dysmorphics | open post

1943? Nineteen-forty-three?! Bucky shook his head as he turned to look back at Sam and hand him the note, then looked over at Bruce. "You didn't do this," he told him, wrapping his brain around what he was pretty sure was going on.

Taking a deep breath, his brow softened a bit as he looked back at Steph. How the hell was he supposed to explain this to her? He'd had a hard enough time adjusting to the world once he escaped HYDRA's clutches, and that was with the little snippets of progress he'd seen whenever they took him out of cryo. Steph, on the other hand, had just shot forward a solid eighty years in time.

Meanwhile, in the back of Bucky's mind he was thinking back eighty years, running through the list of medical problems she used to have and wondering what the hell doctors did about them now. Bruce might know. Or that other doctor. Weird? Whatever. Didn't matter. He learned how to help her back then; he could learn how to do it again.

"No, it's- Was there a woman? Looked like you, but taller? Muscles? Did you see her before she gave you the note?"

Steph frowned. She wasn't sure about the looking like her part, but— "There was a woman, she mugged me in the alley." She stared forlornly at her lap, where she'd rested her clenched fists. She didn't mind losing her clothes and bag. Even the sketchpad she could live without. But Bucky's letters were very important to her, and she'd lost them all. "She said... she said I had to disappear." Hell if she knew what that meant.

Sam, who had been reading the note, looked at Bucky then. He wasn't privy to whatever Steph (their Steph) and Bucky had discussed, but he knew of the tremendous guilt she carried about Bucky specifically. Meanwhile, Bruce was echoing Bucky's string of 'no's. "I can't believe she pulled this on us. She knows she's not supposed to use the Time Stone for anything else."

Yet there was a younger Steph, from 1943, right in front of them, coughing and confused as shit.

"Buck?" she asked again, this time in a small, trembling voice. She could tell something was wrong, but she had no inkling what it could be. "You'll tell me what's going on, right?" It was practically pleading.

Shit, it had been so long since he'd heard Steph's voice sound like that--small and scared and unsure--and it was like it shot right through him. Sam and Bruce were no longer important. They might as well not have even been there with the way he no longer paid a single iota of attention to them.

Instead, he was laser-focused on the small, beautiful girl in front of him. The one that hadn't been in and out of literal warzones for years, fighting battle after battle for the sake of everyone around her instead of herself. The one he hadn't seen since the night before he shipped out in 1943.

Frowning, Bucky shifted so he was sitting with her small frame between his legs so he could wrap his arms around her, pulling her into a hug against his chest. Closing his eyes as he tilted his head down to press a kiss to the top of her head. "Of course. I'll tell you everything, alright? I never liked keeping things from you. But you're... probably gonna have a hard time believing any of it."

Bucky sighed as his mind raced, trying to figure out where the fuck he was supposed to start. There had been so much, and nothing was simple. "She- It's-" He let out a groan as the other two men looked back and forth between each other and the pair sitting on that platform. They both knew Bucky and Steph were close--especially Sam--but neither of them had ever seen them like this. With Steph scared and Bucky as her caring protector.

"It's not... It's not 1943 anymore, Steph. It's 2023. Shit, so much has happened. The woman- She was you, but from now. I guess she made you disappear by swapping places with you." He knew it would sound like nonsense to someone who hadn't lived through it all, like the science fiction and fantasy books he still loved so much were getting to him, but it was the truth. If nothing else, he knew he looked different from when she last saw him. Older. More beaten down and worse. Maybe that would help convince her?

To Steph's credit, she never once interrupted, though her face and eyes revealed how shocked she was on multiple fronts. It was 2023? The woman was her, from the future, and they swapped places? It was hard to believe, alright. Like Bucky was making shit up based on stuff he'd read from those scifi dime novels he loved so much. But he wouldn't lie to her, would he?

She opened and closed her mouth a few times, unable to immediately articulate what she wanted to say. When she finally found the words, she honed in on what she felt was the most important part. "I don't understand. Why would she... why would I leave you? I love you, I would never—"

She cut herself off with a gasp, realizing what she'd just said. For a moment she stared at him with wide eyes, then she quickly averted her gaze, focusing on a spot on his jacket while a flush of color appeared on her cheeks and threatened to spread all the way to her neck. Save you from your fate, the note had read, but whatever did that mean?

Bucky had been about to start telling her the very basics of where the other version of her had gone when he heard her say those three words. Then, it was like everything in and around him stopped. All he could see or hear in that moment was her. Not animals in and around the trees, not Sam and Bruce moving away and giving them some space, just tiny Stephanie Grace Rogers, wrapped in his arms.

At first, he assumed she meant in a best friend way, or worse, a brotherly way, but the way she stopped looking at him and her face flushed so red? Maybe that wasn't it. He didn't want to hope, not with how much he'd changed compared to how this version of her had seen him last. Sure, he was a lot better than he had been a few years earlier, but he still wasn't the same man he used to be. She didn't know him now--she might not even like him once she saw what he was in 2023. Or found out who he had been for decades.

But Bucky knew her. He hadn't forgotten what she was like before the serum, or how he felt about her then. Especially since it was no different from how he felt about Steph now, so he couldn't help hoping anyway.

Closing his eyes, Bucky tilted his head forward to let his forehead rest against the side of Steph's head, the smell of her shampoo taking him back decades. His right arm tightened around her slightly, but he wouldn't let his left do the same thing. For him it had hardly been any time since he'd gotten his Wakandan arm, and he didn't want to risk accidentally hurting her with it.

"Steph, I'm not- I'm not like I used to be. I wish I were," he sighed softly then. "The war ended up changing me more than most. Maybe more than anyone. I mean that literally, and I'm just now really starting to recover."

War was a dreadful thing. Steph knew that, even without having been to the front lines. She knew that from her Ma's stories, from meeting her Da's surviving friends from the Army, from the times she'd volunteered at the hospital. Even the physically healthy ones were somehow broken on the inside and never truly came home. Was that why Bucky looked so... different? Was that what she, in the future, was trying to change? She supposed she could get on board with that. And yet—

"To the end of the line." She sounded angry now. She was angry. "Didn't she promise you that?" Even if it was for a good cause, it felt like abandonment. She couldn't even be arsed to say goodbye properly, instead just leaving some crumpled up note? What the hell.

"Yeah. You did. She did," Bucky didn't sound angry, just hurt. She'd told him that a few times, actually, not just the once. And Bucky had believed her. If he'd known this was her plan he would have found a way to put a stop to the mission. What's done was done, she didn't need to go back and try to change his past.

But it was too late for that. She had taken the time stone with her and he'd heard there wasn't enough of whatever stupid time travel particles it was the machine needed to do multiple trips or something.

An idea hit him, though, and Bucky pulled back enough to look at this small Steph again. "Dumbass probably figured she could help both of us in one go. Change things so there's a version of me that never got captured, and a version of you that didn't make her idiot choices--so many idiot choices--in a time with a hell of a lot better medicine. Sound like something you might think up?"

Even if that was the case it still hurt.

Edited (Rewording) 2025-11-26 13:22 (UTC)

Steph wasn't sure she understood what the 'plan' was. Bucky had once told her about H.G. Wells' book about time travel, but she was really more into romance than science fiction. So she couldn't say whether or not she'd think of something like that, but she did know two things.

"Was it her fault? That you got captured?" While she couldn't see how that would be her fault when she wasn't even eligible for the Army Nurse Corps, she was certain she would beat herself up over it if it was something she had a hand in. Maybe she got kidnapped? Maybe he was on leave and enemy spies grabbed him while he was visiting her?

Secondly: "I would do anything for you. I was... I was gonna lie and bribe my way into the ANC. I was heading there when she found me," she confessed. She wrung her hands then, refusing to look at him. "I couldn't just sit back home and garden and wait for Becca to tell me you'd died. I would trade places with you if I could. I would die for you, if it would save you."

She sniffed, turning her head away as she swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. It was easier, somehow, to be honest with this Bucky. Maybe because he already knew. He had to know, right? That she loved him? Even before that little slip up earlier.

"Of course it wasn't her fault," Bucky said simply and without hesitation. "The first time I got captured was before you- she-" that was going to take some getting used to, dammit. "-even got to where I was in Italy. I heard the Colonel was in the middle of writing letters to all the 107th families when she got the news and confronted him. Then she took off on her own and saved us all. Second time, I fell off a train during a fight. Landed in a crevasse and was presumed dead when they couldn't find my body. I wasn't, but they had no way of knowing that."

Bucky paused for a moment then, watching her carefully. He'd always hated seeing her upset. "They were gonna let you into the ANC. Sort of. Between that big heart of yours and that even bigger stubborn streak, you... she... They offered a special program. She, uh... The idiot agreed to test out this serum that was supposed to make her stronger. And it did. Got rid of all her ailments and everything. Next time I saw her she was dragging me off my own experiment table. But I didn't get a choice in mine."

She couldn't believe what she was hearing. Not the part about agreeing to an experimental program; she knew right then and there that she would say yes if she was given the opportunity. She was going to die sooner rather than later anyway, might as well make it count. No, it was about actually making it to the front lines, not as a nurse, but apparently as a soldier. That was something she'd never even considered for herself. Women weren't allowed in the military in the first place.

But it was something else that made her look back up at him. "She thought you were dead," she repeated quietly. That would've broken her. Him leaving for the war very nearly did. She nodded then. "I... I think I get her now."

She stared down at her hands, her anger dissipating and being replaced by some other mix of emotions. If that Steph switched places with her, then the Bucky she knew would be safe. He wouldn't be captured, he wouldn't fall off the train. She would see to that. But that was... in the past. Here and now was another story. And all this time travel shit was making her feel light-headed.

"But I... I don't have the serum thing. I'm... I'm just me. There's nothing I can do for you. I'm just gonna be a burden."

"Yeah," Bucky frowned. "She did. It's only been... ten years? Yeah, ten since I got out of there for good. But to be fair, the world thought she was dead from '45 until 2012. These serums changed us, and we both got frozen for a long time. Really different ways and circumstances though." Bucky didn't plan on hiding anything about his past from her, even if he didn't know how she would react to it. But if she was here now he didn't want to keep it a secret. Steph deserved to know.

But then she was calling herself a burden, and saying she was just her like it was a bad thing. "Hey," he started, brow furrowing yet again as he looked at her. "Don't be stupid. When the hell have I ever thought you were some kinda burden? Or even acted like you were one?" Shaking his head, he sighed. "If anything I'm a burden these days. Have been for years, in one way or another. The people that had me, they really mucked up my head."

She ducked her head. "But I'm always sick. And I don't have anyone else here." A thought struck her suddenly, and while she dreaded the answer, she had to know. "You got a family, right?" As in a wife, maybe even kids. He wouldn't have been married to her if she managed to bring herself to leave him, after all.

Honestly there was just so much information that she was having trouble keeping up. He was believed dead? And her too? Then the serum thing allowed them to live this long?

She glanced around them again. There wasn't anything particularly futuristic other than the contraption they were sitting on. "Is it really 2023?" she asked him. "Do you have a flying car?"

"Honestly, I think her being able to jump out of planes without parachutes made her stress me out more than when you would get sick." Steph had always been a bit on the reckless side, but at least she used to know she had limitations. Sure, she always came out more or less fine, but seeing her do things like fist fighting some kind of giant grape tended to stress him out.

At the mention of family though, Bucky let out a single sad laugh. "Nah, no family." Just Steph. She was the closest thing to family he had. "Becca died the year before I got free. It's just me." Hell, he hardly even had anyone he'd consider a friend. Steph, of course. Shuri, maybe, but that felt odd because she was so young. He was on okay terms with T'challa by that point, and some of the other people in Wakanda, but he wouldn't exactly call them friends.

"No flying cars, either. Howard didn't come through on that." Thinking of Howard made him frown again, remembering how he'd torn the Stark family apart, even if it wasn't his fault. Bucky still had to remind himself that it wasn't his fault. "There's been other tech advancements though. Some big ones, some small ones."

Bucky paused then, hesitating for a moment. He still had his arms around Steph, but the way they were positioned made it easy for him to hold his left hand out beside hers, palm up. His voice sounded unsure when he spoke again. "Can you, uh, take this glove off for me?"

"She what?" Future Steph had some magic medicine and then she wasn't afraid of heights anymore? That was cool. But also insane. Steph couldn't imagine jumping off a plane, parachute or no parachute. She still had nightmares from that one time she went on the Cyclone with Bucky, and felt like throwing up whenever she thought too hard about it. And she'd had her eyes closed the whole time and his hand in a death grip, too.

The absence of flying cars was disappointing (probably more for Bucky than her, honestly) but the fact that he was alone was even more so. She had always imagined him with a family, that he would be happy long after she was gone. And when he'd said he and her future self had managed to survive all the way to 2023, she'd assumed they were together. After all, she only hadn't wanted her feelings known because she didn't want him to be with her out of pity. But were she healthy, she'd have taken her chances.

"You and her, you're not...?" The answer was obvious, but she found herself asking anyway. Then she glanced at his gloved hand, said, "Sure," and started pulling it off. She was focused on his face though, waiting for him to deal with her question, that she didn't immediately notice the metal hand that hid beneath the glove.

"She did a lot of stupid shit. Mostly when I wasn't around," Bucky frowned slightly. This version of Steph would surely know that he would get onto the older one for being an idiot. He'd always done that, it was part of him being protective of her.

Steph's half question threw him off though, and a look of confusion and surprise crossed his face. "What? No. Steph doesn't-" love me. want me. even want to stay in this time with me, apparently. He cut himself off before he could say any of those things though, frowning sadly a bit more as he looked down at his own hand, the biggest piece of physical evidence that he had been so utterly destroyed over the years. Sometimes he didn't even see himself as a whole person any more. "No, we were never like that."

But never let it be said that Bucky Barnes isn't an idiot himself at times, especially when not really considering why the younger version of the woman he'd always been in love with just asked if they ended up together.

Edited 2025-11-27 11:27 (UTC)

"Oh."

Steph already knew the answer, yet she was still utterly disappointed to hear it. Devastated was more like it, in fact, especially at how he didn't even hesitate. She stared forlornly at his glove that was now in her hand, furiously blinking back tears. It wasn't her, she tried to tell herself, and this whole situation was weird and probably not the best measure of her own chances in life, but... what did it mean that she could be healthy and beautiful and still not end up with him?

"Can I..." She could barely speak, her voice thick with emotion. She wouldn't look at him, instead she just fidgeted with the glove's leather fingers until she managed to distill her hurt into anger. It wasn't directed at anyone in particular; it was just more familiar, and she was desperate to hold on to something she knew now that her own world had been upended. "Can I go back now?"

The answer was probably no, too.

There was absolutely no way he could make her happy, Bucky knew that. And it made perfect sense for this version of Steph--the one who had never been through the craziness and the fighting but had been suddenly ripped out of her own time--to want to go back to where she belonged. But it still felt like a knife in his chest to have Steph want to abandon him twice in one day.

"If there's a way, they'll figure it out," he said, his voice filled with sadness as he gestured idly in the direction he was pretty sure the guys went. "Well, Banner will. Bruce. The green one. He's one of the smartest people alive. Sam... not so much." What could he say? Even when he was trying to hold himself together, taking digs at Sam were easy as breathing for Bucky.

"At least she had me hang on to her apartment keys, so there's somewhere comfortable for me to take you. Pretty sure all I've got is a hut on the other side of the world, if it's even still there." Not that he'd been back to check since his return.

Steph nodded, but she wasn't really listening. Right now she didn't care about those other people. Or anyone else at all.

"I'll never be good enough for you, will I?" she asked suddenly, though in spite of her anger she just sounded... defeated. She wasn't sure why she was fixating on this when she had far bigger problems, like, you know, getting back to her own time. But when had she ever been rational? When had she ever not let her heart influence, even dictate, her decisions?

Despite saying and trying to convince herself that he would be better off without her, she did, in fact, want him. But there was no point now in hoping the Bucky of her time would ever feel the same, was there? He probably already met his great love overseas, one of the field nurses or a foreign girl, and Steph would always just be a friend, maybe even a sister.

She held his glove back out to him, already forgetting that he'd had something to show her. Her hand was shaking.

Well that question certainly jolted Bucky back. Did he piece the meaning together properly? Of course not. But that was beside the point.

"Are you crazy?" he asked, looking confused and taken aback by the absolute stupidity in her question. "You've said a lot of stupid shit in your time, but that takes the cake, Steph. There's nobody better than you." No one better for him, no one better in general, not then and not in any of the decades he'd been around. "With or without that serum."

Shaking his head, Bucky wished he at least something he could lean back against. But he didn't, and he wasn't about to move away from Steph just for that. Maybe if he'd had something to smack his head against, he would have thought before saying the next thing. "You should know better than anyone that she just didn't want me like that."

Now it was Steph's turn to be taken aback by the absolute stupidity of Bucky's declaration. "Dumbass," she shot back, with the same fire as Captain America-sized Steph that Sam and Bruce would have been shocked if they were still watching. Clearly Steph did not let her size or poor health get in the way of her righteous fury, even going as far as pounding her tiny fists into Bucky's chest. But it hurt, so she only did it once. Then she just sagged and rested her forehead against his chest while she cried.

"I was gonna join the ANC to find a way to bring you home. I was gonna do whatever it took, even if it killed me. I was gonna do it even if we came back home and you decided to marry, I dunno, Doris. How dare you—" Words were pouring out of her now in her anger, and it didn't matter that he wasn't talking about her, exactly. "How dare you say I don't love you like that."

She didn't even say want; want was so shallow. If she only wanted him, she'd have fucked him during one of those times they'd gotten high from her meds and be done with it. But it wasn't just that. It had always been more than that.

Bucky didn't even flinch when Steph hit him in the chest. He was too busy staring at her, wide eyed and shocked as her words sank into his thick skull. "You- She never told me," Bucky's voice was quieter than it had been earlier and he watched her expression carefully.

"Steph, there was no shot I'd end up married to anyone else. Even my squad knew I was tying to get home to you." That might have been the single most honest thing Bucky had ever told her.

"She never—" What the hell? Well, okay, she could imagine scenarios where she'd keep her silence, but she thought she'd have it in her to be brave enough with the truth if he returned after she nearly lost him. Guess she was a fucking coward after all, huh.

Apparently he told everyone else but her though. "Well why didn't you say anything?" But she wasn't yelling anymore. Rather she was frowning, thinking back to the last time she'd seen him, if there was anything at all to hint at what he felt. "You could've asked her to wait." And she did wait, even if he hadn't asked. Would've been nice to have some confirmation, though.

"Hey, I had good reasons," Bucky frowned. Not happy reasons, but ones that definitely explained it. And he should at least give her the abridged version. "Got captured and brainwashed for seventy years. Spent a couple years trying to remember things after I escaped. I wasn't... Safe. To be around. For anyone."

He looked back towards the lake then. Not at anything in particular, just sort of off into the distance. "They had, uh, trigger words in my head. If they said them I'd do anything they wanted. I finally got rid of those and then not long after that there was another battle, then half the population disappeared for five years. I haven't been back from that for long. Just a couple weeks." See? He had reasons, at least.

"So you didn't like her until she was... better." Since going off to war wasn't even on his list of reasons for not saying anything. It stung, but it could have been worse. Besides, she couldn't be angry at him now after he'd told her all that. He'd been a prisoner for 70 years? Brainwashed, forced to do awful things? Her feelings were irrelevant in the face of that.

It was then that she finally noticed his hand. Eyes flying wide, she reached for it to take into her own and examine. What she'd thought was some kind of rot or illness turned out to be something else entirely. His fingers were cold. Metal.

"They did this to you?"

"What? No. Lord no. Stop assuming things like that." Bucky rolled his eyes then, taking the slight moment of distraction from talking about the shit he'd been put through for so long. "I got to be pretty good friends with some of the guy in my squad before we got captured that first time. They knew better than to even try to get me to so much as dance with a woman on leave weekends since there was a great girl back home I wanted to get back to so I could ask her to marry me. That was months before I found out she went and let herself be a damn test subject."

Chewing his lip, he looked at her again then. "I didn't want to put something like that on you right before I left. I didn't want you to feel obligated, or to pass on something better if someone else came along. And I also knew I wanted to ask you in person, not just in a letter."

But then Steph was examining his hand, and he let her. He didn't pull away at all, just let her look at it as close as she wanted to, turning it for her when it seemed like that was what she was aiming for and everything. "I, uh. I lost my arm when I fell off that train, so they gave me a replacement I didn't want. It got destroyed a few years ago-" by Stark's kid, no less, which was the least Bucky owed him, asshole or not, "-and Steph called in some favors to get this one made for me. I haven't had this one long."

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tell me if i need to change anything? i tried to be kinda vague!

perfect <3

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bucky now is not the time to be making fun of sam

sam just like, I HEARD THAT

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oops it's short

no complaints here, esp if it helps you survive your dinner thing!

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