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phantomrose96 · 5 days

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Sham Sacrifice

(Hi it's time for my favorite headcanon)

...

Vlad Masters sat firm and proper on the Fenton Family couch, legs crossed, teacup pinched in his fingertips, fighting subtly against the sinkhole that came with the mistake of taking Jack’s usual spot on the couch. He appeared with all the same charm and delightfulness of an ant swarm rearranging your picnic.

Danny stood at the doorway, just-still-in-the-kitchen, just not inviting himself to join the adults in the living room where Jack boomed and rambled and Vlad sat so stiff and polite and nice that his tea in his hands was going cold.

“Oh, Danny you’ll love this story—Danny, you should join us—Danny this was, what, summer of ’84? When was that heatwave, Vladdy? The one where you—”

“There’s no need to bore Daniel with the mad ravings of two old kooks, Jack. Kids would rather be off at the mall or—some store, surely. No need to stick around Daniel on my behalf. I assure you I won’t be offended if you leave.”

“No worries, V-man. I’m good right here. I love hearing Dad’s stories." Danny met Vlad's challenge, speaking with more poisonous courtesy than Vlad had proffered first. "In fact I think he should tell a few more, if he’s got more in mind.”

“In fact I do have more in mind—” Jack answered.

Neither Danny nor Vlad were listening to Jack. They held eye-contact, Danny with a stern unblinkingness of a sheepdog on duty. A lot was said without words. A lot was understood when Vlad decided to visit through the front door. Vlad only used the front door when he wanted something.

And it was never good when Vlad wanted something.

“—the core reactor project, yeah? That summer? That was in the lab with no A/C. Top floor. We were sweating like pigs, all of us. And I dared you to eat the really moldy pizza from our fridge the night before and you ralphed right into—”

“—Surely you remember this more fondly than I do. Daniel, really, you can go.”

Not a chance.

“Actually,” Danny answered, brightening some as his opportunity struck. “I am interested in this. For science class I need to write a report on the invention of an important piece of technology. I was gonna ask Mom and Dad about the Ghost Portal. And now that you’re here, I can get the whole history.”

Jack made a giddy little noise. He leaned forward, words primed, but Vlad was quicker to the draw.

“Sorry to say, your faith in me is unfounded. I wasn’t the portal guy back in college—that was always your mother and father’s passion project. I was their skeptic.”

“Bet that’s got you feeling pretty foolish right now, doesn’t it V-man?” Jack chided, a quick jab to Vlad’s ribs that nearly unseated the teacup from his suspended saucer. “Considering the fully-functioning portal right beneath our toes.”

“I hardly feel foolish, Jack. Your calculation for the portal in college was never going to work.”

“What do you mean? Of course it did.” Jack thumped the ground with his foot. “It’s running the old girl right now.”

At this, Vlad’s eyes narrowed. For the first time he’d been shaken off whatever skeezy machinations had brought him in. His pride was being challenged, and by Jack no less.

“Absolutely not. With that calculation? Absolutely not.”

“Well forget the tea biscuits Vlad, because you’re going to be eating your words in a second. Mads, hold my spot,” Jack said, as if anyone was planning to take his spot. He bounced from the couch, scooted from the living room, and vanished into the dark maw of the lab stairs, leaving only the waning beat of his footsteps behind.

His absence filled only a swallowing few seconds. The footsteps returned, bounding upward, creaking with his heavy cadence, and Jack bounced back into the room in much the manner he left. A pad of yellow lined paper was clutched in his hand. When he dropped it on the coffee table, it revealed row after row of tight scribble, churning math, carrying down the page and occupying two entire pages more that Jack flipped through.

“Same baby I came up with in college. It just needed heavier dampening and higher voltage than what we made back then. The portal downstairs has that in spades. Well, in like two-thirds of a spade.” Jack tapped something on the last line. “The projection was still only hitting 70% of the threshold we calculated to reach dimension penetration. But it’s an art, not just a science. We fired it up anyway, and it took!”

Vlad grabbed the paper pad, agitated. His eyes ran over it. Then again. Until he settled on one line, a firmness overcoming his face. He tossed the pad back onto the coffee table, and Vlad leaned back into the couch, arms crossed.

“The lambda, Jack.”

“The lambda?”

“Check it again.”

Jack did, lips pursed, pad of paper nearly swallowed in his big meaty hand.

“What about--?”

“It squares. The units don’t balance otherwise. It originates from an integration step of λ*∂λ/∂t. It squares.”

Jack’s brow remained furrowed, firm, until delight cracked into his eyes, and he let out a laugh.

“Gods, my handwriting is gonna be the death of us. Mads,” he tapped something unseen on the second page. “That’s the genius of Vladdy. Cracked this puppy wide open with just a glance. I never noticed that in all my checking. That explains the missing 30%, at least. That explains how the portal took. Lucky for you Danny that Vlad was here—”

“Jack,” Maddie said.

“—your report can have the correct formula. It’ll be—”

“—Jack—”

“—A+ worthy—”

“—Jack,” Maddie said, curt. “Lambda is the ambient ecto-energy. It’s a few ten-thousandths of a unit.”

“It—huh.”

Maddie had surfaced a pen from her pocket. She sheared a few blank pages out from the back of the pad and started the formula fresh. She made quick work of copying it over, quicker work of solving it through – lambda-squared intact.

She hit the final line and hatched a pen mark beneath the number. Jack stared, confused.

“That can’t… no.”

He repeated the same. New pages torn loose. Formula copied over, processed, line by line by line—lambda squared—by line by line by line.

Jack settled on his answer. Same as Maddie’s.

Confusion made his face tense.

“So it’s not 70% of the way to the threshold… It’s 0.013% of the way to the threshold.”

He held the pen hard, his whole body holding firm and taut as the gears turned in his head. Jack’s eyes flickered across the formula, again and again and again. He looked to Maddie, like a dog issued a command he did not understand.

“But it worked,” he said, small. “But it worked.”

Jack stood, robotic almost, eyes lost in something far away. He disappeared into the lab almost as quickly as he had a few minutes before, but now he exited with a smoothness and a quietness so very uncharacteristic of him. It bothered Danny, somewhere deep in his gut.

Maddie followed, a possession matching Jack’s.

Danny’s fingers curled and uncurled. He’d succeeded. He’s successfully interrupted Vlad’s… whatever this was. But the disquiet infected him. He didn’t like it.

“So what does that mean?” Danny asked, perhaps to Vlad. “What’s wrong with the calculation?”

Vlad sipped on tea ice cold.

“Who knows?” Vlad lied.

…

The math didn’t work.

Maddie and Jack burned through paper, burned through pencils, burned through hours.

The math didn’t work.

Clothes stuck to skin. Sweat lingered fetid and stale in the cold basement air. Exhaustion beat like a slurry through their veins.

The math didn’t work.

The portal supervised all, placidly green, the light for their table, the light for their work when the lightbulb overhead burnt clean out and neither Jack nor Maddie could be pulled away to replace it. It stood, it watched, a testament of contradiction to everything they could not solve on paper, and yet everything they built directly into the fabric of reality.

And it should never have worked.

They threw every radical what-if they’d ever conceived over 20 years of ghost research.

The ecto-ether layer.

The latent activation stitches in space fabric.

The anti-ectomatter collision proposal.

The positive-feedback crystallization theory.

And still nothing worked.

All together, every crackpot theory in their favor taken for granted, racked them up to an activation energy 200x more potent than the calculation, and still just 2% of what would be needed to rip open, and hold open, a stable fissure between their reality and the ghost zone.

Maybe by pure luck, unfathomable luck, Fentonworks basement was directly situated atop a natural portal.

Maybe that would explain ripping it open. It did nothing to explain the stability. Natural portals were unstable by definition. There and gone in a few seconds. Not hours, days, weeks, months, a year, that the Fenton Portal had been open. Never so much as faltering.

It was late. 3am ticked away to 4am, and 4:30am. The discarded paper stacked higher than Jack and Maddie both. Calluses oozed from their hands at another attempt, and another, and another.

Maddie flipped through a folder’s worth of yellowed papers, aggressively thumbed over and over after two decades left untouched. And she settled on the one she’d passed over a few dozen times already, always seeking something else, something better.

This time she unsheathed it, and she placed it on the lab table.

“…If a mouse died. In the machine. If a mouse ran through the machine and accidentally bridged two live wires, and died of violent electrocution. 500 milliamps. Instantly melted into the circuitry.”

Maddie’s mouth was cotton-dry while she wrote. Ambient ecto-energy was low. Always very, very low.

Unless something very, very bad happened to something with the capacity to become a ghost.

The numbers wove. Maddie started the formula fresh, and it was pure muscle memory. A mouse. A big mouse, even. A 99th percentile beast of a mouse. And a wire that had been wired incorrectly. Something grounded that never actually grounded. An absolutely horrific amount of electricity.

0.37%, by pure numbers. If she included every permissive crackpot idea they had thrown on top, it topped out at 6% of the needed activation threshold.

Not a mouse.

“A cat,” Jack said, words gummy, tongue dry, face tired. “If we’ve got mice down here, maybe… a stray cat wandered in. Chased the mouse.”

Maddie nodded. It didn’t matter if it made sense.

She penned it in. A large cat. A devastating electrical short. Cats carried more ecto-potential than mice did. Ecto-potential did not necessarily go up with size. It went up with complexity. The things with the most ecto-potential were the things that most became ghosts.

1.45%, by pure numbers. 18% at absolute, absolute crackpot best.

“A dog,” Jack proposed with a shaky laugh. He swallowed. “A mouse… chased by a cat… chased by a dog… all electrocuted at once”

Maddie didn’t say the thing they both knew, which was that both of them would have noticed the evidence left behind by the electrically exploded pieces of a dog.

Maddie did it anyway. A mouse and a cat and a medium-sized dog, maybe just small enough to notice no evidence of, all together. All at once. All violently ripped apart, sacrificed to a machine still asleep in its wall.

Mice did not often make ghosts. Cats did not either. Dogs, occasionally. But infrequently. Very infrequently.

37%. At best.

“Jack.”

“Maddie, I know just—maybe something really smart—”

“—Jack—”

“—like an octopus—”

“Jack.”

“I hear, maybe, pigs are smart. If it was—”

Maddie was writing, already. Not for a pig. Not an octopus. Jack watched, and he knew what the numbers meant. The ecto-potential she penned gave her away. An ecto-potential that high.

65kg, an estimate

10,000 milliamps, a catastrophic accident, a death certificate.

A human’s amount of ecto-potential.

Maddie wrote.

And she wrote.

And she did not apply a single crackpot theory, not a single discredited proposal, not an ounce of exaggeration.

138%.

Threshold, and then some.

Comfortable, easily, then some.

For the first time, after all the hundreds of times she and Jack had penned this equation over the course of 2 decades, the number met her and Jack’s threshold.

A breakthrough.

A revelation.

A pure eureka moment.

Jack and Maddie were silent.

Alone in a humming basement. Alone with only the soft swirls of the portal for company, happy, stable, purring its contentment, singing to the cold air.

“It has to be something else,” Maddie said. And she said it weakly. And she said it childishly.

“You’re right. It can’t be this,” Jack echoed. “If someone died down here, we’d know. Dead bodies don’t walk away. We’d have seen it. O-or even if, if the body got stuck in the portal, we’d have heard of someone going missing.”

Maddie sat, quiet. A thought held her mind hostage.

“Unless they didn’t go missing,” Maddie said, and she said it barely audibly. “Unless the portal spit them right back out.”

“Then—that’s what I said—a dead body, on the floor, we’d have seen.”

“Not a dead body.”

“It had to be lethal, Mads—”

“I know Jack. But if they died, here, in the portal Jack, then their ghost did not get ripped away from the body and sent to the Ghost Zone. …They ripped the Ghost Zone here.” Palms slick with sweat smoothed over her notes. She pointed to one specific line and found her pen tip trembled no matter how badly she stabilized it. “The ecto-potential of a creature is how strong of a pull their ghost creates on the Ghost Zone. A strong enough pull means the ghost can reach the Ghost Zone and stabilize, like a fish reeling itself up, yeah? We agree on this Jack, yes?”

“Yes,” Jack answered.

“It’s what makes the math even work, Jack. Someone dying in the portal didn’t reel themselves to the boat. They reeled the boat in. Jack, they brought the Ghost Zone here…” Maddie wasn’t breathing right. She pulled sweat-soaked bangs away from her face. “Their ghost never left their body Jack. They died, Jack. And they walked back out.”

“…No. No,” Jack said. “No, they didn’t.”

“Then what?” Maddie asked.

Jack stared. He looked away. He didn’t like the expression on Maddie’s face.

“It—what about the ecto-ether theory?” Jack said, of the theory they’d tested and retested and tested all over, all night. He grabbed his pencil back up and pointed it aimlessly at Maddie’s piece of paper, pointed end out in self-defense. “If the ecto-ether is maybe… if it’s only 250-times stronger than we calculated. Then it could…”

Jack’s voice died. His pencil hung idle. Maddie’s paper remained unblemished.

“If it… was a pig,” Jack offered. “If it was a pig that died in the portal.”

“How, Jack? How would a pig get in? We lock all the doors at night, Jack. No one else can get in, Jack. It’s just us, Jack.”

Jack and Maddie were not there when the portal turned on.

Maddie’s statement carried two possibilities. Only two. Both felt like claws digging all the flesh right out of Jack’s heart.

“I want… I want to try the ecto-ether theory again,” Jack choked. “I think it’s the ecto-ether. I think it’ll work.”

Jack slid a piece of paper over, already covered in scribbles. In its single untouched corner, he started the equation for the several-thousandth time that night.

Above their head, birds were singing.

Sunrise hailed unseen from the windowless laboratory.

…

At 6am, Vlad answered his cell phone. The reception crackled, struggling through the layers of sheetrock above his head.

“Vlad?” Maddie’s voice crackled. “Sorry, did I wake you up?”

“Not at all my dear.” Vlad leaned his weight against the wall, playing with the singsong melody in his voice. “But you sound exhausted. Is anything the matter?”

“Yes. Well… Yes. Jack and I have—all night—trying to fix the equation.”

“Naturally.”

“We found something that maybe works.”

“Oh?” Vlad asked. He straightened, pacing now, cracklingly attentive. “And what might that—”

“If someone died. Activating the portal. We have an on-switch inside the portal’s interior. The trigger we use to press it is external to the portal, of course. But if someone went inside the portal, and they pressed it directly, and if they died, and pulled the Ghost Zone here—”

Vlad’s red eyes reflected pools of iridescent green. He twirled his free hand in the fringes of his cape, tongue working over the fanged edges of his teeth. He stared, consumed, forward.

“—and just, you, I was thinking, you’re the only other expert I’d trust to… maybe weigh in.”

“What does Jack think?”

“He denies it. He’s still. He’s trying other theories.”

“Well who knows, surely? The answer may lie somewhere you haven’t looked.”

“…I’ve looked everywhere, Vlad. That's the thing. There is no more ‘somewhere else’. I’ve looked.”

“You sound like your mind is made up.”

“I just… if maybe you have some idea.”

“Am I meant to talk you out of this idea?”

“Vlad.”

“Do you think I have some secret information you don’t? Sorry to say, I’m just your skeptic.” Some noise came through muffled from the other side. Vlad flashed a smile. “But…as your skeptic I will offer you this—It all sounds a bit absurd, doesn’t it? To kill someone and have them come back intact and… for you to never notice? Who would they be? How would they be? Surely not human anymore, surely. How would you never notice?”

Vlad paced forward, booted feet clicking along his laboratory floor.

“It would be ridiculous,” he continued, with a building crescendo, “so unfathomably self-centered surely, to not notice something like that befall someone so close to you, who died at the hands of your own invention? …If I’m correctly inferring who, in your household, you suspect of having activated the portal?” Vlad’s tongue lingered along his teeth.

Maddie’s line held, quiet. And the seconds of static drew long.

“Ah, apologies. I’ve overstepped,” Vlad continued. “I meant this as a vote of confidence in you. You and Jack both. Two people as attentive, caring, compassionate as yourselves. You would notice. I promise.”

“You’re… Okay, thank you, Vlad. I appreciate it.”

“Is there anything else, my dear?”

“No. No. Thank you, Vlad. I’ll think about this.”

Maddie’s line clicked dead. A chuckle built to Vlad’s lips and he let his head tip back with mirth. It lasted only a moment. He stowed his phone. And as if the interruption had never happened, Vlad reaffixed his attention on his own portal swirling in front of him. It bathed him, swimming green, purring contentment.

And Vlad vanished into his portal.

(Chapter 2)

#danny phantom #dp #dp fanfiction #GIVES YOU THIS GIVES YOU THIS GIVES YOU THIS #its my favorite headcanon so here you get a fic of it

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samodivaa · 13 days

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frenzy of lust and sin 2〗

Part 1 Pairing: Instructor!Bucky x Recruit!Reader

Summary: During your training to become an agent, you've earned the moniker "Sergeant's girl" around the base—that doesn't give him the right to be possessive or jealous, but what gives you the right to be a brat? Warnings: sexual tension, age gap Words: 2.4k

Cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effecting in the future, but future and past are entwined.

“Is SHIELD so desperate that they allow to recruit women here?”

Vlad says loudly, placing the glass down before bringing up his hand to rub his jaw as he chuckles. But nobody else on his table or the other dares to chuckle or laugh. As the room goes quiet, the man feels something like a touch of ice on his heart, like a recollection or, more exactly, a reminder, of something agonizing and revolting that is in that room now, at that moment, Bucky Barnes has heard him speak—he changes the expression of joy on his lips to one of alarm, but he doesn’t dare move from his seat. Someone makes his presence known, quiet thud of his boots cracking the stillness. The deathlike silence is broken—he seems petrified when he hears the melodious ringing sounds of Bucky’s dog tag chimes deep into his soul as if a funeral bell is ringing, pealing for his farewell. He puts the metal arm on the man’s shoulder—a beautiful yet deadly ornament, he can’t shake hands with the Devil and not get sulphur on his hands—his arm is a reminder not only to himself, but to others as well.

And some words set the devil’s creation which has been long caged, to come out roaring, dooming people to eternal perdition. Bucky’s expression is simple and confident, and his manners are always very polite and engaging.

”I-I was just joking” he pants, trembling while Bucky’s large blue eyes wander timidly over everyone in the room, the hollowness round them transforming to haggard wildness, the languid expression they usually possessed. Nothing happens. No words are needed, just one nod and one look with his predatory evil eyes. A warning. Bucky leaves the room. He never exhibits rudeness, loses control of himself, or turns violent. Not that easily.

“Vladimir, you don’t speak about the Sergeant's girl like that” the man seating next to him says, shunning his puzzled gaze. “The Sergeant's girl?” he asks, speaking short and with difficulty as shivers, and glances at his friend, half supplicating, half ashamed.

“Yeah, that's what we call her. You are on his blacklist now” “What does that mean?” Vlad has an expression of agony, he seems convulsed with terror. He sinks in prostate of helpless fear, caused by his friend’s words and glance towards him, there is nothing else to produce such humiliation. He draws in his breath, strikes the table, and swears to himself. The other man is incapable of regarding the childish act with sternness, but he scowled at Vlad and mutters: “Well...that is for you to experience”

That fills Vlad with dread, no one has means of discerning, but there he is, powerless under the gripe of guilt. He shrugs his shoulders, shakes himself, indeed, as if his flesh creeps with aversion, and thrusts back his chair—he is deaf to every attempt at moving his sense of ego or pride.

============================== The same morning, rather afternoon, a different step approaches in the gym—heavier and longer, Bucky enters slowly and Vlad pursues his movements with apathetic eyes. The Sergeant makes no ceremony of greeting, availing himself of his privilege to walk straight in, without saying a word. His dark face is rather composed, his frame is scary, huge. Vlad rises with an impulse to dash out, when he sees him.

“Wanna spar?” Bucky demands sternly, supposing he can frighten Vlad by catching him thus, alone—Vlad perceives that the wretched creature has no power to sympathize with his mental torture since yesterday.

“No, thank-” What a whining coward, Bucky thinks. “I am not asking” He invades Vlad’s personal, calmly, but only in appearance as his gaze fixes on the younger man’s features, his eyes that seem dilating with ecstasy. That radiant gaze makes his pulse seemingly imperceptibly stop and his soul departs. Vlad is a tall, athletic, well-formed man, beside whom, Bucky seems quite slender and youth-like, but no amount of muscles can outmatch decades of skill and murder. Bucky is brooding over the past sometimes, the strain of it is too much, but there is nothing that would make him escape from his old self altogether. Hydra taught him to endure, not to lose his temper easily—the best fighter is never angry, his actions are driven by a mechanical precision. Vlad’s self‐preservation rises up in him at once as Bucky comes closer and he looks at his instructor with questioning, suffering eyes, studies him, his face, uncertain if Bucky would strike or not. Vlad’s head is clouded with fear and regret, his faculties feel half asleep, but his eyes are fastened upon the older man. Ferocity still lurks in the ex Winter Soldier’s brows and his eyes full of black fire.

Whatever has happened, Vlad exits trembling and scared—Bucky’s eyes are usually blue and in a certain light look soft, gentle, and even innocent. Then the light would change, the innocence would vanish, and the eyes look ice cold. This ferocity lurks yet in his angry browns and eyes full of black fire, but it is subdued when he realizes that he has a training session with you. ============================== You don't paint dreams or nightmares, you paint your own reality—but they don’t work unless you take action and you have the power to make it true. That’s how you ended up on the SHIELD’S training camp. All your life has been training—this is the final path before becoming a certified agent. And you have always been an object of discourse, as people might do at a strange repulsive animal—because you don’t have an ordinary childhood nor teen years. But despite that, you have proven yourself as one of the top recruits and yet, your dignity continues to be mocked, abused, compromised, toyed with, lowered and even bad-mouthed, but it can never be taken from you. You wear your skills like a suit of armor—in a dog-eat-dog field, you naturally lose parts of your humanity and emotions in order to survive.

The trashy rumors flourish like a weed—even though you were not there, you knew exactly what was said and what happened earlier in the day. You are grateful for Sergeant Barnes. For protecting your mind. Protecting your value, trying to create peace in your day to day life at the base. He doesn’t let you be exposed to mockery, shame, counterfeit friends or allies, even defending you even in your absence—but now it is different, you see it as a way to show all startling demonstrations of feeling—possessiveness, it makes you experience irresistible attraction towards Bucky, you have not been aware that your attachment has been rising unsolicited since you heard the rumor about Vlad, but for the minute you discover its’ existence, you lay all the blame on him.

Pushing open the door to your room, you look at yourself in the mirror. Your face looks drawn. Tired. Because you have four different courses and it is hard to keep up sometimes. And all those terrible words are inked all over your skin. The scars, the struggles and all the names of those men who have done you wrong. But it makes you unstoppable and much more proud of your journey, how far a woman like yourself has improved, amongst all those people. Reaching for the cropped sweatshirt over the table, you head out of your room—you can’t wait for the training session with Bucky. It is nerve racking, knowing what you wear underneath. But you don’t flatter under pressure easily, you thrive. ============================== As you enter the training room, Bucky’s expression is serious and his cock twitches when he sees you—you love how his eyes soften slightly when he looks at you. The way he looks at you is always different than anyone else—but it all makes sense. From everyone else’s perspective it looks like he is being protective, but it is not just that—it is so much more than that. His throat bobs as you approach him towards the bench he is sitting on, just to surprise him and take a seat on the floor, right in front of his legs. “I'm tough, I could have handled the new guy by myself later” He is pressing his lips together, avoiding a smile. “I know you are” “That guy can’t even bruise my ego, I could have beaten the shit out of him” You force a grin, peering at him through your lashes which makes his blue eyes spark. You undress your cropped sweatshirt slowly, making sure he is looking at your cleavage which is purposely pushed up by a sport bra that you chose. His gaze drops from your eyes, to the swell of your chest—you bite back the disgust at how predictable he is. He even licks his lips. Your chest tightens and you bite your lip to hide the grin wanting to escape. “Well, you can practice on me today” His eyes glow dark, his vibranium fingers tapping against the metal bench. For a slight second, confusion spreads on your feathers, brows drawing inwards and eyes moving back and forth as if you are trying to solve an invisible puzzle. But it all lasts for a moment as that looks vahines, eyes clearing as a smile spreads across your face. Blowing out a heavy breath, you stand up and stare at him—his lips twitch into a ghost of a smile. “Yeah, let’s do it”

He narrows his eyes before standing up and cracking his neck, taking in your perfect look—you are always put together, but today, you look a little extra, revealing more of your body than usual. “After you” he says as his eyes follow you turning and heading to the mats. He breathes in deeply, trying to find a sense of calm. Anything to keep his mind away from the simmering feelings bubbling underneath his skin.

Get it together, Barnes

==============================

Bucky loves to go to the gym at night. It's quiet. So quiet that he can almost hear other people's dreams he wishes he has. He stands weary and motionless before the window, gazing at the feathery clouds gliding around the moon which is by no means a waste of time when suddenly a faint rustle makes him turn round. You enter the gym, walk towards him until you are standing before him. His lips are pressed tightly together and twitching at the corners. For ten full seconds he looks at you in the eyes in silence with a firm relentless gaze as your fragrance touches him—healing and breaking him once again.

“How do you know that I come to the gym at night?” You only stare at each other for a second longer and when your breath begins to slow beneath his penetrating eyes, you force words past your lips:

“Found a reason to practice my spying skills” you pursue anxiously. “Then why do I know that you came by three times this week?” Horror gradually passes from your countenance, the paleness gives place to a glow of your shame. Something has shifted between you, faintly, but the change is almost palpable. Your friendship has sat lightly between you, an ephemeral thing, without weight or gravity. But since you have learned that he has feelings for you—you are bolder in the pursuit of more. More of what? More of him? More of this side of him? Your body unwillingly tilts forward, unable to resist his gravitational pull.

“If you knew, why did you let me do it?” A corner of his lips tips up “Following me like a stalker makes me feel special” Bucky says with a timid tone as he continues to stay still in his place, looking at you with a strange, bewildered expression, as though he is trying to collect his thoughts, and can’t. His mind is a prey to lust, which sets all the muscles of his face quivering. There is some damage to his soul this time, the lack of sleep showing underneath his eyes. He smiles absently. You are like a siren, singing to his shipwreck—he loves your songs.

“You are already special” you chastise. His shoulders pull taut. “I am one hundred and six…and you are, what, eighteen?”

“Nineteen” you release a shallow breath “How old were you when you were presumed dead?” And there is, Bucky fears, both your boldness and naivety—your desire, failing to guard you against your own deceits. Nefarious young woman with logic of your own. These necessities of upspringing in the seed, these beautiful determinations, on the part of a possible relationship entertained, to grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly flower of love.

—Nefarious young woman.

“About 30” His hand muscles flex as he takes your hand in his, and bid you be composed, for a succession of shudders convulses your frame. He lifts his gaze and meets yours and you realize that never before has silence seemed to have its own sound. Like a buzzing hive of bees, it settles on his mind with ferocity, making you tremble. Things are blurry for a second, and at first you don't believe that he is really touching you. “You are so persistent, kotyonok, but you need to get some sleep.”

His eyes are nearly black, the pupils dilated. He can see it takes every last bit of your terrible will for you to remain still beneath his touch. And yet, you do not pull away. You know it is the best he can offer. It is not enough. He drops your hand. You take a deep breath. He still dwells in your soul, but it leaves you both sparkling and broken, because he is warning you away from him.

#bucky x reader #bucky barnes x reader #bucky x you #bucky barnes x you #bucky x female reader #bucky barnes x f!reader #bucky imagine #bucky barnes x female reader

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