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Take care of Buck.
She hadn’t been doing that. They had an arrangement. Not spoken out loud. Not carved into stone but understood. Comfort and silence and skin. That was the rhythm they fell into.
She’d leave without a goodbye, and he never held it against her.
It wasn’t the guilt. It wasn’t even the ache of knowing she was loved. It was the realization that she had built her survival on Bucky’s silence. That every time he said nothing, every time he let her leave, it wasn’t detachment. It was devotion. Quiet, undemanding. Real.
Now she couldn’t pretend it wasn’t love. Or that it didn’t matter.
Steve had loved her. Bucky loves her. And he hasn’t once asked her to return it.
She told herself she wouldn’t go to him. Not yet. Not with Steve’s voice still echoing in her head.
Bucky showed up at the door the next morning, arms full of supplies. Paint rollers, tape, a tarp folded over one shoulder, and a bucket of teal green she’d picked out weeks ago.
He smiled. As if it were the most normal thing in the world. As if last night hadn’t happened. “You ready?”
She almost laughed. As if either of them had ever been ready for anything.
His eyes searched her face, lingering on the edges of exhaustion she couldn’t hide. She thought he knew. That somehow he could see the ink of Steve’s words pressed into her skin.
She almost turned him away. Instead, she stepped aside. Let him in.
Bucky hadn’t let himself hope for it, not after last night. Not after everything that had sat unspoken for so long, but walking through the door, toward the stairs, hope grew with each step.
They didn’t talk while they set up. He laid down the tarp. She moved the chair to the other room, and Bucky saw the letter was missing from the dresser.
Fear gnawed at him. That she’d read Steve’s letter, seen his name on the page, the way he had seen hers, and now every look, every touch would feel like some kind of permission slip. He was a consolation prize her ex-love had signed off on.
He couldn’t stomach that. He wanted her to choose him. Not because Steve told her she could. Not because grief made them reckless. Because she wanted him.
He helped her move the dresser. Their shoulders brushed when they pushed the bed frame against the wall. His palm pressed to the small of her back as he stepped past with the roller tray. A reminder he was there. It burned them both.
The radio was on low, and somehow it still felt like a loaded silence.
Three strokes of his roller, and the silence was broken, “I read it.”
His hands stilled, and his shoulders tensed for a half second before he smoothed over the paint. He didn’t ask. Couldn’t find the words.
The song changed. The deejay spoke. Another song began. Finished then, he asked, “What did it say?” but wouldn’t look at her.
Her throat went dry. She dipped her brush into the tray. Couldn’t paint the fine lines around the light switch. Her hands shook. “Everything I needed it to.”
He huffed a laugh. Rough, but not bitter. “Using my words against me now?”
“Seemed fair,” she smirked.
The drag of brushes across the wall accompanied the radio. Paint fumes tangled with memories.
She should have felt lighter. The trip wire was gone. But the detonation had left a mess.
“We fought before he left,” she said. Maybe Bucky already knew. Steve may have confided in his best friend.
That made him pause again. Long enough for her to notice the way his jaw worked, tightened, chewing back words he didn’t want to say.
Her eyes remained on the paint. “Neither of us said it was over. We just…didn’t say anything at all. I thought maybe we’d work it out.” She let out a sharp breath, half a laugh, half a sob. “He’d already made the choice. I think I knew.”
Bucky waited. He was always waiting.
“It was after that game night that Sam forced us all to go to. Steve had been distant all night.”
Bucky nodded. “We teamed up. Left Steve to brood.”
“Now it’s clear, he wasn’t brooding. He was plotting his escape.”
“It wasn’t about escaping you.” A defense of his friend and an assurance for her.
Either way, she ignored it and continued. “Later, I was teasing him. Poking the bear, I guess. I told him I’d picked the wrong Super Soldier that you’d have fought harder for me. At first, he seemed to agree, as if he were happy we were finally on the same page. Then his face just…broke. I laughed it off, said I didn’t mean it. But I did. I wanted to hurt him. Or wake him up. Something. Because he was already halfway gone and I couldn’t pull him back.”
“No one could.”
“We didn’t shout. We were quiet for a while, but it was so loud.” More green was added to the wall. The radio continued. “I couldn’t stop thinking that I had been right. You’ve fought harder for me. It was you who found me on the balcony at 2 a.m. It was you who saw the anxiety, the fear of following orders that seemed like crossing lines, that felt too much like Hydra orders. You talked me down, made me see I was on the right side this time.”
“You knew it.” He shrugged. “You just needed a reminder sometimes.”
“Still, it was always you, Bucky. Not Steve.”
She wasn’t wrong, but not quite right either. Steve did a lot. Except when he knew Bucky understood her battle better than he did.
He didn’t fault Steve for not knowing. There were things you couldn’t learn from battlefields or strategy talks. There were wounds you only recognized when you wore the same ones.
Maybe that’s what it had always been. Not proximity. Not timing. But understanding. She carried her scars like armor. Most mistook them for sharp edges. Steve had loved the hero in her. Bucky had seen the hurt. When she clawed at her scars, lost in grief and guilt, it was Bucky who sat with her in the dark until she remembered how to keep going.
“Bucky.” It was so soft. So quiet. The radio drowned it out. If he weren’t who he was, he wouldn’t have heard it. He paused his task. Slowly lowered the roller to the tray and met her gaze.
She turned to face him, stood frozen, brush still in hand. The question was there. In her eyes, pleading, sad, and needing.
A heaved breath raised and dropped her shoulders. “What did your letter say?”
“He thanked me for keeping promises. He told me not to let guilt consume me. That he was lucky and selfish to love you first.” Her breath hitched. Tears spilled onto her cheeks. He should have stopped. She wasn’t ready. He wasn’t ready. Simultaneously had always been ready. “He said I should let you choose me. He said I was always going to love you.”
Her chest rose in quick, uneven breaths. Her lips parted, like she was about to say something. Words failed. Her throat worked around a knot too thick to swallow.
‘Love you first.’
It echoed louder than Steve’s letters. Louder than anything either of them had said in months. Louder than the silence that had followed every kiss, every night she slipped out the door.
Bucky stepped toward her, slow, careful. The kind of caution that came from knowing how easily broken things are when they’ve been held too tightly for too long.
She dropped her head to look at the floor. A sob wheezing out of her.
He stopped just shy of touching her. “You don’t have to choose me.”
She looked up at him then. Tears on her cheeks. Swiped at her nose. “He said every part of me is worth loving. That I should take care of you. We both make each other lighter. He said I should let you take care of me.”
“You can-”
She lifted her hand up to interrupt him, “Let me get this out,” and accidentally painted a stripe of green up the stomach of his black shirt. It went ignored for now. “He told me not to let him be the last person I love.” She took a shaky breath. Paint on her fingers, grief in her eyes. “He’s not.”
Bucky’s breath hitched. Held it.
“I want that to be you.”
He didn’t answer. Not with words. Stared at her like she’d given him permission to exhale.
She let the brush drop to the tarp covering the floor. It bounced off something, but neither of them looked. His hands found her cheeks, gentle and uncertain, as if she might still pull away. She didn’t. Her fingers wrapped around his wrists, and she closed her eyes, sinking into his touch.
He kissed her. Soft. Slow. Nothing like the first time. No desperation. No sharp edges. The kind of kiss that’s never forgotten. She kissed him back, as if she wished this had been their first kiss.
Finally, they parted, and Bucky smiled. Though watery, she matched it with one of her own.
He brushed his thumb across her cheek, making teal smudges of her tears.
There was still pain in her eyes and grief in the room, but something new too. For the first time, the silence between them wasn’t mutual destruction.
It was hope.
They were no longer standing in the tattered remains of someone else’s love. They were stepping into something of their own. Steve was right, they made each other lighter.
It was time to bury the ghost that haunted the shadows. The one that was never coming back.
Time to start anew with a love that would shine brighter for having survived the darkness.