#this was partially inspired by an idea i had where if steve had superpowers it would be an insane healing factor | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

trillian-anders · 4 years

Text

chambers - xiii

pairing: bucky barnes x reader

warnings: violence, angst, slow burn

word count: 3748

description: post-endgame. Steve Rogers has passed away from old age. The one remarkable thing is that no one knew his heart would be in the condition it was. He was able to save one more life. After receiving his heart, strange things start happening. Including something that would change your life forever. (Inspired by the Netflix series of the same name.)

Bucky Barnes was a patient man. He learned his patience through trials that no one should have to face. He could wait, but it seemed like right now he couldn’t get back to the compound fast enough. “Hurry up,” He scolded the dash, pushing the throttle further against the board.

“That’s as fast as she can go,” Sam rationed, “We’re getting there as fast as we can.” His voice was tense. Bucky could tell he was anxious to get back too.

Bucky’s heart was racing, palms sweating, throat dry. If Zemo got his hands on you, if he hurt you, Bucky’s metal knuckles groaned in protest with the shift, his fist clenching impossibly tight.

It was dark and hard to see, but what was easy to see was the smoke billowing out of the few smashed windows on the side of the building. Agents left behind, too early in their training were on the grass outside running an emergency protocol, putting out the fire that raged on the Avengers floor.

The jet landed hard against the ground, seat belts ripped off and both soldiers were on the ground before the ramp fully extended. “I’ll do a scan inside.” Redwing shot from Sam’s back, flying steadily into the smoke and disappearing from sight.

Eric. Bucky’s throat constricted as the man ran up to him, panting.

“Have you seen Y/N?” Eric asked, trying to catch his breath. Bucky had to swallow his emotions, the anger seeping out through his pores.

“Have you?” He snapped. Eric shook his head, ignoring Bucky’s anger, looking desperately back at the building. He was covered in soot, the sleeve of his shirt singed. He smelled of smoke and the faintest smell of gasoline.

“It’s clear.” Sam said, the drone speeding back out from the smoke and clicking back into place behind him.

“We saw the jet take off right before the fire started.” Eric said, hands on his hips. Bucky and Sam exchanged a look.

“We should go.” Bucky looked back at the building before them, flames now tamed, water spilling down the sides.

“So you know where she is?” Eric asked hopefully. “I text her, but she hasn’t answered. I just want to make sure she’s okay.”

“She’s fine.” Sam glanced down at his phone, shooting off a text. “Your clearance level isn’t high enough for you to be granted that information.” Eric’s jaw twitched, throat constricting.

“We’re sort of dating,” Eric offered, “I mean, I’m just concerned, that doesn’t get me anything?” Bucky looked at him in suspicion, but said nothing.

“As your Captain I think you should go help your other teammates with the cleanup and let us handle this,” Sam started back up the ramp, “She’ll text you if she wants to text you.” As the ramp closed, the two men exchanged a look. “I don’t like him.”

Bucky breathed a sigh of relief, “Finally.”

The lake was calm. It could almost be called relaxing if you weren’t so emotionally exhausted. The sleep didn’t seem like it was enough. You’d lost count of the amount of times you’d broken down crying. So here you were, sat on a bench out on the dock, watching two ducks float along the water, a chill in the air.

Your skin was tight around your eyes from crying, rubbed raw. The birds were awake, sun finally fully over the horizon when you heard the jet touch down behind you in the distance. It wasn’t long before boots hit the hardwood of the dock. The sound is a courtesy. He wouldn’t make any sound if he didn’t want to.

He slipped into the seat next to you, arm resting on the back of the bench behind you. A comfortable distance.

“I’d ask you if you are okay, but you’re clearly not.” Bucky faced forward, watching the two ducks peck at the water, drifting around.

“How bad is it?” Times Square. Most of the team was still there helping with search and rescue. It was easier to lift debris when you had superpowers.

He couldn’t lie, “It’s bad.” You nod, throat constricting, “We’re going to get him.” He assures you, the blunt metal fingertips brushing against your spine, “This isn’t your fault.”

“But it is.” You lean from his touch, standing and stepping away from the bench, turning to look at him. “Did you know?” You ask, temper rising. His brows scrunch, looking at you questioningly. “Do you know?” He shakes his head,

“Know what?” You look at him incredulously. How could he not know? Could you really believe that Steve never told him? His best friend?

“I need to go see my parents... you should come along.” You begin to make your way back up the dock, the jet sitting idly on the grass next to the log cabin, smoke billowing from the chimney.

“Y/N, sweetheart, I don’t think that’s such a good idea right now.” Who knows what Zemo had planned, Agents had been placed to watch them recently, to make sure they were being kept safe.

You turn to him, the dew on the grass wet on your ankles, it’s a slightly foggy morning, his hair was pulled back tightly from his face, there was blood on his uniform still, he smelled of soot. His eyes looked so blue against the dark contrast of the dirt on his face. You felt your bottom lip tremble, eyes watering once more, your hands shaking.

“I need to see them.”

Peter watched as you entered, fumbling over his words, shifting nervously in the doorway.

“When I was looking at your scan,” He said, “I didn’t know what I was seeing.” You couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t his job to tell you, it wasn’t Strange’s either. He was shifting foot to foot, hand idly clicking his phone screen on and off again.

“It’s okay Pete,” You sigh. Sam stood in the kitchen, across from Strange, both eyes flicking to your frame. “I’m gonna go talk to my parents.” Sam leaned back against the counter, crossing his arms and looked at the man now standing behind you in the doorway. Bucky radiated heat against your back.

“You goin’ with her?” Sam asked. Bucky didn’t speak, but nodded in agreement. “I want to talk to you for a minute.” Eyes pointed at you, Sam gestures with his head for the two of you to leave the room. You peer back at Bucky, confusion clear on his face as you follow his partner into the other room. “Are you sure you want to do this?” He asks you. Hands reaching to gently grasp your arms, comforting.

Your breath catches, emotions still flowing freely just under your skin, the gentle question bringing tears to your eyes, tears you keep from falling.

“I have to.” You nod, voice tight, “For myself.” For the man standing in the corner, the ghost. The man looking at you in complete sorrow. You had to do this for Steve.

Sam nods, “Did you tell him?” You wrap your arms around yourself, pulling back. Shaking your head you look back at the wall that separates you from him. From Bucky. “You can’t have him go into this blind, Y/N.”

“I know,” You know, “I know.” You tug your bottom lip, sore with worry, between your bottom teeth before fully turning from Sam, “I’ll tell him.”

Those curious blue eyes met you in the doorway, a banana in hand, open and partially eaten in his fist, another one was unopened and offered to you as you joined him. He wouldn’t pry, not if you didn’t want him to. But how do you tell him? How do you tell him that it’s because of you that Steve left him.

Steve’s heart was in his throat, palms sweating. Babies were supposed to cry right? So why wasn’t the baby crying? He watched the doctor and nurses surround the frail little thing, face blue and still covered in blood.

“Is she alright?” Peggy cried, hair plastered to her forehead in sweat, face pale. His heart was breaking, his hand gently grasped in hers. She was beginning to hyperventilate. Steve turned to his wife, brushing her hair from her face, gently grasping her cheeks in his palms and pressing a shaky kiss to her forehead.

“She’ll be okay.” He soothed. He didn’t know though, he didn’t know if his baby would survive.

The pregnancy had been hard on Peggy and full of many difficulties. The pair swore that this was the first and last. In the beginning she was so sick. Morning sickness had hit her full speed. It wasn’t uncommon for her to turn her nose at the sight of anything with a strong smell. Steve had resorted to boiling chicken and potatoes most nights, and then she got a strong aversion to the smell it would create in the house so they switched to eating just buttered pasta for a while.

She chewed ginger mints and took naps halfway through the day, sometimes she couldn’t get out of bed at all. Her job was difficult and demanding. She began spotting close to her second trimester and was sat behind a desk. Steve felt helpless. What could he do really?

“Maybe this was a mistake.” He took a sip of the whiskey Howard had poured him, whiskey that would do nothing but burn down his throat and roll in the acid of his stomach, the pair sitting in Howard’s office at SHIELD. “Maybe we shouldn’t have had kids.”

Howard sighed heavily, leaning back in his chair, “Don’t think of it like that, women have been pregnant since the beginning of time, and Peggy is strong.” A sip, “She’ll be fine, her and the kid, they’ll both be fine.”

It didn’t seem to be fine. Not when Peggy’s eyes rolled back in her head and her face grew ashen. Not when the medical staff scrambled. Not when Steve was pushed from the room, pushed away from his silent baby and his heavily bleeding wife.

He thought the serum would transfer.

It was in his blood, why wouldn’t it?

But it didn’t. His daughter was frail. She came out barely three pounds, she could fit in the palm of his hand. But she was breathing, she was alive.

“I don’t know how long she will survive.” The doctor said. But his girl was a fighter. Her breaths rattled, Peggy or Steve kept their baby in a bassinet next to the bed until she outgrew it. Took about a year.

She was late on everything, walking, talking. Peggy doted on her sweet girl, breastfed longer than advised, hoping that it would do her some good. Grow her bones stronger, help her put on weight. A full fat milk in her bottle every morning, there was constantly food around for their baby. Steve tried to remember child trends from his future. Recommendations from Doctors more advanced. He resentfully thought about how much more help his daughter would get if she could see a Doctor in 2023 versus the quacks they’d been taking her to currently.

Howard created the braces for her legs that helped her legs straighten so she could start walking, helping her keep her back upright. He found a better Doctor, a SHIELD Doctor, to perform her first surgery, and second, and third.

It took a scare. A serious one. One where his baby girl almost didn’t make it. Intubated in quarantine for her compromised immune system. The Doctor had told them to say their goodbyes.

“I can’t do this.” Peggy cried, one hand on her hip the other covering her mouth, Steve sat before her, hands on his knees. “I can’t let her go.”

His throat was dry, raspy, acidic. “I can save her.” Peggy’s eyes found his, both red and exhausted,

“What do you mean?” Steve shook his head, opened his mouth and then closed it before sighing heavily,

“I thought he was exaggerating,” He shrugged, “I thought that maybe it was an irrational decision and if I could have just waited it out she would be okay, but she’s not going to be okay.” He gently pulled his wife to his chest, rocking her side to side, looking through the glass behind her at their daughter, her chest barely rising and falling. “We have to let her go, you have to let me take her back.”

Howard fashioned more tech, something he could use to bring his baby somewhere where she’d get the help she needed. Here in the future. When he was still on ice. The emergency room. He said he found her on the street. They took care of her. They saved his daughter’s life. They found a family willing to take her. An older couple who couldn’t have children. Steve watched them for a while.

He watched them take his baby to the park. He watched them take his baby to her first day of school. He watched them take his baby to the hospital, again and again.

But his girl was a fighter, she survived.

He hadn’t believed Strange.

Not when he told him about this.

“You’ll have to give her up.” He said. Steve didn’t believe him. “Everything is going to happen, exactly how it’s supposed to.” Steve didn’t believe him.

“You’re going to go back to Peggy and have a baby girl.” Strange had looked out onto the lake that day, hands in his pockets, “And it’s going to be hard, but you’re going to have to give her up so she can survive. And she will. I’m going to tell you exactly where to take her and when.”

“Why?” Steve asked, “Why wouldn’t I stay?” Bucky. His throat constricted. “Why can’t I stay?” Strange’s eyes turned soft, looking back at the house where Bucky was letting Morgan comb out his hair.

“Your daughter is very important to ensure a sound future for the planet.” Strange took a step back from him, “In every universe that you don’t go back… you lose everything.”

It was hard, Peggy didn’t want to do it.

“I can’t let her go.” Holding her baby to her chest, rubbing her back as she slept soundly, the bout of pneumonia the pair didn’t think their baby would survive finally shaking itself from her lungs. They were crying.

“If we let her go, she’ll survive.” Steve held his wife, their child between them. “If she stays here, she’ll die.”

So he brought you here. And he saved you.

There was a heartbeat.

Then another.

And another.

“Bucky,” The jet was quiet. “Please.” Your parents didn’t know whose child you were, but they adopted you as soon as they heard you’d been abandoned at CHOP.

“We didn’t care that you were sick.” Your Mom smoothed the hair from your face, “We loved you as soon as we saw you.” Such a happy baby she remarked, a happy resilient baby.

The jet was parked in a quiet place, you’d driven into the city and had just gotten back. Bucky wasn’t speaking with you currently. The entire drive back his eyes straight ahead on the road, not even radio to break up the silence.

His shoulders were tense, nearly pulled up against his ears. He stood in the middle of the jet, unmoving.

“Bu-”

“Just give me a minute.” His voice was low, forlorn. You sat heavily on the bench, the buckle clinkling against the floor as it fell. His face was turned down, hair covering most of it, his bottom lip trembling slightly.

You sniffled and his hand reached out for you, slowly grasping your own and pulling you from the bench and into his chest. His arms wrapping around your shoulders to pull you in tightly, your arms wrapping around his waist. His face buried into your shoulder, your eyes looking up at the ceiling.

You both stood there.

And you cried.

Him for the loss of his love, you for the burden of the truth.

“Does Zemo know?” You breathed out shakily. The pair of you sitting on the bench in the jet, thighs pressed tightly together, his hand wrapped tightly around yours to keep from trembling.

He shook his head, “If he did we would have known a long time ago.” His eyes were red rimmed, staring blankly at the wall.

“I don’t know what to do now.” You settled further into his side, your vacant hand wrapping around your joined ones. “What do we even do?”

There was silence once again, a small debate in his head,

“Did he love me?” You gaze up at him, the scruff of his jaw, his pink flushed lips bitten and chapped, slightly parted with unsteady breath.

“Yes.” He looked down at you, so close you could count his eyelashes. The freckles in his eyes.

“How do you know?” The soft timbre of his voice rumbling against your shoulder. “How do you know for sure?” Anxiousness brews in your chest, heart fluttering with the admission,

“Because I’ve felt that love every minute of every day since I was given this heart.” His eyes flutter closed, head coming to bump against the wall behind him, before rolling towards you. His fingers coming up to entwine in your hair and pull your face closer to his.

His lips press against your forehead and rest there for a moment.

A soft sound as he pulls back, “We should get going.”

“I thought it was just the serum,” Peter shrugged, “It was changing the chemistry of your body with the serum, so I assumed at first that’s why those genetic markers were there.” The old holotable hadn’t been used for a while, but with a little tinkering the kid got it up and running again. The files stored on one of his thumb drives displayed your DNA. A mess of ACGT that was specifically you.

Steve’s was pulled up, “This shows paternal DNA.” Margaret Carter’s DNA pulled beside that, “This shows maternal DNA.” You were fresh from a shower and eating a bowl of cereal while sitting cross-legged in a chair in the home office.

“So you had this figured out weeks ago?” Strange asked, a smirk on his face, “And you just decided not to tell anyone?” Peter shrugged, looking at you apologetically.

“I’m happy you didn’t tell me,” You offered, “It wasn’t for you to tell.”

“So this is why the serum is acting the way it is?” Sam asked.

“So there were genetic traces of the serum in her DNA from birth,” He had a previous blood sample from before, before the heart. He looks at you, “You getting the heart, as weird as that is, boosted the serum you already had and it’s almost like… a mutation.” A beat of silence, “That would make sense,” He said standing from his chair, rotating your genetic code on the holotable. “Mutations sometimes come around through specific circumstances of extreme stress or hormonal growth.

When Steve was given the serum he was in a chamber and hit with an incredible amount of energy to fuse the serum with his cells, it gave the body the stress it needed for the serum to completely change his genetic makeup.”

“I’ve been stressed my entire life,” You joke, shaking your head, “But when I got the heart, my body reacted to his genetic code?” Peter nodded.

“When they did your surgery they took the heart from his body in one OR,” Strange interjected, “And brought it immediately to your OR, so the blood that remained in the chambers of the heart, that first heartbeat you experienced, gave you everything you needed.”

That first heartbeat.

The one where the doctors remove your heart and put another in its place. That tense, timed, procedure. That sigh of relief as Steve’s heart beat within your chest for the first time. The claps of a job well done.

You remember waking up.

Your Dad, the man who helped raise you, sat beside your bed. His glasses low on his nose as he filled out a Sudoku book. Your Mom, the woman who helped raise you, walked in with a coffee, one for each of them. The quiet, thank you. A whispered kiss, before she settled into the small couch, pulling out her knitting.

A sigh of relief, a first breath leaving your lungs.

You’d survived another one, and hopefully this one wouldn’t give out on you. Hopefully.

It seemed surreal now, how far everything had gone. How much farther it needed to go.

Zemo didn’t know, at least that’s what Bucky was under the impression of. So his obsession with this heart, trying to harvest the traces of serum that flowed through your bloodstream had nothing to do with your lineage.

“Hey.” Bucky was sitting out on the water, legs hanging off the side of the dock. “I thought you went to bed.” You shrug, sitting down next to him, thigh to thigh.

“I couldn’t sleep.” Your breath came out in clouds. He nods in response, hands held in his lap, eyes unfocused out on the tree line.

“I don’t hate you for it.” Bucky said after a while. “I just… I wanted you to know that.” Your fingers fisted in the sleeves of your sweater, you turn to look at him. Eyes red rimmed, the tip of his nose red from the cold. His eyes met yours, glossy. “I don’t blame you for this.” You press your lips together, swallowing harshly before letting out a sigh of relief. “I’m sorry honestly.” He continues, “I shouldn’t have been the way I was when you first got the heart. None of this was fair to you.”

“I don’t blame you,” Your fingers find his own, cold, half numb. “I… this has been hard for both of us.” He goes to say something, but decides against it. His fingers intertwined with yours.

“We might need to stay here for a while.” He said, “The others are going to go back to the compound, rebuild, save face.” His thumb brushed the back of your hand, calloused and rough against your skin. “We’ll stay here, train a little more. Zemo doesn’t know about this place.” He glanced back at what once was Tony’s cabin. “No one really knows about this place.”

You take a deep breath, looking back out onto the still lake. And it was comfortable. For the first time in a long time you’d felt at peace. Content. And ready to move on.

taglist // @nutellakirb @witch-of-letters @torntaltos @emotionallysalty @an-lover @lbuck121 @rainbowkisses31 @artisticrogers1972 @flightlessbirdiee @sanniegirl1214 @sarcastic-and-cool @bookish-shristi @saturnki @jennmurawski13 @geeksareunique @the-soulofdevil @tinmunky @gifsbysimplysonia @alwaysbenhardysgirl @albinotigerpython

#bucky barnes #sam wilson #peter parker #bucky barnes x reader #doctor strange #steve rogers #peggy carter #tfatws #the falcon and the winter soldier #captain america

336 notes · View notes