The room was quiet—save for the faint hum of the air conditioner and the soft shuffle of Bucky’s boots against the floor.

He wasn’t snooping. Not really. He’d just wanted to find the damn remote. It had to be somewhere—under the bed, between the couch cushions, maybe even behind the stack of books she’d left on the nightstand.

But when his metal fingers brushed against something leather-bound wedged between the mattress and the bedframe, curiosity won before guilt could even show its face.

Her journal.

For a long moment, he just stared at it, thumb running along the worn spine. He’d seen her write in it before—late nights after missions, when the others had gone to bed. Sometimes she’d sit by the window, the faint city light catching in her hair, pen moving quickly, silently.

He told himself he shouldn’t. He knew he shouldn’t.

But then again, she’d trusted him with her life more times than he could count. Maybe… maybe this was his way of understanding her a little better.

When he opened it, the scent of ink and paper filled the air. The first pages were shaky, full of jagged handwriting from their early days on the run—confusion, fear, exhaustion. Mentions of him, always careful, always kind. He saw doodles of birds, of small wildflowers, of his metal arm—tiny lines and delicate shading that made him smile without meaning to.

And then he found it.

A page near the middle, written in smoother ink, deliberate and steady

“If all the days before you were a journey, you are the place I was unknowingly walking towards. Keep choosing me as days become years, because I would wait through 100 seasons to find you standing at the end of them.”

Bucky stared at the words for a long time. His chest ached in a way that was both familiar and foreign, the kind of ache that didn’t come from old wounds or half-remembered memories—but from being seen.

She hadn’t meant for him to read it. That much was obvious. But now that he had, he couldn’t unhear the quiet truth of it, the way her words seemed to echo something inside him he hadn’t had the courage to say aloud.

He closed the journal carefully, almost reverently, and set it back exactly where he’d found it.

The remote lay forgotten on the nightstand.

All he could think about was the way her handwriting curved around his name.