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Two Years Later
The nightmare tears you from sleep like a fishhook through flesh—sudden, violent, leaving you gasping in the dark.
Not yours. Never yours.
Your nightmares don’t taste like copper pennies and gun oil. Don’t echo with the pneumatic hiss of a metal arm recalibrating, with Russian words that burn like acid even when you don’t understand them. Your nightmares don’t feel like falling through endless white, like ice crystallizing in your lungs, like please, I don’t want to hurt anyone, please—
“Shit.” Bucky’s voice, rough with sleep and guilt, cuts through the phantom sensations. The bed shifts as he reaches for you, and even in the darkness you can feel him hesitating—that split-second pause where he weighs his need against your comfort. “Sweetheart, I'm—”
“Don’t.” You’re already turning into him, seeking his warmth like a plant finding sun. Your hand finds his chest first—bare skin sleep-warm and slightly damp with sweat—and the soul bond settles immediately, that electric recognition that never gets old. “Don’t apologize for things that aren’t your fault.”
His breath hitches. Two years, and he still can’t quite believe you mean it.
The lamp clicks on, casting amber shadows across the familiar geography of your bedroom. He looks wrecked—hair sticking up at gravity-defying angles, those devastating blue eyes clouded with memory and guilt. The sheet pools at his waist, revealing the latticework of scars you’ve mapped with fingers and mouth so many times you could recreate them blind.
“I woke you up.” Not a question. He can feel it through the bond—the jagged edges where his nightmare bled into your sleep, the phantom taste of winter he can never quite shake. His metal hand flexes against the mattress, plates whirring in that way that means he’s fighting the urge to touch you.
“You had the falling dream again.” You shift closer, let your thigh press against his, and watch the tension in his jaw ease fractionally. Through the bond, you feel the dream-echo: falling, always falling, Steve’s face getting smaller, smaller, gone. “The train?”
He nods, throat working. “Haven’t had that one in months. Thought maybe—” A bitter laugh. “Stupid. Thinking they’d stop.”
“Hey.” You catch his chin, force him to meet your eyes. “Two years ago, you had them every night. Now it’s been months. That’s not nothing, Buck. That’s not stupid. That’s healing.”
Something breaks in his expression—that devastating vulnerability he only shows you, only here in the safety of your shared bed at 3 AM when the walls come down. “Sometimes I think I’m getting better. Then nights like this happen and I’m right back there.” His throat works around a swallow. “And I can taste your fear in my mouth because I’m bleeding it all over you through the bond and—”
“I love you,” you interrupt, simple and certain as gravity.
He goes still. Even after two years, the words hit him like a physical thing, like something he has to brace for. You feel it through the bond—that cocktail of awe and disbelief and desperate, aching love that floods his system every time.
“Say it again.” Barely a whisper.
“I love you, James Buchanan Barnes.” You shift closer, throw your leg over his hip, needing more contact. Always needing more. The bond hums brighter where skin meets skin. “I love your nightmares and your scars and the way you steal all the blankets. I love how you hum '40s songs when you cook and can’t figure out how to work the dishwasher even though you can disassemble a sniper rifle in thirteen seconds.”
His flesh hand finds your hip, thumbs the soft skin just above your sleep shorts. “Twelve seconds,” he corrects, but his voice is thick. “Got it down to twelve.”
“Show-off.” You roll your hips just slightly, feel his breath catch. Two years of this and your body still lights up like a struck match every time he touches you. “I love how you look at me like I’m a miracle when you’re the one who survived decades of hell and still chose gentleness.”
“You are a miracle.” His metal hand comes up to cradle your face, thumb tracing your cheekbone with impossible tenderness. The plates are warm now, heated by proximity to your skin. “My miracle. My best girl. My—”
“Yours,” you agree, and kiss him before he can spiral back into guilt.
He makes a sound against your mouth—relief and hunger and something deeper, something that lives in the spaces between words. The kiss starts soft, an apology and a promise all at once, but then you nip at his bottom lip and his control splinters. His flesh hand tightens on your hip, pulls you fully on top of him, and suddenly you’re straddling his waist, feeling exactly how awake he is now.
“Let me,” he says against your mouth, and you know what he’s asking. It’s become a ritual of sorts—after the bad nights, he needs to ground himself in your pleasure, needs to replace the phantom taste of violence with something sweeter. Needs to prove his hands can create instead of destroy.
His mouth trails down your throat, stubble catching on sensitive skin, and you feel the bond pulse with his desperate need to give, to please, to worship. “Please, baby. Need to taste you. Need to—” His hips roll up, just once, and the friction makes you both groan. “Need to make it up to you.”
“There’s nothing to make up for,” you breathe, but you’re already letting him reverse your positions, letting him press you back into the mattress with careful strength.
“Let me anyway.” His eyes in the lamplight are winter-storm blue, pupils blown wide with want. “Let me be good for you. Let me make you feel good. Please.”
How could you deny him anything when he looks at you like that? Like you’re salvation and absolution all at once?
You nod, and his whole body relaxes with relief. He takes his time—pressing grateful kisses to your collarbones, your breasts through thin cotton, the soft curve of your stomach. Each touch is reverent, each kiss a thank you, until you’re squirming with need and he hasn’t even gotten your shorts off yet.
“Patience,” he murmurs against your hip bone, but you can feel his smile, feel the way his own need pulses through the bond like a second heartbeat.
“Don’t have any,” you gasp, threading your fingers through his hair, still messy from sleep. “Not when it comes to you.”
He makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be a sob, pressing his forehead to your stomach. “Fuck, I love you. Love you so much it feels like dying sometimes. Like coming back to life. Like—”
“Bucky.” Your voice breaks on his name. “Please.”
“Yeah, sweetheart. I’ve got you.”
He pulls your shorts down with careful hands, tosses them somewhere in the darkness beyond the lamp’s reach. The first touch of his mouth against you is electric, makes your back arch off the bed, but he just pins you gently with his metal arm across your hips and does it again, slower.
“Perfect,” he breathes against you, and through the bond you feel it—how true he finds it, how touching you like this quiets all the broken pieces inside him, makes him feel useful and whole and human. “So fucking perfect. Taste so good, baby. Could do this for hours.”
And he has, on lazy Sunday mornings when the world feels less sharp, less demanding. But tonight is different. Tonight he’s desperate to give you pleasure like it might erase the nightmares, might prove something to the universe about who he chooses to be.
His tongue finds that spot that makes you see stars, and your hips buck against his hold. The metal arm adjusts, recalibrates, and somehow that tiny mechanical sound in the quiet room makes everything hotter. Makes you remember exactly who’s between your thighs, exactly what he’s capable of, exactly how he chooses to use all that strength and skill.
“That’s it,” he encourages when you moan, when your thighs start to shake. “Let me hear you. Love those sounds you make. Love how wet you get for me. Love how you—fuck—”
You’ve reached down to tangle your fingers with his flesh hand, needing more connection, and the simple touch floods the bond with so much emotion you both gasp. It’s always like this—the physical pleasure amplified by emotional intimacy, by the soul-deep recognition that makes every touch feel like coming home.
He doubles his efforts, slides two fingers inside you while his mouth works magic, and the dual sensation has you climbing fast. Your free hand fists in his hair, not guiding, just holding on, and he groans against you like your pleasure is his own.
It is his own, you realize. Through the bond, you can feel the ghost of what you’re feeling reflected back—the building pressure, the electric heat, the desperate need for more. It should be overwhelming, feeling everything twice, but instead it’s perfect. Like this is what you were made for. What you both were made for.
“Close,” you gasp, though he already knows. Can feel it in the way your thighs tense, the way your breathing goes ragged, the way the bond itself seems to pull taut between you.
“Yeah?” He looks up at you, mouth slick and eyes wild, looking like sin and salvation all at once. “You gonna come for me, sweetheart? Gonna let me taste it? Gonna be good for me?”
The words hit you like a physical thing, and he knows it. Knows exactly what that particular tone—commanding and desperate in equal measure—does to you. He curls his fingers just right, seals his mouth over your clit, and you shatter.
The orgasm rolls through you in waves, each crest higher than the last, and through the bond you feel his echoing pleasure—not physical, but soul-deep satisfaction at being the one to take you apart like this. At being trusted with your vulnerability. At being loved despite everything he’s done.
He works you through it, gentle but relentless, until you’re pushing at his shoulders, oversensitive and shaking. Only then does he crawl back up your body, pressing kisses to heated skin as he goes.
“Better?” he asks against your throat, and you can feel him hard against your thigh, can feel his need through the bond like a physical ache.
“Are you?” you counter, reaching between you to palm him through his sleep pants.
He hisses, hips bucking into your touch. “This isn’t about me—”
“Bullshit.” You squeeze gently, watch his eyes flutter closed. “Two years, Barnes. I know you by now. You need this as much as I do. Need to feel—”
“Human,” he finishes, barely a whisper.
“You are human,” you say firmly, working him free of his pants. He’s hot and hard in your hand, already leaking, and the first stroke has him burying his face in your neck with a broken sound. “You’re human and you’re mine and I need you inside me. Please.”
“Fuck.” His control splinters—you feel it through the bond like ice cracking under spring warmth. “Fuck, okay, yeah. Yeah, sweetheart. Whatever you need.”
He lines himself up, meets your eyes in the amber light, and pushes home in one long, perfect slide. Two years of this and it still feels like revelation. Like puzzle pieces clicking together. Like the universe admitting it got something right.
“Love you,” he breathes against your mouth, starting to move with slow, deep strokes that have you seeing stars. “Love you so fucking much. Love this, love us, love—”
You kiss him quiet, pouring everything you can’t say into the contact. The bond opens fully between you, that rare perfect circuit where you can’t tell where you end and he begins. Where his pleasure becomes yours becomes his in an endless feedback loop that builds and builds until you’re both shaking with it.
He makes love to you like a poem—all rhythm and reverence and barely contained desperation. Like he’s trying to say with his body what he still struggles to say with words: that you saved him, that you see him, that you chose him despite everything.
“Close,” he warns after what could be minutes or hours—time tends to blur when you’re like this, when the bond sings so bright between you. “Can't—fuck, you feel so good. Perfect. Mine. My perfect girl, my—”
“Yeah,” you gasp, already falling again, dragged under by his need and your own combining into something greater. “Yours. Always. Forever.”
He breaks with your name on his lips, face buried in your neck, hips grinding deep as he spills inside you. The physical sensation is intense, but it’s the emotional wave through the bond that devastates—love and gratitude and home home home flooding your system until you can’t breathe with it, until you’re crying with the beauty of being so thoroughly known, so completely held.
After, he doesn’t pull out immediately. Never does, on nights like this. Just shifts enough that his weight isn’t crushing, keeping you close, keeping you full. His metal hand traces lazy patterns on your spine while his flesh hand tangles in your hair, and through the bond you feel the nightmares retreating, chased away by present sensation and future promise.
“Thank you,” he murmurs against your temple.
“For what?”
“Existing. Choosing me. Letting me—” He shifts slightly, and you both gasp at the oversensitivity. “Letting me love you. However I need to. However I can.”
You turn to kiss him properly, slow and deep and full of promise. “Always. In any universe. In every universe. I’d always choose you.”
He shudders, holds you tighter. Outside, Brooklyn starts to wake—sirens and car horns and life going on. But here in your bed, in the circle of his arms, in the warm glow of the bond that ties you together, the rest of the world can wait.
“No more nightmares tonight,” you say, and feel him smile against your skin.
“No,” he agrees. “Just good dreams now. Just this. Just us.”
“Just us,” you echo, and let sleep take you under, safe in the knowledge that when you wake—whether to sunlight or storms—he’ll be right here, yours as much as you’re his, two souls made one by choice and time and the kind of love that survives everything.
Even falling.
Especially falling.