“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.
Tag winterhawk fic
614.
“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
615.
Clint comes in whistling, kicks his shoes off by the door, drops his jacket on the back of the couch and comes into the kitchen, wrapping his arms around Bucky so that the posy of flowers he holds presses damp into his stomach. He holds Bucky tight and squeezes him close, and Bucky can feel him smile against the side of his neck.
“Hey, love,” Clint says, and the gentle wash of warm breath against Bucky’s neck makes him shiver. “Happy anniversary.”
“You remembered?” he asks, and Clint slides around him, forcing him to lift his arm so Clint can squeeze between him and the sink.
“I put sticky notes on my tablet,” Clint tells him, “and on the bathroom mirror for before you got up. I got Sam and Steve and Tasha and Kate to send me texts every couple hours. I wrote it on the back of my hand,” he says, and shows Bucky the huge plaster with ‘ry’ just about visible beside it.
“And you still forgot,” Bucky says, and Clint’s shoulders kinda slump.
“Yeah, still forgot. I came in and saw the table and ran straight back out again, I didn’t think you saw.”
“You confused the fuck outta the dog,” Bucky says, and Clint sighs and hands him the flowers, signing sorry just as soon as his hands are free.
Bucky gently touches one of the beautiful petals, stroking his finger over its softness and feeling his heart grow a little.
“You didn’t get these at a gas station, sweetheart,” he says, and Clint shrugs.
“They didn’t have your favourite.”
Bucky grabs Clint’s hand, pulls it up so he can brush his lips against Clint’s palm.
“You remembered,” he says.
614.
“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.”
614.
“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.”
613.
Clint watched the beautiful cryptid from the fifth floor pause in front of Clint’s apartment, and he experienced that helpless, awed kinda feeling that sits like champagne on the stomach, like if he’d seen a double rainbow or a baby futzin deer.
“Hey,” he said, low as he could make it, careful, and the cryptid whirled around and scowled at him, shoulders hunched and hands shoved deep into his pockets.
“My heating’s fucked,” he said, harsh and abrupt, and Clint nodded, easing up the last couple steps and toward his front door. The beautiful cryptid edged kinda sideways, eyeing him warily, circling around until he had the escape route of the stairs safely accessible.
“I’ll just grab my tools,” Clint said, jerking his head at his front door, and then winced a little, apologetic. “Gonna have to come into your apartment to fix it, sorry. I can let myself in and get it done when you’re not there, if that works better for you?”
Cryptid scowled at him – remained scowling at him, ‘cos it wasn’t like he’d eased up any since Clint had appeared – but his body language changed. Clint was well aware from the glimpses he’d gotten over the weeks that the guy was jacked, but with his jaw clenched and his shoulders squared he looked like he could hardcore fuck somebody up.
It would be creepy to think ‘yes, please,’ about that, so Clint tried really hard not to.
“You know which apartment I’m in?” He said, and Clint winced again. Like, he’d knocked on the guy’s door before, was he really that unmemorable? Also –
“I’m your landlord,” Clint said, a little bemused, “alongside being resident handyman. You didn’t know that?”
The cryptid rubbed a hand across his face; when he removed it again the flash of – what, defeat? – was entirely gone.
“Sorry,” he said, looking at the floor and shrinking down into himself again. “I don’t always remember so good.”
Huh.
Clint sent a smile his way, mind turning this over curiously.
“I can tell you as many times as you need that I’m Clint, man,” he said.
The cryptid smiled and Clint’s goddamn heart let off confetti. “Bucky,” he said.
609.
Clint floats up from dreaming to the gentle tugging of fingers through his hair and he smiles before he’s even conscious of it, wakes up with it already on his face. He’s draped over Bucky, one of his legs hanging off the couch and the other nestled warmly between Bucky’s thighs, his face resting against the warmth of Bucky’s chest and stubble burn on his forehead.
“Hey, I love you,” he slurs, inelegant because he refuses to moves his head enough to articulate, makes a pathetic protesting noise when Bucky’s fingers still in his hair.
“You still dreaming, sweetheart?” he asks, all soft and low, and Clint turns his head just enough to press a kiss against the soft skin of Bucky’s throat.
“No,” he says, decisive, sure, and he levers himself up just enough to watch the slow dawn of a smile on Bucky’s tired face.
“Maybe I am, then,” he says.
34.
Bucky started sneaking him these small sly sidelong glances, and it took Clint a little while to catch on. Nothing outright, nothing he could point to and prove he wasn’t crazy, just these smiles that settled in his stomach and set his brain to working it out.
He got a look like he was out of his tree when he leaned next to Bucky against the counter in the kitchen, various Avengers scattered around the room in various states of awareness and dress. So okay, this thing had rules, and the first one was like fight club, and no one else was allowed to know.
Clint upped the ante immediately, ‘cos papa had raised a gamblin’ man. He dropped Bucky a wink from behind Steve’s broad back, and the way Bucky immediately choked on his coffee had to mean Clint was winning, right? Straight out of the gate.
The next move was a hint of body heat as Bucky leaned a little closer in the darkness of a movie night. Clint retaliated with an unsubtle brush of fingers as he made sure to lunge for popcorn at the same time. With the solid hand Bucky rested on his thigh as he pushed himself to his feet, Clint was calling that one a draw.
The heat of Bucky’s hand in the small of his back on the way out of a meeting left Clint tied up in knots he couldn’t understand, let alone start to untangle, so Clint followed him down to the canteen. Slouched unapologetically, their knees pressed together safely out of sight, but Bucky’s smile visible for as long as Clint stayed.
Bucky ruffled Clint’s hair in the back of the quinjet; Clint stole gum from Bucky’s pocket and grinned into the back of his shoulder. Bucky warmed Clint’s hands while they waited in anticipation of a fight; Clint, daring, hooked their pinkies together while Fury yelled after it.
It wasn’t until Bucky cornered him in an empty corridor, pushing in close and eyes dropping to Clint’s mouth, that Clint realised that maybe this wasn’t gay chicken. That maybe they were heading for something real.
(And when Bucky kissed him, Clint gave his all to the kiss he gave back, because all of a sudden this had always been true.)
27.
“James Buchanan Barnes you goddamn son of a fuck!”
Steve hunched his shoulders automatically, the last bite of pancake falling off his fork. Bucky, unfazed, unerringly stabbed it and shoved it in his mouth with a sticky grin.
“Of all the assholes I could’ve fallen in love with -” Clint’s voice faded out a little, muffled by distance, then rang out with renewed strength, “ – smarmy good-for-nothing handsome fuck-face rat bastard!”
Clint thumped down the stairs like he bore an individualised and long-held grudge against each and every one of them.
“Conniving,
corkscrew-twisty, thieving dick,” Clint growled as he rounded the bottom of the stairs and came over to where they were sitting. “Morning, Steve.”
“Hey, Clint,” Steve said, hesitant.
“Morning, Clint,” Bucky echoed with an utterly relaxed and sunny grin.
“Fuck you, you fuckin’ fuck.” Clint took a step closer to Bucky, and all sorts of never particularly buried instincts reared up in Steve, had him half out of his chair before he registered the care with which Clint slid his hand into Bucky’s hair, the way Bucky pressed up into the kiss like he was breaking the surface, like this was all he needed to live. Steve focused down on his mug like it held the secrets of the universe, his ears turning pink. He’d seen Bucky in more compromising situations, of course, but this was – well, Steve was pretty sure this was how Bucky looked when he was in love, which felt like an imposition somehow to watch.
Clint pulled away slowly, his thumb running across Bucky’s cheek and a bemused, hopelessly adoring look on his face.
“Morning, asshole,” he said, in the gentlest tone Steve’d ever heard from him. “Don’t steal my fucking coffee.”
26.
Bucky pretends to eat Tiny Princess Thor’s tiny princess fingers to the sound of her shrieking laughter, which is, y’know, totally fine. Clint didn’t actually need his heart, anyway, so it’s not a problem that it’s flopped out of his chest to land with a sad splat at Bucky’s feet. Clint grins for the seven hundredth Super Selfie – $5 a pop, all proceeds to the local children’s hospital – and then heads over to the grill. Apparently there’s a space inside him to fill.
It turns out hotdogs do not, actually, cure all ills, no matter the amount of relish. So Clint finds a spot that’s quickest to lose the light that’s slowly fading out of the sky, tilts his head back against the trunk of a bunting-wrapped tree, and sighs the sigh of the world-weary and love-lorn. It’s a tune that comes easy to his lips.
(Bungee cord is maybe what he needs, ‘cos he always gives his heart away too quickly, and it’s never particularly timely about coming back.)
“Hey,” a low voice says, and Clint hitches a grin into place with a block and tackle.
“Tired of the adoration, Barnes?”
Bucky shrugs, his shoulders loosed from the tension they normally carry.
“Not sure it’s deserved,” he says, taking his share of the tree. Clint elbows him in the side.
“Sure it is,” he says, matter-of-fact enough to build a university on. “You’re a gold-standard genuine hero, Buck, nobody doubts that but you.”
Bucky shifts his weight, turns to the side, rests his shoulder against the tree. Clint figures it’s safer to keep staring up at the stars.
“You’re a goddamn prince, Barton,” he says, “and you don’t get told that nearly enough.”
Clint risks a glance right, regrets it immediately. Mentally kisses his heart goodbye, ‘cos he’s not sure this time he’s getting it back.
theproblemwithstardust 