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Bucky knows something is wrong.
He can’t tell for sure yet what it is, but after so many years of hyper vigilance and sniper’s pinpoint attention to reading the atmosphere, the feeling in his gut, however vague and obscure to anyone else, is one that he’s come to trust implicitly.
Your apartment is silent, the wall you share with his eerily still. It’s not a cause for concern on its own; you’ve always been quiet, considerate, careful not to disturb the other neighbors on your floor. But your boyfriend’s never afforded the same courtesy.
Bucky’s been on edge since the moment you first brought him home a couple months ago. Instincts aside, the guy’s the sort of subtle asshole that knows how to fake it at first, that smiles to your face and then drops it the second you look away. Bucky’d disliked him from the moment he caught the two of you in the hallway, when you tried to introduce the two of them and he’d looked at Bucky’s hand it was going to infect him somehow. You’d come to apologize later that night, and again and again every time he’d make a snide remark under his breath in passing about Bucky’s unfortunately still very public past.
But Bucky never cared about those. He’s more than capable of taking care of himself. What he worries about is you.
And now there’s an unexplained pit in his chest that won’t go away. There’s no stomping feet that refused to take their shoes off by the door like you always do. There’s no banging cabinet doors or a voice that’s a pitch louder than it needs to be. The only thing there was was the inconspicuous whisper of a door creaking closed about an hour ago and the pulse of a long shower and then—nothing.
He’s been pacing by the wall for half an hour, maybe more. Listening for signs of life, listening for you. He’d had a couple of issues before that landed him back in therapy for a while, nights when the paranoia was so thick that he’d convinced himself of things that weren’t there. They’d given him tips for it, ways to make sure he was rooted in reality.
He can smell the freshly cleaned laundry from earlier this afternoon sitting at the end of his bed. Taste the stale dinner he’d had hours ago, the lingering flavor of a few sips of beer. Feel the chill in the air since he’d shut off the noisy heating system. See the splitting hardwood under his feet.
But he still can’t fucking hear you.
He’s already in his shoes, already dutifully aware of where the nearest weapons are meticulously hidden and tucked out of sight. Aware of how quickly he could have them in his hand and get to your place, even if there’s no audible signs that point to danger.
He’s in the middle of stalking to the door to go over and check when there’s a knock. He doesn’t break stride, doesn’t hesitate as he pulls it open, but he does falter for a moment when he sees you on the other side.
Bucky eyes you with the gaze of an analyst first. He can’t help it. He tracks your shoulders up by your ears, the delay of your pupils and glassy vision. Your hair still damp, haphazardly dried, pieces of it sticking to your temples and the sides of your neck and curled with moisture. There’s sweat on there, on your upper lip too, but he doesn’t think it’s just the humidity.
You’re not shaking, not visibly injured. But you’re holding yourself like you might fracture if any one muscle twitched out of place, your arms folded tight around your middle and knuckles white where they grip your own arms, dressed in clothes that would hardly even touch you if you weren’t clinging to them so closely.
You’re eerily calm. The kind that Bucky knows well—the kind that either preempts recklessness or the sort of sadness that spreads like a virus and swallows him whole.
But then, when he’s scanned for blood and bruises and come up empty, he looks at you with something a lot closer to compassion.
He says your name, once, gentler than he would with anyone else, and you shudder as if he’d just spoken you into existence.
Your chest caves with a breath first, more of a wheeze than anything else. Your legs start to buckle next, and without Bucky reaching out for your arms, you’d have fallen right to the floor before your delayed reflexes kicked in.
He says your name again, more firmly this time. “Hey. Tell me what’s wrong.”
Tell me who did this, he wants to say, but the sinking feeling inside of him tells him he already knows the answer.
Your head tilts, chin dropping to your chest as you glance at his hands, the flesh one and then the metal. Bucky’s fingers twitch, unsure of if he should keep his hold on you or let you go and risk you losing your balance. He tries to gentle his grip, and he watches your chest swell with a slow, shuddered breath.
When you look up at him again, lips chapped from your teeth and face lacking its regular color, Bucky has the distinct thought that he really fucking hates being right about these things.
And that he should have gone to your place an hour ago.
“I need you to drive me to the hospital,” you tell him.
Bucky shuts the door with a practiced calmness years in the making, and walks you downstairs.
+
You’ve never liked hospitals.
The lights are too bright, the scent of antiseptic and iron too clinical. Everyone’s rushing from one emergency to the next, and things never fail to get lost between the cracks.
Bucky waits with you while you check in, and you can’t bring yourself to look at his face when you tell them what you’re there for. You’re taken to a different part of the clinic, something in between emergency and routine check ups. Everybody’s quieter here and the lights are lower, but you’re not so sure it’s as comforting as you thought it would be.
There are eyes on you; you can feel them. The receptionist who hands you the paperwork looks distantly sympathetic and uncomfortably curious, and the security guard lingering by the entrance keeps glancing at you like he’s prepared for you to suddenly burst into tears or start yelling or something. They’re looking at Bucky too, and you want to tell them that it’s not like that—that Bucky’s nothing like—
But your words jam into a knot in your throat, like you’ve swallowed barbed wire and it won’t loosen.
When your hands shake too badly to finish writing, Bucky finishes filling out the forms for you and takes them back up to the desk. When he returns to the seat beside you he inhales a slow breath, wipes his palms off on his jeans, and then very carefully lays one up-facing on the wooden arms of the chairs between you.
It’s so against everything you’ve come to know about him in the months since you moved in, and the gesture of kindness pushes a few of the stubborn tears from the corner of your eyes. You force in your own breath and take him up on the unspoken offer, threading your smaller, trembling fingers through his calloused, steady ones.
Time passes in a blur until they call your name, the same way it had back at your apartment, in—in the bedroom, in the shower, on the bathroom floor, your mind taking you somewhere else to protect your body from processing too much too quickly.
But all the eyes in the waiting room turn back to you when you stand, and you have a feeling you’re going to have to process it now.
“D’you want me to—?” Bucky starts to ask.
You tighten your grip on his hand. “Come with me. Please.”
Bucky’s eyes flick over your face again and he nods, certain enough that it eases some of your nerves. You know he probably won’t be able to stay for the entire thing, but you’re not sure if you’ll be able to do this from start to finish on your own.
You’ve been in Bucky’s position before with friends, other people who’d needed rides or support. You know how to be that, but you’ve never—it’s never been you on this side of things before. You rack your brain for what to expect, what you can remember of those appointments, but everything is still just blank.
It stays that way through the nurse taking your measurements and when you’re scared to be alone even just long enough to provide a urine sample in the bathroom, when you stand idle and still outside the exam room while they swab your mouth, your fingernails, sealing them all into little cups and baggies with various labels you can’t make yourself process at the moment.
You get assigned an exam room and Bucky faces the door to keep watch while you change into a gown, then returns to your side once you’re seated on the uncomfortable crinkle of clean, white paper.
You’re relieved when he offers his hand again. You’re not sure you’ve taken a full breath since you had to let go of it.
The physician comes in and seems to move in stop motion, a well oiled machine of hand sanitizer-take a seat and flip through your forms-acknowledge you; in that order.
“So. You’ve been assaulted?”
You flinch lightly at his blunt lack of introduction, and Bucky’s flesh hand squeezes enough to anchor you back to the present where he’s standing beside the exam table.
Untrusting of your voice, you nod.
“When did the incident take place?”
You clear your throat. “Um. About—a couple of hours ago, I think. Maybe a little more, now.”
The doctor clicks a pen and sets to writing on his clipboard, his graying hair and bifocals tilted down toward the paper in his lap.
“Can you walk me through what happened immediately afterward?”
“I was—in my apartment,” you start tentatively, your own voice distant in your ears. “I went to the bathroom to take a shower—”
“You showered?”
You falter. “Yes.”
The physician’s head tilts up toward you for the first time since he entered the room, his eyes narrowed over the top of his glasses. “And you’ve changed clothes as well, I assume?”
“I—yes.”
The man takes a very pointed inhale and exhale, rubbing at the side of his temple. “Ideally, you shouldn’t shower or change clothes between the incident and coming here. It makes the process of collecting evidence much more difficult.”
Your swallow is audible in the tense silence of the room. “Oh.”
Bucky’s grip twitches on your hand again and your eyes stray to him briefly, but this time he’s not so much offering you comfort as he is biting his tongue, you realize. A muscle in his jaw flexes, but when he notices you looking, he offers an encouraging twist of his lips.
“You can continue,” the doctor prompts. You turn back to him, trying ot focus.
“I—I took a shower, and then I got dressed. And then I went to Bucky’s, and then—here.”
He hums, flipping through the papers. “And you’re planning to report it, I see,” he says, looking up at you. Or, mostly Bucky. “So we’ll have to get the paperwork started on all of that. And this—Bucky, I assume?—you should prepare yourself to be questioned in the event that law enforcement needs more information. Since we don’t have some of the usual forms of evidence, they’ll likely reach out.”
“Fine,” Bucky says immediately, flippant in light of the doctor’s seeming exasperation but not of you.
The paper flips again. “Did you know the perpetrator?”
“Yes,” you admit, throat tight. “My boyfriend, um—”
“This was a partner?” he interrupts.
You nod, and the doctor flips the paper closed altogether and sets it on his tray, lacing his fingers together over his knee. He scoots toward you a little and you and Bucky both tense, and you get the distinct feeling of being talked to like a child even if you’re the one that’s technically on higher ground than he is at the moment.
“If you need another moment to think through whether or not you’d like to report this, I can step out. Some folks who report intimate partners might come to regret it, should the situation change. Or perhaps, if there was an argument prior to—”
“She’s sure,” Bucky interjects sharply.
It’s obvious Bucky hasn’t wanted to speak for you at all, which you appreciate. But you’re glad he’s chosen now to step in, because the stinging behind your eyes is suddenly shifting from dull background noise to something much more imminent.
With a measured exhale, the doctor glances at Bucky and then back to his papers, standing from the stool and collecting them again. He holds the folder to his chest and faces you.
“Alright, well. Typically we would start with a forensic evidence kit, but in this case we’ll do a blood test to check you for pregnancy and for sexually transmitted infections, and then we’ll do a cervix culture to rule out anything else.” He blinks flatly. “Do you have any questions?”
You shake your head, teeth digging into your lower lip until he’s finally gone.
When the door closes and leaves you and Bucky alone again, your shoulders cave, your eyes water, the tightness in your throat blown wide open. This time, you can’t stop it.
It’s exhaustion more than anything else, you think—the restless pathways your mind and body have been down tonight. Every stage of grief except for elusive acceptance, swinging from denial to anger to sadness and back again. You’re not sure there’s even anything to bargain for, except it’d be really, really nice if—
“Bucky,” leaves your mouth in a desperate, ugly sob, the strings you’d been holding yourself together with snapping all at once.
One of your hands is clutching his still, the other fisted in his shirt so hard that you can feel your fingernails digging into your palm even through the thick material. You can hear him talking but it’s difficult to get a breath in enough to listen, to get your ears to stop ringing.
One thing gets through: “Can I touch you?”
You sob again, already reaching for him when he bends to wrap his arms around you. It’s everything you need it to be and nothing like earlier—like the push of greedy fingers and the shock of it all making you limp, not your looping thoughts of I should have known or I should’ve tried harder to get away or IsaidnoIsaidnoIsaidnoIsaid—
Bucky is steady, just like always.
Steady arms at your sides, letting you control the pressure. Steady hand at the back of your head, light enough that it would fall away completely if you moved away. Steady pulse underneath your cheek, unflinching as you attempt to get yours to match it.
“I did it wrong,” you tell him fretfully, worry like a weight on your shoulders. “I shouldn’t have showered, or—or changed, and now—”
“Hey. Look at me.” Bucky pulls back enough to look you in the eye, and it takes you a minute, but you manage to match him for it. “You’ve done nothing wrong. Nothing. You hear me? I don’t care what that shit doctor says or what the shit cops are gonna say about it either. He’s not going to get away with this. Do you understand?”
He’s so convicted about it that it makes your breath catch, your tears slowing. Your eyes drop fleetingly to the prosthetic, the one you’ve read things about online. You aren’t sure what he’s offering exactly, only that no one else has ever insinuated something so irrefutable in pursuit of your safety.
“Bucky…” you breathe.
“If you ask me to stand up and testify, I will. Anything you need. But if that doesn’t cut it, there are other options. Okay? He won’t touch you again.”
You wait for a fracture in the dents of his expression, his furrowed brow and determined mouth, the sharp cut of his eyes softened with concern. You glance between them until you feel steadier again, and then nod.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Bucky repeats, exhaling. You see him visibly shift from whatever mindset he’d previously been in, his hold on you gentling. “What—what can I do now? What’s—should I step out, or—?”
“You’ll probably have to for the exam, yeah,” you agree, your palms already growing clammy at the thought. “But could you—could you ask them if they have someone else that could do the exam please?”
“Yes. Definitely.” Bucky carefully pulls himself away, seeming much more assured with a task to fulfill. He pauses halfway between you and the door. “I’ll be right back. You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah,” you say, raspy with leftover tears. You offer him a small, wobbly smile. “Thanks, Bucky.”
He gives you one back and then he’s gone, leaving the door cracked so you can hear the low murmur of his voice when he talks to the nurse.
You lift your hands to your face in his absence, regret and relief fighting for a precedence you’re too tired to give.
+
The thing is, Bucky’d known how shit the medical system could be. More often than not it’s made up of good people with good intentions who are stuck working underneath the assholes who get all the salary and the credit for their hard work, and Bucky tries to remind himself of this repeatedly as he watches you stumble through the practitioner’s invasive questioning, the way your pain is packaged and made clinical.
He’s got his own horror stories, especially with the arm. But all of that poking and prodding was after years of the serum and methodical training, learning to live with pain and uncomfortability. Without that as a primer, he thinks about the memories that are still a little fuzzy, shoved behind others in the back of his head: himself, young and defenseless and lying on a hard, cold medical cot, uncertain of even his own identity, the distinct feeling of being small in a way that left no room to defend himself from it.
The thought of you like that makes him so viscerally ill that he has to lock himself in the restroom while you’re being examined, splashing cold water onto his face until he’s back in his body again.
He tells himself he won’t hurt anyone, not unless he has to. But even as he thinks it the plates in his arm shift and recalibrate themselves around the idea of bloodied vengeance, of how easy it might be to track him down and make certain that he had nothing left to touch people with at all. Something inside of him aches, dust shaking off in preemptive preparation.
But. One thing at a time. You don’t need vengeance right now. You just need, somehow, miraculously, Bucky.
So he holds his tongue as he leaves the restroom and waits outside of the exam room, fighting the urge to pace and scare the nursing staff more than he already is. His guilt and regret for not having checked on you sooner has no place here, not now. He can save that for when he’s alone.
What he can do is promise himself that he won’t question his instincts again. Not when it comes to you.
The door clicks open to his left and Bucky turns to face it immediately, a little of his tension easing when you come out in your clothes instead of a gown, talking quietly with the woman he’d found to do your exam instead of the man from earlier. She seems much more empathetic, Bucky thinks, and you seem more at ease than you had when he’d left the room.
You finish talking with her and then make your way over to him, still carrying a little tension and obviously tired. It’s a far cry from the smiles and waves he gets in the hallway, and the comparison is too much to swallow at the moment.
He thinks you look beautiful either way.
“Hey,” you ease up to him, a thin stack of papers and brochures in hand.
“Hi,” he says. “Y’alright?”
“Managing, yeah,” your lips twitch and then find the cut of your teeth again, a divot in between your brows. “Um. She suggested that I probably shouldn’t go back to my apartment tonight. Both for evidence and for—I just—” you stop yourself, take a breath, start again. “She said I should find somewhere I feel safe.”
Bucky nods. “Understood. Is there somewhere I can take you?”
“I was—I was hoping I could stay at yours, just for tonight. If you don’t mind.”
The request shocks him, but he tries his best not to let it show. You’d trusted him enough to let him drive you here, to hold your hand and let him in the room with you while you talked about it, to do much more than Bucky thought he’d get to do for you.
But the idea of being someone people think of as safe is something else. Even once he was back in the city and purged of the programming, even after a decade since a life of hiding and running and killing, the people who felt safe with him were few and far between, and now mostly gone.
He blinks several times, shaking his head past the torrent of emotion in his chest, and looks into the open, vulnerable expanse of your expression. He can be this for you. He wants to be. “Of course.”
You seem to relax even more at having that out of the way, bringing a hand up to rub thoughtfully at your temple. “I left a few of my things over there, though. I need…”
“I’ll get ‘em.”
Your lips tug upward barely at the corner, your hand dropping to your side. “Thank you.”
You don’t touch on the way out into the rest of the hospital and the parking lot like you had on the way in, but Bucky stays close enough to you that he’d be there if you reached for him. He tells himself to keep his eyes on his footsteps, on the road, on the menu board when he stops to pick you up something to eat on the way home, but every time, he finds his gaze drifting back to you in the passenger side.
You spend most of the ride with your eyes closed, your knees pulled up into the seat, your head tilted and eyes closed. Your breathing is calm but Bucky knows better than to assume the same for you as a whole. He’s had nightmares that leave him feeling awful for weeks. He’s not imagining that any part of this is easy for you.
And yet, you never once lost your composure. It would have been perfectly okay, maybe even a little bit more understandable if you had, but you’d held yourself together even while you were sobbing against his shoulder, careful to keep your emotions contained behind the locked door, confined to the material stretched across Bucky’s chest that’d absorbed the proof.
You’d known what to do, where to go even through unimaginable stress. You’d known you wouldn’t be able to drive and you’d secured a safe way to get where you needed to go. You conversed calmly even while you nearly squeezed his knuckles to aching, and you’d stood your ground when they’d tried to coax you into changing your mind.
It’s all the telltale signs of someone who’s been through trauma before. It only takes once, really, for the body to learn how to shift into survival mode. From there it’s muscle memory.
Bucky knows what that feels like, in his own way. He can’t, wouldn’t compare the two, but something in him softens and spills open at the familiarity of grief in all its unpredictable, shifting forms, wondering idly if that’s the reason he’d been drawn to you in the first place.
Carefully, he props a wrist against the passenger seat above your head, then very gently lets his fingertips meet your hair until you stir. You blink sluggishly, tilting your chin at the smell of food in the car.
“Need to eat, sweetheart.”
Bucky freezes at his own slip up, worried about any implications it might carry for you tonight even if he’d meant it innocently.
But you don’t tell him off, and you don’t flinch. If anything, the tenderness in his tone—the way that Bucky forgets he’s even capable of embodying sometimes—seems to encourage you.
Even now you trust him, enough to feed you and get you home safely, enough to fall asleep in his passenger seat using his jacket as a blanket.
Bucky can’t think about it for too long, and that isn’t what tonight is about anyway. He makes sure you get something on your stomach and then heads back to his apartment, careful not to take anything more than what you’ve given.
Your trust isn’t something he plans to take lightly, and he’s going to spend every moment he has it making sure it’s never something you regret.
+
You’ve always been told how resilient you are.
Trauma softens you. Makes you malleable where others are unwavering, makes you more likely to believe that empathy is a given and not a choice that people make.
It’s likely what opened you up to your last relationship in the first place; assuming that everyone is capable of change in the ways that you are, that changing is something they even want to do in the first place.
That you would be enough to make them want it, even if they didn’t.
Some people, though, don’t deserve your leniency, and even if they do, it isn’t your job to try to fix them. You just typically don’t have this realization until the afterward, the bandages and bruises both metaphorical and, this time, literally.
The night before comes back slowly, sinking into you like the sunlight from the window on the wall facing the couch. Your body tenses as soon as you’re conscious even if you have nothing to be afraid of here—you’re at Bucky’s, you remember, and you can hear him still in the apartment with you.
You force yourself to take note of your surroundings. The smell of coffee drifting in from the kitchen. The ache in your jaw from presumably grinding your teeth during the night, and the faintness of lingering borrowed toothpaste on your tongue. The soft blanket you’re lying under on the couch, and the pillow under your head because you hadn’t wanted to sleep in the bed.
The imprint of Bucky in the armchair across from you where he’d slept, keeping watch each time you’d woken yourself with a fragment of a memory, saw him there and were able to relax again.
You’d forgotten how nice it was to be around someone predictable. Someone who says what they’re going to do and then does it.
“Coffee?” Bucky asks, hovering in the doorway with a cup.
Your stomach rolls at the thought of eating or drinking much of anything at all, but you decide that caffeine is probably a good choice if you’re going to have to talk to the officers later today.
“Sure. Thanks.”
Bucky steps into the room then, holding out the mug as you sit up on the sofa. “Got plain toast too, if you want it. S’what I eat when my appetite’s shot.”
The coffee is warm and strong between your hands, enough to wake you up a little more. Enough to feel heat gather in your cheeks at the half-memory of Bucky saying need to eat, sweetheart the night before. You clear your throat, blow on the steaming cup, and take a tentative sip.
“Toast sounds great, Bucky. I’ll come help.”
He looks like he might protest at first, but seems to understand your blatant need to move. You leave the blanket folded and follow him to the kitchen, but you collapse into one of the stools the moment you get there.
Your mind wants to go in all sorts of directions the moment you’re on your feet, as if it’d been waiting for the cue. What happens if he comes after you and gets violent after hearing about the charges? What if there hadn’t been enough evidence to charge him at all? If not, should you let Bucky enforce whatever his justice would be? Would you feel right about it if you did?
And your apartment—you’re not sure you’ll be able to go back there, not with the memories engrained into the places you once considered most safe. You can probably afford to move if you choose a place that’s around the same price and alert the landlord to what happened. But then—that means telling someone else about it, and it means having to pack all your things up and get them out and find a way to move them somewhere else, means starting over again in a way you hadn’t planned for or expected.
Bucky sets a plate down in front of you. True to his word, a single square of plain toast, a slice of butter for taste so it’s not too dry.
One step at a time.
“Can I—” Bucky starts, then pauses. He leans back against the opposite cabinet, flesh and prosthetic fingers curved over the edge of the granite. “Can I ask how you’re doing?”
It’s not a command. It’s a genuine question, one you can say no to if you felt like it. But Bucky’s asking not because it has to go on record and not because he’s going to try to talk you into feeling something else, and that counts for something right now.
“I don’t know,” you admit, tearing a piece of toast with your fingers.
Bucky nods like he’d suspected as much, or maybe like he knows the feeling. He doesn’t elaborate, and you don’t ask him to.
“Bucky, I want to thank you for last night,” you preface, grabbing the napkin and twisting it between your fingers. The morning light has brought an uncomfortable sense of vulnerability with it, and even though you trust Bucky more than just about anybody at this point, you value his opinion of you. You know you’ve done all the right things, but you can’t help the inkling of embarrassment at someone you respect seeing you at your worst.
“Don’t. Please. I—” Bucky stops you, looking down. “I don’t need any thanks for that. It’s not something I ever want to have to do, but I’m glad you came to me.”
He lapses into heavy silence while you finish eating small pieces of your toast, washing it down with coffee and hoping the mix of them will keep your nausea at bay. By the time your plate is clean he’s still staring blankly at the cabinet opposite his legs, knuckles white on the counter.
He twitches slightly when you say his name, his eyes cutting up to yours and then guiltily away.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t have stopped it,” he says.
Your eyes widen, indignation kicking up in your chest. “What?”
“I didn’t think it was any of my business,” Bucky continues gruffly. “I didn’t think you’d care if I thought he was an asshole, because I’m just your neighbor. So I didn’t say anything. But maybe if I had…”
“Bucky,” you stop him, shaking your head, “those sorts of people, these things—bad things—just happen sometimes. It wasn’t your job to predict it, just like it wasn’t mine to endure it.” It feels good, saying it out loud. “If there’s someone at fault here, it’s definitely not us.”
Something hardens a little in Bucky’s expression at your words, and he gives a terse nod in your direction. “You’re right. It’s not.”
“And I do value your opinion, for what it’s worth,” you add tentatively. “I don’t think of you as just a neighbor.”
You’re far removed from being able to think about the attraction you’ve harbored for him at the moment, but you flush with warmth nonetheless at the intimate admission. You almost can’t believe how much you’d let him see and help you with last night, but you don’t regret it. Your body had taken over and located the closest thing to safety, and Bucky, you think, was a perfect option.
“I meant what I said last night,” he tells you, quiet and certain across the kitchen. “I know you still have to talk to the cops today. I’ll make my statement too. But I have ways that I can take care of things that aren’t what you’re thinking. I don’t do that sort of thing anymore, but I still have…options. About this or—about anything. You can always come to me.”
You know how hard he’s worked to separate himself from his past because you’ve seen a lot of it firsthand, living next to him. The gesture touches you; even if his options aren’t quite the same as what they used to be, he’s still offering you a part of himself he hadn’t wanted to associate with anymore, and he’d done it thinking nothing of his own uncomfortability and everything of your safety.
“That’s a really nice thing to do for a neighbor,” you prompt, the lingering heat from your coffee mug warming your chin.
“Yeah, well,” Bucky says. “Maybe I don’t think of you as just a neighbor either.”
Breakfast comes to a close with a second cup of coffee for him and another slice of toast for you, the silence less pressing now and more comfortable as the two of you move around his kitchen. You’re glad for the way he doesn’t protest you washing your plate and slipping it into the dishwasher, needing to use your hands somehow, to feel at home in your body again.
When you migrate into the living room, checking your phone that’s charged from where he’d plugged it in for you the night before, Bucky sets to folding the blanket he’d slept with on the armchair, draping it over the back and busying himself to give you some privacy.
“Do you need anything from next door? I can grab it before anybody shows up.”
“I don’t think so,” you tell him. “I still have the clothes you got for me last night and they said not to touch anything more than necessary anyway.”
You lock your phone and set it on the coffee table, ignoring the handful of messages from friends and family that feel too familiarly mundane to handle at the moment.
Standing from the sofa, you swallow your nerves and clear your throat. “But if I could ask for something else…?”
“Anything,” Bucky returns, abandoning the armchair to settle his full attention on you.
Rounding the edge of the table, you step toward him and hesitate for a moment, shifting on your feet. Wanting to offer him the same choice.
“Can I touch you?”
The tilt of his mouth would seem humorous, if not for the way he struggles to keep his brow from twitching. Your gut feeling might just be correct; maybe Bucky hasn’t been afforded the privilege of choice all that often either.
He nods, quick and hesitantly eager, and you step forward to close the distance between you, wrapping your arms around his middle in a hug.
The fortification of safe physical touch hits you like a much needed sigh, your body relaxing even more than it had in your sleep. You turn your cheek against his chest and feel it when Bucky gives in, his own arms carefully winding around your back and shoulder blades, holding you like something both fragile and unbreakable.
His chin bends until it rests lightly on top of your head, his larger body curved around yours. Time drifts again in a different way than it had before, the easy fit of your limbs and the mindless sway of your bodies as you hold each other.
Later, when the knocks come, Bucky lets you hold his hand then too.
.
.
.
These days, Bucky doesn’t do it as much to keep from spiraling as he does to root himself in the moment, to make sure he doesn’t miss a single thing.
He can smell the faint scent of Alpine’s hair, getting used to her new spot between your feet and tickling his nose. Taste the imprint of your sleepy kisses on his mouth. See sunlight coming in through the blinds, falling over the rug and the sheets. Feel the mattress beneath both of your clothed bodies, the one that’s shoved into the corner of the living room for the nights when his nightmares and your flashbacks are too much to stay in the bed.
He can hear you, trusting and safe beside him.
“Bucky?” you murmur against his collarbone, waking slow. He hides a smile in your hair and swipes a thumb over your hip where his arm is wrapped around you, inhaling, exhaling.
He knows it’s not as much a question as an affirmation; proof that’s given freely, never demanded.
“Yeah, sweetheart.”
Alpine meows as if in agreement, and the two of you shake with easy laughter. He lives for these moments now—these interludes and in betweens and almosts.
Everything good, and nothing bad.