Work Text:
Bucky feels it in his shoulder before he ever sees the flurry of white outside the window.
Winter announces itself in aching bones and itching scars and sore muscles. The smell of something sweet from the kitchen is a more recent, more pleasant addition to the seasonal welcome-wagon.
He’s rubbing where flesh meets metal, fingers working at the bundle of tight tendons beneath pink-scarred skin, when she comes padding into the room, footsteps quieted by a pair of thick, wool-knit socks.
“Hot chocolate,” she answers the silent question he poses with the raising of his eyebrow, tired eyes peering down into the teacup she presents to him.
“Thanks.”
She laughs when he pulls the mug away from his lips, leaning in to wipe a stripe of chocolate from the corner of his mouth. “Good?”
“Yeah, great,” he nods, another swallow of the warm liquid coating his sleep-thickened throat. "Couldn’t sleep?”
“Woke up freezing because someone stole all the covers,” she teases accusingly. “Needed something to warm me up.”
Bucky unwraps his metal fingers from around the mug, testing them momentarily along the exposed skin of his right wrist, before reaching out and cupping her face in his gunmetal hand. She sighs at the contact, the warmth of the mug transferred from his vibranium appendage to her flesh, pressing her cheek further into his palm.
“I could warm ya up.”
She shows him her teeth, face splitting open with the type of smile that always leaves him a bit breathless, coming up for air in his siren’s waters. “Are you gonna share the covers this time?”
“Gonna be bringing that up all damn day, aren’t you?”
He sets the mug, now empty, aside. The box spring groans at the shifting of his weight, all six feet of him sliding across the mattress to make a space for her to slide into the impression of where his body had just laid. Tilting her head back, she swallows down the rest of the drink, a hint of chocolate at her lip, before climbing in beside him.
When he leans over her, thumb swiping at the remnants of that dark sweetness at her cupid’s bow before meeting her with a kiss, she breathes against his lips, “Keep being sweet to me and maybe I’ll forget it.”
That sends Bucky laughing, really laughing. His chest vibrates with the quiet noise of it, shoulders shaking above her. She’s a comedian, he thinks, because the idea that he could ever be anything but sweet to her is so damn funny it makes his stomach feel like it might split open with the way his abs are squeezing at it in laughter.
How could he be anything but sweet to her when she had those lips like candy, that tongue that melts in his mouth like chocolate all the damn time?
When she took his bad dreams and wrapped them around her fingers like cotton candy in the middle of the night, swallowing the worst of him down as easily as sugar dissolves in the mouth; when his shoulder screamed with the chill of winter, she’d stretch and pull salt-water taffy from his muscles until he was humming; when the first sight of snow sent him reeling with gumball-rounded eyes, she blew pastel pink bubbles with the horrors.
“What’s so funny?”
“You,” he admits, still chuckling above her, fingers delicately wrapped around her jaw.
“Me? How am I being funny?”
He shakes his head, unable to find the words to explain. Instead, he wraps her up in his arms, gathering her up between piles of blankets and sheets, flesh and metal arms, and settles her against his chest.
“I love you,” he says for maybe the hundredth-time this week.
His arm, the one adorned with gold plating, snakes around her middle, a conductor absorbing her body heat.
How could he ever be anything but sweet when her kisses paint his lips candied apple red? How could he ever be anything but warm when his arm is wrapped around the ever-giving, sugar-melting heat of her waist?