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

"I think we all learned a thing or two about waiting from that," Steph agreed, her tone wistful. She had no idea how time travel worked, but her best friend had been wearing a wedding band when he showed up, so he had to have also said to hell with waiting and made his move. And Cap would've been an even bigger idiot if she hadn't agreed, unless she was still harboring feelings for her best friend, which didn't seem to be the case. Maybe it had been years, if she'd managed to save Bucky from the train. Steph made a mental note to pry her bestie for details the next time they hung out.

Returning to their apartment with a ring on her finger felt different. She'd already been sure she was staying in this time, with this Bucky, but the ring, on top of her legally existing in this world, seemed to physically anchor her. Nothing could make her leave now, and anyone or anything that might try would not live to regret it.

She didn't bother with their haul once they got inside. While he set their bags down on the coffee table, she took off her shoes and coat, then moved to the record player and put on Fred Astaire. "You owe me a dance," she teased, pulling her scarf off as she approached him. She tried throwing it over his head and around his neck, but she wasn't tall enough to reach and the scarf just bounced off his chest. That made her laugh. "Dammit, I was tryin' to be sexy!"

Bucky had barely set the bags down and taken off his own jacket before he was accosted with a scarf. Laughing, he took the scarf and dropped it onto the coffee table with all their bags. "You're always sexy, sweetheart," he told her with a smile, but stepped to the side to drop down onto the couch. "I'll dance with you, though, just lemme get my boots off first."

He wasn't exactly the same sort of light on his feet that he was back when he was young, and the last thing he wanted was to step on her foot or anything like that. He could be considered quick footed when he was fighting, but he mostly still stomped around when he did that.

Once his boots were off and set aside, Bucky stood and crossed the room to his fiancée again, slipping his arms around her. "You sure you wanna marry an old man like me?" he asked as he held her close and they swayed to the soft music. But he was still smiling as he looked down at her.

Steph rested her hands on Bucky's chest as they slowly swayed to the music, still occasionally glancing at the ring on her finger. "You're only old on paper," she reminded with a laugh. "You fuck like a teenager." They had been fucking like teenagers, practically been unable to keep their hands off each other since the night she arrived.

She sobered after a while, though she still had a soft smile on her face and gazed up at him like he was everything. There was a question behind those eyes, however, and when he gently pried her about it, she hesitated, but eventually acquiesced.

"Will you tell me everything now?" she asked. "Not now now, but, you know. Now that we got here." And with the trial approaching. Knowing probably wouldn't help or change anything, but now more than ever she wanted to protect him, so she was going to have to take her chances.

Edited (i should reread before posting, not after XD) 2026-03-16 16:19 (UTC)

Sighing, Bucky nodded. He knew he had to tell her all of it eventually so she would hear it from him and not however people would try to twist it in the trial, but he'd been putting it off. Deep down there was a part of him that worried that everything he'd done--everything he'd been forced to do--would scare her off. Because it was a lot, and all of it was horrible. Plus, he had no way of knowing what, exactly, would be brought up in the trial.

"Yeah, I'll tell you everything," he started as he leaned down, then pressed a kiss to her head. "And we can talk about it now, if you want. Go ahead and get it over with." Bucky would say he didn't mind, but he did. And it didn't matter when they talked about it, he was always going to mind.

But Steph had already suffered through his nightmares, and the occasional times where he just had to go... be in a silent room for a little while. His mistrust of new people, his caution about doing something as small as answering the door when they knew they had a delivery coming, all of it. And none of that was on her; it was all his issues.

Bucky chewed his lip as he moved to the couch, gently pulling her with him as he sat down, then tugged her down to curl against his side. "I just didn't want you to look at me different." Another deep breath. "Where do you want me to start?"

"I love you so much, and I'm gonna marry you. That's not gonna change," Steph promised, cupping Bucky's cheek and leaning in to kiss him softly. Then she climbed into his lap and settled there, curling into him.

"Tell me everything, from the beginning? In my world you just shipped out. That was as far as I got." Sure, she could just ask what it was exactly they were putting him on trial for, or why the red book spooked him so much, but context was important. She had already learned things from scattered conversations with him and from assorted third-party sources, but she wanted his truth, and hopefully it would be easier for him to start from the top.

She didn't rush him into speaking. She didn't even look at him, in case that made him self-conscious. She just snuggled into him, head on his shoulder and arms around him.

Bucky wrapped his arms around her, holding her close but glad she wasn't looking at him yet anyway. Then he figured out a starting point.

"The first few months were... Well they weren't fine, it was a big goddamn war, but they were normal, at least. I'd write to you every day that I could--which was most of them--but I'd usually end up having to shove multiple letters in one envelope. We could only send out mail so often," he figured he'd start with something easier, at least. Something she might like to hear. "I'd make sure to date every letter so you would know what order to read them in."

At least it all started almost nicely. "Then in October, my unit got captured. This... evil fucker called Zola started experimenting on me pretty much immediately. Injecting me with stuff, I didn't know what any of it was. After a couple weeks, Steph showed up and pulled me right off the table they would put me on. She was huge and had no backup, just ran off on her own, and managed to save me and the rest of my squad." The ones who were still alive in the first place, at least. But that was still a lot of people.

Steph knew of the experiments, but she hadn't been able to keep the order of events straight. At last she had a timeline. By now, if she hadn't been pulled out of her world, he'd already have been captured. She shuddered at the thought — and the realization that, while Cap had succeeded in rescuing him and his unit, she had been too late.

"Then the train?"

It was one failure after another, wasn't it? Steph could imagine just how Cap took that. Because, in spite of everything, they were the same person. Steph only had the luck of knowing Bucky had felt the same for her; otherwise she would've made some real stupid decisions, too.

Bucky nodded sadly at that. "Yeah. Well, first I did a year and some change with a unit called the Howling Commandos. Steph was there, too. And sometimes Howard and Peggy. Then there was me, but I didn't tell any of them what'd already been done to me since I didn't know what the government would do. That I was healing and thinking too fast. Then the train. We were trying to get Zola, but that's when I fell and lost my arm."

Letting out weak chuckle, Bucky looked down at her, then grabbed the throw off the back of the couch to pull around him, the memories giving him a chill. "I'm not a big fan of heights any more, if you can believe it."

It was good he had Steph in his arms though, because her presence was a comfort for him, and he knew once he was on the stand recounting the worst parts of his past he wouldn't have that comfort.

He went on to explain how the US Government deemed him killed in action but how HYDRA found him and started their real work on him. He was vague about the details, not wanting to go into all the ways they tortured him, or all the things they prodded at him with and ways they kept experimenting on him, but he did mention that it happened, and how they even sunk so low as to taunt him with the headlines announcing his best friend's death, especially since they knew he carried her picture in his pocketwatch. They could put two and two together.

Bucky had tried to resist for so long, but eventually he still broke down.

"Why didn't you tell her?" Steph couldn't help wondering. "She got strong and fast too, right?" Which made her think Cap would have understood, even if she wouldn't have known what to do about it. It couldn't have been easy dealing with those changes alone. He could have been terrified, even though Steph couldn't imagine Bucky being scared of anything.

Did Cap fail him in that, too? Was Steph going to have to prepare for life dealing them with the worst hand? She should seriously look into those plans should the trial go south.

It wasn't easy hearing what happened after he fell. She reached for his hand to hold in her tiny one, while the other gently rubbed his back; it was as much for her as it was for him. Though that was all in the past, she was furious. She wanted to tear HYDRA apart, wanted to make every one who hurt him pay. And she wanted to keep him in her arms so that no one could ever touch him again, despite the knowledge that she was even more powerless than her counterpart.

"We can... we can stop," she said. "I'm sorry I made you do this." She was hurting him, too.

Shaking his head, Bucky squeezed the tiny hand he held in his own, then pulled it up to press a kiss to it. "She had enough going on," he said, almost like confessing to why he kept a secret. "Depending on who you asked, she was either Lady Liberty or Captain America. There was mission after mission, strategy meetings, plus all the people who just... wanted a piece of her. She'd become the face of everything and she was stressed as hell. I... didn't want to add to it, I guess." Even though logically he knew that she'd never think of him that way, Bucky didn't want to become one of the people who just needed things from her instead of one of the people who was there for her.

So, instead, he kept his mouth shut and his arms open to hold her and listen whenever it all became too much.

"You didn't make me do anything, sweetheart, it's alright," he added. "You deserve to know who you agreed to marry. And I should tell you so other people can't twist up my words. I'll broad strokes the next few decades, alright?"

"I would've wanted to know," Steph said quietly. She hugged Bucky a little tighter with that arm she had around his back. "You'll tell me if anything like that happens again, right? I... I might not be capable of much... but I'm here for you..."

Not capable of much, said the woman who would've become Captain America had the opportunity not been taken away from her. But while she might doubt her abilities, she had no doubt about her resolve. She would move heaven and earth for him, defy the universe for him — as her counterpart had, over and over, even if he was mad at her for it.

She nodded and let him continue. If it were up to her, she would want every detail, if only to list every name and tally every transgression. But she did not want him to relive his pain and suffering any more than he had to, so she didn't push it. She simply held him and listened.

"You're capable of a hell of a lot more than you realize, sweetheart," Bucky said truthfully as he held her close. "Especially when it comes to me, but I'll tell you. I promise."

He continued then, wanting to make sure he was clear about just how messed up they made his mind, how he couldn't remember anything at all most of the time, just did whatever they told him to. And how that awful book was part of that. "I had trigger words," he said. "If certain things were said in a certain order I'd stop whatever I was doing and just... comply. They don't work any more, thank god. That's one of the main reasons I spent time healing in Wakanda."

And then Bucky told her about how they would put him in cryo for months or years at a time, then take him out for missions, wipe his brain, give him his orders, then send him out for an assassination. Sometimes it was politicians, sometimes it was people they found annoying. Sometimes he was the Soldier they'd pick from their mini-army just because it amused them to have Bucky Barnes do it, like when they sent him after Howard.

Sometimes it wouldn't even be for an assassination. Those were almost preferable to the times HYDRA would just loan him out for allies to do whatever they wanted with. Bucky absolutely didn't go into details there, but the meaning was clear.

He also pointed out that his handlers were usually these tall blonde haired, blue eyed women, because it didn't take them long to realize that he resisted a bit less when they resembled his Captain America. At least they didn't realize that a tiny blonde haired, blue eyed woman would have had the same effect, so it limited the agents they could pull from.

For a moment Steph naively believed Bucky's story couldn't get much worse. And then it did. So much that she had tears silently streaming down her face, and he was far from done. What could she even say to that? What could she do? If HYDRA hadn't captured him, if he hadn't fallen off that train—

She swallowed, realizing that was exactly the path Cap had spiraled down on. Yet even that hadn't been enough. Maybe Steph's best friend was now safe from most of the horrors, but it didn't undo any of the awful, awful things that happened to the man she was going to marry.

So she didn't say anything, just continued to hold him and listen, while silently making some promises to herself. He would always have a choice. He would never have to do anything he didn't want, especially in bed.

And he would always have her. No matter the outcome of the trial, no matter what else came their way. He would be safe with her. He would be loved with her. And, hopefully, he would be happy with her.

Pulling the blanket around the two of them tighter, Bucky kissed Steph's hair again. At least he was almost done, then she would know all of it, and she would be able to run if it was too much for her. He wouldn't blame her if she did, honestly.

He might have been a hell of a lot better than he was when he escaped, but he was still a very damaged man.

"They screwed up with the last mission, though," he began, then let out a single weak, sad laugh. "After Captain America came back, they thought it'd be funny if I was the one they pulled out of cryo to send after her. But seeing her started... triggering memories. Sort of. I didn't even know my own name, but I knew I knew her somehow, but didn't know how, and they didn't like that. I still almost killed her, though, then we fell in this river, and I pulled her out instead before taking off. That's how I finally got away from them.

"For a couple years I went on the run, stayed mostly in abandoned buildings or HYDRA safe houses before burning them down, lived off the money I stole from those safe houses. I even managed to take out a couple of HYDRA bases single handed, but I kept trying to find out more about this random woman, and imagine my surprise when every time I'd find something about her, there I was, too. Then she caught up to me in Romania."

Steph let out a mirroring weak laugh as she attempted to joke, "You probably saw her face and thought, 'Hey, I know that dumbass'." Self-deprecating humor had been her specialty long before Bucky began to wield it too, and she didn't mind making a fool of herself if it got him to smile. It was a desperate attempt at levity, but she had to try.

Especially after all those awful stories and the admission that he'd almost killed her. She'd always thought being sick was a terrible way to die; one didn't only suffer in pain and with the knowledge of what and who they were leaving behind, but their loved ones would have to watch them wither and fade away, too. But it turned out there was a scenario far, far worse.

"Was that after they accused you of bombing some peace conference?" She had been reading and trying to piece things together after she learned he was going to be put on trial. The bombing was in a lot of news sites and had turned up easily when she looked up his name on the Google.

"Yeah, well, turns out when you've been in love with someone since puberty, it gets hard to completely erase them from your mind, even with mind control," Bucky told her before pressing another kiss to her head. There was no way HYDRA had expected that, not after so many decades of conditioning.

"It was immediately after. I'd just seen a paper with my face plastered on it when she tracked me down, then some kind of angents and T'Challa were right on her heels. His dad was the king of Wakanda that had been killed in the bombing. At least we were able to convince him it was a frame job." As fast as Bucky was, Black Panther had been faster. And he was scary dammit.

At least, he was scary until you actually got to see the guy regularly.

After that, Bucky went into how he and Steph had gone on the run for a very short time, they got taken in and that asshole used the book on him, the big fight at the airport, ('Tony brought a goddamn kid to the fight. He was a strong kid, but he was still a damn kid.'), how he and Steph had found their way to the Winter Soldier facility only to find the rest already dead, and how Tony found them there.

Then he mentioned how he went to Wakanda and volunteered to be put back in Cryo until they could figure out how to fix him. Fix both his mind and also replacing the arm Tony had blown off.

Edited (i also need to reread BEFORE hitting post) 2026-03-17 17:16 (UTC)

It was a lot. Steph realized it had to be more difficult for Bucky, recounting all this, but she was having trouble, too. None of it changed what she thought of and felt for him, no. But she was angry, and there wasn't anything she could do about it but hold it in until she could safely let it out. Right now, he needed her to be a safe space, and she was determined to be that.

"But they found a way, yeah? In Wakanda?" She remembered the broad strokes from there — recovering, the goat he named Rogers, the alien invasion, and dying. Or at least disappearing for years until Cap and the surviving Avengers brought half the universe back through a combination of magic and time travel. Steph didn't really get it, it was still something she'd yet to wrap her mind around, but she knew it was real. She was here, decades into the future, as a consequence of all that.

She squeezed his hand. "Why did you think knowing this would change my mind about you? About us?" Maybe it was a difficult question, especially because they had never really been used to talking about feelings and shit, but since that night they had gotten together she'd told herself they had to get better at communicating. So she was trying.

"They found a way, yeah. Those words don't work on me any more, but I still hate the sight of that book. The Wakandans even built me this new arm to replace the one Tony blew off me, so I don't even have to carry that piece of HYDRA hardware around any more. It's lighter than the old one in more ways than one." Bucky looked down at her, only to let go of her hand and bring it up to gently wipe the tears off her cheeks, unaware that he had some of his own. "I caused a lot of the scars around it, you know. Trying to get it off when HYDRA first put it on me."

Not all of them, of course. Some were from the surgery. But many of them were caused by a desperate man trying to get rid of something that didn't belong there.

Her last couple of questions made him pause, though. Bucky chewed on his lip for a moment before answering. "I spent a lot of time questioning and second-guessing myself after I got away from them. I still do sometimes, but not as much as I did before. But it sort of... bleeds into other things, too." He sighed. "Plus, I just have a lot of guilt. Logically, I know none of that was my fault, but I can still remember every face, every name, and that's what most of my nightmares are about."

Steph hesitated, but after a moment she slowly brought a hand up to Bucky's face to wipe off his tears. She didn't call attention to it though; in their time, boys grew up learning they shouldn't show emotion, shouldn't cry. While she couldn't ignore his tears, she could spare his pride.

"I don't really know what to say that wouldn't make you feel worse," she admitted. "That was... that was fucked up." Sorry felt like an empty platitude, and he already said he knew, logically, that it wasn't his fault. It wasn't her absolution that he needed.

Then she remembered something he said before, about how Cap hadn't asked him if he wanted to be saved or whatever it was she thought she was accomplishing. So Steph asked. "What do you want me to say? What do you need me to do?" For him, she would do anything.

Bucky didn't say anything about his tears, either. He just took the hand she used to wipe them away and held it up so he could press a soft kiss to the inside of her wrist, right over her pulse point.

"I don't need you to say or do anything you don't want to, sweetheart," he started with another sigh. "I just don't want to lose you."

He'd already told her before that if she ever wanted to go, she could. Bucky would never force her to stay where she didn't want to. But at the same time, he didn't know what he would do if she did decide to leave one day. Not to her, not to others, but he didn't know what he would do with--or to--himself.

But he knew he wouldn't be telling her that part.

"Hey." Steph shifted to straddle Bucky's lap, not to distract him or start anything, but so he had no choice but to face her and look at her in the eyes. She cupped his face gently. "To the end of the line, remember? Or 'till death do us part, if you'd rather. You are my husband." She didn't even seem to realize she'd already claimed it, instead of stating it as a future occurrence. "And I ain't going anywhere you aren't. Just... don't push me away, please?"

She would give him time and space if he ever needed any, or if there were things he felt he had to take care of on his own, things about his past and the nightmares that continued to haunt him. She was only asking that he not shut her out, that he talk to her — even if it was to tell her that he couldn't sleep beside her that night and he wanted to be alone for a while.

Bucky couldn't help a slight smile at that. It was small, and it was still sad, but it was there. Reaching up, he wrapped both his hands around Steph's tiny wrists just as gently as she was holding his face. "I'm your husband already, huh?" he asked, picking at her just the tiniest bit. He wouldn't mind already being her husband, after all. If he had, he wouldn't have asked her to marry him.

"I won't push you away, sweetheart. Not intentionally," he promised before leaning in to give her a soft kiss. If she wasn't running away, he wouldn't either. Not from this. "And if it ever seems like I am just, let me know, alright? You already know sometimes I just need quiet for a little while, but I always come back around to you, don't I?"

Steph blushed at Bucky's teasing, and almost immediately went into the defensive, as she tended to do when he pushed her buttons. But something in his face gave her pause. Her expression softening into a smile, she said, "All that's missing are just our signatures on some papers, right? The important part is..." She brushed a thumb over his lower lip. "I, Stephanie Grace Rogers, take you, James Buchanan Barnes, as my husband."

So what if she was a sap? Let him make fun of her; it would be worth it, to ease even a little of that pain and sorrow he carried with him all the time.

When they broke off the kiss, she rested her forehead against his. "Like when you would move to sleep on the floor sometime during the night?" Yeah, she'd noticed. She wasn't a light sleeper, not now when she was finally getting some relief from most of the symptoms that had been plaguing her, but there were times she woke up ahead of him and found herself alone on their bed.

Somehow, even after everything Bucky had told her about what he'd been through and what he'd done, Steph still wanted to marry him. That fact in itself almost felt like a miracle or a blessing and, god, he hoped he never did anything to ruin that.

Instead of making fun of her, he just said a simple, "I take you, too, Stephanie Grace Rogers," before giving her another sweet kiss. It might not have been all the words required, but it was enough to get Bucky's point across.

Letting go of her wrists, Bucky wrapped his arms around her waist again, holding her as he let his eyes close. "The floor thing, that's a mix of the nightmares and going eighty years without regularly sleeping in an actual bed." Between the war, the cryo, and the sleeping in whatever buildings he could find, beds had been few and far between for him. Sure, there had been a few here and there since his escape, but none as regular as he'd had since he came to stay with his best friend after the blip.

Actually, none as regular as since he and Steph became an item. Up until then, Bucky usually slept on the floor of the guest room.

"Trust me, if it wasn't for that, I'd stay in bed beside you all the time. It's just, I don't know. Really soft when you're used to sleeping on the ground."

"I can stay with you on the floor, if you want?" Steph offered, leaning into him and closing her eyes as well. It wasn't like she wasn't used to a difficult life. Nor was it a real hardship to be sleeping on the floor. And even if it were, she would happily make the sacrifice. Anything for Bucky, because she loved him, even after learning about what he'd been through and what he'd done.

After a while of just holding each other, she asked, "What about when you have nightmares? Should I leave you alone, or will you tell me what you need?" Maybe she was overthinking things, especially as he'd been fine with most of what they'd gotten up to, even the intimate stuff. But all that information made her start to rethink her actions. Had she been too inconsiderate? Too careless? Had he just been putting up with her so she wouldn't leave him?

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