｡⋆𖦹.✧˚──

the walls were humming again.

old brownstone in brooklyn, refurbished under tony’s sardonic generosity, always kept a low electric thrum in its bones, like the ghosts of forgotten circuits whispering secrets only bucky could half understand. you stood in the kitchen, brewing chamomile tea, because caffeine might nudge him too close to that frayed edge. and tonight wasn’t about vigilance. tonight was about the slow reassembly of someone who’d come apart in the public square.

"you're up," you said without turning. you knew his footsteps by now, they were measured, controlled, like a dancer trained by violence. the tea kettle clicked off. you didn’t look yet, you didn’t have to.

"didn’t sleep," came the reply, low and rough, as if spoken through gauze. there was a lilt of apology buried in the words, though he would never say sorry for something he couldn't remember.

"nightmares?" you asked, pouring two mugs, yours black, his with a generous slosh of milk. bucky didn’t answer right away. you finally glanced at him.

his face bore the aftermath, not of a battle, but of the war within. a gash, hastily closed with someone else’s field kit, reopened across his temple. the left sleeve of his shirt was torn and soaked dark from shoulder to elbow. blood. his or someone else's, you didn’t ask yet.

he looked at you like you were a mirror he was afraid to believe in. "i—" he began, then faltered. the words, you imagined, must have choked like wires tangled in the gears of his mind.

“it wasn’t you,” you said, not kindly, not cruelly, just truthfully. that mattered more.

bucky lowered himself into the old leather armchair, tony’s, once, back in the MIT dorms when he'd had enough ego to furnish a living room like a billionaire. you smiled faintly at the memory. tony had been your friend first. before the fame, before the arc reactor. before everything.

"you heard what happened?" bucky asked.

you nodded. “i did.”

it had started three days ago, a hidden hydra outpost in the carpathians had released a dead protocol, something ancient and buried in binary. a psychic landmine, they called it. bucky, standing too close to the detonation, had turned before anyone could react. in twenty minutes, he nearly killed sam, cracked nat’s ribcage, and left steve unconscious in a crater the size of a van. the winter soldier had returned. perfect, brutal, remorseless.

he’d disappeared afterward. the avengers had looked, of course. you hadn’t.

you knew he’d come here.

“i thought i’d locked it away,” he whispered. “i thought it was done.”

“no one ever locks anything away,” you said, handing him his tea. “not really. we just learn to live beside it.”

bucky took the mug with his left hand. the vibranium fingers trembled just slightly.

you knelt in front of him, grabbing the first aid kit from beneath the table, white with a red cross that had faded to a tired pink. like most things in this house, it carried the wear of use and memory. your hands were steady as you pulled gauze and antiseptic. his eyes followed your movements, but he didn’t flinch. not at the alcohol, not at the sting. that was its own kind of progress.

“tony would’ve been pissed,” bucky said, voice flat.

you smiled softly, not looking up from where you were dabbing at the gash above his eye. “he would’ve had you in a magnetic net before you blinked. then he’d get drunk and make you apologize to his suit.”

bucky chuckled, barely, but it was a laugh, however hollow. “you miss him?”

“every day,” you said simply.

there was a silence then, not empty but full. the kind of silence that grows between people who don’t need to fill it to know it matters.

the fire crackled in the hearth. outside, snow began to fall in soft, unhurried spirals. in here, there was warmth. in here, he was just bucky. scared, wounded, healing. and you were here too, mending more than wounds.

he looked down at you, hair falling into his face, lips slightly parted as if to speak but afraid of the shape of the words.

“thank you,” he said, finally. two syllables, but they carried centuries.

you finished with the bandage and sat back, legs folded beneath you on the rug. “don’t thank me yet,” you said. “we’re not done. i’ve got soup and a lecture on post traumatic mythologies lined up. you don’t get to brood until we finish both.”

he looked at you like you were light seen through fog. dim, far, but steady.