“It’s fine, Buck. We’ll figure it out.”
Bucky rolls his eyes. His time on the Avengers has been peppered with ridiculously weird shit, there’s no question about it; aliens and monsters and sentient furniture ain’t even the half of it. But this broad, with her wild dark hair and her pendants and her herbs, this ain’t exactly scary.
“What was it she said to you, exactly,” Tony asked, arms folded across his metal chest. “And not ‘vague gist’ exactly, Barnes, gimme at least a decent paraphrase, here.”
“She said I’d forget what was most important to me,” he said, and shrugged, then made an expansive gesture in Steve’s direction. “He’s right here.”
“Aaw,” Steve said, and clutched at his heart, his smile genuine and warm even if he was bein’ a punk. “Aaw, Buck, I love you too.” Bucky considers, for a moment, putting him in a headlock, but he gets distracted when Barton ducks under the police tape and runs over to him, looking weirdly concerned for how vertical and uninjured Bucky obviously is.
“Barnes,” he says, moving in all close, “you okay?”
Bucky kind of startles, ‘cos on the other side of Bucky from Steve and the others, Barton’s grabbed hold of his shirt, got it all rucked up by his hip.
“Woah,” he says, backing off, knocking Barton’s hand away. “Getting a little friendly there, Barton?”
The archer sends a quick look at Steve and the others, then back at Bucky, his face going through all kinds of expressions before he finally settles on confused.
“Sorry,” he says, “sorry. Just wanted to make sure the team was all fine.”
“Sure,” Bucky said, dismissive – it wasn’t like he even knew the guy that well. “Nothing happened.”
my hand slipped. xD
It was all Clint could do to get back to his room in one piece, despite his entire world falling apart around him.
Sure, they’d been on the down-low, feeling out this relationship of theirs, seeing if it was a thing, before making it a thing-thing. It had made sense, yesterday.
Today? Today, it was gone.
Clint felt the air in his lungs rush out, in staggered, gasping breaths, unable to stop them. He shouldn’t be surprised; how could he expect to hold onto a relationship when he couldn’t even manage to breathe properly?
Getting a little friendly there, Barton?
The word, they were the worst kind of hurt. No, Clint corrected, they were the second worst kind of hurt; the honour of top spot rested solely with the look in Bucky’s eyes. That look, devoid of any expression beyond what the hell, that look that said Bucky had no wish to be that close to Clint, that hurt deeper than the words. Hurt deeper than the knife last week, or the bullet last year.
Bucky looked at Clint like he had way back when, when he didn’t know anyone, didn’t want to know anyone.
Clint didn’t want to admit it, but he had worked hard to get past that look, to think of himself as worth something again. To show Bucky that he was worth something. That together, they made something that was worth everything.
But now Clint was on his knees in his room, the bed still unmade from this morning, when he’d woken up in Bucky’s arms. He blinked at the sheets, before getting to his feet. He stormed to the bed, and pulled everything off of it. the pillows, the sheets, all of them fell to the floor. He then picked them up, ripping them apart, all the time screaming a wordless scream, from the depths of his soul.
He didn’t know what had happened to Bucky, but he wouldn’t stop until he found out.
Eeeehehehehe thank you you made it hurt worse 💜💜💜
Goooooorgeous!
OK so I’ve never written either of these characters before so this may be very OOC but I wanted to continue this so I tried anyway
* * *
“What happened.”
Bucky jolted, a little. It wasn’t often he got startled, but the Black Widow somehow always managed sneak up on him. She was perched on the counter, and Bucky had no idea how he’d missed her. He gave her a look, one that said, don’t do that and I don’t know what you’re talking about.
“Something’s changed,” she said, disapproving in that subtle way of hers. “The past few days, you and Clint… what happened?”
Bucky scowled. “Nothing,” he said.
“It started when you came back from your last mission,” she said, insistent.
Bucky thought back. “When that fake witch pretended to curse me?” he said at last.
If he wasn’t looking for it, he would have missed the shift in her expression. “What did the witch say?” Black Widow asked, the room suddenly charged with a dangerous energy.
“I… That I’d forget what’s most important to me,” Bucky said, and she grimaced.
“So that’s it.”
“But I didn’t, I still remember-“
“You think you didn’t,” Nat said, cutting him off, “because you did, and you don’t know any better.”
Bucky scowled at her again. “What’d I forget,” he said, not so much mad at her as with the realization that someone had been in his brain again, been deleting pieces of him and he hadn’t even known it this time.
“You forgot your boyfriend,” Nat said, scathing. “He’s heartbroken.”
That made Bucky take pause. Boyfriend. Someone actually… he had a boyfriend? “Who…” he started. Then, “Shit. Barton?”
Nat nodded. “Clint,” she told him.
I LOVE THAT THIS IS NOW A CROWDSOURCED FIC
and I adore the idea that Tasha knew, because of COURSE she knew, even if Clint never told her.
(He’s just been sitting silently by her, the past few nights, resting his head on her shoulder and doing pretty terribly at pretending everything is fine)
Thank you thank you for continuing this! 💜
Now that Bucky knew something – someone – was missing, it seemed obvious. There was a Clint Barton shaped hole in his life. His sheets felt cold, and his nights were too quiet. There was an empty space in his dresser and a book he didn’t recognize on the second night table. The final straw was when he spotted a lone purple sock hiding under his bed.
It was strange knowing that only a few days ago Barton, Clint, was the most important person in his life. Now Bucky felt like he barely knew the man. It seemed so unlikely that they’d have anything in common, a brainwashed supersoldier and a human who thought sticks and string made a decent weapon. Yet the more Bucky pushed, the more it felt like his mind was going to unravel.
He swore, curling in on himself, no longer in the mood for completing his morning pushups. No wonder they had seemed more difficult than usual. His morning routine was probably different now that he shared it with someone else.
When did they get together? How?
And Clint. Fuck. Bucky hadn’t seen him in days.
Rolling to his feet, Buck considered searching the tower, finding Clint and explaining everything to him. Or maybe that would make it worse. What if Clint didn’t return his feelings? Though running and hiding made it seem like they had both been on the same page.
Then Bucky had brushed him off and ignored him.
“Fuck.” He tugged at his hair. “Hey, J?”
“How can I help, Sargent Barnes?” the disembodied voice asked.
“Can you give me Barton, Clint’s, location?”
Jarvis was silent for a moment, then said, “It would appear Agent Barton has left the premises.”
Immediately, Bucky was tugging on a shirt and reaching for his tac vest. Hell, he may not have memories of the guy, but his brain was already switching to high alert, like this was a common reaction.
“Where is he?” Bucky grabbed the pistol out of his bedside drawer, then hesitated when he couldn’t locate his rifle beneath the couch.
“J, where’s my rifle?”
“Agent Barton suggested the gun locker in the closet would be a more suitable place for storing a weapon,” Jarvis said.
Bucky froze. The amount of trust he must have placed in Barton was unbelievable. He didn’t even move his guns for Steve.
Once he had his weapons in place (he’d snagged the unfamiliar set of throwing knives out of the gun locker, guessing they were probably Barton’s), Bucky took the stairs to the roof.
He sighed when his palm print was denied, then flicked on the communications. “Stark, I’m gonna need your access codes for the quinjet.”
“Woah Robocop. Where are you going in such a hurry?”
“Barton’s missing. And my gut is telling me he went after the witch.” Bucky blinked. Right. He had no idea where that came from, but it did seem like the kind of thing Clint would do.
His head throbbed as the fake memories warred with the real ones. He almost missed the harsh curse, followed by Natasha saying, “Stay there. I’m coming with you.”
This is the most amazing thing, I love you guys so much, I am SO EXCITED BY THIS
Hunting the witch down had been easy compared with getting her to undo whatever she’d done to Bucky.
She just laughed as Clint held an arrow steadily pointed at her. “You think you can threaten me?”
“I think I’m the last guy anyone wants as an enemy,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Look, lady, you’ve had your fun. Just give it up now and I’ll let you go.”
The memory of the way Bucky’s eyes had passed over him at breakfast was engraved in his mind, casual and uninterested, as if Clint were little more than the toaster or the coffee pot. Before, he used to linger on his face, sending him a quick wink if the others weren’t looking and sometimes pressing a sneaky foot against Clint’s, under the table.
The witch tipped her head to one side with interest. “And what if I want more from you than that? What will you bargain with?”
Anything. Everything. Clint hadn’t realised just how much this thing with Bucky meant to him until it was abruptly gone. “What do you want?” he asked, and her smile bloomed into a grin.
“If he gets the most important thing to him back, then you should lose the most important thing to you.”
“What would be the point if I just forget him instead?”
She shook her head. “Oh no, not that. I want your foundation. The thing you’ve built your identity on, World’s Greatest Marksman. The man who never misses. And I want you to remember what you’ve lost, every single time you miss a target.”
Clint hesitated, and then was distracted as a quinjet descended from the clouds, coming in to land near them. His heart leapt in his chest, because if Bucky had realised he was missing and come after him, then it wasn’t too late. They could get what they’d had back, if there was the slightest kernel still there.
It was Natasha that jumped out of the quinjet before it was fully landed though, shouting Clint’s name in fury.
Clint swallowed back his disappointment, and looked at the witch. He only had a split-second to make this decision before Natasha got close enough to stop him.
He lowered his bow. “Do it.”
OH MY LORD NO WHY THIS IS AMAZING I MAY DIE
NOOOOO SOMEONE FIX IT
Just as Bucky hopped from the quinjet, it came over him in crashing waves. Sticky-static false memories peeled away, uncluttering his mind, and more, because the witch had taken away so much more than he realized. His knees almost buckled with the onslaught of emotion.
Late nights spent talking about nonsensical things, or, sometimes, when the shadows were more like dancing ashen pitch, and haunting embers burned his scream-stained throat, they talked about their nightmares. Clint would crack some stupid joke in the middle of Bucky crying like a baby, and a laugh would manage its’ way through all that salt-water brine, as he clung to the body of a man who felt so much like hope. They did little things, dates, movies in the common room, walks in the middle of the afternoon when everything was all sun-warm, liquid-gold, still figuring it out (that’s stupid, there was nothing to figure out, the moment they’d gotten close like that, the moment Bucky found love and haven and happiness in those starlight eyes, it’d been set in stone). How on earth could he forget that? any of it?
And the feelings are so intense, he gets swept up in their tide, his throat tightening, heart clenching, vision tunneled on Clint, on the way he takes a shaky step back, nocks an arrow, aims at the smirking witch, and shoots. Nearly point-blank, and wide by a mile. The witch doesn’t even garner a scratch.
“No,” he hears Natasha plea, growl, in front of him, before full-tilting into a sprint toward the woman, all knives and firing guns, but the witch disapparates before she can unleash her fury, find her vengeance, and she’s left standing there, panting, blood-thirsty, impotent and unsated.
Bucky presses unsteadily forward, swallows harshly when Clint looks to him with wide, sad eyes. He wants to ask what he did, he wants to ask why, but he already knows.
“Do you remember?”
Love curls, warm and devastating, behind his ribcage.
“Yeah,” he rasps, anguished.
And Clint’s eyes soften, his face brightening into a smile that, Bucky is sure, breaks his heart.
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
theproblemwithstardust 