friend’s or the park that overlooks the East River, or something. From this way, you can see your bedroom window; you can see the fire escape, too, a spindly, narrow set of iron staircases affixed to the side, painted black by the landlord a few months back to disguise how it’s all rusted to shit. It’s wrong, though, the whole thing is twisted and mangled like a broken spine— like somebody had torn it straight off the building in places, grabbed some part and pulled until the railing bent and the stairs warped and the brackets ripped right out from where they’d been cemented into the wall.

When you wake up the next morning, it’s deceptively easy to make yourself believe you had just gone to bed at midnight and stayed asleep straight through until your alarm had gone off.

That all of it had just been part of that strange, surreal dream.

Passionfruit is another South American native, about the size of a kiwi, maybe a little smaller; the rind on the outside is this mottled kind of purple color, and the edible insides are soft and jelly-like and weird-looking.

“I had to go all the way to Whole Foods on Houston just to find something new,” Bucky’s telling you– complaining, from the sound of it, but from his face and the curve of his mouth you can tell he doesn’t really mind– dragging a plastic spoon around the edge of the peel. He’d brought two, split the first one in half with the knife you’d bought him for his birthday, and you’d grinned like an idiot, seeing it. “Took a train and everything. Wasted a whole hour.”

“Yeah, well, ” He’s not wearing the glove, not on his right; he usually doesn’t, anymore. You’re trying not to look at his hands, trying to make eye contact like you normally do, trying to even remember how much eye contact you normally make, trying to stop thinking about the tiny little two-foot table or his legs on either side of your own underneath it or the way that he’s staring at you. “There’s only so many fruits out there.”

You take a spoonful of passionfruit out of your half, focus on that. It’s less sweet than it looks; more tart, not exactly citrusy, but close. He’s still watching you, which isn’t unusual, but it’s making you feel weird, jittery and off-balance and unseasonably warm for mid-March.

“I’m gonna have to come up with a whole new gimmick pretty soon,” you say, just to fill the quiet. Just teasing. “Or else you’re gonna get bored of me.”

Bucky makes this flat and disbelieving sound in response, a scoff, dry and short and incredulous, like it’s really that bizarre, for you to even suggest it. Even as a joke.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, sarcasm evident, and then something else about the store, something he’d seen maybe for next week. But you’re not paying attention, just watching him, that warm thing in your belly again, the one that feels like some terrible and badly-kept secret.

The one that just keeps getting harder to ignore.

There really aren’t that many things left; you hadn’t been kidding about that.

Persimmons, most of which are imported from Japan. One of the men in my unit was Japanese, Bucky says, picking out the blood-red seeds with the point of his knife, From San Francisco, Jim Morita. He was a funny guy. Lychee, native to China, the first thing that he dislikes, people eat these things? tastes like— fancy soap, and then figs, something else he’d had back in the ‘40s, when they’d be in season down in California. Those you eat only after carefully inspecting the inside, telling him, you know wasps lay eggs in these things, right? And, no, he did not know that, and I didn’t really want to, either, but thanks, dunno if I’ll ever be able to eat ‘em again, that’s– gross.

“When I was maybe about nineteen,” he says after that, some rainy day in mid-April, the sky still not quite black even after eight, the pavement slick and dark and reflecting back shards of white and yellow from the streetlights turning on above it. “There was this wasp’s nest outside my bedroom window. Steve’d just moved in when his mom died, and he’s– well, he was– real allergic to bee stings, right?”

He pauses, finishes his coffee. The way the light is, right now, the blue twilight from outside and the artificially bright gold from the coffee shop— he looks—

You swallow, glance away.

“Anyway,” Bucky continues, setting the cup down, “Anyway, I was all worried he’d get stung by these things so bad he might really die, or somethin’, so I made him stay inside and went out with a whole three layers of clothes on, a slingshot, and a trash can. Still got stung seventeen times. Supposed to go on a date that weekend– she bailed on me, ‘cause my face was so swollen up.”

You lose the fight to not laugh somewhere long before he finishes; he gets as close to smiling as you’ve seen since his birthday, watching you fold into yourself, giggling.

“Oh, yeah?” he says, “What’s so funny, huh?”

You are, you want to tell him, you’re funny and I like you a lot and you’re probably my favorite part of this stupid fucking job.

“Nothing,” you say, ducking your head with a grin, “Nothing, just– you know people who are allergic to bee stings aren’t usually allergic to wasps, right?”

He blinks at you, and then makes some exasperated noise and leans back in his chair and throws up his hands, like he’s annoyed, except for the corners of his mouth twitching higher. “Yeah, well, how was I supposed to know that? It was the thirties, doll, not like there was the internet.”

And there it is again, like an echo, like maybe it’s really 1941 again and he hasn’t gone off to war yet and he’s just a few years older than you, some twenty-seven-year-old playboy from back before the Playboy magazine had even been founded. You’re strangely endeared by it, and then even more by the fact that he’s not that at all, that it’d come from the mouth of someone older and stranger, who’d been through hell and back in some haphazard approximation of a decade spread out over almost a whole century and come out of it still the same, in a lot of ways, and different, in a lot of them, too.

He’s so stunned by what he’s said it doesn’t even matter that his reflexes are faster than yours multiple times over; he’s still just staring at you, struck dumb and unspeaking and frozen like a deer in headlights, by the time your brain has processed what’d happened.

“I like hearing you talk about it,” you say, smiling softly, “Sometimes you get so caught up it’s like– watching somebody travel in time.”

Bucky seems to relax at the realization that you’re not going to be weird about it. You won’t– you’re not even going to think about it in any amount of detail. Right now you are going to put it in a little box inside your head where you put all of the things about him that you don’t think about anywhere except the privacy of your room, in your own bed, staring up at the ceiling fan blades spinning listless and slow in the dark of the evening or the gray light of pre-dawn.

“That’s really just a nice way of saying you sound like a fucking geriatric,” you add, sidestepping all of those thoughts with a practiced ease and hiding your smile behind your coffee cup. “I bet the old ladies would love you down at the bingo hall.”

He shoots you this rueful look, “Yeah,” he says, self-deprecating, “Yeah, they probably would.”

It’s not that you forget, not really, the two sides to the coin, just that you stop thinking so much about the other one. You just get used to the weird things, and they all kind of fade into the background– the staring and the subconscious fidgeting with the knife and the way that Bucky moves, sometimes, so fast and so precise that it’s unsettling.

The warning. Lock your door. Windows, too.

He always says it. It starts to feel normal. He’s just worried about you, your safety. Hypervigilance, again. He’s a little bit paranoid, and you don’t blame him for that— how could you. It’s not his fault.

And you do remember to lock your door. You always do, you always had, even before he’d started reminding you. You have a routine, to wind down after a closing shift and go straight to bed; you get home and lock your door and hang up your keys, take a shower and brush your teeth and gor right to bed.

By the time you get to your bedroom, you’ve always forgotten about it completely— that he’d said to lock your window, too.

It’s not like he says it the exact same way every time. Sometimes he says remember to lock everything, other times don’t forget to lock up, sometimes he says lock your door, windows, too, always a little different.

Which is why you almost don’t notice, when what he says one night is;

“Really do lock them, this time. Your windows.”

Something flashes in his expression as soon as he’s said it. A flicker of realization, sharp and volatile and impossibly fast, and then his whole face does something you’ve never seen before– it hardens, and it shuts off, and it goes cold.

Your heartbeat pitches up in your chest until it feels like it’s beating in the hollow of your throat, fluttering there like bird’s wings, and your breath catches. It’s only the smallest amount, so little that you can barely hear it, but you know— somehow— that he can. That he notices. That he can tell. Even though his expression stays utterly empty, frozen still and serene like the unbroken surface of a deep, depthless lake— you just know. It’s something in the pit of your stomach, or the base of your spine, or maybe neither of those places, maybe starting in your hindbrain, that base and unthinking instinct that can sense the presence of a threat even before the rational parts of your consciousness have registered it. Whatever it is, it’s flooding your body with adrenaline, like somebody had pulled a fire alarm in a multi-story building, the warning siren wailing and the emergency lights flashing and the inhabitants all scattering towards the exit signs.

Except, in this analogy, you’re not the people, you think. You’re more like the building; stationary, unable to run.

“Okay,” you say, slow and small and strangely calm, “You always say that. Why?”

A muscle in his jaw tenses, but he doesn’t say a word. Just stands there, silent, like a statue, his eyes flat and cold and devoid of anything at all.

You think of a lot of things you haven’t in a while. The knife and the blood and the Winter Soldier.

Inside of you, something twists— something that, you think, might be fear.

(Something that isn’t.)

Your mind is racing. Your thoughts— they’re scattered and fragmentary and moving so fast you can’t hold onto them, connected by some subconscious thread of understanding that you can’t see.

What you can see, though, is how Bucky’s still looking at you, his eyes vacant and empty and his expression so lifeless he looks catatonic; it’s not like he’s forced himself into some impassive and impenetrable detachment as much as it looks like he’s torn out everything inside and crushed it into nothing, ground it into the dirt, anything he might think or feel. Left this emptied-out imitation of himself, like a shell. Like a skeleton. Like that very first time, the husk of the pomegranate, the wilted, waxy skin, with all of the red stripped clean—and it startles you, how vehemently some part of you reacts to it. Thinks, a little desperately; no. Please don’t do that. Please come back.

“Bucky,” you say, on purpose, after he’s been silent for a long time, careful to keep your voice soft; he flinches, a brief, slight thing that’s almost imperceptible, a fissure splitting across whatever facade he’s put on. Something inside of you clings to it, evidence that he’s still even there at all, that he hasn’t shut himself off from you completely.

He makes this low sound, and he finally moves, just a little, shifts his weight and drags his palm down the lower half of his face.

“I just want to know that you’re– safe,” he manages, his voice carefully flat, not really admitting to anything, not explicitly, but this weightless trembling shock of adrenaline pierces right through your belly, anyways.“That’s– that’s all.”

You swallow. Your throat feels tight, your chest, too, like your muscles have all constricted, like your lungs can’t expand fully. You’re suddenly aware of the sound of your own breathing, aware that something must be off about it, that it’s coming too fast or too shallow or just somehow wrong, because it feels like you’re not getting enough air. And maybe that explains it, the way that you feel right now, dizzy and breathless and strangely numb, like your brain is just– shut off. Or, no, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s the opposite, maybe it’s working so fast you can’t make sense of any of it, all of your thoughts blurring out into this long indecipherable stretch of white noise.

Maybe, you think, distantly, maybe you’re just– overreacting. Maybe you’re being paranoid. Maybe you’re overworked and overtired and all of this is just a very long, very strange list of uncanny coincidences.

(But also— maybe not.)

“But I’m not, like–” your voice cracks, and you have to clear your throat, force yourself to focus on steadying it when you continue, “You don’t think I’m– in danger, or anything, right?

Bucky opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.

“No,” he says, his voice something worse than hoarse, like it’d been ripped to shreds, like you’d carved the word right out of his mouth.

He looks like he might say something else, but you cut him off before he can. The way that he seems right now– you’re afraid that if he speaks again it might be something terribly final. I shouldn’t, he’d said, once, and meant it like he should go, and not come back. Meant it like goodbye.

“Okay,” you blurt out, before you can even think; because, you realize, you don’t want that, you do not want that at all, and that matters to you much more than whatever may or may not be happening right now. You don’t want him to leave and you don’t want things to change and you want everything to stay exactly the same as it’s been, and you would do anything– rationalize anything– to make sure of it, to have the assurance that he’s not going to just disappear, that you wouldn’t just wake up tomorrow to a world in which you'd never see him again. You’d do it in a heartbeat.

(You’ve done it already. Ignored things that, you think, maybe you shouldn’t have. Lots of them, that perpetual voice in the back of your head supplies– so, really, even if you are right, even if you’re not being paranoid, what’s one more?)

“Then it’s fine,” you tell him, forcing your voice to be as steady as you can make it. “It’s— I’ll lock it, I will, as soon as I get inside, and– and everything will be fine, okay? You won’t have to worry anymore.”

You glance down at your feet, the pavement, huscuffing your shoe against the sidewalk, toeing at a crushed, dirt-caked bottlecap wedged into a crack in the asphalt, just to give yourself an outlet for your nerves. Waiting for him to say— anything.

He doesn’t say a word.

“I gotta go to bed, it’s pretty late,” you say, after a while. You look back up at him. You wonder if he’d even taken his eyes off you at all. “I’ll—I’ll see you next week, though?”

His face twists up, just for a second, his brow raising, furrowing in, his eyes gone wide and round and stricken, before he seems to notice the shift in his expression and forces it to smoothen out again. “If— if you still do,” he says, “Then— I’ll— yeah.”

He starts saying something else, but you say, “I do,” before he’s even got the first syllable out.

He stares at you for a long moment before he responds, and it takes everything you have to hold his gaze, not to blink or flinch or look away.

Maybe you should, you think.

Maybe you should have been doing that the whole time.

At night, you replay everything, alone in your bedroom. In the absence of that nervous adrenaline you’d felt down on the street, it all kind of seems silly. Bucky knows you; he knows that you’re a terminal procrastinator and he knows that you’re always really tired after work and he knows that you never really took it seriously, the thing with the windows. It’s not so outlandish to think he’d just– guessed, and guessed right, and then felt bad about having anxiety, the way he, historically, feels bad about ever having any kind of visible emotion that’s considered less-than-palatable. And all of the things about his behavior that your brain had taken as evidence otherwise, it had been so subtle that you could barely be certain that there’d been anything there at all. He gives you so little to go off of, it’s like it renders your rational mind utterly useless, the scraps of information you feel like you have to fight to even get in the first place arranging themselves into absolutely nothing.

All you have, then, is your gut. Your instinct.

You glance over at the window. The curtain is open, and you can see the moon between the silhouettes of the buildings across the street, hanging pearlescent and full against the backdrop of the night, like the globe of an eye. Milky and opaque and sightless. Blind.

You really should lock it.

Yeah, you think, yeah, you probably should. But– just because you’d promised. Tomorrow you’ll do that, before you go to work, and then Bucky won’t have to worry anymore, and everything will be fine.

You tell yourself this, firmly, like that will make it true.

Everything will be fine.

In your dream, the eye of the moon in the window has a pupil, endless and blacker than the night sky, blown out so wide the iris around it is just this slender, paper-thin ring of color.

Blue.

You wake up in the middle of the night with a start, your blanket kicked down into a twisted heap at the foot of your bed, your bare legs and the stretch of your exposed stomach where your shirt had ridden up in your sleep staring back at you accusingly, every inch of your skin burning up and running hot like you’re fighting a fever. You’d fallen asleep without getting up to close the curtain, something you normally do in the spring and summer when the sun rises before you wake up; you tell yourself it’s just that you’re not in the habit yet, haven’t gotten used to needing to bother, because it’d been winter. But it’s the middle of the night and your body temperature feels like it’s skyrocketing and your pulse is so loud in your ears you can hear it, and when you try to lie to yourself it’s like your brain just won’t let you.

You’re shaking, you realize.

You’re not even a little bit cold.

You force yourself up out of bed on unsteady feet and you move to the window and you don’t lock it, you don’t even think to, but you do, shamefully, draw the curtains closed.

When you lay back flat in your bed you pull up your blanket, even though your skin is sticky and glinting with a faint sheen of sweat. You draw it up over your whole body, your head, too, and only when it’s covering you completely do you finally slip your fingers past the elastic of your underwear. The thoughts rush back again and you fall right into them, his name in your mouth; even if you can’t quite bring yourself to say it aloud, just holding the silent shape of it on your tongue and so close to your teeth, feels like this terrible, bloody secret—Bucky. Bucky. Bucky—

You come quickly, so quickly, well before the air starts to feel thin, but you still gasp for a breath when you throw off the blanket after, like you’d been suffocating. You force your lungs to expand out far past what feels natural, filling them until your chest starts to burn and then holding it for as long as you can.

You exhale, horribly unsteady, and draw in another, slower breath–

There’s a sound, from outside, like something scraping against brick, and your breathing— it catches, so hard you nearly choke on it.

You burrow deeper into your blanket, trembling, your whole body alight with adrenaline and your brain telling you that you’re being paranoid and something deeper telling you– or wishing, hoping, which is maybe even worse– that you’re not. That it’s–

You can’t bring yourself to think it, not even in the privacy of your own head, but you don’t even have to. Whatever brief and shallow feeling of satisfaction you’d felt– it’s already gone, like it’s evaporated, and that feverish, trembling warmth has flooded right back.

You think you might be afraid of Bucky Barnes. You’re pretty sure you should be.

(You know, though, deep down– you know you’re not.)

#bucky barnes x reader #fic; drops of blood #please tell me why this is going to finish at like 4 chapters/45k #HOWWWW!#it does not feel that long when I'm writing it

40 notes · View notes