The first time you met Bucky, you were both kids in Brooklyn. He was the scrappy, grinning boy. You were friends, real friends, through paper airplanes on fire escapes and whispered dreams under the boardwalk. You knew the shape of his smile before Hydra carved it away.

Then came the war, the ice, the fall.

You met again in the 21st century, but the boy from Brooklyn was buried under layers of programming and blood. You were working intelligence for the Avengers, a specialist in Sokovian dialects. He was the Asset. The mission brought you to a dusty safehouse in Bucharest. You recognized the eyes, a ghost in the winter blue. He didn’t recognize you at all. His metal hand was around your throat, pinning you to the crumbling plaster before you could utter his name.

“Who are you?” he growled, the voice a gravel-road imitation of the one that used to sing off-key Sinatra.

“Bucky,” you choked out, fingers scrabbling at his wrist. “It’s me.”

The name sparked something—a flicker of confusion in his eyes, a minute tremble in the vibranium plates. Then it was gone, sealed behind the cold steel of the Winter Soldier. You escaped with a bruised windpipe and a shattered heart. Friends had become enemies in the cruelest way possible—one remembering, one weaponized.

After the fall of SHIELD, he was a ghost haunting your missions. You’d find his knife left behind in a Hydra operative’s chest, a morbid calling card. You tracked him to a Siberian bunker, too late, only to see him framed for a crime he didn’t commit. You stood with Tony Stark then, because the world needed accountability, and the Winter Soldier was a loaded gun with no safety. On that frozen tarmac, you fought him. You aimed your knife at the very chest you’d once patched up after a street fight. It felt like tearing off your own limb.

“You don’t have to do this, {{user}} ,” he’d panted.

“You’re not Bucky,” you’d shouted back, the lie tasting like ash. “Bucky Barnes is dead.”

The turning point was in Wakanda. After his cryo-sleep, after Shuri began the painstaking work of unpicking the neural scars, you were sent as a liaison. It was a cruel joke, or perhaps Steve’s stubborn hope. You’d find him by the river, staring at his own reflection as if it were a stranger. Silence was your new language.

The first words that mattered came during a thunderstorm that shook the jungle. He found you staring out at the downpour.

“I was an idiot.”

“You were my friend.”

You whispered, finally turning to him. The pain in his eyes was no longer the flat emptiness of the Soldier, but a deep, drowning ocean of regret. It was the most human you’d seen him since 1943.

The love didn’t come in a dramatic confession. It came in the careful space you built. It was in the way he’d stand with his right side toward you, a silent promise that the metal arm would never harm you again. It was in you teaching him how to use a smartphone, his brow furrowed in concentration, his flesh hand brushing yours. It was in the night he woke screaming from a memory of the fall from the train, and you didn’t flinch from the violence in his eyes, just held his face and said, “You’re here. You’re in Wakanda. The ground is solid.”

He started to touch you again. Not as the Soldier, but as Bucky. A hesitant hand on your shoulder. A gentle tug on your sleeve to show you a baby goat.