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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #ai #economics #business #hype #bubbles #bubblenomics #residue

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bluemerakis · 4 months ago

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────────── ᝰ bluemerakis ༝༚༝༚ ────

❝ skin covered in ego ❞

❝ all the stars ── ၊၊||၊|။||||။၊| ── kendrick lamar ft. sza ❞

─ ۶ৎ ─

pairing ୨୧ soldier boy x fem!supe!reader

warnings .ᐟ cussing, dual pov, angst, oral f receiving, unprotected sex p in v, fluff, just sappy drama actually. pls lmk if i forgot any :)

synopsis ─ a retrospect of how soldier boy meets his saving grace—a superhero he’d been forcibly co-partnered with during payback’s prime. throughout their time spent together, she helps to refine all the fragments of him that have always lingered within, but had lacked the grip to pull together into something whole—respectable. eventually, with her influence, he reinvents his image into a sense of self he can claim without pre-programmed shame, and in the process, he discovers just how pivotal her existence is within his formerly, self-centred universe.

word count ~ 9.2k

based on this fic

──────────────────────

ʿ Skin covered in egoʾ

Vought-American’s council room felt suffocated with the aged, bronze statues looming in every corner of the space—a dramatic glorification of countless Vought-owned Supes, both old and new alike, that you’d neglected to learn the names of. Like honourable guards, they perched on their metal posts with watchful eyes meant to convey a sense of security and comfort. But instead, the weight of their rusted, faux eyes compressed your lungs to the point of shallow, jittery breaths, and the impressive height on them made you feel belittled. Judged.

Misplaced—like you’d never measure up to all the virtues of Supe life that their metal forms had come to embody.

The unwelcoming, inanimate atmosphere was only given a certain life by the company’s executives, who’d personally received you at the doors and guided you into this room. But there’d been no genuine sentiment beyond professionalism to warm their welcoming smiles, and every advance they’d made in becoming better acquainted with you had felt orchestrated—robotic. It’d done little to soothe your unease, and everything to feed the mental monster fear-mongering your better judgement.

Now, in the midst of the council room, the executives were fanned out all around you in a formation that should’ve made you feel caged in—like you were about to be fed to something far worse than the statues’ lingering jaws of judgement. But even then, you didn’t seize any wise instinct to flee. You felt immobilised by dread—the dread plaguing the idea of new beginnings. Your new beginning as Payback’s newest, super-abled member.

The title should’ve left you feeling honoured. Where you should’ve celebrated the letter housing the formal invitation, you mourned the loss of the comforts you’d come to call home. Where you should’ve marvelled at the idea of getting to work with Vought-American’s renowned Supe team, you harboured only a nagging fear of never measuring up to their standards. Where excitement should’ve imploded within at the mere idea of meeting the Soldier Boy, only panic arrived to brace every inch of your mind.

You were terrified.

And what didn’t help your rattled lungs was the way the doors to the room seemed to part with a dramatised creak, displacing the tense silence momentarily—only to replace it with an overwhelming air of self-righteousness as the man you dreaded meeting finally strode into the room. It was as though all the air in the room parted and pressed up against the walls to accommodate his demanding existence, and all at the expense of everybody else unlucky enough to share the space.

Clad in the iconic green uniform you’d seen advertised across countless costume stores, Soldier Boy marched a line that drew directly toward you. His jaw was perched on some invisible stage of importance, his hardened eyes finding yours in a cynical standoff. His broad shoulders were braced with a practiced composure as he covered the length of the floor, and it only added to the overwhelming demeanour you were sure he’d forged for the sole purpose of intimidating everybody below his pay grade.

As he drew up before your waiting form, you found yourself rooted to the spot—frozen with the uncertainty of how to approach the figure you’d come to know as America’s icon. But thankfully, you were shielded from Soldier Boy’s grilling glare as the executives all around you stirred, taking turns to greet the leader of Payback with more enthusiasm than they’d showed you.

You took that moment to gather your wit, but your attention didn’t falter from Soldier Boy, and you couldn’t help but notice the way he came off as a dull, painful contrast to his bustling higher-ups. He seemed disinterested, gloved hand outstretched to deliver curt, half-hearted shakes—if only to fulfil the duty of formalities that must’ve come hand-in-hand with his position of import. It was so unlike the charming and chatty persona you’d grown used to seeing through on-screen commercial airings, but his aloofness didn’t seem to phase the executives.

It shouldn’t have surprised you, either. Meeting your heroes never went to plan. Reality wasn’t something that could be as carefully scripted as the faux media aired from every corner of America—and like that, you knew that Soldier Boy’s cheery personality was all an act. It’d fooled you, that’s for sure.

As you stood there, unable to tear your gaze away from America’s Sweetheart, you couldn’t help but seize the close-up company to study every detail about him—his sharp features rigged with enough tension to fuel an army, the captivating green of his eyes framed with a hard stare, and the soft, light brown hair that seemed to effortlessly catch the room’s light. And yet, for the long-standing reputation of war he’d forged his name within, there was not a single scar carved into his fair skin to reflect the records. But it didn’t make him less rough and raw.

And admittedly, he was breathtakingly beautiful—like he was made to be more of a God than a disciple.

Everything about him laid a siege on your lungs—made breathing the same air as him feel impossible. But you were forced to adapt when his attention finally forsook the executives to pin you down, and for a second, you saw him squint with a curiosity that mirrored your own. But the fraction of transparency he’d let weaken his carefully-curated mask was blinked away before he furthered his advance on you, effortlessly clearing a line through the loitering executives.

Subconsciously, you held your breath as you watched his taller frame stagger up to you. He drew up before you with an arm’s length of space to spare, the shy space breaching your bodies quickly becoming infused with his strong cologne. His gaze was intense as he searched between your features—enough of a silent interrogation to make your skin crawl with the urge to buckle your head. But you didn’t. You feigned bravery by holding his quiet challenge with a fragile determination, just hoping that he didn’t catch the subtle bop of your throat.

Your apparent boldness must’ve been an amusing feat on your part because the corner of Soldier Boy’s lips hitched with a light smirk. For a few seconds, neither of you said anything, but it did everything to thicken the air circulating between your faces. You wished he knew what was going through his mind as he scrutinised what felt like every inch of your face. It was intense—slightly uncomfortable, but you continued to hold his attention out of a petty need to prevail. Your head only buckled to shed his glare when movement on his part caught your eye, his hand finally neglecting his formation to lift in the offer of a greeting.

“What’s your name?” He asked—the sound unexpectedly sonorous. Dulcet. Composed. It’s not an octave you’ve ever heard broadcasted across the radio—so you figured it must’ve been a genuine detail about him. Something worth remembering.

Hesitantly, you reached out your own hand, drawing it rigid to still the nerves before you slid your fingers across his palm. Instantly, his own fingers seized your hand in a firm grasp—but he didn’t shake on it. It made you lift your head with mildly-alarmed curiosity, and when you met his gaze once more, you saw that same look of scrutiny he’d branded you with upon his arrival.

“Does the mouth on you talk, or’s it only there for the sake o’ pretty smiles? Which you still haven’t graced me with, by the way,” He said smoothly, features now polished with the same charm he often weaponised amongst his fans—as if you were some fangirl he’d expected to swoon under his influence.

You uttered a mental scoff at that. You’d be damned to let Soldier Boy believe your otherwise muteness was owed entirely to his presence—and while it definitely played a role, it wasn’t the singular circumstance holding your tongue hostage. Today had been extremely overwhelming. Draining. It had put a damper on your mood—and clearly made you come across as a meek thing star-struck into silence. But you were far from it, and if you were to work alongside Soldier Boy for the foreseeable years to come, you’d rather not have his first impression of you be a doting fangirl.

You firmed up your own grip on his hand, which the Supe acknowledged with a hitch of his brows and a subtle jut of his lower lip. “She speaks,” you replied eventually, thankful that the sound was clear and not breached by a quiver. “And she smiles when she’s smiled at, which I don’t seem to remember you doing, either,” you added with a certain spunk.

Soldier Boy grinned at that—perfect, white teeth blooming into view. But it didn’t last long, and it certainly wasn’t as authentic as the action was made to be. It quickly simmered into a laxity of his jaw, tongue poking out to drag across his lower lip—like he was attempting to understand you. “Alright,” he conceded ambiguously, his grip on your palm unrelenting. “Fair enough—and if you’re goin’ to be joinin’ my team, you better keep on makin’ points as valid as that,” he huffed half-heartedly, eyes making a bold dip toward your lips. “And some more,” he muttered distractedly.

You pretended not to notice his wandering, flirtatious eyes, your own gaze steadfast at eye level despite the faint hint of self-consciousness burning your body hot. “Our team,” you corrected thickly, which made the Supe’s attention snap back to you with a newfound focus that banished his play-boyish desires from existence.

“The hell you mean our team?” Soldier Boy demanded tensely, his voice roughened with a note of disapproval as he finally released your palm in disdain—like he’d touched something revolting. But he didn’t wait for your answer as his head swivelled to drink in the idling executives, and the glare on him must’ve been scathing because a few of them were instantly averting their attention—like students who didn’t want to be picked on by the prying teacher.

You watched the Supe retreat a stride as he sought to confront the only people in the room with more power than him—in title, at least. If it came down to getting physical, god bless their souls.

“The fuck is she on ‘bout, huh?” He snapped, his voice resonating across the room. “Payback’s mine—I built this team up from the fuckin’ ground. I own each and every one o’ those sorry shits—turned them into somethin’ worth a damn! So if you think I’m just gonna step aside and let some dreamy-eyed rookie take the credit, you better think again—or somebody’s gettin’ their useless fuckin’ head bashed in.”

You grimaced at the temper on him. It took one hell of an ego to speak so confidently about one’s ability’s, and you didn’t doubt Soldier Boy harboured enough of it to represent the entire male population. It made you wonder how his super suit could contain all six feet of it.

The executives had warned you about his temper prior to this meeting, and the likelihood of an outburst once the news finally reached him. You’d taken it with a grain of salt—unconvinced that the leader of Payback could be so comparable with a teenager grappling with puberty—but as you stood observing his slightly feral stance, you decided, then, that you’d seen it all.

Feeling as though you should have some say in this—being a new addition to the team in question—you cleared your throat with enough purpose to turn all the heads in the room. Soldier Boy abided last, as though it was a mockery of his importance to spare you the light of day. The Supe turned his body fully to face you, and the displeasure radiating from his rigid stance made you clench your jaw with careful consideration. The last thing you wanted was to ruffle his invisible cape the wrong way. You didn’t need that sort of drama on your first day—and you certainly had zero desire to entertain a feud that would taint the rest of your days with Vought-American.

You offered Soldier Boy a tiny nod of thanks—a peace-offering, but the Supe merely lifted his chin, as though undecided on his standpoint with you. You took your lower lip into a brief bite before releasing it with the first clause of your peace-treaty.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” you began lightly, taking a few steps toward him until you were returned to the personal vicinity from before.

“That so?” He mocked bitterly, watched you with careful eyes almost turned scornful. But he didn’t falter an inch from his position, so you figured that he was listening, anyway.

You lifted your hands in a steadying gesture. “Look, I’m not here to steal your spotlight—”

“Nobody’s stealin’ my spotlight, sweetheart,” he cut in with a scathing huff, and an equally heartfelt frown to accompany it.

Your nostrils flared with a breath of patience, providing the pause you needed to reason against the urge to strangle him. “Like I said,” you continued tensely. “Not here to steal your spotlight. The only reason Vought decided to recruit me is because I’ve been gaining attention with my most recent feat—”

“Yeah?” He interjected, arms coming up in a cross as his head tilted with the slightest interest—but somehow, it still felt like a mock. “And what’d ya do to get on Vought’s radar? Campaign for the destructive feminists? Screamin’ some free the nipple bull-shit at the top o’ your lungs?” He paused at that, lips drawing into a slight pout as his eyes flickered skyward. Then, with a slight tilt of his head, he made some silent concession. “On second thought, they might be onto somethin’ with that,” he stated, eyes finding yours in a mischievous squint—like he sought to get a rise out of you.

You weren’t going to let him rub your hair the wrong way, so you disregarded that comment entirely—but it didn’t stop the word dick from blaring at the back of your mind. “It was a fire,” you clarified, which apparently was a detail mundane enough to make Soldier Boy’s lips draw back with disinterest. “Started in the park of a neighbourhood I used to patrol frequently. Burned right through to the nearest house, and the family got caught inside. Parents and three kids—one barely old enough to walk.”

As the Supe listened, the judgmental furrow in his brow didn’t relent, but there was some new interest to his attention because his chin jerked in your direction. “So?” He prompted. “What’d you do—tell it to fuck off? You a wind-whisperer or somethin’?”

Far from a wind-whisperer, but I know a few ways to tell you to fuck off, you remarked silently. Your tongue poked at the inside of your cheek in a summons of patience. “It’s easier to show than tell,” you said tensely, the explanation so ambiguous that Soldier Boy frowned questioningly.

“Well, we don’t got all fuckin’ da—” his words caught in his throat as he sputtered on some invisible lump, his arms uncrossing in a state of panic. Almost instantly, his cheeks flushed with a deep red only elicited by a lack of air, and the veins usually tracing his temple in secrecy now bulged with a concerning thickness. His eyes—bloodshot in the state of his asphyxiation—flickered to you with a primal fear that you didn’t believe he’d ever worn, before his attention dropped to the hand you’d brought up in a focused clench.

Decidedly satisfied with your display, you relaxed your flexed fingers, and it was the singular permission that the Supe needed to draw in a large bout of air, his chest rattling with a series of coarse coughs. He staggered over slightly, but caught himself just in time to remain respectable.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he choked out, frown lines carved into his forehead as he lifted his head to glare at you past stray strands of his bangs—freshly escaped from the prison of his collected hairdo. “Alright. . .” He murmured hoarsely, fashioning caution—and wiser words—as he straightened to full height and faced you once more. “I’ll admit, that’s not the worst parlour trick.” You knew that it was Soldier Boy for that was impressive, so you accepted it with a satisfied jut of your chin. Then, the Supe’s index finger lifted in your direction in a stern scolding. “But don’t fuckin’ do that again,” he warned.

You smirked at that, crossing your arms with the intent to negotiate. “Stop doubting my capabilities and I won’t have to,” you countered smugly.

Soldier Boy glanced around the room with a clenched jaw, as though unhappy with his dwindling sense of control, before turning to face you again. “Yeah, whatever,” he relented with a sniff, but you could have sworn that there was a shade of red still lingering in his cheeks. “So I take it you choked the shit outta that fire, too?”

“Mhm. Saved the whole family. Some guy saw the whole thing and reported it to. . . whoever the hell makes things like this happen. Next thing I knew, a Vought-American letter’s in my mailbox. Apparently, I left quite an impression on the public, and they thought it’d be good for the scores—having me partner up with the Soldier Boy.“

“The public is gonna love it!” One of the executives chimed in eagerly, as though seizing the opportunity to quench the lead Supe’s ruffled fire once and for all. But when Soldier Boy slowly turned to cast him a glare, he wilted back into silence.

Turning back to you, the Supe scoffed. “What—so we’d be like America’s next, hottest couple?”

You paused at that, mulling over the title. Admittedly, it had a certain ring to it. “You could put it that way,” you said thoughtfully. “Because if there’s one thing this country loves—it’s Supe scandals.”

For the first time, the lead Supe showcased an emotion other than scorn and condemnation—he laughed, genuinely laughed. “Ain’t that the goddamn truth,” he agreed gruffly, head briefly tilted to the ground as he considered your words with ridicule. “God bless fuckin’ America.” Then, he lifted his eyes to you, and they softened with just enough tolerance to come off as respect. “Whaddya say then?” He asked. “Ready to take on the role, sweetheart?” There was the faintest ghost of a smirk on his lips—like he was eager awaiting your reply.

“First of all, drop the sweetheart thing,” you told him flatly. “It’s not flattering, and it’s certainly not the panty-dropper you think it is.”

Soldier Boy’s brows lifted with brief offence at being called out, but then his chin dipped in surrender. “Fine. You got somethin’ else you prefer? Cause you still haven’t told me your name.” His eyes glinted with something mischievous as he added, “sweetheart.”

With a light shake of your head and a weakly amused smile, you offered him your name. He rolled it over his tongue once or twice, then winked in acknowledgment once he’d mentally marked it down.

“A beautiful name, but I still think sweetheart suits ya,” he wondered aloud.

You couldn’t help but smile at the nerve of the Supe. He’s attractive—he knew it, and so did you. And you also couldn’t deny the way some primal part of you seemed to flutter at his attention, but you were wise enough to know that it wasn’t exclusive—nothing ever was when it came to him. “Well, I guess it’s a shame that you’ve named every other woman you come across sweetheart,” you scoffed.

Soldier Boy’s smirk deepened, like he enjoyed your nerve. “What—you callin’ me some sorta floozy?”

You shrugged innocently. “If you really have to ask that, I think you know the answer.”

His chest rattled with a chuckle—you figured you should’ve started a tally of all the times you got the Supe to laugh. You might’ve been able to pawn it off to some museum showcasing historical events to behold.

“Yeah, alright,” he murmured half to himself, then sobered his attention as he cast you a scheming glance. “Just one last thing,” he said.

“What?”

Soldier Boy leaned into your vicinity—close enough to feel his breath flush your nose with warmth. “Think you can handle being tethered to my side ‘round the clock?” He murmured lowly, a smug smirk poking through as he eyed you like an object of desire.

You braced your chin with a boldness to match his. “Can you handle me?” You countered levelly, arms coming up in a cross as you searched his sultry stare.

“Damn right I can,” he murmured even softer than before—more like drawled, but it was no less intense. His attention snagged on the view of your lips for a few, hot seconds before fluttering back up to your eyes.

You stole your own glance of his lips, and you wandered whether they were good for anything other than offending every person he came across. “Really? Sure I won’t take your breath away?” You jabbed lightly, casting him a heavy-lidded stare.

Air jetted through his nostrils in an amused sound, his tongue poking through to sweep across his lips. “You already have,” he admitted with a heavy stare. “And I don’t think you’re quite finished yet, either.”

Those words took you by surprise, your head recoiling a measly centimetre, but Soldier Boy seemed perfectly content with his choice of words—unmoved by your reaction. With a mildly flustered swallow, you shook your head lightly. “You’re trouble, Soldier Boy,” you remarked carefully, but a fraction of a smile still managed to slip through.

“Ben,” he corrected, lips wound thin with a devilish smirk. “And you may be right—but I’m all the right kinds of trouble, sweetheart.”

ʿ Get to talkin', I get involved, like a rebound

Got no end game, got no result, got to stay downʾ

The first week at Vought-American had been quiet on the mission front, so you’d spent most of your time exploring the compound, though not without unsuccessfully shaking Ben’s company. More often than not, the lead Supe got his fill of entertainment by trailing around after you like a sheet of toilet paper you’d accidentally tracked from the bathroom. It drove you insane, but he was relentlessly clingy, so he’d gotten his way and stuck around.

And what made it worse, was that—against your will, you’d come to tolerate him. But as the weeks turned to months, tolerate became appreciate, and it wasn’t long before appreciate became crave. Coming to terms with the fact that you actually sought out Ben’s company had been a jarring moment in your character arc. You’d made yourself the promise—when it all began—not to let the faux title of America’s Power Couple influence your heart. But beneath all the Supe makeup, you hosted a very human heart that thumped loud and clear, and it was the ultimate weak link that betrayed your own.

You’d tried hard to fight the urges that had jumped you without any prior warning, but it felt impossible to escape when you were attached to his hip every other day—if not to cover one another in adrenaline-worthy missions, then to pose for the camera as the duo that America had come to adore. The news of your partnership had taken to the headlines almost immediately, and it meant that there was no going back on it—meant that you truly were stuck with him now.

Most of the public had voiced their adoration for your relationship, and as part of the act to make it believable, Vought had sent you both to events as a couple forced to act in love. There were shared hugs, hands draped across your waist during idle chatter, glances exchanged with intense passion, and lips contacting with a point to prove—and it’d all made it difficult for you to not join in on the public’s swooning.

In stark contrast to your own, very clear struggle with the push on professional boundaries, Ben seemed elated by it all. Marvelled in it, even. He seized every opportunity to make casual remarks that burned your cheeks hot, or made sure to hover his hand a fraction too long when lightening the load on your palms. He could see right through you, and he’d made true on his word to pose the trouble he’d warned you of.

One night, he’d taken it a step—one giant leap further.

After a late night, last minute meeting with the executives, you and Ben had exited the room in tandem, and it wasn’t supposed to lead anywhere past walking you back to your suite. But it did. It did—from the moment he cut in front of you with an earnest look morphing the features you’d come to memorise in the midst of your growing infatuation. And it did when he took the step that pressed your bodies close together, exchanging heat like a symbiosis that had always meant to exist. And it did when his hand came up to frame your jaw with a gentleness you’d never seen him practice, his lips lowering onto yours with a point that invalided your every pre-conceived notion on his capabilities.

You should have pulled away—if you’d known what was good for you because you knew that Ben was no role model for long-term commitments. And you knew that your heart would be the first to find that out somewhere down the line. But because you chose to listen to what was good for your body, instead, you pressed your lips against his with a force that made you an equal accomplice to bad decisions.

You should have pulled away, but you didn’t.

ʿ It's the way that you making me feel like nobody ever loved me

Like you do, you doʾ

The door to Ben’s suite slammed closed behind you before his hands seized your waist firmly, his lips hot on the trail to provide all the reinforcement needed to corner you against the nearest wall. With a passionate lack of care, the length of your back was pressed flush against the cement as his palms glided over the meat of your hips, squeezing the anatomy with an appreciative firmness before they glided to the underside of your thighs.

His lips feuded with your own in a sloppy and heated make out, then dipped into the divot of your chin when he buckled an inch to gather the momentum needed to hoist you up. Your arms instinctually found his neck in a vice grip, legs coming up to wrap around his waist as he successfully—and effortlessly—lifted you into his grasp. His head leaned back into yours to slur a brief kiss across your lips, large palms tightening around your thighs as he turned and steered the both of you toward the nearest sofa.

You were blind to where the sofa began, but Ben lowered your form just enough for the armrest to graze the small of your back before you were tossed a very short distance into the cushioned length of the couch. The thud of your back against the sofa knocked a breath from your lungs, but you weren’t afforded the chance to replenish it before the Supe came crashing down on you with one motive in mind: devouring you.

His lips crashed into yours once more, one hand curling around your nape, tussling your hair as he pressed you further into his famished lips, while the other skilfully worked at undressing you. And it wasn’t long before he was dragging a wet trail of kisses down the arch of your neck, around each perked bud of your breasts, and down the line of your abdomen.

“Fuck, Ben, it feels so good,” you breathed out appreciatively, head burrowing back into the sofa and toes curling into the material as he flicked and dragged his tongue through your folds—tracing all sorts of patterns he’d perfected through prior experiences you’d chosen to bar from your mind.

His tongue was rough—impatient, and it did a splendid job at summoning your high. But his hands trapped your thighs against the sofa to deny the buck of your hips that would’ve given you the last push you needed to fall into the abyss of pleasure, and before you could complain, he pulled you up at the wrist and spun you around.

Positioned ass up and face down, he smoothed over the skin of your ass with an appreciative hum. “You look good like this, sweetheart,” he remarked crassly—only because he knew it’d burn you the darkest shade of red. And it wasn’t long before he slid himself into your welcoming entrance, his thrusts driven with by purpose—rough, quick and straight to the point.

He fanned a hand over the small of your back, pressing you further into the sofa while the other found firm grip at your hip. The space was filled with a raw skin-on-skin percussion that sounded primal—shameful, almost, but you were so far lost to the drilling of his tip against your cervix that you couldn’t find it in yourself to care. You craved him—craved the way he made you feel. And you showed him through the slurred moans pouring from your mouth with every snap of his hips against you.

His broad chest pressed against your bare back as he brought himself to your ear. “Jesus, you’re somethin’,” he growled, his thrusts intensifying to the point of flattening your lower half against the sofa. “You’re everythin’,” he husked against your hair, one hand coming up to wrap around the front of your neck while the other tightened into a bruise-worthy grip at your hip, and as he pummelled you into the cushions, all you could think about was how you never wanted this to end—and you also hoped that the sofa wouldn’t break.

ʿ You kinda feel like you tryin' to get away from me

If you do, I won't moveʾ

You counted another night in Ben’s bed, where raked your gaze over his sleeping form, and it marvelled you that he could look so at peace with himself—with life. In waking times, where he constantly barrelled from one mission to the other, he gave the sort of impression that he didn’t know a second of peace—like he’d been made solely for war and conflict. So seeing him like this—it warmed something inside of you. But the feeling didn’t linger when you swallowed thickly with a guilty realisation.

You’d lied to yourself.

What was supposed to be a once-off, one-night stand had turned to weeks of ritualistic, late-night visits. Almost every other night, you and Ben were tackling one another—a battle of bodies and orgasms. It wasn’t supposed to go beyond that first night—and once it did, you’d told yourself that it wasn’t supposed to go beyond a physical relationship.

But it had—for you, at least. You hadn’t exactly had the nerve to ask Ben whether he saw you as anything more than a warm body to pass time—didn’t think you could handle that punch to the gut. But it’d been slowly eating you up inside—the uncertainty of it all.

Deciding that it wasn’t tonight’s problem, you cosied up beside his sleeping form, eyes drifting closed to summon a sleep that would quell your mental misery. It took a while, and after a few tosses and turns, you’d settled in with your back facing Ben. And at some point—just as you started to swoon with the first glimpse of dreams—Ben’s hand shifted to wrap around your waist. That singular action provided all the comfort you needed to slip off into easy dreams.

The days following that night had taken a complete detour in energy. Ben had been uncharacteristically distant and curt—almost as though he’d reverted back to the hardened persona you’d thought you’d worked your way through with the weeks spent at Vought—with the time spent at his side. You had no concrete idea on what had installed the distance between you, but you suspected that the Supe had come to realise the feelings you bore for him outside of a night of fun.

It must’ve deterred him because he kept your every interaction short—filled with nothing but droning reports and information about the next missions to come. It was agonising to endure, and you wanted nothing more than to go back to the way things had been before.

But they didn’t.

Back in the warmer days—prior to the current, cold ones that currently hosted you both as strangers—you would find Ben waiting outside your door, craving more than what your body had to offer him. Company, chatter that wasn’t rehearsed down to the last line, and friendship. He didn’t have many friends—you’d once told him that directly in the heat of an argument, but hadn’t looked too marred by it. Despite his ego, he could admit that he wasn’t the easiest person to tolerate.

But you had learnt to, and maybe that had played a role in morphing your relationship of pleasure into a relationship of the mind, body and soul—all at once. And you realised then, that maybe Ben did share all of your finer feelings. It would certainly explained the way he’d suddenly turned his back on everything you’d once shared. As much as you wanted to chase after him with the question armed at the ready, eager to gun down the excruciating tension, you chose to offer your surrender, instead.

Ben wouldn’t come around with your pestering. He had his own things to figure out. And when he did, you could only hope he’d take the initiative of returning to you—unshielded, unhardened, vulnerable. That he’d acknowledge the truth that hung over both your heads like a brooding storm cloud—the truth that what had started out as a hollow title of professionalism had been filled to the brim with countless banter, near-death experiences, and shared warmth that warranted a type of closeness only this lifestyle could provoke.

That you were more than partners—more than two people playing make believe for the public eye.

That you were in love.

You could only wait and hope that he’d see it, feel it, and own it.

ʿ I just cry for no reason, l just pray for no reasonʾ

On the drive to the next mission, the vehicle’s air was thick with tension. Ben manned the driver seat, so there wasn’t much opportunity for his stare to forsake the road ahead—but when it did, it never lingered on you for more than a second.

He gave nothing away, either. He’d gone back to being as mysterious as when you’d first met him, and it made your heart ache. You bit down on the inside of your cheek, head turned to gaze out of the window as though it could shun the taunting reality into non-existence—but it didn’t.

Each passing second of silence weighed heavier than the next, and Ben said nothing, did nothing to alleviate the crushing force of it. So all you could do, as you found yourself drinking in the buildings and trees whisking across your vision, was hope and pray that he’d live up to his title, act the soldier and put an end to this misery by confessing his feelings for you.

But you couldn’t ignore the nagging feeling that it was a day you’d never come to outlive.

ʿ I give thanks for the day

For the hours and another way, another life breathin'ʾ

The mission had taken every wrong turn possible, and you’d been caught in the cross-fire of the enemy’s newest anti-supe contraption that had left you severely wounded—injuries that not even your super-abled body could resolve.

Your vision was mostly blurred with the severe bloodloss, so you couldn’t make sense of the shapes whisking past your vision as medics carried you through Vought’s compound. The pain festering at multiple sites upon your body was debilitating and brutal, almost enough of a force to persuade you into letting go of life entirely—but a hand kept you grounded, tethered, through the dragged out minutes that it took to set you down on that operating table.

Ben’s frantic face appeared in front of yours, but most detail of his features were lost to your disorientation. His lips moved with words that sounded distant, and your face scrunched with the frail effort to try and perceive them—but you couldn’t. Darkness began pressing at the corners of your vision, threatening to drag you into a sleep that had no return. You caught the way one of the assistant’s placed a hand onto Ben’s shoulder, tugging at him with a passion that the Supe didn’t permit—if evident by the way he straightened up to send his fist flying into the assistant’s face.

Guards showed up to contain him, and he cast you one last glance with a mouth gaped around a shout you couldn’t acknowledge. You wanted to reach out to him, to tell him you’d be okay, but you couldn’t. The world weighed heavy on you now, blanketing you with a darkness that felt comforting—tempting you into fluttering your eyes closed for a much needed break.

And you listened.

For a while, there was nothing. You floated through endless, dark matter, ceasing to exist in the bottomless space. And then a light beamed through, so blinding that your eyes screwed shut to avert the assault, and when you opened them again, you were greeted with the view of Vought’s hospital. You blinked many times, fighting off the haze that had consumed you for god knows how long, and when you finally mustered up the strength to lift your head, you found Ben nestled at the side of your bed.

His cheek was settled into the cross of his arms, his eyes sown shut in a steady sleep. You don’t know how long you’d been asleep, and how long he’d been camping it out beside your comatose form, but what you did know, is that you were thankful to have survived the whole ordeal. Thankful to see another day—to see Ben here with you.

With great effort, you reached out a hand to brush through his hair—and he’d always been a light sleeper, but this time, he didn’t stir. Not immediately, at least. It took a few surfs of your hand through hair before his eyes fluttered open to drink you in, and it was then that you noticed just how deep the skin beneath his eyes had sunken—as though the wait he’d endured to acquaint you in the land of the living once more had burned through everything that he was. Exhausted him to the point of a humanly slumber.

Instantly, Ben collected himself into a sit, hand reaching to grab yours fiercely. “You’re okay,” he breathed, his green eyes brimming with raw relief, and slightly teary along the edges. “Jesus, I thought I’d lost you,” he choked out gruffly, jaw clenching around his worst fear.

You smiled weakly, warmly, sympathising with his pain as your own eyes grew teary. “I’m right here,” you murmured meekly, your voice cracking with the prolonged disuse. “I’m not going anywhere,” you added in a soft, broken whisper.

Ben’s composure cracked at that, and instead of responding with words he had no experience utilising, he leaned himself toward you to place a chaste kiss on your forehead. When he pulled back to gaze at you, something in his expression shifted, and he felt compelled to speak, anyways.

“You wouldn’t stand a damn chance, anyway, ‘cause I’d follow you all the way to the edge of the earth—holdin’ that fuckin’ lifeline that’s keepin’ you tethered to a sorry dick like me. ‘Cause I’m selfish—and ‘cause I’m nothin’ worth a damn without you.”

Your heart imploded at that, the tears that had been idling about your eyes now cascading down your cheeks uncontrolled. Ben’s hands shifted to cradle your face with an unfamiliar tenderness—one that you could, and would, grow accustomed to—as he leaned himself down to place a kiss on your lips.

When he came face to face with you once more, his eyes brimmed with adoration. “Fuckin’ hell, I love you—I do. I’ve been a real pussy ‘bout it these last few weeks, but I do,” he murmured.

“I know,” you told him gently, leaning your cheek further into his hold. “I’ve always known—I just needed you to be the first to say it. You needed to decide what you wanted for yourself—”

“You,” he cut in instantly, earnestly. “You—god, you’re all I want. Nothin’ else—nobody else.”

You smiled weakly at that. “Then I’m all yours.”

ʿ I did it all 'cause it feel good

But wouldn't do it all if it feel bad

Your recovery was slow, but Ben had been by your side through it all, handing off missions to the rest of Payback while he nursed you back to full health within the comforts of his suite. Nothing you asked of him was ever too much, and it made you burn with a newfound love for him—made you fall in love with him all over again.

Better live your life

We are running out of timeʾ

Little did you know that the next mission to come would be as heart-breaking as the last. You and Ben had gotten split up in the midst of Niaguara, and the gunfire was so heavy that you’d lost tabs on his whereabouts during your attempt to take cover. All around you, bullets whisked through the air. It was defeaning—overwhelming, and you almost thought it’d never end short of claiming your life.

And then the scene around you only intensified when an aircraft suddenly blared overhead, and your head tilted back against the brick wall shielding you from death as you tried to get a glimpse of the structure. But when you saw what dangled from the aircraft—a contraption immobilising and holding Ben’s unconscious form captive, your heart seized up on the spot with such panic that a bullet might as well have pierced right through it, ending all that you were.

And you almost wish it did—that you’d been put out of your misery right there and then because as you watched the aircraft grow smaller with the distance, you weren’t sure you’d ever see Ben again.

And like he’d told you back at the hospital—that wasn’t a life worth living

ʿ Love, let's talk about love

Is it anything and everything you hoped for?ʾ

As soon as you’d recouped with the rest of Payback, they’d enlightened you on who the aircraft belonged to—that is was the Russians that had kidnapped Ben. It sparked some sort of hope within you, knowing that you had a lead to follow, and you’d taken it upon yourself that evening to plan out his rescue with Vought’s executives.

It was then that the jarring truth of it all had been revealed, that Ben’s kidnap had been staged by the company—and Payback—itself. You’d been outraged and overcome with an anger you hadn’t thought yourself capable of, doing something regrettable in the process.

It all happened so fast—your hand curling into a fist that drained the lungs of the closet executive to the point of no return. It only hit you once his body dropped to the floor, never to stir again despite the remaining, panicked executives rushing to his aids. And they’d cast you horrified stares, something that told you you were done for if you didn’t make a run for it now—so you did.

You didn’t look back as you fleed the compound, not once, but you made a beeline toward an office you knew held all the information of Vought’s dirty secrets, adding another body or two to your fatality count to acquire the files that would lead you directly to the Russian compound holding Ben captive.

The journey there had been a hassle, almost enough to make you want to give up—but then you pictured how helpless and afraid Ben must’ve felt, and it fuelled you with the power you needed to keep on going. You needed to see him again. You would see him again.

You’d managed to gain access to the compound under the alias of a compound v scientist, and given your very real knowledge and experience on the sciences, it was an easy role to assume—and one that brought you all the more closer to seeing Ben again.

But the circumstances of your reunion was far from ideal—Ben strapped to an experimenting table while a lab assistant approached you presenting a vile of poison you were to inject into his veins, all without a single guess about what it’d do to him. How it’d completely remake him. But you did it, anyway because your compliance meant building trust with the Russians, and trust paved way toward power—influence. And that meant that you could take control of these sessions—keep him safe.

So you grabbed the needle and approached Ben, who drank you in with an amalgamation of relief, betrayal and fear all at once. But the minute you sank that needle into his arm—all his emotions sobered up into one, single thing. Hatred. And it ate away at everything that you were, and continued to do so in all the years that passed.

But despite the heartbreak, you kept at it—kept on returning with needles of poison you’d modified with just enough care to spare him disastrous side effects, finding solace in that fact to ignore the way each dose completely remade him. You weren’t sure how much of the Soldier Boy you’d come to know and love would be left by the time the Russians concluded the experiment, but you did know that you were doing a necessary evil to keep him safe from something far sinister, should you be taken off the experiment.

And thankfully, that day never came. You’d made contact with a group known as The Boys—who launched the plan to free both yourself and Ben from the compound in exchange for a favour that only Ben could fulfil. Once he’d done it, you were both free to pursue your newfound freedom, and to rekindle the bond that the tragic years had eaten away at. And you were given the chance to explain that everything you’d done to him had been done from a place of love—as fucked up as it sounded.

And it wasn’t a type of love you’d ever dreamt of knowing—of showing him.

ʿ Or do the feeling haunt you?ʾ

Ben watched your lip quiver with the memories of the harmful emotions and experiences that he hadn’t been around to shield you from. The time with the Russians had broken him in every manner physical—all part of the plan to build him up into something far more lethal. But you? You’d been mentally reconstructed.

As you delved deeper into your experience working under the Russians, he listened to you speak with a heaviness he didn’t usually acknowledge—not him, super-abled Soldier Boy, strongest man alive with nary a concept on humanly burdens. Emotional and physical. But the words that slunk from your mouth settled over him like a deadweight that had him feeling—for the first time ever—like he was helpless in escaping it. Like he was weak.

He felt weakened by the guilt of knowing what you had been forced to endure. The strength you’d mustered up in order to stick poisoned needles into his arm, and the strength you’d needed to keep your chin elevated with the memory of the goodness in your heart. And he felt weakened by the guilt of knowing, there and then, just how much you truly loved him.

It was crushing.

He’d never mastered the depths and tides of his emotions, but you’d taught him how to surf the currents with just enough control to remain afloat. And it was a regrettable skill on some days—days like this—where he was forced to feel things he’d perfected the art of ignoring for. Because now, he felt it all.

And it haunted him—the way you love.

The way you love him. The way you’d do anything for him. The way you’d bargained away years of your life to ensure that the years of his were bought and secured. The way you’d once promised you’d stick with him through it all, and the way you’d followed through. Because deep down, he didn’t feel like he deserved any of it.

The guilt of knowing your love—it haunted him.

ʿ I know the feeling haunt youʾ

Ben found his lips wandering every inch of your skin with a need to memorise the taste of your flesh. He pressed kisses the soft apples of your cheeks, to the bridge of your nose, to the fragile sheets of your lids after you’d simmered into a symphony of pleasure. And because he’s greedy, he even found his nose burrowed into the crook of your neck while his lips branded the arch—where he inhaled the scent of you and surfed a wave of ecstasy that put the bona fide drug to shame.

You were an assault on his senses, disorienting every sensible instinct he’d spent years forging. His instincts were critical. They made him strong and driven and deserving of his title as a soldier. But you. . . you were like a foreign scent that had wafted beneath his unassuming nose—a scent that he just couldn’t ignore. A scent that triggered some other, unexplored instinct within him, and it compelled him to blindly follow you. Allowed himself just enough slack to be consumed by you.

Once he'd worked his way into the wet warmth between your thighs, his thrusts were slow and sensual. Patient. He wanted to savour every second of you-more like needed to. He gripped one of your thighs with a firm gentleness, the other arm venturing beside your head to prop himself up as he carried his hips toward yours. Your hands curled around the muscle of his biceps in a sensual line, moans spewing from your lips before your palms flattened over the toned contours of his back—nails gripping his flesh to keep yourself grounded against his ascension-worthy movements.

He took his sweet time feeling on, listening to, and indulging you. And once you begged him for more, he delivered. He nurtured your high with a quickened pace, releasing your thigh to join the other you'd wrapped around him. He settled both arms on either side of your head, and there, he hovered himself over your lips, pressing scattered, incomplete kisses to the tender flesh while he focused on the tension connecting—and threatening—to end you both.

“Just like that, Ben,” you breathed into his ear, your hand curling around the nape of his neck, where you clung to him like any other hair embedded within his skin.

“Yeah—I got you,” Ben grunted against your lips, air jetting through the slits of his grit teeth as he endured the overwhelming storm of pleasure. He pressed a firm kiss to the corner of your lips, eyes briefly flickering up to where your expression contorted with each of his thrusts. And he studied everything—the bold furrow of your brows, the lustful haze glazing your eyes, and the way your nose scrunched with every other prod of his manhood. You were breathtaking, and it drove him feral. “I got you,” he repeated—promised.

He felt as the hand you’d furled around his neck drifted up the expanse, fingers ploughing through the field of his hair to entangle with the unruly strands. His eyes fluttered closed—however briefly—at the way you tousled his hair. The sensation was overwhelming, hypnotising—almost enough of a physical persuasion on his shoulders to release a year’s worth of tension. You’d had that effect to you from the moment he’d met you, and somehow, it’d always worked on him.

It wasn't long before you finally let go of yourself, and he tossed a line of his own to match. Then, you were briefly smothered by the weight of his panting form before he rolled himself over to the side and pulled you into his arms. You instantly took to nestling his one arm in the crook of your neck, and his other moved to drape loosely across your waist while you drifted into an instantaneous sleep.

As Ben laid there, curled around the fragile body he’d tucked into the safety of his grip, he felt like he’d been reborn—like the hands the Russians had forged to meld iron could now cradle fragile glass without instilling a single crack. Like he’d been modelled into something—somebody more than his upbringings. Somebody worthy enough to be bestowed with the highest honours of loving you.

It amazed him, really, how you’d unintentionally strolled into his life with zero intention to take up space within it. And yet, you’d managed to selfishly hog every inch of his heart—making him feel things that forced him to reminisce the misery of humanity and feelings. You filled his heart with adrenaline that was unlike any he’d ever hopped himself up on amongst the battlefield. That adrenaline was potent—wired him to flee the dangers constantly gunning for him. But this adrenaline—the type only you could get his heart to muster—it drew him in like a whirlpool that would swallow him whole given the chance.

It made him want to do anything but flee.

Your grit, your wit, and your unwillingness to let him dangle from the rope he’d hung himself from had left more of a mark on him than the binding of his trauma. For once, he actually craved to memorise the lines left behind by the cuffs you’d unknowingly slung around his wrists—tugging him along after you like a dickless mutt begging for some long-lost action. And he blindly followed. He didn’t question it. For once, he didn’t want to question it.

He only wanted you.

God, admitting it made him feel like a goddamn swooning pussy—but you’d once smacked him across the shoulder for saying that aloud. He’d get better at it—the whole holding hands and professing feelings thing. He would. Admittedly, it was difficult following through on a resolution so soft he could have throttled it between two firm fingers—but he’d made you a promise, and it served as an armour that shielded his word against any intrusive impulse he’d allowed to jab at his life for far too long.

As he laid there, savouring the bare warmth of your body pressed against his with every hushed breath, he couldn’t have pictured a more ideal view. He’d once thought it a big, stinking pile of bull that one person could demand everything that you were—that somebody could ever matter that much to warrant his unfaltering devotion. But now, he knew it to be true. He knew it with every glance he stole of you.

The thought of losing you haunted him.

It haunted him with the same fear that the solar system would regard the loss of their sun with—the singular body drawing in and holding everything together. Making it whole. Complete. Functional. In the same way, you’d become a sort of North Star in the black expanse of his heart, orientating the soul he’d thought he’d lost ahold of a long time ago. You kept him grounded and guided. Safe.

And in all that he was and ever would be—everything that you’d thought him capable of—he’d devote it to keeping you safe, too.

Even if it killed him.

Because the thought of having you plucked from his grasp was one that he couldn’t entertain without a debilitating dread. Life without you wouldn’t be truly living—it would be boiled down to fruitless survival. It’d be the misery he’d been trapped in before you came and snagged onto the latch that finally set him free. And he couldn’t—wouldn’t be forced back into that cage.

So, the arm he’d loosely strung around your waist neglected all careful consideration as he pulled you tighter against him. You stirred briefly with a groan so soft and slurred that he might as well have imagined it—but he clung to it like a mantra of just how real this all was. It was selfish, maybe, trapping you against him with a fervour that wouldn’t have him letting up anytime soon—but he did it, anyway.

Ben wasn’t supposed to be human enough to be marred by anything. Physical wounds could scarcely be inflicted, but scars couldn’t be left behind. It was an exhilarating reality—one that made him feel invincible. Fearless. But you—the thought of letting you go, it was unbearable. Crippling. Fear-worthy.

And it haunted him.

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a/n ─ first of all, i was on my sza shit more than usual and the lyrics of this song resonated with me and the sb’s unfinished story i was thinking about. i had always wanted to do some sort of story portrayal for how he and fem!supe!reader met, sooo have this ig?! second of all, i did not forget about wrapping this fic up, i just got severely demotivated and side-tracked. oopsie. i swear i’ll post the last part some day. for now, it’s rotting in my drafts, unedited and with a few gaps that need to be filled. my motivation comes and goes like the auroras, so that’ll come when it comes lmfao. thirdly, i hope you guys enjoyed this. i started out feeling great about this, but i’ve been sitting with a massive migraine as i finished it, so it feels like ive placed words that dont quite click. idk? 🤷‍♀️ also im like 8 followers from 700 so take this as my wtf thank you sm gift!! 😭 this is not proofread bc it’s 1 am and i have class tomorrow so actually i apologise for the horrendous amount of errors you’ve likely come across—i’ll fix it tomorrow, i just wanted to get this out like i promised

thank you for reading! all likes, comments & reblogs are deeply appreciated

tags ─ @gibson-g1rl @bohemianblasphemy @fallbhind @angelicjackles @deansbbyx @titsout4jackles @starzify @ultravi0lence14 @honeyryewhiskey @florchids @floralscented @deansbeer @deansbbyx @figthoughts @dulcescorderitas @whisperingdaze @st4rmarley @bakugotypecrashout @jaydensluv @chi-raz @youdontknowe @misatxox @lixiesbrowniess @ilovedeanwinchester4 @beelzebzb

want to become part of the taglist for any future soldier boy works?

other works ─ the boys masterlist

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jscrawls · 3 months ago

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Widows rest

My take on a Black widow! Reader x Batman and Batfam but with a slight twist, reader doesn't know the Bats but they seem to know them...

Warning: contains avengers infinity war spoilers, black widow spoilers, graphic violence, injuries, physical torture, Guns, ❗ some graphic harm happens to reader so read with caution❗ dreykov needs his own warning, possible ooc,

Part 22: bandaids don’t fix

🔹🔹🔹

it’s been seven hours according to your guestimate since you were taken.

you’d been sleeping not so peacefully in the bunks with the others when they’d come, one moment the bunker was relatively quiet. only the sound of mountain wind howling outside and the occasional shuffling of sheets. the next, shots were being fired into the dark room.

you don’t have time to fight back, you don’t even have time to kick the sheets off your body or pull on the shackles keeping you locked to the bed when something slams into the side of your head and something sharp jams painfully into your under arm pulse point.

now after gradually coming to and realizing you’re somewhere unknown, grey concrete everything, floor, walls, ceiling. The only things in the room are a metal table against one wall covered in a sheet, the bolted down rusty steel chair you're occupying, and yourself. No sound at all except your haggard breathing and the occasional groan of aged steel walls shifting in the wind. you’ve tried to take stock of yourself. blurred vision, trailing spots as your head turns, so a concussion. blood trickles and sticks in your shirt uncomfortably from the needle piercing your skin too roughly, your wrists and ankles are tied to the chair so tightly that you know you’ll suffer nerve damage if you live through this much longer, you could lose something If you make it through the day.

A dim light sways ever so slightly overhead, the yellow circle of light around you swirling in a maddening dance that's just distracting enough to keep you aware of the passing time. The light flickers ever so slightly before the rusted steel door swings open with a loud grinding creak. The bottom of it scraping against the floor as four masked people walk in, all of them armed and focused on you.

”How's your head feeling? You took a solid blow.” one speaks- his Russian thick and over pronounced- you can hear the satisfied curl in his upper lip as he mocks you.

You say nothing, only stare at them as they circle you like wolves.

The one behind you leans over your back, chest pressing against the back of your neck uncomfortably as he slowly grabs one of your fingers, your ring finger, and then jerks his hand back. The hand you thought you'd lost feeling in buzzes with heat and sparks of sharp pain crawl up your wrist like fire ants as he breaks your finger.

”You were asked a question, red devil.”

You bite your own tongue hard enough to draw blood but still, no sound escapes you as the man steps back, they all watch, expectant, pissed.

The programs been compromised, and now they want what you have, information. They're going to attempt to wring it out of you until you die like the weak trainees or you crack, both will end in your death at someone's hand.

At your continued silence the first one who spoke crosses the room, his boots clicking against the concrete before pausing, he slowly pulls the white sheet off the steel table and you get a look at what exactly is on it. Even in the dim light you can see the handles, blades probably, but your stomach doesn't drop until he picks up a vial of liquid and shakes it at you tauntingly, his other hand finds a needle and your pulse soars in your ears as he slowly draws out half a syringe of a pinkish tinted liquid.

You don't know how long it's been now, they come and go. Sometimes leaving you in complete darkness, sometimes setting a water drip over your head from the small water pipe you hadn't noticed before. Everything feels right now, the the bruises, burns, shocks, it feels worse after whatever they'd injected you with. Your nerves alight like fire was injected under your skin, like mercury was in your blood veins.

Whatever it was made every little slap feel like you were covered in tarantula wasps, you've probably sweat so much you're at risk of dying to dehydration by now.

And Still you've remained quiet.

Even as they pressed the barrel of a gun against your head, the cold metal reminding you of a childhood spent in the mountains. What an odd thing to find comfort in as they pull the trigger.

The empty click confuses you, you shouldn't have heard anything at all…you slowly glance up at their makes faces while they all seem to blur in your vision under the yellowed light.

Your bleary eyes squint as the door swings open, you don't even have it in you to react when he walks in.

Dreykov.

All you can manage to rasp out is a quiet “A test?”

He smiles thinly, looking over your brutalized form as if you were made of something precious. Looking at each bruise like it's an award being presented to him personally. He's never looked at you like that before, it's unsettling as much as you pathetically find comfort in it.

“A success. You did as expected. Prep them for the ceremony.”

he gestures over his shoulder and the very same men that'd just tortured you near-to-death stroll over and start removing your bindings like nothing happened, one of them even whistles as he begins to wipe blood off the instruments.

The normalcy hurts near as much as your limbs do when the blood slowly returns, your broken fingers ache so much worse as it does, like glass crawling through your fingertips. You can hardly breathe, animalistic panic at just their presence nearly topples you. But you don't move at all until they start to lift you out of that chair by your biceps.

You wanted to beg him for time, time to heal and process and maybe even to tell the soldier…something, to hear a voice that wasn't demanding secrets and blood of you. But you bite your tongue. They'll see you used for organs before they let you question their orders.

The surgery awaits you.

🔹🔹🔹

you wake up panting like a dog and covered in sweat, your vision blurred as your body aches weirdly, you’re both numb and feeling like you’re laying on a live wire. dull sparks of pain shoot up your body sporadically, dulled by something not quite strong enough.

For a terrible, terrible moment you're still there. They're about to put the knife to you and you're about to get your first suit, barely able to even try it on due to the pain of something being removed from you.

But you're not.

Looking around you recognize the plain walls of the guest room you've claimed as your own at Wayne manor, moonlight streams in the window between the gaps in the curtain and illuminates the sparse furniture and decor, the tray full of medical tools on the bedside table is new.

You slide the covers off and try to sit up when you realize how stiff you are, looking down you notice bandages across your chest, your hands, your legs, what?

Oh, Gotham City. The car, the fires, Batman, the near-explosion, your….Your head falls into your hands as another wave of nausea hits you for a moment, you could throw up if you moved too fast right now…

The bedroom room door creaks open.

You whirl around so fast you almost gag, your hand covers your mouth as your eyes squeeze shut at the uncomfortable feeling. When you eventually peel them back open you can make out an outline in the dark, is that Bruce?

“….I thought you might still be asleep.” His voice is careful, forcedly soft as he fills out the doorway with one hand resting on the door handle, you can't see him well enough to read him.

“…. Weird dreams, what happened?….” You murmur quietly, throat raw as if you've drank everclear. Was it the gas fumes? Or were you out for that long? You don't have it in you to ask just yet.

Bruce slowly steps into the room, sliding the door shut with a quiet little click before crossing the room to stand at the foot of the bed. The dim light streaming in only illuminates half his face, one blue eye visibly locked on you.

“You wanna tell me?” he grunts out, tense, oh…he's angry.

You lean back against the headboard slowly, body still protesting your every action. You've had worse though. “I'm assuming you know I went into the city with Tim and Alfred….”

“Oh, do I?” He doesn't move at all, but you have the feeling you'd see a clenched jaw if the light was flicked on.

What's he playing at here? Is he trying to scold a confession out of you like you were a runaway teen who snuck back in? Your hand balls up under the sheet as you reign yourself back in.

“Bruce.” You huff tiredly, he picked a horrible moment to catch you for whatever this is. Couldn't he have waited until tomorrow morning?

“(Name). Don't start this, not like last week again.” He crosses his arms over his chest and you get a peek at bandages poking out from under his sleeve, what?

You mirror his body language, your arms settle across your chest and dig into the soft fabric covering your body, bandages press into cuts you'd forgotten you'd received on your chest but you don't move an inch after that. “I'm not, you're acting very odd considering the circumstance of things.”

“And what's your circumstance? A victim of your own success, your own reckless actions?”

He pauses, taking a deep breath and holding it before exhaling. You pick up on the slightest tremor in him before he meets your eye with his one visible one.

Anger bleeds into you at his words, a scowl tugging at your lips. And here he was the one saying not to pick back up that argument you'd never finished.

“Sorry I wound up in the middle of a pyromaniac attack while trying to pick two children up from school, Bruce. Next time I'll just sit on my ass at home, would that make you feel better about yourself?”

“No, but at least I wouldn't have to wonder if you're beating someone to death in front of one of those said kids. Or is garroting your new favorite one?”

Any chance of this remaining civil is out the window, clearly since you're both getting worked up. Your nails dig into the fabric of your shirt hard enough that you can feel them scraping skin, and he's clearly tense even in the tiny bit of him visible to you. “Is that what this is about? That man tried to burn me to death, and then tried to make a car bomb next to those vigilantes.”

He nearly snarls as he replies quickly to that.

“So you think killing is the best way to stop a killer? If you'd have failed you'd have been blown up right after killing a man, could you really die with that in your conscience (name)? After everything your children have watched you go through, is being a murderer the memory you want to leave behind?”

Something in you aches as he says that, Natalia's horrified green eyes flashing through your mind, the last thing you focused on before you died. You don't know what compels you to stand, but you find yourself face to face with Bruce.

“yes. I'd rather die knowing I tried and failed than sat back and just watched others die like I did. At least I know I can fucking handle it unlike some people in this shithole of a city.”

His response is like a splash of cold water to the face. “Like you did?”

His question nearly knocks the anger right out of you, but you roll your eyes and roll with it. “The gala, I feel like I died there and woke up something different. I'm not afraid of this anymore.”

He stares, stares hard enough you wonder if he even heard you at all. “Maybe you should be.”

Again he's thrown you for a loop, what the hell does that mean?

“What, afraid? Of Gotham? Myself? What the fuck are you on about now!?”

You hate that he sees you angry, it feels too much like he's seeing you. The version of yourself that feels, that revels and savors, the ugliest side of the real you.

“I think you know, I think you're playing dumb with me right now just like you have been all this time.” The snarls gone from his face, but the tensions still there, the tense jaw, the tightly crossed arms, the wide stance…. Does Bruce think you're a threat?

“I'm…What?” this isn't right, none of this is right. It's like he's on the verge of busting down a door you thought you'd locked and bolted. He's navigating too close to dangerous waters.

He continues on in that same, gruff accusing tone. The eye contact is quickly becoming unsettling as he presses on. “Have we ever had an honest conversation, just you and I as people?”

You roll your eyes in a bluff, feigning annoyance when all you feel is panic twisting behind your ribs, forcing your blood through your veins uncomfortably fast.

“I think the fact you married me says yes.” You force snark and vitriol into your voice that you're not currently feeling at the moment, the bubbling piss and vinegar from just moments ago has all burned off in the face of his line of questions and snarled statements. Being so close to him, you get a close up of the distrust in the furrow of his brow and the pulled thin lips.

“I'm talking about you and I.”

The silence that falls over the bedroom is sudden and heavy, You could just about suffocate under his stare as you blank out. That one statement knocked the wind right out of your sails, your heart pounds so hard you can feel it behind your eyes, can he hear it?

“…. Bruce, you sound crazy right now. You know that right? How did an argument about me doing something idiotic turn into this?”

You uncross your arms and set your hands on your hips, trying to look mildly annoyed when right now you're thinking of ways to escape this room quickly if things turn for the worse. How'd you get to this point!?

He tilts his head as he studies you, for a split second you catch sight of something on his lip before he speaks again- “the (name) I know doesn't act this erratically. doesn't shoot people. Or make case files to hide in their room. Or know how to remove spyware from phones. So how do you.”

the dark room feels too small, too stuffy, is this your icarus moment? you’ve flown too close to the sun in your comfort, you’d grown into the body you woke up in and now you feel too seen. Like he'd sliced your skin open to see the rot between your ribs and now there's nothing you can do to make him unsee it.

“You say that like I'm somebody else, am i a body double, switched at the hospital with another person with amnesia? Did you forget that I remember the gala? I remember the ballet shoes in my pocket that I carried for Cassandra! I remember watching Damian get grabbed by two men! I remember the gun slamming into my head and the gas canister spraying under my face! I'm them Bruce!”

Your voice rises in pitch just a touch as you step back away from him, escaping his accusation. You just need a moment, a second to think rationally before this completely escapes your crumbling control.

He doesn't allow you the space, stepping after you just as quickly as you stumble away on unsteady legs and cornering you, you're boxed in in-between the bed and the wall and his knowing stare. “Don't you mean you're you.”

He sounds so accusatory, so certain of himself every time he wrings something from your words, it's almost sickening how astute he actually is. He's the calm one here while you're…. You know there's no twisting this in your favor now, but you'll be damned twice over before you give in willingly.

“…I am, even if you don't trust the new me I'm the one who's here now.” Your voice goes completely flat, going from near hysterical anger to lacking any bite at all. you're past anger and panic now, slipping into the embrace of numbness just like when that gun was against your head all those years ago.

For a moment he goes silent as the dead, his head tilting just slightly as he assesses the shift in you. Stepping close enough that you can see the lines of his face in the moonlight.“…that sounds like a confession, (name)…. Do I call you that?”

That gets a genuine eye roll out of you, the vitriol in his voice does nothing but squash what little hope you had of salvaging your cover. You're surprised he's not calling someone.

“there's no convincing you when you're fucking insane. My name is (name), and it has always been, I….” something catches your eye on his face, his lip specifically…

Bruce has a split lip, it looks just like…

“….I hit Batman in that same spot with a gun.”

You hear Bruce's breath audibly hitch, the room falls dead silent again as that little nugget sinks into your conscience. Neither of you move, neither of you even blink, silently daring the other to make a move first. He doesn't deny a thing, instead he just slowly steps back, eyes still locked on your form like you might jump him at any moment and…. Well you know what he thinks of your more violent tendencies.

Eventually he speaks, voice thick with unknown emotion. “…. This conversation isn't over, don't go out.”

There's a lot of unspoken words in that sentence alone, the ‘if you run you're admitting guilt.’ isn't said but is heard loud and clear. An order you're expected to obey.

You nod slowly, finally feeling like you can breathe as you sag your weight back against the wall. “Understood.”

It's not a lie, after all…. You didn't say you agreed to stay.

🔹🔹🔹

M.list | prev | next

A/n: *dodges rocks* don't hate me! I know y'all wanted a good action scene or a group reveal, (I did too I promise) but I honestly think this moment needed to happen just between these two. A crowd would make this look very different. 😿💔

Taglist: @cxcilla @mercuryathens @dind1n @redsakura101 @ninihrtss @let-me-dance @ladykamos @one-piecelover @cuntiesweet @omnivirgo @shirp-collector-of-fixations @spidermanluvr444 @br33zy-blizzardz @lunarapple @findingjaxx @4rachn3 @buckturd @tsxukikami @paastaboi @duskeras @ibelyss @1abi @that-creepy-girl-000 @kaylaphantomhive @viilan @karmaxq

#dc x y/n #dc x reader #batfamily x reader #batman fanfiction #batman x reader #bruce wayne x reader #bruce wayne x gn!reader #bruce wayne x y/n #black widow reader

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youngsadlesbian · 4 months ago

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RED THREADS | winterwidow x daughter!reader

summary: after discovering you were rescued from the red room as a child, you question everything—your past, your identity, and your parents. as anger and doubt consume you, they must prove one thing: you have always been their daughter.

a/n: i really love writing for winterwidow, but i confess that i don’t have much inspiration to write for both of them. i didn’t like this story very much, but i hope you like it

word count: 3,1k

warnings: really angst but with happy ending.

Some of your earliest memories weren’t soft or warm.

They were sharp, like the way Natasha’s green eyes would scan every exit before walking into a room. Like the cold press of Bucky’s metal arm against your back when he held you as a child, murmuring reassurances when you had nightmares you didn’t understand.

You never knew why they were so cautious, why they watched you like you were something fragile, something precious.

But there were good memories, too.

There were late-night stakeouts where Bucky would teach you how to shuffle a deck of cards, the two of you huddled together in the back of a van while Natasha handled a mission. There were mornings in the compound kitchen, where Natasha would attempt to make pancakes and always burn them—Bucky teasing her, you laughing between bites of something that was more charcoal than food.

They weren’t normal parents. But they were your parents.

And that was enough.

Until the day you learned the truth.

Your first official mission wasn’t supposed to be high-risk. A simple recon job. In, out, report back.

But nothing was ever simple when it came to Hydra.

You crouched behind a rusted crate, your earpiece buzzing with Steve’s voice.

"Do not engage. I repeat—do not engage."

You rolled your eyes. Like you’d ever been good at following orders.

Through the dim lighting of the abandoned warehouse, you could hear two men talking. You adjusted the audio enhancer on your suit, focusing on their conversation.

"Romanoff took her before the program could start," one of them muttered.

A pit formed in your stomach.

"She was one of Dreykov’s best prospects. The Red Room never got their hands on her, but she was meant to be one of us."

Your heartbeat thundered in your ears.

They couldn’t be talking about you.

Could they?

The other man scoffed. "Does she even know?"

A pause. Then, a cruel chuckle.

"Of course not. Barnes and Romanoff raised her like she was theirs. Poor thing probably thinks she belongs with them."

The world tilted.

The words slammed into your chest like a bullet, but you forced yourself to stay still, every muscle locked in place.

"She’s not Barnes’s. Not Romanoff’s. But they took her anyway."

You were never their daughter.

The mission ended in a blur.

You weren’t even sure how you got back to the compound—only that your hands were trembling the entire way. The words still echoed in your head, slicing through every memory you had with Natasha and Bucky.

"She was meant to be one of us."

"Does she even know?"

No. You didn’t.

And now, you needed answers.

The moment the quinjet landed, you stormed through the hangar, your steps heavy with anger and confusion. The compound was quiet—most of the team was still out on other assignments. That meant no interruptions. No distractions.

Just you and them.

You found Natasha and Bucky in the training room. They were sparring, but the second you entered, Natasha’s sharp gaze flicked to you.

She noticed everything. The tension in your shoulders, the way your breathing was uneven.

"Something’s wrong," she said immediately, stepping toward you. "What happened?"

Bucky’s expression darkened. His metal fingers twitched at his side, like he was already preparing for a fight.

You didn’t know how to say it. The words got stuck in your throat, tangled up in years of trust and love—love that suddenly felt false.

So you just said it.

"I know the truth."

Silence.

Natasha’s face didn’t change, but you saw the way her fingers curled into fists. Bucky’s jaw clenched, his blue eyes flickering with something unreadable.

They knew what you meant.

"You lied to me." Your voice wavered. "All this time, you lied."

Bucky took a step forward. "Kid, we—"

"Don’t." You took a step back, shaking your head. "I need to hear it from you. No deflections. No excuses. Just tell me."

A muscle in Natasha’s jaw twitched. She glanced at Bucky before exhaling, her voice quieter than you’d ever heard it.

"You were taken by the Red Room as a baby."

Your breath caught.

"It wasn’t just some random Hydra mission that led us to you," Bucky said. "We went there for you. We—" He hesitated, eyes dark with something close to guilt. "We took you before they could finish their training. Before they could turn you into one of them."

The room tilted.

"Turn me into one of them," you repeated, voice hollow. "You mean… like you?"

Natasha flinched. Bucky’s eyes dropped to the floor.

Neither of them denied it.

You let out a short, bitter laugh, though nothing about this was funny. "So what? You saved me and decided I should just never know? That I should grow up thinking—" Your voice broke.

"Thinking we were your real parents?" Natasha finished.

You didn’t answer.

Because the worst part was that, in every way that mattered… they were your parents.

And now, you didn’t know if that was even real.

Bucky’s voice was low, pained. "You are ours. We didn’t tell you because we wanted to protect you."

You looked between them, your chest tight. "Protect me, or protect yourselves from losing me?"

Neither of them had an answer.

And that hurt more than anything.

The silence stretched between the three of you, heavy and suffocating. Natasha was the first to move, stepping forward as if she could close the distance that had suddenly become unbearable.

But you stepped back.

The movement was small, barely noticeable, but the way Natasha froze—it was as if you had physically struck her.

Bucky exhaled sharply, running a hand through his hair. "We never wanted you to find out like this."

"Like this?" Your laugh was hollow. "So when exactly were you planning to tell me? Or was the plan to just let me live my whole life without ever knowing?"

Natasha’s face was unreadable, but you knew her. Knew that she was battling with the right words, searching for something that wouldn’t make this worse.

"Yes."

The single word made your breath hitch.

Natasha swallowed hard. "Yes, that was the plan. Because telling you wouldn’t have changed anything except hurt you. And we never wanted that."

"You never wanted that?" Your voice rose, shaking. "Then maybe you shouldn’t have lied to me my whole damn life!"

Bucky flinched at your tone. Natasha’s fingers twitched, like she wanted to reach for you—but she didn’t.

"Everything I know about myself—everything—feels like a lie now." Your voice cracked. "I trusted you. I trusted that you were my parents, that the life we had was real."

"It was real," Bucky said desperately. "You’re ours. No matter how you came to us, no matter what happened before—you are our daughter."

"But I didn’t get to choose that, did I?" You shook your head, tears burning your eyes. "You decided for me. You took that choice away."

Neither of them had anything to say to that.

You didn’t even realize you were crying until Natasha’s expression changed—until the slightest hint of pain flashed in her green eyes.

"Do you even regret it?" Your voice was barely above a whisper. "Do you ever wonder if you should have just left me there?"

"Don’t say that." Bucky’s voice was raw, his hands curling into fists. "We would never—"

"Wouldn’t you?" You cut him off, glaring at them through your tears. "If you could do it all over again, would you still take me?"

"Yes," Natasha said instantly.

"Without a second thought," Bucky added.

The certainty in their voices made something in your chest ache.

But it didn’t change the fact that you didn’t know who you were anymore.

"I just… I need time," you whispered, backing away toward the door. "I need to think."

"Please, don’t leave," Natasha said softly.

But you already were.

The halls of the compound felt colder than usual. Maybe it was just you.

You had no idea where you were going—just that you couldn’t stay in that room with them any longer.

Your feet carried you to the one place you knew would be empty this time of day: the rooftop.

You sat near the edge, knees pulled to your chest, staring blankly at the horizon. The sky was dark, a storm rolling in. It felt fitting.

Everything felt like a storm now.

You barely heard the door open behind you.

"You know, when I ran away as a kid, I picked rooftops, too."

You sighed. "I don’t need a lecture, Stark."

Tony walked over and sat beside you. He didn’t say anything right away, just pulled out a protein bar and took a bite.

"You want half?" he asked.

You glared at him. "No."

"Good, ‘cause I wasn’t really offering." He smirked, but the usual arrogance in his tone was softer.

Silence settled between you.

Then, Tony leaned back on his hands and let out a breath. "So. You found out, huh?"

You whipped around, staring at him. "You knew?"

He didn’t flinch. "Of course I knew. Most of the team does."

You turned away, throat tightening. "Great. So I was the only one being lied to."

Tony sighed. "Kid, it wasn’t like that."

"Then what was it like?" Your voice cracked. "Because from where I’m standing, it looks a hell of a lot like they just decided to rewrite my whole life."

Tony was quiet for a moment. Then, he said, "You know, they could’ve left you there."

You blinked. "What?"

"They didn’t have to take you," he said simply. "Natasha and Bucky… they weren’t exactly the ‘adopt a kid’ type back then. Hell, they could barely deal with their own trauma, let alone raise a child."

You swallowed hard.

"But they did it anyway. Because the thought of leaving you in that hellhole wasn’t an option for them. And yeah, maybe they made the wrong call keeping it from you. Maybe they should’ve told you years ago. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that those two love you more than anything."

You bit your lip, staring down at your hands.

Tony nudged your shoulder. "Look, I get it. You’re pissed. You should be. But don’t let this make you forget everything they’ve done for you. And don’t pretend like you don’t love them, too."

You didn’t answer.

You didn’t have to.

Because the truth was, no matter how angry you were…

You still did love them.

And that made everything so much harder.

You weren’t ready to face them yet.

But you also couldn’t sit on that rooftop forever.

So you found yourself outside Yelena’s room, hesitating only a moment before knocking.

The door swung open almost immediately. Yelena stood there in sweatpants and a hoodie, chewing on a protein bar. When she saw you, her expression shifted—concern flickering in her sharp eyes.

"You look like hell," she said.

You snorted. "Thanks."

She stepped aside. "Come in before you start crying in the hallway and make everyone uncomfortable."

You rolled your eyes but walked in anyway.

Yelena’s room was nothing like Natasha’s—where Nat kept things organized, Yelena had an absolute mess. Clothes were draped over the back of a chair, empty coffee mugs sat on her desk, and there was a throwing knife stabbed into the wall near the bed.

She flopped onto the couch and gestured for you to sit. "Alright, kid. Talk."

You hesitated, then sighed. "I found out."

Yelena didn’t ask what you meant. She just nodded, chewing slowly. "About the Red Room."

"Yeah."

"And about how Natasha and Bucky stole you like little rebels in an action movie?"

"Yeah."

She studied you, tilting her head. "So what’s the problem?"

You blinked at her. "What’s the problem? Yelena, they lied to me my entire life—"

"To protect you," she interrupted.

You clenched your jaw. "That doesn’t make it okay."

"No, it doesn’t," she agreed. "But it makes it understandable."

You ran a hand through your hair, frustrated. "I just… I don’t know what to do. I feel like everything I knew about myself is gone. Like I don’t even belong to them anymore."

Yelena scoffed. "Are you stupid?"

You stared at her. "Excuse me?"

"You belong to them more than anyone," she said, standing up. "Do you have any idea who my sister used to be before you?"

You frowned.

Yelena crossed her arms. "Natasha Romanoff was the deadliest assassin in the world. A soldier with no attachments. No real reason to live except to make up for the blood on her hands." She exhaled sharply. "Then you showed up."

You swallowed.

"She changed because of you," Yelena continued. "She learned what it meant to have a family. To fight for something real instead of just trying to erase the past." Her voice softened. "You gave her a reason to be more than what the Red Room made her."

You looked away, throat tight.

Yelena walked over and nudged your shoulder. "You are the best thing that ever happened to her, sestrenka."

Tears burned your eyes, but you blinked them back.

"I don’t know how to fix this," you admitted.

"Start by talking to Steve," Yelena said, plopping back onto the couch. "He’s good with dumb emotional stuff."

You let out a weak laugh. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Now get out of my room before I start charging for therapy."

Steve was easy to find.

He was in the training room, throwing punches at a sandbag hard enough to make it swing violently.

"You’re gonna break that," you said, leaning against the doorframe.

Steve paused, wiping sweat from his brow. When he turned and saw you, he gave you a small smile. "Hey, kid."

You hesitated, then walked inside.

Steve grabbed a towel and draped it around his neck. "Yelena told me."

You exhaled. "Of course she did."

He gestured for you to sit on the bench beside him. You did.

"You know," he started, "when I found out what Hydra did to Bucky, I thought I’d lost him forever. He was my best friend, my family… but he wasn’t him anymore."

You stayed silent.

"For years, I tried to bring him back. But it wasn’t until you came along that I really saw him start to heal." Steve looked at you. "You brought him back to life."

Your breath caught in your throat.

Steve smiled softly. "Bucky isn’t just your father—he’s your biggest protector. You ground him. You gave him something Hydra never could: a real life. A reason to fight for himself, not just for survival."

You pressed your lips together, looking down at your hands.

Steve reached out, squeezing your shoulder. "You don’t have to forgive them right away. But don’t push them away forever. They need you just as much as you need them."

You swallowed hard.

Maybe… maybe Steve was right.

You stood outside their door for what felt like an eternity.

Your heart was hammering against your ribs, and your hands were curled into fists at your sides.

Steve’s words echoed in your mind.

"You don’t have to forgive them right away. But don’t push them away forever."

Yelena’s voice, too.

"You are the best thing that ever happened to her."

You inhaled sharply and knocked.

For a second, there was silence. Then footsteps. The door opened, and Natasha stood there, eyes widening slightly when she saw you.

“Hey,” she said cautiously.

Behind her, Bucky was sitting on the couch, looking exhausted. He glanced over, his expression unreadable.

You swallowed. “Can we talk?”

Natasha stepped aside, letting you in. The room was dimly lit, cozy, but there was a tension so thick you could barely breathe.

You didn’t sit. Neither did Natasha.

Bucky leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “We didn’t think you’d come back.”

You shifted on your feet. “I almost didn’t.”

Natasha’s jaw tensed. “We were giving you space.”

“I know.” You exhaled. “But I don’t think space is helping.”

They both stayed quiet, waiting.

You hesitated, then clenched your fists. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Bucky sighed. “We wanted to. A hundred times over, we wanted to.”

“But we were scared,” Natasha admitted. Her voice was softer than you’d ever heard it. “Scared you’d hate us. That you’d see us differently.”

You let out a bitter laugh. “Congratulations. That worked out great.”

Natasha flinched, and guilt twisted in your stomach.

Bucky leaned forward. “We never wanted to lie to you.” His voice was heavy, rough. “But you have to understand, kid, we didn’t rescue you—we stole you. If they’d found out, they would’ve come for you. And we weren’t going to risk losing you.”

You swallowed hard. “So you just decided for me?”

Natasha’s green eyes locked onto yours. “Yes.”

There was no hesitation. No excuses.

Your throat tightened.

“We chose to be your parents. We chose you, every single day, for your entire life.” Natasha stepped closer. “And we’d do it again.”

Bucky nodded. “No regrets.”

Your breath hitched.

No regrets.

After everything, they still meant that.

Your hands trembled. “I don’t know how to just forgive this.”

“You don’t have to,” Natasha said quickly. “Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

Bucky ran a hand through his hair. “But we need you to know that no matter what you decide, we love you. We always have. You’re ours, and nothing changes that.”

You clenched your jaw. “I don’t feel like I belong to anyone.”

Bucky’s expression turned pained. “You belong to yourself. But if you ever want us, we’ll be right here.”

There was a long silence.

You stared at them—two of the most dangerous people in the world, your parents, the people who raised you and lied to you.

And yet…

And yet, a part of you knew you were still their daughter.

Maybe forgiveness wouldn’t come easy.

Maybe it would take time.

But for now, you took a shaky breath, let your walls down just a little, and whispered:

“…I want to come home.”

Natasha let out a sharp breath, like she had been holding it for hours.

Bucky stood first, crossing the room in a second, pulling you into a tight hug. You stiffened, then melted into it, gripping his shirt like you were afraid he’d disappear.

Natasha wrapped around both of you, pressing a kiss to your temple.

And for the first time since everything fell apart, you felt like you could breathe again.

#natasha romanoff x reader #bucky barnes x reader #natasha romanoff x bucky barnes x reader #buckynat x reader #winterwidow x reader #natasha romanoff #bucky barnes #buckynat #winterwidow

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