We’ll Meet Again—Vera Lynn

The night before Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes shipped out to England was not a bleak one. In fact, it was beautiful—achingly so. The kind of night that you wanted to bottle up and carry with you, to uncork whenever the world grew too sharp.

After attending the Stark Expo with his best friend Steve and his best girl, Bucky seemed content in a way you hadn’t seen in weeks. He’d laughed at Howard Stark’s flashy inventions, teased Steve about nearly tripping over a curb, and slipped his arm around your waist as if daring the world to take even a second of joy from him.

When you returned home, Steve retreated to his bedroom almost immediately, his slight frame weighted with fatigue. You and Bucky exchanged a knowing glance, trying to hold back your laughter as his footsteps faded. The apartment seemed to exhale around you, the quiet of the night settling over everything.

Together, you tiptoed upstairs, hands brushing, until the door to your shared bedroom clicked shut behind you. The hush turned to giggles and then to whispers, the kind that held promise, as if you had a hundred nights like this ahead of you.

You put on a record—something bold and brassy—and he pulled you into a swing across the wooden floor, boots thudding, your laughter echoing. Then the music slowed, and so did you. Big band gave way to something softer, strings lilting into the air as Bucky swayed you against his chest.

You tucked your head against the khaki cotton of his uniform, listening to the steady thrum of his heartbeat beneath. That sound—the most ordinary and the most precious thing you’d ever known—was stronger than any music. He smelled faintly of cologne and starch, of cigarette smoke that clung stubbornly no matter how many times you scolded him.

The night unfolded in fragments of tenderness: his fingertips tracing idle circles over your spine, his voice murmuring reassurances against your hairline, the low, breathless laughter that came when you kissed him just to silence his teasing. You made love slowly, as though each kiss, each touch, could stretch the hours until dawn into eternity.

And then the light came. The first rays of sunlight broke through the fire escape window, spilling across the sheets, painting him in gold. You watched as it caught on the sharp line of his jaw, the curve of his smile, the soft blue of his eyes that lingered on you as if memorizing every detail.

“Go back to sleep, doll,” he whispered finally, brushing your temple with his lips, his voice carrying both steadiness and something hidden beneath—something like fear. He kissed your forehead one last time, careful and reverent, before pulling away.

The soldat does not dream. When he does, it’s in black and white. Of a girl. A woman. A beautiful woman, at that. Spoken for, the soldat knows. He wonders by who. With red lips the color of cherries in spring, and freckles like raindrops, the soldat wonders what metal would do to such porcelain skin. If the hands only ever used for killing could hold the woman’s face tenderly, without hurting her.

It’s a shame the soldat will never know.

“Daybreak,” the handler urges.

Urging the soldat to comply.

The soldat does.

He always does.

Sunlight floods the cryostasis room, daybreak’s first rays enlightening the bleak chamber.

Daybreak.

Steve and Sam leave you two alone for a moment. You approach Bucky carefully, eyeing his hands. The hands that once traced mine on your spine in night’s quietest moments are calloused, now. Scratched. Bruised.

You wonder if his hands are still capable of gentleness. If he is still capable of gentleness. Bucky looks up. His vibranium arm is pinned under a stupid amount of scrap metal, preventing him from going anywhere or… the alternative.

Lips the color of cherries in spring.

Freckles like raindrops.

It’s her. The woman from his dreams.

“Hey, doll,” he mutters weakly, managing a smile that clearly hurts and doesn’t reach his eyes.

But to you, it shines like the sun.