dysmorphics | it's you and me up against the world, it's you and me

Steph suddenly felt light-headed and weak in the knees, as if Bucky's hand on her waist was the only thing holding her up. She hadn't realized just how much she needed this. Maybe it was the loneliness. Maybe it was suppressing all those big feelings. Or maybe because she'd been at the verge of once again giving up on everything, and he came just in time to save her.

"I was gonna end it all," she admitted with a sob, practically collapsing in his arms. It wasn't an appropriate response by any means, but he had to know. She owed him the truth, no matter how ugly it was. He had to know what he was getting into with her. "After tonight. After I took you to see her." She didn't know how, but that had been the plan. There was no point living in a world without him — or in one where she had failed him.

"But you... you stayed." Even after she fucked things up. He stayed, and he held her, and he didn't hate her, and that meant more than he could ever know.

Steph's admission made Bucky's eyes widen in a mix of shock and fear. Shock that she would go that far for any reason, and fear of losing her for good. But that only lasted for a second before he moved, one arm wrapping tightly around her waist and the other wrapping around her shoulders in a tight hug, holding her close.

"You can't- You can't do that, Steph. To you or to me," he said as he clung to her, his chin on her shoulder. Even then, he knew it was stupid to make it about him even slightly, but he'd say absolutely anything to convince her not to do anything that stupid.

Plus, if he knew for sure she was gone for good--not just some stupid rumors that people were trying to link to his missing best friend--Bucky couldn't be sure he wouldn't be right on her heels.

Men weren't supposed to cry. That had been drilled into Bucky's head since he could remember. But that didn't stop him from feeling his eyes well up as he squeezed them closed.

"Of course I stayed, punk. Since you pulled that stupid scarf off your face, I've taken every chance to stay with you. I spent too much time trying to find you to just... leave."

Steph was quiet for a moment, but she held on to Bucky as tightly as she could without hurting him. He was alive and whole, and now with the chance to live out the life he never had, yet he was saddling himself with the broken, damaged version of his best friend. He deserved better than her, anyone but her, yet he wanted her anyway.

"I don't deserve you," she said eventually, no longer sobbing but voice still thick with emotion. "But I'll stay for as long as you want me to." That had been one of his assertions earlier, that her mission should have been his call, not hers. He didn't want to be saved if it meant being parted from her. If she had known — if she had asked — then it wouldn't have come to this.

She hoped Bucky was fine in their timeline. Mad at her, probably, but she could live with that. Hopefully having the younger, sweeter, less jaded version of herself around would be good for him. He deserved to be happy, after everything.

"You don't deserve me?" Bucky asked with an incredulous laugh as he pulled back just far enough to look up at her again. His smile was definitely weak, as he hadn't felt like he was worth much of anything in quite a long time, but at least it was there. A little. "Steph, you could go live at any point in time, but I'm the selfish bastard that's askin' you to stay here in the 40s with me instead of going to some better time. Or even just... going to be with that other version of me."

Was he ignoring the whole thing about how she planned to go off herself after he left? Absolutely, he was. Bucky didn't think he had it in himself to really address that just yet, but he'd get there at some point.

"Hell, Steph, I'm greedy enough that I'm already trying to think of how to keep this from Becca since you said I can't tell anyone about you."

"Buck, if I hadn't been so dumb and fucked things up, you wouldn't have had to ask," Steph retorted with a mirroring weak self-deprecating laugh. She could've done anything else really and it would've been better than this. She could've brought the other Steph back so she was here when Bucky returned from the war, and he could've had the happy ending he deserved. But she didn't. Who was the selfish bastard now?

She cupped his cheek then, running her thumb over his lower lip. There probably wasn't any version of him that she wouldn't love and want. But he was the only one who asked, after a lifetime of waiting.

"We'll figure out what to tell Becca. And your friends." She'd already had her fill of being a science project and government property, and she'd like to avoid the same fate for him. Being one of the founders of SHIELD in this universe should at least help his case. She wasn't sure about hers. If anything they might think she was a HYDRA asset, their answer to Captain Carter.

But there were far more important things they had to deal with first. "I ain't going anywhere without you, alright? I promise." She let go of his face to fish out her tags (and locket) from under her shirt and place them into his hand. They were the only truly personal effects she had, having left everything else behind.

Not in the mood to argue about which of them was more selfish, at least for the time being, Bucky just ignored her comment and let his eyes close while he felt Steph touch his lip, then looked up at her again. Another timeline or not, Bucky sure did love this woman.

Besides, their divergent timelines meant that for the first time since they were little kids getting to know each other, they would actually have things to learn about one another, instead of just knowing everything.

"We don't need to tell anyone everything, but I don't want to just keep you hidden away forever. And my family is gonna recognize this face of yours the second they see it." At least Becca and his Ma would. His dad... could go either way, really.

It probably said something about how Bucky had been living that it actually took him a moment to figure out what friends Steph was referencing, though. "The folks at the office are gonna know something's going on if I'm not in as foul of a mood as I usually am, though."

But he took her tags in hand and examined them, running his thumb over the raised lettering. "It's weird as hell seein' your name on tags like this, Steph." He had his own, of course, and if she was giving him hers then he would give her his in return, but it was still odd to think of her being in the Army.

"Yeah, but we gotta think of something to explain this," Steph said, gesturing vaguely to her body, "without the government wanting to lock me up and stick things into me." There were still people in Brooklyn who would recognize her. Could they get away with saying she was a relative, Steph's cousin maybe? Becca would call bullshit, probably Bucky's Ma too, but they could at least be sworn to secrecy. Maybe. Hopefully. She hadn't had to think about this, as she hadn't intended to stay.

His friends would be another story. They couldn't know she had the serum. But she should be able to figure something out. She knew them — Peggy and Howard and the Howlies, even Colonel Phillips — so she should at least have an idea what they might think. She just needed more time. And less distractions.

As Bucky looked her tags over, Steph ran her fingertips up along his left arm in turn — still flesh and bone, which was weird as hell after everything. "It was the only way I could get to you," she told him. "I didn't wanna just... stay in Brooklyn and garden and wait for Becca to tell me you've been killed." Then she glanced at him with a teasing grin. "Must be weird that I outrank you, Sarge."

Edited 2026-01-17 04:46 (UTC)

"Hey, no matter what happens, nobody's gonna go poking and prodding at you, you got that?" Bucky would shoot his so-called friends himself if he had to when it came to protecting Steph. "But we'll have to figure something out, cause they've been seeing your face for years now."

Bucky pressed her tags back into her hand before pulling out the pocket watch she'd gotten a quick glimpse of earlier. He flicked it open and handed it to her, letting Steph really take a look at the photo of her--happy and amused at something Becca had said to her off camera--tucked inside the cover. "I've got another photo of you on my desk at the office, too." So they knew her face, just not as well as he and his family did. And especially with the larger picture on his desk, it was easier to tell she was supposed to be small and skinny, not tall and curvy.

While she looked at the pocket watch, Bucky grinned slightly. "You outranking me isn't the surprising part, sweetheart. I usually ended up letting you boss me around anyway." Did Bucky mean to call her sweetheart just then? No, he did not. But he wasn't going to take it back, either.

"We can trust Pegs, and Howard, but I ain't sure how things work now that the war's over." Steph worried for Bucky, too; they never did find out just how the serum affected him. She had hoped to talk to the Wakandans about it at some point, but she'd ended up spending nearly all of her time with him whenever she visited. She would let Howard run some tests on them both for their peace of mind, but not until they were sure that wouldn't reach anyone else. Even if they'd destroyed all that they knew of HYDRA by now, she didn't want to take any chances. There could still be other moles and sleeper agents.

She touched her fingertips to her picture in his pocket watch. "I don't remember ever being this happy since you told me you enlisted." She'd been so mad at him that she wouldn't speak to him for a whole day, then she was morose and moody in all those weeks after that. She understood doing one's duty, but why did he have to leave? Why did he have to leave her? It wasn't fair.

If she'd known then that he loved her too, she would've begged him to run away with her. She instead tried for the next best thing: that if he must die, then at least they could die together.

She glanced back at him in surprise, expecting him to take back the endearment. When he didn't, she felt her stomach twist — in a good way — and she had to grin. "Too bad we were so dumb. I could've given you a proper dressing down while we made our way through Europe. What a wasted opportunity." Did he catch the innuendo? She'd never really flirted before.

"Yeah, guess I wasn't exactly someone that could call some shots with them after your war, was I?" Not if he was off being a POW with a missing arm. "But we'll be careful about what we tell people, and who we tell it to, alright?"

Oh. That was right. Oops. "Yeah, I sorta lied about that," Bucky started with a frown. "I didn't enlist. I was trying to stay here in the city with you, and had even uh... convinced myself I needed to actually tell you how I felt, but then I got my draft letter and decided to wait and tell you when I got home." It would give him a reason to make it home, after all.

Bucky looked down at the picture in his watch. He didn't have to see it, he had every single part of it burned into his mind, and he had for a long time. "I don't remember what she said, but Becca said something you thought was funny. Then I took your photo." And while he had many photos of Steph, that one was one of his favorites. It's why he took it with him.

"I don't know if it woulda been better or worse if you had been over there with me," Bucky said, grinning as he looked back up at Steph. "I mighta gotten distracted with the dressing downs, or with just wanting to protect you. But I would have at least been with you instead of half a world away."

"You were drafted?" That was news to Steph. All this time, she'd believed Bucky had chosen to go off to war on his own accord.

But that also had a new implication: "You could've gone home. After Azzano, they offered you and the others an honorable discharge." At Steph's insistence, actually. She'd strong-armed Colonel Phillips into convincing top brass to send their captured boys home in exchange for her going into service, since she was worth a hundred men in battle anyway. "You didn't take it. You said I needed a second-in-command and you didn't trust anyone else to watch my back." The gesture had moved her, and she'd selfishly accepted, because she had been so afraid. But to now realize that he'd stuck around because of her, which then led to the train and all the tragedy that followed...

She suddenly grabbed him in a fierce hug, mumbling into his hair, "You absolute moron," with a sob. He wasn't the Bucky who made that choice, that was true, but she knew now that he would've done the same. That, and to keep his being drafted from her was such a dumb move. "We could've gotten married and run far away. Lived in a farm on the mountains and tended to goats or something." People made such a big deal about how honorable and heroic it was to be a soldier, but having been there, they knew of war's true horrors and now had to live with what's left of themselves after it had destroyed them both.

Bucky wrapped his arms around her in return, hugging her back tightly as he sighed. "Can't blame him for sticking around for you," he said, his voice soft. "But I wasn't given the discharge option. I'd been captured, but clearly I wasn't injured enough to get sent home." What they didn't realize was that it was because most of his injuries had healed already, because of what they did to him.

"I thought about grabbing you and running, you know," he said with a sad laugh. "Woulda been a shit life for you, though. And if I got caught and sent to jail, where would that have left you? Alone in a place you didn't know that well?" Steph didn't have any remaining family (even though everyone always insisted she was an unofficial Barnes), and with her health? He couldn't risk leaving her abandoned and alone somewhere.

"Better a shit life with you than one without you." Which wasn't all that different from Bucky's declaration that he would rather live through everything HYDRA put the other version of him through than lose her. They clearly were peas in a pod.

Steph pulled back to look at Bucky again. Yeah, this wasn't the best time period. The food was bland, healthcare sucked, and there were still more wars to come. But she meant it, that she would rather be with him through all that shit than be alone once more. "Need me to put my promise in writing, or can we kiss now?"

They could spend all night being hung up on their pasts and all the what-could-have-beens. Or they could try to move forward. In any case, they were together now at least. That was the most important part.

Bucky looked back up at her then, focused on those beautiful--if red-rimmed from the off-and-on tears they'd both dealt with that evening--blue eyes. His left hand came up to rest on her cheek, thumb brushing over her cheekbone. That didn't last long, though, before he slid his hand to the back of her neck and tugged her in so he could kiss her for the first time.

It wasn't exactly how Bucky imagined it over and over for years, of course, but that was simply because he didn't ever picture himself being the shorter one of the pair, or Steph not being a skinny little thing. That didn't make it any less perfect as his eyes slid closed. She might have been built differently, but she was still his dreamgirl.

This wasn't how Steph imagined kissing Bucky would be like either. She certainly never imagined it to be so hungry, so desperate, as if he was about to go off to war again. Or maybe this was what their homecoming would have been like in a world where she never got the serum and he never fell off the train.

Steph had never kissed anyone before. What she knew about kissing she learned from Natasha, who'd kissed her when they'd been evading some HYDRA goons. "Public displays of affection make people very uncomfortable, especially between the same sex," had been the redhead's brilliant idea. It had worked, but in those few seconds all Steph could think about was Bucky, even through the scent of Natasha's perfume.

This time it really was him, and Steph buried her hands into his hair as she kissed him like he was the very air she needed to breathe. She was sloppy and inexperienced, she didn't really know what to do with her mouth and tongue only that she had to taste him — but if he wanted her then it didn't matter, right?

Bucky had kissed before, but not as much as many people seemed to assume he had. And, honestly, those kisses (that he generally didn't even want) never felt right, because he had always wanted to be kissing Steph instead of whatever girl cornered him.

But none of those past kisses could have prepared Bucky for how right it did feel to finally kiss her. It had started gently, but it took almost no time for them to be all but clinging to each other as it got deeper and more desperate.

Eventually, Bucky broke the kiss so he could do that pesky breathing thing, but he didn't go far. He only pulled back enough so he could take a couple of deep breaths as he looked at her, grinning. "I love you, Steph."

This hadn't been part of the plan. Steph was supposed to disappear after the war was over and she'd finished tying up those loose threads involving HYDRA. It certainly hadn't been her intention to take the place of this Bucky's Steph, in his life or otherwise. But it seemed like the universe had other plans. If this was destiny or fate or whatever it was called, it was shitty as fuck, but she was going to take it.

That grin? It made everything worth it. Maybe she did succeed, after all. Just in a way she didn't expect.

"I love you too, Buck." She would always love him, that she was sure of. Any version of him, at any point in time. It didn't make sense, but also it did, somehow. She leaned in to rest her forehead against his, smiling contentedly. "I'm gonna need a new picture for my locket."

Bucky couldn't help his soft laugh as he closed his eyes. He still had plenty of tension and stress coiled inside of him, but it was the most relaxed he'd felt since 1943.

"Something wrong with the one you've got in there?" he asked, moving so he had both his arms wrapped around her waist to hold her close. "I didn't actually look at it before. Just sorta focused on your tags."

Steph had to take a moment to find the most comfortable way of having her arms around him, since even after all these years she was still used to being the smaller one. "I just want one with both of us, that's all," she told Bucky as she likewise relaxed in his hold.

Her tiny kitchen was hardly the most romantic place for declarations of love and making out, but it was more like what she'd imagined when she was younger than, say, a battlefield. They should probably at least move back to the living/dining area where it was more comfortable though.

"If that's what you want, I'll make sure you get it," Bucky said simply. Because, for him, it was that simple. If Steph wanted something--and it wasn't something stupid like, "I really want to punch that guy for talkin' through the newsreels at the start of the film"--Bucky would do his best to get it for her.

After stretching up just enough to press another soft kiss to her lips, he pulled back enough to look at her, still smiling softly. "Now, just to make sure. You're at least my steady girl now, right? Only one, really. But I know you heard when I told you I love you. And that I planned on coming home to marry you."

"Yeah, of course, darling." Steph had waited for so long for all of that — for Bucky to tell her that he loved her, to be his. Hell, she would marry him right then and there if he'd ask.

Had she forgotten that his Steph was out there in 2023, and that he still wanted to talk to her at some point? Of course not. If that Steph wanted to come back and be with him then she would let him go, but until then she would stay with him and do her best to make him happy.

"I still don't know what we'll tell your family though." They would either recognize her, or think she was a dead ringer of his missing childhood love who would have some very big shoes to fill, with how much he loved her. "Maybe we oughta just say HYDRA got me, and they messed with my head so I don't remember a lot of things. Just you, mostly." She was already using the Winter Soldier name anyway, might as well go all the way.

God, Bucky had always wanted to hear Steph call him that. Or at least some sort of pet name that belonged to couples. "Good. Next I'll just have to convince you to marry me one of these days."

Bucky wouldn't be surprised if he woke up tomorrow to discover that the entire night had been a dream, and while that would be awful at least it would be a good one instead of a nightmare. But that didn't mean he wanted it to be a dream.

"I say that, at least with my family, we go simpler than that," Bucky said, shaking his head slightly. The people at work? He could lie to them. But he didn't want to outright lie so much to his family. Still, there were ways around that. "You could still be you with them, but the last few years you were doing confidential work, but my branch wasn't a part of that so we weren't in on it. And you still can't talk details with them. Maybe we even let them know you're calling yourself Gracie in public now, like I heard the girls downstairs calling you."

"What makes you think I still need convincing?" Steph teased with a soft laugh, the quip out of her mouth before she could even really think about it. It was true, though. She'd only ever entertained thoughts of marriage with Bucky, and when there didn't seem to be a chance of that, she just didn't bother anymore. But she didn't think he would be serious about it, or at least not so soon.

(Then again, if he wanted to get back with his Steph, it wouldn't matter whether or not they were married. Technically they were the same person. She and Bucky wouldn't even have to get divorced, but they would have some explaining to do.)

"Yeah, I... I guess we could work with that." It would save them a lot of trouble, frankly. And it would be nice to just be herself around them. She bit her lower lip self-consciously. "Did they know? Or did they want someone else for you?" She'd always felt welcome with his family, but that didn't mean they wanted them together.

"What, you wanna go visit a courthouse tomorrow?" Bucky teased. He genuinely didn't think that was something she even might say yes to, but it was something he'd do if she wanted to.

"That way, if they try to ask anything you can't get into, or explain easily, we can just say it's something you can't talk about. They're used to me having things I can't tell them about at work." Honestly, there was very little he could tell them about his job, and while it took them a little while to adapt to it, they managed. Now they didn't ask him for details about his work, and the only reason Becca was allowed in the building at all was because of the fits she'd throw in the lobby when he first came back and was avoiding his family. But even she knew that when she stopped by she wasn't supposed to look around. He just... put away his papers and ushered her into his office.

Her questions made him sigh, though. "They knew. I always knew Becca knew I had feelings for you, she'd tease me about it all the time. But I didn't realize my folks knew until I got back. They told me the dates they set me up on every once in a while were either favors for people they knew, or they thought it'd give one of us enough of a push to finally fess up to each other." Bucky pressed a quick, gentle kiss to her lips again. "Apparently, even they wanted us to hurry it up."

"I thought they didn't want me for you," Steph admitted. "I knew I was gonna be a burden with my poor health, financially and physically and emotionally, and no parent would want their child to have a shitty life." And she loved him too much to want him to suffer on her account.

Thankfully, that wasn't the case anymore, or at least being sick was no longer going to be a problem. So was money. There would be other issues, mostly byproducts of the war, but they should be able to get through them together.

"Do you wanna go to the courthouse? I told you, I ain't gonna need convincing. Wanted to marry you since we were teens." She'd have married him straight out of high school if he'd asked, or even during high school, with her Ma's blessing. Sarah Rogers had known, too.

what chris evans 🤪

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