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crybabycabin · 9 days ago

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touch and go | b.b.

✮ synopsis: he's the winter soldier, and you're just you. but when your skin touches his, he becomes bucky barnes again.

(or: the soulmate fic where touch is everything and bucky barnes will fight his way back to you, one broken memory at a time.)

✮ pairing: ca:tws!bucky x soulmate!reader

✮ disclaimers: fem!reader, soulmates, violence/action sequences, graphic descriptions of torture/memory wiping, PTSD, panic attacks, dissociation, past torture, brainwashing, heavy angst, touch deprivation, references to past violence/assassinations, hurt/comfort, fluff, eventual happy ending, bucky is down horrendously bad

✮ warnings: (18+) MDNI, explicit sexual content, unprotected sex, p in v, oral (f receiving), overstimulation, multiple orgasms, soul bond sex (enhanced sensations), touch-starved bucky, possessive behavior, marking/bruising, praise kink, body worship, emotional sex, crying during sex (in a good way), size kink if you squint, bucky has a dirty filthy mouth

✮ word count: 14.3k

✮ a/n: re-uploading all my fics to this blog so i'm posting a ca:tws-era oldie but goodie (the last 4k of this is straight smut, so if that's not your cup of tea feel free to stop at the **)

bonus drabble 1 bonus drabble 2 series masterlist

The library basement feels like a crypt tonight—all dead air and fluorescent buzz that makes your molars ache.

You've been down here so long your bones have started to match the temperature of the concrete, cold seeping through your jeans where you've been sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a semi-circle of photocopied articles that all essentially say the same nothing in different ways.

3:17 AM according to your phone, which you check compulsively every twenty minutes like maybe time will take pity and skip forward to your deadline. The security guard made his last round two hours ago—Gerald? Gary? Something with a G—his whistling fading up the stairwell along with any pretense that you're not completely alone down here.

Your neck cracks when you roll it, vertebrae protesting the last six hours of hunching over sources that shouldn't be this hard to parse. But your advisor had smiled that sharp little smile when assigning this topic, the one that says let's see if you're really cut out for this, and spite is a hell of a motivator.

Even if your eyes are burning. Even if the coffee tastes like battery acid. Even if your soul bond has been aching since midnight with that peculiar emptiness you've learned to ignore.

The lights flicker—building's older than sin, held together by asbestos and prayer—but the air changes with it. Shifts. Like all the oxygen just remembered it had somewhere else to be.

Your fingers still on the keyboard mid-sentence.

Don't be stupid. It's a basement. In a library. The scariest thing down here is your browser history.

But your body knows things your mind pretends it doesn't. Every hair follicle suddenly awake, skin prickling with the kind of ancient warning that kept humans from being eaten in the dark. Your heartbeat kicks up, stuttering from normal to concerned between one breath and the next.

You turn.

He stands at the edge of the stacks like violence in human form.

Black tactical gear eats the light, makes him look like someone cut a hole in reality and taught it how to hunt. The mask covering the lower half of his face should make him less human, but somehow it's worse—forces you to focus on the eyes that track your movement with the kind of empty precision that makes your hindbrain scream predator predator predator.

"Oh." The sound punches out of you, high and strangled.

He doesn't speak. Doesn't need to. Just moves toward you with the kind of lethal economy that makes you understand, suddenly and completely, why rabbits freeze when hawks circle overhead. No wasted motion. No hesitation. Just purpose distilled into muscle and intent.

Your body tries—God, it tries. Scrambling backward, papers scattering, laptop sliding off your thighs to crack against the floor in what feels like slow motion. Three months of work fracturing into digital garbage as you crab-walk backward, palms slipping on photocopies, knee catching on your backpack hard enough to send you sprawling.

He crosses the space between you like it's nothing.

Like you're nothing.

His hand finds your throat before you've even processed standing, leather and pressure sending you backward into the wall hard enough to knock the air from your lungs. Old brick catches your hair, pulls it, but that barely registers against the feeling of being pinned like an insect, specimen for examination before disposal.

Both your hands fly to his wrist, fingernails catching on tactical fabric that won't give, won't move, won't budge. He's not crushing your windpipe—not yet—but the promise is there in the careful placement of his thumb, the calculated pressure that says I could, if I wanted to.

"Please—" It comes out thin, reedy. Your right hand abandons his wrist to push against his chest, trying to create distance that doesn't exist, will never exist. "I don't know what you—I'm nobody, I'm just—"

His head tilts. Minute. Considering. The eyes stay empty, stay cold, but something flickers there—assessment, maybe. Calculation. How long it will take. How quiet you'll be.

Your left hand keeps clawing at his grip while your right slides up his chest, finds the edge of his tactical vest, pushes uselessly at a shoulder that might as well be carved from stone. But the movement makes you stretch, makes your hand slip higher, past the collar of his gear, past the edge of the mask, until—

Your fingertips brush his jaw.

Skin against skin.

The world breaks apart.

Heat races from that point of contact like lightning seeking ground, if lightning could rewrite your DNA as it traveled. Every nerve ending lights up at once, not with pain but with recognition so profound it feels like drowning in reverse. Like every cell in your body suddenly remembers how to breathe.

His entire body locks. The hand at your throat spasms, loosens, and you hear him make a sound—sharp, bitten off, like someone just slid a knife between his ribs. Those empty eyes blow wide, pupils expanding until there's barely any gray left, and his chest heaves against your palm like he's just broken the surface after being underwater too long.

He rips the mask off with his free hand. Tears it away like it's burning him, revealing a face that makes your chest cavity feel too small. Sharp jaw, soft mouth, stubble that catches the shit fluorescent lighting and turns it into shadow. Beautiful in the way broken things can be beautiful, in the way that makes you want to cut yourself on the edges.

The leather glove at your throat disappears—he tears it off with his teeth, movements gone jerky and desperate where they were smooth before. Then his bare hand is cupping your face, thumb brushing your cheekbone with the kind of reverence reserved for holy things, impossible things, things that might disappear if you breathe wrong.

He pulls you forward, or maybe he falls into you—either way, your foreheads meet in the space between one heartbeat and the next. His breath fans across your face, ragged and hot, and you can feel him shaking. This man who moved like death incarnate thirty seconds ago is shaking.

"Oh," he breathes, and his voice—Christ, his voice is nothing like you imagined during those empty nights when the bond ached worst. Rough like he hasn't used it in years. Soft like he's afraid it'll break something. Accent pulling at the vowels in ways that make your chest hurt. "Oh, no. No, not—not like this."

You can't move. Can't think. Can't process anything beyond the electricity still racing through your veins, the place where his thumb traces your cheekbone like he's trying to memorize the architecture of your face through touch alone. Your hands are caught between you, one still fisted in his tactical vest, the other pressed flat against his chest where you can feel his heart hammering out a rhythm that matches yours.

He pulls back just enough to look at you, and the devastation in his eyes makes your throat close for reasons that have nothing to do with violence. Gray like winter mornings, like grief, like the moment before the sky breaks open.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, wrecked. His thumb catches the tear you didn't realize was sliding down your cheek, and the tenderness of it makes you want to scream. "I'm so fucking sorry, I didn't—I couldn't—"

"Who are you?" Your voice comes out destroyed, barely recognizable. The soul bond hums between you like a live wire, like coming home to a place that's on fire, and you don't know whether to run toward it or away.

His jaw works, muscles tightening and releasing like he's fighting something immense. When he speaks again, it's careful. Measured. Like each word costs him something irreplaceable.

"Someone who's going to disappear." His forehead presses against yours again, harder this time, desperate. Both hands frame your face now, holding you like something precious, something he's about to lose. "Someone who needs you to run. Now. Before—"

A sound echoes down the stairwell. Footsteps. Multiple sets.

The change in him is instant and terrible. The softness vanishes like it was never there, replaced by the same lethal efficiency that brought him here, but now there's something else in his eyes. Something that looks like anguish.

"Forgive me," he says, and before you can ask for what, his thumb finds a spot behind your jaw.

The world tilts. Your legs go liquid. But he catches you—of course he catches you—lowers you to the ground like you're made of spun glass while your vision tunnels to nothing.

The last thing you feel is his mouth pressed to your forehead, words whispered against your skin in a language you don't recognize but somehow understand.

I'll find you again.

I promise.

I'm sorry.

When security finds you four hours later, you have bruises on your throat that look like purple-black fingerprints, a concussion that makes the world swim, and no memory the EMTs will accept of how you ended up unconscious in a locked basement.

But you remember.

You remember the way his hands shook when he held your face. You remember the devastation in winter-gray eyes. You remember the electricity of recognition, the soul bond snapping into place only to be severed, leaving you with a phantom ache that feels like dying in slow motion.

There's a leather glove clutched in your fist that no one can pry from your fingers.

You tell them you don't remember where it came from.

You lie.

The world had always been divided into two types of people: those who'd found their match and those still waiting.

You'd grown up watching the found ones move through life with that particular brand of settled confidence, like they'd discovered some fundamental truth the rest of you were still stumbling toward.

Your mother used to tell the story at dinner parties, after her second glass of wine made her sentimental. How she'd been twenty-three, working at a bank in downtown Brooklyn, when a man came in to dispute an overdraft fee. Their hands touched when she passed back his paperwork. The bond snapped into place like a rubber band that had been stretched across decades, just waiting to contract.

She'd knocked over her coffee. He'd forgotten his own name for thirty seconds. They'd been married six months later.

"You just know," she'd say, fingers intertwined with your father's across the table. "It's like every cell in your body suddenly remembers what it was made for."

You'd wanted to believe her. Spent your eighteenth birthday waiting for that recognition to hit, for your body to suddenly make sense in a way it never had before.

But days turned to weeks turned to months, and all you felt was the same low-grade emptiness everyone without a bond carried—that constant, quiet ache of incompleteness.

By twenty-one, you'd stopped looking for it in every accidental touch.

By twenty-three, you'd convinced yourself you were one of the statistical anomalies. No bond. No match. Just you and your dissertation and a future that looked exactly like your present, only with better coffee and maybe tenure if you played your cards right.

The bruises have faded to sick yellow-green by the time you make it back to campus. Two weeks of medical leave that you spent staring at your apartment ceiling, trying to make sense of something that refuses to be made sensible. The official report sits in your email, cc'd to your advisor and the department head and probably half the university's legal team: Student found unconscious in library basement. Possible assault. No cameras functioning. Investigation ongoing.

You don't correct them. Don't mention the glove hidden in your nightstand drawer. Don't explain that the bruises on your throat match the exact span of fingers that had held your face like you were something holy, something worth breaking for.

Your body remembers even when your mind tries to forget. The soul bond, severed as quickly as it formed, has left you feeling like someone hollowed out your chest cavity with a melon baller. It's worse than before—before was just absence. This is active loss. This is knowing exactly what you're missing.

The dreams start the first night home from the hospital.

Not nightmares—that would be easier. These are soft things that leave you gasping awake at 3 AM with tears on your face and your hand pressed to your cheek where he'd touched you. Dreams where those gray eyes find yours across impossible distances. Where his hands shake as they frame your face. Where he whispers apologies in languages you don't speak but somehow understand.

Sometimes you dream of snow. Of cold so profound it burns. Of a voice saying his name—names?—until there's nothing left but the mission.

Sometimes you dream of falling. Of a train that screams through mountain passes. Of reaching for something—someone—who's always just beyond your fingertips.

But mostly you dream of that moment. The mask coming off. The devastating gentleness of his forehead against yours. The way he breathed you in like his lungs hadn't recognized oxygen until then, like you were the first real thing he'd touched in decades.

You become an expert in lying about the nightmares. "Trauma response," you tell the university-mandated therapist. "Yes, I'm processing. No, I don't remember details. Yes, I feel safe on campus."

Lies. All lies.

You remember everything. The weight of him. The contrast between violence and tenderness that shouldn't have existed in the same person. The way the soul bond had sung between you for those impossible seconds—not the gentle hum your mother described, but something desperate and raw, like two halves of something broken trying to fuse back together.

The research starts three weeks after the incident. You tell yourself it's academic curiosity. Tell yourself you're not the first person to lose a soulmate before really finding them. There are support groups. Statistics. An entire subset of psychology dedicated to severed bonds and what they do to the human psyche.

Increased rates of depression. Anxiety. Insomnia. Some subjects report physical pain at the site of initial contact. Others experience what researchers call "phantom bond syndrome"—the persistent sensation of a connection that no longer exists.

You check every box. Feel him in every room you enter, just a second too late. Wake up with your hand pressed to your face, trying to hold onto the ghost of leather and gunpowder and something metallic you couldn't place then but can't stop tasting now.

The databases give you nothing. Facial recognition software turns up empty. You sketch what you remember of his face—strong jaw, soft mouth, eyes like winter—but it feels like trying to draw music, like something essential gets lost in translation.

"Maybe he was military," Katrina suggests over coffee that tastes like disappointment. She's trying to help, your best friend since undergrad, but she looks at you with the kind of careful concern reserved for people about to break. "Special ops or something. That would explain the tactical gear."

You don't tell her about the way he moved. Don't mention that special ops soldiers don't usually have metal arms—you'd felt it when he caught you, the strange whir of plates adjusting beneath the fabric. Don't explain that whatever he was, military doesn't quite cover it.

December bleeds into January. You submit your dissertation proposal late, blame the incident, receive an extension wrapped in sympathetic looks. The bruises are long gone but you wear scarves anyway, can't stand the feeling of air against your throat where his thumb had pressed.

Your google search history becomes a testament to obsession:

“severed soul bonds recovery time?” “can soul bonds reconnect?” “military tactical gear supplier identification” “metal prosthetic arm advanced” “soul bond physical pain management”

Nothing. Always nothing.

But late at night, when the world sleeps and you're alone with the ache that lives between your ribs, you pull out the glove. Run your fingers over worn leather that's been softened by use and something else—care, maybe. The kind of attention that comes from having nothing else to focus on.

It smells like winter. Like violence. Like the ghost of cologne that might have been nice once, before it mixed with gunpowder and fear and whatever else clings to people who move through the world like weapons.

You press it to your face and breathe deep, eyes closed, trying to summon those impossible seconds when he'd looked at you like you were salvation and damnation all at once. When his voice had broken on an apology for something you didn't understand. When he'd promised to find you again in words you shouldn't have been able to translate but did.

The bond throbs. Phantom pain for a phantom connection.

You fold the glove carefully. Place it back in the drawer. Go to bed knowing you'll dream of gray eyes and the kind of gentleness that only comes from people who've forgotten they deserve it.

Tomorrow you'll get up. Go to class. Pretend your chest doesn't feel like someone excavated it with rusty tools. Pretend you don't scan every face on campus, looking for winter eyes and a jaw that could cut glass.

But tonight, you let yourself remember. Let yourself feel the echo of his forehead against yours, the desperate press of his mouth to your skin, the way he'd held you like you were worth breaking the world for.

I'll find you again.

You touch your throat, the memory of leather and promise.

I'm waiting.

The asset doesn't fight anymore.

Hasn't for years. Learned the hard way that resistance only makes it worse—more voltage, longer sessions, deeper cuts into whatever remains of the person he might have been.

Better to go limp. Better to let them position him like a doll, open his mouth for the rubber guard, wait for the electricity to wash it all away.

The asset craves it sometimes. The blankness. The nothing. Easier than carrying the weight of what his hands have done.

But Bucky Barnes fights.

Screams himself raw before they get the guard between his teeth. Thrashes against the restraints hard enough to bend the metal table, to make the technicians step back with wide eyes because the asset never does this, hasn't done this in fifteen years, not since they perfected the chair's calibration.

"Hold him!" Pierce's voice cuts through the chaos, sharp with irritation. "Get those restraints tightened before—"

Bucky's metal arm tears through the leather strap like tissue paper. Swings wild, catches a handler across the jaw with a crack that sends him spinning into medical equipment. Two more rush forward and he fights them with everything he has, everything he'd forgotten he could be.

Soft hands on his face. Bright eyes wide with recognition. The soul bond singing between them like coming home—

"No!" The word tears out of him, accent thick with desperation. Russian, English, something older—he doesn't know anymore, doesn't care. "Please—please, I can't—"

A needle finds his neck. Sedative, fast-acting, enough to drop an elephant. His knees buckle but he keeps fighting, keeps reaching for—what? The memory's already going slippery, falling through his fingers like water.

Someone. There was someone. Wasn't there?

"Interesting." Pierce circles him as four handlers wrestle him into the chair, voice clinical. "What happened on the mission? You terminated the target, but something affected you. The timeline's off by forty-three minutes."

Bucky's jaw works around the guard they're shoving between his teeth. Can't tell them. Won't tell them. But what is he protecting? The feeling's there—urgent, desperate, worth dying for—but the shape of it keeps shifting.

A face. Soft mouth parted in shock. The way she'd—

The electricity hits before he can finish the thought.

White-hot agony races through every nerve ending, bows his back against the restraints they've doubled, tripled. The scream locks in his throat, comes out as a sound that doesn't belong to anything human. But underneath the pain, worse than the pain, is the feeling of something essential being carved out of him.

Don't take her, some part of him begs. Take everything else, but not her, not this—

But the machine doesn't care about please. Doesn't care that he's crying—when did he start crying? The asset doesn't cry. The asset doesn't feel. But Bucky Barnes is sobbing, choking on the rubber guard as memories start to fracture and fade.

Her hand against his jaw. The world breaking open. Recognition so profound it rewrote thirty years of programming in seconds—

Another pulse. Stronger. Pierce has turned the dial past safety parameters, past sanity, past anything they've done before.

"Sir," one of the technicians ventures, nervous. "The readings—"

"Continue."

Forehead to forehead. Breathing her in. The apology scraping his throat raw because he'd never wanted to meet her like this, never wanted her to know him as a weapon first and a man second—

Gone. It's gone. He reaches for it, desperate, but there's only white noise where her face should be. Only the echo of something precious he'd held for minutes—hours?—seconds?—he doesn't know anymore.

The machine winds down. Silence except for his ragged breathing, the drip of something (blood? tears?) hitting the concrete floor.

"Asset."

He doesn't respond. Can't. There's something wrong with his chest, like someone reached in and scooped out everything that mattered.

"Asset."

Training kicks in where consciousness fails. His head lifts, eyes focusing with effort on the man in the suit. Pierce. Handler. The one who holds the leash.

"Ready to comply." The words come out broken. Mechanical. But correct.

"Mission report."

"Target eliminated. No witnesses." A pause. Something scratches at the back of his mind, urgent, important. But when he reaches for it there's nothing but static. "Extraction successful."

Pierce studies him, pale eyes narrowed. "And the deviation? You were off-schedule."

The asset blinks. Searches the white noise of his mind for an answer that makes sense. "Unexpected resistance. Handled."

"I see." Pierce doesn't look convinced, but he waves to the technicians. "Run a full cognitive recalibration. I want him stable before the next deployment."

They unstrap him eventually. He doesn't fight. Doesn't do anything but stare at his metal hand, trying to understand why it feels wrong. Why everything feels wrong. There's an ache in his chest that wasn't there before—or was it always there? He can't remember. Can't remember anything but the mission, the chair, the readiness to comply.

But that night, locked in cryo-prep, he dreams.

Fragments. Glimpses. A basement that smells like old paper and fear. Someone pressed against a wall, hands pushing at his chest. The feeling of skin against skin and the world exploding into color he didn't know existed.

He wakes with her ghost on his lips—no name, no face, just the shape of an apology in a language he's not supposed to know.

The asset reports for cryo on schedule. Lies still as they prep the chamber, ice already forming in the tubes that will freeze him until the next time he's needed. But as consciousness fades, as the cold takes him under, one thought persists:

Someone. There was someone. And I've lost them.

The machine hisses. Frost spreads across the glass.

The asset sleeps.

Bucky Barnes screams.

The Starbucks on 42nd doesn't have soul bonds on the menu, but they do have overpriced lattes and witnesses, which is why you're here instead of home, staring at your bedroom ceiling and trying to parse nightmares from memories.

Six months.

Six months of the glove under your pillow losing his scent. Six months of your advisor asking pointed questions about your "lack of focus" and your therapist prescribing sleeping pills that don't work because how do you medicate a severed soul bond?

How do you explain that you're mourning someone you knew for less than five minutes?

You're arguing with yourself about the merits of a fourth shot of espresso when the world explodes.

Glass shatters inward, the windows becoming a thousand diamonds catching afternoon light. Your coffee hits the floor—there goes eight dollars you don't have—as your body moves on instinct, dropping behind the counter with five other people who smell like fear and pumpkin spice.

Screaming. So much screaming. Cars screeching outside, the percussion of something that might be gunfire but sounds too wrong, too close, too real for a Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan.

You peek around the espresso machine and your heart forgets how to beat.

He's standing in the middle of the street like death dressed for winter. Same tactical gear, same casual violence, same way of moving that makes everyone else look like they're traveling through molasses. The mask covers the lower half of his face again, but you'd know those eyes anywhere. Have been seeing them every night for six months, after all.

A cop raises his weapon. The soldier—your soulmate, your ghost, your nightly torment—disarms him with an economy of motion that's almost beautiful. The crack of breaking fingers carries even through the shattered windows.

Get up, your brain screams. Run. Move. Do something that isn't standing here like a deer watching headlights come to claim it.

But your body has other plans. Your treacherous, soul-bonded body that recognizes his even across thirty feet of chaos and broken glass. You're moving before conscious thought catches up, stumbling through the destroyed storefront on legs that feel like they belong to someone else.

This is stupid. Monumentally stupid. The kind of stupid that gets psychology PhD candidates killed in broad daylight. But your hand is already reaching, already grasping, because maybe—

Your fingers close around his wrist.

The barest slip of skin where his sleeve has ridden up, your thumb finding his pulse like it was made for nothing else. The connection slams through you—heat and recognition and yes, finally, yes—

The gun clatters to the asphalt.

His whole body goes rigid, that same terrible stillness from before. You watch his pupils dilate, watch six months of careful nothing shatter in his eyes as a stranger crashes back into existence.

He moves so fast you don't process it. One second you're standing there, thumb on his pulse, the next you're spinning, back slamming into his chest as his metal arm locks across your body. The gun—when did he pick it up?—presses cold against your temple.

You stop breathing.

Around you, cops and civilians alike freeze. Weapons lower incrementally because now there's a hostage situation, now there's a girl who was stupid enough to touch the Winter Soldier and—

"Name." His voice in your ear, so quiet you almost miss it under the sirens. That sound that had haunted your dreams, rougher now, desperate. "Your name. Please."

Your lips barely move, sound threading between heartbeats. You tell him, soft as a whisper.

The gun doesn't waver. To everyone watching, he's perfectly still, a predator considering prey. But his metal thumb moves against your bare arm where your shirt has ridden up. Gentle. Deliberate. Tracing letters maybe, or just feeling, and you wonder if he can—if there are sensors in the metal that let him—

"My name is James Buchanan Barnes." Each word careful, precious, pressed into the space below your ear like a secret. Like a gift. "Bucky. My name is Bucky. I won't remember, so I need you to—you have to remember for me."

James Buchanan Barnes.

It tickles something in your memory. A history class, maybe. Something about World War II, about Captain America, about—

"What have they done to you?" The words slip out, horrified, because the pieces are trying to fit together but the picture they're making can't be right, can't be possible—

"Find me." Urgent now. His realness, his hereness makes your chest ache with completion even as your mind screams danger. "When I—after they—find me. Please. I can't—"

His voice cracks.

The gun leaves your temple.

The crack of the shot makes you flinch, but it's the cop to your left who goes down, clutching his knee, screaming. Bucky shoves you—not hard, but enough to send you stumbling into the crowd as he moves the opposite direction, using the chaos as cover.

You hit the ground hard, knees cracking against asphalt, palms scraped raw. Around you, people scatter like startled birds. Someone's hands on your shoulders, pulling you back, asking if you're hurt, if you need medical attention.

You can't answer. Can't do anything but stare at the place where he'd stood, where he'd held you, where he'd given you his name like it was the only thing he had left to give.

Your arm throbs where his metal thumb had traced patterns. When you look down, you can see the faint red marks—not bruises, just pressure. Just proof.

"Miss? Miss, we need to get you checked out—"

"I'm fine." You're not. You're the opposite of fine. You're shattering in slow motion, held together by adrenaline and the phantom feeling of his chest against your back. "I'm—he didn't hurt me."

The EMT looks skeptical. "He held a gun to your head."

"He didn't hurt me," you repeat, and you're not sure who you're trying to convince.

They take you anyway. St. Luke's emergency room, where you spend four hours being poked and prodded and questioned by people who look at you like you might break or explode. The FBI shows up eventually, two agents in bad suits who ask the same questions fifteen different ways.

"Did he say anything to you?"

My name is James Buchanan Barnes.

"No."

"Are you sure? Even something small could help."

Find me.

"He didn't say anything."

They don't believe you. You can see it in the way they exchange glances, the way their pens hover over notepads. But what are you supposed to tell them? That the most wanted man in America is your soulmate? That he gave you his name like a prayer? That even now, hours later, you can still feel the phantom press of metal against your skin?

They release you near midnight with a card and instructions to call if you remember anything. You take a cab home because the subway feels too exposed, too dangerous, like maybe he'll be there in the shadows between stops.

Your apartment is exactly as you left it. Laptop open on the counter, half a cup of cold coffee growing something ambitious by the sink. Normal. Safe.

Empty.

You sink onto your bed, still fully dressed, and pull out your phone. Your search history is already damning, but what's one more nail in the coffin?

James Buchanan Barnes

The results make your stomach drop.

Born 1917. Best friend of Steve Rogers, Captain America. Sergeant in the 107th Infantry Regiment. Fell from a train in the Alps in 1945. Presumed dead.

Except he's not dead. He's not dead because you touched him today, felt his pulse under your thumb, heard him breathing in your ear as he held you like something breakable and precious all at once.

You dig deeper. Past the official records, past the Wikipedia entries, into the conspiracy forums and leaked documents that only half-load on your shitty wifi.

The Winter Soldier.

HYDRA.

Seventy years of ghost stories.

An assassin who appears and disappears like smoke, leaving bodies in his wake.

Your soulmate is a century-old brainwashed assassin. Your soulmate is Bucky Barnes, who died in 1945. Who didn't die. Who was turned into something else, something violent and beautiful and dangerous.

Who fights back to consciousness every time you touch him only to be dragged under again.

What have they done to you?

You close your laptop. Lie back on your bed, fully clothed, and stare at the water stain on your ceiling that looks like a rabbit if you squint. Your arm still throbs where he touched you. Traced letters, maybe, or just—

You bolt upright.

Grab a pen, try to recreate the pattern from memory on your other arm. It takes three tries before the movements feel right, before the shapes resolve into something recognizable.

Numbers.

He'd traced numbers on your skin. Coordinates.

Find me, he'd said.

Your hands shake as you type them into your phone. A location upstate, middle of nowhere, the kind of place where no one would look twice at an abandoned building or hear the screams from underground.

You should leave it alone. Should forget his name, forget the numbers, forget the feeling of being whole for thirty seconds in the middle of chaos. Should be smart and safe and boring and alive.

Instead, you screenshot the location. Book a rental car for tomorrow. Pack a bag with things that might matter—the glove, pepper spray that won't do shit against a super soldier but makes you feel better, a first aid kit you probably won't get the chance to use.

Find me.

You're going to. God help you, you're going to find James Buchanan Barnes.

Even if it kills you.

(It probably will.)

(You're going anyway.)

The HYDRA facility squats in the pre-dawn darkness like something that crawled out of the Cold War and forgot to die. You're crammed in the back of a tactical van between enough weaponry to level a city block and Captain America's guilt, which somehow takes up more space.

Forty-eight hours. That's all it took from wine-drunk-email-to-vague-Avengers-PR-listing to this—body armor that doesn't fit right, your heart hammering against ceramic plates, and the ghost of coordinates still throbbing on your arm where he'd traced them.

"Two minutes to insertion." Natasha's voice crackles through comms you're not supposed to have. But Steve had insisted, jaw set in that way that apparently nobody argues with. Not even Fury.

Steve Rogers had shown up at your door with Natasha Romanoff and Nick Fury, your roommate had screamed in her towel, and you'd told them everything. About the library. About the way Bucky's entire being had shifted when you touched him, like watching someone break the surface after drowning.

About how he'd held you in that Starbucks, whispered his name against your ear like a secret, like salvation, like the only thing he had left that was his.

Steve had gone very, very still. Then: "We're finding him. We're bringing him home."

Now he's sitting across from you, shield balanced against his knee, and you can see why people follow him into impossible situations. It's not the shoulders or the jaw or the way he fills out tactical gear like he was born to it. It's the way he looks at you—not through you, not around you, but at you. Like you matter. Like your connection to his best friend makes you worth protecting.

"Remember," he says quietly, pitched below the engine noise. "The moment we find him, the moment you make contact—"

"I know." Your fingers won't stop moving, tracing and retracing the numbers Bucky left on your skin. "Skin contact. Bring him back." Don't let go."

What you don't say: What if it doesn't work this time? What if they've wiped him too many times? What if whatever's left isn't enough to—

The van stops.

Everything happens too fast after that. Doors flying open, bodies moving with practiced precision, you stumbling to keep up as Steve's hand on your elbow guides you through pre-dawn shadows toward a concrete mouth that looks like it's waiting to swallow you whole.

The facility is worse inside. All industrial fluorescents and that particular kind of silence that sounds like screaming if you listen too hard. Your soul bond, quiet for months, starts to ache with proximity—a deep, bone-level recognition that makes your teeth chatter.

"Northeast corridor clear." Natasha's voice, clinical.

"Southwest clear." Someone else, call sign you didn't catch.

"Movement in the lower levels." Another voice. "Looks like they're mobilizing—"

A sound cuts through the chatter. Not quite human. Not quite animal. Something between a scream and static that makes your hindbrain light up with warnings to run.

Steve's already moving. "That's him."

You follow because what else can you do? Down stairs that smell like rust and terror, through corridors that branch like diseased arteries. The ache in your chest intensifies with each level down, soul bond pulling taut as piano wire.

Then—

The room opens before you like a wound. Medical equipment that belongs in museums next to things that belong in nightmares. And in the center, strapped to a chair that looks more like an electric chair than anything medical—

"Bucky." Steve's voice breaks on it.

He's shirtless, sweat-slick and shaking, with enough electricity running through him to light up half of Brooklyn. His hair hangs limp around his face, and even from here you can see the way his muscles lock and release in waves as current pulses through the chair. Fresh burn marks lattice across his chest where the nodes attach, and there's blood—so much blood—dripping from where he's fought against the restraints.

There are bodies on the floor. Technicians, by their white coats. The blood is fresh enough to still be spreading.

"Stay back." Natasha has her weapon trained on him, all business. "He's still the Winter—"

Bucky's head snaps up.

His eyes find yours across twenty feet of blood and machinery.

Time stops.

Those aren't the empty eyes from the library. Aren't the desperate clarity from the coffee shop. These are something else entirely—feral and frightened and so fucking broken under all that damage. He looks like something that's been torn apart and reassembled wrong, like an animal that's been in a cage so long it's forgotten what sky looks like.

You're moving before conscious thought catches up. Dodging Steve's reaching hand, slipping past Natasha's outstretched arm. Your feet slip in blood—whose blood? His? Theirs?—but you don't stop. Can't stop. The soul bond is screaming, every cell in your body reaching for its other half.

"Don't—" Someone shouts. Might be Steve. Might be God himself. Doesn't matter.

Because Bucky's watching you approach with the kind of stillness that precedes violence. His metal arm—and this close you can see how it's grafted to flesh, red and raw and infected at the edges—flexes against the restraints. The leather creaks. His chest heaves with each breath, and there's a wild look in his eyes like he can't decide if you're real or another torture.

You collapse on the arm of the chair. His breathing is ragged, chest heaving, and this close you can see old scars layered on new ones, a roadmap of decades of damage. Seventy years of this. Seventy years of being unmade and remade into something sharp and wrong.

Your hand reaches up, slow as you'd approach a wounded animal.

He flinches.

Actually flinches, this assassin who's probably felt every kind of pain there is. A sound escapes him—small, wounded, barely human. But when your fingertips brush his cheek—skin to skin, that electric recognition—his whole body convulses.

"Oh," you breathe, and it's inadequate, it's nothing, it's everything. Because the bond slots into place like coming home if home was a person who'd been carved hollow and filled with ghosts.

His eyes clear incrementally. Pupil contraction, focus sharpening, and then—

The noise that tears out of him is inhuman. Seventy years of grief and rage and desperate loneliness condensed into a single sound that makes your bones ache. His metal hand shatters the restraint like tissue paper, then the flesh one, and before you can process the movement he's dragging you up, up, into his lap, crushing you against his chest with desperate strength.

"You," he's saying, over and over, voice wrecked beyond recognition. "You, you, you—real, you're real, you're—"

His hands are everywhere at once. Metal fingers tangling in your hair, flesh hand splayed across your back hard enough to bruise, holding you like you might dissolve if he loosens his grip for even a second. He buries his face in the curve of your neck and the sob that escapes him is pure agony, seventy years of touch starvation hitting him all at once.

You can feel him shaking—no, not shaking, convulsing, like his body doesn't know how to process gentle touch anymore. Doesn't know what to do with softness after decades of nothing but pain.

"I'm here," you whisper against his temple, your own tears falling freely. "I'm real. I found you. I've got you."

His response is to hold you tighter, tight enough that breathing becomes difficult, but you don't care. Can't care when he's falling apart in your arms like this. The metal hand fists in your tactical vest and you hear fabric tear, but he doesn't seem to notice. He's pressing his face harder into your throat, breathing you in like you're air and he's been suffocating for seventy years.

"Thought I dreamed you." The words come out destroyed, muffled against your skin. "They said—they said I made you up. That the pain was making me see things. But you smell real. You feel—" His flesh hand slides up to cup the back of your head, holding you in place. "Please be real. Please, please be real."

"I'm real." You press your lips to his temple, just a brief touch of comfort. "James Buchanan Barnes, you're real and I'm real and I found you."

His breath hitches at his full name, and suddenly he's pulling back just enough to look at you. This close, you can see everything—the burst blood vessels in his eyes, the way his pupils can't quite focus, the decades of accumulated scars. He looks ancient. He looks young. He looks absolutely shattered.

"Don't know who that is anymore." Raw honesty, delivered while his thumbs trace your cheekbones with desperate reverence. "Don't know who I am when I'm not killing. When they're not—" He breaks off, jaw working. "I've been empty for so long. So fucking long. And then you touched me and I remembered what it felt like to be human and they took it away—"

"They can't take it away again." You frame his face with your hands, forcing him to meet your eyes. "We're leaving. Right now. Together."

"You don't understand." He's crying openly now, no shame in it, just pure emotional overflow. "Seventy years. Seventy fucking years of this chair, this room, these walls. They put me in the dark and take me out to kill and put me back and I can't—when they say the words, I disappear. Everything disappears."

"Then we don't let them say the words."

"I've killed so many people." He presses his forehead to yours hard enough to hurt, but the contact seems to calm something in him. "Children. Civilians. Good people. Bad people. So many I lost count. The things they made me do—the things I did—"

"I don't care."

"You should." His metal hand comes up to wrap around your throat, gentle but present. "This hand has strangled innocent people. These fingers have pulled triggers that ended lives. I'm not—I'm not good. I'm not worth—"

"Stop." You turn your head to press your lips to his metal palm, and the sound he makes is pure agony. "You're worth everything. You're my soulmate. You're—"

He makes a broken noise and crushes you against him again, like he's trying to crawl inside your skin. His whole body trembles with the effort of holding you close enough, like no amount of contact will ever be sufficient after seventy years of nothing.

"They're gonna wipe me again." Matter-of-fact. Resigned. "Soon as they realize what happened here. They always do. And I'll forget you again. Forget this. And next time—" His voice breaks. "Next time they'll make sure I can't touch you. They'll find ways to hurt you through me. They'll make me—"

"No." Your hands tighten on his face. "No, they won't. We're leaving. Steve's here. Natasha. We're getting you out."

"Stevie?" For the first time, his eyes flicker past you, landing on his best friend. The confusion there is heartbreaking. "But you're—you're supposed to be—"

"Hey, Buck." Steve's voice is thick with emotion. "It's me. It's really me. We're taking you home."

But Bucky's already looking back at you, like he can't bear to look away for more than seconds. His flesh hand hasn't stopped moving—tracing your face, your neck, tangling in your hair like he's trying to memorize you through touch alone.

"I don't want to forget again." It comes out small, broken. "Please. I can't do it again. Can't lose you again. It'll kill me. It'll—"

"You won't forget." You shift in his lap, wrap your arms around his neck, and he makes a sound like you've given him salvation. "I won't let them take you. I won't let them hurt you anymore. I promise."

"We need to move." Natasha's voice, soft but urgent. "Security response in two minutes."

Steve's at your side instantly, but when he reaches for Bucky, the soldier flinches back violently, metal arm coming up in defense. The only thing that keeps him from lashing out is your hand on his chest, your voice in his ear.

"It's okay. It's Steve. He's safe. He's here to help."

"Can you walk?" Steve asks, careful to keep his distance.

Bucky nods against your shoulder, but when you try to move off his lap, his arms lock around you with desperate strength.

"No." Panicked. "No, please. Need to—need to touch—"

"I'm not going anywhere." You run your fingers through his hair, and he leans into it like a cat. "We're walking out of here together. But you have to let me stand up."

It takes visible effort for him to loosen his grip. When you stand, he follows immediately, swaying slightly. He towers over you even hunched with exhaustion, and when his hand finds yours, it's with the grip of a drowning man finding driftwood.

You start moving as a unit, but Bucky can't stop touching you. His free hand keeps finding your face, your hair, your shoulder, like he needs constant confirmation you're real. At one point he stops entirely, pulls you back against his chest, and just breathes you in for several seconds while Steve and Natasha stand guard.

"Left," he says suddenly as you reach a junction, pulling you down a side corridor. "Service tunnel. I've—I've tried before. Three times. No. Four? They always—" His free hand comes up to his head, pressing against his temple.

"Hey." You squeeze his hand. "Doesn't matter. Which way?"

The service tunnel is narrow and dark. Bucky pulls you through it like muscle memory, but halfway through he stops, pressing you against the wall. His hands frame your face in the darkness.

"What if this isn't real?" Desperate. "What if I'm still in the chair? What if this is just another way they're breaking me?"

You reach up to cradle his face in return, thumbs brushing over his cheekbones. "Does this feel like a dream?"

"No." He breathes the word against your mouth. "No, it feels—it feels like waking up."

The exit spills you out into pre-dawn forest. The quinjet looms out of the darkness, and for the first time in seventy years, Bucky Barnes runs toward freedom instead of away from it.

But even on the jet, even safe, he can't stop holding you. He pulls you into his lap on the bench seats, ignoring the medical team, ignoring everyone, and just holds on. His face stays buried in your neck during takeoff, his arms locked around you like prison bars in reverse—keeping the world out instead of keeping him in.

"You're free," you whisper, over and over, like a prayer. "You're free. You're safe. You're mine."

"Yours," he agrees, and finally, finally, his death grip loosens just enough for you to breathe. "Yours. Always yours. Even when I couldn't remember. Even in the dark. Somehow I was always yours."

The sun breaks the horizon as you fly toward home, and for the first time in seventy years, Bucky Barnes believes he might actually make it there.

The first time Bucky Barnes calls you at 3 AM, your body knows it's him before your mind catches up.

The phone vibrates against your nightstand, and your hand's already reaching, heart already racing—not with fear but with recognition. That soul-deep pull that's been your compass for three months now.

"Bucky?" Your voice comes out sleep-rough, concerned.

Just breathing on the other end. Ragged, like he's been running. Or fighting. The sound makes your chest tight.

"Can't—" His voice cracks like splintered wood. "Can't remember if the blood on my hands is from yesterday or a decade ago."

You're already moving, sheets tangling around your legs as you hunt for clothes in the dark. "Where are you?"

"Steve's. The Tower. I'm—" A shaky exhale that you feel in your own lungs. "I'm safe. Everyone's safe. Just needed—"

"Me." Not a question. The bond thrums with his distress, a phantom ache under your ribs. "I'm coming."

"You don't have to—"

"I'm coming."

Twenty minutes later, Happy's pulling up to the Tower's private entrance. You're wearing the first things your hands found—pajama shorts with snowflakes on them that you stole from your roommate, one of Bucky's hoodies that still smells like him (cedar and gunpowder and something indefinably him).

The elevator ride feels eternal. Your skin prickles with proximity, the bond pulling taut as you rise through the floors. By the time JARVIS deposits you on the residential level, your hands are shaking with the need to touch him, to soothe whatever's tearing him apart.

You find him on the couch, knees drawn up to his chest like he's trying to make himself smaller. His metal hand is clenched so tight you can hear the recalibration whirs, flesh hand buried in his hair. Steve hovers nearby, hands opening and closing like he wants to help but doesn't know how.

"Buck," you breathe.

His head snaps up, and oh—his eyes are winter-wild, pupils blown with panic, caught in some liminal space between then and now. You watch him catalog you in pieces: face, voice, the way you're already moving toward him like gravity's reversed its pull.

You don't speak. Don't need to. Just fold yourself onto the couch beside him, close enough that the line of your body presses against his from shoulder to hip. His flesh hand finds yours immediately, desperate, fingers lacing between yours like maybe if he holds tight enough he won't drift away.

The effect is immediate—a full-body shudder, his breathing starting to sync with yours. The bond hums, warm honey spreading through your veins. Steve makes a sound—relief wrapped in something more complicated—and quietly retreats.

"Sorry," Bucky murmurs after a moment. His thumb finds your pulse point, traces it like he's counting heartbeats. "Shouldn't have woken you."

"Yes, you should have." No reproach, just fact. "That's what this is."

He turns to look at you then, really look, and you watch him surface by degrees. His metal hand comes up without conscious thought, fingertips ghosting along your jaw with impossible gentleness. The cool metal makes you shiver, but you lean into it, letting him map the reality of you.

"There you are," he whispers.

Something fractures inside you. He pulls you in—careful, always so careful with you—until your foreheads touch. His breathing ghosts across your lips, and you stay suspended in that space, sharing air and warmth and the indescribable thing that ties soul to soul.

It becomes your new normal.

The calls come at all hours. Sometimes Steve's the one calling, voice carefully controlled: "Can you come? He's asking for you." Sometimes it's Natasha, brusque but not unkind: "Barnes needs you." Once, memorably, it's Tony: "Your touch-starved assassin is having a moment. Also, he may have broken my espresso machine."

You always go.

The team adapts to your presence like you're a new piece of furniture—necessary, functional, occasionally in the way. You learn to read Bucky's tells from across a room: the way his eyes go distant when memory bleeds through, the micro-flinches when sound becomes too much, the careful way he holds himself when he's fragmenting.

But more than that, you learn the language his body speaks when it's seeking yours.

He's always careful at first, tentative as a feral cat learning to accept kindness. A brush of fingers, testing. The barest press of his palm to yours. But once that first contact is made, something in him unravels.

He touches you like he's mapping a new world.

It starts innocuous enough—fingers tangled together during movie nights, his thumb painting absent patterns on your wrist. His hand finds the small of your back when you walk, not possessive but anchoring, like he needs proof you're real. He pulls you between his knees when he's sitting, arms banding around your waist, chin notching over your shoulder while you chat with Sam about nothing important.

But as weeks become months, the touches grow bolder. Hungrier.

"Does it bother you?" he asks one afternoon.

He's had a brutal therapy session—three hours of guided recall that left him shaking and grey-faced. You'd spent the past hour with his head in your lap, your fingers carding through his hair while he pieced himself back together. His flesh hand has found its way under your shirt, palm spread wide over your ribs, and his metal fingers trace delicate patterns on the inside of your wrist.

"Does what bother me?"

"This." He gestures vaguely at the negative space between you that stopped existing weeks ago. "How much I need—" He stops. Swallows. Tries again. "How I can't stop touching you."

The question deserves honesty, so you give it consideration. Think about how your life has restructured itself around these points of contact. How you've started wearing layers just so there's always fabric to push aside, skin to find. How your body anticipates his touch now, turns toward him without conscious thought.

"No," you say finally. "It doesn't bother me."

He studies your face with those searching eyes, looking for the polite lie. You let him look, keeping your expression open.

"I've been thinking," you continue, adjusting so you can see him better. His hand immediately shifts, fingers splaying wider across your ribs like he needs more contact to make up for the movement. "About touch. About deprivation."

A muscle in his jaw ticks.

"Seventy years," you say softly. "Seventy years where touch meant pain. Programming. Violence. Where hands on you meant—"

"Stop." Rough. His hand presses harder against your ribs, feeling your heartbeat.

"—so is it any wonder you're hungry for something else? Something good?"

His exhale shudders out of him. "The doctors say it's codependence."

"The doctors haven't had their souls systematically unmade and remade." You cover his flesh hand with yours, pressing it more firmly against your skin. "You're not codependent, Bucky. You're human. You're healing. And if touch helps—"

"It's not just that it helps." The words come out jagged, confessional. "I want—" His metal hand comes up, traces the line of your throat with one careful finger. "I want to touch you all the time. Want to know the texture of every inch of your skin. Want to map you like territory, like—" He cuts himself off, jaw clenching.

Heat pools low in your stomach, but you keep your voice steady. "Like what?"

"Like you're mine." Barely audible. His eyes won't meet yours. "Like I have any right to—"

"You do." You turn into him more fully, catch his face between your palms. His eyes flutter closed, and he leans into the touch like a man starved. "You have every right. We're soulmates, Bucky. That means something."

"What if I never get better?" Raw, honest. "What if I always need this? Need you?"

"Then you'll always have me."

His eyes snap open, winter-blue and desperate. "You can't promise that."

"Watch me."

The trial is excruciating. You watch from designated seating as Bucky sits statue-still, hair pulled back severe, wearing a suit that makes him look like someone else entirely. They read names, show photographs, detail missions that exist in his memory like shattered glass—some pieces clear, others reflecting nothing but blood.

The days he testifies, he comes to you after.

Never speaks about it. Just shows up at your door looking hollowed out, and you let him in without questions. He wraps himself around you like you're the only solid thing in a tilting world, face buried in the curve of your neck, breathing you in like oxygen.

These are the times his hands grow bold.

Not inappropriate—never that. But searching. He maps you like a cartographer charting new territory. Palms skimming your sides, memorizing the curve of waist to hip. Fingers tracing the ladder of your ribs through thin fabric. Metal thumb finding the hollow of your throat where your pulse flutters hummingbird-quick.

"I need—" he'll say against your skin, words muffled and desperate.

"I know," you always answer. "Take what you need."

So he does. His flesh hand slips under your shirt, finds the warm plane of your stomach, spreads wide like he's trying to absorb your steadiness through osmosis. His metal fingers trace patterns on whatever skin he can find—the inside of your wrist, the nape of your neck, the sensitive spot behind your ear that makes you shiver.

Sometimes you'll find his hand at your sternum, metal fingers splayed over your heartbeat like he's using it to calibrate his own. Sometimes he'll trace the boundary where clothing meets skin, fingertips ghosting under hems and necklines but never pushing further, just needing to know there's softness underneath, that not everything in the world has sharp edges.

"Is this okay?" he asks every time, even as his touch grows more familiar, more certain.

"Yes," you answer every time, even as your skin heats and your breath catches and you want—

You want.

"So are you two fucking yet?"

You choke on your coffee, hot liquid searing your throat. Across the kitchen, Bucky's shoulders go rigid where he's making eggs with the kind of focus usually reserved for defusing explosives.

"Tony," Steve says, warning clear in his voice.

"What? It's a legitimate question. All that touching, the eye-fucking across every room, the way Barnes goes feral if anyone else so much as—"

"We're not." Your face burns. "That's not—we haven't—"

Tony's eyebrows achieve escape velocity. "You're telling me you've been playing the world's most intense game of grabass for three months and haven't—"

"Stark." Bucky's voice is winter-quiet, dangerous in the way that makes smart people reevaluate their life choices.

But Tony's never been accused of survival instincts. "I'm just saying, that level of sexual tension could power—"

The plate in Bucky's metal hand shatters.

Silence rings out, broken only by the drip of egg yolk hitting tile.

"I'll just." Tony backs toward the door, hands raised. "Workshop. Important things. Very important things."

He's gone before anyone can blink, leaving you, Bucky, and Steve in a kitchen that suddenly feels airless. Bucky stares at the ceramic shards in his hand like they've personally betrayed him.

"Buck—" Steve starts.

"I need air."

He's out the door before you can process the movement, leaving you with cooling eggs and Tony's words hanging in the air like smoke.

Steve sighs, the sound of a man who's aged a century in the last minute. "He's an idiot. Tony, I mean. Though Buck's also—" He stops. Runs a hand through his hair. "This is none of my business."

"But?"

"But." Steve fixes you with those earnest eyes that probably ended wars. "He thinks he's protecting you. From himself. From what he's done. He doesn't think he deserves—" A gesture encompasses you, the kitchen, the entire situation.

"That's not his decision to make."

"No," Steve agrees. "But when has that ever stopped him?"

You find Bucky on the roof because of course that's where he goes. He's sitting on the edge, legs dangling over nothing, and your heart does something complicated in your chest.

"Most people have their existential crises at ground level," you say, settling beside him carefully.

His mouth twitches—not quite a smile, but close. "Most people haven't fallen off a train."

"Fair point."

The city spreads below like a circuit board, all light and movement and life. Without looking, his hand finds yours, fingers interlacing with the ease of long practice. The bond settles, that constant thrum of rightness that comes with skin meeting skin.

"Tony's not wrong," he says eventually.

You wait, let him find the words in his own time.

"I think about it." His voice is carefully controlled, but you can feel the tremor in his hand. "Touching you. Not just—not just to ground myself. Not for the bond. I think about touching you because I want to. Because you're—"

He stops. His throat works, and when he speaks again, his voice is rougher. "Because you're beautiful. And kind. And you laugh at my terrible jokes even when they're not funny. You come when I call at 3 AM. You let me put my hands on you even though these same hands have—"

"Bucky—"

"I dream about it." The confession comes out raw. "Dream about kissing you. About how you'd taste. How you'd feel. Wake up with your name in my mouth and my hands reaching for you, and it's not about the bond, it's about—" He turns to look at you then, eyes dark with something that makes your breath catch. "It's about how much I want you. How much I want things I have no right to want."

"What if," you say, voice steadier than your pulse, "I want those same things?"

His breathing stutters. "You don't. You can't."

"Don't tell me what I want." You turn toward him fully, free hand coming up to his jaw. He leans into it helplessly, eyes falling closed. "I know exactly what I want. Who I want."

"I'm held together with duct tape and trauma," he says, but his resolve is crumbling. You can see it in the way he presses harder into your palm. "I can't take you on normal dates. Can't promise I won't have panic attacks. Can't even sleep through the night without—"

"I don't want normal." Your thumb traces his cheekbone, feels him shudder. "I want you. Every piece, every edge, every nightmare and bad day. I want the man who hums old songs when he thinks no one's listening. Who makes terrible eggs but keeps trying. Who touches me like I'm something precious and looks at me like I'm a miracle."

"You are," he breathes. "You're—"

You kiss him.

Or maybe he kisses you.

Maybe you meet in the middle, drawn together by forces older than choice.

The first press of lips is tentative, a question asked and answered in the same breath. His flesh hand comes up to cradle your face, and the tenderness of it makes your chest ache. But then you make a sound—small, needy—and something in him breaks.

Or maybe something in him finally fixes itself.

His metal arm bands around your waist, pulls you against him with desperate strength. The kiss deepens, and oh, you understand now why people write symphonies and wage wars. Because Bucky Barnes kisses like he's drowning and you're air, like he's been starving for seventy years and you're sustenance, like maybe the universe knew exactly what it was doing when it tied your souls together.

He kisses you like he's trying to crawl inside your skin.

His tongue traces the seam of your lips and you open for him without thought, and the sound he makes—broken, grateful—sends heat racing down your spine. He tastes like coffee and something indefinably him, and you chase that taste deeper, hands fisting in his shirt.

He doesn't surface for air. Doesn't pause. Just tilts his head to find a better angle and kisses you deeper, harder, like he's trying to memorize the shape of your mouth, the texture of your sighs. His metal hand spans your lower back, pulling you impossibly closer, while his flesh hand maps your face, thumb stroking your cheek even as his mouth devastates you.

You're half in his lap now, twisted awkwardly on the ledge, and you don't care. Can't care about anything beyond the heat of his mouth, the way he groans when you nip at his lower lip, the way his hands shake where they hold you.

"Wanted this," he gasps against your mouth, not pulling back enough to actually stop kissing you. "Wanted you. Before I even knew you. So long, so fucking long—"

You answer by sliding your hands into his hair, nails scraping his scalp, and he shudders against you, kiss going a little sloppy and desperate. He's not cold, not controlled, not careful. He's burning, pressing against you like he wants to fuse at the molecular level, like the soul bond isn't enough and never could be.

When you finally break apart—only because oxygen is apparently necessary—you're both wrecked. His lips are swollen, eyes dark and dazed. You probably look the same. His forehead drops to yours, and you can feel him trembling against you, all that careful control finally, beautifully shattered.

"Okay?" His voice is destroyed, rough like he's been screaming.

"So far past okay," you manage. "Though your timing—we're on a roof, Barnes."

He laughs, the sound surprised out of him, and presses kisses to your cheeks, your jaw, the corner of your mouth like he can't quite stop now that he's started. "Sorry. I'll plan better next time."

"Next time?" You're going for teasing but it comes out breathless, hopeful.

His eyes find yours, and the intensity there steals any words you might have had. "Every time. Any time. All the time, if you'll—if you want—"

You press your mouth to his again, swallowing whatever self-deprecating thing he was about to say. He makes a noise of pure relief and hauls you closer, and you think maybe Tony Stark has exactly one good point in his entire existence.

Not that you'll ever tell him.

** The science had been clinical, sterile words on a page that you'd skimmed in college while nursing a hangover and trying to make sense of your Behavioral Psych reading.

Enhanced neural connectivity. Synchronized endorphin response. Heightened sensory feedback between bonded pairs.

Academic language that utterly failed to capture this—Bucky's mouth hot and slick and desperate against your throat while his hands relearn territory they've been mapping under cotton and denim for months, each touch sending electricity racing down your spine like lightning seeking ground.

"Fucking finally," he growls against your pulse point, and you feel the words more than hear them, vibrating through skin into bone, into the very marrow of you. His metal hand spans your ribs, each individual plate recalibrating against your skin with tiny whirs and clicks, like even the machinery of him is trying to get closer.

"You know what it's been like? Having you close enough to smell, to taste in the air, but not—Christ, the way you tremble each time I touch you, like you're starving for it—"

You try to form words but he's already peeling your shirt away with hands that shake despite their practiced efficiency, and the first full press of his bare chest to yours—scarred skin against soft, furnace heat against cool air—whites out anything resembling higher thought.

The soul bond doesn't just sing—it screams, every nerve ending recognizing its other half and lighting up like a constellation, like a neural map catching fire.

"Oh," you gasp, and it's inadequate, it's nothing, but Bucky goes rigid above you like you've shot electricity straight through his spine.

"Yeah," he agrees, voice absolutely wrecked. His forehead drops to your shoulder, dog tags dragging cold metal across your overheated chest as he pants against your skin, each exhale making you shiver. "Yeah, that's—fuck, is it always gonna feel like this? Like touching a live wire, just—"

"More," you manage, arching into him until there's no space left between your bodies, and you feel his control splinter like ice under pressure.

His mouth finds yours again, hungry and graceless, all that careful restraint from months of chaste touches finally, blessedly gone. His tongue slides against yours and you taste coffee and something metallic—blood maybe, from where he's been biting his lip. When you nip at his bottom lip he makes a sound like something wounded, something primal, hips rolling into yours with zero finesse, just pure need, his cock hard and insistent through too many layers of fabric.

"Sensitive," he warns against your mouth, but it comes out more like a plea, like he's begging you to understand. "Everything's dialed up to eleven, I can—I can hear your blood moving in your veins. Can feel every place you're warm and wet and—fuck—" His whole body shudders when you rake your nails down his back.

Your fingers find the scarred terrain of his back and he actually whimpers, muscles rolling under your touch like water, like something liquid and desperate. That's when the second revelation hits: whatever you're feeling, he's feeling it magnified. Seventy years of sensory deprivation plus enhanced everything plus a soul bond that's been stretched taut for months—

"Gonna lose my mind," he mutters, mouthing at your jaw, your throat, anywhere he can reach, leaving wet trails that cool in the air and make you shiver. His stubble scrapes against sensitive skin and you gasp, hips bucking up involuntarily. "Already lost it. Lost it the second you touched me in that library. Do you know? Do you have any fucking idea what it's like, having someone reach inside your skull and turn all the lights on? Like going from black and white to color, like—Jesus—"

His flesh hand fumbles with your pants, clumsy with urgency, while his metal hand grips your hip hard enough to leave marks—and god, you hope it does, hope you wear his fingerprints for days. The button pops free and he makes a victorious sound that might be funny if you weren't so desperate, if you weren't already so wet you can feel it soaking through your underwear.

His hand slides lower, fingers slipping beneath elastic, and when he finds you soaked and swollen, the noise that punches out of him is pure animal—a growl that starts in his chest and rumbles through both your bodies where they're pressed together.

"Christ." His fingers slip through wetness, exploratory and reverent, and you can feel the tremor in his hand. "This is—this is for me? You get like this just from—" He circles your clit with his thumb and you cry out, hips jerking. "Fuck, you're dripping. Can feel your pulse in your cunt, baby. So swollen, so ready—"

"From you," you gasp, grinding down against his hand as he slides two fingers inside without warning. The stretch makes you moan, makes your walls clench around him immediately. "Always from you. Only from you."

Something fractures in his expression—something raw and possessive and desperately vulnerable all at once. He hooks his fingers, finding that spot that makes your vision white out, and watches your face like he's cataloging miracles, like he's mapping the geography of your pleasure. "Say that again."

"Only you." It comes out breathless, edged with desperation as he finds a rhythm that has your thighs shaking, has wet sounds filling the air between you. "Only ever you, Bucky, please—"

"No." His thumb finds your clit and circles with devastating precision, pressure just the right side of too much. "Not yet. Not when I've been imagining this for—do you know how many times I've jerked off in the shower thinking about this? About how you'd sound when you're desperate? How you'd taste?" He adds a third finger, stretching you wider, and grins dark and feral when you sob. "Bet you thought about it too. Bet you touched yourself thinking about me, didn't you? Tell me."

"Yes," you admit, face burning, and his pupils blow even wider.

He drops to his knees between your thighs suddenly, metal hand holding you open like something precious, like an offering. The first swipe of his tongue has you jackknifing off the bed, but he just pins you down with his metal arm across your hips and does it again, slower, a long drag from entrance to clit that has you seeing stars.

"Fuckin' knew it," he groans against you, and the vibration of his voice makes you clench around nothing. "Knew you'd taste like heaven. Like mine. Knew you'd shake for me just like this." He spreads you wider with his fingers, looking at you with dark eyes. "So pretty. So perfect." He spits on your cunt, watching it mix with your wetness, and the filthy intimacy of it makes you moan. "Gonna ruin you for anyone else. Gonna make it so you can't come without thinking of my mouth, my fingers, my cock."

His words dissolve into action, mouth working you over with single-minded focus. He eats you out like he's starving, like he's dying, all lips and tongue and just the edge of teeth. The soul bond makes it devastating—you don't just feel the physical sensation, you feel his hunger, his satisfaction at finally being allowed to give pleasure instead of pain. His metal fingers dig into your thigh hard enough to bruise and you hope they do, hope you wear his marks for days, hope everyone who sees them knows exactly who put them there.

"Close," you warn, though he probably knows—can probably taste it in the way your cunt's clenching, feel it in the bond that's gone molten between you. Your thighs are shaking, muscles pulled so tight they hurt, and there's a sound filling the room that you distantly realize is you, making noises you've never made before.

He pulls back just enough to speak, lips glossy with your wetness, chin soaked, eyes wild. "Yeah? You gonna come on my tongue? Gonna let me taste it?" He slides three fingers in, curling with devastating intent, and your back arches off the bed. "Come on, sweetheart. Give it up. Let me have it, don't be greedy."

You shatter with a sound that might be his name, might be pure noise. The orgasm rolls through you in waves, each crest higher than the last, and he works you through it mercilessly, not letting up even when you try to squirm away from oversensitivity. Through the bond you feel his echoing pleasure—not physical, not yet, but something bone-deep and satisfied and proud.

"Atta girl," he murmurs against your inner thigh, pressing kisses to sweat-slick skin while his fingers still move lazily inside you, drawing out aftershocks. "So fucking beautiful. Look at you, all fucked out and soft and mine. Could do this for hours. Will do this for hours. Keep you here, coming apart on my hands, my mouth, until you're so sensitive you cry, until you forget there was ever a time we weren't—"

"Bucky." You tug at his hair, need making your voice rough despite the orgasm still sparking through your nerves. "Get up here. Need you inside me. Need—"

He's moving before you finish, shucking his pants with graceless efficiency. The first glimpse of his cock—thick and long and leaking steadily—makes your mouth water and your cunt clench with fresh want. When you reach for him he catches your wrist, gentle but firm.

"Next time," he promises, reading your intent with unnerving accuracy. His voice is strained, like he's hanging on by a thread. "Let you taste me next time. Let you choke on it, fuck that pretty mouth until you're drooling, until—" He cuts himself off with visible effort, chest heaving. "But right now I need—if I don't get inside you in the next ten seconds I'm gonna fucking die—"

"So do it." You spread your legs wider, shameless, showing him how wet and open you are, how ready. "Come on, sergeant. Follow through."

His control snaps audibly. He's on you between one breath and the next, pinning you down with his weight, cock nudging at your entrance. The head catches on your rim and you both groan, but he stops there, trembling with effort, forehead pressed to yours.

"Look at me." It's not a request—it's a command, rough and desperate. You force your eyes open, meet his gaze—winter blue swallowed by black, raw and vulnerable and fierce. "Need to see you when I—need to know you're here, that you're real, that this is—"

"Real," you confirm, wrapping your legs around his waist, heels digging into his ass to urge him forward. "I'm real. You're real. This is—oh fuck—"

He pushes inside in one long, devastating slide, and the world reconstitutes itself around this moment. Around the stretch and burn and perfect fullness of him, around the broken sound he makes against your throat—half sob, half growl—around the soul bond lighting up like a supernova, like every nerve ending suddenly discovering what it was made for.

"Fuck." His metal hand grips the headboard hard enough to crack wood, splinters raining down. "Fuck, you're—tight. So fucking tight. Hot. Perfect. Can feel—God fucking damn, I can feel everything. Can feel how good it is for you, can feel how your cunt's trying to pull me deeper—" He shifts his hips and hits something devastating inside you, makes you clench around him involuntarily. He laughs, breathless. "Yeah, right there. That's it, isn't it, baby? Right fucking there."

He moves experimentally, just a slow roll of hips, and you both moan at the drag of him inside you, at how your bodies fit together like they were made for this, only this. The angle is perfect—he's reading your body's responses in real-time, adjusting until every thrust has you climbing higher, until you're making noises that would embarrass you if you could think.

"Not gonna last," he warns, rhythm already getting ragged, desperate. Sweat drips from his forehead onto your chest, mixing with the sheen already there. "Not this time. Too much, too long waiting, too—the way you feel—" His flesh hand finds your throat, rests there warm and possessive, thumb pressing just enough to make your pulse flutter. "Like velvet. Like coming home. Like I could fuck you forever and it would never be enough—"

"Don't care." You pull his head down, bite at his jaw hard enough to leave marks just to feel him shudder, to watch his control fracture further. "Just want you. Just need—"

"Tell me." His grip on your throat tightens fractionally, not enough to restrict breathing but enough to make you aware, to make you feel it. "Tell me what you need. Want to give you everything. Want to be so good for you, sweetheart. Want to make up for every night you went to bed empty when you should've been—"

"Full of you," you finish, and his hips stutter, lose rhythm entirely for a moment.

"Yeah?" His thumb presses against your pulse, feeling how fast your heart's racing. "That what you need? Need me to fill you up? Keep you full and fucked out and dripping with my come? Make sure everyone knows you're mine, that I'm the only one who gets to—"

"Yes." You're beyond shame, beyond anything but the building pressure where he's driving into you harder now, each thrust shoving you up the bed. The wet sounds of your bodies meeting fill the room, obscene and perfect. "Yes, Bucky, please—"

"Say my name again." He's fucking you harder now, chasing his release with single-minded intensity. The bed frame creaks ominously with each thrust. "Want to hear it when you come. Want to feel it when you—fuck, you're clenching around me, baby. You close? You gonna come on my cock? Gonna be good for me?"

You nod frantically, words lost to the slide of him inside you, the relentless pressure against that perfect spot, the way his pubic bone grinds against your clit with each thrust. His metal fingers find your clit, cold against overheated flesh, and the contrast makes you scream.

"That's it," he growls, working your clit in tight circles while maintaining that punishing rhythm. "Come for me. Come on my cock like a good girl. Let me feel it, let me—fuck, there it is, I can feel it starting, you're getting so tight—"

You come with his name on your lips, back arching off the bed so hard you think you might snap in half. The orgasm slams through you like a freight train, like dying and being reborn, every muscle locking up as pleasure whites out your vision. The bond makes it circular—your pleasure slamming into him and reflecting back, amplified, until you're both shaking with it, until you can't tell where you end and he begins.

"Oh fuck—" His rhythm breaks entirely, becomes something desperate and animal. "Fuck, I'm gonna—gonna fill you up, gonna—"

"Inside." You dig your nails into his shoulders hard enough to draw blood, hold him deep even as oversensitivity makes you want to squirm away. "Want to feel it. Want all of it."

He comes with a sound that's half your name, half prayer, half roar, hips grinding deep as he spills inside you. You feel it all—not just the physical sensation of his cock pulsing, filling you with warmth, but the emotional avalanche through the bond. Relief and want and mine mine mine and something that feels dangerously close to devotion, to worship, to complete and utter belonging.

He fucks you through it, shallow little thrusts like he can't help himself, like his body won't stop even though he's already given you everything. Each movement makes more come leak out around his cock, makes wet sounds that have you hiding your face in his shoulder, embarrassed and aroused in equal measure.

The aftershocks last forever, little sparks of shared pleasure that have you both gasping, twitching, clutching at each other like lifelines. When he finally stills, he doesn't pull out, just shifts enough that his weight isn't crushing you, keeping you plugged full of him.

"Stay," he mumbles into your neck, words slurred like he's drunk. "Just—stay exactly like this. Please. Need to—need to keep you full. Need to know you're here, that this is real, that I get to—"

"Not going anywhere." You card your fingers through his sweat-damp hair, feel him shiver at the gentle touch after all that intensity. "Never going anywhere. You're stuck with me, Barnes."

His arms tighten around you, and you can feel his smile against your skin, feel the way his cock twitches inside you with renewed interest. "Good. Because now that I know what this feels like, what you feel like—" He rocks his hips experimentally, and you both groan as you feel his come shift inside you, feel how wet and open you are. "We're not leaving this bed for a week. Gonna fuck you in every position I've imagined. Gonna map every inch of your body with my mouth. Gonna find out exactly how many times I can make you come before you beg me to stop—"

"What about—"

He kisses you quiet, slow and thorough and filthy, tongue fucking into your mouth in a pale imitation of what his cock just did. When he pulls back, his eyes are dark with promise and his cock is fully hard inside you again, enhanced recovery time making itself known.

"Nothing else matters," he says simply, starting to move again, slow and deep and devastating. You're so sensitive it borders on too much, but the soul bond floods you with his pleasure, his desperate need, and suddenly you're right there with him again. "Just this. Just us. Just how many times I can make you come before sunrise. How full I can keep you. How loud I can make you scream."

You clench around him involuntarily and his eyes flutter closed, hips stuttering.

"Gonna kill me," he mutters, picking up speed, the wet sounds even more obscene now with his come easing the way. "Seventy years of nothing and now—" A particularly deep thrust has you seeing stars. "Now I've got a soulmate who looks at me like I'm worth something, who touches me like I'm not a weapon, who lets me use her however I need—"

"Who loves you," you interrupt, watching his face crumble and rebuild itself, watching him fight back what looks suspiciously like tears.

"Yeah?" Barely a whisper, so vulnerable it makes your chest ache.

"Yeah." You pull him down for another kiss, pouring everything you can't say into the contact, letting him feel it through the bond. "So much. So long. Even before I knew you, I think I loved you. Think I was waiting for you."

He makes a broken sound and starts fucking you in earnest, like a man possessed, like he's trying to climb inside you and never leave. "Say it again."

"I love you."

"Again." Harder now, each thrust shoving you up the bed.

"I love you, Bucky Barnes."

He fucks you like a promise, like a prayer, like maybe if he does it right the universe will let him keep this. You come apart under him again and again, until time becomes meaningless, until the only reality is where you're joined, where the soul bond burns brightest, where his come leaks out of you with each thrust only to be fucked back in, marking you inside and out as his.

When exhaustion finally claims you both, he's still inside you, still hard, wrapped around you like armor and apology all at once. You're going to be sore tomorrow—hell, you're sore now—but you wouldn't move for anything.

The last thing you feel before sleep takes you is his lips against your temple, his voice rough with wonder and satisfaction:

"Love you too, sweetheart. More than I've got words for. More than I probably should. Gonna spend the rest of my life showing you, if you'll let me. Gonna take such good care of you. My girl. My soulmate. Mine."

"Yours," you mumble, already drifting, clenching around him one last time just to feel him shudder.

His arms tighten, and you feel his smile against your skin, feel the way his cock twitches inside you with interest despite everything.

"Forever," he promises.

"Forever."

Outside, Brooklyn wakes to another morning, unaware that two souls have finally, fully, found their way home.

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em1i2a3 · 2 months ago

Note

Here my out. I don't have a solid concept other than Bob finds a sketchbook filled with supersuit concepts so he starts flipping through it and it turns into pictures of the team and then pictures of just him. Anyway reader finds him looking at it and somehow the conversation ends up like "sorry, you're just really pretty in the sunlight. I mean, you're pretty in any light." I just need someone to tell Bob he's pretty 😭

Velour and Velcro

Pairing: Bob/Robert Reynolds/The Sentry/The Void x Thunderbolt!Fem!Reader

Summary: You have a hobby of drawing and designing things in your spare time, one day Bob stumbles across your sketchbook and discovers something surprising.

Warnings: Semi Spoilers for Thunderbolts I guess cause Bob. No crazy warnings apart from that partners, just super fluffy, super sweet stuff happening here, with like a hint of intimacy :)

Author’s Note: Thought I’d make a cute little one-shot for today as I’ve been focusing on a lot of my bigger works and getting those prepared for posting (there’s not a lot of editing to do, just want to go through it with a fine toothed comb.). Hope y’all enjoy this one though!

Word Count: 5,939

The common room of the compound had been a war zone not even less than an hour ago.

The aftermath of game night still lingered in the air like smoke after a fireworks show–explosive, and borderline destructive. A half-empty bowl of popcorn had been flung across the room at some point, scattering kernels into the shag rug. Three pillows had been used as makeshift shields. Walker had accused Yelena of cheating, and Yelena had accused Walker of being a “living embodiment of a root canal.” Ava had sat back and watched the chaos, while Bucky and Alexei had both quietly removed themselves to get their respective alcoholic beverages–Bucky’s was whiskey, Alexei’s was vodka.

Through it all though, you had sat curled into the corner of the oversized grey cloud couch–legs folded up, sketchbook braced against your thighs, pencil and pen moving in quick, distracted arcs while chaos was blooming around you.

Bob had taken refuge in the open kitchen where he would be able to hide slightly from the chaos, and bake without being totally bothered by people.

The cake he made had started as a peace offering and became a full-blown stress bake the moment he heard someone scream “YOU CAN’T STACK DRAW FOURS” with the kind of fury usually reserved for battlefield decisions. The rich scent of chocolate and vanilla had poured into the air, mingling with the salt and butter from the popcorn, and the faint citrus of someone’s spilled soda that still clung to the coffee table.

Now, the kitchen was dark. The last flicker of the oven light had gone out. Most of the team had vanished to their quarters, trailing groggy grumbles and sore losers’ muttering. The common room had finally settled, breathing again after the riot of laughter and arguing had burned itself out.

Only a single lamp remained on beside the couch, casting warm, golden rays over the cushions and the floor beneath. The glow hit the coffee table in soft shapes, glinting off an abandoned spoon and catching in the tiny rainbow oil spill of a spilled cup of tea. Outside the windows, the city buzzed on–he could hear everything even though he was eighty levels up above the streets; car horns honking, people’s laughter, the booming bass coming from clubs.

Bob sat on the edge of the couch, right where you had been earlier.

The cushions were still warm, and your blanket was slipping off onto the floor. And there–tucked beneath one of the throw pillows–was your sketchbook.

He had picked it up with every intention of returning it to your room, but it felt so warm in his hands, and familiar because it was yours–the temptation was great.

You took it everywhere with you–mission briefings, airport lounges, quiet rooftops. He had watched you doodle in the margins of reports, on napkins, sometimes on your own hands when you ran out of space. He’d seen you sketch everything from tactical armor blueprints to a cartoon of Alexei in a tutu–as per his request because he thought you would be able to execute it perfectly…He still has it hanging in his room. Bob admired your creativity, how you were able to conjure anything up onto paper without really thinking about it, and the pride on your face when you made someone laugh with a sketch of them. You took joy in the little things, and Bob loved that about you…It was one of the multitude of things that made him grow so attached to you in such a short period of time as well.

So when he flipped the book open, just to see what tonight had looked like through your eyes…Bob couldn’t help but smile.

The first page hit him like a kaleidoscope–an explosion of rough linework, little notes crammed into the margins, and the chaotic charm that could only belong to you. A suit with heat-reactive armor filled the center, the panels labeled and crosshatched, but the entire thing was surrounded by doodles of stars and question marks. A sticky note had been pressed into the corner with a scrawl that read:

“Would this melt? Ask Ava. Or throw it into a bonfire and find out.”

Tucked under the edge of the next page was a scrap of metallic blue fabric–shiny, a little torn at the edge, maybe scavenged from a prototype–and beside it, you’d written:

“Love this for night missions. Or roller disco.”

He flipped another page.

More sketches. Some wildly technical–complete with annotations, chemical compound breakdowns, tensile strength estimates. Others looked like pure fantasy. There was one labeled “Bucky but make it James Bond” with a tuxedo that clearly had at least three concealed weapons built into it and a bowtie that doubled as a GPS tracker. Right beneath it, you’d scribbled:

“He’s going to hate this. It’s perfect.”

Next to it:

“New project idea: suit that deploys snacks for the hangry people on the team.”

There were fingerprints smudged across some pages. A couple places where tea had clearly splattered–rings of soft brown staining the edges, a few ink trails bleeding where it had touched the lines. Some of the pages had been ripped out and taped back in, corners folded and unfolding like they’d been touched again and again.

It wasn’t just a sketchbook. It was a journal. A blueprint. A scrapbook of your brain.

On one page, tucked into a hand-stitched envelope you’d glued to the inside of the paper, was a tiny Polaroid of Yelena fast asleep during a mission debriefing, mouth slightly open, arms crossed. You’d captioned it:

“Her highness at rest. Do not wake unless you want to be attacked.”

There was another one a few pages later: Alpine in full loaf mode on top of Bucky’s clean laundry pile. Her eyes were mid-blink, deeply unimpressed with the camera. Beneath it:

“Make Bucky a serious portrait of her for his b-day. Buy oil paints and a heavy frame. She deserves it.”

Bob laughed quietly to himself, breath fogging a little against the thick silence of the room. The sketchbook was warm in his lap now, heavy with secrets, and he felt like he’d broken into something sacred–but you’d also left it there, hadn’t you?

Part of him wondered if that was on purpose.

He flipped again. Slower now.

The sketches were less structured as he turned the pages. More personal. Little candid moments rendered in soft lines and shaded pencil.

Ava with her nose buried in a novel, curled under three blankets in the common room.

Walker fast asleep with his mouth open and one sock half-off from Alpine pulling at it, labeled “he snores like a wood chipper.”

Alexei doing squats with a few books balanced on his shoulders like it was the most normal thing in the world.

Bucky standing in the hall with a grocery bag slung over his shoulder and a faint smile on his face–captured like you’d seen it only once and hadn’t wanted to forget.

He flipped again.

Still more familiar faces—moments frozen in graphite and ink.

Yelena dancing alone in the kitchen, socked feet sliding on the tile. Ava perched on the compound balcony, wind tangling her hair as she stared out at the horizon. Walker and Alexei arm-wrestling over a stack of pancakes. Even Val, drawn from behind, pacing a briefing room with her phone clutched in one hand like it was a weapon.

Page after page of everyone else. Little snapshots of the people you spent your days with, drawn in affection and detail. Not always flattering, but always seen.

And Bob…

He wasn’t anywhere.

He turned the page again.

There it was–a suit design labeled SENTRY (high altitude / max durability). It was stunning. Sleek. Reinforced in all the right places. Smart. Sharp. Sharp in a way that felt distant from the rest. You’d even drawn it over a silhouette that wasn’t quite him—too tall, too broad, too composed.

Your handwriting was still there though. All the notes, all the care.

“Reduce friction on shoulder seams. They always leave marks.”

“Flexible core armor. He moves quieter than you’d expect.”

“Lining should be soft. He won’t ask, but he hates the scratchy stuff.”

Bob stared at the page, chest tightening.

You paid attention. You always paid attention. But this didn’t feel like the others. It wasn’t him. It was the idea of him. What he wore. What he could withstand. What the Sentry needed to be.

The ache bloomed slowly in his chest, quiet and a little hollow.

Because maybe you didn’t draw him the way you drew them. Maybe to you, he was mostly suit specs and duty. Not laughter. Not stillness. Not warmth. Maybe you only looked at him in relation to what he could do–not who he was when he wasn’t glowing.

He turned the page anyway. Resigned.

And something fell.

A loose sheet slipped from the binding–like it had been tucked there with a kind of reluctant care. Not meant to be lost. But maybe not meant to be found so easily either.

Bob caught it midair.

And his breath left him.

It was him.

Drawn entirely in pencil, soft and textured. He was sitting on the common room windowsill in profile, knees pulled up, chin resting on his arm. The city behind him glowed like a galaxy, but the light you’d shaded most carefully wasn’t the skyline. It was the way it spilled across his shoulder and cheek.

Sunlight. Or something that felt like it.

He stared at it, stunned.

There was no suit. No armor. Just Bob. Just quiet.

He flipped the page.

Another sketch.

Bob on the rooftop, hoodie pulled tight around his shoulders, the wind ruffling his hair. He was mid-laugh. The kind of laugh that closed his eyes, tilted his head back. You’d captured the movement like you hadn’t wanted to forget a single detail. And again–there was light. Sketchy, warm, bleeding across the horizon and catching in his smile.

He flipped again. Faster now.

There he was–dozing on the Quinjet, arms crossed, sun pouring through the window and across the bridge of his nose.

There–leaning against the railing in the compound garden, hair mussed, holding a mug. His silhouette edged in early morning glow.

There–half-turned toward you in the middle of a conversation, eyes soft, lips parted. Lit from the side like you’d drawn him straight from memory. Every version of him surrounded by brightness. Like you couldn’t separate him from light even if you tried.

The ache in his chest cracked open into something else.

Wonder.

Disbelief.

Hope, soft and new.

He turned one last page.

This time, it was just his face. Close-up. No background. No distraction. His eyes were open–looking just slightly off to the side, like he was listening. A small crease between his brows, his lips parted as if he’d just started to speak. The light hit only one side of his face, casting the rest in gentle shadow.

And under it, scrawled in your familiar, almost apologetic handwriting:

“I don’t know why I always draw him in the sun. Maybe because that’s how I see him…My Golden Boy.”

Bob stared at the words; My Golden Boy.

His heart thumped once, hard–then stuttered like it was trying to reset itself, like it completely forgot its job. The breath caught behind his ribs trembled, and slowed when it left him. He wasn’t used to seeing himself like this–not as the Sentry, not even as himself…But as someone you looked at with wonder. With affection…With light.

He pressed his hand gently to the page, fingers trembling slightly as if the graphite might smear. His name wasn’t written anywhere, but it didn’t have to be. It was all him. The way you’d drawn the softness in his expression. The warm shadows. The quiet tension in his brow that only surfaced when he was thinking too hard and trying not to let it show.

He could still feel the echo of your voice in the caption, even though he hadn’t heard it out loud.

Maybe because that’s how I see him…

Bob’s fingertips were still hovering over the page–his page–when he heard the quiet creak of the hallway floorboards.

He sat bolt upright.

And then you appeared in the doorway.

Fresh from the shower.

Your maroon robe clung to your shoulders, cinched loosely at the waist, and the dim light from the lamp pooled over your damp collarbones and down the glisten of your chest like water still hadn’t finished tracing its path across you. The robe stuck slightly to your skin in places, hinting at curves and damp warmth beneath. Your hair was wet, curling and dripping at the ends, your legs bare and gleaming from the knee down. You looked soft. Blurred around the edges from heat and water. And the way your eyes swept the room like you’d just remembered something important made Bob feel like the oxygen had been sucked out of the compound.

“Oh,” You said, eyes landing on him, then on the sketchbook. Your lips curled into a sly, sleepy smile. “Caught you red-handed…”Bob opened his mouth. No sound came out.

You stepped into the light, unbothered, tugging the robe closed just slightly more as you approached.

“Sorry,” You murmured, mock whispering like you were letting him in on a secret, “Forgot I left it out here. I usually hide my embarrassing fanart in my room.”

He blinked, surprised by how casual you sounded. “This isn’t—this isn’t embarrassing.”

“Oh no?” You asked, arching a brow. “Not even the page where I drew a suit that dispenses emergency pizza rolls?” He let out a breath of a laugh, eyes dropping to the sketchbook that was still open in his lap.

“I d-don’t think I made i-it to that page.” He muttered, his voice soft and nervous. He was always nervous around you, and his stutter became worse when you were around him. Bob swallowed hard, fingers still curled protectively around the edges of the sketchbook as you settled onto the couch beside him, tucking your smooth, bare legs up under you with ease. The robe shifted again–just slightly–but it was enough to make the air leave his lungs slowly, like they were also resigning from working. You noticed his sudden stillness and smirked like you knew exactly what you were doing.

”You really didn’t get to the pizza roll suit?” You asked, kissing your teeth, “What a tragedy. It’s probably the most important contribution I’ve made to modern tactical gear.” Bob let out a shaky laugh, feeling it catch in his chest briefly. You smelled like fresh citrus, like someone had cut up lemons and limes and saved the skin and sprinkled sugar on them. You always smelled sweet to him, and now with the close proximity it was apparent that it was definitely a mixture of your natural scent and a lotion of some kind that gave you that essence.

“I-I’d wear the pizza roll suit,” He started, “If i-it meant I got to be in your s-sketchbook more often.” You tilted your head at him, eyes sweeping his face with a smirk that softened the edges of your mouth.

”Bob Reynolds, are you flirting with me?” Bob’s face went pink almost instantly. It wasn’t a quick flush, either–it bloomed slowly, like heat rising from the collar of his shirt to the tips of his ears. His mouth opened, then closed again, like he was cycling through a thousand possible replies and discarding every single one.

“I–uh–n-no–” He stammered, then gave up with a breathy laugh. His eyes flicked to the sketchbook and then quickly away, like it might catch fire if he stared too long. You tilted your head, grinning softly.

“I like it,” You murmured, and your voice was quieter now. Gentler. “You, flustered. It’s…Sweet.”

Bob’s eyes widened slightly, as though he didn’t know what to do with a word like that in your mouth–like it wasn’t meant for someone like him. He glanced down, fumbling for something safe to say, but his gaze caught on the sketch again. The one you knew he’d been looking at.

“That one,” You said, following his eyes. Your voice dipped low. “It’s one of my best.” He looked up at you slowly.

“Why do y-you call me that?” He asked, almost a whisper. His hand brushed lightly over the corner of the page. “‘G-Golden boy.’”

You shifted beside him, your knee brushing his. The robe slipped a little on your shoulder but you didn’t fix it. Instead, you leaned in slightly, voice so soft it nearly caught on the warmth between you.

“Because you look pretty in the sunlight,” You responded, like it was the simplest truth in the world. The words lodged somewhere between his ribs and his throat, reverberating through him like soft thunder. He didn’t know how to hold them. They weren’t something he’d ever been given before–not like this, not in a tone that curled with heat and truth and something dangerously close to want.

You were so close he could feel the steam from your shower radiating off your skin, could see the droplets still clinging to the edge of your collarbone, the damp sheen painting your clavicle in a way that made his mouth dry. And then you tilted your head, eyes catching the lamp’s glow like they were catching him, and with a sultry little smile.

“For the record though…You look pretty in any lighting. But the sunlight just does something to you…” It was spoken like sin and silk. Like worship. Bob looked at you like you’d peeled the sky back and let the sun touch just him.

Your words lingered in the air like smoke after something mass–You look pretty in any lighting…But the sunlight just does something to you–and he was burning from the inside out. Blushing so deep it felt inhuman, like even his bones had turned a soft shade of pink. The warmth of your voice, the way you leaned in just enough to let the intimacy rest on the space between you—it was unraveling him. Gently. Completely.

His throat bobbed. His breath shook. And then, barely above a whisper, he answered:

“I think…I only look l-like because of the way you see me…”

It wasn’t a line. It wasn’t practiced. It fell out of him soft and raw, stripped of armor, the kind of honesty that only exists between two people sitting too close in a quiet room.

And you smiled.

Not the teasing kind, not the cocky kind–but a slow, molten thing that curled at the edges of your mouth like you were letting him see something private. Something treasured.

”Do you want a live demo?” She asked, glancing at the sketchbook, before returning your gaze to his. Bob’s breath caught in his throat, and his eyebrows raised slightly, confusion and panic blooming all at once in his eyes like twin stars flaring to life.

“I–uh, I–I don’t–I mean, y-you don’t have to–”The words stumbled out, all jagged and half-formed, tumbling over one another in a panic that came from hope. From longing. From the quiet, desperate part of him that had spent so many nights dreaming of being this close to you and never once dared imagine it could feel like this.

You smiled again–soft and amused, but there was nothing mocking in it. If anything, there was kindness there. Heat. Want.

“Relax, golden boy,” You murmured, rising from the couch with an easy grace that made his stomach twist. You crossed to the low coffee table, brushing past the old Uno cards and empty mugs and remnants of popcorn carnage, and picked up your favorite pen from the chaos. As you turned back toward him, the lamp caught the curve of your throat, the warmth on your cheeks, and the dampness that lined your collarbone–and Bob swore he’d never seen anything more radiant in his life.

“It’s not a big deal,” You said gently, as though you weren’t walking him toward the edge of a moment that would burn into the rest of his existence. And then–slowly, deliberately–you crossed the room to him again.

Your hand found his chest.

Not forceful. Not hesitant. Just sure. Steady.

Your palm rested right over his heart–where it was pounding, thunderous under his ribs like it wanted to climb out just to get to you–and then you pushed. Softly. Gradually. Until Bob let himself be moved, shoulders sinking back into the plush cushions, legs parting slightly for balance, arms trembling where they rested at his sides.

You bit your lip–just a little–concentrating, maybe. Or maybe just savoring the moment, the way he looked with his head tilted up–admiring you. Awestruck. Unmoored.

Then you reached for the sketchbook still balanced on his lap, sliding it away gently, like it was no longer needed–because what you were about to draw wasn’t on paper.

Bob didn’t have time to ask what came next.

You climbed onto him.

One knee, then the other. Thighs bracketing his hips. Bare skin to soft cotton. You moved like water–like gravity had chosen you as its favorite–and then you settled, slow and devastating, into his lap.

Bob’s breath left him in a rush.

A whimper, almost. A sound he hadn’t meant to make.

His hands gripped the edge of the couch like they might keep him from floating away. Every part of you pressed against him now–your thighs warm and damp from your shower, the robe parting just enough to reveal the bare skin of your chest, your breath brushing his cheeks. The heat of you–your weight, your scent, your nearness–it made everything else disappear.

Time bent.

You were straddling him like you were meant to live there. Like he was built for this exact moment. And you were close. So close. He could see the tiny beads of water still clinging to the fine hairs at your temples. The curve of your bottom lip. The way your eyes searched his face with an intensity that made him feel naked–not in body, but in soul.

You rested the sketchbook on his stomach, the spine nestled against the slow rise and fall of his breath.

Then you leaned in.

“Don’t move,” You whispered, the pen now poised in your hand. “I want to remember this expression. The one where you look like you don’t know if you’re dreaming.”

Bob swallowed. Hard.

His voice, when it came, cracked like light through stained glass.

“I-I don’t think I am. But if I am, please…Don’t let me wake up yet.” His breath stuttered in his chest, shallow and tremoring, and his hands clenched tighter around the edge of the couch–white-knuckled, desperate. Like if he let go, he might reach for you. Might pull you closer. Might ruin this moment with the sheer want bleeding out of him.

Because he was trying not to think about your legs, draped warm over his thighs.

Not to think about the dip of your robe, the way it shifted every time you breathed.

Not to think about your scent curling around him like a memory he hadn’t earned.

And especially not to think about the way you looked at him–as if he was art already. As if he was worthy of being captured.

But God, he could feel everything.

The press of you against him. The delicate weight of the sketchbook rising and falling on his stomach like it had synced with his breath. And your hand–your hand was moving, slow and fluid, sketching something onto the page with such focus that it made him ache.

You were so close he could see the way your lashes kissed your cheeks when you looked down. The way your mouth curved softly in concentration. And still, his gaze drifted–devotional and restless. First to the hollow of your throat. Then to the curve of your knee. Then back to your mouth like it was something sanctified. Forbidden.

You glanced up and caught his eyes, smiling.

“You’re fidgeting,” You murmured, the pad of your thumb smudging a line across the paper. “What are you thinking about?” Bob could feel his throat tighten a bit, as he coughed a bit. His fingers spasming against the couch cushion.

”I-I’m not,” He whispered, too fast to sound convincing. Your brow arched, slowly.

”No? That blush says otherwise.” He could feel his cheeks grow hotter beneath your stare as he looked down at your hands, “Whatever is on your mind…Better tell me now…Or else I’ll have to draw you with steam coming out of your ears. Might ruin the composition.” You added, sweeping long graceful lines across the page. Bob’s throat worked around a sound that didn’t quite make it out. He shifted beneath you, breath fluttering through parted lips, and sighed.

“I-I…Y-You’re just…” He trailed off, blinked hard, and took a deep breath before continuing, “Y-you’re r-really close…”

Your pen paused mid-stroke. That tiny smile flickered again across your lips–mischievous, but not unkind.

“So that’s what your fidgeting is about, hm?” You asked, cocking your head just slightly as if inspecting him from a new angle. “All this tension just because I’m close?” You dragged the tip of the pen lightly across the paper again–nothing dramatic, just a line to keep your hand busy while you watched him melt.

Bob opened his mouth–probably to deny it–but all he managed was a shaky breath and another glance down. His fists had tightened on the cushion again, knuckles white, like the couch was the only thing anchoring him to the moment. You followed his gaze and saw the way his fingers were digging into the fabric.

You didn’t say anything for a moment.

Then, soft and playful:

“You know…” Your voice dropped to a purr as your eyes flicked back to his, “You could put them on my hips. I promise it’d be better than the poor old cushion.”

Bob inhaled sharply–like the suggestion itself was enough to knock the wind out of him. His eyes met yours again, wide and caught between wonder and panic.

“I–I d-don’t wanna mess this up,” He admitted in a hush, the words barely held together by breath. “I-I don’t wanna touch you wrong. Or–or make you uncomfortable. I j-just–”

You leaned in a fraction closer, your breath brushing the corner of his mouth.

“You won’t,” You whispered. “I promise.”

Then, slower, softer, like an invitation dressed as a tease:

“I want you to. That’s kind of the reason why I climbed on top of you in the first place…” Your hands stayed steady on the sketchbook, but your thighs squeezed gently around him in reassurance. His hands twitched against the cushion again. He looked like a man at the edge of a precipice–equal parts terrified and desperate to fall.

You sighed softly–barely a sound–and lowered your pen to rest atop the sketchbook that still remained on his stomach. Your gaze flicked back down to his hands, which were back to being clenched into the cushion, as if it was going to save him from coming undone.

”Alright…I guess I’ll fix it myself.” You murmured, voice like velvet against his ears. Bob’s eyes darted up to yours, startled–uncertain–but he didn’t move, he just froze in his spot.

You reached for him slowly, deliberately, your fingertips brushing the air before touching down gently on the inside of each of his wrists. And the moment you made contact, something happened. His breath stuttered. His jaw tightened. He froze–not from fear, but from the overwhelming awareness of your skin on his. You were the first person to touch his hands in what felt like forever.

You curled your fingers around his wrists–carefully, tenderly–and lifted them. They didn’t fight you. If anything, they followed the motion like they were tethered to you by something deeper than bone. He watched, helpless and wide-eyed, as you guided his trembling hands up to your waist. The fabric of your robe was still damp, soft against his skin, and your body underneath was warm and alive and impossibly close.

And then–you placed his hands on you.

Right on the curve of your hips.

You didn’t let go right away. You kept your hands atop his, cradling them. Holding them in place like you were making sure they knew they belonged there. Like you were grounding him with something far more intimate than words.

Bob exhaled sharply through his nose, his fingers twitching instinctively. His thumbs flexed but didn’t dare move–not yet.

Your thumbs brushed over the backs of his hands in slow, gentle strokes. Tracing the veins. The bones. The skin that trembled under your touch. You could feel how warm his hands were. How careful. How desperately he was holding himself back.

Then you leaned forward, just a breath. Just enough.

And Bob tensed.

You saw it in the sharp tick of his jaw, the way the muscles there fluttered under his skin like wings struggling not to fly. His breath caught–again–and his eyes, wide and dark and searching, darted to yours.

Still, you didn’t speak.

You let the silence cradle you both, let the hush between your bodies fill with everything unsaid. The air was thick with heat, your knees snug around his hips, your chest nearly brushing his.

”Kiss me Bob…” The words were soft—barely above a whisper—but they hit him like a solar flare. No fanfare. No hesitation. Just truth. Raw and crystalline and glowing at the edges.

Bob’s breath stilled in his chest. His hands, still resting on your hips beneath your own, trembled like a leaf caught between seasons. His pulse roared in his ears. His jaw clenched tighter, the muscle jumping as he stared at you with wide, reverent eyes—like he wasn’t sure if you were real, or if his dreaming had finally bled into the waking world.

You could feel it—the way his fingers curled just slightly against you. The way his breath shuddered as it passed your cheek. His lips were parted, damp and trembling. And when your nose brushed his—when the air between you seemed to collapse under the weight of wanting—his eyes fluttered closed for a second like the moment alone might undo him.

He was so warm beneath your touch.

So human.

And so afraid to move.

Your hands slid from atop his fingertips gliding up his wrists, along the crook of his elbows, to the dip in his shoulders—slow and patient, grounding him inch by inch. He followed your motion like a tethered thing, like a current pulled toward a shore he didn’t dare believe in. You cupped his face gently–just the edges of his jaw, your thumbs brushing along the sharp lines softened by awe–and tilted his gaze back to yours.

“Only if you want to of course…” You whispered, breath ghosting across his lips like the first touch of dawn.

Bob didn’t answer right away. He couldn’t. He was still unraveling–thread by golden thread–under the weight of the moment. The way you were looking at him was unbearable in its tenderness. Like he was beautiful. Like you were waiting for him. Like he was safe here, in your hands.

“I do,” He breathed, and it was hoarse with want. “I–I’ve w-wanted to for…for so long, I–”

You silenced him with nothing but the brush of your forehead against his. Close. Closer. Until the world fell away and there was only breath. Skin. Heat. Until the tip of your nose nudged his again, teasing him, beckoning him to come closer.

He leaned in like a man surrendering–like he was handing himself over with shaking hands and an open heart.

And when Bob kissed you, it wasn’t practiced or perfect. It wasn’t confident or slick. It was slow. Soft. Starved. Like his lips had never truly known what they were for until they found yours.

The kiss started as a brush–barely there. Like the whisper of silk against skin. His breath trembled as it left him, catching on yours, and then he kissed you again. Firmer. Deeper. Still slow, still trembling, but real. Like he meant it. Like he needed it.

His lips were warm and unsure, moving with reverent caution, and you could feel it–the aching restraint thrumming through every fiber of his body. He wasn’t holding you like he wanted to devour you–he was holding you like he was afraid you might disappear.

You responded with a steadiness he couldn’t manage, your mouth tilting gently into his, coaxing him closer. You kissed him like you knew he could take more, like you knew he wanted to be undone if you did it slowly enough.

Your hands slid up into his hair, threading through the soft, messy strands at the back of his head. He gasped into your mouth at the feeling—barely a sound, more like a breath catching on something too big to hold. And then you did it again–fingernails grazing his scalp, thumbs sweeping across the hinges of his jaw–and his whole body gave the faintest shudder beneath you.

He whimpered–soft and broken and so full of want it made heat bloom low in your stomach.

You opened your mouth against his just slightly, inviting him in–and Bob kissed you harder. Still careful, but with a new desperation under the surface. Like something in him had finally snapped loose. His hands, once trembling against your hips, flexed and pulled you in tighter. Not greedy–yearning. Anchoring. Like if he pressed you close enough, he could finally quiet whatever storm had lived inside his chest since the day he met you.

When your tongue touched his–soft, tentative–he gasped like he wasn’t prepared for the heat of it. His whole body stiffened beneath you, then melted so quickly you almost collapsed into him. The kiss deepened by inches, by instinct, until it was slow-burning and sultry, hot and aching and so much.

Your lips parted only slightly, breath mingling with his, and you murmured something soft against his mouth–something he couldn’t even register, because the sound of you speaking into his kiss lit a fuse inside him he didn’t know he carried.

He kissed you again, and again. And again.

Each one a little longer. A little slower. A little more desperate.

Your robe shifted with every move–slipping just a touch more from your shoulder, brushing across the backs of his hands, baring more skin to his touch. His thumbs skated over your waist now, unthinking, and slow. As if he was mapping you. Memorizing you.

You broke the kiss with a whisper-soft sigh, eyes half-lidded, your lips still brushing his.

“Still feel like you don’t know what you’re doing?” You asked, breathless and smug and sweet.

Bob didn’t answer right away. His mouth chased yours again, stealing another kiss that was softer than the last. Sweeter. Like a thank you.

“I feel like I c-could kiss you forever,” He said, and his voice cracked beautifully on the last word.

You smiled at him. “Good,” you whispered. “Because I don’t want you to stop.”

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too-deviant · 1 year ago

Text

strategic manoeuvre.

— WITH…ART DONALDSON!

contains...babysitter!reader, age gap, 18+ MDNI, art cheats w reader but it is lowkey implied that tashi planned the whole thing, car sex, semi-public sex, head (f receiving), p in v, unprotected sex, inspired by this post from @traumatrios

You had never been interested in tennis before Art.

You weren’t interested in sports at all, really — you just wanted to buckle down and focus on your college work, earn some money with an easy part-time job. You didn’t have time to follow sports, or anything else.

But then you got a call. You had been in the middle of a lecture when your phone buzzed against your notebook, a California number shining up at you and enticing you to pick up. Normally you would’ve let it go to voicemail, but you had recently gone around some of the fancier hotels in your city with flyers, asking for babysitting jobs and posting your number, so you excused yourself with a wave and took the call in the hallway.

You didn’t know who Tashi Donaldson was when she introduced herself, but the hotel she’d asked you to come to later that night was fancy enough that you didn’t question it. You had done an extensive google search afterwards, of course, but simply raised an impressed brow at her repertoire.

Then you met Art, her tennis player husband and the father of the lovely little girl you would be taking care of, and suddenly you were pretty interested in tennis.

It started when Lily had a bad nightmare and you couldn’t get her down — well, it started when you met the guy, palm sweaty in his own as he introduced himself, but it didn’t really start until you had to put one of his old games on the TV for the girl to watch until she fell asleep at your side, tear tracks from her bad dream dry on her cheeks.

You had been planning on carrying her back to her bed when she was down for the count, but you had been so fixated on Art’s movements; his determined look, his arms, his legs, that you ended up dropping out too. You woke up a few hours later with a blanket over your body and Art standing quietly at the kitchen island behind the sofa.

“You looked peaceful. Didn't wanna wake you.” He’d said, sipping at his tea, and you knew you were done for.

Now all of a sudden you had time to watch a tennis match in the morning, play one as background noise while you studied. You had started following his tennis journey right from the Junior Open in 2006 — you didn’t think you'd ever actually see him again, but you could fantasise about it whenever you remembered the smell of his cologne as he thanked you for taking care of Lily, promising a big tip would go straight into your account in the morning.

(The money went in fifteen minutes after you’d left).

It came as a pleasant surprise when Tashi’s number popped up on your screen once more, a few months later. You had been in your kitchen, and took the call the moment you recognised the digits.

“We’re a little ways out of town.” She’d said, “But Lily raved about you for days after last time, and we know you better than a stranger. If you can’t make it out here, don’t worry, but we still wanted to try our luck.”

We she’d said. As in her and Art.

You cursed yourself for lusting after a married man in the uber to the hotel.

From then on out, you became their primary babysitter. Since they travelled a lot, and Tashi’s mom was with them most of the time, you only really sat for them once every couple of months. The town you lived in was sunny and had a huge private sports centre for professional athletes — a fact you weren’t aware of until Art told you over a cup of tea — so they always came back. You were glad you could count on them coming back — it was like magic, the way your phone lit up with Tashi’s now saved contact whenever the late night bingeing of matches and interviews stopped fueling your infatuation.

The guilt was almost enough to make you ignore it, say you were busy or just get a new number all together. But you never did. As much as you knew it was wrong, you always dropped what you were doing and drove to that cushy hotel where the receptionist knew your face and let you in with a smile. You travelled that same memorised route to the master suite, knocked on the door and made sure you were standing far enough away from the peep hole that you didn’t look weird and distorted when Art would look through before letting you in.

It was always Art now. Tashi had greeted you a few times but lately it had always been him — a sick part of you thought she might’ve known about your crush on him, played with it for fun because she couldn’t play tennis anymore. But that was crazy, and you really needed to sort yourself out.

You would greet him with a smile, push through the small talk, lean up against the kitchen island and watch his shirt stretch around the planes of his back as he made you coffee (On those unlucky days he would be wearing a shirt. Sometimes he would be just done with warm ups and physio and would answer the door half naked and covered in sweat. Those were the good days). Then Lily would come running at you from her room, hug you around your waist and pull you in to play; Art would laugh and grin at you, sliding the coffee cup in your direction and holding your eyes before heading to his room to get ready.

You would be knee deep in headless barbies and chewed up polly pocket clothes when he and would return, dressed up and ready to go. He would lean down, kiss Lily on the forehead, and press his hand to your back in a silent goodbye. Then he would leave, and you would spend the whole day trying to pull yourself together.

He was married. He was ten years older than you. He had a child, and was paying you to look after her.

But he always made you coffee when you arrived — just how you liked it because he remembered. He always checked in on you, asked you how your life was while you nursed the mug that was warm from the beverage and his hands. He would tell Lily to behave for you because We like her, and we don’t want to scare her off. He would let his land linger on your back half a second longer every single time he left.

But.

But Tashi was the one who would call you. She was the one who made you coffee the first time, told you it was the least they could do for you. She would walk out of her room with Art, smile at you and tell you how beautiful you look in that shirt. She would grin at you before leaving, waiting patiently by the door for her husband to take his hand off your back.

You were evil. Truly. The guy was married.

But as evil as you were, you always made sure there was an old game of his playing on the TV when they would return — because then Art would prompt you to stay and listen to him talk about it. And you would have an excuse to lean up against that island and watch him make tea while Tashi excused herself to bed. Hours would pass before he was checking his watch and hissing out an apology for keeping you so late, and then letting you leave.

The first couple of times he’d simply make sure you got in your uber safely. Then he started calling cars himself, the same ones that would drive him and his family to and from matches, press events. The same sort of service celebrites used, not their babysitters. You didn’t mind — it was a thrill, listening to him ask the person behind the wheel to make sure you got back safely.

(The bar was under the court at this point, but at least you were aware of that).

But tonight was different. In more ways than one.

In the beginning, all was the same. You were left sitting on the plush carpet of Lily’s room surrounded by lego pieces, a burning in your gut and guilt in your heart. You played doctor, you made dinner, ordered room service after her relentless begging, put on a movie, carried her sleeping form to bed, came back and watched Art play tennis until he returned.

You had started to run out of games to watch, ones you hadn’t already seen, so settled for an old game from 2006. He was playing against his old partner, Patrick something, and you wondered where the lesser known second half of Fire and Ice had disappeared to after that night.

Then Art came back, Tashi right behind him, and you smiled at them both over the back of the sofa. Tashi watched the game, something unfamiliar glinting in her irises, before blinking back at Art, “I’m going to bed.”

He responded a little slower, kissing her goodnight and looking back at you, “Tea? This game was one of my most memorable.”

“Even though you lost?” You teased, leaning against the marble.

He paused, looking back at you. He blinked, “Yeah.”

You drank your tea. You pretended like you weren’t full of shame for standing that inch closer to him. You let him talk until he had nothing left to talk about, and watched him check his watch. You waited for him to pick up the phone and call the car — only he paused by the phone, hand floating just before it, and retracted his steps to the kitchen, “I’m gonna drive you back, if it’s not too much trouble. Saves waking up my driver.”

“Oh.” Your fingers twitched, and you told them to stop. “Sure, of course.”

Art’s car wasn’t what you had expected. Thinking back on it, he didn’t seem like the sports car type, but his status and riches led you to assume you were about to get into one of the two seats in his Bugatti — you didn’t. The black jeep was expensive enough for someone like him, but close enough to home that you didn’t feel like an outsider climbing into the passenger seat.

The drive wasn’t all that far — twenty minutes both ways, so Art would’ve been back before Tashi fell asleep if he hadn't pulled into a parking lot five minutes out.

Your lips parted, eyes following his hands as they slid slowly off the wheel and into his thighs. His chest rose with a deep breath and his jaw constricted when he swallowed. Then he was looking at you, eyes piercing.

“Lily likes you.”

You were unsure, feet shifting beneath you, the sound encasing the silence of the space and forcing you to stop and blink, “I’m glad. I like her.”

“Tashi likes you.”

You weren’t too positive that she would like you if she could feel how you were feeling now — that all too familiar heartbeat pulsing between your legs with every one of Art’s breaths.

“I like you.” He finished, tilting his head until his temple rested softly on the headrest of his seat. His smile was almost taunting when he undid his seatbelt, “Which is your favourite?”

“What?”

“The games.” He clarified, knowing his question was too broad and that you would have to ask, “The ones you watch every time you’re over. The ones I assume you watch even when you aren’t sitting for us. My games. Which is your favourite?”

“Oh. Um —“ Slightly distracted by the way he shed his jacket, dumping it in the backseat. He’d lent all the way forward to take it off and his eyes didn’t leave yours once. “I don’t know.”

“The one you were watching tonight.” He asked then, “What’d you think of it? Honestly.”

“Honestly?” You swallowed, mortified that you were even entertaining this, “You looked a little distracted.”

He huffed a laugh, finally looking away and letting you breathe. It didn’t last long, because he was then getting out of the car and rounding the front of it.

The breeze was cool when it hit you, Art blocking most of it from where he stood in the gap. His hand was still on the handle, but you were busy unbuckling your own seatbelt — the message had been received, you had crossed a line and he was kicking you out of his car.

But when you turned, legs swinging carefully into the cold, his hand on your knee stopped you from really getting out. Your eyes snapped up to his, and you realised you had been caged — with one hand on the door and one hand on you, Art Donaldson had you right where you had been dreaming of him having you. It felt surreal.

“My opponent. In the game from tonight.” He breathed, glancing around casually like you were having one of your simple conversations over tea. “He slept with my wife.”

Out of all the things…

“What?” Your eyes darted between his, but the rest of your body otherwise remained still. Even when his hand on your knee travelled upwards.

“He’d slept with her before. In college. We weren’t together then.” He was now watching his hand move, like he wasn’t the one moving it, “But then he slept with her again, in Atlanta. After I’d already married her.”

“Wow.” You breathed, mainly because it was the easiest word you could slide out of your mouth whilst holding your breath. His fingers reached your thigh, begged to dip between them. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He was quick to respond. Your legs parted on instinct, and at this point you had surrendered to being an awful person — although maybe you’d fallen asleep on the couch and this was all a dream. You didn’t think you’d be able to face Art if it was. You couldn’t even face him now.

He took the newfound space for granted, stepping between your legs and holding them open with his body. His hand on the door followed him, taking its new place on your other leg. He rubbed up and down your thighs, but you couldn’t look away from his face.

“I don’t want you watching him play.” He spoke lowly, tracing his fingertips around your waistband, “I’ve seen enough of his games.”

“Okay.” You didn’t hesitate to let out, swallowing the hungered saliva that had built up in your mouth.

He unbuttoned your jeans, pulled the zipper down — painstakingly slow, but it allowed you time to brace your hands on the seat and the dashboard so you could raise your hips and let him slide them off you.

You were stuck in your head, but Art didn’t seem to notice since he was too busy folding your jeans and hanging them over the open car door. You dared question it through a heavy breath but he just moved on to your panties, throwing them precariously on the dashboard and exposing your glittering cunt to his bright eyes.

“We shouldn’t —“ It was a half-assed attempt at reconciling with your guilt, but the fact that you were half naked and spread eagle made it lose its meaning.

Art shushed you, kneeling down so he was looking at your pussy, “We can, and we will.” Then he glanced back at you, brow arched, “Unless you don’t want to.”

Any sense of rationale had fucked off when he put his hand on your leg, so you swallowed and said, “I want to.”

He wasted no time, licking a thick stripe from your asshole to your clit. You knocked your head back with a gasped moan, bucking into him and hissing when the gear stick poked you in the back when you led back too far.

You let out a shaky breath as he lapped you up, tongue dipping inside of you before travelling up to that sweet spot and sucking at it gently. You gasped and moaned, hands scrambling between holding yourself up and holding him down. His own were resting on your thighs — his calm and collected demeanour was a drastic contradiction from your own.

His head nodded calmly between your legs, relaxed in its position — yours, shaky and tense all at once, neck bracing whenever you fell back. His hands tapped soft melodies on your skin whereas yours tightened around whatever was in their old, whether that be the leather of the seats or the blonde of Art’s hair.

When he finally came up for air, his chin was coated in your slick, and he licked his lips clean before straightening up above you. You watched, paralysed, while he unbuckled his belt, threw it over the door with your jeans, and sent you a look under his lashes that you’d only seen him wear during his tennis matches.

You had been keeping quiet earlier, but when he bottomed out inside you and started to piston, your mind went wild. Choruses of Oh my God and Fuck!, shouts of Art’s name and whimpers under your breath — it all came tumbling out and you couldn’t even try and stop it.

Not that you wanted to; your vocality seemed to make him go faster, harder. It made him vocal, no longer calm and relaxed as he had been when eating you out, but loud and gruff. Grunts and moans you had dreamt about hearing outside of a television screen, now being huffed into the air you shared.

You came with a whine and Art followed not long after, and you settled there for a moment — legs spread in his passenger seat with him standing between them — until you could muster up the strength to push yourself up.

Five minutes later and you were both dressed, Art’s black jeep parked outside of your apartment building. You hadn’t exchanged any more words, but when you turned to slam the door once you had jumped out, you found his eyes on yours.

“I have a game this weekend. Two hours out. Tashi wanted you to come. A gift, for all you’ve done for us.”

(You went to the game. Art won. Tashi grinned like she’d made it happen and then offered to buy you a drink).

divider by @cafekitsune !!

#art donaldson #art donaldson x you #art donaldson x reader #art challengers #art donaldson smut #babysitter!reader #challengers #challengers movie #@lia’s works #tashi duncan

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starry-sophrosyne · 3 months ago

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I'm not really a dessert person tbh.. I would honestly take a good bowl of fruit over a slice of cake or brownies almost any day of the week but it really depends on if im in the mood for sugar or not- I will say though, I do love dark chocolate and i think you can never go wrong with those little godiva ganache heart thingies :) tiramisu is a close second tho

As for some things Starry likes? She likes good calligraphy, collecting little trinkets (me when hoarder/attachment issues /hj) and koi fish! along with flowy fabric, the ambience/white noise of the ocean waves, and of course, the night sky :) and if she were gonna pick a mario party character, she'd ofc play "that'll do!~ 🌠" (aka rosa! my girl :D)

(i would add more likes but they're more for me than starry as a persona atp XD /hj; some of my /gen likes include seashells, drying flowers, and simple jewelry ( ´﹀` ) )

Hey crab bucket (or anyone that's in pc rpf), what's your favorite desserts? Totally not for research purposes is there something brewing? Yes. Will it be done soon? No. Also I want the most random things you (or your OC) likes :3

#cant STAND stuff made almost entirely out of pure sugar (jello cotton candy caramel; marshmellows unless theyre in smores or hot cocoa)#but a really big fan of semi sweet things and coffee is growing on me a lil more (only as a dessert; i think it taste horrid without sugar-#excited to see what ur brewing up btw crystal XD /gen #we should have more of these community questions tbh; i love getting to know more about you guys even if what i end up learning #is more or less “in character” for you guys XD /lh /gen /pos #also! love citrus; hate tea/bitter things (saying this just cause i saw pens reblog of this post first XD)#pc rpf #rpf #pc rpf community #starry's sona(s)

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cathnospam · 9 months ago

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Posttimeskip/Canon!Bakugo Katsuki NSFW Alphabet

Thanks for 100 follows :-P

(((Black girlfriend reader mentioned a few times, if you are not black or a girl you can obviously ignore it.)))

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

You were his first everything so with that you wanted to teach him just a few things like aftercare. However, Bakugo already had to down to a science. He didn’t like sleeping in sweat and cum so he’d offer you to take a shower while he puts new sheets on the bed and he joins you a little later. He noticed how thirsty you get after so he’d bring a water bottle and some juice/tea, maybe even a sweet snack if you don’t fall asleep too soon. A lot of this stuff was common sense except the cuddle part. It’s not like he didn’t want to hold you after it was just awkward for him. He just had you cross eye’d and crying on his dick now you him to be held and babied? But after some reassurance that you definitely do and you also wanted to make sure if you did good. “Of course you did dumbass you always do.” Is what he could huff out hearing such nonsense.

Post nut clarity Bakugo is softer, more touchier somehow and quiet. He’d much rather hear your yapping and he just responds with “Yeah.” “Of course” “No. dumbass” with a lot of kissing in between of course

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

Yeah we all know he loves ass. He does, shamelessly so, smacking it while eating you out, smacking it when your back is faced him, patting it while you lay on his lap . But he loves your lips just as much. They’re like pillows, bouncy, and incredibly soft. It’s like a sweet flavor as well knowing you always have different types of lipgloss to wear.

I don’t think he is very particular of any part of his body, but since dating you, you love to talk about his back and arms, the way you hug him from behind or grab onto his arm walking through a crowd. More importantly how you scratch his back when he’s inside you and claw his shoulders when he keeps overstimulating you. It’s become partial motivation to his workout now.

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

Bakugo actually practices safe sex 90% of the time. He isn’t prepared to have any children yet and he doesn’t want any scares so he does at least buy the ULTRA thin condoms. However. The day you finally let him w/o a condom for his birthday he almost came faster than usual which actually made him upset LMAOO.

“What the—F-FFUCK!”

“Y-Y’ok—“

“I AM!…just…fuck this feel good.”

So he will cum in you or on your ass, and smack it with his dick because he seems clean but he’s such a dirty bastard at heart.

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

He doesn’t keep many secrets from you but the few are really only justified. The first one was that when you both were making out for the first time you grinded against his semi hard dick and he let out a soft moan in your mouth. You never pointed it out but it sounded so hot and it almost threw him off because he never made that noise before. After that, for the next few months before you both finally had sex he thought of that feeling alone to get off when masturbating. Not his finest moment but he couldn’t help it.

He likes when you pull his hair but you only did it once and he’ll be damned if he asks you to do it again. Do it again

Another one would be when you and him were just talking and not having sex yet he used to only watch porn where the people looked similar to you. So he’d sometimes type up Asian guy x black girl or some shit. He was actually using it to mentally prepare himself for when he does fuck you and it’s something he isn’t ready to ever tell you because he knows getting sex advice from porn is absolutely terrible.

Speaking of getting prepared he also asked Kiri for some advice on how to eat you out. Bakugo used to watch a lot of oral sex videos and honestly he really was most nervous about that part, he’s aware he wasn’t the best kisser at first and the last thing he wanted to do was bite you or something so he simply asked his best friend that loss his virginity before him the question: “Where is the clit?”

He swore Kiri to secrecy to never speak of that conversation again after that.

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

A virgin up until he dated you. Like I said you’re his first everything so teaching him was actually something you were expected to do, however his pride always got the best of him so when you corrected him he’d always get pissy.

“My clit is here—“

“I fucking know that.”

So instead of verbally telling him what to do you you showed him with your body, moaning louder when he hits or licks the right spot, praising him when he uses the right move. He caught onto this quick and by the time it was the 2nd round he was damn near perfect

F = Favorite position (this goes without saying)

A lot of people say backshots but I personally think Lotus and honorable mention is missionary Hear me out: Bakugo gives vanilla. He just does he doesn’t need all the special positions and areas to fuck he just wants you, him, and a comfortable surface preferably a bed or couch. He doesn’t want to be perceived as some sex freak or anything he is very simple when it comes to sex. Mostly because he’s so shy but won’t admit it.

The Lotus Position is something that actually overwhelms him in the best way possible. Your foreheads touching, your breast pushed up against his as he assist your push to keep grinding and bouncing against him, FUCK does he love the noises you make in his ear when you’re close too, biting him as you cum. He kisses you a lot too to swallow some of your sounds. How your hands creep onto his neck moaning his name. Plus he is squeezing your ass as you both move in sync. He loves it.

Missionary is almost a ties in because he feels he has the most control. Yeah he can be soft but he still loves to be in charge. He likes the intimacy that comes with these positions so best believe it’s a go to.

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

Unintentionally. He has always been so funny to you, but he likes it believe he is serious during sex. Yet you can’t help but giggle when he makes a comment about blaming you for making him get so close to cumming.

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

He has a visible happy trail. Doesn’t grow much so he never needs to trim it, he was going to cut it off the day after you had sex with him the first time and you were able to stop him. Bakugo wanted to make his pelvic area smooth for you because he was worried his hair was itchy to you, once you explained it felt good to feel it on your pussy when he fucked you he haven’t touched it since.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

Well….he can try. You can tell when he tries but bless his heart he is so damn aggressive on accident. He once tried to give you a massage but his own sweat mixed with the oil cause his hand to slip so much to the point he got mad and pop a small explosion on your lower back.

You still have the small burn mark and laugh at it from time to time. He doesn’t laugh though he regrets it a lot.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

He masturbates…often. He has for years and even after graduating high school he only did it every other day or week when he was really tense or couldn’t sleep. But ever since he got with you it stopped.

Because you do it for him.

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

He’d tell you he doesn’t have any. Which is half true.

He is pretty vanilla, BUT from the last few times you tried something new you noticed he enjoyed a couple things:

Overstimulation is always fun, he used to do it on accident. Now, it’s almost expected to happen after oral or penetrative sex. Something about that second orgasm really puts him in a whole ‘ other cloud 9 he can’t even explain. It’s the rarest times he’s ever selfish with you sexually.

Praise Kink 100000%. It’s so funny to see the frustrated look on his face of focusing to not cum when you’re in his ear telling him how amazing he is and how nobody else could make you feel this way. Gets him hard every time.

L = Location (favorite places to do the do)

He does enjoy the bed, but he has a huge couch in his dorm, he ate you out a few times during a movie and it led to you on top riding him. It felt so cozy falling asleep after that now 90% of the movie nights y’all have in his dorm leads to something not so wholesome.

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

You.

Your reactions, your twitches, your moans, the way you say his name it all drives him more to keep going and practicing to get better for you. He absolutely loses his MIND the way you cry out for him too.

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

He will not ever do anything like humiliation or too much violence like slapping your face. He knows he can be abrasive as it is on accident and even the thought of going to far and harming you would possibly cause him to take a pause on sex no matter how much he loves it

I am 50/50 on somno. I believe he wants you alert to what he’s doing to you for his own peace of mind. But he wouldn’t be opposed to him waking up to YOU touching him.

He’s not a big fan of “daddy”, he won’t stop what he’s doing but he’d rather hear his name or “baby” or even a nickname you made out of his name.

You will not peg him. He is very sensitive about his ass.

No threesomes or anybody watching. Call him selfish, but your body is his in his mind so he’d prefer if nobody sees what you have only blessed him with.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

LOVES giving. Way more than he will admit, there has been days where he’d finish sparring with someone and to release the stress he had from Deku almost beating his ass again he came to your dorm and offered to lay between your thighs as you studied.

You didn’t get much studying done.

He’s improved on his skill too. However he’s constantly messy, it’s not just kitten licks with this man he sucks and fingers and even nibbles on you like he’ll never eat you again. It’s almost selfish.

He loves the feel of your pussy against his tongue, he doesn’t taste much. If you were to ask him what you taste like he would say nothing, really but the warm, slimy slick just does something to him. If he could he’d eat you for hours

Now that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love seeing you gag and swallow his dick absolutely not. When you both started getting more physical you actually sucked his dick quite often (since he was afraid to eat you out at the time) he would actually anticipate on it whenever you both were alone so he’d keep his sweats incredibly low to his waist on purpose

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

Bakugo an intense guy so he starts off slow and his touches gradually turn more focused towards your reactions. He’s consistently looking into your eyes with every noise you make, each thrust is deep and nearly knocks the wind out of you. It’s not until he’s close he begins to chase that high, breathing into your mouth, circling your clit w his fingers, and going faster with slightly shallow thrusts.

He’s a big kisser btw so be prepared for little to no air because if he’s not kissing your low lips he’s kissing your upper lips with each thrust swallowing your cries

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

Hates em.

The idea is always fun to him but when he realizes he has to stop right when he’s getting started he hates it. He wants to take his time. He probably enjoys foreplay the most which is why he can’t stand having to make it short.

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

Bakugo is pretty stubborn and doesn’t like too much change but if you’re willing to reassure him about what you want he may consider. It can’t be any of the no though.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

Man can last a while. He can even if he’s sensitive, but he can last EVEN LONGER in between breaks. Just as long as you cock warm him. An average night of sex with him is usually 30-35 minutes, but including foreplay is actually an all day thing. Foreplay can start from the moment you wake up and he’s kissing you good morning all the way to that evening when you both are showering together and his fingers are creeping between your thighs

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

Doesn’t understand toys but if you’re willing pick like a vibrator he wouldn’t mind it. You just can’t use it too much, he has read those things can fuck up your sensitivity and he’ll be DAMNED if he loses to a TOY

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

Bakugo actually wasn’t that much of a teaser until you brought it out of him. When he went down on your once he kept kissing and biting your thighs for WAY too long that you began to whine his name. Once he heard that pretty little “please” slip through your tongue something just snapped. He loves to hear you beg now so occasionally he’ll edge you or tease you a bit before giving you what you want.

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

He’s not that loud. A few mumbles of your name and a couple groans is the most you’ll get because he wants to hear you more. When he’s close he’ll begin to say a few “cum with me” “cum for me’s” which is so hot to hear since his voice breaks when he’s cumming

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

He learned sign language through out the years after finding out his hearing was becoming worse and he taught you as well. Now you both communicate in public through SL, and a few times he said the nastiest shit to you across the room during a lecture.

Bonus: He’s a big Pokémon nerd. Loves Gengar, Charizard, and Growlithe.

Bonus two: He has a secret tattoo he got when he turned 21

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

Bakugo is a more length than girth guy. He’s a shower and cut. About 7.8ish inches and it curves to the left. He also had a beauty mark on the left side of his shaft and pelvic area.

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

Y’all have sex about 4-5 times a week. If yall miss a week spike it up to 6 because he needs to release some stress

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

You fall asleep before him so after taking care of you and cleaning you up he usually waits until you’re sleep and follows suit. Sometimes when you’re still yapping and he’s ready to go to bed he’ll gently fan your eyelids to close with his fingers. Somehow it works everytime and you slowly stop talking a dm cuddle in his chest.

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athena-xox · 1 year ago

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Ever after high books + links

Link one (most books)

Link two (other books)

EDIT: SINCE THIS IS GETTING ATTENTION AGAIN I IMPLORE EVERYONE TO CHECK MY PINNED POST SINCE THERE IS SO MUCH MORE GOOD RESOURCES!!! (This includes webisode timelines, doll diaries, EAH dictionary, confirmed birthdays and sm more)

The Main Trilogy (& Other Shannon Hale Books)

The Storybook of Legends by Shannon Hale

The Unfairest of Them All by Shannon Hale

A Wonderlandiful World by Shannon Hale

Once Upon a Time by Shannon Hale

The Legend of Shadow High by Shannon Hale

Ever After High School Series

Next Top Villain by Suzanne Selfors

Kiss and Spell by Suzanne Selfors

A Semi Charming Kinda Life by Suzanne Selfors

Fairies Got Talent by Suzanne Selfors

Truth or Hair by Suzanne Selfors

Fairy Tail Ending by Suzanne Selfors

Destiny Do-Over Diary companion books to the school series

General Villainy by Suzanne Selfors

Science & Sorcery by Suzanne Selfors

Hero Training by Suzanne Selfors

Once Upon a Pet

A Princely Present by Suzanne Selfors

Candy Wish Fish by Suzanne Selfors

Trouble with Jackalopes by Suzanne Selfors

Next Top Bird by Suzanne Selfors

Hedgehog’s Hexcellent Adventures by Suzanne Selfors

Horse of a Different Colour by Suzanne Selfors

Dapper Doormouse by Suzanne Selfors

Snow Fox’s First Winter by Suzanne Selfors

Once Upon a Twist

When the Clock Strikes Cupid by Lisa Shea

Cerise and the Beast by Lisa Shea

Rosabella and the Three Bears by Perdita Finn

Duchess Lets Down Her Hair by Perdita Finn

The Kitty Mermaid by Perdita Finn

The Secret Diary of

The Secret Diary of Apple White by Heather Alexander

The Secret Diary of Raven Queen by Heather Alexander

Diary of an Evil Queen by Stacia Deutsch

Junior Novels

Dragon Games Stacia Deutsch

Epic Winter by Perdita Finn

Activity books

Yearbook

Royals and Rebels

The Sleepover Spellebration Party Planner by Kirsten Mayer

The Totally Tea-RRIFIC Hat-Tastic Book About YOU

Madeline Hatter’s Guide to Riddlish! A Topsy-Turvy Write-In Book by Elizabelle Castle

The Hat-Tastic Tea Party Planner by Melissa Yu

A Spelltacular Year

Plan Your Destiny

Ever After High Activity Book

Spellbinding Activities

Write Fableous Fairytales

Picture books

Welcome, Baby Dragons by Margaret Green

Let the Dragon Games Begin by Margaret Green

Royally Cool Adventure by Perdita Finn

Meet Crystal Winter by Perdita Finn

Colouring/Sticker books

Thronecoming Reusable Sticker Book by Melissa Yu

A Wonderlandiful Doodle Book by Jeanine Henderson

Draw Dream Create Sketchbook

An Enchanted Pop-Up Sketchbook

Other books

Five Minute Stories by Robert Rudman & Ellie Rose

Class of Classics by Leigh Dragoon & Jessi Sheron

The books that don’t have a link are ones I know exist but I couldn’t find on internet archive/other searching.

If you have any links to these missing books, or books that I don’t have PLEASE lmk. Or if you have higher quality or pdf links (since some of the books are just screenshots of pages that I put together on a doc…)

The last two books in the once upon a twist series don’t exist.. they were cancelled or only a few copies were made (and those who have them aren’t saying anything). But I’m hoping to find them somehow if I have to message perdita finn myself. I believe there are a few chapters up somewhere so I’ll try to compile all that’s available

Any title that is coloured with a link means I don’t have a pdf or full copy yet but I have a preview

Because this is getting so much attention make sure to check my pinned post that has more eah resources!!

There are also diaries that went along with the dolls that you can find on @everafterhigharchive’s page who is also responsible for most of the links here

(Also one of my interconnect libraries has meet Crystal Winter so I’ll upload that onto internet archive + add it on here once it ships)

#ever after high #eah #eah books

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shinysobi · 2 months ago

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ecobrutalism (kim mingyu)

because drafting tables are not meant to be anything more than a decoration.

☆ annoyances to lovers: architect!mingyu x therapist!reader ☆ wc: 5k ☆ genres: non-idol au, annoyances to lovers, office setting? romance, fluff, comedy, no angst (this is a first for me) vibes based on second wind ☆ regular warnings apply; mingyu is both delusional and dramatic, jihoon is tired. ☆ notes: tiya was one of my first mutuals here on tumblr, and she's always been one of the people i can count on to listen to my yapping and not think of me as a strange person (is this weird? i dont think so) but our birthdays are only one day apart, and so, because i can't send a gift from so far away, here's my gift, a small mingyu fic that i hope will bring a smile to your face. happy birthday, @gyubakeries, i hope i know you for a very long time <3 thank you to alta @haologram for making the banner at my speedy request, and @mylovesstuffs for betaing this (if there are errors, there aren't.) masterlist

“She’s insane,” Mingyu mutters, holding on to a pamphlet, “she’s insane, and she’s going to make me insane too.”

“She’s not insane,” Jihoon mutters, sipping his tea, “she’s just a therapist. You’re projecting.”

“I’m not,” Mingyu mutters, “she’s the one who’s arguing about stupid rules in the building code that doesn’t even make any sense. I mean, who brings a folder with color-coded tabs to every meeting? Why does she have opinions on how we should build and decorate, for every shop in the building? No one even makes use of these codes in today’s day, they’re virtually obsolete.”

“So, object to them,” Jihoon shrugs, “you’re good at that, right?”

“I’m not, actually,” Mingyu groans, “I’m not even good at ignoring her. It’s making me anxious and irritable. To the extent that it’s affecting how I behave with my clients.”

“Your clients, meaning the old ladies who come here to ogle you and then force their husbands to get their shops redesigned by you?” Jihoon arches a brow, “I hardly doubt those count as actual clients, Kim Mingyu. You’ve got admirers here.”

“They bring money so yes, they’re my clients,” Mingyu snaps, “and you’re one to talk, hyung. Didn’t I catch you yesterday, buying random books from the bookstore? You don’t even read post-war Japanese crime fiction, for heaven’s sake. You were trying to get with the bookstore owner, weren’t you? You even composed a song for her, don’t even think about denying it.”

Jihoon colors, “none of your business, Mingyu.”

“None of your business, Mingyu,” Mingyu taunts, “anyway, help me out with this woman. She continues to get on my nerves at every possible opportunity, and I don’t know how long I can hold on before I inevitably lose my shit and kill her or something like that.”

“Not long for that,” Jihoon muses.

“Shut up, and try and help me.”

Jihoon sighs. He’s been tolerating Mingyu’s antics since the past year when the younger man decided to open his shiny new office in their dilapidated shopping centre, and while his perfect visuals have helped in footfall, it also means Jihoon has to take care of Mingyu and his tantrums on a semi-regular basis. Semi-regular now that he’s managed to find himself a sworn enemy. It’s not even a big deal, Jihoon does not understand why he keeps swearing to high heavens that he hates her guts.

“She doesn’t seem so bad,” Jihoon says, trying to get Mingyu to calm down to a certain degree, “you don’t even typically get this angry, do you?”

“I don’t,” Mingyu shakes his head, “imagine how royally annoying she has to be, to get me this mad.”

“Huh,” Jihoon turns it over in his head a few times, “are you sure it’s not just a random one-time thing? She’s not proposing bad things as such, she’s just telling us to be more aware of the city’s building rules and regulations. Something which I thought you would have been a stickler for, given how you are the architect here, not her.”

“I do care about building rules and regulations,” Mingyu seethes, “I’m just not a bloody fanatic about it.”

“Ah, so that’s the problem,” Jihoon shrugs, “anyway, sort this shit out amongst yourselves, all this is seriously cramping my rizz.”

“Your rizz?” Mingyu scoffs, “hah! You’re just going to spend all your money at the bookstore, aren’t you? You’ve got no rizz to speak of.”

“Speak nicely to your elders, you little shit.”

“I’ll speak nicely to you when you actually show me proof of your rizz that goes beyond stupid yearning from a distance,” Mingyu taunts, “wait, have you even talked to her? Or are you just planning to stare at her and creep her out? You know that’s not how anyone asks someone out, right?”

“Shut up,” jihoon ‘s looking intently at the door, “I’m actually trying to get her to go on a date with me.”

“And have these thoughts found any other home outside of your mind, Lee Jihoon?”

“You know she’s friends with the therapist you keep yelling at during the meetings,” Jihoon groans, “until you stop fighting with her friend, she’s not even going to look at me or give me the time of day. Now make up amongst yourselves and for once, let me go on a fucking date.”

He leaves to go back to his regular yearning duties, and Mingyu is left seated in his chair, pondering over two things; the current state of his finances, which would absolutely not withstand the onslaught of a renovation putting it to date with the city’s newest regulations, and Jihoon’s love life.

—

“Why the fuck won’t he just comply with whatever I’m asking?” you yell, throwing up your hands, “it’s the city’s regulations, stuff that he should be familiar with, given that he’s an architect, for heaven's sake, not me! Why the hell am I the person telling him things?”

“Maybe it’s because you can be a bit annoying about these things,” the bookstore owner, your only friend in this goddamn place, pipes up from behind her stack of books, “maybe if you weren’t so pushy about it, he’d hate you a little less.”

“He’s just an asshole," you say, “I need to look into his architecture degree.”

“Not to that extent,” she holds up her hands, “but you can be really pushy and I think maybe, if you’re really this concerned about the building regulations, then you should come to a compromise with him before the next building committee meeting two weeks later.”

“That soon?” You groan, “oh god, he’s going to be so annoying when I approach him first, isn’t he?”

“It’s not about who’s more annoying, it’s about who is more reasonable out here,” she shrugs, “have you ever seen me pick fights I don’t need to?”

You shake your head, “god knows how you manage to do it. If it were up to me, I’d have his head on a pike outside my office.”

“And risk facing the wrath of all the neighbourhood aunties?”

“Yes, that’s the only thing he’s good at,” you seethe, “he’s basically eye-candy for all the neighborhood aunties. Why the hell is he on the neighbourhood watch? He didn’t even live here until a few years ago!”

“Neither did you.”

“I did! I moved back!”

“Look, the point is that you need to make amends with him,” your friend reasons, “or else living in this shopping complex will be difficult for you. People actually like him a lot more than you think they do, which is why it will not be difficult for them to get you out of here.”

“Out of here?” you shriek, “what do you mean out of here? They can’t do that to me, not legally at least.”

“They can make your life a hundred times more difficult than it already is, which will make it worse for you to run a business,” she replies, strangely calm, “I’ve been here far longer than you have. Being likeable is currency. They want someone likeable, not someone who sticks to the rules and makes everyone more annoyed than they already are.”

“Ugh, I knew I was right about him the moment I met him,” you mutter, and your friend frowns.

“You really did have a poor choice of words back then.”

You shake your head, ignoring the jibe, “So, I need to be nice with him.”

“Precisely.”

—

Mingyu is trying to be nice, he really is. Jihoon has been blowing up his phone, asking him to fix things so he can go back to creepily stalking the bookstore owner, but he’s a good friend, so he’s going to be nice.

Which is what he’s been telling himself since the moment he stepped foot into the clinic run by that woman. Happiness Clinic, he repeats, looking at the sign on the wall, how stupid.

“Kim Mingyu,” you say, surprised to see him walking through your doors in the middle of the day, “strange to see you here.”

“No business?” he asks, offhandedly, making a motion at the empty waiting area.

“I have a consultation in half an hour,” you reply, “what do you want?”

Mingyu sighs. He’s really not looking for an argument, but your attitude is not helping his current goal. “Look,” he says, after a whole minute, “about the newest resolutions, can we at least work it out? Most of the residents don’t want to upend their entire businesses to make sure their stores are up to code.”

“Yes, but shouldn’t they be making sure they’re not violating code?” she argues, “and you of all people should be making sure they’re not being fined by the city officials. You’re an architect. I’m just a random therapist.”

“You’re not a random therapist,” Mingyu argues, before taking a deep breath, “even the city officials generally give the store owners a window of time within which they have to comply with regulations. At least give them more than a week.”

“Fine,” she snaps, “just so you know, I’m not doing this as a favour to you. I’m doing this as a favour to my friend.”

“The bookstore owner?”

“Yes, the bookstore owner,” The sarcasm is not lost on him, “she’s the one who told me I have to at least make sure the residents don’t hate my guts.”

“See, she’s got it down,” Mingyu suddenly feels a bout of gratitude towards the bookstore owner, whose name he still is not familiar with, but he’s going to give her a basket of flowers the next day. “You need to compromise to some degree, to be able to cohabitate. Life is all about cohabitation and compromise, you know.”

“Yes, yes,” she makes a face, “fine, I’ll tone down the arguing. They can make their arrangements taking as long as they want. When the city officials come knocking on their doors, don’t say I did not warn you.”

“Noted, doctor.” he gives her a mock salute, before turning to leave the same way that he came. You groan, before making a rude gesture, which Mingyu catches. He just laughs, before walking away. Cute.

—

“Hyung,” Mingyu has been running for an hour, he thinks, knocking on Jihoon’s door, until the older man opens up, angry expression on his face, “why the hell did you take so long to open the door?”

“I was taking a nap, Mingyu,” Jihoon mutters, “it’s four in the afternoon, and I don’t have customers right now, so of course I was doing what any normal person does, and was taking a nap.”

“Wow, you’re such a productive member of society, hyung,” Mingyu scoffs, before opening the door wide open, “okay, I need your help with something.”

“I don’t have money.”

“It’s not—why does everything have to be about money?”

“We live in a capitalistic society, Kim Mingyu-ssi, of course everything is about money.”

“Ugh fine, but this one is not,” he waves a hand, “I think I’m going crazy.”

“And it took you this long to figure out?” Jihoon raises an eyebrow, “wow, you really are a genius, as they say.”

“This is not a time to make fun of me, hyung,” Mingyu wails, which, in retrospect, is not the best look on a grown adult man, “how did you even know you liked the bookstore owner?”

“She has a name, you idiot,” Jihoon swats the back of his head, “and no, why would I tell you?”

“Just help me out once, please,” Mingyu wails again, “I’m seriously never going to ask you for help again if you help me out here.”

“Fine,” Jihoon is not entirely convinced with his declaration, but he sits down at the counter anyway, “what seems to be your problem?”

Mingyu takes a deep breath, “I think I like her.”

Jihoon scowls, “like who? There are eight billion people in the world, you have to be specific here.”

“The therapist!” Mingyu throws up his hands, pacing around the shop, “I seriously think I like her or something like that. I’m going crazy here, just help me out once.”

“Might I suggest a psychiatric hospital?”

“Hyung.”

“What do you expect me to say?” Jihoon makes a vague gesture with his hands, “until yesterday, you were vowing to kill her with your bare hands or something like that. Now you’re here at my door, telling me you like her. I’m not the only person, you ask anyone else, they’ll all say the same thing; you’ve got to check yourself into a hospital or something like that.”

“You’re not even getting the point,” Mingyu groans, “up until last night, I never even had thoughts about her in that way.”

Jihoon raises an eyebrow. It reminds him of his elementary school teacher, just as terrifying, “Mingyu, what have we said about catching feelings from a sex dream?”

“It was not a sex dream!”

“So it was worse,” Jihoon leaned back into the chair, “go on.”

“I don’t know man,” Mingyu sighs, “I went to meet with her yesterday afternoon about the upcoming meeting, and she was actually nice to me.”

“You mean she did not actively argue with you?” Jihoon tries to smile, although it’s more of a grimace, “you seriously need to rethink the reasons for getting attracted to someone.”

“It’s not even like that!” Mingyu protests, “she was actually nice to me. And she didn’t even yell that much!”

“Mingyu, last week, at the committee meeting, she told you to go fuck yourself.”

“And I’m coming to that,” he holds up a hand, “she actually did flip me the bird when I was about to leave.”

Jihoon’s got an expression on his face that makes it very clear he does not understand anything Mingyu’s saying, “she flipped you off? Made the sign which tells you to go fuck yourself?”

“Yes, but there was no real malice behind it,” Mingyu waves, “that’s not the point here.”

“I think you’ve gone insane,” Jihoon sighs, “and what, she flipped you off, and you fell in love with her?”

Mingyu makes a face, “why would I fall in love? I’m not that stupid.”

“Yes, you just dreamed about her and are now yapping to me,” Jihoon mutters under his breath, “nothing stupid.”

“Anyway, last night, I literally saw her in a dream,” Mingyu explains, waving his hand about, “it was not even an explicit dream, I legitimately just dreamt of us going on a picnic. And I woke up, and kept thinking about her. Now, whenever I think about her, my heartbeat rises just slightly, not noticeable enough to be concerned, but just enough to make me stop and think, ‘oh? Do I actually think about her in my spare time?’ and it turns out, I actually am thinking of her in my spare time! I even went down to her clinic today, to make sure what I was feeling or thinking about were not just random feelings, and I saw her through the glass doors, and my heartbeat increased to 119, I’m not even kidding, hyung, look at it—”

“Mingyu!” Jihoon yells, “calm the fuck down, you’re rambling.”

“Am I?” Mingyu clutches at his hair, “I really don’t know whatI’m supposed to do, it’s so embarrassing, I want to die.”

Jihoon sighs. This is new. “Look, Mingyu,” he says, cautiously, as if approaching a spooked fawn, “are you confused or are you scared?”

“What do you mean?”

“These feelings, for her,” Jihoon shrugs, “do they confuse you, or do they scare you?”

He pauses, and then replies, “scares me. I’m terrified.”

“That’s good,” Jihoon replies, going to the small fridge in the shop and offering Mingyu a diet coke, “being scared of your feelings means you’re at least acknowledging the attraction. If you were confused about what you were feeling, I would have told you to drop it.”

“Yes, but like you said, I’ve only had about three civil interactions with her, and now I’m feeling attracted to her? Is this normal?”

“Attraction does not follow the rules of normal social behaviour, Mingyu,” Jihoon replies, feeling very much like the father of an emotional teenager, “it does not follow what we want it to do. And being attracted to someone is not a bad thing. She’s not a minor, nor does she have a boyfriend or girlfriend. You’re allowed to like her.”

Mingyu groans, before shoving his entire face into his hands, “I just feel like I’m going to mess everything up if I even try to like her. I mean, she’s never really going to give me the time of day, so why bother? Just look at it this way, hyung, if I go up to her right now, in that stupidly well-lit mental health clinic of hers, and tell her, ‘hey, I think I am attracted to you’, what do you think she’s going to do?”

Jihoon muses, “Probably take your teeth out with a punch.”

“See!” Mingyu wails, “even you know she’s going to think this is all a giant joke or a prank and that I am exactly what she thought of me in the first place.”

“And what exactly did she think of you in the first place?” Jihoon raises an eyebrow, although he’s perfectly aware of the exact words you had said. Mingyu had agonised over it for a whole hour, before deciding to just embrace the misconception and go with it. Shallow, you had called him, a shallow man with no sense of right and wrong. “And you’re sure if you go ahead and tell her you’re attracted to her, to a certain degree, she’s going to label you as a shallow person?”

Mingyu nods.

“She does not seem like the person to do that,” Jihoon says, “and if she really does do that, then I’ll tell you to just forget about her, because that does not seem like the characteristics of a good person.”

“So, what do I do right now, hyung?” Mingyu asks.

“For starters, go to your office, and leave me the fuck alone,” Jihoon shrugs, “and in the evening, just go over to her office with a cake or something, and ask her to work with you on which regulations the business owners should adopt in the upcoming meeting.”

“Wow, hyung, look at you go. Who would say that you’ve been single since birth?”

—

“I think I’m going to be killed.”

Your friend stares at you, seated across the table in the bookstore, two lunch boxes open in front of you both. She takes a gulp, swallowing down a large piece of kimbap, and manages to warble out a “come again?”

You sigh, “I think I’m going to be killed soon.”

“By who?” she half-yells, taking a swig from her water bottle, “who the hell wants to kill you?”

“Kim Mingyu.” You whisper conspiratorially, and her face falls. “What?” You protest, “he’s really out to get me, you know that, right?”

“You told him that he was a shallow, self-centred man within thirty minutes of meeting him,” she replies, going back to eating, “I’m going to be surprised if he hasn’t made any attempts on your life yet.”

“You don’t get it,” you wail, “yesterday, he came to my office, asking about the committee meeting next week, and even made an appointment to draft a joint resolution that accommodates both the new regulations of the city and complies with the business owners’ demands of more time and extra funds.”

“And?” She's still not getting the point, which is making you slightly frustrated at this point, “he’s trying to make amends, and he’s actually doing something about what the larger community wants and needs, instead of yelling at everyone and annoying them in public meetings.”

“I’m going to ignore that jibe because I’ve got better things to think about,” you mutter, “he also smiled at me when I flipped him off! He smiled!”

“And you flipped him off, like a middle schooler,” she sighs, “was it a creepy smile, or was it a normal one?”

“Pretty normal, but you can’t really know with Kim Mingyu, right?”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say he’s much more normal than you,” she replies, still calm in the face of your anxiety, which in other circumstances would be a good thing, but right now, it is not, “has he done anything else that would give you the impression that he intends on killing you?”

“He’s also asked me to meet him in his office this evening to discuss the joint resolution.” You say, “why the hell would he do that if he did not have nefarious intent?”

“Maybe he just wants to draft a joint resolution,” she counters, “after all, you both argued for so long last time, the committee had to disperse on their own. They even postponed the whole voting process and argument over the resolution because they wanted you to come up with a joint solution to the problem. And he’s the one who’s been making steps towards peace, not you.”

“You’re my friend. You’re supposed to be on my side, not his.”

“I am on the side of whoever makes me not attend those boring meetings,” she yawns, “the last time it ran for over an hour and half, just because you two were fighting so much. This time, please make sure you play nice with him.”

You narrow your eyes, “Are you sure you’re saying that because you want me to be nice to Mingyu, or are you saying that because you want to flirt with the music store owner?”

“At least I have better social skills than you,” she counters, “and I’m not running out my only chances at normal socialising out with a proverbial broom.” The last part of that sentence is said in English, which goes over your head.

“What the hell do you mean by that? Stop using complicated English words because you’re a bookstore owner.”

She sighs, ignoring the second sentence, “the music shop owner is Lee Jihoon, and him and Kim Mingyu, yes I know you hate him, are the only people in this shopping centre who are of our age. The rest of them are all thirty years older than us. People don’t come here to have fun and open up swanky offices, they come here to retire in peace and get a sense of community.”

“I do not get the point you are trying to make.”

“The point is, if you at least tried to be friends with those two, we would have someone of our age to at least talk to. We could go on dinners, trips, ask them to set us up with their friends—”

“Hold on,” you raise a hand to stop her, who’s rattling off things to do with friends, “why do you even want to hang out with those two after work? We already see them here seven days a week, is that not enough for you?”

“No, it’s not,” she makes a face, “I cannot be fraternising solely with senior citizens, you know. I’m not old. But talking to these women, every day and every week, has made me feel like I’m some sort of ahjumma, too. Last week, I corrected a child’s posture.”

“You probably spared them some very expensive spinal surgery down the line.”

“Does not matter!” she snaps, “I don’t want to be correcting a child’s posture, I want to actually go out and have fun, after I close up my shop, instead of just sitting around my house and doing nothing!”

“You actually spend a lot of time doing inventory.”

“And you are going to go and talk to Mingyu,” she practically chases you out of the door, “and don’t even think about coming back here without fixing this mess!”

—

“There, all done,” Mingyu holds up a document, waving it around like he’s won a war, “this is the joint resolution we are proposing, right? Don’t go back on it, please.”

“Now why would I do that?” You ask.

‘I don’t know, general issues. Maybe you’ll hate the way I dress in the meeting.”

“Do you plan on wearing something wildly inappropriate?” You ask, eyes narrowed, “then I will reconsider.”

“No!” Mingyu yelps, taking a step back, “I do not plan on wearing anything inappropriate for the meeting. In fact, I shall be the most appropriate man in the room that day.”

“That’s good. Bare minimum, but good,” you snipe, wondering how and why your friend wants you to be nice to him, given his penchant for saying the wrong things at the wrong times, “let’s get a meal next time, yeah?”

It’s a polite question, of course, one that does not require a proper answer, of course, no one expects an answer for this question, but Mingyu perks up instantly, wide grin in place, “do you want to get dinner with me right now?”

“Right now?” You check your wristwatch, it’s ten p.m already. If you were to stick to your usual schedule, you would have been at home by now, sitting in front of the television to catch up on your daily hour of peace and entertainment. But the man in front of you seems unable to take no for an answer, nor does he look like he’s someone who has been told no very often. Did no one ever reject him, you wonder, and contemplate idly how it would feel to be the first person to ever say ‘no, thank you’ to his face.

But he’s looking at you with an open and honest expression, so you sigh, picking up your bag, “let me close up.” another day. I’ll tell him to fuck off another day.

—

Mingyu is going insane, really. He should have left her alone, their work was done, so why bother to even hang around for another couple hours? But Jihoon’s words from earlier have kept bugging him for longer than he would care to admit. He’s even messed up a semi-important meeting and has been forced to reschedule it. Hell, he’s been so fucked up over this one little thing, he even went back to drafting plans by hand, using the same vintage drafting table he’s used exclusively as decoration. Even that failed, and he spent the rest of the evening wallowing in his misery.

Why the hell was he looking forward to spending time with her?

Even now, he’s aware that she doesn’t really want to get a meal with him, and he really feels bad, he does, but he’s also slightly selfish, and he wants to make sense of his own feelings, preferable in a setting separate from their usual one. Proximity breeds affection. Maybe all this is because I’ve been spending too much time in that shopping centre.

“What’s your favorite architectural style?” She asks, picking up a piece of mushroom from their soup.

“Huh?”

She rolls her eyes, “I asked you what your favorite architectural style was. I assume you have one, since you are an architect.”

He ignores the jab, “Organic architecture, actually. All throughout university, I was obsessed with the works of Frank Lloyd Wright.”

“The architect of Jiyu Gakuen, right?” She asks, shrugging, “I had an architect as a patient. Back in Seoul City Hospital.”

He files that information for later, “yes, the architect of Jiyu Gakuen. I was so obsessed I even took a trip to see the Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania. And yes, I made several trips to see all his Japanese works.”

“What draws you to him?”

“It’s interesting, how he uses nature, not as a foil, but as a companion to human existence,” Mingyu replies, smiling slightly, “I think I fell in love when I saw pictures of the Pope-Leighey house, when I was in my first year. Honestly speaking, I don’t think I would have been an architect if it was not for—” he pauses, “are you trying to therapize me?”

She laughs, “is it that obvious?”

“You are not as slick as you think,” he laughs, “you said you moved here from Seoul.”

She sighs, “I was hoping you would not hold on to that.”

Mingyu shrugs, “if you don’t want me to, then I won’t, but if you don't mind me asking—”

“I mind, actually.”

“—why did you move to a new clinic? From Seoul City Hospital, too.”

She sighs, “look, there were personal reasons, that’s all I will say. Other than that, I just realised one day that the big hospital did not allow me to look after my patients as well as I could. So, I moved here.”

“And opened the clinic?”

“And opened a clinic.” She smiles suddenly, broad and open, and Mingyu’s smartwatch beeps; abnormal heart rate detected: 109 BPM.

Damn, he’s fucked.

—

She’s actually having fun. Mingyu might be out to kill her, but he’s a terrific dinner partner, to the point where she does not miss the warmth of her familiar house and her familiar sofa and the familiar tv dramas. This is concerning.

—

“Traitor,” your friend scowls, over lunch the next afternoon, “did you get dinner with Kim Mingyu?”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Mingyu posted it on his instagram story,” your friend holds up her phone, where Mingyu had posted a picture of her, seated across from him in the restaurant, eating dinner. It could very well have been mistaken for a soft launch picture, if no one was aware of the facts. It should be embarrassing.

“Huh,” you mutter, going back to organising your notes for all your patients, “I did not think he’d post a picture of me.”

Your friend narrows her eyes, observes her for a full minute, “you like him, don’t you?”

“I—what the hell are you talking about?”

“Don’t even give me that act,” she scowls, and for a split second, you hesitate, thinking back on the whole evening, and whether or not it would have been embarrassing if anyone had caught you out with Mingyu, of all people, and, “answer the question.”

“It wasn’t embarrassing,” you murmur, half in disbelief.

“What?” Your friend asks, but she’s heard it too, only asking you to repeat yourself.

“I said it was not embarrassing!” You yell, and immediately clap your hand over your mouth. What the hell was that about?

“Knew it. Lee Jihoon owes me ten thousand won.” Your friend grins, self-satisfied, before settling back into her chair.

“Were you actually betting on this?” You shake your head, “you’re such a traitor.”

“A traitor who will buy you coffee after work,” she grins, “happy now?”

“Ugh, I would be happier if I was not attracted to him,” you sigh, finishing your lunch, “and he was really respectful about the whole thing too, which makes it even more annoying. How can I hate him in peace when I know that he likes Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and wants to repurpose old concrete buildings into designated ‘breathing spaces’ filled with greenery? Like, that is objectively a beautiful idea.”

“Selfless, too.”

“And selfless!” You wail, “I cannot even hate him in peace. All I can do is be annoyed with myself.”

“You like those concrete buildings, don’t you?” Your friend asks after a beat, “they’re symmetrical.”

“And orderly! I like order in my life, which is why I like those buildings.”

“And he wants to turn them into ‘breathing spaces’.”

“Who the hell has heard of something so annoying?”

“It’s not a bad thing at all, you know,” she says, putting a mini sausage on your rice, as though she were comforting a small child, “not everything goes according to plan at all times. Order is well and good, but some sunshine is also good for your health.”

“I’d rather die.” You scow, “just wait, I will never even talk to Kim Mingyu ever again. Even if he shows his stupidly handsome face back in here, I am never talking to him! Never, on my life, never again—”

The door swings open, and a brightly-smiling Kim Mingyu pokes his head in, “what are you doing for dinner?”

“Nothing,” your friend says on your behalf, “she’s free after eight.”

“Great, I’ll see you for dinner, then!” He waves again, and it’s annoying, how you automatically blush, “it’s a date!”

The door closes, and your friend laughs, “should I look up architectural style names now?”

You sigh. I’m really screwed.

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